Xu Yang
Author directoryPapers on this page may belong to the following people: Xu Yang, Xu Yang
2026
Rotation Control Unlearning: Quantifying and Controlling Continuous Unlearning for LLM with The Cognitive Rotation Space
Xiang Zhang | Kun Wei | Xu Yang | Jiahua Li | Su Yan | Cheng Deng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xiang Zhang | Kun Wei | Xu Yang | Jiahua Li | Su Yan | Cheng Deng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent, their security vulnerabilities have already drawn attention.Machine unlearning is introduced to seek to mitigate these risks by removing the influence of undesirable data. However, existing methods not only rely on the retained dataset to preserve model utility, but also suffer from cumulative catastrophic utility loss under continuous unlearning requests.To solve this dilemma, we propose a novel method, called Rotation Control Unlearning (RCU), which leverages the rotational salience weight of RCU to quantify and control the unlearning degree in the continuous unlearning process.The skew symmetric loss is designed to construct the existence of the cognitive rotation space, where the changes of rotational angle can simulate the continuous unlearning process.Furthermore, we design an orthogonal rotation axes regularization to enforce mutually perpendicular rotation directions for continuous unlearning requests, effectively minimizing interference and addressing cumulative catastrophic utility loss.Experiments on multiple datasets confirm that our continuous unlearning method without retained dataset achieves SOTA performance.
Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search
Yifei Zhang | Xu Yang | Xiao Yang | Bowen Xian | Qizheng Li | Shikai Fang | Jingyuan Li | Jian Wang | Minrui Xu | Yuge Zhang | Weiqing Liu | Jiang Bian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yifei Zhang | Xu Yang | Xiao Yang | Bowen Xian | Qizheng Li | Shikai Fang | Jingyuan Li | Jian Wang | Minrui Xu | Yuge Zhang | Weiqing Liu | Jiang Bian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
LLM-based agents for machine learning engineering (MLE) predominantly rely on tree search, a form of gradient-free optimization that uses scalar validation scores to rank candidates. As LLM reasoning capabilities improve, exhaustive enumeration becomes increasingly inefficient compared to directed updates, analogous to how accurate gradients enable efficient descent over random search. We introduce Gome, an MLE agent that operationalizes gradient-based optimization. Gome maps structured diagnostic reasoning to gradient computation, success memory to momentum, and multi-trace execution to distributed optimization. Under a closed-world protocol that isolates architectural effects from external knowledge, Gome achieves a state-of-the-art 35.1% any-medal rate on MLE-Bench with a restricted 12-hour budget on a single V100 GPU. Scaling experiments across 10 models reveal a critical crossover: with weaker models, tree search retains advantages by compensating for unreliable reasoning through exhaustive exploration; as reasoning capability strengthens, gradient-based optimization progressively outperforms, with the gap widening at frontier-tier models. Given the rapid advancement of reasoning-oriented LLMs, this positions gradient-based optimization as an increasingly favorable paradigm. We release our codebase and GPT-5 traces at: https://github.com/microsoft/RD-Agent.
Evaluating Coreference Consistency in Chinese-to-English Dialogue Translation
Xu Yang | Zhengxian Gong | Junhui Li | Jinlong Yang | Min Zhang | Shimin Tao | Daimeng Wei
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xu Yang | Zhengxian Gong | Junhui Li | Jinlong Yang | Min Zhang | Shimin Tao | Daimeng Wei
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Coreference consistency is essential for preserving discourse coherence in dialogue translation, yet it remains underexplored in the context of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of coreference preservation in Chinese-to-English dialogue translation. We construct a new dataset based on the RiSAWOZ corpus, annotated with source-side zero pronouns and coreference chains. Translations are obtained from a diverse set of LLMs of varying sizes. To evaluate whether coreference relations are maintained, we propose the Coreference Consistency Score (CCS), which quantifies the extent to which translated mentions preserve original coreferential chains. We further introduce an LLM-as-Judge protocol for assessing the faithfulness of translated mentions. Our results reveal that, despite producing fluent translations, many LLMs, including both small and large models, struggle to maintain cross-lingual coreference, highlighting the need for more discourse-aware dialogue translation models. All code and data will be released.
Semantically Comprehensive Token Pruning in LVLMs via Maximizing Concept Coverage
Xueting Li | Qi Liu | Chenghao Xu | Xu Yang | Guangtao Lyu | Jiahua Li | Cheng Deng
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xueting Li | Qi Liu | Chenghao Xu | Xu Yang | Guangtao Lyu | Jiahua Li | Cheng Deng
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
High-resolution visual tokens impose substantial computational burdens owing to extreme redundancy in Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs). Existing visual token pruning methods typically leverage simple metrics derived from human experience, such as attention or similarity, to rank and select tokens within a highly entangled feature space. However, these metrics lack interpretability and often introduce human bias, failing to capture the genuine semantic significance of tokens, especially amidst the inherent semantic complexity and ambiguity of visual tokens. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a novel Semantically Comprehensive Token Selection (SCTS) method for unbiased, interpretable visual token pruning via a concept-driven paradigm. To unravel the model’s intrinsic semantic representation mechanism, we first introduce a Sparse Autoencoder to disentangle visual features into an interpretable space, with each dimension encoding a distinct semantic concept. We then formulate the token pruning task as a Maximum Concept Coverage problem, quantifying the Marginal Semantic Gain (MSG) of each token’s contribution to uncovered concepts and iteratively selecting tokens with the highest MSG. This concept-centric approach prioritizes tokens with unique semantic contributions, guaranteeing semantic comprehensiveness while preserving robust performance even at high compression ratios. Extensive experiments across multiple LVLM architectures and benchmarks verify that SCTS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a superior trade-off between computational efficiency and semantic completeness.
2024
Exploiting Intrinsic Multilateral Logical Rules for Weakly Supervised Natural Language Video Localization
Zhe Xu | Kun Wei | Xu Yang | Cheng Deng
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhe Xu | Kun Wei | Xu Yang | Cheng Deng
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Weakly supervised natural language video localization (WS-NLVL) aims to retrieve the moment corresponding to a language query in a video with only video-language pairs utilized during training. Despite great success, existing WS-NLVL methods seldomly consider the complex temporal relations enclosing the language query (e.g., between the language query and sub-queries decomposed from it or its synonymous query), yielding illogical predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel plug-and-play method, Intrinsic Multilateral Logical Rules, namely IMLR, to exploit intrinsic temporal relations and logical rules for WS-NLVL. Specifically, we formalize queries derived from the original language query as the nodes of a directed graph, i.e., intrinsic temporal relation graph (ITRG), and the temporal relations between them as the edges. Instead of directly prompting a pre-trained language model, a relation-guided prompting method is introduced to generate ITRG in a hierarchical manner. We customize four types of multilateral temporal logical rules (i.e., identity, inclusion, synchronization, and succession) from ITRG and utilize them to train our model. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method on the Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions datasets.
2014
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Co-authors
- Cheng Deng 2
- Jiahua Li 2
- Kun Wei 2
- Jiang Bian 1
- Cheng Deng 1
- Shikai Fang 1
- Yan Gao 1
- Zhengxian Gong (贡正仙) 1
- Jingyuan Li 1
- Junhui Li (李军辉) 1
- Qizheng Li 1
- Xueting Li 1
- Qi Liu 1
- Weiqing Liu 1
- Guangtao Lyu 1
- Shimin Tao 1
- Jian Wang 1
- Rui Wang 1
- Daimeng Wei 1
- Bowen Xian 1
- Chenghao Xu 1
- Minrui Xu 1
- Zhe Xu 1
- Su Yan 1
- Jinlong Yang 1
- Xiao Yang 1
- Min Zhang 1
- Xiang Zhang 1
- Yifei Zhang 1
- Yuge Zhang 1