Jiechao Gao
2026
Revealing the Truth with ConLLM for Detecting Multi-Modal Deepfakes
Gautam Siddharth Kashyap | Harsh Joshi | Niharika Jain | Ebad Shabbir | Jiechao Gao | Nipun Joshi | Usman Naseem
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Gautam Siddharth Kashyap | Harsh Joshi | Niharika Jain | Ebad Shabbir | Jiechao Gao | Nipun Joshi | Usman Naseem
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
The rapid rise of deepfake technology poses a severe threat to social and political stability by enabling hyper-realistic synthetic media capable of manipulating public perception. However, existing detection methods struggle with two core limitations: (1) modality fragmentation, which leads to poor generalization across diverse and adversarial deepfake modalities; and (2) shallow inter-modal reasoning, resulting in limited detection of fine-grained semantic inconsistencies. To address these, we propose ConLLM (Contrastive Learning with Large Language Models), a hybrid framework for robust multimodal deepfake detection. ConLLM employs a two-stage architecture: stage 1 uses Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) to extract modality-specific embeddings; stage 2 aligns these embeddings via contrastive learning to mitigate modality fragmentation, and refines them using LLM-based reasoning to address shallow inter-modal reasoning by capturing semantic inconsistencies. ConLLM demonstrates strong performance across audio, video, and audio-visual modalities. It reduces audio deepfake EER by up to 50%, improves video accuracy by up to 8%, and achieves approximately 9% accuracy gains in audio-visual tasks. Ablation studies confirm that PTM-based embeddings contribute 9%–10% consistent improvements across modalities. Our code and data is available at: https://github.com/gskgautam/ConLLM/tree/main
Do Clinical Question Answering Systems Really Need Specialised Medical Fine Tuning?
Sushant Kumar Ray | Gautam Siddharth Kashyap | Sahil Tripathi | Nipun Joshi | Vijay Govindarajan | Rafiq Ali | Jiechao Gao | Usman Naseem
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Sushant Kumar Ray | Gautam Siddharth Kashyap | Sahil Tripathi | Nipun Joshi | Vijay Govindarajan | Rafiq Ali | Jiechao Gao | Usman Naseem
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Clinical Question-Answering (CQA) industry systems are increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs), yet their deployment is often guided by the assumption that domain-specific fine-tuning is essential. Although specialised medical LLMs such as BioBERT, BioGPT, and PubMedBERT remain popular, they face practical limitations including narrow coverage, high retraining costs, and limited adaptability. Efforts based on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) have attempted to address these assumptions but continue to reinforce what we term the SPECIALISATION FALLACY—the belief that specialised medical LLMs are inherently superior for CQA. To address this assumption, we introduce MEDASSESS-X, a deployment-industry-oriented CQA framework that applies alignment at inference time rather than through SFT. MEDASSESS-X uses lightweight steering vectors to guide model activations toward medically consistent reasoning without updating model weights or requiring domain-specific retraining. This inference-time alignment layer stabilises CQA performance across both general-purpose and specialised medical LLMs, thereby resolving the SPECIALISATION FALLACY. Empirically, MEDASSESS-X delivers consistent gains across all LLM families, improving Accuracy by up to +6%, Factual Consistency by +7%, and reducing Safety Error Rate by as much as 50%.
2025
LLMs on a Budget? Say HOLA
Zohaib Hasan Siddiqui | Jiechao Gao | Ebad Shabbir | Mohammad Anas Azeez | Rafiq Ali | Gautam Siddharth Kashyap | Usman Naseem
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Zohaib Hasan Siddiqui | Jiechao Gao | Ebad Shabbir | Mohammad Anas Azeez | Rafiq Ali | Gautam Siddharth Kashyap | Usman Naseem
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Running Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is constrained by high compute and memory demands—posing a barrier for real-time applications in industries like healthcare, education, and embedded systems. Current solutions such as quantization, pruning, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offer only partial optimizations and often compromise on speed or accuracy. We introduce HOLA, an end-to-end optimization framework for efficient LLM deployment. Internally, it leverages Hierarchical Speculative Decoding (HSD) for faster inference without quality loss. Externally, AdaComp-RAG adjusts retrieval complexity based on context needs. Together with Lo-Bi, which blends structured pruning (LoRA) and quantization, HOLA delivers significant gains: +17.6% EMA on GSM8K, +10.5% MCA on ARC, and reduced latency and memory on edge devices like Jetson Nano—proving both scalable and production-ready. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zohaibhasan066/HOLA_Codebase
SynFix: Dependency-Aware Program Repair via RelationGraph Analysis
Xunzhu Tang | Jiechao Gao | Jin Xu | Tiezhu Sun | Yewei Song | Saad Ezzini | Wendkûuni C. Ouédraogo | Jacques Klein | Tegawendé F. Bissyandé
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Xunzhu Tang | Jiechao Gao | Jin Xu | Tiezhu Sun | Yewei Song | Saad Ezzini | Wendkûuni C. Ouédraogo | Jacques Klein | Tegawendé F. Bissyandé
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved software development automation, including bug localization, code synthesis, program repair, and test generation. However, most prior work on program repair focuses on isolated elements, such as classes or functions, neglecting their interdependencies, which limits repair accuracy. We present SynFix, a RelationGraph-based approach that integrates LLMs with structural search and synchronization techniques for coordinated program repair across codebases. SynFix constructs a RelationGraph to capture relationships among classes, functions, variables, and their interactions (e.g., imports, inheritance, dependencies). Each RelationGraph node includes detailed code descriptions to help LLMs understand root causes and retrieve relevant contexts. By analyzing one-hop nodes in the RelationGraph, SynFixensures repairs account for dependent updates across components. Patch validation is conducted using regression tests from the SWE-bench benchmark suite. Evaluated on SWE-bench datasets, SynFix resolves 52.33% of issues in SWE-bench-lite (300 GitHub issues), 55.8% in SWE-bench-verified (500 issues), and 29.86% in SWE-bench-full (2,294 issues), outperforming baselines such as Swe-Agent, Agentless and AutoCodeRover. The codebase is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AutoFix-EC86/.
The Confidence Paradox: Can LLM Know When It’s Wrong?
Sahil Tripathi | MD Tabrez Nafis | Imran Hussain | Jiechao Gao
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Sahil Tripathi | MD Tabrez Nafis | Imran Hussain | Jiechao Gao
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) models often produce overconfident or ethically misaligned responses, especially under uncertainty. Existing models like LayoutLMv3, UDOP, and DONUT focus on accuracy but lack ethical calibration. We propose HonestVQA, a model-agnostic, self-supervised framework that aligns model confidence with correctness using weighted loss and contrastive learning. We introduce two new metrics—Honesty Score (H-Score) and Ethical Confidence Index (ECI)—to evaluate ethical alignment. HonestVQA improves accuracy and F1 by up to 4.3% across SpDocVQA, InfographicsVQA, and SROIE datasets, while reducing overconfidence. It also generalizes well across domains, achieving 78.9% accuracy and 76.1% F1-score.
Truth, Trust, and Trouble: Medical AI on the Edge
Mohammad Anas Azeez | Rafiq Ali | Ebad Shabbir | Zohaib Hasan Siddiqui | Gautam Siddharth Kashyap | Jiechao Gao | Usman Naseem
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Mohammad Anas Azeez | Rafiq Ali | Ebad Shabbir | Zohaib Hasan Siddiqui | Gautam Siddharth Kashyap | Jiechao Gao | Usman Naseem
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for transforming digital health by enabling automated medical question answering. However, ensuring these models meet critical industry standards for factual accuracy, usefulness, and safety remains a challenge, especially for open-source solutions. We present a rigorous benchmarking framework via a dataset of over 1,000 health questions. We assess model performance across honesty, helpfulness, and harmlessness. Our results highlight trade-offs between factual reliability and safety among evaluated models—Mistral-7B, BioMistral-7B-DARE, and AlpaCare-13B. AlpaCare-13B achieves the highest accuracy (91.7%) and harmlessness (0.92), while domain-specific tuning in BioMistral-7B-DARE boosts safety (0.90) despite smaller scale. Few-shot prompting improves accuracy from 78% to 85%, and all models show reduced helpfulness on complex queries, highlighting challenges in clinical QA. Our code is available at: https://github.com/AnasAzeez/TTT
FT-MDT: Extracting Decision Trees from Medical Texts via a Novel Low-rank Adaptation Method
Yuheng Li | Jiechao Gao | Wei Han | Wenwen Ouyang | Wei Zhu | Hui Yi Leong
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Yuheng Li | Jiechao Gao | Wei Han | Wenwen Ouyang | Wei Zhu | Hui Yi Leong
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Knowledge of the medical decision process, which can be modeled as medical decision trees (MDTs), is critical to building clinical decision support systems. However, current MDT construction methods rely heavily on time-consuming and laborious manual annotation. To address this challenge, we propose PI-LoRA (Path-Integrated LoRA), a novel low-rank adaptation method for automatically extracting MDTs from clinical guidelines and textbooks. We integrate gradient path information to capture synergistic effects between different modules, enabling more effective and reliable rank allocation. This framework ensures that the most critical modules receive appropriate rank allocations while less important ones are pruned, resulting in a more efficient and accurate model for extracting medical decision trees from clinical texts. Extensive experiments on medical guideline datasets demonstrate that our PI-LoRA method significantly outperforms existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning approaches for the Text2MDT task, achieving better accuracy with substantially reduced model complexity. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results while maintaining a lightweight architecture, making it particularly suitable for clinical decision support systems where computational resources may be limited.
DRUM: Learning Demonstration Retriever for Large MUlti-modal Models
Ellen Yi-Ge | Jiechao Gao | Wei Han | Wei Zhu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Ellen Yi-Ge | Jiechao Gao | Wei Han | Wei Zhu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in dealing with new tasks with the help of in-context learning (ICL). In the study of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), when implementing ICL, researchers usually adopt the naive strategies like fixed demonstrations across different samples, or selecting demonstrations directly via a visual-language embedding model. These methods do not guarantee the configured demonstrations fit the need of the LVLMs. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, demonstration retriever for large multi-modal model (DRUM), which fine-tunes the CLIP embedding model to better meet the LVLM’s needs. First, we discuss the retrieval strategies for a visual-language task, assuming an embedding model is given. And we propose to concate the image and text embeddings to enhance the retrieval performance. Second, we propose to re-rank the the embedding model’s retrieved demonstrations via the LVLM’s feedbacks, and calculate a list-wise ranking loss for training the embedding model. Third, we propose an iterative demonstration mining strategy to improve the training of the embedding model. Through extensive experiments on 3 types of visual-language tasks, 7 benchmark datasets, our DRUM framework is proven to be effective in boosting the LVLM’s in-context learning performance via retrieving more proper demonstrations.
Time-LlaMA: Adapting Large Language Models for Time Series Modeling via Dynamic Low-rank Adaptation
Juyuan Zhang | Jiechao Gao | Wenwen Ouyang | Wei Zhu | Hui Yi Leong
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Juyuan Zhang | Jiechao Gao | Wenwen Ouyang | Wei Zhu | Hui Yi Leong
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Time series modeling holds significant importance in many industrial applications and has been extensively studied. A series of recent studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) possess robust pattern recognition and semantic understanding capabilities over time series data. However, the current literature have yet striked a high-quality balance between (a) effectively aligning the time series and natural language modalities and (b) keeping the inference efficiency for industrial deployment. To address the above issues, we now propose the Time-LlaMA framework. Time-LlaMA first converts the time series input into token embeddings through a linear tokenization mechanism. Second, the time series token embeddings are aligned with the text prompts. Third, to further adapt the large languag model (LLM) backbone for time series modeling, we have developed a dynamic low-rank adaptation technique (DynaLoRA). DynaLoRA dynamically chooses the most suitable LoRA modules at each layer of the Transformer backbone for each time series input, enhancing the model’s predictive capabilities. Our experimental results on an extensive collection of challenging open and proprietary time series tasks confirm that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and have potentials for wide industrial usages.
AMAS: Adaptively Determining Communication Topology for LLM-based Multi-agent System
Hui Yi Leong | Yuheng Li | Yuqing Wu | Wenwen Ouyang | Wei Zhu | Jiechao Gao | Wei Han
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Hui Yi Leong | Yuheng Li | Yuqing Wu | Wenwen Ouyang | Wei Zhu | Jiechao Gao | Wei Han
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Although large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing capabilities, their practical implementation as autonomous multi-agent systems (MAS) for industrial problem-solving encounters persistent barriers. Conventional MAS architectures are fundamentally restricted by inflexible, hand-crafted graph topologies that lack contextual responsiveness, resulting in diminished efficacy across varied academic and commercial workloads. To surmount these constraints, we introduce AMAS, a paradigm-shifting framework that redefines LLM-based MAS through a novel dynamic graph selector. This component autonomously identifies task-specific optimal graph configurations via lightweight LLM adaptation, eliminating the reliance on monolithic, universally applied structural templates. Instead, AMAS exploits the intrinsic properties of individual inputs to intelligently direct query trajectories through task-optimized agent pathways. Rigorous validation across question answering, mathematical deduction, and code generation benchmarks confirms that AMAS systematically exceeds state-of-the-art single-agent and multi-agent approaches across diverse LLM architectures. Our investigation establishes that context-sensitive structural adaptability constitutes a foundational requirement for high-performance LLM MAS deployments.
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Co-authors
- Gautam Siddharth Kashyap 4
- Usman Naseem 4
- Wei Zhu 4
- Rafiq Ali 3
- Wei Han 3
- Hui Yi Leong 3
- Wenwen Ouyang 3
- Ebad Shabbir 3
- Mohammad Anas Azeez 2
- Nipun Joshi 2
- Yuheng Li 2
- Zohaib Hasan Siddiqui 2
- Sahil Tripathi 2
- Tegawendé F. Bissyandé 1
- Saad Ezzini 1
- Vijay Govindarajan 1
- Imran Hussain 1
- Niharika Jain 1
- Harsh Joshi 1
- Jacques Klein 1
- MD Tabrez Nafis 1
- Wendkûuni C. Ouédraogo 1
- Sushant Kumar Ray 1
- Yewei Song 1
- Tiezhu Sun 1
- Xunzhu Tang 1
- Yuqing Wu 1
- Jin Xu 1
- Ellen Yi-Ge 1
- Juyuan Zhang 1