Haobo Zhang

Author directory

2026

Memory-backed agents need provenance that can survive leaked or migrated snapshots, where logs, visible outputs, and trusted metadata may be absent. We propose MEMMARK, a state-evolution attribution watermark that embeds an owner-controlled signal into latent memory-write decisions. At each internal LLM call, MEMMARK samples among admissible candidates using keyed, distribution-preserving selection, and records cryptographic commitments with signed session anchors and reveal evidence. This makes attribution depend on reproducible backend behavior rather than mutable provenance fields. Across A-Mem and Graphiti on LOCOMO, with three LLM backbones, MEMMARK preserves memory utility: Overall F1 retains 99.6 percent of the unwatermarked baseline, while BLEU-1 changes by +0.2 percent. It also provides usable carrier capacity, with 1.16, 1.14, and 1.26 bits of mean entropy for update-target, link-target, and semantic-realization decisions. In the snapshot-only R3 setting, MEMMARK recovers the full 40-bit payload from final snapshots, while wrong-key verification remains near chance. Under nine memory-lifecycle attacks, verification distinguishes tampering, evidence deletion, and partial payload recovery. These results show that robust snapshot-only attribution is feasible for long-term agent memory without surviving traces, trusted metadata, or utility degradation.

2025

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown the potential to enhance recommendations due to their sufficient knowledge and remarkable summarization ability. However, the existing LLM-powered recommendation may create redundant output, which generates irrelevant information about the user’s preferences on candidate items from user behavior sequences. To address the issues, we propose a framework UR4Rec that enhances reranking for recommendation with large language models through user preference retrieval. Specifically, UR4Rec develops a small transformer-based user preference retriever towards candidate items to build the bridge between LLMs and recommendation, which focuses on producing the essential knowledge through LLMs from user behavior sequences to enhance reranking for recommendation. Our experimental results on three real-world public datasets demonstrate the superiority of UR4Rec over existing baseline models.
Fine-tuning large language models (LMs) for individual tasks yields strong performance but is expensive for deployment and storage. Recent works explore model merging to combine multiple task-specific models into a single multi-task model without additional training. However, existing merging methods often fail for models fine-tuned with low-rank adaptation (LoRA), due to significant performance degradation. In this paper, we show that this issue arises from a previously overlooked interplay between model parameters and data distributions. We propose Orthogonal Subspaces for Robust model Merging (OSRM) to constrain the LoRA subspace prior to fine-tuning, ensuring that updates relevant to one task do not adversely shift outputs for others. Our approach can seamlessly integrate with most existing merging algorithms, reducing the unintended interference among tasks. Extensive experiments on eight datasets, tested with three widely used LMs and two large LMs, demonstrate that our method not only boosts merging performance but also preserves single-task accuracy. Furthermore, our approach exhibits greater robustness to the hyperparameters of merging. These results highlight the importance of data-parameter interaction in model merging and offer a plug-and-play solution for merging LoRA models.