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Zhihao Zhang

33 accepted papers

2026

Does Reinforcement Fine-Tuning Improve Generalization of LLM Agents? An Empirical Study

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has shown promise for training LLM agents to perform multi-turn decision-making based on environment feedback. However, most existing evaluations remain largely in-domain—training and testing are conducted in the same environment or even on the same tasks. In real-wor…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Less Is More: Fast and Accurate Reasoning with Cross-Head Unified Sparse Attention

ICML 2026poster

Large reasoning models achieve strong performance through test-time scaling, but this incurs substantial computational overhead due to long decoding from short prompts. While sparse attention can reduce latency and memory usage, existing methods often degrade reasoning accuracy because selection err…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reasoning or Memorization? Unreliable Results of Reinforcement Learning Due to Data Contamination

AAAI 2026technical

Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external supervision. Surprisingly, some studies even suggest that rand

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Stabilizing Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for LLMs via Balanced Policy Optimization with Adaptive Clipping

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the core paradigm for aligning and strengthening large language models (LLMs). Yet, applying RL in off-policy settings—where stale data from past policies are used for training—improves sample efficiency, but remains challenging: policy entropy decline…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Unleashing the Power of Chain-of-Prediction for Monocular 3D Object Detection

CVPR 2026

Monocular 3D detection (Mono3D) aims to infer 3D bounding boxes from a single RGB image.Without auxiliary sensors such as LiDAR, this task is inherently ill-posed since the 3D-to-2D projection introduces depth ambiguity.Previous works often predict 3D attributes (e.g., depth, size, and orientation)

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

VectorGlide: Realizing Continuum Drive Paradigm via Integrated Contact Kino-Dynamic MPC for Wheeled Quadruped Robots

RA-L 2026

This letter addresses the inherent inefficiencies and limited agility of traditional gait-based locomotion by proposing the continuum drive paradigm as a high-performance alternative. Existing control frameworks are limited by their simplified predictive models and decoupled planners, which prevent

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

What Makes a Good Speech Tokenizer for LLM-Centric Speech Generation? A Systematic Study

AAAI 2026technical

Speech-language models (SLMs) offer a promising path toward unifying speech and text understanding and generation. However, challenges remain in achieving effective cross-modal alignment and high-quality speech generation. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of speech tokenizer desi

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

When Agents Go Rogue: Activation-Based Detection of Malicious Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems

ICML 2026poster

While enabling effective collaboration on complex tasks, LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) face critical security challenges due to vulnerabilities at the agent and interaction levels. Most existing MAS security defenses are built upon two core assumptions: semantically-explicit malicious attacks …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Why Reinforcement Fine-Tuning Enables MLLMs Preserve Prior Knowledge Better: A Data Perspective

ICLR 2026poster

Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt multimodal large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on prior knowledge remains unclear. In this paper, we introduce jigsaw puz…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BeefBot: Harnessing Advanced LLM and RAG Techniques for Providing Scientific and Technology Solutions to Beef Producers

COLING 2025system demonstrations

We propose BeefBot, a LLM-powered chatbot designed for beef producers. It retrieves the latest agricultural technologies (AgTech), practices and scientific insights to provide rapid, domain-specific advice, helping to address on-farm challenges effectively. While generic Large Language Models (LLMs)…

2025

CHARM3R: Towards Unseen Camera Height Robust Monocular 3D Detector

ICCV 2025poster

Monocular 3D object detectors, while effective on data from one ego camera height, struggle with unseen or out-of-distribution camera heights. Existing methods often rely on Plucker embeddings, image transformations or data augmentation. This paper takes a step towards this understudied problem by i…

2025

From Generation to Detection: A Multimodal Multi-Task Dataset for Benchmarking Health Misinformation

EMNLP 2025

Infodemics and health misinformation have significant negative impact on individuals and society, exacerbating confusion and increasing hesitancy in adopting recommended health measures. Recent advancements in generative AI, capable of producing realistic, human-like text and images, have significan

2025

LoRACoE: Improving Large Language Model via Composition-based LoRA Expert

EMNLP 2025

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture improves large language models (LLMs) by utilizing sparsely activated expert sub-networks with a routing module, but it typically demands high training cost. Previous work introduces parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) modules, e.g., LoRA, to achieve a li

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts

ACL 2025finding

Process-driven dialogue systems, which operate under strict predefined process constraints, are essential in customer service and equipment maintenance scenarios. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, they still struggle to solve these strict…

2025

Real-time Spatial-temporal Traversability Assessment via Feature-based Sparse Gaussian Process

IROS 2025

Terrain analysis is critical for the practical application of ground mobile robots in real-world tasks, especially in outdoor unstructured environments. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial-temporal traversability assessment method, which aims to enable autonomous robots to effectively navigate

Cited by 4SourcecodeScholar
2025

SEB-Naver: A SE(2)-based Local Navigation Framework for Car-like Robots on Uneven Terrain

IROS 2025

Autonomous navigation of car-like robots on uneven terrain poses unique challenges compared to flat terrain, particularly in traversability assessment and terrain-associated kinematic modelling for motion planning. This paper introduces SEB-Naver, a novel SE(2)-based local navigation framework desig

Cited by 5SourcecodeScholar
2025

SpecReason: Fast and Accurate Inference-Time Compute via Speculative Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in inference-time compute have significantly improved performance on complex tasks by generating long chains of thought (CoTs) using Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However, this improved accuracy comes at the cost of high inference latency due to the length of generated reasoning seq…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

TidalDecode: Fast and Accurate LLM Decoding with Position Persistent Sparse Attention

ICLR 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have driven significant advancements across diverse NLP tasks, with long-context models gaining prominence for handling extended inputs. However, the expanding key-value (KV) cache size required by Transformer architectures intensifies the memory constraints, particularl…

2025

Zero-shot Cross-lingual NER via Mitigating Language Difference: An Entity-aligned Translation Perspective

EMNLP 2025

Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (CL-NER) aims to transfer knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. However, existing zero-shot CL-NER (ZCL-NER) approaches primarily focus on Latin script language (LSL), where shared linguistic features facilitate effective knowledge t

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

ATLAS: Improving Lay Summarisation with Attribute-based Control

ACL 2024short

Lay summarisation aims to produce summaries of scientific articles that are comprehensible to non-expert audiences. However, previous work assumes a one-size-fits-all approach, where the content and style of the produced summary are entirely dependent on the data used to train the model. In practice…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Accelerating Iterative Retrieval-augmented Language Model Serving with Speculation

ICML 2024poster

This paper introduces RaLMSpec, a framework that accelerates iterative retrieval-augmented language model (RaLM) with *speculative retrieval* and *batched verification*. RaLMSpec further introduces several important systems optimizations, including prefetching, optimal speculation stride scheduler,…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Communication Bounds for the Distributed Experts Problem

NeurIPS 2024poster

In this work, we study the experts problem in the distributed setting where an expert's cost needs to be aggregated across multiple servers. Our study considers various communication models such as the message-passing model and the broadcast model, along with multiple aggregation functions, such as…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Cross-domain NER with Generated Task-Oriented Knowledge: An Empirical Study from Information Density Perspective

EMNLP 2024main

Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition (CDNER) is crucial for Knowledge Graph (KG) construction and natural language processing (NLP), enabling learning from source to target domains with limited data. Previous studies often rely on manually collected entity-relevant sentences from the web or attempt…

2024

Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning

EMNLP 2024main

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a crucial approach to aligning language models with human values and intentions. A fundamental challenge in this method lies in ensuring that the reward model accurately understands and evaluates human preferences. Current methods rely on ranking…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

PDF-to-Tree: Parsing PDF Text Blocks into a Tree

EMNLP 2024finding

In many PDF documents, the reading order of text blocks is missing, which can hinder machine understanding of the document’s content.Existing works try to extract one universal reading order for a PDF file.However, applications, like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), require breaking long articl…

2024

Quantized Side Tuning: Fast and Memory-Efficient Tuning of Quantized Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) has been empirically effective on a variety of downstream tasks. Existing approaches to finetuning an LLM either focus on parameter-efficient finetuning, which only updates a small number of trainable parameters, or attempt to reduce the memory footprint durin…

2024

TAMM: TriAdapter Multi-Modal Learning for 3D Shape Understanding

CVPR 2024poster

The limited scale of current 3D shape datasets hinders the advancements in 3D shape understanding and motivates multi-modal learning approaches which transfer learned knowledge from data-abundant 2D image and language modalities to 3D shapes. However even though the image and language representation…

2024

Unveiling Linguistic Regions in Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable cross-lingual alignment and generalization ability. Current research primarily focuses on improving LLMs’ cross-lingual generalization capabilities. However, there is still a lack of research on the intrinsic mechanisms of how LLMs achieve…

2023

Enhancing Biomedical Lay Summarisation with External Knowledge Graphs

EMNLP 2023long main

Previous approaches for automatic lay summarisation are exclusively reliant on the source article that, given it is written for a technical audience (e.g., researchers), is unlikely to explicitly define all technical concepts or state all of the background information that is relevant for a lay audi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

EtriCA: Event-Triggered Context-Aware Story Generation Augmented by Cross Attention

EMNLP 2022finding

One of the key challenges of automatic story generation is how to generate a long narrative that can maintain fluency, relevance, and coherence. Despite recent progress, current story generation systems still face the challenge of how to effectively capture contextual and event features, which has a…

2022

Making Science Simple: Corpora for the Lay Summarisation of Scientific Literature

EMNLP 2022main

Lay summarisation aims to jointly summarise and simplify a given text, thus making its content more comprehensible to non-experts.Automatic approaches for lay summarisation can provide significant value in broadening access to scientific literature, enabling a greater degree of both interdisciplinar…