Jiang Cai
Author directory2026
Mitigating Memory Interference in Lifelong Model Editing through Multi-Head Hopfield Retrieval
Yue Che | Chen Guoyi | Xijian Deng | Yujie Wu | Jiang Cai | Xuming Ran | Mingkun Xu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yue Che | Chen Guoyi | Xijian Deng | Yujie Wu | Jiang Cai | Xuming Ran | Mingkun Xu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Lifelong model editing seeks to continuously incorporate new knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs) without costly retraining. Memory-augmented editors preserve pretrained weights to protect unrelated capabilities, but struggle to balance Generalization to rephrased edit queries and Locality on non-edited knowledge. This challenge becomes particularly severe under dense editing settings, where semantically related edits induce substantial memory interference. To tackle this problem, we propose MH-HoReN, a multi-head Hopfield retrieval framework that performs retrieval across complementary subspaces and combines head-wise matching signals for more reliable memory selection. We further extend Hopfield-based editing into a clustered batched scheme that combines shared codebook memories for related edits with token-level pooling for efficient knowledge storage and query routing. Extensive experiments across diverse LLMs and editing benchmarks demonstrate that MH-HoReN achieves better locality-generalization trade-offs as editing scales increase, improving the sum of Locality and Generalization by more than 12% over existing methods while preserving almost perfect Reliability in sequential editing, alongside 7.7% gains in Overall Performance under batched editing. Our code is available here.
AURA: Intent-Directed Probing for Implicit-Need Surfacing in Situated LLM Agents
Yang Li | Jiaxiang Liu | Jiang Cai | Mingkun Xu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yang Li | Jiaxiang Liu | Jiang Cai | Mingkun Xu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
A situated query like "where is Lin Wei?" often encodes more than its literal content: the user may also want to know whether Lin Wei is free, in a good mood, or worth interrupting now. Standard tool-use agents answer the literal question and stop. AURA inserts an inference step between scene perception and tool use that produces an IntentFrame: a structured estimate of the implicit need with a scalar gap score that controls per-query probe budget and tool selection. On a 100-query four-scene implicit-intent benchmark, AURA improves implicit-need coverage over ReAct-style probing (Delta = +0.07, p < 10^-6); three of four scenes are individually significant, the gain reproduces on a second backbone, and a prompt ablation attributes the lift to gap calibration rather than answer memorisation. A component ablation localises the gain further: the gap-derived budget ceiling alone outperforms the full architecture (p = 0.02), and bin-wise calibration analysis (r = -0.33) identifies the gap score as a probe trigger rather than a calibrated value estimator. On factual lookup the controller trades raw accuracy for 82% fewer probes and zero forbidden-tool violations on a privacy-sensitive slice; scope conditions are detailed in Limitations. Code, simulator, and benchmark are released at https://github.com/innovation64/AURA, with the implicit-intent benchmark also on the HuggingFace Hub (innovation64/aura-implicit-intent).