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Zifeng Cheng

16 accepted papers

2026

Multi-Label Test-Time Adaptation with Bayesian Conditional Priors

ICML 2026poster

Vision--language models such as CLIP have shown strong zero-shot performance, but their reliability degrades in realistic multi-label settings under distribution shift. Standard test-time adaptation (TTA) methods either rely on costly gradient-based updates or adopt lightweight statistical schemes t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

RegionMarker: A Region-Triggered Semantic Watermarking Framework for Embedding-as-a-Service Copyright Protection

AAAI 2026technical

Embedding-as-a-Service (EaaS) is an effective and convenient deployment solution for addressing various NLP tasks. Nevertheless, recent research has shown that EaaS is vulnerable to model extraction attacks, which could lead to significant economic losses for model providers. For copyright protectio

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Rethinking BCE Loss for Multi-Label Image Recognition with Fine-Tuning

CVPR 2026

Fine-tuning vision-language models such as CLIP has become the mainstream paradigm for multi-label image recognition, and prompt tuning is widely adopted due to its lightweight parameter cost and strong transferability. However, we find that when these methods use Binary Cross-entropy as the supervi

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ScaleErasure: Inference-Time Minimal Intervention for Precise Concept Erasure in Next-Scale Autoregressive Image Generation

ICML 2026poster

Concept erasure aims to prevent image generative models from producing unsafe content while preserving their general generative capability. Meanwhile, next-scale autoregressive (AR) image generation has recently emerged as a new generative paradigm characterized by next-scale prediction, for which c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

TraceRouter: Robust Safety for Large Foundation Models via Path-Level Intervention

ICML 2026poster

Despite their capabilities, large foundation models (LFMs) remain susceptible to adversarial manipulation. Current defenses predominantly rely on the ``locality hypothesis", suppressing isolated neurons or features. However, harmful semantics act as distributed, cross-layer circuits, rendering such …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Where Culture Fades: Revealing the Cultural Gap in Text-to-Image Generation

CVPR 2026

Multilingual text-to-image (T2I) models have advanced rapidly in terms of visual realism and semantic alignment, and are now widely utilised. Yet outputs vary across cultural contexts: because language carries cultural connotations, images synthesized from multilingual prompts should preserve cross-

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Who Transfers Safety? Identifying and Targeting Cross-Lingual Shared Safety Neurons

ICML 2026poster

Multilingual safety remains significantly imbalanced, leaving non-high-resource (NHR) languages vulnerable compared to robust high-resource (HR) ones. Moreover, the neural mechanisms driving safety alignment remain unclear despite observed cross-lingual representation transfer.In this paper, we find…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Advanced Sign Language Video Generation with Compressed and Quantized Multi-Condition Tokenization

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Sign Language Video Generation (SLVG) seeks to generate identity-preserving sign language videos from spoken language texts. Existing methods primarily rely on the single coarse condition (e.g., skeleton sequences) as the intermediary to bridge the translation model and the video generation model, w…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Contrastive Prompting Enhances Sentence Embeddings in LLMs through Inference-Time Steering

ACL 2025long

Extracting sentence embeddings from large language models (LLMs) is a practical direction, as it requires neither additional data nor fine-tuning. Previous studies usually focus on prompt engineering to guide LLMs to encode the core semantic information of the sentence into the embedding of the last…

2025

Multi-Prompting Decoder Helps Better Language Understanding

ACL 2025finding

Recent large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) usually only provide users with the inference APIs, namely the emerging Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) setting. To adapt MaaS PLMs to downstream tasks without accessing their parameters and gradients, some existing methods focus on the output-side adaptatio…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Steering When Necessary: Flexible Steering Large Language Models with Backtracking

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across many generation tasks. Nevertheless, effectively aligning them with desired behaviors remains a significant challenge. Activation steering is an effective and cost-efficient approach that directly modifies the activations of LL…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Token Prepending: A Training-Free Approach for Eliciting Better Sentence Embeddings from LLMs

ACL 2025long

Extracting sentence embeddings from large language models (LLMs) is a promising direction, as LLMs have demonstrated stronger semantic understanding capabilities. Previous studies typically focus on prompt engineering to elicit sentence embeddings from LLMs by prompting the model to encode sentence…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Aggregating Multiple Heuristic Signals as Supervision for Unsupervised Automated Essay Scoring

ACL 2023long

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) aims to evaluate the quality score for input essays. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised AES approach ULRA, which does not require groundtruth scores of essays for training. The core idea of our ULRA is to use multiple heuristic quality signals as the pseudo-g…

2023

Controlling Class Layout for Deep Ordinal Classification via Constrained Proxies Learning

AAAI 2023technical

For deep ordinal classification, learning a well-structured feature space specific to ordinal classification is helpful to properly capture the ordinal nature among classes. Intuitively, when Euclidean distance metric is used, an ideal ordinal layout in feature space would be that the sample cluster…

2023

Improving Domain Generalization for Prompt-Aware Essay Scoring via Disentangled Representation Learning

ACL 2023long

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) aims to score essays written in response to specific prompts. Many AES models have been proposed, but most of them are either prompt-specific or prompt-adaptive and cannot generalize well on “unseen” prompts. This work focuses on improving the generalization ability of…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2020

A Symmetric Local Search Network for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

COLING 2020main

Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) is a new task which aims at extracting the potential clause pairs of emotions and corresponding causes in a document. To tackle this task, a two-step method was proposed by previous study which first extracted emotion clauses and cause clauses individually, then…