Zihan Qiu

dblp:313/9471 · DBLP profile ↗
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13ranked-venue papers
5as first author
13since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0008-3991-0817ORCID · reported

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 12 · 5 first-author · 12 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Video Repurposing from User Generated Content: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark
abstract
The demand for producing short-form videos for sharing on social media platforms has experienced significant growth in recent times. Despite notable advancements in the fields of video summarization and highlight detection, which can create partially usable short films from raw videos, these approaches are often domain-specific and require an in-depth understanding of real-world video content. To tackle this predicament, we propose Repurpose-10K, an extensive dataset comprising over 10,000 videos with more than 120,000 annotated clips aimed at resolving the video long-to-short task. Recognizing the inherent constraints posed by untrained human annotators, which can result in inaccurate annotations for repurposed videos, we propose a two-stage solution to obtain annotations from real-world user-generated content. Furthermore, we offer a baseline model to address this challenging task by integrating audio, visual, and caption aspects through a cross-modal fusion and alignment framework. We aspire for our work to ignite groundbreaking research in the lesser-explored realms of video repurposing.
Yongliang Wu, Jiawang Cao, Bozheng Li, Weiheng Chi, Zihan Qiu, Lirian Su, Haolin Zheng, Jay Wu, Xu Yang 0021
AAAI7
2025 Demons in the Detail: On Implementing Load Balancing Loss for Training Specialized Mixture-of-Expert Models
abstract
Zihan Qiu, Zeyu Huang, Bo Zheng, Kaiyue Wen, Zekun Wang, Rui Men, Ivan Titov, Dayiheng Liu, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.
Zihan Qiu, Bo Zheng 0007, Kaiyue Wen, Rui Men, Ivan Titov 0001, Dayiheng Liu, Jingren Zhou 0001, Junyang Lin
ACL (1)1
2025 Post-hoc Reward Calibration: A Case Study on Length Bias
abstract
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback aligns the outputs of Large Language Models with human values and preferences. Central to this process is the reward model (RM), which translates human feedback into training signals for optimising LLM behaviour. However, RMs can develop biases by exploiting spurious correlations in their training data, such as favouring outputs based on length or style rather than true quality. These biases can lead to incorrect output rankings, sub-optimal model evaluations, and the amplification of undesirable behaviours in LLMs alignment. This paper addresses the challenge of correcting such biases without additional data and training, introducing the concept of Post-hoc Reward Calibration. We first propose to use local average reward to estimate the bias term and, thus, remove it to approximate the underlying true reward. We then extend the approach to a more general and robust form with the Locally Weighted Regression. Focusing on the prevalent length bias, we validate our proposed approaches across three experimental settings, demonstrating consistent improvements: (1) a 3.11 average performance gain across 33 reward models on the RewardBench dataset; (2) improved agreement of RM produced rankings with GPT-4 evaluations and human preferences based on the AlpacaEval benchmark; and (3) improved Length-Controlled win rate (Dubois et al., 2024) of the RLHF process in multiple LLM–RM combinations. According to our experiments, our method is computationally efficient and generalisable to other types of bias and RMs, offering a scalable and robust solution for mitigating biases in LLM alignment and evaluation.
Zihan Qiu, Edoardo Maria Ponti, Ivan Titov 0001
ICLR2
2025 Layerwise Recurrent Router for Mixture-of-Experts
abstract
The scaling of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized their capabilities in various tasks, yet this growth must be matched with efficient computational strategies. The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture stands out for its ability to scale model size without significantly increasing training costs. Despite their advantages, current MoE models often display parameter inefficiency. For instance, a pre-trained MoE-based LLM with 52 billion parameters might perform comparably to a standard model with 6.7 billion. Being a crucial part of MoE, current routers in different layers independently assign tokens without leveraging historical routing information, potentially leading to suboptimal token-expert combinations and the parameter inefficiency problem. To alleviate this issue, we introduce the Layerwise Recurrent Router for Mixture-of-Experts (RMoE). RMoE leverages a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to establish dependencies between routing decisions across consecutive layers. Such layerwise recurrence can be efficiently parallelly computed for input tokens and introduces negotiable costs. Our extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that RMoE-based language models consistently outperform a spectrum of baseline models. Furthermore, RMoE integrates a novel computation stage orthogonal to existing methods, allowing seamless compatibility with other MoE architectures. Our analyses attribute RMoE's gains to its effective cross-layer information sharing, which also improves expert selection and diversity.
Zihan Qiu, Shuang Cheng, Yizhi Zhou, Ivan Titov 0001, Jie Fu 0001
ICLR1
2025 Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free
abstract
Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of gating. In this work, we conduct comprehensive experiments to systematically investigate gating-augmented softmax attention variants. Specifically, we perform a comprehensive comparison over 30 variants of 15B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models and 1.7B dense models trained on a 3.5 trillion token dataset. Our central finding is that a simple modification—applying a head-specific sigmoid gate after the Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA)—consistently improves performance. This modification also enhances training stability, tolerates larger learning rates, and improves scaling properties. By comparing various gating positions and computational variants, we attribute this effectiveness to two key factors: (1) introducing non-linearity upon the low-rank mapping in the softmax attention, and (2) applying query-dependent sparse gating scores to modulate the SDPA output. Notably, we find this sparse gating mechanism mitigates `massive activation`, `attention sink` and enhances long-context extrapolation performance. We also release related codes (https://github.com/qiuzh20/gated_attention}) and models (https://huggingface.co/QwQZh/gated_attention) to facilitate future research. Furthermore, the most effective SDPA output gating is used in the Qwen3-Next models (https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-next).
Zihan Qiu, Bo Zheng 0007, Kaiyue Wen, Rui Men, Suozhi Huang, Dayiheng Liu, Jingren Zhou 0001, Junyang Lin
NeurIPS1
2025 A Controllable Examination for Long-Context Language Models
abstract
Existing frameworks for evaluating long-context language models (LCLM) can be broadly categorized into real-world applications (e.g, document summarization) and synthetic tasks (e.g, needle-in-a-haystack). Despite their utility, both approaches are accompanied by certain intrinsic limitations. Real-world tasks often involve complexity that makes interpretation challenging and suffer from data contamination, whereas synthetic tasks frequently lack meaningful coherence between the target information ("needle") and its surrounding context ("haystack"), undermining their validity as proxies for realistic applications. In response to these challenges, we posit that an ideal long-context evaluation framework should be characterized by three essential features: 1) seamless context: coherent contextual integration between target information and its surrounding context; 2) controllable setting: an extensible task setup that enables controlled studies—for example, incorporating additional required abilities such as numerical reasoning; and 3) sound evaluation: avoiding LLM-as-Judge and conduct exact-match to ensure deterministic and reproducible evaluation results.This study introduces $\textbf{LongBioBench}$, a benchmark that utilizes artificially generated biographies as a controlled environment for assessing LCLMs across dimensions of $\textit{understanding}$, $\textit{reasoning}$, and $\textit{trustworthiness}$. Our experimental evaluation, which includes $\textbf{18}$ LCLMs in total, demonstrates that most models still exhibit deficiencies in semantic understanding and elementary reasoning over retrieved results and are less trustworthy as context length increases.Our further analysis indicates some design choices employed by existing synthetic benchmarks, such as contextual non-coherence, numerical needles, and the absence of distractors, rendering them vulnerable to test the model's long-context capabilities.Moreover, we also reveal that long-context continual pretraining primarily adjusts RoPE embedding to accommodate extended context lengths, which in turn yields only marginal improvements in the model’s true capabilities. To sum up, compared to previous synthetic benchmarks, LongBioBench achieves a better trade-off between mirroring authentic language tasks and maintaining controllability, and is highly interpretable and configurable.
Zihan Qiu, Fei Yuan 0006, Jeff Z. Pan, Ivan Titov 0001
NeurIPS4
2025 Neo-TKGC: Enhancing Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion with Integrated Node Weights and Future Information
abstract
Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (TKGC) involves predicting and filling in missing facts within time series data, a crucial task with wide-ranging applications across various domains. The dynamic evolution of Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) adds complexity to this task, making it inherently challenging. Existing research predominantly relies on historical data to complete the missing facts. However, these approaches often overlook the potential of future information and the significance of node weights.To address these challenges, we propose Neo-TKGC, a novel temporal knowledge graph completion model that integrates a graph structure encoding module and a temporal encoding module. The graph structure encoding module introduces node weights to enhance the capabilities of graph neural networks (GNNs) for entity and relation representation learning, implemented using CompGCN. This module can be easily extended to any GNN models utilizing node and edge aggregation. The temporal encoding module leverages both future and historical information to capture relevant contexts and temporal dependencies among entities and relations.By combining node weights and future information, Neo-TKGC achieves more accurate entity and relation representations, thereby improving the model's ability to infer unknown entities. Extensive experiments on three real-world TKGC datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model compared to existing approaches, achieving at least a 1.7% relative improvement in Hits@1 across most metrics.
Zihan Qiu, Xiaoling Zhou, Chunyan An, Qiang Yang 0015, Zhixu Li
WSDM1
2025 A survey on multilingual large language models: corpora, alignment, and bias
abstract
Abstract Based on the foundation of Large Language Models (LLMs), Multilingual LLMs (MLLMs) have been developed to address the challenges faced in multilingual natural language processing, hoping to achieve knowledge transfer from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. However, significant limitations and challenges still exist, such as language imbalance, multilingual alignment, and inherent bias. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of MLLMs, delving deeply into discussions surrounding these critical issues. First of all, we start by presenting an overview of MLLMs, covering their evolutions, key techniques, and multilingual capacities. Secondly, we explore the multilingual training corpora of MLLMs and the multilingual datasets oriented for downstream tasks that are crucial to enhance the cross-lingual capability of MLLMs. Thirdly, we survey the state-of-the-art studies of multilingual representations and investigate whether the current MLLMs can learn a universal language representation. Fourthly, we discuss bias on MLLMs, including its categories, evaluation metrics, and debiasing techniques. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and point out promising research directions of MLLMs.
Yuemei Xu, Zihan Qiu, Yuqi Ye, Hanwen Gu
Frontiers Comput. Sci.4
2024 HyperMoE: Towards Better Mixture of Experts via Transferring Among Experts
abstract
The Mixture of Experts (MoE) for language models has been proven effective in augmenting the capacity of models by dynamically routing each input token to a specific subset of experts for processing.Despite the success, most existing methods face a challenge for balance between sparsity and the availability of expert knowledge: enhancing performance through increased use of expert knowledge often results in diminishing sparsity during expert selection.To mitigate this contradiction, we propose HyperMoE, a novel MoE framework built upon Hypernetworks.This framework integrates the computational processes of MoE with the concept of knowledge transferring in multi-task learning.Specific modules generated based on the information of unselected experts serve as supplementary information, which allows the knowledge of experts not selected to be used while maintaining selection sparsity.Our comprehensive empirical evaluations across multiple datasets and backbones establish that HyperMoE significantly outperforms existing MoE methods under identical conditions concerning the number of experts.
Zihan Qiu, Huijia Wu, Zhaofeng He 0001, Jie Fu 0001
ACL (1)2
2024 Unlocking Emergent Modularity in Large Language Models
abstract
Zihan Qiu, Zeyu Huang, Jie Fu. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.
Zihan Qiu, Jie Fu 0001
NAACL-HLT1
2024 Stacking Your Transformers: A Closer Look at Model Growth for Efficient LLM Pre-Training
abstract
LLMs are computationally expensive to pre-train due to their large scale. Model growth emerges as a promising approach by leveraging smaller models to accelerate the training of larger ones. However, the viability of these model growth methods in efficient LLM pre-training remains underexplored. This work identifies three critical $\underline{\textit{O}}$bstacles: ($\textit{O}$1) lack of comprehensive evaluation, ($\textit{O}$2) untested viability for scaling, and ($\textit{O}$3) lack of empirical guidelines. To tackle $\textit{O}$1, we summarize existing approaches into four atomic growth operators and systematically evaluate them in a standardized LLM pre-training setting. Our findings reveal that a depthwise stacking operator, called $G_{\text{stack}}$, exhibits remarkable acceleration in training, leading to decreased loss and improved overall performance on eight standard NLP benchmarks compared to strong baselines. Motivated by these promising results, we conduct extensive experiments to delve deeper into $G_{\text{stack}}$ to address $\textit{O}$2 and $\textit{O}$3. For $\textit{O}$2 (untested scalability), our study shows that $G_{\text{stack}}$ is scalable and consistently performs well, with experiments up to 7B LLMs after growth and pre-training LLMs with 750B tokens. For example, compared to a conventionally trained 7B model using 300B tokens, our $G_{\text{stack}}$ model converges to the same loss with 194B tokens, resulting in a 54.6\% speedup. We further address $\textit{O}$3 (lack of empirical guidelines) by formalizing guidelines to determine growth timing and growth factor for $G_{\text{stack}}$, making it practical in general LLM pre-training. We also provide in-depth discussions and comprehensive ablation studies of $G_{\text{stack}}$. Our code and pre-trained model are available at https://llm-stacking.github.io/.
Wenyu Du, Tongxu Luo, Zihan Qiu, Yikang Shen, Reynold Cheng, Yike Guo, Jie Fu 0001
NeurIPS3
2024 ValueCSV: Evaluating Core Socialist Values Understanding in Large Language Models
Yuemei Xu, Zihan Qiu
NLPCC (4)3
2022 Supported Policy Optimization for Offline Reinforcement Learning
abstract
Policy constraint methods to offline reinforcement learning (RL) typically utilize parameterization or regularization that constrains the policy to perform actions within the support set of the behavior policy. The elaborative designs of parameterization methods usually intrude into the policy networks, which may bring extra inference cost and cannot take full advantage of well-established online methods. Regularization methods reduce the divergence between the learned policy and the behavior policy, which may mismatch the inherent density-based definition of support set thereby failing to avoid the out-of-distribution actions effectively. This paper presents Supported Policy OpTimization (SPOT), which is directly derived from the theoretical formalization of the density-based support constraint. SPOT adopts a VAE-based density estimator to explicitly model the support set of behavior policy and presents a simple but effective density-based regularization term, which can be plugged non-intrusively into off-the-shelf off-policy RL algorithms. SPOT achieves the state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks for offline RL. Benefiting from the pluggable design, offline pretrained models from SPOT can also be applied to perform online fine-tuning seamlessly.
Jialong Wu 0001, Haixu Wu, Zihan Qiu, Jianmin Wang 0001, Mingsheng Long
NeurIPS3