Zhe Li


2025

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TrInk: Ink Generation with Transformer Network
Zezhong Jin | Shubhang Desai | Xu Chen | Biyi Fang | Zhuoyi Huang | Zhe Li | Chong-Xin Gan | Xiao Tu | Man-Wai Mak | Yan Lu | Shujie Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we propose TrInk, a Transformer-based model for ink generation, which effectively captures global dependencies. To better facilitate the alignment between the input text and generated stroke points, we introduce scaled positional embeddings and a Gaussian memory mask in the cross-attention module. Additionally, we design both subjective and objective evaluation pipelines to comprehensively assess the legibility and style consistency of the generated handwriting. Experiments demonstrate that our Transformer-based model achieves a 35.56% reduction in character error rate (CER) and an 29.66% reduction in word error rate (WER) on the IAM-OnDB dataset compared to previous methods. We provide an demo page with handwriting samples from TrInk and baseline models at: https://akahello-a11y.github.io/trink-demo/

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Zero-Shot Defense Against Toxic Images via Inherent Multimodal Alignment in LVLMs
Wei Zhao | Zhe Li | Yige Li | Jun Sun
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made significant strides in multimodal comprehension, thanks to extensive pre-training and fine-tuning on large-scale visual datasets. However, despite their robust textual safety mechanisms, they remain vulnerable to harmful visual inputs. Existing safeguards—typically relying on pre-filtering or fine-tuning—incur high costs and diminish overall utility. To address this critical vulnerability, we introduce SafeCLIP, a lightweight method that leverages LVLMs’ inherent multimodal alignment for zero-shot toxic image detection. By projecting CLIP’s discarded CLS token into its text space and matching it with toxic descriptors, SafeCLIP detects harmful content without any architectural changes—adding minimal latency and enabling dynamic safety corrections during inference and fine-tuning. Experiments show that SafeCLIP achieves a 66.9% defense success rate with only 3.2% false positive rate and 7.2% overhead. In contrast, state-of-the-art methods achieve 52.9% success but have a 10.7% false positive rate and 210% overhead. Our work demonstrates that leveraging inherent multimodal alignment can yield efficient, low-cost LVLM safety. Code is available at anonymous.4open.science/r/safeclip-2C01.

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Do Influence Functions Work on Large Language Models?
Zhe Li | Wei Zhao | Yige Li | Jun Sun
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Influence functions are important for quantifying the impact of individual training data points on a model’s predictions. Although extensive research has been conducted on influence functions in traditional machine learning models, their application to large language models (LLMs) has been limited. In this work, we conduct a systematic study to address a key question: do influence functions work on LLMs? Specifically, we evaluate influence functions across multiple tasks and find that they consistently perform poorly in most settings. Our further investigation reveals that their poor performance can be attributed to: (1) inevitable approximation errors when estimating the iHVP component due to the scale of LLMs, (2) uncertain convergence during fine-tuning, and, more fundamentally, (3) the definition itself, as changes in model parameters do not necessarily correlate with changes in LLM behavior. Thus, our study suggests the need for alternative approaches for identifying influential samples.

2024

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Are AI-Generated Text Detectors Robust to Adversarial Perturbations?
Guanhua Huang | Yuchen Zhang | Zhe Li | Yongjian You | Mingze Wang | Zhouwang Yang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The widespread use of large language models (LLMs) has sparked concerns about the potential misuse of AI-generated text, as these models can produce content that closely resembles human-generated text. Current detectors for AI-generated text (AIGT) lack robustness against adversarial perturbations, with even minor changes in characters or words causing a reversal in distinguishing between human-created and AI-generated text. This paper investigates the robustness of existing AIGT detection methods and introduces a novel detector, the Siamese Calibrated Reconstruction Network (SCRN). The SCRN employs a reconstruction network to add and remove noise from text, extracting a semantic representation that is robust to local perturbations. We also propose a siamese calibration technique to train the model to make equally confident predictions under different noise, which improves the model’s robustness against adversarial perturbations. Experiments on four publicly available datasets show that the SCRN outperforms all baseline methods, achieving 6.5%-18.25% absolute accuracy improvement over the best baseline method under adversarial attacks. Moreover, it exhibits superior generalizability in cross-domain, cross-genre, and mixed-source scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/CarlanLark/Robust-AIGC-Detector.

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DL-QAT: Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Quantization-Aware Training for Large Language Models
Wenjing Ke | Zhe Li | Dong Li | Lu Tian | Emad Barsoum
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Improving the efficiency of inference in Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical area of research. Post-training Quantization (PTQ) is a popular technique, but it often faces challenges at low-bit levels, particularly in downstream tasks. Quantization-aware Training (QAT) can alleviate this problem, but it requires significantly more computational resources. To tackle this, we introduced Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Quantization-Aware Training (DL-QAT), which merges the advantages of QAT while training only less than 1% of the total parameters. Specifically, we introduce a group-specific quantization magnitude to adjust the overall scale of each quantization group. Within each quantization group, we use LoRA matrices to update the weight size and direction in the quantization space. We validated the effectiveness of our method on the LLaMA and LLaMA2 model families. The results show significant improvements over our baseline method across different quantization granularities. For instance, for LLaMA-7B, our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by 4.2% in MMLU on 3-bit LLaMA-7B. Additionally, our quantization results on pre-trained models also surpass previous QAT methods, demonstrating the superior performance and efficiency of our approach.

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Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreak Attacks via Layer-specific Editing
Wei Zhao | Zhe Li | Yige Li | Ye Zhang | Jun Sun
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted in a wide range of real-world applications. Despite their impressive performance, recent studies have shown that LLMs are vulnerable to deliberately crafted adversarial prompts even when aligned via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or supervised fine-tuning. While existing defense methods focus on either detecting harmful prompts or reducing the likelihood of harmful responses through various means, defending LLMs against jailbreak attacks based on the inner mechanisms of LLMs remains largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate how LLMs respond to harmful prompts and propose a novel defense method termed Layer-specific Editing (LED) to enhance the resilience of LLMs against jailbreak attacks. Through LED, we reveal that several critical safety layers exist among the early layers of LLMs. We then show that realigning these safety layers (and some selected additional layers) with the decoded safe response from identified toxic layers can significantly improve the alignment of LLMs against jailbreak attacks. Extensive experiments across various LLMs (e.g., Llama2, Mistral) show the effectiveness of LED, which effectively defends against jailbreak attacks while maintaining performance on benign prompts. Our code is available at https://github.com/ledllm/ledllm.

2022

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RFBFN: A Relation-First Blank Filling Network for Joint Relational Triple Extraction
Zhe Li | Luoyi Fu | Xinbing Wang | Haisong Zhang | Chenghu Zhou
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Joint relational triple extraction from unstructured text is an important task in information extraction. However, most existing works either ignore the semantic information of relations or predict subjects and objects sequentially. To address the issues, we introduce a new blank filling paradigm for the task, and propose a relation-first blank filling network (RFBFN). Specifically, we first detect potential relations maintained in the text to aid the following entity pair extraction. Then, we transform relations into relation templates with blanks which contain the fine-grained semantic representation of the relations. Finally, corresponding subjects and objects are extracted simultaneously by filling the blanks. We evaluate the proposed model on public benchmark datasets. Experimental results show our model outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. The source code of our work is available at: https://github.com/lizhe2016/RFBFN.

2020

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Low-Resource Text Classification via Cross-lingual Language Model Fine-tuning
Xiuhong Li | Zhe Li | Jiabao Sheng | Wushour Slamu
Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

Text classification tends to be difficult when data are inadequate considering the amount of manually labeled text corpora. For low-resource agglutinative languages including Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz (UKK languages), in which words are manufactured via stems concatenated with several suffixes and stems are used as the representation of text content, this feature allows infinite derivatives vocabulary that leads to high uncertainty of writing forms and huge redundant features. There are major challenges of low-resource agglutinative text classification the lack of labeled data in a target domain and morphologic diversity of derivations in language structures. It is an effective solution which fine-tuning a pre-trained language model to provide meaningful and favorable-to-use feature extractors for downstream text classification tasks. To this end, we propose a low-resource agglutinative language model fine-tuning AgglutiFiT, specifically, we build a low-noise fine-tuning dataset by morphological analysis and stem extraction, then fine-tune the cross-lingual pre-training model on this dataset. Moreover, we propose an attention-based fine-tuning strategy that better selects relevant semantic and syntactic information from the pre-trained language model and uses those features on downstream text classification tasks. We evaluate our methods on nine Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz classification datasets, where they have significantly better performance compared with several strong baselines.