Hello! I’m Yao Zhang (张瑶). I am currently a lecturer at the School of Statistics and Data Science, Nankai University.

Before that, I received my Ph.D. (2022) and B.S. (2017) from Nankai University, advised by Prof. Zhenglu Yang. From 2021 to 2022, I was a visiting student at the NExT Research Centre at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where I was mentored by Prof. Wenqiang Lei and Prof. Chua Tat-Seng.

Research Interests

My research focuses on trustworthy knowledge reasoning that integrates LLMs with KGs, aiming to enhance the reasoning capability, reliability, and safety of models in complex knowledge-intensive scenarios. Specifically, my work covers the following directions:

Knowledge-Enhanced Reasoning

I study methods for integrating LLMs with KGs, leveraging structured knowledge to support complex multi-hop reasoning and improve the accuracy and interpretability of the reasoning process.

Reasoning Reliability

I investigate reasoning stability under conditions of dynamic knowledge updates, insufficient evidence, and knowledge conflicts. My work explores knowledge editing, conflict resolution, and proactive abstention mechanisms to reduce hallucinations and erroneous reasoning.

Reasoning Safety

I study safety risks in knowledge reasoning scenarios, including jailbreak attacks, knowledge-path manipulation, and reasoning-chain interference, and develop corresponding evaluation and defense mechanisms.

Real-World Applications

In addition, our team has a long-standing interest in the deployment of AI technologies in real-world applications, particularly in industrial intelligence and healthcare. We explore how trustworthy knowledge reasoning can support practical needs such as complex decision support, risk identification, and human-AI collaboration.

🔥 News

• 2025.04:  🎉🎉🎉 Three papers are accepted by ACL 2025.

📝 Publications

Generating Questions, Answers, and Distractors for Videos: Exploring Semantic Uncertainty of Object Motions

Wenjian Ding, Yao Zhang#, Jun Wang, Adam Jatowt, Zhenglu Yang#
(ACL 2025)

Listening to Patients: A Framework of Detecting and Mitigating Patient Misreport for Medical Dialogue Generation

Lang Qin, Yao Zhang#, Hongru Liang, Adam Jatowt, Zhenglu Yang
(ACL 2025)

SCOP: Evaluating the Comprehension Process of Large Language Models from a Cognitive View

Yongjie Xiao, Hongru Liang, Peixin Qin, Yao Zhang, Wenqiang Lei
(ACL 2025)

Enhancing Cross-Lingual Dialogue Summarization through Interpretable Chain-of-Thought

Zhongtian Bao, Yao Zhang, Jun Wang, Adam Jatowt, and Zhenglu Yang
(DASFAA 2025)

Can we learn question, answer, and distractors all from an image? a new task for multiple-choice visual question answering

Wenjian Ding, Yao Zhang, Jun Wang, Adam Jatowt, and Zhenglu Yang#
(COLING 2024)

Exploring Union and Intersection of Visual Regions for Generating Questions, Answers, and Distractors

Wenjian Ding, Yao Zhang, Jun Wang, Adam Jatowt, and Zhenglu Yang#
(EMNLP 2024)

Well begun is half done: Generator-agnostic knowledge pre-selection for knowledge-grounded dialogue

Lang Qin∗, Yao Zhang#, Hongru Liang, Jun Wang, and Zhenglu Yang#
(EMNLP 2023)

Interacting with Non-Cooperative User: A New Paradigm for Proactive Dialogue Policy

Wenqiang Lei*, Yao Zhang*, Feifan Song, Hongru Liang, Jiaxin Mao, Jiancheng Lv, Zhenglu Yang, Tat-Seng Chua
(SIGIR 2022)

Fact-Tree Reasoning for N-ary Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

Yao Zhang, Peiyao Li, Hongru Liang, Adam Jatowt, Zhenglu Yang
(ACL 2022)

Modeling Temporal-Modal Entity Graph for Procedural Multimodal Machine Comprehension

Huibin Zhang, Zhengkun Zhang, Yao Zhang, Jun Wang, Yufan Li, Ning Jiang, Xin Wei, Zhenglu Yang
(ACL 2022)

GMH: A General Multi-hop Reasoning Model for KG Completion

Yao Zhang, Hongru Liang, Adam Jatowt, Wenqiang Lei, Xin Wei, Ning Jiang, Zhenglu Yang
(EMNLP 2021)

TRFR: A ternary relation link prediction framework on Knowledge graphs

Yao Zhang, Hengpeng Xu, Xu Zhang, Xingxing Wu, Zhenglu Yang
(Ad Hoc Networks 2021)

Generalized Relation Learning with Semantic Correlation Awareness for Link Prediction

Yao Zhang, Xu Zhang, Jun Wang, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei, Zhe Sun, Adam Jatowt, Zhenglu Yang
(AAAI 2021)

Spatiotemporal-aware region recommendation with deep metric learning

Hengpeng Xu, Yao Zhang, Jinmao Wei, Zhenglu Yang, Jun Wang
(DASFAA 2019)