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Zhiliang Tian

41 accepted papers

2026

DPRM: A Dual Implicit Process Reward Model in Multi-Hop Question Answering

AAAI 2026technical

In multi-hop question answering (MHQA) tasks, Chain of Thought (CoT) improves the quality of generation by guiding large language models (LLMs) through multi-step reasoning, and Knowledge Graphs (KGs) reduce hallucinations via semantic matching. Outcome Reward Models (ORMs) provide feedback after ge

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

DiffuReason: Enhancing Reasoning Ability for Diffusion Language Models via Monte Carlo Tree Search

ICML 2026poster

Auto-Regressive (AR) models with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) are a dominant paradigm for achieving “System 2” reasoning. However, this approach suffers from significant latency due to the serial, token-by-token generation mechanism of AR models. In contrast, Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

TiME: Test-Time Mixture-of-Experts Routing via Asymmetric CO-Optimal Transport for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

ICML 2026poster

Large language models usually face continuous domain shifts during testing, which degrade performance on unseen shifting domains. So, researchers propose continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) to adapt to evolving testing domains while preserving knowledge of previous domains, making adaptability-sta…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

WALKSAFE: Risk-aware Graph Random Walk with Bi-GRPO for LLM Safety

AAAI 2026technical

Large language models (LLMs) may generate harmful outputs on malicious inputs. Existing safety methods, including prompt engineering and model editing, rely on hand-crafted templates or target-driven parameter modifications, limiting their generalizability in unseen harmful scenarios. Post-training

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AGD: Adversarial Game Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks in Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

LLMs demonstrate remarkable utility but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that aim to elicit harmful responses. Existing defenses, including post-training alignment and prompt engineering, rely on training on safety-annotated datasets and safe prompt templates, struggling with adaptability to o…

2025

Advancing Collaborative Debates with Role Differentiation through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

ACL 2025long

Multi-agent collaborative tasks exhibit exceptional capabilities in natural language applications and generation. By prompting agents to assign clear roles, it is possible to facilitate cooperation and achieve complementary capabilities among LLMs. A common strategy involves adopting a relatively ge…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Battling against Tough Resister: Strategy Planning with Adversarial Game for Non-collaborative Dialogues

ACL 2025long

Non-collaborative dialogue involves two participants with conflicting interests engaging in a multi-round dialogue to achieve their own goals. Strategy planning is the key to guiding both participants towards a consensus. Most LLMs-based methods use stimulus prompts or external strategy planners for…

2025

Correlation-Aware Example Selection for In-Context Learning with Nonsymmetric Determinantal Point Processes

EMNLP 2025

LLMs with in-context learning (ICL) obtain remarkable performance but are sensitive to the quality of ICL examples. Prior works on ICL example selection explored unsupervised heuristic methods and supervised LLM-based methods, but they typically focus on the selection of individual examples and igno

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

DPGA-TextSyn: Differentially Private Genetic Algorithm for Synthetic Text Generation

ACL 2025finding

Using large language models (LLMs) has a potential risk of privacy leakage since the data with sensitive information may be used for fine-tuning the LLMs. Differential privacy (DP) provides theoretical guarantees of privacy protection, but its practical application in LLMs still has the problem of p…

2025

DYNTEXT: Semantic-Aware Dynamic Text Sanitization for Privacy-Preserving LLM Inference

ACL 2025finding

LLMs face privacy risks when handling sensitive data. To ensure privacy, researchers use differential privacy (DP) to provide protection by adding noise during LLM training. However, users may be hesitant to share complete data with LLMs. Researchers follow local DP to sanitize the text on the user…

2025

Dovetail: A CPU/GPU Heterogeneous Speculative Decoding for LLM inference

EMNLP 2025

With the continuous advancement in the performance of large language models (LLMs), their demand for computational resources and memory has significantly increased, which poses major challenges for efficient inference on consumer-grade devices and legacy servers. These devices typically feature rela

2025

GCML: Gradient Coherence Guided Meta-Learning for Cross-Domain Emerging Topic Rumor Detection

EMNLP 2025

With the emergence of new topics on social media as sources of rumor propagation, addressing the domain shift between the source and target domain and the target domain samples scarcity remains a crucial task in cross-domain rumor detection. Traditional deep learning-based methods and LLM-based meth

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Hippocampal-like Sequential Editing for Continual Knowledge Updates in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) are now pivotal in real-world applications. Model editing has emerged as a promising paradigm for efficiently modifying LLMs without full retraining. However, current editing approaches face significant limitations due to parameter drift, which stems from inconsistencies…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

LLM-based Rumor Detection via Influence Guided Sample Selection and Game-based Perspective Analysis

ACL 2025long

Rumor detection on social media has become an emerging topic. Traditional deep learning-based methods model rumors based on content, propagation structure, or user behavior, but these approaches are constrained by limited modeling capacity and insufficient training corpora. Recent studies have explo…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LTOS: Layout-controllable Text-object Synthesis via Adaptive Cross-attention Fusions

ICASSP 2025accepted

Controllable text-to-image generation synthesizes visual text and objects in images with certain conditions. However, existing visual text rendering and layout-to-image generation tasks focus on single modality generation or rendering, leaving yet-to-be-bridged gaps between the approaches correspond…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Resilient Test-Time Adaptation by Mitigating Batch-Normalization Overfitting

ICASSP 2025accepted

Test-time domain adaptation adjusts a source domain model to accommodate previously unseen domain shifts in a target domain during inference. In real-world scenarios, domain shifts continually evolve, and test data are often non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.). Existing methods…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Test-Time Adaptation on Noisy Data via Model-Pruning-Based Filtering and Flatness-Aware Entropy Minimization

AAAI 2025technical

Test-time adaptation (TTA) deals with domain shifts during inference by training models based on only unlabeled test samples. Test samples may include noisy samples, which degrade domain adaptation. Existing methods rely on the model's output prediction to detect and filter noisy samples, and furthe…

2025

Zero-resource Hallucination Detection for Text Generation via Graph-based Contextual Knowledge Triples Modeling

AAAI 2025technical

LLMs obtain remarkable performance but suffer from hallucinations. Most research on detecting hallucination focuses on questions with short and concrete correct answers that are easy to check faithfulness. Hallucination detections for text generation with open-ended answers are more hard. Some resea…

2024

Context-aware Watermark with Semantic Balanced Green-red Lists for Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Watermarking enables people to determine whether the text is generated by a specific model. It injects a unique signature based on the “green-red” list that can be tracked during detection, where the words in green lists are encouraged to be generated. Recent researchers propose to fix the green/red…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Intent-Aware and Hate-Mitigating Counterspeech Generation via Dual-Discriminator Guided LLMs

COLING 2024main

Counterspeech is an effective way to combat online hate speech. Considering the multifaceted nature of online hate speech, counterspeech with varying intents (e.g., denouncing or empathy) has significant potential to mitigate hate speech effectively. Recently, controlled approaches based on large la…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

POMP: Probability-driven Meta-graph Prompter for LLMs in Low-resource Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2024long

Low-resource languages (LRLs) face challenges in supervised neural machine translation (NMT) due to limited parallel data, prompting research in unsupervised NMT.Unsupervised NMT (UNMT), without requiring ground truth, provides solutions for LRL translations using synthetic pseudo-parallel data and…

2024

Perception of Knowledge Boundary for Large Language Models through Semi-open-ended Question Answering

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for knowledge-seeking purposes yet suffer from hallucinations. The knowledge boundary of an LLM limits its factual understanding, beyond which it may begin to hallucinate. Investigating the perception of LLMs' knowledge boundary is crucial for detecting h…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

StyleFlow: Disentangle Latent Representations via Normalizing Flow for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer

COLING 2024main

Unsupervised text style transfer aims to modify the style of a sentence while preserving its content without parallel corpora. Existing approaches attempt to separate content from style, but some words contain both content and style information. It makes them difficult to disentangle, where unsatisf…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

DaMSTF: Domain Adversarial Learning Enhanced Meta Self-Training for Domain Adaptation

ACL 2023long

Self-training emerges as an important research line on domain adaptation. By taking the model’s prediction as the pseudo labels of the unlabeled data, self-training bootstraps the model with pseudo instances in the target domain. However, the prediction errors of pseudo labels (label noise) challeng…

2023

EMQ: Evolving Training-free Proxies for Automated Mixed Precision Quantization

ICCV 2023poster

Mixed-Precision Quantization (MQ) can achieve a competitive accuracy-complexity trade-off for models. Conventional training-based search methods require time-consuming candidate training to search optimized per-layer bit-width configurations in MQ. Recently, some training-free approaches have presen…

Cited by 39PDFcodeScholar
2023

GRACE: Gradient-guided Controllable Retrieval for Augmenting Attribute-based Text Generation

ACL 2023findings

Attribute-based generation methods are of growing significance in controlling the generation of large pre-trained language models (PLMs). Existing studies control the generation by (1) finetuning the model with attributes or (2) guiding the inference processing toward control signals while freezing…

2023

GROVE: A Retrieval-augmented Complex Story Generation Framework with A Forest of Evidence

EMNLP 2023long findings

Conditional story generation is significant in human-machine interaction, particularly in producing stories with complex plots. While Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multiple NLP tasks, including story generation, it is challenging to generate stories with both complex and creative plot…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Meta-Tsallis-Entropy Minimization: A New Self-Training Approach for Domain Adaptation on Text Classification

IJCAI 2023poster

Text classification is a fundamental task for natural language processing, and adapting text classification models across domains has broad applications. Self-training generates pseudo-examples from the model's predictions and iteratively trains on the pseudo-examples, i.e., minimizes the loss on…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

Progressive Meta-Pooling Learning for Lightweight Image Classification Model

ICASSP 2023accepted

Practical networks for edge devices adopt shallow depth and small convolutional kernels to save memory and computational cost, which leads to a restricted receptive field. Conventional efficient learning methods focus on lightweight convolution designs, ignoring the role of the receptive field in ne…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

RD-NAS: Enhancing One-Shot Supernet Ranking Ability Via Ranking Distillation From Zero-Cost Proxies

ICASSP 2023accepted

Neural architecture search (NAS) has made tremendous progress in the automatic design of effective neural network structures but suffers from a heavy computational burden. One-shot NAS significantly alleviates the burden through weight sharing and improves computational efficiency. Zero-shot NAS fur…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Self-Evolution Learning for Mixup: Enhance Data Augmentation on Few-Shot Text Classification Tasks

EMNLP 2023long main

Text classification tasks often encounter few-shot scenarios with limited labeled data, and addressing data scarcity is crucial. Data augmentation with mixup merges sample pairs to generate new pseudos, which can relieve the data deficiency issue in text classification. However, the quality of pseud…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Empathetic and Emotionally Positive Conversation Systems with an Emotion-specific Query-Response Memory

EMNLP 2022finding

Emotional conversation systems generate responses for the input queries considering the speaker’s emotions in a conversation. Existing emotional conversation systems output emotional responses according to either a given emotion or the user’s emotion reflected in the input queries. Following a given…

2022

Hard Gate Knowledge Distillation - Leverage Calibration for Robust and Reliable Language Model

EMNLP 2022main

In knowledge distillation, a student model is trained with supervisions from both knowledge from a teacher and observations drawn from a training data distribution. Knowledge of a teacher is considered a subject that holds inter-class relations which send a meaningful supervision to a student; hence…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2022

Improving Meta-learning for Low-resource Text Classification and Generation via Memory Imitation

ACL 2022long

Building models of natural language processing (NLP) is challenging in low-resource scenarios where limited data are available. Optimization-based meta-learning algorithms achieve promising results in low-resource scenarios by adapting a well-generalized model initialization to handle new tasks. Non…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2022

Prompt Conditioned VAE: Enhancing Generative Replay for Lifelong Learning in Task-Oriented Dialogue

EMNLP 2022main

Lifelong learning (LL) is vital for advanced task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems. To address the catastrophic forgetting issue of LL, generative replay methods are widely employed to consolidate past knowledge with generated pseudo samples. However, most existing generative replay methods use only…

2022

Retrieval Bias Aware Ensemble Model for Conditional Sentence Generation

ICASSP 2022accepted

Conditional sentence generation aims to generate proper target sentences with the given condition, and has shown great promise in many text generation applications such as dialogue systems and poetry generation. The ensemble of retrieval and generation-based models retrieve texts according to the in…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Semi-Supervised Lifelong Language Learning

EMNLP 2022finding

Lifelong learning aims to accumulate knowledge and alleviate catastrophic forgetting when learning tasks sequentially. However, existing lifelong language learning methods only focus on the supervised learning setting. Unlabeled data, which can be easily accessed in real-world scenarios, are underex…

2022

SeqPATE: Differentially Private Text Generation via Knowledge Distillation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Protecting the privacy of user data is crucial for text generation models, which can leak sensitive information during generation. Differentially private (DP) learning methods provide guarantees against identifying the existence of a training sample from model outputs. PATE is a recent DP learning a…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2021

Enhancing Content Preservation in Text Style Transfer Using Reverse Attention and Conditional Layer Normalization

ACL 2021long

Text style transfer aims to alter the style (e.g., sentiment) of a sentence while preserving its content. A common approach is to map a given sentence to content representation that is free of style, and the content representation is fed to a decoder with a target style. Previous methods in filterin…

2021

Learning from My Friends: Few-Shot Personalized Conversation Systems via Social Networks

AAAI 2021technical

Personalized conversation models (PCMs) generate responses according to speaker preferences. Existing personalized conversation tasks typically require models to extract speaker preferences from user descriptions or their conversation histories, which are scarce for newcomers and inactive users. In…

2021

Towards Efficiently Diversifying Dialogue Generation Via Embedding Augmentation

ICASSP 2021accepted

Dialogue generation models face the challenge of producing generic and repetitive responses. Unlike previous augmentation methods that mostly focus on token manipulation and ignore the essential variety within a single sample using hard labels, we propose to promote the generation diversity of the n…

Cited by 0SourceScholar