Zhicong Huang
Author directory2026
Leak-Resistant Unlearning: A New Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Hop Reasoning Consistency and Recovery Robustness
Haoting Qian | Qingjie Zhang | Zhicong Huang | Cheng Hong | Han Qiu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Haoting Qian | Qingjie Zhang | Zhicong Huang | Cheng Hong | Han Qiu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Benchmarking machine unlearning methods is critical to understand whether sensitive knowledge is removed from large language models (LLMs) or not. Current unlearning benchmarks include mainly single-hop questions and a narrow set of multi-hop questions. Although effective, they still face two challenges. (1) Knowledge is not isolated, whereby diverse multi-hop reasoning paths can potentially induce knowledge leakage than normal queries. (2) Unlearning may be fragile: unlearned knowledge can be partially recovered through recovery attacks such as lightweight post-unlearning adaptation, making static evaluation insufficient. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce Leak-resistant Unlearning as a novel benchmark to understand robust LLM knowledge removal across diverse reasoning paths and recovery attacks. We experiment with this benchmark on 3 models, 6 unlearning methods, and 2 carefully curated datasets. Results show that existing methods are vulnerable to multi-hop reasoning paths and recovery attacks. We further explore the trade-off among forget quality, robustness, and model utility for LLM unlearning.
When New Generators Arrive: Lifelong Machine-Generated Text Attribution via Ridge Feature Transfer
Zhen Sun | Yifan Liao | Zhicong Huang | Jiaheng Wei | Cheng Hong | Yutao Yue | Xinlei He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhen Sun | Yifan Liao | Zhicong Huang | Jiaheng Wei | Cheng Hong | Yutao Yue | Xinlei He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Machine-generated text (MGT) attribution aims to identify the specific generator responsible for a given text, thereby providing fine-grained evidence for model accountability and misuse investigation. As new large language models continue to emerge, attribution models must continuously incorporate new generators while preserving their ability to recognize previously seen ones. Prior works have shown that this lifelong MGT attribution setting is challenging, and existing methods often struggle to achieve a stable balance between adapting to new classes and retaining old ones. To address this issue, we propose RidgeFT, a lightweight analytic update framework that does not rely on exemplar replay. RidgeFT trains a task-aware encoder on the initial generator set, stores compact class-wise sufficient statistics when each generator class is first observed, and then freezes the encoder for replay-free closed-form updates. It then suppresses generator-irrelevant variation through covariance calibration, improves representation capacity with fixed random features, and updates new classes through closed-form ridge regression based on class-level sufficient statistics. Across multi-topic evaluations with varying initial generator setups, consistently outperforms baselines. It achieves the best overall macro-F1 across domains, backbones, and incremental protocols, while also improving both old-class retention and new-class adaptation. These results suggest that feature-stable analytic updates provide a simple yet effective approach to lifelong MGT attribution.
Fingerprinting LLMs via Prompt Injection
Yuepeng Hu | Zhengyuan Jiang | Mengyuan Li | Osama Ahmed | Zhicong Huang | Cheng Hong | Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuepeng Hu | Zhengyuan Jiang | Mengyuan Li | Osama Ahmed | Zhicong Huang | Cheng Hong | Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) are often modified after release through post-processing such as post-training or quantization, which makes it challenging to determine whether one model is derived from another. Existing provenance detection methods have two main limitations: (1) they embed signals into the base model before release, which is infeasible for already published models, or (2) they compare outputs across models using hand-crafted or random prompts, which are not robust to post-processing. In this work, we propose LLMPrint, a novel detection framework that constructs fingerprints by exploiting LLMs’ inherent vulnerability to prompt injection. Our key insight is that by optimizing fingerprint prompts to enforce consistent token preferences, we can obtain fingerprints that are both unique to the base model and robust to post-processing. We further develop a unified verification procedure that applies to both gray-box and black-box settings, with statistical guarantees. We evaluate LLMPrint on five base models and around 700 post-trained or quantized variants. Our results show that LLMPrint achieves high true positive rates while keeping false positive rates near zero. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/hifi-hyp/ACL-LLMPrint.