Publications

(* Equal contribution, † Corresponding author)  |  Full list on Google Scholar

AI for Education

EMNLP 2025
R. Zhao, A. Borov, J. Li, C. Aloisi, Y. He
  • LLM-based personalised, curriculum-aligned feedback system for science education
  • Tracks student performance and knowledge across different topics
  • Safety gate + educator control to ensure safe and reliable feedback
EMNLP 2025
J. Li, A. Bobrov, R. Zhao, C. Aloisi, Y. He
  • Interactive platform leveraging multiple LLMs for explainable student answer scoring
  • Visualization of key answer sections with generated explanations
  • Annotation and evaluation features for educators to assess explanation quality

AI for Health

BMJ Open 2026
R. Plackett, A. Moro, R. Zhao, A. Ettefaghian, D. Lafitte, C. Reed, A. Hertelendy, T. Y. Wong, A. M. Sitapati, C. Longhurst, J. Car
  • Scoping review protocol examining impacts of patient portals on clinical care measures
  • Systematic evaluation of Epic MyChart and Healthy Planet on health outcomes
Findings of ACL 2023
L. Zhu, R. Zhao, G. Pergola, Y. He
  • Disentangling attention mechanism to separate stance from aspect in opinion mining
  • Cluster-based approach that handles unseen aspect categories without predefined classes
  • Applied to vaccination opinion analysis on social media
EACL 2023
R. Zhao, M. Arana-Catania, L. Zhu, E. Kochkina, L. Gui, A. Zubiaga, R. Procter, M. Liakata, Y. He
  • Web-based misinformation detection system with fact-checking and rumour detection modules
  • NLI-based fact verification with automated veracity assessment and ranked evidence
  • Bi-directional GCN for early-stage rumour detection from tweet networks

Interactive Narrative & Games

ACL 2026
R. Zhao*, Q. Zhu*, H. Xu, B. Liang, L. Gui, Y. He
  • Human-in-the-loop framework combining LLM extraction with symbolic reasoning for relationship understanding
  • Seven types of logical constraints for editable character relationship graphs
  • Released dataset of 160 interpersonal relationships with logical structures
EMNLP 2025
R. Zhao*, C. Cao*, Q. Zhu, X. Lv, S. Shao, L. Gui, R. Xu, Y. He
  • Training-free framework improving instruction following by editing instruction-relevant neurons
  • FreeInstruct benchmark with 1,212 examples for evaluating performance in narrative-rich settings
  • Strong instruction adherence under various instruction attacks while maintaining generation quality
Findings of ACL 2024
R. Zhao*, Q. Zhu*, H. Xu, J. Li, Y. Zhou, Y. He, L. Gui
  • Benchmark for complex character relationship understanding in story scenarios
  • Multi-dimensional relationship annotations capturing differences across character perspectives
  • Reveals LLMs tend to follow high-frequency expressions rather than reasoning through contradictory information
AAAI 2024
R. Zhao*, W. Zhang*, J. Li*, L. Zhu, Y. Li, Y. He, L. Gui
  • Automated system enabling users to roleplay as fictional characters in narrative worlds
  • LLM-generated responses guided by personality traits extracted from narratives
  • Auto-generated visuals including settings, character portraits, and dialogue
Findings of EMNLP 2023
L. Zhu*, R. Zhao*, L. Gui, Y. He
  • Comprehensive survey of narrative understanding tasks, datasets, and evaluation approaches
  • Reconceptualises narrative understanding as retrieving the author's imaginative cues
  • Investigates how modularised LLMs can address novel narrative tasks
Preprint
Q. Zhu*, R. Zhao*, J. Du, L. Gui, Y. He
  • WellPlay benchmark with 1,482 inferential questions across 12 murder mystery games
  • Sensor-based state representation and information-driven strategy for multi-agent reasoning
  • Outperforms existing methods in reasoning accuracy and human-agent interaction

LLM Reasoning

ICML 2026
Z. Wu, G. Gong, Q. Zhu, Y. Chen, R. Zhao
  • Reveals fundamental vulnerability: averaging distributions across 3-5 models removes watermarks
  • WASH method handles vocabulary misalignment across heterogeneous models
  • Detection TPR drops below 50% while improving generation quality by 27.5%
ICML 2025 Spotlight
Q. Zhu*, R. Zhao*, H. Yan, Y. He, Y. Chen, L. Gui
  • Soft Reasoning framework using embedding perturbation for controlled output exploration
  • Bayesian optimisation to refine embeddings via verifier-guided objective
  • Model-agnostic approach with improved reasoning accuracy and text coherence
ACL 2024
H. Xu, R. Zhao, L. Zhu, J. Du, Y. He
  • Benchmark for Theory-of-Mind reasoning with longer narratives and characters with defined personalities
  • Covers both physical and psychological mental state reasoning
  • Reveals LLMs struggle significantly with tracking psychological mental states
J. Li*, R. Zhao*, Y. Yang, Y. He, L. Gui
NeurIPS 2023 Workshop
Q. Zhu, Y. Yao, R. Zhao†, Y. Xiang, A. Saseendran, C. Jin, P. A. Teare, B. Liang, Y. He, L. Gui
Preprint

Opinion Mining

R. Zhao, L. Gui, Y. He
SIGIR 2023
Adversarial Learning of Poisson Factorisation Model for Gauging Brand Sentiment in User Reviews
R. Zhao, L. Gui, G. Pergola, Y. He
EACL 2021