Papers by Lingrui Mei
Context-DPO: Aligning Language Models for Context-Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
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Baolong Bi, Shaohan Huang, Yiwei Wang, Tianchi Yang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Lingrui Mei, Junfeng Fang, Zehao Li, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shenghua Liu
| Challenge: | Context-DPO is the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance contextfaithfulness for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs' context-faithfulness by 35% to 280% over open-source models. |
Decoding by Contrasting Knowledge: Enhancing Large Language Model Confidence on Edited Facts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context knowledge editing (ICE) is currently the most effective method for knowledge editing, but it is constrained by the black-box modeling of LLMs and lacks interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to decode new knowledge by comparing logits with unedited knowledge to improve the accuracy of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of LLaMA3-8B-instruct on MQuAKE by up to 219%. |
Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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Lingrui Mei, Shenghua Liu, Yiwei Wang, Yuyao Ge, Baolong Bi, Jiayu Yao, Jun Wan, Ziling Yin, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Long contexts break transformers, attention scores dilute, model cannot adapt to novel patterns at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that gates the memory consolidation process by estimating Contextual Utility . they propose GDWM to maintain a form of working memory with constant contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance on sparse-information tasks with 4 fewer gradient steps compared to uniform baselines. |
LPNL: Scalable Link Prediction with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on graph learning with large language models have focused on the link prediction task on large graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for scalable link prediction on large-scale heterogeneous graphs based on large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in link prediction tasks on large graphs. |
a1: Steep Test-time Scaling Law via Environment Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable advances in reasoning, yet continue to struggle with hallucinations, logical errors, and inability to self-correct during complex multi-step tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances LLM reasoning through real-time environmental feedback validating each reasoning step, dynamic branch exploration for investigating alternative solution paths when faced with errors, and experience-based learning from successful reasoning trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms comparable models by 24.4 percentage points across benchmarks while outperforming comparable models. |
SLANG: New Concept Comprehension of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Dynamic nature of language limits the adaptability of Large Language Models (LLMs) Traditionally, LLMs are trained on static data, which limits their adaptability . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to integrate novel data and assess LLMs’ ability to comprehend emerging concepts, alongside a causal inference-based approach to enhance LLM comprehension of new phrases and their colloquial context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in terms of precision and relevance in the comprehension of Internet slang and memes. |
Can Graph Descriptive Order Affect Solving Graph Problems with LLMs? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning and logical deduction. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive analysis of how the order of graph descriptions impacts LLM performance. |
| Outcome: | The results show that graph descriptions significantly improve LLMs’ comprehension of graph structures, and the robustness of LLM models to graph description order varies across different tasks. |
“Not Aligned” is Not “Malicious”: Being Careful about Hallucinations of Large Language Models’ Jailbreak (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | “Jailbreak” is a major safety concern of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking framework to evaluate "jailbreak" outputs . they propose specialized validation framework to ensure outputs are useful malicious instructions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances existing benchmarks to ensure outputs are useful . it also aims to evaluate the true potential of jailbroken outputs to cause harm to human society. |
Vulnerability of Text-to-Image Models to Prompt Template Stealing: A Differential Evolution Approach (2025.findings-acl)
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Yurong Wu, Fangwen Mu, Qiuhong Zhang, Jinjing Zhao, Xinrun Xu, Lingrui Mei, Yang Wu, Lin Shi, Junjie Wang, Zhiming Ding, Yiwei Wang
| Challenge: | Prompt trading has emerged as a significant intellectual property concern in recent years, where vendors entice users by showcasing sample images before selling prompt templates that can generate similar images. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-stealing benchmark consisting of 50 templates and 450 images organized into Easy and Hard difficulty levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods with an average improvement of over 10%. |
Adaptive Token Biaser: Knowledge Editing via Biasing Key Entities (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to update parametric knowledge of large language models (LLMs) are outdated and incontext editing (KE) is not effective due to the substantial cost associated with retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a new decoding technique that enhances in-context editing (ICE) they propose to use parametric knowledge to update the models' knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves ICE performance while incurring only half the latency. |
Who is in the Spotlight: The Hidden Bias Undermining Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG models are sensitive to the order in which evidence is presented, resulting in unstable performance and biased reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to quantify position bias in multimodal RAG systems by using position sensitivity index . they also develop a visualization framework to trace attention allocation patterns across decoder layers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that multimodal interactions intensify position bias compared to unimodal settings and that this bias increases logarithmically with retrieval range. |
AdaptFlow: Adaptive Workflow Optimization via Meta-Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Runchuan Zhu, Bowen Jiang, Lingrui Mei, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Haoxiang Gao, Fengshuo Bai, Pu Zhao, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models rely on static templates or manual workflows. |
| Approach: | AdaptFlow is a language-based meta-learning framework inspired by model-agnostic meta- learning. |
| Outcome: | AdaptFlow outperforms manual and automated workflows on question answering, code generation and mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
HiddenGuard: Fine-Grained Safe Generation with Specialized Representation Router (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current alignment approaches rely on refusal alignment to avoid harmful content . large language models are often overly cautious or overlook subtle harmful content. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fine-grained safe generation in Large Language Models that enables real-time, token-level harmfulness detection and redaction without loss in capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves over 90% in F1 score for detecting and redacting harmful content while preserving overall utility and informativeness of the model’s responses. |