Li Zhong
Author directory2026
Evaluating Harmful Memorization in LLM Code Generation
Lizhe Zhang | Wentao Chen | Li Zhong | Letian Peng | Zilong Wang | Jingbo Shang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Lizhe Zhang | Wentao Chen | Li Zhong | Letian Peng | Zilong Wang | Jingbo Shang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Assessing memorization in LLM code generation is challenging because code reuse is not inherently harmful. Correct programs often share APIs, templates, and algorithmic idioms, so code similarity alone may reflect benign reuse rather than problematic memorization. We focus on the harmful case: a model fails to adapt when task semantics change and instead produces code that remains highly similar to the original solution. We propose code rewriting, an automated semantic perturbation pipeline that constructs superficially similar but semantically different variants of existing coding tasks by modifying a core logic element of the reference solution and regenerating the corresponding prompt. To summarize this behavior, we introduce the Harmful Memorization Index (HMI), an operational diagnostic that combines similarity to the original solution with performance degradation on rewritten tasks. We use harmful memorization as an operational behavioral term for this specific failure mode; HMI does not establish whether an original task or solution appeared in a model’s training data. HMI is intended to complement standard accuracy metrics by capturing brittleness under small semantic changes. Across MBPP+ and BigCodeBench, we find that: (1) HMI does not monotonically increase with model scale and often decreases on simpler tasks; (2) high-HMI failures are concentrated in specific logic-edit types, especially constraint changes and data transformations; (3) supervised fine-tuning improves original-task accuracy but can substantially increase HMI on held-out tasks; and (4) across the evaluated post-training settings, PPO yields a more favorable accuracy–HMI trade-off than SFT.
One Token Is Enough: Improving Diffusion Language Models with a Sink Token
Zihou Zhang | Zheyong Xie | Li Zhong | Haifeng Liu | Shaosheng Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zihou Zhang | Zheyong Xie | Li Zhong | Haifeng Liu | Shaosheng Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a compelling alternative to autoregressive approaches, enabling parallel text generation with competitive performance. Despite these advantages, there is a critical instability in DLMs: the moving sink phenomenon. Our analysis indicates that sink tokens exhibit low-norm representations in the Transformer’s value space, and that the moving sink phenomenon serves as a protective mechanism in DLMs to prevent excessive information mixing. However, their unpredictable positions across diffusion steps undermine inference robustness. To resolve this, we propose a simple but effective extra sink token implemented via a modified attention mask. Specifically, we introduce a special token constrained to attend solely to itself, while remaining globally visible to all other tokens. Experimental results demonstrate that introducing a single extra token stabilizes attention sinks, substantially improving model performance. Crucially, further analysis confirms that the effectiveness of this token is independent of its position and characterized by negligible semantic content, validating its role as a robust and dedicated structural sink.
Rethinking Diffusion Large Language Models via Time-aware Weighting and Block-oriented Refinements
Zheyong Xie | Shengrui Li | Li Zhong | Kaiyan Zhao | Fangcheng Shi | Jiakang Wang | Huayi Jin | Zhaokai Luo | Fei Zhao | Haifeng Liu | Jieying Ye | Chonggang Lu | Wenxuan Huang | Yue Liu | Zijie Meng | Shaosheng Cao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zheyong Xie | Shengrui Li | Li Zhong | Kaiyan Zhao | Fangcheng Shi | Jiakang Wang | Huayi Jin | Zhaokai Luo | Fei Zhao | Haifeng Liu | Jieying Ye | Chonggang Lu | Wenxuan Huang | Yue Liu | Zijie Meng | Shaosheng Cao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) have recently emerged as a parallel alternative to autoregressive models, offering bidirectional context modeling and parallel decoding. However, developing highly performant DLLMs is hindered by lifecycle challenges, including suboptimal timestep weighting in pre-training, train-inference distribution gaps in post-training, and underutilized caching during inference. To address these obstacles, we introduce ReDLLM, a 30B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts DLLM. It incorporates a time-aware weighting strategy during continual pre-training that scales gradients according to denoising difficulty. Furthermore, we propose two block-oriented refinements: a terminal-block treatment to narrow the train-inference gap, and a block-aware inference pipeline featuring inline block prefill and block-level scheduling to maximize KV-cache reuse and parallelization. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ReDLLM surpasses existing DLLMs at the same active-parameter scale, achieves generation quality competitive with 100B DLLMs, and attains the highest inference throughput among evaluated models.
2024
Debug like a Human: A Large Language Model Debugger via Verifying Runtime Execution Step by Step
Li Zhong | Zilong Wang | Jingbo Shang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Li Zhong | Zilong Wang | Jingbo Shang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Large language models (LLMs) are leading significant progress in code generation. Beyond one-pass code generation, recent works further integrate unit tests and program verifiers into LLMs to iteratively refine the generated programs. However, these works consider the generated programs as an indivisible entity, which falls short for LLMs in debugging the programs, especially when the programs contain complex logic flows and data operations. In contrast, when human developers debug programs, they typically set breakpoints and selectively examine runtime execution information. The execution flow and the intermediate variables play a crucial role in the debugging process, yet they are underutilized in the existing literature on code generation. In this study, we introduce Large Language Model Debugger (LDB), a novel debugging framework that enables LLMs to refine their generated programs with the runtime execution information. Specifically, LDB segments the programs into basic blocks and tracks the values of intermediate variables after each block throughout the runtime execution. This allows LLMs to concentrate on simpler code units within the overall execution flow, verify their correctness against the task description block by block, and efficiently pinpoint any potential errors. Experiments demonstrate that LDB consistently enhances the baseline performance by up to 9.8% across the HumanEval, MBPP, and TransCoder benchmarks, archiving new state-of-the-art performance in code debugging for various LLM selections.
2021
A Template-guided Hybrid Pointer Network for Knowledge-based Task-oriented Dialogue Systems
Dingmin Wang | Ziyao Chen | Wanwei He | Li Zhong | Yunzhe Tao | Min Yang
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering (DialDoc 2021)
Dingmin Wang | Ziyao Chen | Wanwei He | Li Zhong | Yunzhe Tao | Min Yang
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering (DialDoc 2021)
Most existing neural network based task-oriented dialog systems follow encoder-decoder paradigm, where the decoder purely depends on the source texts to generate a sequence of words, usually suffering from instability and poor readability. Inspired by the traditional template-based generation approaches, we propose a template-guided hybrid pointer network for knowledge-based task-oriented dialog systems, which retrieves several potentially relevant answers from a pre-constructed domain-specific conversational repository as guidance answers, and incorporates the guidance answers into both the encoding and decoding processes. Specifically, we design a memory pointer network model with a gating mechanism to fully exploit the semantic correlation between the retrieved answers and the ground-truth response. We evaluate our model on four widely used task-oriented datasets, including one simulated and three manually created datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art methods over different automatic evaluation metrics.
2019
Confusionset-guided Pointer Networks for Chinese Spelling Check
Dingmin Wang | Yi Tay | Li Zhong
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Dingmin Wang | Yi Tay | Li Zhong
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
This paper proposes Confusionset-guided Pointer Networks for Chinese Spell Check (CSC) task. More concretely, our approach utilizes the off-the-shelf confusionset for guiding the character generation. To this end, our novel Seq2Seq model jointly learns to copy a correct character from an input sentence through a pointer network, or generate a character from the confusionset rather than the entire vocabulary. We conduct experiments on three human-annotated datasets, and results demonstrate that our proposed generative model outperforms all competitor models by a large margin of up to 20% F1 score, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three datasets.