Yanghai Zhang
Author directory2026
Layer-Order Inversion: Rethinking Latent Multi-Hop Reasoning in Large Language Models
Xukai Liu | Ye Liu | Jipeng Zhang | Yanghai Zhang | Kai Zhang | Qi Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xukai Liu | Ye Liu | Jipeng Zhang | Yanghai Zhang | Kai Zhang | Qi Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multi-hop reasoning, yet how they internally compose multiple facts remains unclear. Recent work proposes **hop-aligned circuit hypothesis**, suggesting that bridge entities are computed sequentially across layers before later-hop answers. Through systematic analyses on real-world multi-hop queries, we show that this hop-aligned assumption does not generalize: later-hop answer entities can become decodable earlier than bridge entities, a phenomenon we call **layer-order inversion**, which strengthens with total hops. To explain this behavior, we propose a **probabilistic recall-and-extract** framework that models multi-hop reasoning as broad probabilistic recall in shallow MLP layers followed by selective extraction in deeper attention layers. Through probing and causal intervention analyses, we further show that shallow recall of deeper-hop knowledge can act as an intuition-like signal for answer selection, with stronger effects in weaker models and higher-hop queries. Our framework further explains prior empirical phenomena and provides a mechanistic diagnosis of multi-hop failures despite correct single-hop knowledge. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Layer-Order-Inversion/.
2024
Leveraging Entity Information for Cross-Modality Correlation Learning: The Entity-Guided Multimodal Summarization
Yanghai Zhang | Ye Liu | Shiwei Wu | Kai Zhang | Xukai Liu | Qi Liu | Enhong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Yanghai Zhang | Ye Liu | Shiwei Wu | Kai Zhang | Xukai Liu | Qi Liu | Enhong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
The rapid increase in multimedia data has spurred advancements in Multimodal Summarization with Multimodal Output (MSMO), which aims to produce a multimodal summary that integrates both text and relevant images. The inherent heterogeneity of content within multimodal inputs and outputs presents a significant challenge to the execution of MSMO. Traditional approaches typically adopt a holistic perspective on coarse image-text data or individual visual objects, overlooking the essential connections between objects and the entities they represent. To integrate the fine-grained entity knowledge, we propose an Entity-Guided Multimodal Summarization model (EGMS). Our model, building on BART, utilizes dual multimodal encoders with shared weights to process text-image and entity-image information concurrently. A gating mechanism then combines visual data for enhanced textual summary generation, while image selection is refined through knowledge distillation from a pre-trained vision-language model. Extensive experiments on public MSMO dataset validate the superiority of the EGMS method, which also prove the necessity to incorporate entity information into MSMO problem.
2023
Enhancing Hierarchical Text Classification through Knowledge Graph Integration
Ye Liu | Kai Zhang | Zhenya Huang | Kehang Wang | Yanghai Zhang | Qi Liu | Enhong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Ye Liu | Kai Zhang | Zhenya Huang | Kehang Wang | Yanghai Zhang | Qi Liu | Enhong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is an essential and challenging subtask of multi-label text classification with a taxonomic hierarchy. Recent advances in deep learning and pre-trained language models have led to significant breakthroughs in the HTC problem. However, despite their effectiveness, these methods are often restricted by a lack of domain knowledge, which leads them to make mistakes in a variety of situations. Generally, when manually classifying a specific document to the taxonomic hierarchy, experts make inference based on their prior knowledge and experience. For machines to achieve this capability, we propose a novel Knowledge-enabled Hierarchical Text Classification model (K-HTC), which incorporates knowledge graphs into HTC. Specifically, K-HTC innovatively integrates knowledge into both the text representation and hierarchical label learning process, addressing the knowledge limitations of traditional methods. Additionally, a novel knowledge-aware contrastive learning strategy is proposed to further exploit the information inherent in the data. Extensive experiments on two publicly available HTC datasets show the efficacy of our proposed method, and indicate the necessity of incorporating knowledge graphs in HTC tasks.