Zhi Zhang


2025

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NeuroAda: Activating Each Neuron’s Potential for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Zhi Zhang | Yixian Shen | Congfeng Cao | Ekaterina Shutova
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods primarily fall into two categories: addition-based and selective in-situ adaptation. The former, such as LoRA, introduce additional modules to adapt the model to downstream tasks, offering strong memory efficiency. However, their representational capacity is often limited, making them less suitable for fine-grained adaptation. In contrast, the latter directly fine-tunes a carefully chosen subset of the original model parameters, allowing for more precise and effective adaptation, but at the cost of significantly increased memory consumption.To reconcile this trade-off, we propose NeuroAda, a novel PEFT method that enables fine-grained model finetuning while maintaining high memory efficiency. Our approach first identifies important parameters (i.e., connections within the network) as in selective adaptation, and then introduces bypass connections for these selected parameters. During finetuning, only the bypass connections are updated, leaving the original model parameters frozen.Empirical results on 23+ tasks spanning both natural language generation and understanding demonstrate that NeuroAda achieves state-of-the-art performance with as little as 0.02% trainable parameters, while reducing CUDA memory usage by up to 60%.We release our code here: https://github.com/FightingFighting/NeuroAda.git.

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Beyond Words: Exploring Cultural Value Sensitivity in Multimodal Models
Srishti Yadav | Zhi Zhang | Daniel Hershcovich | Ekaterina Shutova
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025

Investigating value alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) based on cultural context has become a critical area of research. However, similar biases have not been extensively explored in large vision-language models (VLMs). As the scale of multimodal models continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to assess whether images can serve as reliable proxies for culture and how these values are embedded through the integration of both visual and textual data. In this paper, we conduct a thorough evaluation of multimodal model at different scales, focusing on their alignment with cultural values. Our findings reveal that, much like LLMs, VLMs exhibit sensitivity to cultural values, but their performance in aligning with these values is highly context-dependent. While VLMs show potential in improving value understanding through the use of images, this alignment varies significantly across contexts highlighting the complexities and underexplored challenges in the alignment of multimodal models.

2023

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CK-Transformer: Commonsense Knowledge Enhanced Transformers for Referring Expression Comprehension
Zhi Zhang | Helen Yannakoudakis | Xiantong Zhen | Ekaterina Shutova
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

The task of multimodal referring expression comprehension (REC), aiming at localizing an image region described by a natural language expression, has recently received increasing attention within the research comminity. In this paper, we specifically focus on referring expression comprehension with commonsense knowledge (KB-Ref), a task which typically requires reasoning beyond spatial, visual or semantic information. We propose a novel framework for Commonsense Knowledge Enhanced Transformers (CK-Transformer) which effectively integrates commonsense knowledge into the representations of objects in an image, facilitating identification of the target objects referred to by the expressions. We conduct extensive experiments on several benchmarks for the task of KB-Ref. Our results show that the proposed CK-Transformer achieves a new state of the art, with an absolute improvement of 3.14% accuracy over the existing state of the art.

2019

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A Hybrid Approach of Deep Semantic Matching and Deep Rank for Context Aware Question Answer System
Shu-Yi Xie | Chia-Hao Chang | Zhi Zhang | Yang Mo | Lian-Xin Jiang | Yu-Sheng Huang | Jian-Ping Shen
Proceedings of the 31st Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (ROCLING 2019)