Publications

* = co-first author.

2026

🎛️

PCA-guided Activation Scaling for Monotonic Bidirectional Control over LLM Sycophancy

Zheng Chen, Zhaoxin Feng, Yip Tin Po, Jianfei Ma, Emmanuele Chersoni, Bo Li

COLM 2026

paper code
🙊

Good Arguments Against the People Pleasers: How Reasoning Mitigates (Yet Masks) LLM Sycophancy

Zhaoxin Feng, Zheng Chen, Jianfei Ma, T. P. Yip, Emmanuele Chersoni, Bo Li

ACL 2026

paper code
📐

Every Time I Hire a Linguist, Inference Costs Go Down: On Linguistic Rules as Effective Prompt Compressors

Jianfei Ma, Zhaoxin Feng, Emmanuele Chersoni, Si Chen

EMNLP 2026

paper
🎯

Know It, Act on It: Investigating Memory Utilization in LLM Personalization

Zhaoxin Feng, Jianfei Ma, Emmanuele Chersoni

Preprint

paper

2025

🔊

PhonoThink: Improving Large Language Models' Reasoning on Chinese Phonological Ambiguities

Jianfei Ma*, Zhaoxin Feng*, Emmanuele Chersoni, Huacheng Song, Ziqi Zhang

EMNLP 2025 Oral Co-first

paper code
👁️

Learning to Look at the Other Side: A Semantic Probing Study of Word Embeddings in LLMs with Enabled Bidirectional Attention

Zhaoxin Feng, Jianfei Ma, Emmanuele Chersoni, Xiaojing Zhao, Xiaoyi Bao

ACL 2025 Oral

paper code
🧠

Which Model Mimics Human Mental Lexicon Better? A Comparative Study of Word Embedding and Generative Models

Huacheng Song, Zhaoxin Feng, Emmanuele Chersoni, Chu-Ren Huang

IWCS 2025 Oral

paper code
🏷️

From BERT to LLMs: Comparing and Understanding Chinese Classifier Prediction in Language Models

Ziqi Zhang, Jianfei Ma, Emmanuele Chersoni, Jieshun You, Zhaoxin Feng

BlackboxNLP 2025

paper
🔁

Reasoning or Memorization? Investigating LLMs' Capability in Restoring Chinese Internet Homophones

Jianfei Ma*, Zhaoxin Feng*, Huacheng Song, Emmanuele Chersoni, Zheng Chen

KnowFM @ ACL 2025 Co-first

paper code
🪞

Can LLMs Recognize Their Own Analogical Hallucinations? Evaluating Uncertainty Estimation for Analogical Reasoning

Zheng Chen, Zhaoxin Feng, Jianfei Ma, Jiexi Xu, Bo Li

KnowFM @ ACL 2025

paper

2022

🧮

The Effects of AR Learning Environment to Preschool Children's Numerical Cognition

Zhaoxin Feng, Chenxi Gong, Xinyue Jiao, Zifeng Liu, Su Cai

ICALT 2022

paper code