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Zhisong Zhang

17 accepted papers

2025

A Silver Bullet or a Compromise for Full Attention? A Comprehensive Study of Gist Token-based Context Compression

ACL 2025long

In this work, we provide an empirical investigation of gist-based context compression methods to improve context processing in large language models. We focus on two key questions: (1) How well can these methods replace full attention models? and (2) What potential failure patterns arise due to comp…

2025

Attention Entropy is a Key Factor: An Analysis of Parallel Context Encoding with Full-attention-based Pre-trained Language Models

ACL 2025long

Large language models have shown remarkable performance across a wide range of language tasks, owing to their exceptional capabilities in context modeling. The most commonly used method of context modeling is full self-attention, as seen in standard decoder-only Transformers. Although powerful, this…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LoGU: Long-form Generation with Uncertainty Expressions

ACL 2025long

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, they still struggle with generating factually incorrect content (i.e., hallucinations). A promising approach to mitigate this issue is enabling models to express uncertainty when unsure. Previous research on uncertainty modeling…

2025

Low-Bit Quantization Favors Undertrained LLMs

ACL 2025long

Low-bit quantization improves machine learning model efficiency but surprisingly favors undertrained large language models (LLMs). Larger models or those trained on fewer tokens exhibit less quantization-induced degradation (QiD), while smaller, well-trained models face significant performance losse…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Recall with Reasoning: Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Mamba’s Long-Context Memory and Extrapolation

EMNLP 2025

Mamba’s theoretical infinite-context potential is limited in practice when sequences far exceed training lengths. This work explores unlocking Mamba’s long-context memory ability by a simple-yet-effective method, Recall with Reasoning (RwR), by distilling chain-of-thought (CoT) summarization from a

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

UNCLE: Benchmarking Uncertainty Expressions in Long-Form Generation

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, particularly in long-form generations. A promising direction to mitigate hallucination is to teach LLMs to express uncertainty explicitly when they lack sufficient knowledge. However, existing work lacks direct and fair evaluation of LLMs’ abi

2025

UniGist: Towards General and Hardware-aligned Sequence-level Long Context Compression

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models are increasingly capable of handling long-context inputs, but the memory overhead of KV cache remains a major bottleneck for general-purpose deployment. While many compression strategies have been explored, sequence-level compression is particularly challenging due to its tende…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

WebCoT: Enhancing Web Agent Reasoning by Reconstructing Chain-of-Thought in Reflection, Branching, and Rollback

EMNLP 2025

Web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for next-generation AI, but their limited reasoning in uncertain, dynamic web environments hinders robust deployment. In this paper, we identify key reasoning skills essential for effective web agents, i.e., reflection & lookahead, bran

2025

WebEvolver: Enhancing Web Agent Self-Improvement with Co-evolving World Model

EMNLP 2025

Agent self-improvement, where agents autonomously train their underlying Large Language Model (LLM) on self-sampled trajectories, shows promising results but often stagnates in web environments due to limited exploration and under-utilization of pretrained web knowledge. To improve the performance o

2024

A Thorough Examination of Decoding Methods in the Era of LLMs

EMNLP 2024main

Decoding methods play an indispensable role in converting language models from next-token predictors into practical task solvers. Prior research on decoding methods, primarily focusing on task-specific models, may not extend to the current era of general-purpose large language models (LLMs). Moreove…

2024

On the Worst Prompt Performance of Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is acutely sensitive to the phrasing of prompts, which raises significant concerns about their reliability in real-world scenarios. Existing studies often divide prompts into task-level instructions and case-level inputs and primarily focus on evaluati…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Reasons to Reject? Aligning Language Models with Judgments

ACL 2024findings

As humans, we consistently interact with our peers and receive feedback in the form of natural language. This language feedback allows us to maintain appropriate behavior, and rectify potential errors. The question arises naturally: can we use language feedback to align large language models (LLMs)?…

2024

Self-playing Adversarial Language Game Enhances LLM Reasoning

NeurIPS 2024poster

We explore the potential of self-play training for large language models (LLMs) in a two-player adversarial language game called Adversarial Taboo. In this game, an attacker and a defender communicate around a target word only visible to the attacker. The attacker aims to induce the defender to spea…

2023

Data-efficient Active Learning for Structured Prediction with Partial Annotation and Self-Training

EMNLP 2023long findings

In this work we propose a pragmatic method that reduces the annotation cost for structured label spaces using active learning. Our approach leverages partial annotation, which reduces labeling costs for structured outputs by selecting only the most informative sub-structures for annotation. We also…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

Transfer Learning from Semantic Role Labeling to Event Argument Extraction with Template-based Slot Querying

EMNLP 2022main

In this work, we investigate transfer learning from semantic role labeling (SRL) to event argument extraction (EAE), considering their similar argument structures. We view the extraction task as a role querying problem, unifying various methods into a single framework. There are key discrepancies on…

2021

On the Benefit of Syntactic Supervision for Cross-lingual Transfer in Semantic Role Labeling

EMNLP 2021main

Although recent developments in neural architectures and pre-trained representations have greatly increased state-of-the-art model performance on fully-supervised semantic role labeling (SRL), the task remains challenging for languages where supervised SRL training data are not abundant. Cross-lingu…