Xiaowen Chu
Author directory2026
Probing the Plasticity and Correlation of LLM Value Systems: LLM Value Rankings are Not Stable
Zhenheng Tang | Qihua Pan | Jingya Shen | Xiang Liu | Qian Wang | Bo Li | Xiaowen Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zhenheng Tang | Qihua Pan | Jingya Shen | Xiang Liu | Qian Wang | Bo Li | Xiaowen Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
The value alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical because value is the foundation of LLM decision-making and behavior. Some recent work show that LLMs have similar value rankings. However, little is known about how susceptible LLM value rankings are to external influence and how different values are correlated with each other. In this work, we investigate the plasticity of LLM value systems by examining how their value rankings are influenced by different prompting strategies and exploring the intrinsic relationships between values. To this end, we design 6 different value transformation prompting methods including direct instruction, rubrics, in-context learning, scenario, persuasion, and persona, and benchmark the effectiveness of these methods on 3 different families and totally 8 LLMs. Our main findings include that the value rankings in large LLMs are much more susceptible to external influence than small LLMs, and there are intrinsic correlations between certain values (e.g., Privacy and Respect). Besides, through detailed correlation analysis, we find that the value correlations are more similar between large LLMs of different families than small LLMs of the same family. We also identify that scenario method is the strongest persuader and can help entrench the value rankings.
Architecture-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Makes Sliding-Window Attention Competitive in Math Reasoning
Kai Liu | Peijie Dong | Xie Xinchen | Jianfei Gao | Qipeng Guo | Xiaowen Chu | Shaoting Zhang | Kai Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Kai Liu | Peijie Dong | Xie Xinchen | Jianfei Gao | Qipeng Guo | Xiaowen Chu | Shaoting Zhang | Kai Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The rapid progress of reasoning and agentic large language models (LLMs) has increased the demand for long-context inference, but self-attention (SA) scales quadratically with context length. To address this, we propose SWARR (Sliding-Window Attention with Reinforced Adaptation for Math Reasoning), a practical recipe for adapting SWA models to mathematical reasoning. SWARR has two stages: (1) efficient conversion from a pretrained SA model to SWA with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which avoids pretraining a new base model, and (2) architecture-aware policy adaptation with reinforcement learning (RL). We find that SWA still underperforms SA after SFT, and we hypothesize that this gap is caused in part by a data-architecture mismatch: most SFT data are prepared for SA models and may contain long-range dependencies that are difficult for SWA to model. Because RL is architecture-aware and optimizes self-generated trajectories under the SWA constraint, it can adapt training trajectories to better match the SWA architecture. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that this architecture-aware RL substantially narrows the gap between SWA and SA, recovering much of the accuracy lost during SWA conversion while preserving the efficiency benefits of linear-complexity attention.
Beyond the Efficiency Paradox: Unlocking Multimodal Subspaces via Cumulative Information Span
Xiuze Zhou | Xiaowen Chu | Xuming Hu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xiuze Zhou | Xiaowen Chu | Xuming Hu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
In real-world multimodal applications, different modalities often exhibit weakly aligned adaptation requirements, making it challenging for a shared adapter to effectively capture heterogeneous signals. Existing approaches typically use a unified low-rank adapter for concatenated multimodal representations, leading to competition among modality-specific adaptations and diminishing returns as the adapter rank increases. To address this limitation, we propose msLoRA, a modality-specific adaptation framework for efficient multimodal fine-tuning. msLoRA assigns independent low-rank adapters to different modalities, allowing them to capture specialized adaptation directions while maintaining efficient parameterization. Our theoretical analysis introduces the concept of cumulative information span, demonstrating that modality-specific adapters can expand the effective adaptation space and avoid the cross-modal disagreement typical of shared adapters. We evaluate msLoRA using multiple prominent open-source LLMs, including the Llama, Qwen, and Mistral families, across four multimodal tasks, showing consistent improvements in scalability and effectiveness for low-rank adaptation in multimodal LLMs. The source code is available at https://github.com/XiuzeZhou/msLoRA/.
FinKario: Event-Enhanced Automated Construction of Financial Knowledge Graph
Xiang Li | Penglei Sun | Wanyun Zhou | Zikai Wei | Yongqi Zhang | Xiaowen Chu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xiang Li | Penglei Sun | Wanyun Zhou | Zikai Wei | Yongqi Zhang | Xiaowen Chu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Individual investors are significantly outnumbered and disadvantaged in financial markets, overwhelmed by abundant information and lacking professional analysis. Equity research reports stand out as crucial resources, offering valuable insights. By leveraging these reports, large language models (LLMs) can enhance investors’ decision-making capabilities and strengthen financial analysis. However, two key challenges limit their effectiveness: (1) the rapid evolution of market events often outpaces the slow update cycles of existing knowledge bases, (2) the long-form and unstructured nature of financial reports further hinders timely and context-aware integration by LLMs. To address these challenges, we tackle both data and methodological aspects. First, we introduce the Event-Enhanced Automated Construction of Financial Knowledge Graph (FinKario), a dataset comprising over 305,360 entities, 210,328 relational triples, and 19 distinct relation types. FinKario automatically integrates real-time company fundamentals and market events through prompt-driven extraction guided by professional institutional templates, providing structured and accessible financial insights for LLMs. Additionally, we propose a Two-Stage, Graph-Based retrieval strategy (FinKario-RAG), optimizing the retrieval of evolving, large-scale financial knowledge to ensure efficient and precise data access. Extensive experiments show that FinKario with FinKario-RAG achieves superior stock trend prediction accuracy, outperforming financial LLMs by 18.81% and institutional strategies by 17.85% on average in backtesting. [Our code is available at https://github.com/Jackson906E/FinKario.]
Llm agent memory: a survey from a unified representation–management perspective
Zhenheng Tang | Xin He | Tiancheng Zhao | Fanjunduo Wei | Xiang Liu | Peijie Dong | Qian Wang | Qi Li | Huacan Wang | Ronghao Chen | Sen Hu | Weidong Guo | Yu Xu | Haolan Chen | Kunfeng Lai | Kaiyong Zhao | Keyan Ding | Ivor Tsang | Yew-Soon Ong | Bo Li | Xiaowen Chu
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhenheng Tang | Xin He | Tiancheng Zhao | Fanjunduo Wei | Xiang Liu | Peijie Dong | Qian Wang | Qi Li | Huacan Wang | Ronghao Chen | Sen Hu | Weidong Guo | Yu Xu | Haolan Chen | Kunfeng Lai | Kaiyong Zhao | Keyan Ding | Ivor Tsang | Yew-Soon Ong | Bo Li | Xiaowen Chu
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in sustaining long-term memory for agentic applications due to limited context windows. To address this limitation, many work has proposed diverse memory mechanisms to support long-term, multi-turn interactions, leveraging different approaches tailored to distinct memory storage objects, such as KV caches. In this survey, we present a unified taxonomy that organizes memory systems for long-context scenarios by decoupling memory abstractions from model-specific inference and training methods. We categorize LLM memory into three primary paradigms: natural language tokens, intermediate representations and parameters. For each paradigm, we organize existing methods by three management stages, including memory construction, update, and query, so that long-context memory mechanisms can be described in a consistent way across system designs, with their implementation choices and constraints made explicit. Finally, we outline key research directions for long-context memory system design.
2025
Perovskite-LLM: Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models for Perovskite Solar Cell Research
Xiang Liu | Penglei Sun | Shuyan Chen | Longhan Zhang | Peijie Dong | Huajie You | Yongqi Zhang | Chang Yan | Xiaowen Chu | Tong-yi Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Xiang Liu | Penglei Sun | Shuyan Chen | Longhan Zhang | Peijie Dong | Huajie You | Yongqi Zhang | Chang Yan | Xiaowen Chu | Tong-yi Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
The rapid advancement of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has led to an exponential growth in research publications, creating an urgent need for efficient knowledge management and reasoning systems in this domain. We present a comprehensive knowledge-enhanced system for PSCs that integrates three key components. First, we develop Perovskite-KG, a domain-specific knowledge graph constructed from 1,517 research papers, containing 23,789 entities and 22,272 relationships. Second, we create two complementary datasets: Perovskite-Chat, comprising 55,101 high-quality question-answer pairs generated through a novel multi-agent framework, and Perovskite-Reasoning, containing 2,217 carefully curated materials science problems. Third, we introduce two specialized large language models: Perovskite-Chat-LLM for domain-specific knowledge assistance and Perovskite-Reasoning-LLM for scientific reasoning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms existing models in both domain-specific knowledge retrieval and scientific reasoning tasks, providing researchers with effective tools for literature review, experimental design, and complex problem-solving in PSC research.
UnrealLLM: Towards Highly Controllable and Interactable 3D Scene Generation by LLM-powered Procedural Content Generation
Song Tang | Kaiyong Zhao | Lei Wang | Yuliang Li | Xuebo Liu | Junyi Zou | Qiang Wang | Xiaowen Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Song Tang | Kaiyong Zhao | Lei Wang | Yuliang Li | Xuebo Liu | Junyi Zou | Qiang Wang | Xiaowen Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
The creation of high-quality 3D scenes is essential for applications like video games and simulations, yet automating this process while retaining the benefits of Procedural Content Generation (PCG) remains challenging. In this paper, we introduce UnrealLLM, a novel multi-agent framework that connects natural language descriptions with the professional PCG system (Unreal Engine 5) to automate scene generation. UnrealLLM constructs a comprehensive knowledge base to translate text into executable PCG blueprints and a diverse asset library that guarantees high-quality scene generation. Additionally, it also introduces a text-based blueprint system with a spline-based control mechanism for geometric arrangement, enabling natural language interaction and enhancing interactivity in 3D environments using UE5’s advanced capabilities. Through extensive experiments, we show that UnrealLLM achieves competitive performance in technical metrics and aesthetic quality, offering unique advantages in generation scale and interactivity. This work makes a valuable contribution to automated 3D content creation, benefiting both novice users and professional designers.
AdaEdit: Advancing Continuous Knowledge Editing For Large Language Models
Qi Li | Xiaowen Chu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Qi Li | Xiaowen Chu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Knowledge editing (KE) has emerged as a prominent alternative that enables efficient and precise information modification inside language models. However, a critical challenge arises in continuous language models editing — a significant performance decline both in knowledge update and retention when the number of edits increases. By dissecting the perturbation weight of language model in continuous KE, we uncover that disentangled and sparsified knowledge representation can significantly alleviate the performance decline. Building on these insights, we introduce AdaEdit, a novel knowledge editing method. Extensive empirical evaluations on multiple LLMs demonstrate that our proposed methods can enhance the performance of edited LLMs in large-size continuous editing regimes, outperforming existing ones without substantially compromising the general abilities of these models.
2024
LPZero: Language Model Zero-cost Proxy Search from Zero
Peijie Dong | Lujun Li | Xiang Liu | Zhenheng Tang | Xuebo Liu | Qiang Wang | Xiaowen Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Peijie Dong | Lujun Li | Xiang Liu | Zhenheng Tang | Xuebo Liu | Qiang Wang | Xiaowen Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Despite the outstanding performance, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is criticized for massive computation. Recently, Zero-shot NAS has emerged as a promising approach by exploiting Zero-cost (ZC) proxies, which markedly reduce computational demands. Despite this, existing ZC proxies heavily rely on expert knowledge and incur significant trial-and-error costs. Particularly in NLP tasks, most existing ZC proxies fail to surpass the performance of the naive baseline. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework, LPZero, which is the first to automatically design zero-cost (ZC) proxies for various tasks, achieving higher ranking consistency than human-designed proxies. Specifically, we model the ZC proxy as a symbolic equation and incorporate a unified proxy search space that encompasses existing ZC proxies, which are composed of a predefined set of mathematical symbols. To heuristically search for the best ZC proxy, LPZero incorporates genetic programming to find the optimal symbolic composition. We propose a Predictive-Pruning Strategy (PPS), which preemptively eliminates unpromising proxies, thereby mitigating the risk of proxy degradation. Extensive experiments on FlexiBERT, GPT-2, and LLaMA-7B demonstrate LPZero’s superior ranking ability and performance on downstream tasks compared to current approaches.
LongGenBench: Long-context Generation Benchmark
Xiang Liu | Peijie Dong | Xuming Hu | Xiaowen Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Xiang Liu | Peijie Dong | Xuming Hu | Xiaowen Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Current long-context benchmarks primarily focus on retrieval-based tests, requiring Large Language Models (LLMs) to locate specific information within extensive input contexts, such as the needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) benchmark. Long-context generation refers to the ability of a language model to generate coherent and contextually accurate text that spans across lengthy passages or documents. While recent studies show strong performance on NIAH and other retrieval-based long-context benchmarks, there is a significant lack of benchmarks for evaluating long-context generation capabilities. To bridge this gap and offer a comprehensive assessment, we introduce a synthetic benchmark, LongGenBench, which allows for flexible configurations of customized generation context lengths. LongGenBench advances beyond traditional benchmarks by redesigning the format of questions and necessitating that LLMs respond with a single, cohesive long-context answer. Upon extensive evaluation using LongGenBench, we observe that: (1) both API accessed and open source models exhibit performance degradation in long-context generation scenarios, ranging from 1.2% to 47.1%; (2) different series of LLMs exhibit varying trends of performance degradation, with the Gemini-1.5-Flash model showing the least degradation among API accessed models, and the Qwen2 series exhibiting the least degradation in LongGenBench among open source models.
Can We Continually Edit Language Models? On the Knowledge Attenuation in Sequential Model Editing
Qi Li | Xiaowen Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Qi Li | Xiaowen Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Model editing has become a promising method for precisely and effectively updating knowledge in language models. In this paper, we investigate knowledge attenuation, in which the retention of updated knowledge within the language model decreases as the number of edits increases after sequential editing. Through empirical study, we discovered that existing editing methods generally suffer from knowledge attenuation. We attribute this phenomenon to two aspects: (1) redundant parameters interference and (2) update weight disentanglement. To this end, we propose the AdaPLE method. It not only mitigates the knowledge attenuation issue but also improves the performance on existing benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the cause and mitigation of knowledge attenuation in sequential LLM editing.
BitDistiller: Unleashing the Potential of Sub-4-Bit LLMs via Self-Distillation
DaYou Du | Yijia Zhang | Shijie Cao | Jiaqi Guo | Ting Cao | Xiaowen Chu | Ningyi Xu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
DaYou Du | Yijia Zhang | Shijie Cao | Jiaqi Guo | Ting Cao | Xiaowen Chu | Ningyi Xu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The upscaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has yielded impressive advances in natural language processing, yet it also poses significant deployment challenges. Weight quantization has emerged as a widely embraced solution to reduce memory and computational demands. This paper introduces BitDistiller, a framework that synergizes Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) with Knowledge Distillation (KD) to boost the performance of LLMs at ultra-low precisions (sub-4-bit). Specifically, BitDistiller first incorporates a tailored asymmetric quantization and clipping technique to maximally preserve the fidelity of quantized weights, and then proposes a novel Confidence-Aware Kullback-Leibler Divergence (CAKLD) objective, which is employed in a self-distillation manner to enable faster convergence and superior model performance. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that BitDistiller significantly surpasses existing methods in both 3-bit and 2-bit configurations on general language understanding and complex reasoning benchmarks. Notably, BitDistiller is shown to be more cost-effective, demanding fewer data and training resources. The code is available at https://github.com/DD-DuDa/BitDistiller.
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- Peijie Dong 5
- Xiang Liu 5
- Qi Li 3
- Zhenheng Tang 3
- Xuming Hu 2
- Bo Li 2
- Xuebo Liu 2
- Penglei Sun 2
- Qian Wang 2
- Qiang Wang 2
- Yongqi Zhang 2
- Kaiyong Zhao 2
- Shijie Cao 1
- Ting Cao 1
- Haolan Chen 1
- Kai Chen 1
- Ronghao Chen 1
- Shuyan Chen 1
- Keyan Ding 1
- DaYou Du 1
- Jianfei Gao 1
- Jiaqi Guo 1
- Qipeng Guo 1
- Weidong Guo 1
- Xin He 1
- Sen Hu 1
- Kunfeng Lai 1
- Lujun Li 1
- Xiang Li 1
- Yuliang Li 1
- Kai Liu 1
- Yew-Soon Ong 1
- Qihua Pan 1
- Jingya Shen 1
- Song Tang 1
- Ivor Tsang 1
- Huacan Wang 1
- Lei Wang 1
- Fanjunduo Wei 1
- Zikai Wei 1
- Xie Xinchen 1
- Ningyi Xu 1
- Yu Xu 1
- Chang Yan 1
- Huajie You 1
- Longhan Zhang 1
- Shaoting Zhang 1
- Tong-yi Zhang 1
- Yijia Zhang (张益嘉) 1
- Tiancheng Zhao 1
- Wanyun Zhou 1
- Xiuze Zhou 1
- Junyi Zou 1