Qingsong Yang
Author directory2026
Understanding and Mitigating Cross-lingual Privacy Leakage via Language-specific and Universal Privacy Neurons
Wenshuo Dong | Qingsong Yang | Shu Yang | Lijie Hu | Meng Ding | Wanyu Lin | Tianhang Zheng | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Wenshuo Dong | Qingsong Yang | Shu Yang | Lijie Hu | Meng Ding | Wanyu Lin | Tianhang Zheng | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on massive data capture rich information embedded in the training data. However, this also introduces the risk of privacy leakage, particularly involving personally identifiable information (PII). Although previous studies have shown that this risk can be mitigated through methods such as privacy neurons, they all assume that both the (sensitive) training data and user queries are in English. We show that they cannot defend against the privacy leakage in cross-lingual contexts: even if the training data is exclusively in one language, these (private) models may still reveal private information when queried in another language. In this work, we first investigate the information flow of cross-lingual privacy leakage to give a better understanding. We find that LLMs process private information in the middle layers, where representations are largely shared across languages. The risk of leakage peaks when converted to a language-specific space in later layers. Based on this, we identify privacy-universal neurons and language-specific privacy neurons. Privacy-universal neurons influence privacy leakage across all languages, while language-specific privacy neurons are only related to specific languages. By deactivating these neurons, the cross-lingual privacy leakage risk is reduced by 23.3%-31.6%.
Flattery in Motion: Benchmarking and Analyzing Sycophancy in Video-LLMs
Wenrui Zhou | Mohamed Hendy | Shu Yang | Qingsong Yang | Zikun Guo | Yuyu Luo | Lijie Hu | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Wenrui Zhou | Mohamed Hendy | Shu Yang | Qingsong Yang | Zikun Guo | Yuyu Luo | Lijie Hu | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
As video large language models (Video-LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications that demand grounded multimodal reasoning, ensuring their factual consistency and reliability is of critical importance. However, sycophancy, the tendency of these models to align with user input even when it contradicts the visual evidence, undermines their trustworthiness in such contexts. Current sycophancy research has largely overlooked its specific manifestations in the video-language domain, resulting in a notable absence of systematic benchmarks and targeted evaluations to understand how Video-LLMs respond under misleading user input. To fill this gap, we propose ViSE (Video-LLM Sycophancy Benchmarking and Evaluation), the first benchmark designed to evaluate sycophantic behavior in state-of-the-art Video-LLMs across diverse question formats, prompt biases, and visual reasoning tasks. Specifically, ViSE pioneeringly brings linguistic perspectives on sycophancy into the video domain, enabling fine-grained analysis across multiple sycophancy types and interaction patterns. Furthermore, we propose two potential training-free mitigation strategies revealing potential paths for reducing sycophantic bias: (i) enhancing visual grounding through interpretable key-frame selection and (ii) steering model behavior away from sycophancy via targeted, inference-time intervention on its internal neural representations. Our code is available at https://github.com/William030422/Video-Sycophancy.