Papers by Zekai Lin
English as Defense Proxy: Mitigating Multilingual Jailbreak via Eliciting English Safety Knowledge (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in many tasks, but their safety guarantees vary by language. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified approach that leverages English as a universal safety anchor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach leverages English as defense proxy (E-Proxy) to transfer safety knowledge across languages. |
Parameter Importance is Not Static: Evolving Parameter Isolation for Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zekai Lin, Chao Xue, Di Liang, Xingsheng Han, Peiyang Liu, Xianjie Wu, Lei Jiang, Yu Lu, Bob Simons, Shuang Liang, Minlong Peng
| Challenge: | Recent approaches to fine-tuning of large language models suffer from task interference and catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning framework that adapts isolation decisions based on online estimates of parameter importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces interference and forgetting while releasing outdated parameters to recover plasticity. |
BanditMTL: Bandit-based Multi-task Learning for Text Classification (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to regularize task variance are unexplored in multi-task text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning method based on adversarial multi-armed bandit to regularize the task variance by means of a mirror gradient ascent-descent algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art in multi-task text classification. |
MASPO: Unifying Gradient Utilization, Probability Mass, and Signal Reliability for Robust and Sample-Efficient LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaoliang Fu, Jiaye Lin, Yangyi Fang, Binbin Zheng, Chaowen Hu, Zekai Shao, Cong Qin, Lu Pan, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing RLVR algorithms rely on rigid, uniform, and symmetric trust region mechanisms . current algorithms lack robustness, asymmetric signal reliability and inefficient gradient utilization . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to harmonize three dimensions of RLVR algorithms, a paper argues . a binary cutoff is used to discard valuable reinforcement signals, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in evaluating a robust RLVR solution. |
From log 𝜋 to 𝜋: Taming Divergence in Soft Clipping via Bilateral Decoupled Decay of Probability Gradient Weight (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaoliang Fu, Jiaye Lin, Yangyi Fang, Chaowen Hu, Cong Qin, Zekai Shao, Binbin Zheng, Lu Pan, Ke Zeng
| Challenge: | Standard algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) enforce stability via "hard clipping" but relying on log-probability gradient yields divergent weights as probabilities vanish, destabilizing LLM training. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled gradient policy optimization that uses a decay mechanism to decouple the probability of a boundary token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms baselines on various mathematical benchmarks. |
Read it in Two Steps: Translating Extremely Low-Resource Languages with Code-Augmented Grammar Books (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using code rules improves rule retrieval and application of grammar books in low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose a grammar rule retrieval and application step into two steps . they propose to represent grammar rules as code functions to facilitate LLM reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts rule retrieval and application, resulting in 13.1% BLEU improvement. |
MetaWeighting: Learning to Weight Tasks in Multi-Task Learning (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing task weighting methods assign weights only based on training losses, while ignoring the gap between the training loss and generalization loss. |
| Approach: | They propose a task weighting algorithm which automatically weights the tasks via a learning-to-learn paradigm and a multi-task text classification paradigm. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in multi-task text classification. |