Papers by Xinyang Zhao

7 papers
Modeling Multi-Dimensional Cognitive States in Large Language Models under Cognitive Crowding (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) mainly address isolated tasks such as emotion analysis or stance detection.
Approach: They propose a large-scale model that combines large-level annotations with hyperbolic space to model human cognitive states.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on cognitive dimensions on single dimension tasks while retaining strong hierarchical structure.
Beware of Your Po! Measuring and Mitigating AI Safety Risks in Role-Play Fine-Tuning of LLMs (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing role-play fine-tuning techniques improve role adaptability but may degrade safety performance, especially for villainous characters.
Approach: They propose safety-aware Role-Play Fine-Tuning (SaRFT) to balance role-playing capabilities and safety.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both LoRA and full-parameter fine-tuning settings.
PersLEARN: Research Training through the Lens of Perspective Cultivation (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: PersLEARN is a tool designed to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives . junior researchers struggle to identify the perspectives reflected in the literature and struggle to develop their own viewpoints.
Approach: They propose a tool to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives by interacting with a prompt-based model and allowing students to develop their own perspectives explicitly.
Outcome: The proposed tool outperforms baseline approaches across multiple domains of literature from different perspectives.
DORM: Preference Data Weights Optimization for Reward Modeling in LLM Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences are noisy and varying in importance of preference samples.
Approach: a new method enhances reward modeling by learning to dynamically weigh preference data.
Outcome: a new method improves the performance of large language models with human preferences . it initializes data importance and iteratively refines them to maximize validation performance.
Chain of Strategy Optimization Makes Large Language Models Better Emotional Supporter (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) fails to address these issues, as it trains models on single gold-standard responses without modeling nuanced strategy trade-offs.
Approach: They propose a two-stage framework that optimizes strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn.
AdaSteer: Your Aligned LLM is Inherently an Adaptive Jailbreak Defender (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Activation steering offers training-free defense but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal protection and increased false rejections of benign inputs.
Approach: They propose an adaptive activation steering method that dynamically adjusts model behavior based on input characteristics.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baseline methods across multiple jailbreak attacks with minimal impact on utility.
WASA: WAtermark-based Source Attribution for Large Language Model-Generated Data (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have impressive performance but intellectual property concerns are looming . a framework that can be used to perform source attribution for LLMs can be developed.
Approach: They propose a framework that enables an LLM to generate synthetic texts with embedded watermarks that contain information about their source.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves source attribution accuracy and robustness against adversaries.

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