Papers by Yihua Zhang
SOUL: Unlocking the Power of Second-Order Optimization for LLM Unlearning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jinghan Jia, Yihua Zhang, Yimeng Zhang, Jiancheng Liu, Bharat Runwal, James Diffenderfer, Bhavya Kailkhura, Sijia Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the need for effective unlearning mechanisms to comply with data regulations and ethical AI practices. |
| Approach: | They propose a second-order optimization-based LLM unlearning framework which extends the static, one-shot model update using influence unlearning to a dynamic, iterative unlearning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms first-order methods across unlearning tasks, models, and metrics. |
SEUF: Is Unlearning One Expert Enough for Mixture-of-Experts LLMs? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in LLMs unlearning have shown remarkable success in removing unwanted data-model influences while preserving the model’s utility for legitimate knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Selected-Expert Unlearning Framework (SEUF) that combines expert attribution and an anchor loss to ensure controlled unlearning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves forget quality and model utility by 35% on MoE LLMs across benchmarks and LLM architectures compared to standard unlearning algorithms . |
Exploring Label Hierarchy in a Generative Way for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hierarchical text classification are lacking in the field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchy-aware T5 model with path-adaptive attention mechanism to exploit hierarchical dependency across different levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models especially in Macro-F1 and low Macro. |
Reasoning Model Unlearning: Forgetting Traces, Not Just Answers, While Preserving Reasoning Skills (2025.emnlp-main)
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Changsheng Wang, Chongyu Fan, Yihua Zhang, Jinghan Jia, Dennis Wei, Parikshit Ram, Nathalie Baracaldo, Sijia Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for LRM unlearning overlook critical information leakage in reasoning traces, even when final answers are successfully removed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that suppresses reasoning traces while preserving the model's general reasoning ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces reasoning trace leakage and achieves strong performance across reasoning and safety benchmarks, including WMDP, StrongReject, JBB-Behaviors and WildJailbreak. |
Unlearners Can Lie: Evaluating and Improving Honesty in LLM Unlearning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning in large language models often hallucinate, generate abnormal token sequences, or behave inconsistently, raising safety and trust concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal definition of unlearning honesty that preserves both utility and honesty on retained knowledge and ensures effective forgetting while encouraging the model to acknowledge its limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves highest rejection rate and refusal stability on Q A tasks from the forget set, nearly double the second-best method. |
ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yihua Zhang, Mingfu Liang, Jiyan Yang, Rong Jin, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Luke Simon, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal recommenders lack explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves ranking metrics and performance on four standard recommendation tasks across five real-world datasets. |
Android in the Zoo: Chain-of-Action-Thought for GUI Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models (LLMs) focus on the semantics of smartphone operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model (LLM) which predicts a sequence of actions of API by analyzing past actions and visual observations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the prediction of actions on a zero-shot Android-In-The-Zoo dataset compared to previous models . |