Chunlei Meng
Author directory2026
How Order-Sensitive Are LLMs? OrderProbe for Deterministic Structural Reconstruction
Zhaolu Kang | Yingjie He | Kehan Jiang | Leqi Zheng | Jiachen Qian | Qianyuan Zhang | Chunlei Meng | Yujie Feng | Yuan Wang | Stephen Dou | Aming Wu | Pengxiang Zhao | Jiaxin Liu | Guansu Wang | Zeyu Zhang | Zeyu Wang | Lei Wang | Qishi Zhan | Xiaomin He | Meisheng Zhang | Jianyuan Ni | Richeng Xuan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zhaolu Kang | Yingjie He | Kehan Jiang | Leqi Zheng | Jiachen Qian | Qianyuan Zhang | Chunlei Meng | Yujie Feng | Yuan Wang | Stephen Dou | Aming Wu | Pengxiang Zhao | Jiaxin Liu | Guansu Wang | Zeyu Zhang | Zeyu Wang | Lei Wang | Qishi Zhan | Xiaomin He | Meisheng Zhang | Jianyuan Ni | Richeng Xuan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models (LLMs) excel at semantic understanding, yet their ability to reconstruct internal structure from scrambled inputs remains underexplored. Sentence-level restoration is difficult to evaluate automatically because scrambled sentences often admit multiple valid reorderings. We introduce OrderProbe, a deterministic benchmark for structural reconstruction using fixed four-character expressions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which have a unique canonical order and thus support exact-match scoring. We further propose a diagnostic framework that evaluates models beyond recovery accuracy, including Semantic Accuracy, Logical Validity, Structural Consistency, Robustness, and Information Density. Experiments on twelve widely used LLMs show that structural reconstruction remains difficult even for frontier systems: zero-shot recovery frequently falls below 35%. We also observe a consistent gap between meaning-oriented generation and exact structural reconstruction, suggesting that structural robustness is not an automatic byproduct of semantic competence.
Adaptive Hierarchical Representation Alliance for Multimodal Learning
Chunlei Meng | Pengbin Feng | Jacqueline J. Pang | Chih-Ting Liao | Rong Fu | Zhaolu Kang | Zhongxue Gan | Chun Ouyang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Chunlei Meng | Pengbin Feng | Jacqueline J. Pang | Chih-Ting Liao | Rong Fu | Zhaolu Kang | Zhongxue Gan | Chun Ouyang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Multimodal models often align language, vision, and audio in a single final-layer latent space, implicitly assuming that task-relevant evidence emerges at the same semantic depth across modalities. Using layer-wise CKA analysis, we observe that this assumption leads to semantic granularity mismatch: textual cues usually require deeper contextual abstraction, whereas visual and acoustic cues often provide discriminative perceptual evidence in shallow or middle layers. This mismatch can flatten fine-grained modality-private cues and reduce reliability under noisy, imbalanced, or missing inputs. To address this, we proposed Adaptive Hierarchical Representation Alliance (AHRA), a hierarchical shared–private expert framework. AHRA factorizes each modality into shared and private streams across semantic levels, regularizes them with shared alignment and private decorrelation, routes shared information through a cross-modal expert, and enhances task-relevant private tokens with modality-specific experts guided by a sparsity-controlled soft-gating mechanism (foreground exam). A hierarchical co-fusion module then performs intra-level expert coordination and inter-level semantic selection. Experiments on six benchmarks across image-text classification, multimodal intent recognition, and trimodal sentiment analysis show that AHRA consistently improves over strong baselines and remains robust under noisy and missing-modality settings.