Junhua Ding
Author directory2026
Puzzles to Paradigms: A Survey of Human–Agent Collaboration in Scientific Innovation
Zhenni Liang | Haoxuan Zhang | Haihua Chen | Ting Xiao | Junhua Ding | Yang Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zhenni Liang | Haoxuan Zhang | Haihua Chen | Ting Xiao | Junhua Ding | Yang Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Agentic AI systems are increasingly embedded in scientific workflows, including literature synthesis, hypothesis generation, tool use, writing, and peer review. However, existing surveys and evaluations often emphasize task performance while underexamining how humans and agents coordinate under different epistemic conditions of scientific work. This survey introduces **CSCW**×**Kuhn**, a coordination-aware framework that connects computer-supported cooperative work dimensions with distinct scientific contexts. Using this framework, we synthesize recent human–agent systems and benchmarks to examine how coordination demands and failure risks may vary across contexts. Our synthesis identifies five recurring failure modes: procedural drift, grounding substitution, evaluative flattening, proxy optimization, and epistemic black-boxing, and argues for evaluations that move beyond task accuracy and toward grounding, provenance, disagreement preservation, and long-horizon scientific reliability. Our corpus and coding artifact are available at https://github.com/jenlia024/CSCWxKuhn-artifact.
MetaGAI: A Large-Scale and High-Quality Benchmark for Generative AI Model and Data Card Generation
Haoxuan Zhang | Ruochi Li | Yang Zhang | Zhenni Liang | Junhua Ding | Ting Xiao | Haihua Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Haoxuan Zhang | Ruochi Li | Yang Zhang | Zhenni Liang | Junhua Ding | Ting Xiao | Haihua Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
The rapid proliferation of Generative AI has created a pressing need for rigorous documentation standards that support transparency and governance. Manual creation of Model and Data Cards, however, is difficult to scale, and automated approaches lack the large-scale, high-fidelity benchmarks required for systematic evaluation. We introduce MetaGAI, a benchmark of 2,541 semantically matched document triplets constructed from academic papers, GitHub repositories, and Hugging Face artifacts. Reference cards are produced by a multi-agent pipeline of specialized Retriever, Generator, and Editor agents, and the pipeline is assessed through a four-part validation protocol. We further propose an evaluation framework that combines reference-based automated metrics with a multi-model LLM-as-a-Judge protocol, together with explicit agreement and sensitivity analyses. Among the evaluated baselines, Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct achieves the best observed cost–quality trade-off, and the results reveal a recurring tension between faithfulness and completeness. MetaGAI provides a testbed for benchmarking, training, and analyzing automated Model and Data Card generation at scale. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/haoxuan-unt2024/MetaGAI-Benchmark.
Harmful Factuality: LLMs Correcting What They Shouldn’t
Mingchen Li | Hanzhi Zhang | Heng Fan | Junhua Ding | Yunhe Feng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Mingchen Li | Hanzhi Zhang | Heng Fan | Junhua Ding | Yunhe Feng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained for factual accuracy, this objective can directly conflict with the critical demand for source fidelity. This paper isolates and formalizes this conflict as Harmful Factuality Hallucination (HFH): a previously overlooked failure mode where an LLM’s attempt to “correct” perceived source errors results in an output that is factually true but unfaithful to the input. Unlike traditional hallucination research focused on models generating falsehoods, we investigate the harm of misplaced correctness. We introduce a reproducible framework to elicit and measure HFH using controlled entity-level perturbations (both soft, embedding-based and hard, instruction-based) paired with strategic entity selection. Across summarization, rephrasing, and QA tasks, our evaluation of diverse LLMs reveals that HFH is a prevalent behavior that worsens with model scale. We identify three underlying mechanisms and demonstrate that a simple instructional prompt can reduce HFH rates by approximately 50%. Our framework turns the abstract factuality–faithfulness tension into a measurable, actionable target for building more reliable LLM systems. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ResponsibleAILab/Harmful-Factuality-Hallucination.
Lexical Perturbations Disrupt LLM Reasoning: An Empirical Study of Attention Diversion
Jiaqian Zhu | Yang Zhang | Junhua Ding | Xiaowei Yu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jiaqian Zhu | Yang Zhang | Junhua Ding | Xiaowei Yu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning performance, but their robustness to realistic lexical corruption remains poorly understood. We evaluate four open-weight instruction-tuned models and frontier models across four reasoning benchmarks under keyboard noise, character swaps, and filler insertion. Character-level perturbations substantially degrade accuracy, especially on multi-step reasoning tasks, while filler insertion has little effect. We trace this asymmetry to Attention Diversion: lexical corruption fragments subword tokenization, and the resulting fragments attract disproportionate attention mass, concentrated in middle and final transformer layers. Length-matched controls confirm that fragmentation, not prompt length, drives the loss. A factorial intervention then shows why the damage is hard to undo: fragmentation corrupts token content and attention allocation together, and the two are coupled. Restoring clean attention while the content remains corrupted is actively harmful, restoring content alone is insufficient, and only restoring both recovers a substantial share of the gap. This coupling explains why inference-time strategies, including chain-of-thought prompting, spell-checking, self-repair, and stronger repair models, fail to consistently recover performance: each addresses one channel at a time. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Jiaqian-Janelle/Attention-Diversion.
OCR-Memory: Optical Context Retrieval for Long-Horizon Agent Memory
Jinze Li | Yang Zhang | Xin Yang | Jiayi QU | Jinfeng Xu | Shuo Yang | Junhua Ding | Edith Cheuk-Han Ngai
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jinze Li | Yang Zhang | Xin Yang | Jiayi QU | Jinfeng Xu | Shuo Yang | Junhua Ding | Edith Cheuk-Han Ngai
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Autonomous LLM agents increasingly operate in long-horizon, interactive settings where success depends on reusing experience accumulated over extended histories. However, existing agent memory systems are fundamentally constrained by text-context budgets: storing or revisiting raw trajectories is prohibitively token-expensive, while summarization and text-only retrieval trade token savings for information loss and fragmented evidence. To address this limitation, we propose Optical Context Retrieval Memory (OCR-Memory), a memory framework that leverages the visual modality as a high-density representation of agent experience, enabling retention of arbitrarily long histories with minimal prompt overhead at retrieval time. Specifically, OCR-Memory renders historical trajectories into images annotated with unique visual identifiers. OCR-Memory retrieves stored experience via a locate-and-transcribe paradigm that selects relevant regions through visual anchors and retrieves the corresponding verbatim text, avoiding free-form generation and reducing hallucination. Experiments on long-horizon agent benchmarks show consistent gains under strict context limits, demonstrating that optical encoding increases effective memory capacity while preserving faithful evidence recovery.
2025
DP-GTR: Differentially Private Prompt Protection via Group Text Rewriting
Mingchen Li | Heng Fan | Song Fu | Junhua Ding | Yunhe Feng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Mingchen Li | Heng Fan | Song Fu | Junhua Ding | Yunhe Feng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Prompt privacy is crucial, especially when using online large language models (LLMs), due to the sensitive information often contained within prompts. While LLMs can enhance prompt privacy through text rewriting, existing methods primarily focus on document-level rewriting, neglecting the rich, multi-granular representations of text. This limitation restricts LLM utilization to specific tasks, overlooking their generalization and in-context learning capabilities, thus hindering practical application. To address this gap, we introduce DP-GTR, a novel three-stage framework that leverages local differential privacy (DP) and the composition theorem via group text rewriting. DP-GTR is the first framework to integrate both document-level and word-level information while exploiting in-context learning to simultaneously improve privacy and utility, effectively bridging local and global DP mechanisms at the individual data point level. Experiments on CommonSense QA and DocVQA demonstrate that DP-GTR outperforms existing approaches, achieving a superior privacy-utility trade-off. Furthermore, our framework is compatible with existing rewriting techniques, serving as a plug-in to enhance privacy protection. Our code is publicly available at anonymous.4open.science for reproducibility.
Speaking at the Right Level: Literacy-Controlled Counterspeech Generation with RAG-RL
Xiaoying Song | Anirban Saha Anik | Dibakar Barua | Pengcheng Luo | Junhua Ding | Lingzi Hong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Xiaoying Song | Anirban Saha Anik | Dibakar Barua | Pengcheng Luo | Junhua Ding | Lingzi Hong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Health misinformation spreading online poses a significant threat to public health. Researchers have explored methods for automatically generating counterspeech to health misinformation as a mitigation strategy. Existing approaches often produce uniform responses, ignoring that the health literacy level of the audience could affect the accessibility and effectiveness of counterspeech. We propose a Controlled-Literacy framework using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with reinforcement learning (RL) to generate tailored counterspeech adapted to different health literacy levels. In particular, we retrieve knowledge aligned with specific health literacy levels, enabling accessible and factual information to support generation. We design a reward function incorporating subjective user preferences and objective readability-based rewards to optimize counterspeech to the target health literacy level. Experiment results show that Controlled-Literacy outperforms baselines by generating more accessible and user-preferred counterspeech. This research contributes to more equitable and impactful public health communication by improving the accessibility and comprehension of counterspeech to health misinformation.