Zhen Yang
Other people with similar names: Zhen Yang, Zhen Yang
Unverified author pages with similar names: Zhen Yang
2026
CompTab: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Real-World TableQA with Complex Reasoning and Irregular Tables
Zhen Yang | Wei Du | Jie Wang | Wenze Zhou | Xiangfeng Meng | Zhengyang Wang | Suping Sun | Ziwei Du | Haodong Zou | Jie Chen | Yongbin Liu | Shicheng Tan | Jiahao Ying | Shu Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhen Yang | Wei Du | Jie Wang | Wenze Zhou | Xiangfeng Meng | Zhengyang Wang | Suping Sun | Ziwei Du | Haodong Zou | Jie Chen | Yongbin Liu | Shicheng Tan | Jiahao Ying | Shu Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent progress in Large Language Model (LLM) based Table Question Answering (TableQA) has demonstrated strong performance on standard benchmarks. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on well-structured tables and fail to reflect the irregular structures and complex reasoning commonly encountered in real-world scenarios. We propose CompTab, a benchmark designed to evaluate TableQA under complex reasoning and irregular table conditions. CompTab covers six representative types, including semantic ambiguity, multi-hop reasoning, transposed tables, merged cells, missing values, and outliers. It is constructed from real-world seed tables across multiple domains using controlled LLM based generation and human verification to ensure realism and diversity. In addition, to improve the generalization of LLMs under complex and irregular table settings, we propose a two-stage training framework that progressively aligns models with textual reasoning and executable decision signals, instantiated as CompTabLLM. Evaluations on 38 representative LLMs and CompTabLLM show clear limitations of existing LLMs under realistic conditions, while the proposed framework improves generalization. CompTab thus provides a challenging benchmark for advancing TableQA in real-world.
Thinking Beyond the Local: Multi-View Instructed Adaptive Reasoning in KG-Enhanced LLMs
Minghan Zhang | Shu Zhao | Zhen Yang | Hongsheng Wu | Yongxing Lin | Haodong Zou | Jie Chen | Zhen Duan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Minghan Zhang | Shu Zhao | Zhen Yang | Hongsheng Wu | Yongxing Lin | Haodong Zou | Jie Chen | Zhen Duan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Knowledge Graph-enhanced Large Language Models (KG-Enhanced LLMs) integrate the linguistic capabilities of LLMs with the structured semantics of Knowledge Graphs (KGs), showing strong potential in knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks. However, existing methods typically adopt query-driven iterative reasoning from a local perspective, which limits their ability to capture semantically distant but crucial information, leading to dual bottlenecks in efficiency and accuracy for complex multi-hop tasks. To address this issue, we propose MIAoG, a multi-view instructed adaptive reasoning of LLM on KG, which is designed to overcome the limitations of local exploration by enabling LLMs to plan, evaluate, and adapt reasoning paths from a global perspective. Instead of query-anchored exploration, MIAoG first prompts the LLM to generate a multi-view instruction set that outlines diverse potential reasoning paths and explicitly specifies global reasoning intentions to guide the model toward coherent and targeted reasoning. During reasoning, MIAoG integrates a real-time introspection mechanism that evaluates the alignment between the current path and the instructions, adaptively pruning inconsistent trajectories to enhance global consistency while maintaining efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets show that MIAoG achieves state-of-the-art performance in KG-enhanced LLM reasoning, particularly excelling in complex multi-hop scenarios.
Execution as Verification: Fine-Grained Self-Correcting Reasoning for Complex KBQA
Minghan Zhang | Zhen Yang | Haodong Zou | Jie Chen | Zhen Duan | Shu Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Minghan Zhang | Zhen Yang | Haodong Zou | Jie Chen | Zhen Duan | Shu Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) leverages structured knowledge bases to offer superior interpretability and hallucination resistance, making it a critical technology for precise knowledge reasoning. However, the prevailing LLM-based generate-then-execute formulation of semantic parsing is limited by strict syntactic constraints, making it primarily prone to structural deviations that render queries unexecutable, while suffering from semantic deviations that yield incorrect execution results. To address these challenges, we propose the Execution as Verification (EVER) framework, reframing semantic parsing as an iterative, self-correcting reasoning process driven by execution feedback. First, motivated by the insight that query executability serves as a strong proxy for answer correctness, we introduce Fine-Grained Execution-Aware Planning. This mechanism decomposes complex semantic parsing into a sequence of stepwise reasoning processes oriented by executability verification, ensuring high query executability. We further design a Self-Guided Semantic Correction mechanism based on execution result verification, utilizing execution feedback to verify and calibrate semantic deviations, thereby ensuring the semantic correctness of executable queries. Experimental results on the WebQSP and CWQ datasets demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in both query executability and answer accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art performance, particularly in complex multi-hop scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/ahu-zmh/EVER.
2025
Forget the Unneeded: Backdooring Large Language Models via Contrastive-enhanced Machine Unlearning
Shiji Yang | Shu Zhao | Congyao Mei | Zhen Yang | Jie Chen | Fulan Qian | Zhen Duan | Yanping Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Shiji Yang | Shu Zhao | Congyao Mei | Zhen Yang | Jie Chen | Fulan Qian | Zhen Duan | Yanping Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Prompt tuning for Large Language Models (LLMs) is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing methods find backdoor attacks to be a significant threat in data-rich scenarios. However, in data-limited scenarios, these methods have difficulty capturing precise backdoor patterns, leading to weakened backdoor attack capabilities and significant side effects for the LLMs, which limits their practical relevance. To explore this problem, we propose a backdoor attacks through contrastive-enhanced machine unlearning in data-limited scenarios, called BCU. Specifically, BCU introduces a multi-objective machine unlearning method to capture precise backdoor patterns by forgetting the association between non-trigger data and the backdoor patterns, reducing side effects. Moreover, we design a contrastive learning strategy to enhance the association between triggers and backdoor patterns, improving the capability of backdoor attacks. Experimental results on 6 NLP datasets and 4 LLMs show that BCU exhibits strong backdoor attack capabilities and slight side effects, whether the training data is rich or limited. Our findings highlight practical security risks of backdoor attacks against LLMs, necessitating further research for security purposes. Our code is available at https://github.com/AHU-YangSJ/BCU.