Papers by Xiaohua Wang
Enhancing Model Privacy in Federated Learning with Random Masking and Quantization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhibo Xu, Zhu JianHao, Jingwen Xu, Changze Lv, Zhenghua Wang, Zisu Huang, Xiaohua Wang, Muling Wu, Qi Qian, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | federated learning approaches are limited by the complexity of large language models and the need for specialized expertise to protect intellectual property. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated learning approach that leverages random masking to obscure a subnetwork of model parameters and applies quantization to the remaining parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach maintains strong model performance in federated learning settings and achieves enhanced protection of model parameters compared to baseline methods. |
Aligning Large Language Models with Human Preferences through Representation Engineering (2024.acl-long)
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Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Zhu JianHao, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for achieving this alignment involve employing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) Existing approaches involve using RLHF to fine-tune LLMs based on human labels . however, RLRF is susceptible to instability during fine- tuning and presents challenges in implementation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use reinforcement learning from human feedback to fine-tune large language models with human preferences to achieve precise control of model behavior. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAHF can be used to capture and manipulate representations to align with a broad spectrum of human preferences or values rather than being confined to a single concept or function. |
MEVTR: A Multilingual Model Enhanced with Visual Text Representations (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that generate multilingual text representations perform poorly on low-resource languages due to lack of representation space and model capacity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual model enhanced with visual text representations which complements textual representations and extends multilingual representation space with visual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks without the target language adapter. |
MTLS: Making Texts into Linguistic Symbols (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In linguistics, all languages can be considered as symbolic systems . most work overlooks the properties of languages as symbol systems - aaron et al., 1989). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to make texts into linguistic symbols to improve multilingual capability . they use a pre-training method to replace pre-trained language models with a vocabulary map . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual capabilities on multilingual tasks using BERT and RoBERTa as the backbone. |
Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenhao Liu, Siyu An, Junru Lu, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Role-playing Agents (RPAs) struggle to recognize and respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model’s refusal accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves RPAs’ refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities. |
Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, especially in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose several strategies for deploying RAG that balance performance and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a “retrieval as generation” strategy. |
Multimodal Invariant Sentiment Representation Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sensing ignore significant sentiment distribution imbalances and cross-modal sentiment conflicts, hindering performance improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn stable multimodal invariant sentiment representations by incorporating distributional discrepancies and sentiment conflicts into the model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves MSA performance and achieves new state-of-the-art. |
Cross-lingual Multimodal Sentiment Analysis for Low-Resource Languages via Language Family Disentanglement and Rethinking Transfer (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal sentiment analysis methods are limited to textual data and cannot handle multimodal scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a transfer learning framework that allows cross-lingual and cross-modal alignments and a language family disentanglement module that enhances the sharing of language universals within families. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods and can handle low-resource languages. |
HqeKV: Towards Hybrid Quantization and Eviction for KV Cache in Long-Context LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | autoregressive inference requires repeated computation across transformer layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid compression framework built on both quantization and eviction . they propose varying importance metric and flexible conversion policies to reduce memory overhead . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods under memory constraints. |
Proxy-Driven Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Incomplete Data (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on optimizing model structures to handle uncertain missingness, but models still face challenges when dealing with uncertain missing data. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric robust multimodal sentiment analysis method, Proxy-Driven Robust Multimodal Fusion, which maps unimodal data to the latent space of Gaussian distributions to capture core features and structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models in noise resistance and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmark datasets. |
UPLex: Fine-Grained Personality Control in Large Language Models via Unsupervised Lexical Modulation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Tianlong Li, Wenhao Liu, Muling Wu, Shihan Dou, Zhenghua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Personality is a crucial factor that shapes human communication patterns, thereby regulating the personalities of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses an Unsupervisedly-Built Personalized Lexicon (UPL) during the decoding phase to manipulate LLM’s personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can modulate the personality expression of large language models by dynamically altering their predicted probability of upcoming words in a pluggable fashion. |
Advancing Parameter Efficiency in Fine-tuning via Representation Editing (2024.acl-long)
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Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Tianlong Li, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Zhu JianHao, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has gained significant attention for its ability to achieve competitive results while updating only a small subset of trainable parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to fine-tuning neural models that scales and biases the representation produced at each layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the number of trainable parameters by a factor of 25,700 compared to full parameter fine-tuning and by . 32 compared with LoRA. |
DaNet: Dual-Aware Enhanced Alignment Network for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods assume a direct alignment between images and aspects, matching the entire image with a corresponding aspect. Existing algorithms assume 'direct alignment' between images, introducing noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-Aware Enhanced Alignment Network (DaNet) that can enhance fine-grained multimodal aspect-image alignment and denoising. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing methods in three subtasks and is available on https://github.com/***/DaNet. |
Beyond Single Labels: Improving Conversational Recommendation through LLM-Powered Data Augmentation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing recommendation quality face false negatives . only one "silly cop movie" is labeled as positive, leading to suboptimal recommendations . |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework that leverages an LLM-based semantic retriever to identify diverse and semantically relevant items and filter them by a relevance scorer to remove noisy candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on two benchmark datasets and user simulators. |
VIB-Probe: Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models via Variational Information Bottleneck (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing hallucination detection methods rely on external verification tools . however, entanglement of visual-linguistic syntax and noise makes it difficult to detect hallucis . |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination detection framework that leverages the Variational Information Bottleneck theory to detect hallucinic heads and to infer hallucication mitigation strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in hallucinations and noise detection environments. |
Revisiting Jailbreaking for Large Language Models: A Representation Engineering Perspective (2025.coling-main)
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Tianlong Li, Zhenghua Wang, Wenhao Liu, Muling Wu, Shihan Dou, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) however, limited research into the underlying mechanisms that make LLMs vulnerable to such attacks has been conducted. |
| Approach: | They propose that LLMs' self-safeguarding capability is linked to specific activity patterns within their representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be detected with a few pairs of contrastive queries, and the robustness can be manipulated by weakening or strengthening these patterns. |
Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models by Bayesian Sequential Estimation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations require large numbers of observations to be retrieved, increasing response times. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Bayesian sequential analysis to optimize the trade-off between costs and benefits during the hallucination detection process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing methods in efficiency and precision of hallucination detection. |
Measure Children’s Mindreading Ability with Machine Reading (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing scoring models do not take the features of the stories and video clips into account when scoring, which will reduce the accuracy of the models. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the features extracted from stories and videos related to the questions being asked during the children’s mindreading evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework agrees well with human experts on scores produced by the models. |
Improving Continual Pre-training Through Seamless Data Packing (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations across various model architectures and corpus domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming baselines in 99% of all settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a sliding window technique to pack data before continual pre-training to preserve contextual information and enhance model performance. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations across various model architectures and corpus domains demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method outperforming baselines in 99% of settings. |
Promoting Data and Model Privacy in Federated Learning through Quantized LoRA (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhu JianHao, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Tianlong Li, Zixuan Ling, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing federated learning frameworks require substantial data and computational resources to develop large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that distributes a quantized version of the model’s parameters during training and combine it with a popular fine-tuning method to significantly reduce communication costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables accurate estimations for parameter updates while preventing clients from accessing a model whose performance is comparable to the centrally hosted one. |
Controllable Memory Usage: Balancing Anchoring and Innovation in Long-Term Human–Agent Interaction (2026.acl-long)
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Zisu Huang, Muzhao Tian, Xiaohua Wang, Jingwen Xu, Zhengkang Guo, Qi Qian, Kaitao Song, Jiakang Yuan, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing systems that use memory as an "all-or-nothing" approach to memory usage are often static and rely on experience-following tendencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to dynamically regulate memory reliance by adding context into the model's prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms prompting and memory masking strategies in multiple scenarios. |