Rui Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of Penn State University. He is a co-director of the PSU Natural Language Processing Lab. His research interest lies in Trustworthy Human-Centered AI, LLM Agents, and AI for Science. He received an NSF CAREER Award, a Senior Area Chair Paper Award at NAACL 2025, and an Outstanding Area Chair Award at EMNLP 2024. His research is supported by a Microsoft Research Award, an Amazon Research Award, an eBay Research Award, and a Cisco Research Award. He received B.S. degrees from both Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Michigan in 2015 and received his Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department at Yale University in 2020. He has done industry research internships at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Grammarly Research, and Google AI.
Publications
2025
Training Step-Level Reasoning Verifiers with Formal Verification Tools
Ryo Kamoi, Yusen Zhang, Nan Zhang, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Rui Zhang
Preprint
[paper] [website]
When Reasoning Meets Compression: Benchmarking Compressed Large Reasoning Models on Complex Reasoning Tasks
Nan Zhang, Yusen Zhang, Prasenjit Mitra, Rui Zhang
Preprint
[paper]
Accelerating Causal Network Discovery of Alzheimer Disease Biomarkers via Scientific Literature-based Retrieval Augmented Generation
Xiaofan Zhou, Liangjie Huang, Pinyang Cheng, Wenpen Yin, Rui Zhang, Wenrui Hao, Lu Cheng
Preprint
[paper]
HRScene: How Far Are VLMs from Effective High-Resolution Image Understanding?
Yusen Zhang, Wenliang Zheng, Aashrith Madasu, Peng Shi, Ryo Kamoi, Hao Zhou, Zhuoyang Zou, Shu Zhao, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Vipul Gupta, Xiaoxin Lu, Nan Zhang, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Avitej Iyer, Renze Lou, Wenpeng Yin, Rui Zhang
ICCV 2025
[paper] [website]
GreaterPrompt: A Unified, Customizable, and High-Performing Open-Source Toolkit for Prompt Optimization
Wenliang Zheng, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Yusen Zhang, Rui Zhang
ACL 2025 - Demo
[paper] [code]
Enhance Multimodal Consistency and Coherence for Text-Image Plan Generation
Xiaoxin Lu, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Yusen Zhang, Rui Zhang
ACL 2025 - Findings
[paper]
TaxoAdapt: Aligning LLM-Based Multidimensional Taxonomy Construction to Evolving Research Corpora
Priyanka Kargupta, Nan Zhang, Yunyi Zhang, Rui Zhang, Prasenjit Mitra, Jiawei Han
ACL 2025
[paper]
Improving Fairness of Large Language Models in Multi-document Summarization
Haoyuan Li, Rui Zhang, Snigdha Chaturvedi
ACL 2025
[paper]
GReaTer: Gradients Over Reasoning Makes Smaller Language Models Strong Prompt Optimizers
Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Ryo Kamoi, Bo Pang, Yusen Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Rui Zhang
ICLR 2025
[paper] [code]
SiReRAG: Indexing Similar and Related Information for Multihop Reasoning
Nan Zhang, Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Alexander Fabbri, Gabriel Bernadett-Shapiro, Rui Zhang, Prasenjit Mitra, Caiming Xiong, Chien-Sheng Wu
ICLR 2025
[paper] [code]
From Lazy to Prolific: Tackling Missing Labels in Open Vocabulary Extreme Classification by Positive-Unlabeled Sequence Learning
Haoran Ranran Zhang, Bensu Uçar, Soumik Dey, Hansi Wu, Binbin Li, Rui Zhang
NAACL 2025 - Findings
[paper]
Coverage-based Fairness in Multi-document Summarization
Haoyuan Li, Yusen Zhang, Rui Zhang, Snigdha Chaturvedi
NAACL 2025
[paper] [code]
Senior Area Chair Paper Award
2024
VisOnlyQA: Large Vision Language Models Still Struggle with Visual Perception of Geometric Information
Ryo Kamoi, Yusen Zhang, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Rui Zhang
Preprint
[paper] [code]
Verbosity ≠ Veracity: Demystify Verbosity Compensation Behavior of Large Language Models
Yusen Zhang, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Rui Zhang
Preprint
[paper] [code]
Direct-Inverse Prompting: Analyzing LLMs' Discriminative Capacity in Self-Improving Generation
Jihyun Janice Ahn, Ryo Kamoi, Lu Cheng, Rui Zhang, Wenpeng Yin
Preprint
[paper]
Chain of Agents: Large Language Models Collaborating on Long-Context Tasks
Yusen Zhang, Ruoxi Sun, Yanfei Chen, Tomas Pfister, Rui Zhang, Sercan Ö. Arık
NeurIPS 2024
[paper]
When Can LLMs Actually Correct Their Own Mistakes? A Critical Survey of Self-Correction of LLMs
Ryo Kamoi, Yusen Zhang, Nan Zhang, Jiawei Han, Rui Zhang
TACL 2024
[paper]
Evaluating LLMs at Detecting Errors in LLM Responses
Ryo Kamoi, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Renze Lou, Jihyun Janice Ahn, Yilun Zhao, Xiaoxin Lu, Nan Zhang, Yusen Zhang, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Sujeeth Reddy Vummanthala, Salika Dave, Shaobo Qin, Arman Cohan, Wenpeng Yin, Rui Zhang
COLM 2024
[paper] [code]
Fair Abstractive Summarization of Diverse Perspectives
Yusen Zhang, Nan Zhang, Yixin Liu, Alexander Fabbri, Junru Liu, Ryo Kamoi, Xiaoxin Lu, Caiming Xiong, Jieyu Zhao, Dragomir Radev, Kathleen McKeown, Rui Zhang
NAACL 2024
[paper] [code]
Pruning as a Domain-specific LLM Extractor
Nan Zhang, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Wei Cheng, Runxue Bao, Rui Zhang, Prasenjit Mitra, Haifeng Chen
NAACL 2024 - Findings
[paper] [code]
MT-Ranker: Reference-free Machine Translation Evaluation by Inter-system Ranking
Ibraheem Muhammad Moosa, Rui Zhang, Wenpeng Yin
ICLR 2024
[paper] [code]
DocMath-Eval: Evaluating Math Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in Understanding Long and Specialized Documents
Yilun Zhao, Yitao Long, Hongjun Liu, Linyong Nan, Lyuhao Chen, Ryo Kamoi, Yixin Liu, Xiangru Tang, Rui Zhang, Arman Cohan
ACL 2024
[paper] [code]
FinanceMATH: Knowledge-Intensive Math Reasoning in Finance Domains
Yilun Zhao, Hongjun Liu, Yitao Long, Rui Zhang, Chen Zhao, Arman Cohan
ACL 2024
[paper] [code]
LLMs assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing
Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Peng Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Ranran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Jiayang Cheng, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Sanjay Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Wenpeng Yin
EMNLP 2024
[paper]
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic
Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alex Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabo, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander R. Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Victoria Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
EMNLP 2024
[paper] [code]
Enhancing LLM Capabilities Beyond Scaling Up
Wenpeng Yin, Muhao Chen, Rui Zhang, Ben Zhou, Fei Wang, Dan Roth
Tutorial at EMNLP 2024
[paper] [website]
Large Language Models for Mathematical Reasoning: Progresses and Challenges
Janice Ahn, Rishu Verma, Renze Lou, Di Liu, Rui Zhang, Wenpeng Yin
EACL 2024 Student Research Workshop
[paper]
Veiled Pathways: Investigating Covert and Side Channels within GPU Uncore
Yuanqing Miao, Yingtian Zhang, Dinghao Wu, Danfeng Zhang, Gang Tan, Rui Zhang, Mahmut Kandemir
MICRO 2024
[paper] [code]
2023
FaMeSumm: Investigating and Improving Faithfulness of Medical Summarization
Nan Zhang, Yusen Zhang, Wu Guo, Prasenjit Mitra, Rui Zhang
EMNLP 2023
[paper] [code]
Unified Low-Resource Sequence Labeling by Sample-Aware Dynamic Sparse Finetuning
Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Peng Shi, Wenpeng Yin, Rui Zhang
EMNLP 2023
[paper] [code]
Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models in Generating Code-Tracing Questions for Introductory Programming Courses
Aysa Xuemo Fan, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Luc Paquette, Rui Zhang
Findings of EMNLP 2023
[paper]
XSemPLR: Cross-Lingual Semantic Parsing in Multiple Natural Languages and Meaning Representations
Yusen Zhang, Jun Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Rui Zhang
ACL 2023
[paper] [code]
MACSum: Controllable Summarization with Mixed Attributes
Yusen Zhang, Yang Liu, Ziyi Yang, Yuwei Fang, Yulong Chen, Dragomir Radev, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng, Rui Zhang
TACL 2023
[paper] [code]
ConEntail: An Entailment-based Framework for Universal Zero and Few Shot Classification with Supervised Contrastive Pretraining
Ranran Haoran Zhang, Aysa Xuemo Fan, Rui Zhang
EACL 2023
[paper] [code]
Hermes: Unlocking Security Analysis of Cellular Network Protocols by Synthesizing Finite State Machines from Natural Language Specifications
Abdullah Al Ishtiaq, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Syed Md Mukit Rashid, Ali Ranjbar, Kai Tu, Tianwei Wu, Zhezheng Song, Weixuan Wang, Mujtahid Al-Islam Akon, Rui Zhang, Syed Rafiul Hussain
USENIX Security 2024
[paper] [code]
Selective Annotation Makes Language Models Better Few-Shot Learners
Hongjin Su, Jungo Kasai, Chen Henry Wu, Weijia Shi, Tianlu Wang, Jiayi Xin, Rui Zhang, Mari Ostendorf, Luke Zettlemoyer, Noah A. Smith, Tao Yu
ICLR 2023
[paper] [code]
2022
XRICL: Cross-lingual Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Cross-lingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing
Peng Shi, Rui Zhang, He Bai, Jimmy Lin
Findings of EMNLP 2022
[paper] [code]
ReasTAP: Injecting Table Reasoning Skills During Pre-training via Synthetic Reasoning Examples
Yilun Zhao, Linyong Nan, Zhenting Qi, Rui Zhang, Dragomir Radev
EMNLP 2022
[paper] [code]
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models
Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu
EMNLP 2022
[paper] [code]
SummN: A Multi-Stage Summarization Framework for Long Input Dialogues and Documents
Yusen Zhang, Ansong Ni, Ziming Mao, Chen Henry Wu, Chenguang Zhu, Budhaditya Deb, Ahmed H. Awadallah, Dragomir Radev, Rui Zhang
ACL 2022
[paper] [code]
CONTaiNER: Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition via Contrastive Learning
Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Arzoo Katiyar, Rebecca J. Passonneau, Rui Zhang
ACL 2022
[paper] [code]
MultiHiertt: Numerical Reasoning over Multi Hierarchical Tabular and Textual Data
Yilun Zhao, Yunxiang Li, Chenying Li, Rui Zhang
ACL 2022
[paper] [code]
DYLE: Dynamic Latent Extraction for Abstractive Long-Input Summarization
Ziming Mao, Chen Henry Wu, Ansong Ni, Yusen Zhang, Rui Zhang, Tao Yu, Budhaditya Deb, Chenguang Zhu, Ahmed H. Awadallah, Dragomir Radev
ACL 2022
[paper] [code]
Contrastive Data and Learning for Natural Language Processing
Rui Zhang, Yangfeng Ji, Yue Zhang, Rebecca J. Passonneau
Tutorial at NAACL 2022
[paper] [website]
MIA 2022 Shared Task: Evaluating Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for 16 Diverse Languages
Akari Asai, Shayne Longpre, Jungo Kasai, Chia-Hsuan Lee, Rui Zhang, Junjie Hu, Ikuya Yamada, Jonathan H Clark, Eunsol Choi
Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA) at NAACL 2022
[paper] [code]
Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models
BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model
with many authors in the BigScience Research Workshop
Preprint
[paper] [code]
FeTaQA: Free-form Table Question Answering
Linyong Nan, Chiachun Hsieh, Ziming Mao, Xi Victoria Lin, Neha Verma, Rui Zhang, Wojciech Kryściński, Nick Schoelkopf, Riley Kong, Xiangru Tang, Murori Mutuma, Ben Rosand, Isabel Trindade, Renusree Bandaru, Jacob Cunningham, Caiming Xiong, Dragomir Radev
TACL 2022
[paper] [code]
2021
Structured in Space, Randomized in Time: Leveraging Dropout in RNNs for Efficient Training
Anup Sarma, Sonali Singh, Huaipan Jiang, Rui Zhang, Mahmut T. Kandemir, Chita R. Das
NeurIPS 2021
[paper]
An Exploratory Study on Long Dialogue Summarization: What Works and What's Next
Yusen Zhang*, Ansong Ni*, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Chenguang Zhu, Budhaditya Deb, Asli Celikyilmaz, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Dragomir Radev
*: Equal Contribution
Findings of EMNLP 2021
[paper]
TURINGBENCH: A Benchmark Environment for Turing Test in the Age of Neural Text Generation
Adaku Uchendu, Zeyu Ma, Thai Le, Rui Zhang, Dongwon Lee
Findings of EMNLP 2021
[paper]
Cross-language Sentence Selection via Data Augmentation and Rationale Training
Yanda Chen, Chris Kedzie, Suraj Nair, Petra Galuscakova, Rui Zhang, Douglas Oard, Kathleen McKeown
ACL 2021
[paper] [code]
Logic-Consistency Text Generation from Semantic Parses
Chang Shu*, Yusen Zhang*, Xiangyu Dong, Peng Shi, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang
*: Equal Contribution
Findings of ACL 2021
[paper] [code]
DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation
Linyong Nan, Dragomir Radev, Rui Zhang, Amrit Rau, Abhinand Sivaprasad, Chiachun Hsieh, Xiangru Tang, Aadit Vyas, Neha Verma, Pranav Krishna, Yangxiaokang Liu, Nadia Irwanto, Jessica Pan, Faiaz Rahman, Ahmad Zaidi, Murori Mutuma, Yasin Tarabar, Ankit Gupta, Tao Yu, Yi Chern Tan, Xi Victoria Lin, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Nazneen Fatema Rajani
NAACL 2021
[paper] [code]
SCoRe: Pre-Training for Context Representation in Conversational Semantic Parsing
Tao Yu,Rui Zhang, Oleksandr Polozov, Christopher Meek, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
ICLR 2021
[paper]
2020 and before
ESPRIT: Explaining Solutions to Physical Reasoning Tasks
Nazneen Fatema Rajani*, Rui Zhang*, Yi Chern Tan, Stephan Zheng, Jeremy Weiss, Aadit Vyas, Abhijit Gupta, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
*: Equal Contribution
ACL 2020
[paper] [code]
MATERIALizing Cross-Language Information Retrieval: A Snapshot
Petra Galuscakova, Douglas Oard, Joe Barrow, Suraj Nair, Shing Han-Chin, Elena Zotkina, Ramy Eskander, Rui Zhang
LREC 2020 Workshop on CLSSTS
[paper]
Editing-Based SQL Query Generation for Cross-Domain Context-Dependent Questions
Rui Zhang, Tao Yu, He Yang Er, Sungrok Shim, Eric Xue, Xi Victoria Lin, Tianze Shi, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
EMNLP 2019
[paper] [code]
CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases
Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, He Yang Er, Suyi Li, Eric Xue, Bo Pang, Xi Victoria Lin, Yi Chern Tan, Tianze Shi, Zihan Li, Youxuan Jiang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Sungrok Shim, Tao Chen, Alexander Fabbri, Zifan Li, Luyao Chen, Yuwen Zhang, Shreya Dixit, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Walter Lasecki and Dragomir Radev
EMNLP 2019
[paper] [dataset and leaderboard]
Improving Low-Resource Cross-lingual Document Retrieval by Reranking with Deep Bilingual Representations
Rui Zhang, Caitlin Westerfield, Sungrok Shim, Garrett Bingham, Alexander Fabbri, Neha Verma, William Hu, Dragomir Radev
ACL 2019
[paper] [slides]
This Email Could Save Your Life: Introducing the Task of Email Subject Line Generation
SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context
Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Yi Chern Tan, Xi Victoria Lin, Suyi Li, Heyang Er, Irene Li, Bo Pang, Tao Chen, Emily Ji, Shreya Dixit, David Proctor, Sungrok Shim, Jonathan Kraft, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
ACL 2019
[paper] [dataset and leaderboard]
Surprise Languages: Rapid-Response Cross-Language IR
with Douglas W. Oard, Petra Galuscakova, Kathleen McKeown, Dragomir Radev and many authors
EVIA 2019
[paper]
ScisummNet: A Large Annotated Corpus and Content-Impact Models for Scientific Paper Summarization with Citation Networks
Michihiro Yasunaga, Jungo Kasai, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Irene Li, Dan Friedman, Dragomir Radev
AAAI 2019
[paper] [dataset]
Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task
Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Kai Yang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Dongxu Wang, Zifan Li, James Ma, Irene Li, Qingning Yao, Shanelle Roman, Zilin Zhang, Dragomir Radev
EMNLP 2018
[paper] [dataset and leaderboard]
SyntaxSQLNet: Syntax Tree Networks for Complex and Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Task
Tao Yu, Michihiro Yasunaga, Kai Yang, Rui Zhang, Dongxu Wang, Zifan Li, Dragomir Radev
EMNLP 2018
[paper] [code]
Neural Coreference Resolution with Deep Biaffine Attention by Joint Mention Detection and Mention Clustering
Rui Zhang, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Michihiro Yasunaga, Bing Xiang, Dragomir Radev
ACL 2018
[paper]
Improving Text-to-SQL Evaluation Methodology
Catherine Finegan-Dollak, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Li Zhang, Karthik Ramanathan, Sesh Sadasivam, Rui Zhang, Dragomir Radev
ACL 2018
[paper] [code]
TypeSQL: Knowledge-based Type-Aware Neural Text-to-SQL Generation
Tao Yu, Zifan Li, Zilin Zhang, Rui Zhang, Dragomir Radev
NAACL 2018
[paper] [code]
Addressee and Response Selection in Multi-Party Conversations with Speaker Interaction RNNs
Rui Zhang, Honglak Lee, Lazaros Polymenakos, Dragomir Radev
AAAI 2018
[paper] [code]
Graph-based Neural Multi-Document Summarization
Michihiro Yasunaga, Rui Zhang, Kshitijh Meelu, Ayush Pareek, Krishnan Srinivasan, Dragomir Radev
CoNLL 2017
[paper]
Effects of Creativity and Cluster Tightness on Short Text Clustering
Catherine Finegan-Dollak, Reed Coke, Rui Zhang, Xiangyi Ye, Dragomir Radev
ACL 2016
[paper]
Dependency Sensitive Convolutional Neural Networks for Modeling Sentences and Documents
Rui Zhang, Honglak Lee, Dragomir Radev
NAACL 2016
[paper]
