Zhe Ren
Author directory2026
Bayesian Sparse Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Model Uncertainty Estimation
Jijie Zhang | Zhe Ren | Quan Zhang | Dandan Guo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jijie Zhang | Zhe Ren | Quan Zhang | Dandan Guo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities, but their task-specific fine-tuning is notoriously plagued by overconfidence, severely hindering trustworthy deployment. We propose Data-Adaptive Lower-Rank Adaptation (DALorRA), a simple and effective variational Bayesian sparse framework that shifts the paradigm of uncertainty quantification from the dense parameter space to the lightweight rank level of low-rank adaptation (LoRA). With the insight that LoRA essentially aggregates multiple rank-one components that may provide superfluous model capacity, DALorRA imposes stochastic masking on rank dimensions, enabling Bayesian regularization of model capacity during training and ensemble-like calibration during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate DALorRA’s excellent calibration of LLMs without compromising reasoning accuracy.
How Much Can We Trust LLM Search Agents? Measuring Endorsement Vulnerability to Web Content Manipulation
Yimeng Chen | Zhe Ren | Firas Laakom | Yu Li | Dandan Guo | Jürgen Schmidhuber
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yimeng Chen | Zhe Ren | Firas Laakom | Yu Li | Dandan Guo | Jürgen Schmidhuber
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language model (LLM)-based search agents synthesize open-web content into actionable recommendations on behalf of users, creating a risk that attacker-published pages are transformed into endorsed claims. We introduce SearchGEO, a controlled evaluation framework for measuring endorsement corruption in LLM-based web-search agents, combining a web-evidence manipulation pipeline, a five-mode attack taxonomy, and multiple output-level metrics. We evaluate 13 LLM backends on 308 cases each. Results show that vulnerability patterns vary across backends: overall attack success rate (ASR) ranges from 0.0% on Claude-Sonnet-4.6 to 31.4% on Gemini-3-Flash, the strongest attack mode differs by model family, and the same deployment scaffold could amplify or decrease ASR on different backends. An auxiliary agent-skill probe, where endorsement becomes an install command, exposes a sharp split among otherwise robust backends: Claude over-rejects while GPT over-trusts. These findings argue for treating recommendation reliability under adversarial search content as a first-class dimension of backend safety evaluation.