![]()
I am Cass Zhixue Zhao, lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Natural Language Processing at the Computer Science Department of the University of Sheffield. My long-term research goal is to enable trustworthy, responsible, and efficient NLP models. These days, I am interested in anything related to interpretability and large language models (LLMs). My recent research projects focus on model compression, model editing, and text-to-image models. Previously, I served as co-Principal Investigator on the ExU project, developing multilingual AI tools to support journalists and fact-checkers in identifying disinformation narratives. During my postdoc, I worked on explainable AI and responsible AI. I have also contributed to NIHR-funded NLP projects using NLP to support systematic reviews in public health. My doctoral work focuses on transfer learning and bias mitigation in hate speech detection.
According to CSRankings, I have been among the most productive AI researchers in the UK since 2024 (12 recorded publications accepted to top conferences, or 3.2 divided for co-authorship; for comparison, 18/3 for the top one). I always feel inspired and passionate about working with different researchers.
Test TestUnfortunately, I do not have more funding for PhD students or internships this year. However, 📩 if you’re considering self-funding or already have external funding, please feel free to contact me with your CV. Visiting students are also very welcome! Get in touch if you’d like to chat about the PhD, our research, or life in Sheffield (please indicate your funding plan in your email).
Test TestKDD2026 Can Fine-Tuning Erase Your Edits? On the Fragile Coexistence of Knowledge Editing and Adaptation
Yinjie Cheng, Paul Youssef, Christin Seifert, Jörg Schlötterer, Zhixue Zhao
@inproceedings{cheng2026finetuning,
title = {{Can Fine-Tuning Erase Your Edits? On the Fragile Coexistence of Knowledge Editing and Adaptation}},
author = {Cheng, Yinjie and Youssef, Paul and Seifert, Christin and Schl{\"o}tterer, J{\"o}rg and Zhao, Zhixue},
year = {2026},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining},
doi = {10.1145/3770855.3817879},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3770855.3817879}
}
EMNLP2026 From Value Conditioning to Behavioral Shift: Lightweight Value Alignment of LLMs Shangrui Nie, Florian Mai, David Kaczér, Charles Welch, Zhixue Zhao, Lucie Flek
@inproceedings{nie2026value,
title = {{From Value Conditioning to Behavioral Shift: Lightweight Value Alignment of LLMs}},
author = {Nie, Shangrui and Mai, Florian and Kacz{\'e}r, David and Welch, Charles and Zhao, Zhixue and Flek, Lucie},
year = {2026},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=LkZMtWhCxK}
}
EMNLP2026 Findings LLMs Decide Early and Explain Later: You Can Stop Them Early Ayan Datta, Zhixue Zhao, Mounika Marreddy, Bhuvanesh Verma, Radhika Mamidi, Alexander Mehler
@inproceedings{datta2026early,
title = {{LLMs Decide Early and Explain Later: You Can Stop Them Early}},
author = {Datta, Ayan and Zhao, Zhixue and Marreddy, Mounika and Verma, Bhuvanesh and Mamidi, Radhika and Mehler, Alexander},
year = {2026},
booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22266}
}
CVPR2026 SCIEval: Evaluating and Benchmarking the Faithfulness of Scientific Image Generation and Interpretation with Large Multimodal Models
Guanghui Ye, Huan Zhao, Zhixue Zhao, Tengfei Ma, Kehan Wang, Steffen Eger, Zhihua Jiang
@inproceedings{ye2026scieval,
title = {{SCIEval: Evaluating and Benchmarking the Faithfulness of Scientific Image Generation and Interpretation with Large Multimodal Models}},
author = {Ye, Guanghui and Zhao, Huan and Zhao, Zhixue and Ma, Tengfei and Wang, Kehan and Eger, Steffen and Jiang, Zhihua},
year = {2026},
booktitle = {Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026},
url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=S35l5fi0ZY}
}
ICLR2026 Tracing and Reversing Edits in LLMs: A Study on Rank-One Model Edits
Paul Youssef, Zhixue Zhao, Christin Seifert, Jörg Schlötterer
@inproceedings{youssef2026tracing,
title = {{Tracing and Reversing Edits in LLMs}},
author = {Youssef, Paul and Zhao, Zhixue and Seifert, Christin and Schl{\"o}tterer, J{\"o}rg},
year = {2026},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
url = {https://proceedings.iclr.cc/paper_files/paper/2026/hash/28bfea825dc61f7adc9f1e2eaf5bdd2b-Abstract-Conference.html}
}
ICLR2026 PerSpectra: A Scalable and Configurable Pluralist Benchmark of Perspectives from Arguments
Shangrui Nie, Kian Omoomi, Lucie Flek, Zhixue Zhao, Charles Welch
@inproceedings{nie2026perspectra,
title = {{PerSpectra: A Scalable and Configurable Pluralist Benchmark of Perspectives from Arguments}},
author = {Nie, Shangrui and Omoomi, Kian and Flek, Lucie and Zhao, Zhixue and Welch, Charles},
year = {2026},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
url = {https://proceedings.iclr.cc/paper_files/paper/2026/hash/7be86db6ef1209cf97a418758101fa7c-Abstract-Conference.html}
}
AAAI26 Oral Mitigating Content Effects on Reasoning in Language Models through Fine-Grained Activation Steering
Marco Valentino, Geonhee Kim, Dhairya Dalal, Zhixue Zhao, Andre Freitas
@inproceedings{valentino2026mitigating,
title = {{Mitigating Content Effects on Reasoning in Language Models through Fine-Grained Activation Steering}},
author = {Valentino, Marco and Kim, Geonhee and Dalal, Dhairya and Zhao, Zhixue and Freitas, Andr{\'e}},
year = {2026},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
volume = {40},
number = {39},
pages = {33314--33322},
doi = {10.1609/aaai.v40i39.40617},
url = {https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/40617}
}
AAAI2026 Poster Making Visual Dialogue More Engaging: A New Task, Method, and Metric
Guanghui Ye, Huan Zhao, Yingxue Gao, Zhixue Zhao, Kehan Wang, Xupeng Zha, Zhihua Jiang
@inproceedings{ye2026making,
title = {{Making Visual Dialogue More Engaging: A New Task, Method, and Metric}},
author = {Ye, Guanghui and Zhao, Huan and Gao, Yingxue and Zhao, Zhixue and Wang, Kehan and Zha, Xupeng and Jiang, Zhihua},
year = {2026},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
volume = {40},
number = {19},
pages = {16145--16153},
doi = {10.1609/aaai.v40i19.38650},
url = {https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/38650}
}
TACL2026 Investigating Language-Specific Calibration for Pruning Multilingual Large Language Models
Simon Kurz, Jian-Jia Chen, Lucie Flek, Zhixue Zhao
@article{kurz-etal-2026-limitations,
title = "On the Limitations of Language-targeted Pruning: Investigating the Calibration Language Impact in Multilingual {LLM} Pruning",
author = "Kurz, Simon and
Chen, Jian-Jia and
Flek, Lucie and
Zhao, Zhixue",
journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
volume = "14",
year = "2026",
address = "Cambridge, MA",
publisher = "MIT Press",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.9/",
doi = "10.1162/tacl.a.599",
pages = "167--192"
}
ICWSM26 SCRum-9: Multilingual Stance Classification over Rumours on Social Media
Yue Li, Jake Vasilakes, Zhixue Zhao, Carolina Scarton
@inproceedings{li2026scrum9,
title = {{SCRum-9: Multilingual Stance Classification over Rumours on Social Media}},
author = {Li, Yue and Vasilakes, Jake and Zhao, Zhixue and Scarton, Carolina},
year = {2026},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media},
volume = {20},
number = {1},
pages = {1471--1487},
doi = {10.1609/icwsm.v20i1.42707},
url = {https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/42707}
}
EACL2026 Main KidsArtBench: Multi-Dimensional Children’s Art Evaluation with Attribute-Aware MLLMs
Mingrui Ye, Chanjin Zheng, Zengyi Yu, Chenyu Xiang, Zhixue Zhao, Zheng Yuan, Helen Yannakoudakis
@inproceedings{ye-etal-2026-kidsartbench,
title = "{K}ids{A}rt{B}ench: Multi-Dimensional Children{'}s Art Evaluation with Attribute-Aware {MLLM}s",
author = "Ye, Mingrui and
Zheng, Chanjin and
Yu, Zengyi and
Xiang, Chenyu and
Zhao, Zhixue and
Yuan, Zheng and
Yannakoudakis, Helen",
editor = "Demberg, Vera and
Inui, Kentaro and
Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = mar,
year = "2026",
address = "Rabat, Morocco",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-long.267/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.eacl-long.267",
pages = "5702--5722",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-380-7"
}
EACL2026 Findings Seeing All Sides: Multi-Perspective In-Context Learning for Subjective NLP
Benedetta Muscato, Yue Li, Gizem Gezici, Zhixue Zhao, Fosca Giannotti
@inproceedings{muscato-etal-2026-seeing,
title = "Seeing All Sides: Multi-Perspective In-Context Learning for Subjective {NLP}",
author = "Muscato, Benedetta and
Li, Yue and
Gezici, Gizem and
Zhao, Zhixue and
Giannotti, Fosca",
editor = "Demberg, Vera and
Inui, Kentaro and
Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EACL} 2026",
month = mar,
year = "2026",
address = "Rabat, Morocco",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-eacl.137/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.137",
pages = "2622--2638",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-386-9"
}
ICML2025 Rulebreakers Challenge: Revealing a Blind Spot in Large Language Models’ Reasoning with Formal Logic.
Jason Chan, Robert Gaizauskas, Zhixue Zhao
@inproceedings{pmlr-v267-chan25a,
title = {{RULEBREAKERS: Challenging LLMs at the Crossroads between Formal Logic and Human-like Reasoning}},
author = {Chan, Jason and Gaizauskas, Robert J. and Zhao, Zhixue},
year = {2025},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning},
volume = {267},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher = {PMLR},
pages = {7276--7305},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/chan25a.html}
}
ICML2025 Position: Editing Large Language Models Poses Serious Safety Risks.
Paul Youssef, Zhixue Zhao, Daniel Braun, Jörg Schlötterer, Christin Seifert
@inproceedings{pmlr-v267-youssef25a,
title = {{Position: Editing Large Language Models Poses Serious Safety Risks}},
author = {Youssef, Paul and Zhao, Zhixue and Braun, Daniel and Schl{\"o}tterer, J{\"o}rg and Seifert, Christin},
year = {2025},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning},
volume = {267},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
publisher = {PMLR},
pages = {82426--82440},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v267/youssef25a.html}
}
ICLR2025 ScImage: How good are multimodal large language models at scientific text-to-image generation?
Leixin Zhang, Yinjie Cheng, Weihe Zhai, Steffen Eger, Jonas Belouadi, Fahimeh Moafian, Zhixue Zhao
@inproceedings{zhang2025scimage,
title = {{ScImage: How good are multimodal large language models at scientific text-to-image generation?}},
author = {Zhang, Leixin and Eger, Steffen and Cheng, Yinjie and Zhai, Weihe and Belouadi, Jonas and Moafian, Fahimeh and Zhao, Zhixue},
year = {2025},
booktitle = {The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
url = {https://proceedings.iclr.cc/paper_files/paper/2025/hash/146b5b0feb14fe8e630669ad1faba25e-Abstract-Conference.html}
}
EMNLP2025 Main Minimal, Local, and Robust: Embedding-Only Edits for Implicit Bias in T2I Models
Feng He, Chao Zhang, Zhixue Zhao
@inproceedings{he-etal-2025-minimal,
title = "Minimal, Local, and Robust: Embedding-Only Edits for Implicit Bias in {T}2{I} Models",
author = "He, Feng and
Zhang, Chao and
Zhao, Zhixue",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.777/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.777",
pages = "15374--15392",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6"
}
EMNLP2025 Main Oral Top15% Label Set Optimization via Activation Distribution Kurtosis for Zero-Shot Classification with Generative Models
Yue Li, Zhixue Zhao, Carolina Scarton
@inproceedings{li-etal-2025-label,
title = "Label Set Optimization via Activation Distribution Kurtosis for Zero-Shot Classification with Generative Models",
author = "Li, Yue and
Zhao, Zhixue and
Scarton, Carolina",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1617/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1617",
pages = "31724--31741",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6"
}
EMNLP2025 Main It’s All About In-Context Learning! Teaching Extremely Low-Resource Languages to LLMs
Yue Li, Zhixue Zhao, Carolina Scarton
@inproceedings{li-etal-2025-context-learning,
title = "It{'}s All About In-Context Learning! Teaching Extremely Low-Resource Languages to {LLM}s",
author = "Li, Yue and
Zhao, Zhixue and
Scarton, Carolina",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1502/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1502",
pages = "29544--29559",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6"
}
EMNLP2025 Findings Revisiting Pruning vs Quantization for Small Language Models
Zihan Zhou, Simon Kurz, Zhixue Zhao
@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2025-revisiting,
title = "Revisiting Pruning vs Quantization for Small Language Models",
author = "Zhou, Zihan and
Kurz, Simon and
Zhao, Zhixue",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.645/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.645",
pages = "12055--12070",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7"
}
EMNLP2025 Main Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful Post-hoc Rationalisation?
Samuel Lewis-Lim, Xingwei Tan, Zhixue Zhao, Nikolaos Aletras
@inproceedings{lewis-lim-etal-2025-analysing,
title = "Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful Post-hoc Rationalisation?",
author = "Lewis-Lim, Samuel and
Tan, Xingwei and
Zhao, Zhixue and
Aletras, Nikolaos",
editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Rose, Carolyn and
Peng, Violet",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2025",
address = "Suzhou, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1516/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1516",
pages = "29838--29853",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6"
}
ACL2025 Main. Knowledge Image Matters: Improving Knowledge-Based Visual Reasoning with Multi-Image Large Language Models
Guanghui Ye, Huan Zhao, Zhixue Zhao, Xupeng Zha, Yang Liu, Zhihua Jiang
@inproceedings{ye-etal-2025-knowledge,
title = "Knowledge Image Matters: Improving Knowledge-Based Visual Reasoning with Multi-Image Large Language Models",
author = "Ye, Guanghui and
Zhao, Huan and
Zhao, Zhixue and
Zha, Xupeng and
Liu, Yang and
Jiang, Zhihua",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.1063/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1063",
pages = "21883--21896",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}
ACL2025 Findings Explainable Hallucination through Natural Language Inference Mapping
Wei-Fan Chen, Zhixue Zhao, Akbar Karimi, Lucie Flek
@inproceedings{chen-etal-2025-explainable,
title = "Explainable Hallucination through Natural Language Inference Mapping",
author = "Chen, Wei-Fan and
Zhao, Zhixue and
Karimi, Akbar and
Flek, Lucie",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.96/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.96",
pages = "1888--1896",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5"
}
Knowledge-Based Systems 2025 AI-generated content in cross-domain applications: Research trends, challenges and propositions
Jianxin Li, Liang Qu, Taotao Cai, Zhixue Zhao, Nur Al Hasan Haldar, Aneesh Krishna, Xiangjie Kong, Flavio Romero Macau, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Aniket Deroy, Binshan Lin, Karen Blackmore, Nasimul Noman, Jingxian Cheng, Ningning Cui, Jianliang Xu
@article{li2025aigc,
title = {{AI-generated content in cross-domain applications: Research trends, challenges and propositions}},
author = {Li, Jianxin and Qu, Liang and Cai, Taotao and Zhao, Zhixue and Haldar, Nur Al Hasan and Krishna, Aneesh and Kong, Xiangjie and Romero Macau, Flavio and Chakraborty, Tanmoy and Deroy, Aniket and Lin, Binshan and Blackmore, Karen and Noman, Nasimul and Cheng, Jingxian and Cui, Ningning and Xu, Jianliang},
year = {2025},
journal = {Knowledge-Based Systems},
volume = {330},
pages = {114634},
doi = {10.1016/j.knosys.2025.114634},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950705125016739}
}
IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems CCDE: A Compact and Competitive Dialogue Evaluation Framework via Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models
Guanghui Ye; Huan Zhao; Bo Li; Haijiao Chen; Zhixue Zhao; Zhihua Jiang
@article{ye2025ccde,
title = {{CCDE: A Compact and Competitive Dialogue Evaluation Framework via Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models}},
author = {Ye, Guanghui and Zhao, Huan and Li, Bo and Chen, Haijiao and Zhao, Zhixue and Jiang, Zhihua and Li, Keqin},
year = {2025},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems},
doi = {10.1109/TCSS.2025.3580272},
url = {https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/231513/}
}
NAACL2025 Main How to Make LLMs Forget: On Reversing In-Context Knowledge Edits
Paul Youssef, Zhixue Zhao, Jörg Schlötterer, Christin Seifert.
@inproceedings{youssef-etal-2025-make,
title = "How to Make {LLM}s Forget: On Reversing In-Context Knowledge Edits",
author = {Youssef, Paul and
Zhao, Zhixue and
Schl{\"o}tterer, J{\"o}rg and
Seifert, Christin},
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.630/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.630",
pages = "12656--12669",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6"
}
NAACL2025 Main Oral Has this Fact been Edited? Detecting Knowledge Edits in Language Models?
Paul Youssef, Zhixue Zhao, Jörg Schlötterer, Christin Seifert.
@inproceedings{youssef-etal-2025-fact,
title = "Has this Fact been Edited? Detecting Knowledge Edits in Language Models",
author = {Youssef, Paul and
Zhao, Zhixue and
Seifert, Christin and
Schl{\"o}tterer, J{\"o}rg},
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.492/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.492",
pages = "9768--9784",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6"
}
(More papers in publications.) Download all BibTeX entries
Test