Lingxiao Zhao
Author directory2026
Towards Anticipatory Agents for Streaming Video Understanding
Haolin Yang | Feilong Tang | Lingxiao Zhao | Xinlin Zhuang | Yifan Lu | Xiang An | Ming Hu | Xiaofeng Zhang | Abdalla Swikir | Junjun He | Zongyuan Ge | Muhammad Haris Khan | Imran Razzak
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Haolin Yang | Feilong Tang | Lingxiao Zhao | Xinlin Zhuang | Yifan Lu | Xiang An | Ming Hu | Xiaofeng Zhang | Abdalla Swikir | Junjun He | Zongyuan Ge | Muhammad Haris Khan | Imran Razzak
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Real-time streaming video understanding in domains such as autonomous driving and intelligent surveillance poses challenges beyond conventional offline video processing, requiring continuous perception, proactive decision making, and responsive interaction based on dynamically evolving visual content. However, existing methods rely on alternating perception-reaction or asynchronous triggers, lacking task-driven planning and future anticipation, which limits their real-time responsiveness and proactive decision making in evolving video streams. To this end, we propose a StreamAgent that anticipates the temporal intervals and spatial regions expected to contain future task-relevant information to enable proactive and goal-driven responses. Specifically, we integrate question semantics and historical observations through prompting the anticipatory agent to anticipate the temporal progression of key events, align current observations with the expected future evidence, and subsequently adjust the perception action (e.g., attending to task-relevant regions or continuously tracking in subsequent frames). To enable efficient inference, we design a streaming KV-cache memory mechanism that constructs a hierarchical memory structure for selective recall of relevant tokens, enabling efficient semantic retrieval while reducing the overhead of storing all tokens in the traditional KV-cache. Extensive experiments on streaming and long video understanding tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in response accuracy and real-time efficiency, highlighting its practical value for real-world streaming scenarios.
2025
T-REG: Preference Optimization with Token-Level Reward Regularization
Wenxuan Zhou | Shujian Zhang | Lingxiao Zhao | Tao Meng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Wenxuan Zhou | Shujian Zhang | Lingxiao Zhao | Tao Meng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been pivotal in enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively follow instructions and produce meaningful alignment by leveraging human preference data. Traditionally, RLHF involves generating responses to a query and using a separate reward model to assign a score to the entire completion. This approach, however, presents challenges, as it provides a single, sparse reward at the end of a sequence, making optimization difficult for the model, in which both training and generation occur auto-regressively at token levels. While recent methods have attempted to address this by assigning token-level discrete or continuous rewards, these often rely on either a trained credit assignment model or AI annotators, which raises concerns about the quality and reliability of the token-level rewards. In this paper, we propose T-REG, which utilizes both sequence-level and token-level rewards for preference optimization. T-REG employs self-generated token-level rewards, derived through opposite prompting, as a weak supervision signal to guide the model in distributing sequence-level rewards at the token level, thereby achieving more effective token-level credit assignment and improving alignment performance. Experiments on the instruction following benchmarks, including Alpaca Eval 2 and Arena-Hard, show that our method consistently outperforms baseline methods by up to 3.8% and 4.4%, respectively.
2024
Improving Multilingual Instruction Finetuning via Linguistically Natural and Diverse Datasets
Sathish Reddy Indurthi | Wenxuan Zhou | Shamil Chollampatt | Ravi Agrawal | Kaiqiang Song | Lingxiao Zhao | Chenguang Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Sathish Reddy Indurthi | Wenxuan Zhou | Shamil Chollampatt | Ravi Agrawal | Kaiqiang Song | Lingxiao Zhao | Chenguang Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced instruction-following capabilities. However, most Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) datasets are predominantly in English, limiting model performance in other languages. Traditional methods for creating multilingual IFT datasets—such as translating existing English IFT datasets or converting existing NLP datasets into IFT datasets by templating—struggle to capture linguistic nuances and ensure prompt (instruction) diversity. To address this issue, we propose a novel method for collecting multilingual IFT datasets that preserves linguistic naturalness and ensures prompt diversity. This approach leverages English-focused LLMs, monolingual corpora, and a scoring function to create high-quality, diversified IFT datasets in multiple languages. Experiments demonstrate that LLMs finetuned using these IFT datasets show notable improvements in both generative and discriminative tasks, indicating enhanced language comprehension by LLMs in non-English contexts. Specifically, on the multilingual summarization task, LLMs using our IFT dataset achieved 17.57% and 15.23% improvements over LLMs fine-tuned with translation-based and template-based datasets, respectively.