Zequn Xie
2026
Rectifying the Emotional Flow: Aligning Priors and Dynamic Guidance for High-Arousal Text-to-Speech
Fangming Feng | Dongjie Fu | Zequn Xie | Yu Zhang | Yangyang Wu | Zhou Zhao | Tao Jin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Fangming Feng | Dongjie Fu | Zequn Xie | Yu Zhang | Yangyang Wu | Zhou Zhao | Tao Jin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While diffusion and flow-matching models have advanced TTS, generating high-arousal emotions remains a persistent challenge due to the trade-off between stability and expressiveness. Existing systems often suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels under stable settings. In this work, we identify that standard Gaussian initialization inevitably introduces a neutral prosody bias, while uniform Classifier-Free Guidance often distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. To address this, we propose an inference framework that rectifies the emotional trajectory. An Emotion-Rectified Noise Prior injects a semantic gradient at initialization to align sampling with the target emotional manifold, and Likelihood-Inverse Guidance adaptively schedules guidance via a conditional/unconditional likelihood ratio, strengthening guidance only when the trajectory drifts toward a neutral fallback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively resolves the stability bottleneck in high-intensity scenarios, achieving superior linguistic accuracy and emotional fidelity without model retraining. Audio samples are available at https://showtts.github.io/emotionTTS/.
WebClipper: Efficient Evolution of Web Agents with Graph-based Trajectory Pruning
Junjie Wang | Zequn Xie | Dan Yang | Jie Feng | Yue Shen | Duolin Sun | Meixiu Long | Yihan Jiao | Zhehao Tan | Jian Wang | Peng Wei | Jinjie Gu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Junjie Wang | Zequn Xie | Dan Yang | Jie Feng | Yue Shen | Duolin Sun | Meixiu Long | Yihan Jiao | Zhehao Tan | Jian Wang | Peng Wei | Jinjie Gu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Deep Research systems based on web agents have shown strong potential in solving complex information-seeking tasks, yet their search efficiency remains underexplored. We observe that many state-of-the-art open-source web agents rely on long tool-call trajectories with cyclic reasoning loops and exploration of unproductive branches. To address this, we propose WebClipper, a framework that compresses web agent trajectories via graph-based pruning. Concretely, we model the agent’s search process as a state graph and cast trajectory optimization as a minimum-necessary Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) mining problem, yielding pruned trajectories that preserve essential reasoning while eliminating redundant steps. Continued training on these refined trajectories enables the agent to evolve toward more efficient search patterns and reduces tool-call rounds by about 20% while improving accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce a new metric called F-AE Score to measure the model’s overall performance in balancing accuracy and efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that WebClipper compresses tool-call rounds under excellent performance, providing practical insight into balancing effectiveness and efficiency in web agent design.
DPDV: Dual-Pathway and Dual-View Representation Learning for Bridging Information Asymmetry in Text-Video Retrieval
Zequn Xie | Xin Liu | Fangming Feng | Boyun Zhang | Tao Jin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zequn Xie | Xin Liu | Fangming Feng | Boyun Zhang | Tao Jin
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In recent years, CLIP-based text-video retrieval methods have developed rapidly, with research focusing on constructing diverse features and achieving effective interactions. However, the asymmetry of cross-modal information poses a challenge to accurately establishing retrieval relationships. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel video retrieval framework, termed the Dual-Pathway and Dual-View model (DPDV), which consists of the Dual-Pathway Partitioning Module (DPPM) for constructing features at an appropriate granularity and the Dual-View Interaction Module (DVIM) for performing effective feature interactions. For DPPM, we simulate a human macro-level cognitive perspective by partitioning visual features into two categories based on their relevance to the text query and supplementing less relevant features with additional textual information. For DVIM, we simulate a human alignment strategy from macro to micro levels, focusing on local visual features while comprehensively modeling fine-grained interactions. We evaluate DPDV on five benchmark datasets, achieving leading retrieval performance.
2025
Chat-Driven Text Generation and Interaction for Person Retrieval
Zequn Xie | Chuxin Wang | Yeqiang Wang | Sihang Cai | Shulei Wang | Tao Jin
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zequn Xie | Chuxin Wang | Yeqiang Wang | Sihang Cai | Shulei Wang | Tao Jin
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Text-based person search (TBPS) enables the retrieval of person images from large-scale databases using natural language descriptions, offering critical value in surveillance applications. However, a major challenge lies in the labor-intensive process of obtaining high-quality textual annotations, which limits scalability and practical deployment. To address this, we introduce two complementary modules: Multi-Turn Text Generation (MTG) and Multi-Turn Text Interaction (MTI). MTG generates rich pseudo-labels through simulated dialogues with MLLMs, producing fine-grained and diverse visual descriptions without manual supervision. MTI refines user queries at inference time through dynamic, dialogue-based reasoning, enabling the system to interpret and resolve vague, incomplete, or ambiguous descriptions—characteristics often seen in real-world search scenarios. Together, MTG and MTI form a unified and annotation-free framework that significantly improves retrieval accuracy, robustness, and usability. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves competitive or superior results while eliminating the need for manual captions, paving the way for scalable and practical deployment of TBPS systems.