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Zhifang Sui

56 accepted papers

2026

FIRE: Learning to Navigate and Act on Real-World Files via Stateful Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026poster

Large language models still struggle to reliably answer questions grounded in real-world files like spreadsheets and slides, where evidence is scattered across irregular layouts and heterogeneous formats. We address this by formalizing File Reasoning, a setting where agents must interact directly wi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

From Mathematical Reasoning to Code: Generalization of Process Reward Models in Test-Time Scaling

AAAI 2026technical

Recent advancements in improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models have underscored the efficacy of Process Reward Models (PRMs) in addressing intermediate errors through structured feedback mechanisms. This study analyzes PRMs from multiple perspectives, including training methodo

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

GroundingME: Exposing the Visual Grounding Gap in MLLMs through Multi-Dimensional Evaluation

CVPR 2026

Visual grounding, localizing objects from natural language descriptions, represents a critical bridge between language and vision understanding. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve impressive scores on existing benchmarks, a fundamental question remains: can MLLMs truly visually g

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Large Language Models Struggle with Unreasonability in Math Problems

AAAI 2026technical

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success on a wide range of math and reasoning benchmarks. However, we observe that they often struggle when faced with unreasonable math problems. Instead of recognizing these issues, models frequently proceed as if the problem is well-posed, produc

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

RICo: Refined In-Context Contribution for Automatic Instruction-Tuning Data Selection

AAAI 2026technical

Data selection for instruction tuning is crucial for improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) while reducing training costs. In this paper, we propose Refined Contribution Measurement with In-Context Learning (RICo), a novel gradient-free method that quantifies the fine-grained cont

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Stabilizing MoE Reinforcement Learning by Aligning Training and Inference Routers

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial approach for enhancing the capabilities of large language models. However, in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, the routing mechanism often introduces instability, even leading to catastrophic RL training collapse. We analyze the training-inference…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Probabilistic Inference Scaling Theory for LLM Self-Correction

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capability to refine their generated answers through self-correction, enabling continuous performance improvement over multiple rounds. However, the mechanisms underlying how and why accuracy evolves during this iterative process remain unexplored.

2025

AdaMMS: Model Merging for Heterogeneous Multimodal Large Language Models with Unsupervised Coefficient Optimization

CVPR 2025poster

Recently, model merging methods have demonstrated powerful strengths in combining abilities on various tasks from multiple Large Language Models (LLMs). While previous model merging methods mainly focus on merging homogeneous models with identical architecture, they meet challenges when dealing with…

2025

Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Implicit Narratives in Comic Strip?

EMNLP 2025

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated strong performance on vision-language benchmarks, yet current evaluations predominantly focus on single-image reasoning. In contrast, real-world scenarios always involve understanding sequences of images. A typical scenario is comic strips understandi

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Confidence v.s. Critique: A Decomposition of Self-Correction Capability for LLMs

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) can correct their self-generated responses, but a decline in accuracy after self-correction is also witnessed. To have a deeper understanding of self-correction, we endeavor to decompose, evaluate, and analyze the self-correction behaviors of LLMs. By enumerating and ana…

2025

Exploring Activation Patterns of Parameters in Language Models

AAAI 2025technical

Most work treats large language models as black boxes without an in-depth understanding of their internal working mechanism. To explain the internal representations of LLMs, we utilize a gradient-based metric to assess the activation level of model parameters. Based on this metric, we obtain thr…

2025

How Far are LLMs from Being Our Digital Twins? A Benchmark for Persona-Based Behavior Chain Simulation

ACL 2025finding

Recently, LLMs have garnered increasing attention across academic disciplines for their potential as human digital twins, virtual proxies designed to replicate individuals and autonomously perform tasks such as decision-making, problem-solving, and reasoning on their behalf.However, current evaluati…

2025

SG-FSM: A Self-Guiding Zero-Shot Prompting Paradigm for Multi-Hop Question Answering Based on Finite State Machine

NAACL 2025findings

Large Language Models with chain-of-thought prompting, such as OpenAI-o1, have shown impressive capabilities in natural language inference tasks. However, Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) remains challenging for many existing models due to issues like hallucination, error propagation, and limited…

2025

Self-Boosting Large Language Models with Synthetic Preference Data

ICLR 2025poster

Through alignment with human preferences, Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced significantly in generating honest, harmless, and helpful responses. However, collecting high-quality preference data is a resource-intensive and creativity-demanding process, especially for the continual improvemen…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2025

Towards Harmonized Uncertainty Estimation for Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

To facilitate robust and trustworthy deployment of large language models (LLMs), it is essential to quantify the reliability of their generations through uncertainty estimation. While recent efforts have made significant advancements by leveraging the internal logic and linguistic features of LLMs t…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Achilles-Bench: A Challenging Benchmark for Low-Resource Evaluation

ACL 2024findings

With promising yet saturated results in high-resource settings, low-resource datasets have gradually become crucial benchmarks (e.g., BigBench Hard, superGLUE) for evaluating the learning ability of advanced neural networks. In this work, we find that there exists a set of “hard examples” in low-res…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Be a Multitude to Itself: A Prompt Evolution Framework for Red Teaming

EMNLP 2024finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention for their remarkable capacity, alongside concerns about safety arising from their potential to produce harmful content. Red teaming aims to find prompts that could elicit harmful responses from LLMs, and is essential to discover and mitig…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Can Large Language Models Always Solve Easy Problems if They Can Solve Harder Ones?

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but still suffer from inconsistency issues (e.g. LLMs can react differently to disturbances like rephrasing or inconsequential order change). In addition to these inconsistencies, we also observe that LLMs, while capable of solv…

2024

Can Large Multimodal Models Uncover Deep Semantics Behind Images?

ACL 2024findings

Understanding the deep semantics of images is essential in the era dominated by social media. However, current research works primarily on the superficial description of images, revealing a notable deficiency in the systematic investigation of the inherent deep semantics. In this work, we introduce…

2024

DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

ACL 2024long

In the era of large language models, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a promising architecture for managing computational costs when scaling up model parameters. However, conventional MoE architectures like GShard, which activate the top-K out of N experts, face challenges in ensuring expert specializati…

2024

FaGANet: An Evidence-Based Fact-Checking Model with Integrated Encoder Leveraging Contextual Information

COLING 2024main

In the face of the rapidly growing spread of false and misleading information in the real world, manual evidence-based fact-checking efforts become increasingly challenging and time-consuming. In order to tackle this issue, we propose FaGANet, an automated and accurate fact-checking model that lever…

2024

Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators

ACL 2024long

In this paper, we uncover a positional bias in the evaluation paradigm of adopting large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, as a referee to score and compare the quality of responses generated by candidate models. We find that the quality ranking of candidate responses can be easily hacked by simp…

2024

Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations

ACL 2024long

In this paper, we present an innovative process-oriented math process reward model called Math-shepherd, which assigns a reward score to each step of math problem solutions. The training of Math-shepherd is achieved using automatically constructed process-wise supervision data, breaking the bottlene…

Cited by 242SourcePDFScholar
2024

ShieldLM: Empowering LLMs as Aligned, Customizable and Explainable Safety Detectors

EMNLP 2024finding

The safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained increasing attention in recent years, but there still lacks a comprehensive approach for detecting safety issues within LLMs’ responses in an aligned, customizable and explainable manner. In this paper, we propose ShieldLM, an LLM-based safety de…

2024

Taking a Deep Breath: Enhancing Language Modeling of Large Language Models with Sentinel Tokens

EMNLP 2024finding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising efficacy across various tasks, becoming powerful tools in numerous aspects of human life. However, Transformer-based LLMs suffer a performance degradation when modeling long-term contexts due to they discard some information to reduce computational o…

2024

Unlocking Efficiency in Large Language Model Inference: A Comprehensive Survey of Speculative Decoding

ACL 2024findings

To mitigate the high inference latency stemming from autoregressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs), Speculative Decoding has emerged as a novel decoding paradigm for LLM inference. In each decoding step, this method first drafts several future tokens efficiently and then verifies them in p…

2023

Bi-Drop: Enhancing Fine-tuning Generalization via Synchronous sub-net Estimation and Optimization

EMNLP 2023long findings

Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in natural language understanding. However, fine-tuning pretrained models on limited training data tends to overfit and thus diminish performance. This paper presents Bi-Drop, a fine-tuning strategy that selectively updates model parameters…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Denoising Bottleneck with Mutual Information Maximization for Video Multimodal Fusion

ACL 2023long

Video multimodal fusion aims to integrate multimodal signals in videos, such as visual, audio and text, to make a complementary prediction with multiple modalities contents. However, unlike other image-text multimodal tasks, video has longer multimodal sequences with more redundancy and noise in bot…

2023

DialogQAE: N-to-N Question Answer Pair Extraction from Customer Service Chatlog

EMNLP 2023long findings

Harvesting question-answer (QA) pairs from customer service chatlog in the wild is an efficient way to enrich the knowledge base for customer service chatbots in the cold start or continuous integration scenarios. Prior work attempts to obtain 1-to-1 QA pairs from growing customer service chatlog, w…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Enhancing Continual Relation Extraction via Classifier Decomposition

ACL 2023findings

Continual relation extraction (CRE) models aim at handling emerging new relations while avoiding catastrophically forgetting old ones in the streaming data. Though improvements have been shown by previous CRE studies, most of them only adopt a vanilla strategy when models first learn representations…

2023

ImageNetVC: Zero- and Few-Shot Visual Commonsense Evaluation on 1000 ImageNet Categories

EMNLP 2023long findings

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been serving as general-purpose interfaces, posing a significant demand for comprehensive visual knowledge. However, it remains unclear how well current LLMs and their visually augmented counterparts (VaLMs) can master visual commonsense knowledge. To inve…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

InfoCL: Alleviating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Text Classification from An Information Theoretic Perspective

EMNLP 2023long findings

Continual learning (CL) aims to constantly learn new knowledge over time while avoiding catastrophic forgetting on old tasks. We focus on continual text classification under the class-incremental setting. Recent CL studies have identified the severe performance decrease on analogous classes as a key…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Learn to Not Link: Exploring NIL Prediction in Entity Linking

ACL 2023findings

Entity linking models have achieved significant success via utilizing pretrained language models to capture semantic features. However, the NIL prediction problem, which aims to identify mentions without a corresponding entity in the knowledge base, has received insufficient attention. We categorize…

2023

Not All Demonstration Examples are Equally Beneficial: Reweighting Demonstration Examples for In-Context Learning

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained the In-Context Learning (ICL) ability with the models scaling up, allowing them to quickly adapt to downstream tasks with only a few demonstration examples prepended in the input sequence. Nonetheless, the current practice of ICL treats all demonstr…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Speculative Decoding: Exploiting Speculative Execution for Accelerating Seq2seq Generation

EMNLP 2023long findings

We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an independent model specially optimized for efficient and accurate…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Statistical Knowledge Assessment for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Given varying prompts regarding a factoid question, can a large language model (LLM) reliably generate factually correct answers? Existing LLMs may generate distinct responses for different prompts. In this paper, we study the problem of quantifying knowledge contained in an LLM regarding a given se…

2023

Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers

ACL 2023findings

Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning (ICL) ability. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without parameter updates. Despite the great success in performance, its working mechanism still remains an open questi…

2022

A Token-level Reference-free Hallucination Detection Benchmark for Free-form Text Generation

ACL 2022long

Large pretrained generative models like GPT-3 often suffer from hallucinating non-existent or incorrect content, which undermines their potential merits in real applications. Existing work usually attempts to detect these hallucinations based on a corresponding oracle reference at a sentence or docu…

2022

A Two-Stream AMR-enhanced Model for Document-level Event Argument Extraction

NAACL 2022long

Most previous studies aim at extracting events from a single sentence, while document-level event extraction still remains under-explored. In this paper, we focus on extracting event arguments from an entire document, which mainly faces two critical problems: a) the long-distance dependency between…

2022

ATP: AMRize Then Parse! Enhancing AMR Parsing with PseudoAMRs

NAACL 2022findings

As Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) implicitly involves compound semantic annotations, we hypothesize auxiliary tasks which are semantically or formally related can better enhance AMR parsing. We find that 1) Semantic role labeling (SRL) and dependency parsing (DP), would bring more performance…

2022

An Enhanced Span-based Decomposition Method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling

NAACL 2022long

Few-Shot Sequence Labeling (FSSL) is a canonical paradigm for the tagging models, e.g., named entity recognition and slot filling, to generalize on an emerging, resource-scarce domain. Recently, the metric-based meta-learning framework has been recognized as a promising approach for FSSL. However, m…

2022

CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

ACL 2022long

Artificial Intelligence (AI), along with the recent progress in biomedical language understanding, is gradually offering great promise for medical practice. With the development of biomedical language understanding benchmarks, AI applications are widely used in the medical field. However, most bench…

2022

Calibrating Factual Knowledge in Pretrained Language Models

EMNLP 2022finding

Previous literature has proved that Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) can store factual knowledge. However, we find that facts stored in the PLMs are not always correct. It motivates us to explore a fundamental question: How do we calibrate factual knowledge in PLMs without re-training from scratch?…

2022

DialogUSR: Complex Dialogue Utterance Splitting and Reformulation for Multiple Intent Detection

EMNLP 2022finding

While interacting with chatbots, users may elicit multiple intents in a single dialogue utterance. Instead of training a dedicated multi-intent detection model, we propose DialogUSR, a dialogue utterance splitting and reformulation task that first splits multi-intent user query into several single-i…

2022

HPT: Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning for Hierarchical Text Classification

EMNLP 2022main

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging subtask of multi-label classification due to its complex label hierarchy.Recently, the pretrained language models (PLM)have been widely adopted in HTC through a fine-tuning paradigm. However, in this paradigm, there exists a huge gap between th…

2022

Hierarchical Curriculum Learning for AMR Parsing

ACL 2022short

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to translate sentences to semantic representation with a hierarchical structure, and is recently empowered by pretrained sequence-to-sequence models. However, there exists a gap between their flat training objective (i.e., equally treats all output…

2022

Knowledge Neurons in Pretrained Transformers

ACL 2022long

Large-scale pretrained language models are surprisingly good at recalling factual knowledge presented in the training corpus. In this paper, we present preliminary studies on how factual knowledge is stored in pretrained Transformers by introducing the concept of knowledge neurons. Specifically, we…

2022

Learning Robust Representations for Continual Relation Extraction via Adversarial Class Augmentation

EMNLP 2022main

Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to continually learn new relations from a class-incremental data stream. CRE model usually suffers from catastrophic forgetting problem, i.e., the performance of old relations seriously degrades when the model learns new relations. Most previous work attribut…

2022

Premise-based Multimodal Reasoning: Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues

ACL 2022long

It is a common practice for recent works in vision language cross-modal reasoning to adopt a binary or multi-choice classification formulation taking as input a set of source image(s) and textual query. In this work, we take a sober look at such an “unconditional” formulation in the sense that no pr…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2022

Robust Fine-tuning via Perturbation and Interpolation from In-batch Instances

IJCAI 2022poster

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) on downstream tasks has become common practice in natural language processing. However, most of the PLMs are vulnerable, e.g., they are brittle under adversarial attacks or imbalanced data, which hinders the application of the PLMs on some downstream tas…

2022

StableMoE: Stable Routing Strategy for Mixture of Experts

ACL 2022long

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) technique can scale up the model size of Transformers with an affordable computational overhead. We point out that existing learning-to-route MoE methods suffer from the routing fluctuation issue, i.e., the target expert of the same input may change along with training,…

2021

Decompose, Fuse and Generate: A Formation-Informed Method for Chinese Definition Generation

NAACL 2021long

In this paper, we tackle the task of Definition Generation (DG) in Chinese, which aims at automatically generating a definition for a word. Most existing methods take the source word as an indecomposable semantic unit. However, in parataxis languages like Chinese, word meanings can be composed using…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2021

Towards Faithfulness in Open Domain Table-to-text Generation from an Entity-centric View

AAAI 2021technical

In open domain table-to-text generation, we notice the unfaithful generation usually contains hallucinated entities which can not be aligned to any input table record. We thus try to evaluate the generation faithfulness with two entity-centric metrics: table record coverage and the ratio of hallucin…

2020

An Anchor-Based Automatic Evaluation Metric for Document Summarization

COLING 2020main

The widespread adoption of reference-based automatic evaluation metrics such as ROUGE has promoted the development of document summarization. In this paper, we consider a new protocol for designing reference-based metrics that require the endorsement of source document(s). Following protocol, we pro…