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Zilong Zheng

56 accepted papers

2026

Can LLMs Reason Soundly in Law? Auditing Inference Patterns for Legal Judgment

ICLR 2026poster

This paper presents a method to analyze the inference patterns used by Large Language Models (LLMs) for judgment in a case study on legal LLMs, so as to identify potential incorrect representations of the LLM, according to human domain knowledge. Unlike traditional evaluations on language generation…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LIFT: A Novel Framework for Enhancing Long-Context Understanding of LLMs via Long Input Fine-Tuning

ICML 2026poster

Long context understanding remains challenging for large language models due to their limited context windows. This paper introduces Long Input Fine-Tuning (LIFT), a novel framework for long-context modeling that can enhance the long-context performance of arbitrary short-context LLMs by dynamically…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Native Parallel Reasoner: Reasoning in Parallelism via Self-Distilled Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026poster

We introduce **Native Parallel Reasoner (NPR)**, a teacher-free framework that enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to self-evolve genuine parallel reasoning capabilities. NPR transforms the model from sequential emulation to native parallel cognition through three key innovations: 1) a **self-disti…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

PoliCon: Evaluating LLMs on Achieving Diverse Political Consensus Objectives

ICLR 2026poster

Achieving political consensus is crucial yet challenging for the effective functioning of social governance. However, although frontier AI systems represented by large language models (LLMs) have developed rapidly in recent years, their capabilities in this scope are still understudied. In this pape…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

UniCode: Augmenting Evaluation for Code Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Current coding benchmarks often inflate Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities due to static paradigms and data contamination, enabling models to exploit statistical shortcuts rather than genuine reasoning. To address this, we introduce \textbf{UniCode}, a generative evaluation framework that syste…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

When Large Multimodal Models Confront Evolving Knowledge: Challenges and Explorations

ICLR 2026poster

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) store vast amounts of pretrained knowledge but struggle to remain aligned with real-world updates, making it difficult to avoid capability degradation when acquiring evolving knowledge. Furthermore, most current work focuses on exploring static textual knowledge inject…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown promise in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models by learning directly from rule-based outcome rewards. Recent RLVR works that operate under the zero setting avoid supervision in labeling the reasoning process, bu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Adaptive Preference Optimization with Uncertainty-aware Utility Anchor

EMNLP 2025

Offline preference optimization methods are efficient for large language models (LLMs) alignment. Direct Preference optimization (DPO)-like learning, one of the most popular approaches, stands out for its efficiency in reward modeling. However, these methods typically follow the convention to use Br

2025

Amulet: ReAlignment During Test Time for Personalized Preference Adaptation of LLMs

ICLR 2025poster

How to align large language models (LLMs) with user preferences from a static general dataset has been frequently studied. However, user preferences are usually personalized, changing, and diverse. This leads to the problem that the actual user preferences often do not coincide with those trained by…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Are the Values of LLMs Structurally Aligned with Humans? A Causal Perspective

ACL 2025finding

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into critical applications, aligning their behavior with human values presents significant challenges. Current methods, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), typically focus on a limited set of coarse-grained values…

2025

DiveR-CT: Diversity-enhanced Red Teaming Large Language Model Assistants with Relaxing Constraints

AAAI 2025technical

Recent advances in large language model assistants have made them indispensable, raising significant concerns over managing their safety. Automated red teaming offers a promising alternative to the labor-intensive and error-prone manual probing for vulnerabilities, providing more consistent and scal…

2025

Evaluating Generalization Capabilities of LLM-Based Agents in Mixed-Motive Scenarios Using Concordia

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for social interaction and are increasingly being deployed in situations where they might engage with both human and artificial agents. These interactions represent a critical frontier for LLM-based agents, yet existing eval…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse?

ICML 2025poster

Model collapse in synthetic data indicates that iterative training on self-generated data leads to a gradual decline in performance. With the proliferation of AI models, synthetic data will fundamentally reshape the web data ecosystem. Future GPT-$\{n\}$ models will inevitably be trained on a blend…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2025

In-Context Editing: Learning Knowledge from Self-Induced Distributions

ICLR 2025poster

In scenarios where language models must incorporate new information efficiently without extensive retraining, traditional fine-tuning methods are prone to overfitting, degraded generalization, and unnatural language generation. To address these limitations, we introduce Consistent In-Context Editing…

2025

In-situ Value-aligned Human-Robot Interactions with Physical Constraints

IROS 2025

Equipped with Large Language Models (LLMs), human-centered robots are now capable of performing a wide range of tasks that were previously deemed challenging or unattainable. However, merely completing tasks is insufficient for cognitive robots, who should learn and apply human preferences to future

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Look Both Ways and No Sink: Converting LLMs into Text Encoders without Training

ACL 2025long

Recent advancements have demonstrated the advantage of converting pretrained large language models into powerful text encoders by enabling bidirectional attention in transformer layers. However, existing methods often require extensive training on large-scale datasets, posing challenges in low-resou…

2025

MCU: An Evaluation Framework for Open-Ended Game Agents

ICML 2025spotlight

Developing AI agents capable of interacting with open-world environments to solve diverse tasks is a compelling challenge. However, evaluating such open-ended agents remains difficult, with current benchmarks facing scalability limitations. To address this, we introduce \textit{Minecraft Universe} (…

2025

MMKE-Bench: A Multimodal Editing Benchmark for Diverse Visual Knowledge

ICLR 2025poster

Knowledge editing techniques have emerged as essential tools for updating the factual knowledge of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models (LMMs), allowing them to correct outdated or inaccurate information without retraining from scratch. However, existing benchmarks for multimodal knowl…

2025

Navi2Gaze: Leveraging Foundation Models for Navigation and Target Gazing

IROS 2025

Task-aware navigation continues to be a challenging area of research, especially in scenarios involving open vocabulary. Previous studies primarily focus on finding suitable locations for task completion, often overlooking the importance of the robot’s pose. However, the robot’s orientation is cruci

Cited by 6SourcecodeScholar
2025

OmniMMI: A Comprehensive Multi-modal Interaction Benchmark in Streaming Video Contexts

CVPR 2025poster

The rapid advancement of multi-modal language models (MLLMs) like GPT-4o has propelled the development of Omni language models, designed to process and proactively respond to continuous streams of multi-modal data. Despite their potential, evaluating their real-world interactive capabilities in stre…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ReflectEvo: Improving Meta Introspection of Small LLMs by Learning Self-Reflection

ACL 2025finding

We present a novel pipeline, ReflectEvo, to demonstrate that small language models (SLMs) can enhance meta introspection through reflection learning. This process iteratively generates self-reflection for self-training, fostering a continuous and self-evolving process. Leveraging this pipeline, we c…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Reinforced Query Reasoners for Reasoning-intensive Retrieval Tasks

EMNLP 2025

Traditional information retrieval (IR) methods excel at textual and semantic matching but struggle in reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks that require multi-hop inference or complex semantic understanding between queries and documents. One promising solution is to explicitly rewrite or augment queri

2025

TokenSwift: Lossless Acceleration of Ultra Long Sequence Generation

ICML 2025poster

Generating ultra-long sequences with large language models (LLMs) has become increasingly crucial but remains a highly time-intensive task, particularly for sequences up to 100K tokens. While traditional speculative decoding methods exist, simply extending their generation limits fails to accelerate…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Understanding and Leveraging the Expert Specialization of Context Faithfulness in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

EMNLP 2025

Context faithfulness is essential for reliable reasoning in context-dependent scenarios. However, large language models often struggle to ground their outputs in the provided context, resulting in irrelevant responses.Inspired by the emergent expert specialization observed in mixture-of-experts arch

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

VideoLLaMB: Long Streaming Video Understanding with Recurrent Memory Bridges

ICCV 2025poster

Recent advancements in large-scale video-language models have shown significant potential for real-time planning and detailed interactions. However, their high computational demands and the scarcity of annotated datasets limit their practicality for academic researchers. In this work, we introduce V…

2024

An Efficient Recipe for Long Context Extension via Middle-Focused Positional Encoding

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recently, many methods have been developed to extend the context length of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), but they often require fine-tuning at the target length ($\gg4K$) and struggle to effectively utilize information from the middle part of the context. To address these issues, we prop…

2024

Boosting LLM Agents with Recursive Contemplation for Effective Deception Handling

ACL 2024findings

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant success in using LLMs as agents. Nevertheless, a common assumption that LLMs always process honest information neglects the widespread deceptive or misleading content in human and AI-generated material. This oversight might expo…

2024

Combining Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Label Classification Tasks with Partial Labels

ACL 2024long

Traditional supervised learning heavily relies on human-annotated datasets, especially in data-hungry neural approaches. However, various tasks, especially multi-label tasks like document-level relation extraction, pose challenges in fully manual annotation due to the specific domain knowledge and l…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Efficient Temporal Extrapolation of Multimodal Large Language Models with Temporal Grounding Bridge

EMNLP 2024main

Despite progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the challenge of interpreting long-form videos in response to linguistic queries persists, largely due to the inefficiency in temporal grounding and limited pre-trained context window size. In this work, we introduce Temporal Grounding Br…

2024

LangSuit·E: Planning, Controlling and Interacting with Large Language Models in Embodied Text Environments

ACL 2024findings

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown inspiring achievements in constructing autonomous agents that rely onlanguage descriptions as inputs. However, it remains unclear how well LLMs can function as few-shot or zero-shot embodied agents in dynamic interactive environments. To add…

2024

LooGLE: Can Long-Context Language Models Understand Long Contexts?

ACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) are typically limited to processing texts within context window size, which has spurred significant research efforts into enhancing LLMs’ long-context understanding as well as developing high-quality benchmarks to evaluate the ability. However, prior datasets suffer from…

2024

Mars: Situated Inductive Reasoning in an Open-World Environment

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on massive corpora have shown remarkable success in knowledge-intensive tasks. Yet, most of them rely on pre-stored knowledge. Inducing new general knowledge from a specific environment and performing reasoning with the acquired knowledge—situated inductive reaso…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

MathBench: Evaluating the Theory and Application Proficiency of LLMs with a Hierarchical Mathematics Benchmark

ACL 2024findings

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have showcased significant improvements in mathematics. However, traditional math benchmarks like GSM8k offer a unidimensional perspective, which fall short in providing a holistic assessment of the LLMs’ math capabilities. To address this gap, we…

2024

MindAgent: Emergent Gaming Interaction

NAACL 2024findings

Large Foundation Models (LFMs) can perform complex scheduling in a multi-agent system and can coordinate agents to complete sophisticated tasks that require extensive collaboration.However, despite the introduction of numerous gaming frameworks, the community lacks adequate benchmarks that support t…

Cited by 100SourcePDFScholar
2024

Towards More Realistic Chinese Spell Checking with New Benchmark and Specialized Expert Model

COLING 2024main

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold considerable promise for artificial general intelligence, given their intrinsic abilities to accomplish a wide range of open-domain tasks either independently or in tandem with specialized expert models. However, despite these capabilities, the performance of LLMs h…

2024

Varying Sentence Representations via Condition-Specified Routers

EMNLP 2024main

Semantic similarity between two sentences is inherently subjective and can vary significantly based on the specific aspects emphasized. Consequently, traditional sentence encoders must be capable of generating conditioned sentence representations that account for diverse conditions or aspects. In th…

2023

Modeling Instance Interactions for Joint Information Extraction with Neural High-Order Conditional Random Field

ACL 2023long

Prior works on joint Information Extraction (IE) typically model instance (e.g., event triggers, entities, roles, relations) interactions by representation enhancement, type dependencies scoring, or global decoding. We find that the previous models generally consider binary type dependency scoring o…

2023

ProBio: A Protocol-guided Multimodal Dataset for Molecular Biology Lab

NeurIPS 2023poster

The challenge of replicating research results has posed a significant impediment to the field of molecular biology. The advent of modern intelligent systems has led to notable progress in various domains. Consequently, we embarked on an investigation of intelligent monitoring systems as a means of t…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Rethinking Dictionaries and Glyphs for Chinese Language Pre-training

ACL 2023findings

We introduce CDBert, a new learning paradigm that enhances the semantics understanding ability of the Chinese PLMs with dictionary knowledge and structure of Chinese characters. We name the two core modules of CDBert as Shuowen and Jiezi, where Shuowen refers to the process of retrieving the most ap…

2023

SQA3D: Situated Question Answering in 3D Scenes

ICLR 2023poster

We propose a new task to benchmark scene understanding of embodied agents: Situated Question Answering in 3D Scenes (SQA3D). Given a scene context (e.g., 3D scan), SQA3D requires the tested agent to first understand its situation (position, orientation, etc.) in the 3D scene as described by text, th…

2023

Semi-automatic Data Enhancement for Document-Level Relation Extraction with Distant Supervision from Large Language Models

EMNLP 2023short main

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE), which aims to extract relations from a long context, is a critical challenge in achieving fine-grained structural comprehension and generating interpretable document representations. Inspired by recent advances in in-context learning capabilities emergent…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

VSTAR: A Video-grounded Dialogue Dataset for Situated Semantic Understanding with Scene and Topic Transitions

ACL 2023long

Video-grounded dialogue understanding is a challenging problem that requires machine to perceive, parse and reason over situated semantics extracted from weakly aligned video and dialogues. Most existing benchmarks treat both modalities the same as a frame-independent visual understanding task, whil…

2022

Energy-Based Generative Cooperative Saliency Prediction

AAAI 2022technical

Conventional saliency prediction models typically learn a deterministic mapping from an image to its saliency map, and thus fail to explain the subjective nature of human attention. In this paper, to model the uncertainty of visual saliency, we study the saliency prediction problem from the perspec…

2022

SHARP: Search-Based Adversarial Attack for Structured Prediction

NAACL 2022findings

Adversarial attack of structured prediction models faces various challenges such as the difficulty of perturbing discrete words, the sentence quality issue, and the sensitivity of outputs to small perturbations. In this work, we introduce SHARP, a new attack method that formulates the black-box adve…

2022

Unsupervised Vision-Language Grammar Induction with Shared Structure Modeling

ICLR 2022oral

We introduce a new task, unsupervised vision-language (VL) grammar induction. Given an image-caption pair, the goal is to extract a shared hierarchical structure for both image and language simultaneously. We argue that such structured output, grounded in both modalities, is a clear step towards th…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2022

Unsupervised Vision-Language Parsing: Seamlessly Bridging Visual Scene Graphs With Language Structures via Dependency Relationships

CVPR 2022poster

Understanding realistic visual scene images together with language descriptions is a fundamental task towards generic visual understanding. Previous works have shown compelling comprehensive results by building hierarchical structures for visual scenes (e.g., scene graphs) and natural languages (e.g…

Cited by 13PDFcodeScholar
2021

Generative PointNet: Deep Energy-Based Learning on Unordered Point Sets for 3D Generation, Reconstruction and Classification

CVPR 2021poster

We propose a generative model of unordered point sets, such as point clouds, in the forms of an energy-based model, where the energy function is parameterized by an input-permutation-invariant bottom-up neural network. The energy function learns a coordinate encoding of each point and then aggregate…

Cited by 91PDFcodeScholar
2021

Learning Cycle-Consistent Cooperative Networks via Alternating MCMC Teaching for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Translation

AAAI 2021technical

This paper studies the unsupervised cross-domain translation problem by proposing a generative framework, in which the probability distribution of each domain is represented by a generative cooperative network that consists of an energy-based model and a latent variable model. The use of generative…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2021

Learning Energy-Based Model with Variational Auto-Encoder as Amortized Sampler

AAAI 2021technical

Due to the intractable partition function, training energy-based models (EBMs) by maximum likelihood requires Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to approximate the gradient of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between data and model distributions. However, it is non-trivial to sample from an EBM…

Cited by 51SourcePDFScholar
2021

Learning Triadic Belief Dynamics in Nonverbal Communication From Videos

CVPR 2021poster

Humans possess a unique social cognition capability; nonverbal communication can convey rich social information among agents. In contrast, such crucial social characteristics are mostly missing in the existing scene understanding literature. In this paper, we incorporate different nonverbal communic…

Cited by 27PDFcodeScholar
2021

Patchwise Generative ConvNet: Training Energy-Based Models From a Single Natural Image for Internal Learning

CVPR 2021poster

Exploiting internal statistics of a single natural image has long been recognized as a significant research paradigm where the goal is to learn the distribution of patches within the image without relying on external training data. Different from prior works that model such distributions implicitly…

Cited by 24PDFScholar
2020

Joint Inference of States, Robot Knowledge, and Human (False-)Beliefs

ICRA 2020poster

Aiming to understand how human (false-)belief— a core socio-cognitive ability—would affect human interactions with robots, this paper proposes to adopt a graphical model to unify the representation of object states, robot knowledge, and human (false-)beliefs. Specifically, a parse graph (pg) is lear…

Cited by 27SourceScholar
2019

Reasoning Visual Dialogs With Structural and Partial Observations

CVPR 2019oral

We propose a novel model to address the task of Visual Dialog which exhibits complex dialog structures. To obtain a reasonable answer based on the current question and the dialog history, the underlying semantic dependencies between dialog entities are essential. In this paper, we explicitly formali…

Cited by 143PDFcodeScholar
2018

Learning Descriptor Networks for 3D Shape Synthesis and Analysis

CVPR 2018poster

This paper proposes a 3D shape descriptor network, which is a deep convolutional energy-based model, for modeling volumetric shape patterns. The maximum likelihood training of the model follows an "analysis by synthesis" scheme and can be interpreted as a mode seeking and mode shifting process. The…