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Zhao Cao

22 accepted papers

2026

When Planning Fails Despite Correct Execution: On Epistemic Calibration for LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

ICML 2026poster

LLM-based multi-agent systems can fail even when planned actions are executed correctly because agents may misjudge their knowledge when evaluating plan feasibility, a phenomenon we term epistemic miscalibration in planning. Unlike execution errors, epistemic miscalibration is latent during planning…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ICLEval: Evaluating In-Context Learning Ability of Large Language Models

COLING 2025main

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a critical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) as it empowers them to comprehend and reason across interconnected inputs. Evaluating the ICL ability of LLMs can enhance their utilization and deepen our understanding of how this ability is acquired at the training…

2025

MomentSeeker: A Task-Oriented Benchmark For Long-Video Moment Retrieval

NeurIPS 2025poster

Accurately locating key moments within long videos is crucial for solving long video understanding (LVU) tasks. However, existing benchmarks are either severely limited in terms of video length and task diversity, or they focus solely on the end-to-end LVU performance, making them inappropriate for…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Combining Multiple Supervision for Robust Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval

AAAI 2024technical

Recently, dense retrieval (DR) models, which represent queries and documents with fixed-width vectors and retrieve relevant ones via nearest neighbor search, have drawn increasing attention from the IR community. However, previous studies have shown that the effectiveness of DR critically relies on…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Image Retrieval with Composed Query by Multi-Scale Multi-Modal Fusion

ICASSP 2024accepted

Image retrieval with composed query (IR-CQ) is a challenging task since it aims to retrieve the target image according to a hybrid-modality query which consists of a reference image and a text modifier. Previous approaches mainly focus on designing various multi-modal fusion modules to fuse the hybr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Argue with Me Tersely: Towards Sentence-Level Counter-Argument Generation

EMNLP 2023long main

Counter-argument generation—a captivating area in computational linguistics—seeks to craft statements that offer opposing views. While most research has ventured into paragraph-level generation, sentence-level counter-argument generation beckons with its unique constraints and brevity-focused challe…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

FashionSAP: Symbols and Attributes Prompt for Fine-Grained Fashion Vision-Language Pre-Training

CVPR 2023poster

Fashion vision-language pre-training models have shown efficacy for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, general vision-language pre-training models pay less attention to fine-grained domain features, while these features are important in distinguishing the specific domain tasks from general t…

2023

Hence, Socrates is mortal: A Benchmark for Natural Language Syllogistic Reasoning

ACL 2023findings

Syllogistic reasoning, a typical form of deductive reasoning, is a critical capability widely required in natural language understanding tasks, such as text entailment and question answering. To better facilitate research on syllogistic reasoning, we develop a benchmark called SylloBase that differs…

2023

Hi-ArG: Exploring the Integration of Hierarchical Argumentation Graphs in Language Pretraining

EMNLP 2023long main

The knowledge graph is a structure to store and represent knowledge, and recent studies have discussed its capability to assist language models for various applications. Some variations of knowledge graphs aim to record arguments and their relations for computational argumentation tasks. However, ma…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

IAG: Induction-Augmented Generation Framework for Answering Reasoning Questions

EMNLP 2023long main

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), by incorporating external knowledge with parametric memory of language models, has become the state-of-the-art architecture for open-domain QA tasks. However, common knowledge bases are inherently constrained by limited coverage and noisy information, making ret…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Learning from the Wisdom of Crowds: Exploiting Similar Sessions for Session Search

AAAI 2023technical

Search engines are essential internet services, enabling users to efficiently find the information they need. Session search employs users’ session logs of queries to solve complex retrieval tasks, in which users search multiple times until interested documents are found. Most existing session searc…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models

ACL 2023long

Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) have been widely used in document-oriented NLP tasks, such as question answering. However, the encoding-task coupling requirement results in the repeated encoding of the same documents for different tasks and queries, which is highly computationally inefficient.…

2023

RetroMAE-2: Duplex Masked Auto-Encoder For Pre-Training Retrieval-Oriented Language Models

ACL 2023long

To better support information retrieval tasks such as web search and open-domain question answering, growing effort is made to develop retrieval-oriented language models, e.g., RetroMAE and many others. Most of the existing works focus on improving the semantic representation capability for the cont…

2023

SSP: Self-Supervised Post-training for Conversational Search

ACL 2023findings

Conversational search has been regarded as the next-generation search paradigm. Constrained by data scarcity, most existing methods distill the well-trained ad-hoc retriever to the conversational retriever. However, these methods, which usually initialize parameters by query reformulation to discove…

2023

Search-Oriented Conversational Query Editing

ACL 2023findings

Conversational query rewriting (CQR) realizes conversational search by reformulating the search dialogue into a standalone rewrite. However, existing CQR models either are not learned toward improving the downstream search performance or inefficiently generate the rewrite token-by-token from scratch…

2022

BMU-MoCo: Bidirectional Momentum Update for Continual Video-Language Modeling

NeurIPS 2022accept

Video-language models suffer from forgetting old/learned knowledge when trained with streaming data. In this work, we thus propose a continual video-language modeling (CVLM) setting, where models are supposed to be sequentially trained on five widely-used video-text datasets with different data dist…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2022

Coarse-to-Fine: Hierarchical Multi-task Learning for Natural Language Understanding

COLING 2022main

Generalized text representations are the foundation of many natural language understanding tasks. To fully utilize the different corpus, it is inevitable that models need to understand the relevance among them. However, many methods ignore the relevance and adopt a single-channel model (a coarse par…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2022

ConvTrans: Transforming Web Search Sessions for Conversational Dense Retrieval

EMNLP 2022main

Conversational search provides users with a natural and convenient new search experience. Recently, conversational dense retrieval has shown to be a promising technique for realizing conversational search. However, as conversational search systems have not been widely deployed, it is hard to get lar…

2022

Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering

ACL 2022long

To alleviate the data scarcity problem in training question answering systems, recent works propose additional intermediate pre-training for dense passage retrieval (DPR). However, there still remains a large discrepancy between the provided upstream signals and the downstream question-passage relev…

2022

RetroMAE: Pre-Training Retrieval-oriented Language Models Via Masked Auto-Encoder

EMNLP 2022main

Despite pre-training’s progress in many important NLP tasks, it remains to explore effective pre-training strategies for dense retrieval. In this paper, we propose RetroMAE, a new retrieval oriented pre-training paradigm based on Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE). RetroMAE is highlighted by three critical d…

2022

Towards Efficient NLP: A Standard Evaluation and A Strong Baseline

NAACL 2022long

Supersized pre-trained language models have pushed the accuracy of various natural language processing (NLP) tasks to a new state-of-the-art (SOTA). Rather than pursuing the reachless SOTA accuracy, more and more researchers start paying attention to model efficiency and usability. Different from ac…

2022

Visual Prompt Tuning for Few-Shot Text Classification

COLING 2022main

Deploying large-scale pre-trained models in the prompt-tuning paradigm has demonstrated promising performance in few-shot learning. Particularly, vision-language pre-training models (VL-PTMs) have been intensively explored in various few-shot downstream tasks. However, most existing works only apply…