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Zuchao Li

55 accepted papers

2026

End-to-End Contrastive Language-Speech Pretraining Model for Long-Form Spoken Question Answering

AAAI 2026technical

Significant progress has been made in spoken question answering (SQA) in recent years. However, many existing methods, including large audio language models, struggle with processing long audio. Follow the success of retrieval augmented generation, a speech-related retriever shows promising in help

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Ghost in the Transformer: Detecting Model Reuse with Invariant Spectral Signatures

AAAI 2026technical

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely adopted, but their high training cost leads many developers to fine-tune existing open-source models. While most adhere to open-source licenses, some falsely claim original training despite clear derivation from public models, raising pressing concerns about i

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

SRPO: Self-Reflective Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Self-reflection is a powerful mechanism for credit assignment in human learning, converting sparse outcome feedback into actionable guidance. However, its potential for post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) remains underexplored. We propose Self-Reflective Policy Optimization (SRPO), a framewor…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Scaling LLM Speculative Decoding: Non-Autoregressive Forecasting in Large-Batch Scenarios

AAAI 2026technical

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by utilizing otherwise idle computational resources during memory-to-chip data transfer. Current speculative decoding methods typically assume a considerable amount of available computing power, then generate a complex and massive draft tree using a sma

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AMIA: Automatic Masking and Joint Intention Analysis Makes LVLMs Robust Jailbreak Defenders

EMNLP 2025

We introduce AMIA, a lightweight, inference-only defense for Large Vision–Language Models (LVLMs) that (1) Automatically Masks a small set of text-irrelevant image patches to disrupt adversarial perturbations, and (2) conducts joint Intention Analysis to uncover and mitigate hidden harmful intents b

2025

Can Large Language Models Be Good Language Teachers?

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains. However, their potential as effective language teachers—particularly in complex pedagogical scenarios like teaching Chinese as a second language—remains inadequately assessed. To address this gap, we propose the fi

2025

CoViPAL: Layer-wise Contextualized Visual Token Pruning for Large Vision-Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) process multimodal inputs consisting of text tokens and vision tokens extracted from images or videos. Due to the rich visual information, a single image can generate thousands of vision tokens, leading to high computational costs during the prefilling stage and

2025

DAC: A Dynamic Attention-aware Approach for Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression

ACL 2025long

Task-agnostic prompt compression leverages the redundancy in natural language to reduce computational overhead and enhance information density within prompts, especially in long-context scenarios. Existing methods predominantly rely on information entropy as the metric to compress lexical units, aim…

2025

Dialogue-RAG: Enhancing Retrieval for LLMs via Node-Linking Utterance Rewriting

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have demonstrated significant potential on tasks across multiple domains. However, ellipses and coreferences, as common phenomena in dialogue scenes, pose challenges to LLMs’ understanding and RAG’s retrieval accuracy. The…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Faster In-Context Learning for LLMs via N-Gram Trie Speculative Decoding

EMNLP 2025

As a crucial method in prompt engineering, In-Context Learning (ICL) enhances the generalization and knowledge utilization capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) (Dong et al., 2024). However, the lengthy retrieved contexts and limited token throughput in autoregressive models significantly con

2025

From Parameters to Performance: A Data-Driven Study on LLM Structure and Development

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains, driving significant technological advancements and innovations. Despite the rapid growth in model scale and capability, systematic, data-driven research on how structural configurations affect performance remains s

2025

Imitate Before Detect: Aligning Machine Stylistic Preference for Machine-Revised Text Detection

AAAI 2025technical

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized text generation, making detecting machine-generated text increasingly challenging. Although past methods have achieved good performance on detecting pure machine-generated text, those detectors have poor performance on distinguishing machine-revised t…

2025

Joint Automatic Speech Recognition And Structure Learning For Better Speech Understanding

ICASSP 2025accepted

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a structure prediction task in the field of speech. Recently, many works on SLU that treat it as a sequence-to-sequence task have achieved great success. However, This method is not suitable for simultaneous speech recognition and understanding. In this paper,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

KV-Latent: Dimensional-level KV Cache Reduction with Frequency-aware Rotary Positional Embedding

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) based on Transformer Decoders have become the preferred choice for conversational generative AI. Despite the overall superiority of the Decoder architecture, the gradually increasing Key-Value (KV) cache during inference has emerged as a primary efficiency bottleneck, bo…

2025

Label Drop for Multi-Aspect Relation Modeling in Universal Information Extraction

NAACL 2025long

Universal Information Extraction (UIE) has garnered significant attention due to its ability to address model explosion problems effectively. Extractive UIE can achieve strong performance using a relatively small model, making it widely adopted. Extractive UIEs generally rely on task instructions fo…

2025

NOTA: Multimodal Music Notation Understanding for Visual Large Language Model

NAACL 2025findings

Symbolic music is represented in two distinct forms: two-dimensional, visually intuitive score images, and one-dimensional, standardized text annotation sequences. While large language models have shown extraordinary potential in music, current research has primarily focused on unimodal symbol seque…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Segment First or Comprehend First? Explore the Limit of Unsupervised Word Segmentation with Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Word segmentation stands as a cornerstone of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Based on the concept of “comprehend first, segment later”, we propose a new framework to explore the limit of unsupervised word segmentation with Large Language Models (LLMs) and evaluate the semantic understanding capab…

2025

SmallKV: Small Model Assisted Compensation of KV Cache Compression for Efficient LLM Inference

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

KV cache eviction has emerged as an effective solution to alleviate resource constraints faced by LLMs in long-context scenarios. However, existing token-level eviction methods often overlook two critical aspects: (1) their irreversible eviction strategy fails to adapt to dynamic attention patterns…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SongSong: A Time Phonograph for Chinese SongCi Music from Thousand of Years Away

AAAI 2025technical

Recently, there have been significant advancements in music generation. However, existing models primarily focus on creating modern pop songs, making it challenging to produce ancient music with distinct rhythms and styles, such as ancient Chinese SongCi. In this paper, we introduce SongSong, the fi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SpindleKV: A Novel KV Cache Reduction Method Balancing Both Shallow and Deep Layers

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive accomplishments in recent years. However, the increasing memory consumption of KV cache has possessed a significant challenge to the inference system. Eviction methods have revealed the inherent redundancy within the KV cache, demonstrating its p…

2025

Teaching Your Models to Understand Code via Focal Preference Alignment

EMNLP 2025

Preference learning extends the performance of Code LLMs beyond traditional supervised fine-tuning by leveraging relative quality comparisons. In existing approaches, a set of n candidate solutions is evaluated based on test case success rates, with the candidate demonstrating a higher pass rate bei

2025

ToM: Leveraging Tree-oriented MapReduce for Long-Context Reasoning in Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs), constrained by limited context windows, often face significant performance degradation when reasoning over long contexts. To address this, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) retrieves and reasons over chunks but frequently sacrifices logical coherence due to its relia

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

What Limits Bidirectional Model's Generative Capabilities? A Uni-Bi-Directional Mixture-of-Expert Method For Bidirectional Fine-tuning

ICML 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in generation tasks, yet their causal attention mechanisms limit performance in embedding tasks. While bidirectional modeling may enhance embeddings, naively fine-tuning unidirectional models bidirectionally severely degrades generative performance. To investigate…

2025

XQuant: Achieving Ultra-Low Bit KV Cache Quantization with Cross-Layer Compression

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks. However, their extensive memory requirements, particularly due to KV cache growth during long-text understanding and generation, present significant challenges for deployment in r

2024

A Novel Energy Based Model Mechanism for Multi-Modal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

AAAI 2024technical

Multi-modal aspect-based sentiment analysis (MABSA) has recently attracted increasing attention. The span-based extraction methods, such as FSUIE, demonstrate strong performance in sentiment analysis due to their joint modeling of input sequences and target labels. However, previous methods still ha…

2024

GKT: A Novel Guidance-Based Knowledge Transfer Framework For Efficient Cloud-edge Collaboration LLM Deployment

ACL 2024findings

The burgeoning size of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to enhanced capabilities in generating responses, albeit at the expense of increased inference times and elevated resource demands. Existing methods of acceleration, predominantly hinged on knowledge distillation, generally necessitate fine…

2024

Hypergraph based Understanding for Document Semantic Entity Recognition

ACL 2024long

Semantic entity recognition is an important task in the field of visually-rich document understanding. It distinguishes the semantic types of text by analyzing the position relationship between text nodes and the relation between text content. The existing document understanding models mainly focus…

2024

Multi-Modal Latent Space Learning for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models

AAAI 2024technical

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has exhibited impressive performance in language models for solving complex tasks and answering questions. However, many real-world questions require multi-modal information, such as text and images. Previous research on multi-modal CoT has primarily focused on extra…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2024

N-gram Unsupervised Compoundation and Feature Injection for Better Symbolic Music Understanding

AAAI 2024technical

The first step to apply deep learning techniques for symbolic music understanding is to transform musical pieces (mainly in MIDI format) into sequences of predefined tokens like note pitch, note velocity, and chords. Subsequently, the sequences are fed into a neural sequence model to accomplish spec…

2024

Reference Trustable Decoding: A Training-Free Augmentation Paradigm for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced and demonstrated impressive capabilities. In-Context Learning (ICL) and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) are currently two mainstream methods for augmenting LLMs to downstream tasks. ICL typically constructs a few-shot learning scenario, eithe…

2024

Soft-Prompting with Graph-of-Thought for Multi-modal Representation Learning

COLING 2024main

The chain-of-thought technique has been received well in multi-modal tasks. It is a step-by-step linear reasoning process that adjusts the length of the chain to improve the performance of generated prompts. However, human thought processes are predominantly non-linear, as they encompass multiple as…

2024

Sparse is Enough in Fine-tuning Pre-trained Large Language Models

ICML 2024spotlight

With the prevalence of pre-training-fine-tuning paradigm, how to efficiently adapt the pre-trained model to the downstream tasks has been an intriguing issue. $\textbf{P}$arameter-$\textbf{E}$fficient $\textbf{F}$ine-$\textbf{T}$uning(PEFT) methods have been proposed for low-cost adaptation. Althou…

2024

The Music Maestro or The Musically Challenged, A Massive Music Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

Benchmark plays a pivotal role in assessing the advancements of large language models (LLMs). While numerous benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate LLMs’ capabilities, there is a notable absence of a dedicated benchmark for assessing their musical abilities. To address this gap, we present ZIQI-E…

2024

VHASR: A Multimodal Speech Recognition System With Vision Hotwords

EMNLP 2024main

The image-based multimodal automatic speech recognition (ASR) model enhances speech recognition performance by incorporating audio-related image. However, some works suggest that introducing image information to model does not help improving ASR performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approac…

2023

Bidirectional Looking with A Novel Double Exponential Moving Average to Adaptive and Non-adaptive Momentum Optimizers

ICML 2023poster

Optimizer is an essential component for the success of deep learning, which guides the neural network to update the parameters according to the loss on the training set. SGD and Adam are two classical and effective optimizers on which researchers have proposed many variants, such as SGDM and RAdam.…

2023

FSUIE: A Novel Fuzzy Span Mechanism for Universal Information Extraction

ACL 2023long

Universal Information Extraction (UIE) has been introduced as a unified framework for various Information Extraction (IE) tasks and has achieved widespread success. Despite this, UIE models have limitations. For example, they rely heavily on span boundaries in the data during training, which does no…

2023

Fine-Grained Position Helps Memorizing More, a Novel Music Compound Transformer Model with Feature Interaction Fusion

AAAI 2023technical

Due to the particularity of the simultaneous occurrence of multiple events in music sequences, compound Transformer is proposed to deal with the challenge of long sequences. However, there are two deficiencies in the compound Transformer. First, since the order of events is more important for music…

2023

iRe2f: Rethinking Effective Refinement in Language Structure Prediction via Efficient Iterative Retrospecting and Reasoning

IJCAI 2023poster

Refinement plays a critical role in language structure prediction, a process that deals with complex situations such as structural edge interdependencies. Since language structure prediction usually modeled as graph parsing, typical refinement methods involve taking an initial parsing graph as input…

2022

Explicit Alignment Learning for Neural Machine Translation

IJCAI 2022poster

Even though neural machine translation (NMT) has become the state-of-the-art solution for end-to-end translation, it still suffers from a lack of translation interpretability, which may be conveniently enhanced by explicit alignment learning (EAL), as performed in traditional statistical machine tra…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2022

What Works and Doesn’t Work, A Deep Decoder for Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2022findings

Deep learning has demonstrated performance advantages in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, including neural machine translation (NMT). Transformer NMT models are typically strengthened by deeper encoder layers, but deepening their decoder layers usually results in failure. In this p…

2021

MiSS: An Assistant for Multi-Style Simultaneous Translation

EMNLP 2021system demonstrations

In this paper, we present MiSS, an assistant for multi-style simultaneous translation. Our proposed translation system has five key features: highly accurate translation, simultaneous translation, translation for multiple text styles, back-translation for translation quality evaluation, and grammati…

2021

Seeking Common but Distinguishing Difference, A Joint Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Model

EMNLP 2021main

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) task consists of three typical subtasks: aspect term extraction, opinion term extraction, and sentiment polarity classification. These three subtasks are usually performed jointly to save resources and reduce the error propagation in the pipeline. However, most…

2021

Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Universal Grammar

EMNLP 2021main

Machine translation usually relies on parallel corpora to provide parallel signals for training. The advent of unsupervised machine translation has brought machine translation away from this reliance, though performance still lags behind traditional supervised machine translation. In unsupervised ma…

2020

Data-dependent Gaussian Prior Objective for Language Generation

ICLR 2020talk

For typical sequence prediction problems such as language generation, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) has commonly been adopted as it encourages the predicted sequence most consistent with the ground-truth sequence to have the highest probability of occurring. However, MLE focuses on once-to-all…

Cited by 69SourceScholar
2020

Neural Machine Translation with Universal Visual Representation

ICLR 2020spotlight

Though visual information has been introduced for enhancing neural machine translation (NMT), its effectiveness strongly relies on the availability of large amounts of bilingual parallel sentence pairs with manual image annotations. In this paper, we present a universal visual representation learned…

Cited by 141SourcecodeScholar