Raluca Ada Popa
Author directory2026
Hidden Thoughts Are Not Secret: Reasoning-Trace Exposure in LLMs
Yu-An Lu | Ci-Yang Tsai | Yu-Lin Tsai | Raluca Ada Popa | Chia-Mu Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yu-An Lu | Ci-Yang Tsai | Yu-Lin Tsai | Raluca Ada Popa | Chia-Mu Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Reasoning traces have become a valuable form of learning signals for improving and transferring the capabilities of large language models. In particular, detailed traces can help distill reasoning behavior from stronger teacher models into weaker student models. The value of capability transfer has motivated many deployed systems with reasoning models to hide raw internal traces and expose at most summaries and answers to users. As a result, we ask whether such interface-level trace hiding prevents users from obtaining useful reasoning supervision through prompting. We study this question with Reasoning Exposure Prompting (), a lightweight in-context elicitation method that uses shadow-model-generated demonstrations wrapped in auxiliary code-like formats to raise user-visible reasoning traces from a victim model. Across the common reasoning dataset, different victim models, and different student model distillation, substantially increases similarity between exposed and REP-conditioned internal traces while preserving useful reasoning signals.
2024
LLoCO: Learning Long Contexts Offline
Sijun Tan | Xiuyu Li | Shishir G Patil | Ziyang Wu | Tianjun Zhang | Kurt Keutzer | Joseph E. Gonzalez | Raluca Ada Popa
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Sijun Tan | Xiuyu Li | Shishir G Patil | Ziyang Wu | Tianjun Zhang | Kurt Keutzer | Joseph E. Gonzalez | Raluca Ada Popa
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Processing long contexts remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the quadratic computational and memory overhead of the self-attention mechanism and the substantial KV cache sizes during generation. We propose LLoCO, a novel approach to address this problem by learning contexts offline through context compression and in-domain parameter-efficient finetuning with LoRA. Our method enables an LLM to create a concise representation of the original context and efficiently retrieve relevant information to answer questions accurately. Our approach extends the effective context window of a 4k token LLaMA2-7B model to handle up to 128k tokens. We evaluate our approach on several long-context question-answering datasets, demonstrating that LLoCO significantly outperforms in-context learning while using 30 × fewer tokens during inference. LLoCO achieves up to 7.62 × speed-up during inference and 11.52 × higher throughput during finetuning, substantially reduces the cost of long document question answering. This makes it a promising solution for efficient long context processing.