Xin Chen
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Unverified author pages with similar names: Xin Chen
2026
Neuron-Guided Fine-Tuning: Unlocking Efficient Alignment Mechanisms for Large Language Models
Zeyu Wu | Junchao Wu | Shudong Liu | Runzhe Zhan | Xin Chen | Shu Yang | Yichao Du | Longyue Wang | Weihua Luo | Jinsong Su | Derek F. Wong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zeyu Wu | Junchao Wu | Shudong Liu | Runzhe Zhan | Xin Chen | Shu Yang | Yichao Du | Longyue Wang | Weihua Luo | Jinsong Su | Derek F. Wong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Existing Supervised Fine-Tuning paradigms, particularly Full Parameter Fine-Tuning are often plagued by parameter redundancy, inconsistent data quality, and catastrophic forgetting, which current methods typically address in isolation and lack a unified optimization signal to bridge data selection, parameter updates, and knowledge preservation. To address this, we propose Neuron-Guided Fine-Tuning (NGFT), a holistic framework that leverages neuron activation patterns as a universal proxy to unify the fine-tuning lifecycle. NGFT operates via three synergistic mechanisms: (1) Adaptive Task-Specific Neuron Selection, which identifies essential neurons in a single forward pass to concentrate updates and reduce redundancy; (2) Activation-Based Data Selection, which prioritizes information-dense samples that maximize contribution to key neurons; and (3) Neuron Activation Alignment, a novel loss function that anchors activations to pre-trained states, deepening representation learning and preserving general knowledge. Experimental results across three models across both domain-specific and general benchmarks demonstrate that NGFT significantly outperforms existing mainstream fine-tuning methods in both efficiency and performance, while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers
Xin Chen | Feng Jiang | Yiqian Zhang | Hardy Chen | Shuo Yan | Wenya Xie | Min Yang | Shujian Huang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xin Chen | Feng Jiang | Yiqian Zhang | Hardy Chen | Shuo Yan | Wenya Xie | Min Yang | Shujian Huang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, yet they remain fundamentally limited by a blind self-thinking paradigm: performing extensive internal reasoning even when critical information is missing or ambiguous. We propose Proactive Interactive Reasoning (PIR), a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs from passive solvers into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. Unlike existing search- or tool-based frameworks that primarily address knowledge uncertainty by querying external environments, PIR targets premise- and intent-level uncertainty through direct interaction with the user. PIR is implemented via two core components: (1) an uncertainty-aware supervised fine-tuning procedure that equips models with interactive reasoning capability, and (2) a user-simulator-based policy optimization framework driven by a composite reward that aligns model behavior with user intent. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing demonstrate that PIR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to 32.70% higher accuracy, 22.90% higher pass rate, and 41.36 BLEU improvement, while reducing nearly half of the reasoning computation and unnecessary interaction turns. Further reliability evaluations on factual knowledge, question answering, and missing-premise scenarios confirm the strong generalization and robustness of PIR.
2025
RepreGuard: Detecting LLM-Generated Text by Revealing Hidden Representation Patterns
Xin Chen | Junchao Wu | Shu Yang | Runzhe Zhan | Zeyu Wu | Ziyang Luo | Di Wang | Min Yang | Lidia S. Chao | Derek F. Wong
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 13
Xin Chen | Junchao Wu | Shu Yang | Runzhe Zhan | Zeyu Wu | Ziyang Luo | Di Wang | Min Yang | Lidia S. Chao | Derek F. Wong
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 13
Detecting content generated by large language models (LLMs) is crucial for preventing misuse and building trustworthy AI systems. Although existing detection methods perform well, their robustness in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios is still lacking. In this paper, we hypothesize that, compared to features used by existing detection methods, the internal representations of LLMs contain more comprehensive and raw features that can more effectively capture and distinguish the statistical pattern differences between LLM-generated texts (LGT) and human-written texts (HWT). We validated this hypothesis across different LLMs and observed significant differences in neural activation patterns when processing these two types of texts. Based on this, we propose RepreGuard, an efficient statistics-based detection method. Specifically, we first employ a surrogate model to collect representation of LGT and HWT, and extract the distinct activation feature that can better identify LGT. We can classify the text by calculating the projection score of the text representations along this feature direction and comparing with a precomputed threshold. Experimental results show that RepreGuard outperforms all baselines with average 94.92% AUROC on both in-distribution and OOD scenarios, while also demonstrating robust resilience to various text sizes and mainstream attacks.1