Papers by Fengli Xu
Controllable LLM Reasoning via Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods struggle to control fine-grained reasoning strategies due to conceptual entanglement in LRMs’ hidden states. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose strategy-entangled hidden states into a disentangled feature space by using Sparse Autoencoders to identify the few strategy-specific features from the vast pool of SAE features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 15% in control effectiveness. |
Identifying Collective Intelligence Factor in LLM Agent Groups for Generalizable Multi-Agent System Design (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have focused on designing customized MAS for specific tasks . a critical research question remains: do LLM agent groups exhibit a form of "general intelligence" |
| Approach: | They find a Collective Intelligence factor in human groups that captures their general capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts the ACI factor based on the features of LLM agent groups and can improve generalization abilities. |
Diffuse Thinking: Exploring Diffusion Language Models as Efficient Thought Proposers for Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, yet their autoregressive generation paradigm makes it computationally prohibitive to explore diverse reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines diffusion-based generation with autoregressive evaluation to efficiently generate diverse intermediate reasoning thoughts and employ LLMs as evaluators to assess and select candidates based on their plausibility and correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves inference efficiency while maintaining competitive or superior reasoning accuracy. |