Baohua Zhang
Author directory2026
Is the Future Predictable? Modeling Future Predictability for Reliable Temporal Reasoning
Yongyi Huang | Huaping Zhang | Wenyao Cui | Qiuchi Li | Lei Li | Baohua Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yongyi Huang | Huaping Zhang | Wenyao Cui | Qiuchi Li | Lei Li | Baohua Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable when reasoning about the future. Existing models often overlook the difference among future states, committing to specific answers even when the queried facts are inherently volatile. To capture this challenge, we introduce ChronoRegime, a future-oriented temporal reasoning task that requires models to determine whether historical temporal evidence justifies commitment to a future answer. Furthermore, we propose Confidence-Aware Temporal Reasoning (CTR), a framework that estimates query predictability from temporal dynamics and regulates answer commitment accordingly. Rather than performing unconditional forecasting, CTR commits only when the reconstructed evidence supports the target future state. Across multiple LLMs, CTR improves strict overall accuracy by 6.7 percentage points and reduces hallucination rates by 18.4 percentage points on average over the plain QA baseline. These results demonstrate that explicit predictability assessment is an effective mechanism for safer and more reliable temporal reasoning under future uncertainty.
Modality-Specific Gating for Large Audio-Language Models
Zhenni Ren | Juan Wang | Qiuchi Li | Lei Li | Chunxiao Gao | Huaping Zhang | Baohua Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhenni Ren | Juan Wang | Qiuchi Li | Lei Li | Chunxiao Gao | Huaping Zhang | Baohua Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Audio-Language Models have made significant advances in audio-text instruction following and multimodal interaction. However, due to their text-conditioned generation architecture, current LALMs tend to be overly influenced by input text prompts. When acoustic evidence conflicts with textual prompts, incorrect or irrelevant textual cues may steer model predictions away from the audio. In this work, we systematically analyze this challenge and show that representative LALMs exhibit a persistent audio-text imbalance during decoding, where attention to audio tokens is weakened across generation steps. To address the imbalance, we propose Modality-Specific Gating (MSG), an acoustic calibration mechanism that improves audio grounding with a small number of additional parameters. MSG introduces a token-wise, query-conditioned bias to the attention logits of audio tokens before softmax, while leaving the original attention computation unchanged. With parameter-efficient fine-tuning, MSG enhances acoustic evidence utilization, leading to consistently improved performance on vocal sound classification and speech emotion recognition, as well as strong robustness under adversarial or irrelevant text prompts.
Distributional Stabilization for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction
Yongxin Liu | Huaping Zhang | Qiuchi Li | Chunxiao Gao | Haocheng Lv | Yan Ruohao | Baohua Zhang | Lei Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yongxin Liu | Huaping Zhang | Qiuchi Li | Chunxiao Gao | Haocheng Lv | Yan Ruohao | Baohua Zhang | Lei Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Joint-encoding zero-shot relation extraction classifies all candidate relation labels in a single Transformer forward pass, achieving strong accuracy and high throughput. However, under a controlled full-vocabulary diagnostic, two distributional pathologies surface: unnormalized dot-product scoring causes recall collapse, with certain types receiving zero predictions, while the per-instance BCE loss leaves gold and negative scores entangled beyond any reliable threshold—confidence ambiguity. We propose SCAR, which keeps the baseline pathway intact and stabilizes both distributions via two auxiliary branches: a gradient-isolated coarse-to-fine cascade with Z-score normalization that restores cross-relation comparability, and a training-only contrastive alignment module that separates gold from negative scores. On Wiki-ZSL (m=15), SCAR raises Macro F1 from 75.9% to 83.0% and cuts zero-recall types from 35 to 1, suggesting that small-pool ZSRE protocols can obscure failure modes critical to large-vocabulary deployment.
2023
PsyAttention: Psychological Attention Model for Personality Detection
Baohua Zhang | Yongyi Huang | Wenyao Cui | Zhang Huaping | Jianyun Shang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Baohua Zhang | Yongyi Huang | Wenyao Cui | Zhang Huaping | Jianyun Shang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Work on personality detection has tended to incorporate psychological features from different personality models, such as BigFive and MBTI. There are more than 900 psychological features, each of which is helpful for personality detection. However, when used in combination, the application of different calculation standards among these features may result in interference between features calculated using distinct systems, thereby introducing noise and reducing performance. This paper adapts different psychological models in the proposed PsyAttention for personality detection, which can effectively encode psychological features, reducing their number by 85%. In experiments on the BigFive and MBTI models, PysAttention achieved average accuracy of 65.66% and 86.30%, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art methods, indicating that it is effective at encoding psychological features.