Ziqing Yang

Also published as: Sak Yang

Other people with similar names: Ziqing Yang


2025

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More Data or Better Data? A Critical Analysis of Data Selection and Synthesis for Mathematical Reasoning
Yike Zhao | Simin Guo | Ziqing Yang | Shifan Han | Dahua Lin | Fei Tan
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

The reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) play a critical role in many downstream tasks, yet depend strongly on the quality of training data. Despite various proposed data construction methods, their practical utility in real-world pipelines remains underexplored. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of open-source datasets and data synthesis techniques for mathematical reasoning, evaluating them under a unified pipeline designed to mirror training and deployment scenarios. We further distill effective data selection strategies and identify practical methods suitable for industrial applications. Our findings highlight that structuring data in more interpretable formats, or distilling from stronger models often outweighs simply scaling up data volume. This study provides actionable guidance for integrating training data to enhance LLM capabilities, supporting both cost-effective data curation and scalable model enhancement. We hope this work will inspire further research on how to balance “more data” versus “better data” for real-world reasoning tasks.

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Consultant Decoding: Yet Another Synergistic Mechanism
Chuanghao Ding | Jiaping Wang | Ziqing Yang | Xiaoliang Wang | Dahua Lin | Cam-Tu Nguyen | Fei Tan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

The synergistic mechanism based on Speculative Decoding (SD) has garnered considerable attention as a simple yet effective approach for accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs). Nonetheless, the high rejection rates require repeated LLMs calls to validate draft tokens, undermining the overall efficiency gain of SD.In this work, we revisit existing verification mechanisms and propose a novel synergetic mechanism Consultant Decoding (CD). CD achieves up to a 2.5-fold increase in inference speed compared to the target model, while maintaining comparable generation quality (~100% of the target model’s performance). Interestingly, this is achieved by combining models whose parameter sizes differ by two orders of magnitude.In addition, CD reduces the call frequency of the large target model to below 10%, particularly in more demanding tasks.CD’s performance was even found to surpass that of the large target model, which theoretically represents the upper bound for speculative decoding.

2024

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Balancing Speciality and Versatility: a Coarse to Fine Framework for Supervised Fine-tuning Large Language Model
Hengyuan Zhang | Yanru Wu | Dawei Li | Sak Yang | Rui Zhao | Yong Jiang | Fei Tan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) showcase remarkable versatility, capable of handling diverse real-world tasks. Meanwhile, aligned LLMs are also expected to exhibit speciality, excelling in specific applications. However, fine-tuning with extra data, a common practice to gain speciality, often leads to catastrophic forgetting (CF) of previously acquired versatility, hindering the model’s performance across diverse tasks. In response to this challenge, we propose CoFiTune, a coarse to fine framework in an attempt to strike the balance between speciality and versatility. At the coarse-grained level, an empirical tree-search algorithm is utilized to pinpoint and update specific modules that are crucial for speciality, while keeping other parameters frozen; at the fine-grained level, a soft-masking mechanism regulates the update to the LLMs, mitigating the CF issue without harming speciality. In an overall evaluation of both speciality and versatility, CoFiTune consistently outperforms baseline methods across diverse tasks and model scales. Compared to the full-parameter SFT, CoFiTune leads to about 14% versatility improvement and marginal speciality loss on a 13B model. Lastly, based on further analysis, we provide a speculative insight into the information forwarding process in LLMs, which helps explain the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/rattlesnakey/CoFiTune.

2022

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HIT at SemEval-2022 Task 2: Pre-trained Language Model for Idioms Detection
Zheng Chu | Ziqing Yang | Yiming Cui | Zhigang Chen | Ming Liu
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

The same multi-word expressions may have different meanings in different sentences. They can be mainly divided into two categories, which are literal meaning and idiomatic meaning. Non-contextual-based methods perform poorly on this problem, and we need contextual embedding to understand the idiomatic meaning of multi-word expressions correctly. We use a pre-trained language model, which can provide a context-aware sentence embedding, to detect whether multi-word expression in the sentence is idiomatic usage.

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HFL at SemEval-2022 Task 8: A Linguistics-inspired Regression Model with Data Augmentation for Multilingual News Similarity
Zihang Xu | Ziqing Yang | Yiming Cui | Zhigang Chen
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

This paper describes our system designed for SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. We proposed a linguistics-inspired model trained with a few task-specific strategies. The main techniques of our system are: 1) data augmentation, 2) multi-label loss, 3) adapted R-Drop, 4) samples reconstruction with the head-tail combination. We also present a brief analysis of some negative methods like two-tower architecture. Our system ranked 1st on the leaderboard while achieving a Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient of 0.818 on the official evaluation set.