Zhe Cao
Author directory2026
Completely Modular Fine-tuning for Dynamic Language Adaptation
Zhe Cao | Yusuke Oda | Qianying Liu | Akiko Aizawa | Taro Watanabe
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Zhe Cao | Yusuke Oda | Qianying Liu | Akiko Aizawa | Taro Watanabe
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Multilingual Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved great advancements in machine translation. However, existing research focuses only on the traditional fine-tuning setting with a fixed set of languages, lacking dynamic adaptability to new ones. Introducing new languages requires retraining and often causes catastrophic forgetting. In this study, we propose a completely modular fine-tuning pipeline that enables dynamic language adaptation for LLMs. Instead of directly fine-tuning on all languages, our approach first trains English-centric input and output LoRA adapters for each language separately, and then merges the corresponding adapters for arbitrary-direction translation without any additional training. Experiments on 12 translation directions of four low-resource and less-supported languages show that modular fine-tuning achieves up to 86% performance of traditional multi-parallel full-parameter fine-tuning, while training only 0.1% parameters and relying solely on English-centric data without any catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis about the merging ratio, when to merge, and the rationale for using English as a bridge language via Bayesian Optimization and logit lens.
OmniHalluc-L: Counterfactual Benchmarking and Modality-Perturbation Calibration for Long-Form Omni Hallucination
Zixuan Dong | Jiafu Tang | Zhide Lei | Zhe Cao | Zijie Zhang | Yanghai Wang | Shihao Li | Xiaodong Wang | Baoyun Peng | Jiaheng Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zixuan Dong | Jiafu Tang | Zhide Lei | Zhe Cao | Zijie Zhang | Yanghai Wang | Shihao Li | Xiaodong Wang | Baoyun Peng | Jiaheng Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Long-video Omni assistants often fail not by inventing content, but by misbinding real evidence: they hear the right utterance and see the right event, yet attach it to the wrong speaker, moment, or modality. These almost-true errors evade standard video QA because local evidence remains valid, so item-level scoring can reward both a supported claim and its near-counterfactual. We introduce a counterfactual event-binding protocol that constructs paired supported/counterfactual claims from the same audio-visual event evidence and evaluates them by strict-pair accuracy. We instantiate it as OmniHalluc-L, to our knowledge the first benchmark for long-video Omni hallucination, with 3600 single-claim QA items from 638 long-form videos averaging 24.16 minutes and covering 256.87 hours. Under this protocol, open-weight Omni models remain weak at pair-level binding: Qwen2.5-Omni-7B reaches 32.06% and Qwen3-Omni-Instruct reaches 41.55%, versus 76.54% for a closed-source reference. To narrow this gap, we propose MPRC (Modality-Perturbation Reliability Calibration), a frozen-backbone calibrator that combines native confidence with response shifts from selected audio-negative probes. MPRC raises these two models to 36.22% and 51.09%, respectively, and improves target-adapted MCQ accuracy on OmniVideoBench and WorldSense. The code is available at https://github.com/ZexDong/omnihallucL-mprc.
AVSCap: Orchestrating Audio-Visual Synergy for Omni-modal Video Captioning
Yanghai Wang | Jiahao Wang | Jiafu Tang | Yuanxing Zhang | Zhe Cao | Hanyan Bian | Zijie Zhang | Weiliang Luo | Zhiyu Pan | Zixuan Dong | Jiaheng Liu | Zhaoxiang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yanghai Wang | Jiahao Wang | Jiafu Tang | Yuanxing Zhang | Zhe Cao | Hanyan Bian | Zijie Zhang | Weiliang Luo | Zhiyu Pan | Zixuan Dong | Jiaheng Liu | Zhaoxiang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Omni-modal video captioning is not merely combining visual captioning with audio transcription: a useful caption must describe how visual actions, speech, music, and sound effects co-evolve over time. Existing large multimodal models often fail at this relational step, treating audio and visual streams as loosely coupled observations, relying heavily on automatic speech recognition, and under-specifying non-speech sounds and their links to visual events. We present AVSCap, a framework for audio-visual captioning centered on explicit cross-modal event binding. First, we construct AVSCap-130K, a tri-modal training corpus generated by a decoupled-then-fused pipeline that anchors visual and acoustic evidence independently before composing temporally grounded omni-modal captions. Second, we train AVSCap-7B, a 7B captioner with a two-stage strategy: supervised fine-tuning establishes baseline captioning ability, while a sample-efficient reinforcement learning stage uses hybrid rewards to optimize acoustic completeness and audio-visual synergy. Our scaling analysis shows that reinforcement learning brings larger gains than simply increasing SFT data. Third, we introduce AVSCapBench, a human-curated benchmark that decomposes captions into visual, audio, and synergy events and evaluates them with fine-grained event recall. Experiments on AVSCapBench and external benchmarks show that AVSCap-7B improves non-speech audio coverage and cross-modal binding, delivering the best overall performance among evaluated open-source models.
2024
Exploring Intrinsic Language-specific Subspaces in Fine-tuning Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Zhe Cao | Zhi Qu | Hidetaka Kamigaito | Taro Watanabe
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhe Cao | Zhi Qu | Hidetaka Kamigaito | Taro Watanabe
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Multilingual neural machine translation models support fine-tuning hundreds of languages simultaneously. However, fine-tuning on full parameters solely is inefficient potentially leading to negative interactions among languages. In this work, we demonstrate that the fine-tuning for a language occurs in its intrinsic language-specific subspace with a tiny fraction of entire parameters. Thus, we propose language-specific LoRA to isolate intrinsic language-specific subspaces. Furthermore, we propose architecture learning techniques and introduce a gradual pruning schedule during fine-tuning to exhaustively explore the optimal setting and the minimal intrinsic subspaces for each language, resulting in a lightweight yet effective fine-tuning procedure. The experimental results on a 12-language subset and a 30-language subset of FLORES-101 show that our methods not only outperform full-parameter fine-tuning up to 2.25 spBLEU scores but also reduce trainable parameters to 0.4% for high and medium-resource languages and 1.6% for low-resource ones.