Zhiang Dong
Author directory2026
Emotion Understanding in Streaming Video with Trajectory-Aware Reliability
Qingsong Wang | Qigong Lei | Zitong Wang | Bohan Yu | Zhiang Dong | Jian Liu | Weiqiang Wang | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Qingsong Wang | Qigong Lei | Zitong Wang | Bohan Yu | Zhiang Dong | Jian Liu | Weiqiang Wang | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Video emotion understanding is commonly studied as an offline classification problem, where the complete video segment is available before prediction.Real-time interaction, however, requires emotion decisions from incomplete and evolving evidence.This paper studies streaming video emotion understanding as a reliability-aware decision process over evolving emotion beliefs. In this setting, a single confident prefix prediction can still be unreliable when the underlying belief trajectory is unstable or repeatedly switches across emotion classes. We propose TRACE, a trajectory-aware reliability framework that forms low-latency emotion beliefs from streaming audio prefixes, estimates reliability from confidence, entropy, stability, and class-switching patterns, and selectively invokes contextual belief reinterpretation with visual, textual, and neighboring-utterance evidence. TRACE keeps stable cases in the low-latency online pathway while allocating stronger multimodal reasoning to uncertain cases that remain ambiguous. Experiments on StreamMER, MELD, and MER2024 show that TRACE improves the accuracy-cost trade-off, retaining most full-context gains while reducing unnecessary contextual reasoning.
2025
Think Both Ways: Teacher-Student Bidirectional Reasoning Enhances MCQ Generation and Distractor Quality
Yimiao Qiu | Yang Deng | Quanming Yao | Zhimeng Zhang | Zhiang Dong | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Yimiao Qiu | Yang Deng | Quanming Yao | Zhimeng Zhang | Zhiang Dong | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Generating high-quality Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) remains challenging for educational tools due to the need for contextual relevance and plausible distractors. Existing methods still struggle with these dual requirements, leading to questions that lack depth and distractors that are either too obvious or irrelevant. In this paper, we propose BiFlow, a novel framework that integrates bidirectional reasoning perspectives: teacher reasoning generates contextually relevant questions and plausible distractors, while student reasoning evaluates question clarity and the misleading nature of the distractors. To further enhance reasoning, we introduce PathFinder, a mechanism that employs breadth-first search and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) strategies to explore diverse reasoning paths, improving both the quality and diversity of generated questions and distractors. Additionally, we enrich the FairytaleQA dataset to FairytaleMCQ with high-quality distractors, providing a robust benchmark for MCQ generation. Experimental results demonstrate that BiFlow outperforms existing methods, particularly in generating text-grounded questions and high-quality distractors for narrative contexts, highlighting its value in educational applications.
Out-of-Distribution Detection via LLM-Guided Outlier Generation for Text-attributed Graph
Xiangwei Lv | Mengze Li | Jingyuan Chen | Zhiang Dong | Sirui Han | Beishui Liao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Xiangwei Lv | Mengze Li | Jingyuan Chen | Zhiang Dong | Sirui Han | Beishui Liao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), which are characterized with text attributes, are widely used in the real world. When evaluating fully trained models designed for TAG predictions, they may perform significantly unsatisfactory on samples outside the In-Distribution (ID) data, which may raise serious security issues. To tackle it, Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection is introduced to the TAGs field, which aims to utilize a detector to classify OOD and ID samples. Recent studies attempt to introduce extra OOD datasets to regularize the detection model. However, due to the vastness of the OOD data space, high-quality OOD samples for training the detector are scarce and difficult to obtain in the real world. Thus, we utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate the OOD training samples with high quality. There are two issues in this process: (1) LLMs tend to generate OOD-node samples significantly different from ID ones, with a limited learning value for OOD and ID relations. (2) Due to the inherent structure of TAGs, obtained OOD nodes need to be integrated with existing nodes by generating edges using LLMs. However, the large number of nodes makes reasoning over each node pair computationally unbearable. Toward these issues, we introduce LLMGuard with challenging OOD-node generation and lightweight edge predictors. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of LLMGuard. The source code is available.