Xu Zhao


2025

pdf bib
The Role of Deductive and Inductive Reasoning in Large Language Models
Chengkun Cai | Xu Zhao | Haoliang Liu | Zhongyu Jiang | Tianfang Zhang | Zongkai Wu | Jenq-Neng Hwang | Lei Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning tasks, yet their reliance on static prompt structures and limited adaptability to complex scenarios remains a major challenge. In this paper, we propose the **Deductive and Inductive (DID)** method, a novel framework that enhances LLM reasoning by dynamically integrating both deductive and inductive reasoning approaches. Drawing from cognitive science principles, DID implements a dual-metric complexity evaluation system that combines Littlestone dimension and information entropy to precisely assess task difficulty and guide decomposition strategies. DID enables the model to progressively adapt its reasoning pathways based on problem complexity, mirroring human cognitive processes. We evaluate DID’s effectiveness across multiple benchmarks, including the AIW, MR-GSM8K, and our custom Holiday Puzzle dataset for temporal reasoning. Our results demonstrate great improvements in reasoning quality and solution accuracy - achieving 70.3% accuracy on AIW (compared to 62.2% for Tree of Thought), while maintaining lower computational costs.

pdf bib
Bayesian Optimization for Controlled Image Editing via LLMs
Chengkun Cai | Haoliang Liu | Xu Zhao | Zhongyu Jiang | Tianfang Zhang | Zongkai Wu | John Lee | Jenq-Neng Hwang | Lei Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

In the rapidly evolving field of image generation, achieving precise control over generated content and maintaining semantic consistency remain significant limitations, particularly concerning grounding techniques and the necessity for model fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose BayesGenie, an off-the-shelf approach that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with Bayesian Optimization to facilitate precise and user-friendly image editing. Our method enables users to modify images through natural language descriptions without manual area marking, while preserving the original image’s semantic integrity. Unlike existing techniques that require extensive pre-training or fine-tuning, our approach demonstrates remarkable adaptability across various LLMs through its model-agnostic design. BayesGenie employs an adapted Bayesian optimization strategy to automatically refine the inference process parameters, achieving high-precision image editing with minimal user intervention. Through extensive experiments across diverse scenarios, we demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods in both editing accuracy and semantic preservation, as validated using different LLMs including Claude3 and GPT-4.

2020

pdf bib
A Relaxed Matching Procedure for Unsupervised BLI
Xu Zhao | Zihao Wang | Yong Zhang | Hao Wu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Recently unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction(BLI) without any parallel corpus has attracted much research interest. One of the crucial parts in methods for the BLI task is the matching procedure. Previous works impose a too strong constraint on the matching and lead to many counterintuitive translation pairings. Thus We propose a relaxed matching procedure to find a more precise matching between two languages. We also find that aligning source and target language embedding space bidirectionally will bring significant improvement. We follow the previous iterative framework to conduct experiments. Results on standard benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which substantially outperforms previous unsupervised methods.

pdf bib
Konwledge-Enabled Diagnosis Assistant Based on Obstetric EMRs and Knowledge Graph
Kunli Zhang | Xu Zhao | Lei Zhuang | Qi Xie | Hongying Zan
Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

The obstetric Electronic Medical Record (EMR) contains a large amount of medical data and health information. It plays a vital role in improving the quality of the diagnosis assistant service. In this paper, we treat the diagnosis assistant as a multi-label classification task and propose a Knowledge-Enabled Diagnosis Assistant (KEDA) model for the obstetric diagnosis assistant. We utilize the numerical information in EMRs and the external knowledge from Chinese Obstetric Knowledge Graph (COKG) to enhance the text representation of EMRs. Specifically, the bidirectional maximum matching method and similarity-based approach are used to obtain the entities set contained in EMRs and linked to the COKG. The final knowledge representation is obtained by a weight-based disease prediction algorithm, and it is fused with the text representation through a linear weighting method. Experiment results show that our approach can bring about +3.53 F1 score improvements upon the strong BERT baseline in the diagnosis assistant task.

pdf bib
Semi-Supervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction with Two-way Interaction
Xu Zhao | Zihao Wang | Hao Wu | Yong Zhang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Semi-supervision is a promising paradigm for Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) with limited annotations. However, previous semisupervised methods do not fully utilize the knowledge hidden in annotated and nonannotated data, which hinders further improvement of their performance. In this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised BLI framework to encourage the interaction between the supervised signal and unsupervised alignment. We design two message-passing mechanisms to transfer knowledge between annotated and non-annotated data, named prior optimal transport and bi-directional lexicon update respectively. Then, we perform semi-supervised learning based on a cyclic or a parallel parameter feeding routine to update our models. Our framework is a general framework that can incorporate any supervised and unsupervised BLI methods based on optimal transport. Experimental results on MUSE and VecMap datasets show significant improvement of our models. Ablation study also proves that the two-way interaction between the supervised signal and unsupervised alignment accounts for the gain of the overall performance. Results on distant language pairs further illustrate the advantage and robustness of our proposed method.