Hairong Zhang
Author directory2026
THE-Tree: Can Tracing Historical Evolution Enhance Scientific Verification and Reasoning?
Xin Wang | Jiyao Liu | Yulong Xiao | Junzhi Ning | Hairong Zhang | Lihao Liu | Junjun He | Botian Shi | Kaicheng Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xin Wang | Jiyao Liu | Yulong Xiao | Junzhi Ning | Hairong Zhang | Lihao Liu | Junjun He | Botian Shi | Kaicheng Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating scientific idea generation, but rigorously evaluating these numerous, often superficial, AI-generated propositions for novelty and factual accuracy is a critical bottleneck; manual verification is too slow. Existing validation methods are inadequate: LLMs as standalone verifiers may hallucinate and lack domain knowledge (our findings show ~60% unawareness of relevant papers in specific domains), while traditional citation networks lack explicit causality and narrative surveys are unstructured. This underscores a core challenge: the absence of structured, verifiable, and causally-linked historical data of scientific evolution. To address this, we introduce THE-Tree (Technology History Evolution Tree), a computational framework that constructs such domain-specific evolution trees from scientific literature. THE-Tree employs a search algorithm to explore evolutionary paths. During its node expansion, it utilizes a novel "Think-Verbalize-Cite-Verify" process: an LLM proposes potential advancements and cites supporting literature. Critically, each proposed evolutionary link is then validated for logical coherence and evidential support by a recovered natural language inference mechanism that interrogates the cited literature, ensuring that each step is grounded. We construct and validate 88 THE-Trees across diverse domains and release a benchmark dataset including up to 71k fact verifications covering 27k papers to foster further research. Experiments demonstrate that i) in graph completion, our THE-Tree improves hit@1 by 8% to 14% across multiple models compared to traditional citation networks; ii) for predicting future scientific developments, it improves hit@1 metric by nearly 10%; and iii) when combined with other methods, it boosts the performance of evaluating important scientific papers by almost 100%. By constructing explicit, verifiable pathways of scientific progression, THE-Tree provides a robust historical foundation for evaluating new hypotheses (human or AI-generated) and enables a computable science history, fostering evidence-based AI-driven scientific discovery.
IterCAD: An Iterative Multimodal Agent for Visually-Grounded CAD Generation and Editing
Tao Hu | Jiaxin Ai | Licheng Wen | Xueheng Li | Shu Zou | Siqi Li | Nianchen Deng | Xinyu Cai | Hongbin Zhou | Pinlong Cai | Daocheng Fu | Yu Yang | Hairong Zhang | Botian Shi | Xuemeng Yang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Tao Hu | Jiaxin Ai | Licheng Wen | Xueheng Li | Shu Zou | Siqi Li | Nianchen Deng | Xinyu Cai | Hongbin Zhou | Pinlong Cai | Daocheng Fu | Yu Yang | Hairong Zhang | Botian Shi | Xuemeng Yang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Computer-Aided Design is pivotal in modern manufacturing, yet existing automated methods predominantly rely on open-loop, one-shot generation, creating a mismatch with iterative real-world practices. In this paper, we present IterCAD, a unified multimodal agent framework for closed-loop, interactive CAD generation and editing. We formulate the task as a multi-turn interaction between a multimodal agent and an executable CAD sandbox, covering three tasks: Drawing-to-Code, Text-to-Code, and Interactive Editing. To support this, we develop a data synthesis pipeline incorporating advanced industrial manufacturing features to generate standard-compliant multi-view engineering drawings, complex code-editing tasks, and high-fidelity interaction trajectories. We optimize the agent via progressive SFT followed by geometry-aware reinforcement learning with viable-prefix masking to enhance code executability and geometric fidelity. Finally, we introduce the IterCAD-Bench evaluation suite and propose the Chamfer Distance Tolerance-Recall (CD-TR) curve alongside its AUC-TR metric, establishing a survivor-bias-free standard that unifies code validity and geometric precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterCAD achieves highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both code executability and geometric precision, while exhibiting superior capabilities in closed-loop iterative refinement.