Chuxu Zhang
Author directory2026
Where LLM Annotators Fail: Label-Free Learning on Graphs with LLMs
Safal Thapaliya | Jiatan Huang | Chuxu Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Safal Thapaliya | Jiatan Huang | Chuxu Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Node classification on graphs often requires labeled nodes, yet obtaining labels at graph scale is expensive. When node attributes contain semantic content, such as paper abstracts, web pages, or product descriptions, large language models (LLMs) can provide low-cost supervision by annotating a small subset of nodes. However, these LLM-generated labels are noisy, and existing label-free graph learning methods usually treat this noise as either global or class-conditional. We find that LLM annotation errors are not only class-dependent but also region-dependent: within the same class, reliability can vary sharply across feature-space clusters. In light of this, we propose Cluster-Aware Noise Estimation (CANE), a label-free learning framework that estimates cluster-conditional LLM reliability without ground truth labels, and uses this estimate to decide which pseudo-labels to trust, and which labels to correct. Across various graph benchmarks and GNN backbones, CANE improves over the strongest label-free baselines, with the largest gains on datasets exhibiting stronger cluster-conditional noise. The code is available at https://github.com/thapaliya19/CANE.
MAPRO: Recasting Multi-Agent Prompt Optimization as Maximum a Posteriori Inference
Zheyuan Zhang | Lin Ge | Hongjiang Li | Weicheng Zhu | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Zheyuan Zhang | Lin Ge | Hongjiang Li | Weicheng Zhu | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, and LLM-based agents further extend these abilities to various practical workflows. While recent progress shows that multi-agent systems (MAS) can outperform single agents by coordinating specialized roles, designing effective MAS remains difficult due to prompt sensitivity and the compounded instability MAS creates. To cope with the challenge, recent efforts in automated prompt design have reduced manual effort. However, multi-agent prompt optimization remains largely unexplored. Challenges like exponentially expanding search space and ambiguous credit assignment together make systematic design intractable without principled methods. Therefore, we introduce Multi-Agent PRompt Optimization (MAPRO), a four-stage framework that first formulates MAS prompt optimization as a Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) inference problem and solves it using a language-guided variant of max-product belief propagation algorithm. To address credit assignment and updates the system iteratively, MAPRO employs a topology-aware refinement mechanism that integrates execution feedback and downstream blames to selectively update agent prompts. Through this process, MAPRO progressively converges to a coordinated set of agent-specific prompt policies. Across benchmarks in various tasks, MAPRO achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently surpassing manually engineered baselines and recent automated alternatives. Beyond performance, our MAP-based formulation also delivers general guidelines for building more reliable and principled multi-agent systems in the future.
Interpretable Graph-Language Modeling for Detecting Youth Illicit Drug Use
Yiyang Li | Zehong Wang | Zhengqing Yuan | Zheyuan Zhang | Keerthiram Murugesan | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Yiyang Li | Zehong Wang | Zhengqing Yuan | Zheyuan Zhang | Keerthiram Murugesan | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Illicit drug use among teenagers and young adults (TYAs) remains a pressing public health concern, with rising prevalence and long-term impacts on health and well-being. To detect illicit drug use among TYAs, researchers analyze large-scale surveys such as the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which preserve rich demographic, psychological, and environmental factors related to substance use. However, existing modeling methods treat survey variables independently, overlooking latent and interconnected structures among them. To address this limitation, we propose LAMI (LAtent relation Mining with bi-modal Interpretability), a novel joint graph-language modeling framework for detecting illicit drug use and interpreting behavioral risk factors among TYAs. LAMI represents individual responses as relational graphs, learns latent connections through a specialized graph structure learning layer, and integrates a large language model to generate natural language explanations grounded in both graph structures and survey semantics. Experiments on the YRBS and NSDUH datasets show that LAMI outperforms competitive baselines in predictive accuracy. Interpretability analyses further demonstrate that LAMI reveals meaningful behavioral substructures and psychosocial pathways, such as family dynamics, peer influence, and school-related distress, that align with established risk factors for substance use. Our codebase is available here.
MDForge: Agentic Molecular Dynamics Pipeline Design under Sparse Simulator Feedback
Zehong Wang | Yijun Ma | Connor R. Schmidt | Tianyi Ma | Weixiang Sun | Ziming Li | Xiaoguang Guo | Chuxu Zhang | Matthew J. Webber | Yanfang Ye
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zehong Wang | Yijun Ma | Connor R. Schmidt | Tianyi Ma | Weixiang Sun | Ziming Li | Xiaoguang Guo | Chuxu Zhang | Matthew J. Webber | Yanfang Ye
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Molecular dynamics (MD) is the canonical in-silico method for atomistic molecular science, simulating molecular behavior from first-principles physics. Designing an MD pipeline for a new system requires substantial expert knowledge: running it on even one molecule is expensive, ruling out trial-and-error. We automate this expert pipeline-design process with an LLM agent. Unlike existing MD agents that orchestrate a predefined tool set, we treat pipeline design as open-ended code generation in which the agent’s behavior is reshaped online by verbal reward. Specifically, we build MDForge, an LLM agent whose in-context update rule densifies the sparse reward via a multi-agent debate among physics experts. On three SAMPL host–guest binding free-energy benchmarks (CB[7], OAH, CBClip), MDForge automatically designs MD pipelines competitive with human experts. Deployed on a library of unseen candidate guests, its CB[7] pipeline discovers a novel binder that wet-lab competition NMR confirms is a high-affinity, picomolar CB[7] binder (Ka ≈ 8 × 1012 M-1). Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/MDForge.
NG-Router: Graph-Supervised Multi-Agent Collaboration for Nutrition Question Answering
Kaiwen Shi | Zheyuan Zhang | Zhengqing Yuan | Keerthiram Murugesan | Vincent Galassi | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Kaiwen Shi | Zheyuan Zhang | Zhengqing Yuan | Keerthiram Murugesan | Vincent Galassi | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Diet plays a central role in human health, and Nutrition Question Answering (QA) offers a promising path toward personalized dietary guidance and the prevention of diet-related chronic diseases. However, existing methods face two fundamental challenges: the limited reasoning capacity of single-agent systems and the complexity of designing effective multi-agent architectures, as well as contextual overload that hinders accurate decision-making. We introduce Nutritional-Graph Router (NG-Router), a novel framework that formulates nutritional QA as a supervised, knowledge-graph–guided multi-agent collaboration problem. NG-Router integrates agent nodes into heterogeneous knowledge graphs and employs a graph neural network to learn task-aware routing distributions over agents, leveraging soft supervision derived from empirical agent performance. To further address contextual overload, we propose a gradient-based subgraph retrieval mechanism that identifies salient evidence during training, thereby enhancing multi-hop and relational reasoning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and backbone models demonstrate that NG-Router consistently outperforms both single-agent and ensemble baselines, offering a principled approach to domain-aware multi-agent reasoning for complex nutritional health tasks.
LongDA: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Long-Document Data Analysis
Yiyang Li | Zheyuan Zhang | Tianyi Ma | Zehong Wang | Keerthiram Murugesan | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
The Proceedings of Workshop on Document Intelligence and Understanding
Yiyang Li | Zheyuan Zhang | Tianyi Ma | Zehong Wang | Keerthiram Murugesan | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
The Proceedings of Workshop on Document Intelligence and Understanding
We introduce LongDA, a data analysis benchmark for evaluating LLM-based agents under documentation-intensive analytical workflows. In contrast to existing benchmarks that assume well-specified schemas and inputs, LongDA targets real-world settings in which navigating long documentation and complex data is the primary bottleneck. To this end, we manually curate raw data files, long and heterogeneous documentation, and expert-written publications from 17 publicly available U.S. national surveys, from which we extract 505 analytical queries grounded in real analytical practice. Solving these queries requires agents to first retrieve and integrate key information from multiple unstructured documents before performing multi-step computations and writing executable code, which remains challenging for existing data analysis agents. To support the systematic evaluation under this setting, we develop LongTA, a tool-augmented agent framework that enables document access, retrieval, and code execution, and evaluate a range of proprietary and open-source models. Our experiments reveal substantial performance gaps even among state-of-the-art models, highlighting the challenges researchers should consider before applying LLM agents for decision support in real-world, high-stakes analytical settings.
AgentRouter: A Knowledge-Graph-Guided LLM Router for Collaborative Multi-Agent Question Answering
Zheyuan Zhang | Kaiwen Shi | Zhengqing Yuan | Zehong Wang | Tianyi Ma | Keerthiram Murugesan | Vincent Galassi | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zheyuan Zhang | Kaiwen Shi | Zhengqing Yuan | Zehong Wang | Tianyi Ma | Keerthiram Murugesan | Vincent Galassi | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) and agent-based frameworks have advanced rapidly, enabling diverse applications. Yet, with the proliferation of models and agentic strategies, practitioners face substantial uncertainty in selecting the best configuration for a downstream task. Prior studies show that different agents and backbones exhibit complementary strengths, and that larger models are not always superior, underscoring the need for adaptive routing mechanisms. Existing approaches to agent routing, however, often emphasize cost efficiency while overlooking the fine-grained contextual and relational structure inherent in QA tasks. In this paper, we propose AgentRouter, a framework that formulates multi-agent QA as a knowledge-graph–guided routing problem supervised by empirical performance signals. Specifically, we convert QA instance into a heterogeneous knowledge graph that jointly encodes queries, contextual entities, and agents, and then train a heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) to propagate information across node types and produce task-aware routing distributions over agents. By leveraging soft supervision and weighted aggregation of agent outputs, AgentRouter learns principled collaboration schemes that capture the complementary strengths of diverse agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms single-agent and ensemble baselines, while generalizing across benchmarks and LLM backbones. These results highlight the effectiveness and robustness of graph-supervised multi-agent routing for question answering. Our code repo is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgentRouter.
2025
Can LLMs Convert Graphs to Text-Attributed Graphs?
Zehong Wang | Sidney Liu | Zheyuan Zhang | Tianyi Ma | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zehong Wang | Sidney Liu | Zheyuan Zhang | Tianyi Ma | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Graphs are ubiquitous structures found in numerous real-world applications, such as drug discovery, recommender systems, and social network analysis. To model graph-structured data, graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a popular tool. However, existing GNN architectures encounter challenges in cross-graph learning where multiple graphs have different feature spaces. To address this, recent approaches introduce text-attributed graphs (TAGs), where each node is associated with a textual description, which can be projected into a unified feature space using textual encoders. While promising, this method relies heavily on the availability of text-attributed graph data, which is difficult to obtain in practice. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel method named Topology-Aware Node description Synthesis (TANS), leveraging large language models (LLMs) to convert existing graphs into text-attributed graphs. The key idea is to integrate topological information into LLMs to explain how graph topology influences node semantics. We evaluate our TANS on text-rich, text-limited, and text-free graphs, demonstrating its applicability. Notably, on text-free graphs, our method significantly outperforms existing approaches that manually design node features, showcasing the potential of LLMs for preprocessing graph-structured data in the absence of textual information. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/TANS.
LLM-Empowered Class Imbalanced Graph Prompt Learning for Online Drug Trafficking Detection
Tianyi Ma | Yiyue Qian | Zehong Wang | Zheyuan Zhang | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Tianyi Ma | Yiyue Qian | Zehong Wang | Zheyuan Zhang | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
As the market for illicit drugs remains extremely profitable, major online platforms have become direct-to-consumer intermediaries for illicit drug trafficking participants. These online activities raise significant social concerns that require immediate actions. Existing approaches to combat this challenge are generally impractical due to the scarcity of labeled samples and imbalance of classes in real-world applications. To this end, we propose a novel Large Language Model-empowered Heterogeneous Graph Prompt Learning framework for illicit Drug Trafficking detection, called LLM-HetGDT that leverages LLM to facilitate heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) to effectively identify minority classes, i.e., drug trafficking participants, in the class-imbalanced scenarios. Specifically, we first pre-train HGNN over a contrastive pretext task to capture the inherent node and structure information over an unlabeled drug trafficking heterogeneous graph (HG). Afterward, to alleviate the class-imbalanced issue, we leverage LLMs to augment the HG by generating high-quality synthetic user nodes in the minority classes. Then, we fine-tune the soft prompts on the augmented HG to capture the important information in the minority classes for the downstream drug trafficking detection task. To comprehensively study online illicit drug trafficking activities, we collect a new HG dataset over Twitter, called Twitter-HetDrug. Extensive experiments on this dataset demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and applicability of our proposed method by comparing it with state-of-the-art baseline methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/GraphResearcher/LLM-HetGDT.
NGQA: A Nutritional Graph Question Answering Benchmark for Personalized Health-aware Nutritional Reasoning
Zheyuan Zhang | Yiyang Li | Nhi Ha Lan Le | Zehong Wang | Tianyi Ma | Vincent Galassi | Keerthiram Murugesan | Nuno Moniz | Werner Geyer | Nitesh V Chawla | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zheyuan Zhang | Yiyang Li | Nhi Ha Lan Le | Zehong Wang | Tianyi Ma | Vincent Galassi | Keerthiram Murugesan | Nuno Moniz | Werner Geyer | Nitesh V Chawla | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Diet plays a critical role in human health, yet tailoring dietary reasoning to individual health conditions remains a major challenge. Nutrition Question Answering (QA) has emerged as a popular method for addressing this problem. However, current research faces two critical limitations. On one hand, the absence of datasets involving user-specific medical information severely limits personalization. This challenge is further compounded by the wide variability in individual health needs. On the other hand, while large language models (LLMs), a popular solution for this task, demonstrate strong reasoning abilities, they struggle with the domain-specific complexities of personalized healthy dietary reasoning, and existing benchmarks fail to capture these challenges. To address these gaps, we introduce the Nutritional Graph Question Answering (NGQA) benchmark, the first graph question answering dataset designed for personalized nutritional health reasoning. NGQA leverages data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) to evaluate whether a food is healthy for a specific user, supported by explanations of the key contributing nutrients. The benchmark incorporates three question complexity settings and evaluates reasoning across three downstream tasks. Extensive experiments with LLM backbones and baseline models demonstrate that the NGQA benchmark effectively challenges existing models. In sum, NGQA addresses a critical real-world problem while advancing GraphQA research with a novel domain-specific benchmark. Our codebase and dataset are available here.
2022
Grape: Knowledge Graph Enhanced Passage Reader for Open-domain Question Answering
Mingxuan Ju | Wenhao Yu | Tong Zhao | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Mingxuan Ju | Wenhao Yu | Tong Zhao | Chuxu Zhang | Yanfang Ye
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
A common thread of open-domain question answering (QA) models employs a retriever-reader pipeline that first retrieves a handful of relevant passages from Wikipedia and then peruses the passages to produce an answer. However, even state-of-the-art readers fail to capture the complex relationships between entities appearing in questions and retrieved passages, leading to answers that contradict the facts. In light of this, we propose a novel knowledge graph enhanced passage reader, namely Grape, to improve the reader performance for open-domain QA. Specifically, for each pair of question and retrieved passage, we first construct a localized bipartite graph, attributed to entity embeddings extracted from the intermediate layer of the reader model. Then, a graph neural network learns relational knowledge while fusing graph and contextual representations into the hidden states of the reader model. Experiments on three open-domain QA benchmarks show Grape can improve the state-of-the-art performance by up to 2.2 exact match score with a negligible overhead increase, with the same retriever and retrieved passages. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jumxglhf/GRAPE.
2020
Few-Shot Multi-Hop Relation Reasoning over Knowledge Bases
Chuxu Zhang | Lu Yu | Mandana Saebi | Meng Jiang | Nitesh Chawla
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Chuxu Zhang | Lu Yu | Mandana Saebi | Meng Jiang | Nitesh Chawla
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Multi-hop relation reasoning over knowledge base is to generate effective and interpretable relation prediction through reasoning paths. The current methods usually require sufficient training data (fact triples) for each query relation, impairing their performances over few-shot relations (with limited triples) which are common in knowledge base. To this end, we propose FIRE, a novel few-shot multi-hop relation learning model. FIRE applies reinforcement learning to model the sequential steps of multi-hop reasoning, besides performs heterogeneous structure encoding and knowledge-aware search space pruning. The meta-learning technique is employed to optimize model parameters that could quickly adapt to few-shot relations. Empirical study on two datasets demonstrate that FIRE outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
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Co-authors
- Yanfang Ye 10
- Zheyuan Zhang 8
- Zehong Wang 7
- Tianyi Ma 6
- Keerthiram Murugesan 5
- Vincent Galassi 3
- Yiyang Li 3
- Zhengqing Yuan 3
- Kaiwen Shi 2
- Nitesh Chawla 1
- Nitesh V Chawla 1
- Lin Ge 1
- Werner Geyer 1
- Xiaoguang Guo 1
- Jiatan Huang 1
- Meng Jiang 1
- Mingxuan Ju 1
- Nhi Ha Lan Le 1
- Hongjiang Li 1
- Ziming Li 1
- Sidney Liu 1
- Yijun Ma 1
- Nuno Moniz 1
- Yiyue Qian 1
- Mandana Saebi 1
- Connor R. Schmidt 1
- Weixiang Sun 1
- Safal Thapaliya 1
- Matthew J. Webber 1
- Lu Yu 1
- Wenhao Yu 1
- Tong Zhao 1
- Weicheng Zhu 1