Ni Zhang
Author directory2026
FormuEvo: LLM-Guided Evolution for Discovering Solver-Efficient Mixed-Integer Programming Formulations
Haofeng Yuan | Jianing Peng | Jieyi Bi | Ni Zhang | Shiji Song | Zhiguang Cao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Haofeng Yuan | Jianing Peng | Jieyi Bi | Ni Zhang | Shiji Song | Zhiguang Cao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mixed-integer programming (MIP) lies at the core of operations research and industrial optimization. While large language models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in automated MIP modeling from natural language, they prioritize semantic correctness but overlook formulation strength, severely bottlenecking the efficiency of downstream solvers. We propose FormuEvo, an LLM-guided evolutionary framework for automated discovery of solver-efficient MIP formulations. FormuEvo frames MIP formulation design as evolutionary optimization over the symbolic space of MIP formulations, represented as executable modeling programs, by iteratively generating, evaluating, and selecting stronger candidates via LLM-driven crossover, mutation, and repair operations. To move beyond blind exploration, FormuEvo introduces a solver-informed diagnosis mechanism that exploits fine-grained solver statistics as verbal gradients for targeted refinement. Additionally, a structured memory abstracts prior experience into reusable modeling strategies, avoiding redundant exploration while enabling zero-shot transfer to unseen problems and bootstrapping smaller LLMs. Experiments across diverse linear and non-linear problems demonstrate that FormuEvo discovers formulations that significantly outperform both expert-designed formulations and existing LLM-based approaches, accelerating solvers by up to 5.5×, with distilled knowledge transferring effectively across problems and model scales.
2018
Visualizing Group Dynamics based on Multiparty Meeting Understanding
Ni Zhang | Tongtao Zhang | Indrani Bhattacharya | Heng Ji | Rich Radke
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Ni Zhang | Tongtao Zhang | Indrani Bhattacharya | Heng Ji | Rich Radke
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Group discussions are usually aimed at sharing opinions, reaching consensus and making good decisions based on group knowledge. During a discussion, participants might adjust their own opinions as well as tune their attitudes towards others’ opinions, based on the unfolding interactions. In this paper, we demonstrate a framework to visualize such dynamics; at each instant of a conversation, the participants’ opinions and potential influence on their counterparts is easily visualized. We use multi-party meeting opinion mining based on bipartite graphs to extract opinions and calculate mutual influential factors, using the Lunar Survival Task as a study case.