Zilei Wang
Author directory2026
ProMediConv: Benchmarking Proactive Conversational Agents in Legal Dispute Mediation
Zesheng Wei | Mengfan Li | Wenhao Liu | Yixin Zhang | Zilei Wang | Yang Deng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zesheng Wei | Mengfan Li | Wenhao Liu | Yixin Zhang | Zilei Wang | Yang Deng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Dispute mediation is essential for maintaining social harmony and resilience, yet developing skilled mediators is costly and time-consuming. Existing LLM-based mediation research remains limited by unrealistic task formulations, low-fidelity datasets, and coarse evaluation metrics that obscure turn-by-turn dynamics. To address these gaps, we introduce ProMediConv, a novel benchmarking framework that models mediation as a proactive, multi-stage, and party-aware dialogue process incorporating 11 mediation strategies and four party behavior pattern (BP) states. Using 972 complete real-world cases, we construct a high-fidelity mediation dataset with utterance-level annotations of strategies and BP states. Furthermore, to better assess agent impact, we propose MAD (Mean Attribute Difference), a fine-grained metric that captures BP shifts throughout the dialogue. Leveraging this framework, we establish a comprehensive benchmark by evaluating diverse models alongside our tailored baseline ProMediAgent. Extensive empirical analyses reveal critical behavioral phenomena and underscore the persistent challenges current models face in dynamic, multi-party mediation. Ultimately, ProMediConv provides a rigorous foundation and a vital quantitative standard for advancing AI-assisted conflict resolution. Our dataset and codebase are accessible at https://github.com/ZsWei66/ProMediConv_repo.
GAPD: Gold-Action Policy Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning in Knowledge Base Question Answering
Xin Sun | Jianan Xie | Zhongqi Chen | Qiang Liu | Shu Wu | Bowen Song | Weiqiang Wang | Zilei Wang | Liang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xin Sun | Jianan Xie | Zhongqi Chen | Qiang Liu | Shu Wu | Bowen Song | Weiqiang Wang | Zilei Wang | Liang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for agentic knowledge base question answering (KBQA), where a model must issue executable actions, observe knowledge-base feedback, and eventually return an answer. However, current RL-based KBQA systems mainly optimize sparse rewards from the final answer, leaving intermediate action errors weakly supervised. This is especially limiting for logical-form annotated KBQA benchmarks: gold logical forms can be converted into executable action sequences, but existing pipelines use them mainly for warm-start data construction rather than for on-policy RL updates. We propose GAPD, a training-time Gold-Action Policy Distillation framework that adds dense token-level guidance to outcome-based RL. To align gold actions with on-policy student rollouts, GAPD uses MID-ANCHOR MATCHING: it treats the intermediate entities reached during student exploration and gold execution as state anchors, and matches student states to gold states through these explored entity sets. The current policy conditioned on this aligned gold action serves as a stop-gradient teacher, whose token distribution is distilled back to the ordinary student policy over generated action-token spans. GAPD consistently surpasses the current state of the art on WebQSP, GrailQA, and GraphQ.
Beyond Static Personas: Situational Personality Steering for Large Language Models
Zesheng Wei | Mengxiang Li | Zilei Wang | Yang Deng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zesheng Wei | Mengxiang Li | Zilei Wang | Yang Deng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) facilitate more natural, human-like interactions in human-centric applications. However, existing personalization methods are constrained by limited controllability and high resource demands. Furthermore, their reliance on static personality modeling restricts adaptability across varying situations. To address these limitations, we first demonstrate the existence of situation-dependency and consistent situation-behavior patterns within LLM personalities through a multi-perspective analysis of persona neurons. Building on these insights, we propose IRIS, a training-free, neuron-based Identify–Retrieve–Steer framework for advanced situational personality steering. Our approach comprises situational persona neuron identification, situation-aware neuron retrieval, and similarity-weighted steering. We empirically validate our framework on PersonalityBench and our newly introduced SPBench, a comprehensive situational personality benchmark. Experimental results show that our method surpasses best-performing baselines, demonstrating IRIS’s generalization and robustness to complex, unseen situations and different models architecture.
MoPrune: Scene-Guided Motion-Aware Token Pruning for Efficient Video Large Language Models
Wenhao Hong | Ziyang Wang | Yixin Zhang | Zilei Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Wenhao Hong | Ziyang Wang | Yixin Zhang | Zilei Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) struggle with the heavy computational cost of long or high-resolution videos due to massive visual token counts and the quadratic complexity of attention. Prior pruning approaches mainly rely on token importance or similarity, while largely overlooking video dynamics and the fact that different scenes exhibit different redundancy patterns. We introduce MoPrune, a training-free, scene-guided and motion-centric token pruning framework for accelerating VideoLLMs. MoPrune first segments videos into semantically coherent scenes to preserve temporal and motion consistency. Within each scene, it determines frame retention rates from intra-scene frame uniqueness. Finally, at the token level, MoPrune retains visually distinctive tokens and motion-salient tokens via a unified score, preserving both informative static details and dynamic regions. Extensive experiments across multiple VideoLLMs and public benchmarks demonstrate MoPrune’s superior efficiency–performance trade-offs. On LLaVA-OneVision, retaining 25% of visual tokens matches or slightly improves the dense baseline, and retaining 15% tokens preserves 99% of the original performance. MoPrune is fully compatible with hardware-efficient techniques such as Flash Attention.
Breaking Temporal Ambiguity: Linguistic Temporal Knowledge Transfer for Weakly-Supervised Action Localization
Zhilin Li | Shining Wu | Yixin Zhang | Chuandong Cheng | Zilei Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhilin Li | Shining Wu | Yixin Zhang | Chuandong Cheng | Zilei Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Weakly-supervised temporal action localization (WS-TAL) remains challenging due to the severe temporal ambiguity inherent in video-level supervision. Existing methods often overfit to highly discriminative snippets, struggling to capture the complete action extent. In this paper, we reconceptualize actions not as isolated events, but as multi-stage action evolutions. To alleviate temporal ambiguity, we propose a novel framework driven by Linguistic Temporal Knowledge Transfer (LTKT) Network, comprising three cohesive modules. First, Temporal Stage Grounding (TSG) leverages explicitly deconstructed LLM descriptions as cross-modal priors, guiding unconstrained visual snippets to anchor their specific evolutionary stages. Second, Temporal Transition Gating (TTG) enforces forward causality on the timeline. By mandating that an execution stage is flanked by historical preparation and future completion, TTG strictly filters static noise to yield refined temporal action scores. Finally, Linguistic Knowledge Transfer (LKT) integrates knowledge distillation and contrastive learning to embed this structural knowledge into the visual backbone. Extensive experiments on THUMOS14, ActivityNet1.2 and ActivityNet1.3 demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
From Completion to Editing: Unlocking Context-Aware Code Infilling via Search-and-Replace Instruction Tuning
Jiajun Zhang | Zeyu Cui | Jiaxi Yang | Lei Zhang | Yuheng Jing | Zeyao Ma | Tianyi Bai | Zilei Wang | Qiang Liu | Liang Wang | Binyuan Hui | Junyang Lin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jiajun Zhang | Zeyu Cui | Jiaxi Yang | Lei Zhang | Yuheng Jing | Zeyao Ma | Tianyi Bai | Zilei Wang | Qiang Liu | Liang Wang | Binyuan Hui | Junyang Lin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The dominant Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) paradigm for code completion is constrained by its rigid inability to correct contextual errors and reliance on unaligned, insecure Base models. While Chat LLMs offer safety and Agentic workflows provide flexibility, they suffer from performance degradation and prohibitive latency, respectively. To resolve this dilemma, we propose Search-and-Replace Infilling (SRI), a framework that internalizes the agentic verification-and-editing mechanism into a unified, single-pass inference process. By structurally grounding edits via an explicit search phase, SRI harmonizes completion tasks with the instruction-following priors of Chat LLMs, extending the paradigm from static infilling to dynamic context-aware editing. We synthesize a high-quality dataset, SRI-200K, and fine-tune the SRI-Coder series. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that with minimal data (20k samples), SRI-Coder enables Chat models to surpass the completion performance of their Base counterparts. Crucially, unlike FIM-style tuning, SRI preserves general coding competencies and maintains inference latency comparable to standard FIM. We release our dataset and models, establishing SRI as a robust, secure, and efficient alignment recipe for next-generation interactive development.
RealChart2Code: Bridging the Gap in Real-World Chart-to-Code Generation via Multi-Task Evaluation
Jiajun Zhang | Yuying Li | Zhixun Li | Xingyu Guo | Jingzhuo Wu | Leqi Zheng | Yiran Yang | Jianke Zhang | Qingbin Li | Shannan Yan | Changguo Jia | Junfei Wu | Zilei Wang | Qiang Liu | Liang Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jiajun Zhang | Yuying Li | Zhixun Li | Xingyu Guo | Jingzhuo Wu | Leqi Zheng | Yiran Yang | Jianke Zhang | Qingbin Li | Shannan Yan | Changguo Jia | Junfei Wu | Zilei Wang | Qiang Liu | Liang Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation across various domains. However, their ability to replicate complex, multi-panel visualizations from real-world data remains largely unassessed. To address this gap, we introduce RealChart2Code, a new large-scale benchmark with over 2,800 instances grounded in authentic datasets and featuring tasks with clear analytical intent. Crucially, it is the first benchmark to systematically evaluate chart generation from large-scale raw data and assess iterative code refinement in a multi-turn conversational setting. Our comprehensive evaluation of 14 leading VLMs on RealChart2Code reveals significant performance degradation compared to simpler benchmarks, highlighting their struggles with complex plot structures and authentic data. Our analysis uncovers a substantial performance gap between proprietary and open-weight models and confirms that even state-of-the-art VLMs often fail to accurately replicate intricate, multi-panel charts. These findings provide valuable insights into the current limitations of VLMs and guide future research directions.
2025
Divide-Then-Align: Honest Alignment based on the Knowledge Boundary of RAG
Xin Sun | Jianan Xie | Zhongqi Chen | Qiang Liu | Shu Wu | Yuehe Chen | Bowen Song | Zilei Wang | Weiqiang Wang | Liang Wang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xin Sun | Jianan Xie | Zhongqi Chen | Qiang Liu | Shu Wu | Yuehe Chen | Bowen Song | Zilei Wang | Weiqiang Wang | Liang Wang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval systems have significantly advanced natural language processing tasks by integrating external knowledge sources, enabling more accurate and contextually rich responses. To improve the robustness of such systems against noisy retrievals, Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT) has emerged as a widely adopted method. However, RAFT conditions models to generate answers even in the absence of reliable knowledge. This behavior undermines their reliability in high-stakes domains, where acknowledging uncertainty is critical. To address this issue, we propose Divide-Then-Align (DTA), a post-training approach designed to endow RAG systems with the ability to respond with “I don’t know” when the query is out of the knowledge boundary of both the retrieved passages and the model’s internal knowledge. DTA divides data samples into four knowledge quadrants and constructs tailored preference data for each quadrant, resulting in a curated dataset for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that effectively balances accuracy with appropriate abstention, enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of retrieval-augmented systems.
2023
Noise-Robust Semi-Supervised Learning for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction
Xin Sun | Qiang Liu | Shu Wu | Zilei Wang | Liang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Xin Sun | Qiang Liu | Shu Wu | Zilei Wang | Liang Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) aims to extract relational facts from texts but suffers from noisy instances. To mitigate the influence of noisy labels, current methods typically use the Multi-Instance-Learning framework to extract relations for each bag. However, these approaches are not capable of extracting relation labels for individual sentences. Several studies have focused on sentence-level DSRE to solve the above problem. These studies primarily aim to develop methods for identifying noisy samples and filtering them out to mitigate the impact of noise. However, discarding noisy samples directly leads to the loss of useful information. To this end, we propose SSLRE, a novel Semi-Supervised-Learning Relation Extraction framework for sentence-level DSRE. We discard only the labels of the noisy samples and utilize these instances without labels as unlabeled samples. Our SSLRE framework utilizes a weighted K-NN graph to select confident samples as labeled data and the rest as unlabeled. We then design a robust semi-supervised learning framework that can efficiently handle remaining label noise present in the labeled dataset, while also making effective use of unlabeled samples. Based on our experiments on two real-world datasets, the SSLRE framework we proposed has achieved significant enhancements in sentence-level relation extraction performance compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, it has also attained a state-of-the-art level of performance in bag-level relation extraction with ONE aggregation strategy.
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Co-authors
- Qiang Liu 4
- Liang Wang 4
- Shu Wu 3
- Yixin Zhang 3
- Zhongqi Chen 2
- Yang Deng 2
- Bowen Song 2
- Xin Sun 2
- Weiqiang Wang (王维强) 2
- Zesheng Wei 2
- Jianan Xie 2
- Jiajun Zhang 2
- Tianyi Bai 1
- Yuehe Chen 1
- Chuandong Cheng 1
- Zeyu Cui 1
- Xingyu Guo 1
- Wenhao Hong 1
- Binyuan Hui 1
- Changguo Jia 1
- Yuheng Jing 1
- Mengfan Li 1
- Mengxiang Li (李孟祥) 1
- Qingbin Li 1
- Yuying Li 1
- Zhilin Li 1
- Zhixun Li 1
- Junyang Lin 1
- Qiang Liu 1
- Wenhao Liu 1
- Zeyao Ma 1
- Xin Sun 1
- Liang Wang 1
- Ziyang Wang 1
- Jingzhuo Wu 1
- Junfei Wu 1
- Shining Wu 1
- Shannan Yan 1
- Jiaxi Yang 1
- Yiran Yang 1
- Jianke Zhang 1
- Lei Zhang 1
- Leqi Zheng 1