Xiaodong Li
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Unverified author pages with similar names: Xiaodong Li
2026
Cascade: Hierarchical Recoverability Control for Large Language Model Unlearning
Qingchen Yu | Shiying Duan | Xiaodong Li | Yuhua Wang | Zhiyu li | Shiji Zhou | Yifan Sun | Zhaoxin Fan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Qingchen Yu | Shiying Duan | Xiaodong Li | Yuhua Wang | Zhiyu li | Shiji Zhou | Yifan Sun | Zhaoxin Fan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning is essential for removing sensitive or copyrighted knowledge while preserving general utility. Existing methods often leave residual knowledge in intermediate representations, which can still be recovered. To address this, we propose Cascade, a hierarchical recoverability control framework that minimizes the internal identifiability of target knowledge. Cascade combines three complementary controls: path-level routing to suppress privacy-associated activation routes, representation-level compression to reduce geometric separability, and decoding-level intervention to limit residual recovery. Experiments on TOFU, MUSE-News, and WMDP, including robustness tests with query reformulation and extraction-style prompts, show that Cascade effectively reduces recoverability while maintaining stable model utility.
Mask-Free Privacy Extraction and Rewriting: A Domain-Aware Approach via Prototype Learning
Xiaodong Li | Yuhua Wang | Qingchen Yu | Zixuan Qin | Yifan Sun | Qinnan Zhang | Hainan Zhang | Zhiming Zheng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xiaodong Li | Yuhua Wang | Qingchen Yu | Zixuan Qin | Yifan Sun | Qinnan Zhang | Hainan Zhang | Zhiming Zheng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Client-side privacy rewriting is crucial for deploying LLMs in privacy-sensitive domains. However, existing approaches struggle to balance privacy and utility. Full-text methods often distort context, while span-level approaches rely on impractical manual masks or brittle static dictionaries. Attempts to automate localization via prompt-based LLMs prove unreliable, as they suffer from unstable instruction following that leads to privacy leakage and excessive context scrubbing. To address these limitations, we propose DAMPER (Domain-Aware Mask-free Privacy Extraction and Rewriting). DAMPER operationalizes latent privacy semantics into compact Domain Privacy Prototypes via contrastive learning, enabling precise, autonomous span localization. Furthermore, we introduce a Prototype-Guided Preference Alignment, which leverages learned prototypes as semantic anchors to construct preference pairs, optimizing a domain-compliant rewriting policy without human annotations. At inference time, DAMPER integrates a sampling-based Exponential Mechanism to provide rigorous span-level Differential Privacy (DP) guarantees. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAMPER significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving a superior privacy-utility trade-off.