Papers by Tianyu Du
Probing the Geometry of Truth: Consistency and Generalization of Truth Directions in LLMs Across Logical Transformations and Question Answering Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast corpora that contain substantial knowledge but their outputs often contain confidently stated inaccuracies. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode truthfulness as a distinct linear feature, termed the "truth direction", which can classify truthfulness reliably. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to logical transformations, question-answering tasks, in-context learning, and external knowledge sources. |
VideoEraser: Concept Erasure in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that VideoEraser outperforms prior methods regarding efficacy, integrity, fidelity, robustness, and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that prevents T2V diffusion models from generating videos with undesirable concepts even when explicitly prompted with those concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in erasure, celebrity erasion, and explicit content erasing tasks. |
KARPA: A Training-free Method of Adapting Knowledge Graph as References for Large Language Model’s Reasoning Path Aggregation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) are limited by step-by-step decision-making on KGs, or require fine-tuning or pre-training on specific KG. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that harnesses the global planning abilities of large language models (LLMs) for efficient and accurate KG reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in KGQA tasks, delivering both high efficiency and accuracy. |
IW-Bench: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Converting Image-to-Web (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongcheng Guo, Wei Zhang, Junhao Chen, Yaonan Gu, Jian Yang, Junjia Du, Shaosheng Cao, Binyuan Hui, Tianyu Liu, Jianxin Ma, Chang Zhou, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing models have been introduced to improve image comprehension, but there is no robust benchmark for imagetoweb conversion. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess imagetoweb conversion proficiency of large multimodal models . they propose to measure layout information of web pages by parsing the Document Object Model tree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures the layout information of web pages—i.e., the positional relationships between elements—which has been overlooked by prior work. |
LongSpec: Long-Context Lossless Speculative Decoding with Efficient Drafting and Verification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can process extremely long contexts, requiring efficient inference over extended inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses a constant-sized key-value cache to train long-context models. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that LongSpec achieves 3.26x speedup over strong Flash Attention baselines and 2.34x wall clock time on four math reasoning tasks. |
RA-ISF: Learning to Answer and Understand from Retrieval Augmentation via Iterative Self-Feedback (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in numerous tasks but the parameterized knowledge stored within LLMs may be incomplete and hard to incorporate up-to-date knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively decomposes tasks and processes them in three submodules to enhance the model’s problem-solving capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks on GPT3.5, Llama2 and other large language models significantly enhancing factual reasoning capabilities and reducing hallucinations. |
A Fast and High-quality Text-to-Speech Method with Compressed Auxiliary Corpus and Limited Target Speaker Corpus (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate high-quality speech with limited target speaker corpus require extensive training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an auxiliary corpus compression algorithm that reduces the training cost while the naturalness of synthesized speech is not significantly degraded. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces training costs while maintaining the naturalness of synthesized speech. |
“I See What You Did There”: Can Large Vision-Language Models Understand Multimodal Puns? (2026.acl-long)
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Naen Xu, Jiayi Sheng, Changjiang Li, Chunyi Zhou, Yuyuan Li, Tianyu Du, Jun Wang, Zhihui Fu, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Puns are a common form of rhetorical wordplay that exploits polysemy and phonetic similarity to create humor. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal pun generation pipeline and a model to evaluate their understanding of puns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves the understanding of multimodal puns by 16.5% in the F1 test. |
CLMTracing: Black-box User-level Watermarking for Code Language Model Tracing (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Open-source code language models (code LMs) are a growing threat for intellectual property protection. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box code LM watermarking framework that uses rule-based watermarks and utility-preserving injection method for user-level model tracing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it performs well across multiple state-of-the-art code LMs and is harmless compared to existing baselines. |
ACIArena: Toward Unified Evaluation for Agent Cascading Injection (2026.acl-long)
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Hengyu An, Minxi Li, Jinghuai Zhang, Naen Xu, Chunyi Zhou, Changjiang Li, Xiaogang Xu, Tianyu Du, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Existing studies consider only limited attack strategies and simplified MAS settings, limiting their generalizability and comprehensive evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the robustness of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) they propose unified evaluation suites spanning attack surfaces and attack objectives . |
| Outcome: | ACIArena provides a benchmark of 1,356 test cases for evaluating MAS robustness . it covers six widely used MAS implementations and provides measurable results . |
IPIGuard: A Novel Tool Dependency Graph-Based Defense Against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks rely on assumptions about the model's inherent security, which lacks structural constraints on agent behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task execution paradigm that models the agents’ task execution process as a traversal over a planned Tool Dependency Graph (TDG). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces unintended tool invocations triggered by injected instructions, enhancing robustness against IPI attacks. |
Efficiently Computing Susceptibility to Context in Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a current language model is able to incorporate information from a user-input context when answering queries, but it is not equally sensitive to subtle changes to that context. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric to quantify the degree to which contexts can influence a model’s response to a query at a distributional level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is comparable to Monte Carlo's estimated susceptibility across a diverse set of query domains despite being 70 faster. |
COIG-P: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Chinese Preference Dataset for Alignment with Human Values (2026.findings-eacl)
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Siwei Wu, JinCheng Ren, Xeron Du, Shuyue Guo, Xingwei Qu, Yiming Liang, Jie Liu, Yunwen Li, Tyler Loakman, Tianyu Zheng, Boyu Feng, Huaqing Yuan, Zili Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wenhao Huang, Chenglin Cai, Haoran Que, Jian Yang, Yuelin Bai, Zekun Moore Wang, Zhouliang Yu, Qunshu Lin, Ding Pan, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Tiannan Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Shenzhi Wang, Xingyuan Bu, Minghao Liu, Guoyin Wang, Ge Zhang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese preference datasets suffer from limited scale, restricted domain coverage, and insufficiently rigorous data validation. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based data annotation pipeline with no human intervention to annotate Chinese preference datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing Chinese preference datasets on AlignBench and Chinese Reward Benchmark. |
Compiling Activation Steering into Weights via Null-Space Constraints for Stealthy Backdoors (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Yin, Tianxu Han, Naen Xu, Changjiang Li, Ping He, Chunyi Zhou, Jun Wang, Zhihui Fu, Tianyu Du, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods to inject safety-aligned large language models rely on token-level mappings, which do not guarantee sustained harmful output. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that directly modifies model weights to map a trigger to an attacker-specified response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high triggered attack success while maintaining non-triggered safety and general utility. |
DROWN: Towards Tighter LiRPA-based Robustness Certification (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for certifying the robustness of deep neural networks suffer from precision or scalability issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to certify the robustness of deep neural networks . they propose to use two pairs of linear bounds to refine pre-activation bounds . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher certified robustness than the baseline on CNNs and 4.68 times larger certified radii than the Transformers. |
PerMemSafe: Benchmarking Implicit Personalized Safety of Long Horizon Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing self-evolving agents have a low safety rate in long-horizon interactions . however, this reliance on context-independent safety evaluations is insufficient . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly models personalized risk inference and memory evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves implicit personalized safety by 23.8% over prior frameworks while maintaining helpfulness in long-horizon interactions. |
COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Yiming Liang, Leo Jin, Junting Zhou, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Mingshan Chang, Tianyu Zheng, Xincheng Zhang, Nuo Ma, Zekun Moore Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Haihong Wu, Hongquan Lin, Wenhao Huang, Jiajun Zhang, Chenghua Lin, Jie Fu, Min Yang, Shiwen Ni, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for Chinese instruction tuning are not well-aligned with Chinese users’ interaction patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese instruction tuning datasets to improve instruction fine-tuning for Chinese users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that Chinese models achieve competitive performance in diverse benchmarks. |
SecCoder: Towards Generalizable and Robust Secure Code Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing secure code generation methods have limited generalizability to unseen test cases and poor robustness against the attacked model, leading to safety failures in code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalizable and robust secure code generation method SecCoder by using in-context learning and the safe demonstration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a significant security improvement of 7.20% on unseen test cases and better robustness against the attacked model. |
ERA-CoT: Improving Chain-of-Thought through Entity Relationship Analysis (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning capabilities in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach ERA-CoT which aids LLMs in understanding context by capturing relationships between entities and supports the reasoning of diverse tasks through Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on GPT3.5 and previous SOTA prompting methods by an average of 5.1% compared to previous prompting approaches. |