Zhen Xiong's Homepage
Zhen Xiong

Zhen Xiong

Computer Science Graduate Student @ USC | NLP Researcher

I am a second-year graduate student at the University of Southern California. I am currently doing research on Large Language Model (LLM) and its interpretability, controllability and applications. I plan to apply for Fall 2026 PhD programs.

Multimodal Large Language ModelsNatural Language ProcessingComputer Vision

Publications

Mapping the Minds of LLMs: A Graph-Based Analysis of Reasoning LLM
Mapping the Minds of LLMs: A Graph-Based Analysis of Reasoning LLM

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2025.

Zhen Xiong, Yujun Cai, Zhecheng Li, Yiwei Wang

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Enhancing Image Generation Fidelity via Progressive Prompts
Enhancing Image Generation Fidelity via Progressive Prompts

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2025.

Zhen Xiong, Yuqi Li, Chuanguang Yang, Tiao Tan, Zhihong Zhu, Siyuan Li, Yue Ma

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TAGExplainer: Narrating Graph Explanations for Text-Attributed Graph Learning Models
TAGExplainer: Narrating Graph Explanations for Text-Attributed Graph Learning Models

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025.

Bo Pan*, Zhen Xiong*, Guanchen Wu*, Zheng Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Liang Zhao (*equal contribution)

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Texture or Semantics? Vision-Language Models Get Lost in Font Recognition
Texture or Semantics? Vision-Language Models Get Lost in Font Recognition

Conference of Language Modeling (COLM) 2025.

Zhecheng Li, Guoxian Song, Yujun Cai, Zhen Xiong, Junsong Yuan, Yiwei Wang

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Vulnerability of LLMs to Vertically Aligned Text Manipulations

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025.

Zhecheng Li, Yiwei Wang, Bryan Hooi, Yujun Cai, Zhen Xiong, Nanyun Peng, Kai-wei Chang

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Preprints

Thinking with Sound: Audio Chain-of-Thought Enables Multimodal Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models
Thinking with Sound: Audio Chain-of-Thought Enables Multimodal Reasoning in Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv preprint arXiv: 2509.21749.

Zhen Xiong, Yujun Cai, Zhecheng Li, JunSong Yuan, Yiwei Wang

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Unveiling the Potential of Diffusion Large Language Model in Controllable Generation
Unveiling the Potential of Diffusion Large Language Model in Controllable Generation

arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.04504.

Zhen Xiong, Yujun Cai, Zhecheng Li, Yiwei Wang

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Advancing Img2LaTeX Conversion via Visual Reasoning with Attention-Guided Refinement

arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.20890.

Zhecheng Li, Guoxian Song, Yiwei Wang, Zhen Xiong, Junsong Yuan, Yujun Cai

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Generalist Scanner Meets Specialist Locator: A Synergistic Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Robust GUI Grounding

arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.24133.

Zhecheng Li, Guoxian Song, Yiwei Wang, Zhen Xiong, Junsong Yuan, Yujun Cai

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Enhancing LLM Character-Level Manipulation via Divide and Conquer

arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.08180.

Zhen Xiong, Yujun Cai, Bryan Hooi, Nanyun Peng, Zhecheng Li, Yiwei Wang

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Education

University of Southern California

Master of Science in Computer ScienceJan. 2025 – Present

GPA: 3.92 / 4.00

University of California, Irvine

Joint Undergraduate Education ProgramSept. 2023 – Jun. 2024

GPA: 4.00 / 4.00

Beijing University of Chemical Technology

Bachelor of Engineering in Computer ScienceSept. 2020 – Jul. 2023

GPA: 93.86 / 100 (Ranked #1 / 161)

Awards & Honors

  • National Scholarship2021
  • Renming Scholarship (Top University Scholarship)2021, 2022, 2023
  • 1st Prize, Mathematics Competition of Chinese College Students2022
  • 1st Prize, University Competitive Programming Contest2022
  • 2nd Prize, Beijing College Student Mathematical Modeling Competition2022
  • University Outstanding Academic Achievement Award2021, 2022, 2023