Xiaoran Liu

Author directory

2026

Despite the non-autoregressive potential of diffusion language models (dLLMs), existing decoding strategies exhibit positional bias, failing to fully unlock the potential of arbitrary-order generation. In this work, we delve into the inherent spectral characteristics of dLLMs and present the first frequency-domain analysis of dLLMs, showing that low-frequency components in hidden states primarily encode global structural information and long-range dependencies, while high-frequency components capture local details. Based on this observation, we propose FourierSampler, which leverages a frequency-domain sliding window mechanism to dynamically guide the model to achieve "structure-to-detail" generation. FourierSampler outperforms other inference enhancement strategies on LLaDA and SDAR, achieving relative task-specific gains up to 20.4% on LLaDA-1.5 and 16.0% on LLaDA-8B-Instruct, as well as average gains up to 8.6% across tasks.
Large Language Models struggle with memory demands from the growing Key-Value (KV) cache as context lengths increase. Existing compression methods homogenize head dimensions or rely on attention-guided token pruning, often sacrificing accuracy or introducing computational overhead. We propose FourierAttention, a training-free framework that exploits the heterogeneous roles of transformer head dimensions: lower dimensions prioritize local context, while upper ones capture long-range dependencies. By projecting the long-context-insensitive dimensions onto orthogonal Fourier bases, FourierAttention approximates their temporal evolution with fixed-length spectral coefficients. Evaluations on Llama and Qwen models show FourierAttention achieves the best long-context accuracy on LongBench and Needle-In-A-Haystack (NIAH). Besides, a custom Triton kernel, FlashFourierAttention, is designed to optimize memory via streamlined read-write operations, enabling efficient deployment without performance compromise.
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Transformers improve scaling efficiency by activating only a subset of experts per token, but deployed inference remains constrained by memory capacity and bandwidth. Existing expert compression methods face a quality–memory–latency trilemma: pruning or fully merging degrades model quality, while partial merging increases per-token activated parameters and hurt latency. We propose NimbleMoE, a training-free, collaboration-aware partial expert merging framework that reduces both model size and activated-parameter cost. NimbleMoE clusters experts by routing co-activation so co-activated experts share a low-rank subspace. To compensate for the capacity lost, NimbleMoE adds hardware-efficient Monarch residuals, with an alignment-aware choice between latent-space and output-space compensation. Across multiple MoE backbones, NimbleMoE preserves model quality under 20–25% total-parameter compression and outperforms prior pruning and merging baselines, while delivering up to 1.89× MoE-MLP kernel speedup in bandwidth-bound settings, 1.31× end-to-end TPOT speedup, and 2.81× expert-parallel MoE-kernel speedup.

2025

While NLP models often seek to capture cognitive states via language, the validity of predicted states is determined by comparing them to annotations created without access the cognitive states of the authors. In behavioral sciences, cognitive states are instead measured via experiments. Here, we introduce an experiment-based framework for evaluating language-based cognitive style models against human behavior. We explore the phenomenon of decision making, and its relationship to the linguistic style of an individual talking about a recent decision they made. The participants then follow a classical decision-making experiment that captures their cognitive style, determined by how preferences change during a decision exercise. We find that language features, intended to capture cognitive style, can predict participants’ decision style with moderate-to-high accuracy (AUC 0.8), demonstrating that cognitive style can be partly captured and revealed by discourse patterns.
Recent advancements in model architectures and length extrapolation techniques have significantly extended the context length of large language models (LLMs), paving the way for their application in increasingly complex tasks. However, despite the growing capabilities of long-context LLMs, the safety issues in long-context scenarios remain underexplored. While safety alignment in short context has been widely studied, the safety concerns of long-context LLMs have not been adequately addressed. In this work, we introduce ${textbf{LongSafety}}$, a comprehensive safety alignment dataset for long-context LLMs, containing 10 tasks and 17k samples, with an average length of 40.9k tokens. Our experiments demonstrate that training with LongSafety can enhance long-context safety performance while enhancing short-context safety and preserving general capabilities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that long-context safety does not equal long-context alignment with short-context safety data and LongSafety has generalizing capabilities in context length and long-context safety scenarios.

2024

The quality of training data is crucial for enhancing the long-text capabilities of foundation models. Despite existing efforts to refine data quality through heuristic rules and evaluations based on data diversity and difficulty, there’s a lack of systematic approaches specifically tailored for assessing long texts. Addressing this gap, our work systematically measures the quality of long texts by evaluating three fundamental linguistic dimensions: coherence, cohesion, and complexity. Drawing inspiration from the aforementioned three dimensions, we introduce a suite of metrics designed to evaluate the quality of long texts, encompassing both statistical and pre-trained language model-based ones. Leveraging these metrics, we present LongWanjuan, a bilingual dataset specifically tailored to enhance the training of language models for long-text tasks with over 160B tokens. In LongWanjuan, we categorize long texts into holistic, aggregated, and chaotic types, enabling a detailed analysis of long-text quality. Furthermore, we devise a data mixture recipe that strategically balances different types of long texts within LongWanjuan, leading to significant improvements in model performance on long-text tasks.
The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant advancements, with models like Claude and Gemini capable of processing contexts up to 1 million tokens. However, efficiently handling long sequences remains challenging, particularly during the prefilling stage when input lengths exceed GPU memory capacity. Traditional methods often segment sequence into chunks and compress them iteratively with fixed-size memory. However, our empirical analysis shows that the fixed-size memory results in wasted computational and GPU memory resources. Therefore, we introduces Incremental Memory (IM), a method that starts with a small memory size and gradually increases it, optimizing computational efficiency. Additionally, we propose Decremental Chunk based on Incremental Memory (IMDC), which reduces chunk size while increasing memory size, ensuring stable and lower GPU memory usage. Our experiments demonstrate that IMDC is consistently faster (1.45x) and reduces GPU memory consumption by 23.3% compared to fixed-size memory, achieving comparable performance on the LongBench Benchmark.

2023

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Access to pre-trained models, courtesy of the open-source community, has made it possible to adapt these models to specific applications for enhanced performance. However, the substantial resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions. This paper introduces CoLLiE, an efficient library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models using 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, and optimizers such as Lion, Adan, Sophia, and LOMO. With its modular design and comprehensive functionality, CoLLiE offers a balanced blend of efficiency, ease of use, and customization. CoLLiE has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios. Furthermore, we provide an empirical evaluation of the correlation between model size and GPU memory consumption under different optimization methods, as well as an analysis of the throughput. Lastly, we carry out a comprehensive comparison of various optimizers and PEFT methods within the instruction-tuning context. CoLLiE is available at https://github.com/OpenLMLab/collie.
While transformer-based systems have enabled greater accuracies with fewer training examples, data acquisition obstacles still persist for rare-class tasks – when the class label is very infrequent (e.g. < 5% of samples). Active learning has in general been proposed to alleviate such challenges, but choice of selection strategy, the criteria by which rare-class examples are chosen, has not been systematically evaluated. Further, transformers enable iterative transfer-learning approaches. We propose and investigate transfer- and active learning solutions to the rare class problem of dissonance detection through utilizing models trained on closely related tasks and the evaluation of acquisition strategies, including a proposed probability-of-rare-class (PRC) approach. We perform these experiments for a specific rare-class problem: collecting language samples of cognitive dissonance from social media. We find that PRC is a simple and effective strategy to guide annotations and ultimately improve model accuracy while transfer-learning in a specific order can improve the cold-start performance of the learner but does not benefit iterations of active learning.