Yilun Liu
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2026
Parameter-Efficient Routed Fine-Tuning: Mixture-of-Experts Demands Mixture of Adaptation Modules
Yilun Liu | Yunpu Ma | Yuetian Lu | Shuo Chen | Zifeng Ding | Volker Tresp
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Yilun Liu | Yunpu Ma | Yuetian Lu | Shuo Chen | Zifeng Ding | Volker Tresp
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) benefits from a dynamic routing mechanism among their specialized experts, which existing Parameter- Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies often fail to leverage. This motivates us to investigate whether adaptation modules themselves should incorporate routing mechanisms to align with MoE’s multi-expert architecture. We analyze dynamics of core components when applying PEFT to MoE language models, and examine how different routing strategies affect adaptation effectiveness. Extensive experiments adapting OLMoE-1B-7B and Mixtral-8×7B on various commonsense and math reasoning tasks validate the performance and efficiency of our routed approach. We identify optimal configurations for different scenarios and provide empirical analyses with practical insights to facilitate better PEFT and MoE applications.
PyraVid: Hierarchical Multimodal Memory for Long-Horizon Video Reasoning
Sikuan Yan | Sicheng Dong | Haotong Wang | Ercong Nie | Yilun Liu | Jinhe Bi | Yingjie Xu | Susanna Schwarzmann | Riccardo Trivisonno | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Sikuan Yan | Sicheng Dong | Haotong Wang | Ercong Nie | Yilun Liu | Jinhe Bi | Yingjie Xu | Susanna Schwarzmann | Riccardo Trivisonno | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Memory has become an increasingly important component of agentic systems, as these systems are expected to reason over long-term experience. However, prior work has largely focused on unimodal memory, leaving multimodal memory relatively underexplored despite its central role in real-world applications. Compared with unimodal settings, multimodal memory introduces additional challenges, including heterogeneous input integration, person-centric information alignment, and evidence aggregation across different granularities. We present PyraVid, a hierarchical multimodal memory framework inspired by Event Segmentation Theory from cognitive science. PyraVid organizes long videos into a coarse-to-fine pyramid structure, enabling structured memory access and effective evidence aggregation. It further supports structure-guided memory expansion with pruning, allowing the retrieval of related events with strong causal connectivity but low semantic similarity while reducing noise. Experiments on multiple long-video understanding benchmarks show that PyraVid consistently improves performance across datasets, model scales, and question types, highlighting the effectiveness of hierarchical multimodal memory for long-horizon reasoning.
Routing-Free Mixture of Experts
Yilun Liu | Jinru Han | Sikuan Yan | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yilun Liu | Jinru Han | Sikuan Yan | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Standard Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) designs rely heavily on centralized routing mechanisms that introduce rigid inductive biases. We propose Routing-Free MoE, which eliminates all hard-coded centralized components, including external routers, Softmax, TopK, and fixed load balancing. All related functionalities become encapsulated within individual experts, allowing each expert to determine its activation entirely on its own. We introduce a unified, adaptively scheduled load-balancing framework to simultaneously optimize both expert-balancing and token-balancing objectives through a customizable interpolation, letting optimal resource allocation pattern emerge locally during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Routing-Free MoE achieves consistently better performance, efficiency, and robustness than baseline approaches at both training and deployment. We further analyze its emergent behavior in detail and offer insights that may facilitate future MoE design and optimization. Code is available at https://liuyilun2000.github.io/RoutingFreeMoE/.
LLM Safety From Within: Detecting Harmful Content with Internal Representations
Difan Jiao | Yilun Liu | Ye Yuan | Zhenwei Tang | Linfeng Du | Haolun Wu | Ashton Anderson
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Difan Jiao | Yilun Liu | Ye Yuan | Zhenwei Tang | Linfeng Du | Haolun Wu | Ashton Anderson
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Guard models are widely used to detect harmful content in user prompts and LLM responses. However, state-of-the-art guard models rely solely on terminal-layer representations and overlook the rich safety-relevant features distributed across internal layers. We present SIREN, a lightweight guard model that harnesses these internal features. By identifying safety neurons via linear probing and combining them through an adaptive layer-weighted strategy, SIREN builds a harmfulness detector from LLM internals without modifying the underlying model. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that SIREN substantially outperforms state-of-the-art open-source guard models across multiple benchmarks while using 250× fewer trainable parameters. Moreover, SIREN exhibits superior generalization to unseen benchmarks, naturally enables real-time streaming detection, and significantly improves inference efficiency compared to generative guard models. Overall, our results highlight LLM internal states as a promising foundation for practical, high-performance harmfulness detection.
2024
SPIN: Sparsifying and Integrating Internal Neurons in Large Language Models for Text Classification
Difan Jiao | Yilun Liu | Zhenwei Tang | Daniel Matter | Jürgen Pfeffer | Ashton Anderson
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Difan Jiao | Yilun Liu | Zhenwei Tang | Daniel Matter | Jürgen Pfeffer | Ashton Anderson
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Among the many tasks that Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized is text classification. Current text classification paradigms, however, rely solely on the output of the final layer in the LLM, with the rich information contained in internal neurons largely untapped. In this study, we present SPIN: a model-agnostic framework that sparsifies and integrates internal neurons of intermediate layers of LLMs for text classification. Specifically, SPIN sparsifies internal neurons by linear probing-based salient neuron selection layer by layer, avoiding noise from unrelated neurons and ensuring efficiency. The cross-layer salient neurons are then integrated to serve as multi-layered features for the classification head. Extensive experimental results show our proposed SPIN significantly improves text classification accuracy, efficiency, and interpretability.