Yanfu Zhang
Author directory2026
Towards Reliable, Generalizable, and Specific In-Context Knowledge Editing via Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning
Xuzhong Wang | Maiqi Jiang | Tejal Nair | Girija Bhusal | Yanfu Zhang | Haipeng Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xuzhong Wang | Maiqi Jiang | Tejal Nair | Girija Bhusal | Yanfu Zhang | Haipeng Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but limited by static parametric knowledge that becomes outdated once pretraining ends. Knowledge editing addresses this problem by updating model behavior on target facts without full retraining. In particular, in-context knowledge editing has gained attention because it is training-free and readily applicable to black-box LLMs. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches improve over fixed retrieval strategies by adapting prompt construction to the quantity-quality trade-off. Despite initial success, they fail to model the prompt as a structured entity under the distinct and often competing objectives of reliability, generality, and specificity. Previous methods largely optimize a single objective and make decisions over only part of the prompt construction process, thereby overlooking both the balance of different objectives and the global organization of demonstrations. We propose Multi-Objective In-context Knowledge Editing (MO-IKE), a multi-objective RL algorithm that formulates prompt construction for in-context knowledge editing as a Constrained Markov Decision Process. MO-IKE trains a dynamic retriever to optimize competing objectives in knowledge editing, enabling more balanced and globally coherent prompt construction. On Llama-3.2, MO-IKE improves edit success (reliability) from 85.0% to 92.0%, paraphrase consistency (generality) from 77% to 79%, while increasing retention rate (specificity) by 23.0% compared to prior RL-based methods.
AffectCodec: Emotion-Preserving Neural Speech Codec for Expressive Speech Modeling
Jiacheng Shi | Hongfei Du | Xinyuan Song | Y. Alicia Hong | Yanfu Zhang | Ashley Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jiacheng Shi | Hongfei Du | Xinyuan Song | Y. Alicia Hong | Yanfu Zhang | Ashley Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Neural speech codecs provide discrete representations for speech language models, but emotional cues are often degraded during quantization. Existing codecs mainly optimize acoustic reconstruction, leaving emotion expressiveness insufficiently modeled at the representation level. We propose an emotion-guided neural speech codec that explicitly preserves emotional information while maintaining semantic fidelity and prosodic naturalness. Our framework combines emotion–semantic guided latent modulation, relation-preserving emotional–semantic distillation, and emotion-weighted semantic alignment to retain emotionally salient cues under compression. Extensive evaluations across speech reconstruction, emotion recognition, and downstream text to speech generation demonstrate improved emotion consistency and perceptual quality without sacrificing content accuracy.
Confidence-Aware Ranker Ensembles for Robust In-Context Knowledge Editing
Tejal Nair | Mahmud Wasif Nafee | Maiqi Jiang | Ashley Gao | Haipeng Chen | Yanfu Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Tejal Nair | Mahmud Wasif Nafee | Maiqi Jiang | Ashley Gao | Haipeng Chen | Yanfu Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Although large language models (LLMs) excel at factual recall, they can still propagate stale or incorrect knowledge, making in-context knowledge editing a gradient-free remedy suitable for black-box APIs. These knowledge editors that use in-context learning typically rely on a single retriever and surface-similarity heuristics to build prompts. However, a key observation in this study is that retrievers can be complementary: semantic rankers may recover paraphrased evidence, while lexical or feature-based retrievers may preserve precise entities and cues. This creates two gaps in single-retriever editors: they (i) miss complementary evidence that different retrievers surface and (ii) cannot adapt when one retriever is clearly more reliable for a query. We introduce a Feature-Weighted Ensemble for In-context Knowledge Editing (FWE-IKE) that calibrates three heterogeneous rankers (LLM-, BERT-, and MLP-based), extracts simple confidence features from each ranker, predicts per-query mixture weights, and applies a conservative margin-based routing gate that selects a single expert when confident; otherwise we mix calibrated distributions with learned per-query weights. On the CounterFact benchmark, FWE-IKE attains 88.33% Edit-Success Rate, a +3.0 point gain over the best single retriever and approaching the oracle upper bound (91%). Case studies, an ablation study, and analyses show the method systematically recovers complementary wins (e.g., BERT-only, LLM-only, MLP-only slices). FWE-IKE improves edit accuracy without touching model weights and provides a practical path to more robust, confidence-aware retrieval for IKE.
Tracing a Sparse Emotion-Control Circuit in LLM-Based Text-to-Speech
Hongfei Du | Jiacheng Shi | Yanfu Zhang | Ashley Gao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hongfei Du | Jiacheng Shi | Yanfu Zhang | Ashley Gao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
LLM-based text-to-speech (TTS) models can generate emotionally expressive speech, but how reference emotion is routed through the model and realized in decoded speech remains unclear. We introduce two emotion-sensitive metrics for matched neutral and emotional syntheses—a codec trajectory score and a late residual direction score—and use them to score activation-patching interventions. Under controlled matched-reference conditions, this analysis identifies a sparse source-to-readout component-level circuit: 23–27 attention heads and MLPs per emotion, roughly 5% of the components considered, recover or suppress 74–88% of the late emotion-readout shift on held-out cases. The circuit combines a shared component backbone with emotion-specific components; cross-emotion activation swaps reduce the target readout in 47 of 48 cases. In decoded speech, the same intervention produces consistent changes in pitch, energy, and spectral brightness over 24 matched pairs per emotion. A readout-matched residual-direction baseline produces only 17–27% of the intervention’s pitch effect, showing that internal readout movement alone does not explain the decoded acoustic changes. These results trace a compact causal route from reference-derived prefix information to emotion-relevant properties of generated speech.
Usage-Modulated Sentiment Representations in Large Language Models
Hongfei Du | Jiacheng Shi | Yanfu Zhang | Gang Zhou | Ashley Gao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hongfei Du | Jiacheng Shi | Yanfu Zhang | Gang Zhou | Ashley Gao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Prior work suggests that sentiment can often be captured by approximately linear directions in LLM activation spaces, but a single direction may not fully capture sentiment representations. In natural communication, sentiment is shaped not only by polarity but also by usage factors, such as tone and audience adaptation. We test whether these factors systematically modulate sentiment representations beyond a shared sentiment direction. We construct a controlled paired dataset that holds event content fixed while varying sentiment polarity and usage factors, and analyze Llama, Mistral, and Gemma. We identify a shared sentiment direction, remove it, and test the residual structure through erasure and generation-time tone steering. Across models, the shared direction is robust (median cosine 0.953–0.975), yet removing it leaves 0.833–0.909 of the original positive–negative representation-difference norm. The residuals contain compact, reproducible usage-conditioned structure. Targeted erasure weakens held-out usage metrics more than random and label-shuffled controls. On Llama, outputs steered along residualized tone components are preferred in 92.8% of blind target-tone comparisons while preserving the requested sentiment polarity in 98.7% of evaluated outputs.
Enabling Confidence-Aware Control of Effective Memorization in Large Language Models
Chenjie Ni | Omid Mersa | Zhepeng Wang | Runxue Bao | Qun Li | Shangqian Gao | Yanfu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Chenjie Ni | Omid Mersa | Zhepeng Wang | Runxue Bao | Qun Li | Shangqian Gao | Yanfu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Current evaluations of memorization in Large Language Models (LLMs) predominantly rely on overlap ratios, which fails to distinguish between sporadic token matches and reliable, sequential recall. What’s more, these methods become inapplicable in practical scenarios where ground truth suffixes is unavailable. To address these limitations, we propose a paradigm shift from quantifying "rates" to determining the Effective Memorization Length—the distinct boundary where a model transitions from faithful recall to open-ended generation. We introduce a Ensemble Memorization Classifier that leverages internal states from the LLM to estimate this boundary in a reference-free manner. This framework enables Confidence-Aware Generation Control, allowing to extract high-precision suffixes by dynamically truncating sequences precisely at the memorization boundary. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this boundary is optimizable; by integrating our classifier as a reward model within a reinforcement learning framework, we actively extend the average effective length of generated suffixes. Experiments on the GPT-Neo and Pythia families demonstrate that our approach not only accurately filters non-memorization tokens but also effectively "unlocks" deeper chains of memorized knowledge, transforming memorization from an unpredictable risk into a controllable utility.
GeoMotionGPT: Geometry-Aligned Motion Understanding with Large Language Models
Zhankai Ye | Bofan Li | Yukai Jin | Shuoqiu Li | Wei Wang | Yanfu Zhang | Shangqian Gao | Xin Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhankai Ye | Bofan Li | Yukai Jin | Shuoqiu Li | Wei Wang | Yanfu Zhang | Shangqian Gao | Xin Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Discrete motion tokenization has recently enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to serve as versatile backbones for motion understanding and motion-language reasoning. However, existing pipelines typically decouple motion quantization from semantic embedding learning, linking them solely via token IDs. This approach fails to effectively align the intrinsic geometry of the motion space with the embedding space, thereby hindering the LLM’s capacity for nuanced motion reasoning. We argue that alignment is most effective when both modalities share a unified geometric basis. Therefore, instead of forcing the LLM to reconstruct the complex geometry among motion tokens from scratch, we present a novel framework that explicitly enforces orthogonality on both the motion codebook and the LLM embedding space, ensuring that their relational structures naturally mirror each other. Specifically, we employ a decoder-only quantizer with Gumbel-Softmax for differentiable training and balanced codebook usage. To bridge the modalities, we use a sparse projection that maps motion codes into the LLM embedding space while preserving orthogonality. Finally, a two-stage orthonormal regularization schedule enforces soft constraints during tokenizer training and LLM fine-tuning to maintain geometric alignment without hindering semantic adaptation. Extensive experiments show that our framework improves the aggregated Average by 22.4% over the strongest baseline on HumanML3D and by 14.4% on KIT-ML, while ablations confirm the effectiveness of the tokenizer, projection, and regularization designs.
2025
Dynamic Retriever for In-Context Knowledge Editing via Policy Optimization
Mahmud Wasif Nafee | Maiqi Jiang | Haipeng Chen | Yanfu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mahmud Wasif Nafee | Maiqi Jiang | Haipeng Chen | Yanfu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) excel at factual recall yet still propagate stale or incorrect knowledge. In‐context knowledge editing offers a gradient-free remedy suitable for black-box APIs, but current editors rely on static demonstration sets chosen by surface-level similarity, leading to two persistent obstacles: (i) a quantity–quality trade-off, and (ii) lack of adaptivity to task difficulty. We address these issues by dynamically selecting supporting demonstrations according to their utility for the edit. We propose Dynamic Retriever for In-Context Knowledge Editing (DR-IKE), a lightweight framework that (1) trains a BERT retriever with REINFORCE to rank demonstrations by editing reward, and (2) employs a learnable threshold σ to prune low-value examples, shortening the prompt when the edit is easy and expanding it when the task is hard. DR-IKE performs editing without modifying model weights, relying solely on forward passes for compatibility with black-box LLMs. On the CounterFact benchmark, it improves edit success by up to 17.1%, reduces latency by 41.6%, and preserves accuracy on unrelated queries—demonstrating scalable and adaptive knowledge editing.
Controllable Memorization in LLMs via Weight Pruning
Chenjie Ni | Zhepeng Wang | Runxue Bao | Shangqian Gao | Yanfu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Chenjie Ni | Zhepeng Wang | Runxue Bao | Shangqian Gao | Yanfu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The evolution of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has significantly transformed natural language processing. However, these advancements pose challenges, particularly the unintended memorization of training data, which raises ethical and privacy concerns. While prior research has largely focused on mitigating memorization or extracting memorized information, the deliberate control of memorization has been underexplored. This study addresses this gap by introducing a novel and unified gradient-based weight pruning framework to freely control memorization rates in LLMs. Our method enables fine-grained control over pruning parameters, allowing models to suppress or enhance memorization based on application-specific requirements. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively balances the trade-offs between memorization and generalization, with an increase of up to 89.3% in Fractional ER suppression and 40.9% in Exact ER amplification compared to the original models.
2024
Unlocking Memorization in Large Language Models with Dynamic Soft Prompting
Zhepeng Wang | Runxue Bao | Yawen Wu | Jackson Taylor | Cao Xiao | Feng Zheng | Weiwen Jiang | Shangqian Gao | Yanfu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhepeng Wang | Runxue Bao | Yawen Wu | Jackson Taylor | Cao Xiao | Feng Zheng | Weiwen Jiang | Shangqian Gao | Yanfu Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Pretrained large language models (LLMs) have excelled in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including summarization, question answering, and translation. However, LLMs pose significant security risks due to their tendency to memorize training data, leading to potential privacy breaches and copyright infringement. Therefore, accurate measurement of the memorization is essential to evaluate and mitigate these potential risks. However, previous attempts to characterize memorization are constrained by either using prefixes only or by prepending a constant soft prompt to the prefixes, which cannot react to changes in input. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method for estimating LLM memorization using dynamic, prefix-dependent soft prompts. Our approach involves training a transformer-based generator to produce soft prompts that adapt to changes in input, thereby enabling more accurate extraction of memorized data. Our method not only addresses the limitations of previous methods but also demonstrates superior performance in diverse experimental settings compared to state-of-the-art techniques. In particular, our method can achieve the maximum relative improvement of 135.3% and 39.8% over the vanilla baseline on average in terms of discoverable memorization rate for the text generation task and code generation task, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/wangger/llm-memorization-dsp.
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Co-authors
- Ashley Gao 4
- Shangqian Gao 4
- Runxue Bao 3
- Haipeng Chen 3
- Hongfei Du 3
- Maiqi Jiang 3
- Jiacheng Shi 3
- Zhepeng Wang 3
- Mahmud Wasif Nafee 2
- Tejal Nair 2
- Chenjie Ni 2
- Girija Bhusal 1
- Y. Alicia Hong 1
- Weiwen Jiang 1
- Yukai Jin 1
- Bofan Li 1
- Qun Li 1
- Shuoqiu Li 1
- Xin Liu 1
- Omid Mersa 1
- Xinyuan Song 1
- Jackson Taylor 1
- Wei Wang 1
- Xuzhong Wang 1
- Yawen Wu 1
- Cao Xiao 1
- Zhankai Ye 1
- Feng Zheng 1
- Gang Zhou 1