Papers by Zhenyu Yan
FunnelRAG: A Coarse-to-Fine Progressive Retrieval Paradigm for RAG (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted in Large Language Models, but is flat and has limitations such as a significant burden on one retriever and constant granularity limits the ceiling of retrieval performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive retrieval paradigm with coarse-to-fine granularity for RAG, termed FunnelRAG, so as to balance effectiveness and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves comparable retrieval performance while the time overhead is reduced by nearly 40%. |
“I’ve Decided to Leak”: Probing Internals Behind Prompt Leakage Intents (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jianshuo Dong, Yutong Zhang, Liu Yan, Zhenyu Zhong, Tao Wei, Ke Xu, Minlie Huang, Chao Zhang, Han Qiu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit prompt leakage vulnerabilities, raising intellectual property and confidentiality concerns. |
| Approach: | They use probing techniques to capture LLMs’ intent-related internal representations and show that they internalize prompt leakage intents in their hidden states before generating tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed probes achieve 90%+ AUROC across all tested models, even when applied to new system prompts and attacks. |
Beyond Static Persona Consistency: Dynamic Persona Coherence in LLM Role-Playing (2026.acl-long)
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Yirui QI, Xiaoming Zhang, Ruilin Zeng, Mengyao Liu, Ziyi Zhou, Dezhuang Miao, Bingyu Yan, Zhenyu Guan
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs conflate identity consistency with emotional rigidity . Existing models exhibit either robotic repetition or persona drift . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples Identity-Layer Stability from Adaptive-Layer Appropriateness to achieve persona coherence repair. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and DeepSeek-V3.2 show consistent improvements (+16–84% gains) |
Revitalizing Black-Box Interpretability: Actionable Interpretability for LLMs via Proxy Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Applying model-agnostic explanations to Large Language Models is hindered by prohibitive computational costs rendering them dormant for real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a budget-friendly proxy framework that leverages efficient models to approximate the decision boundaries of expensive Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves over 90% fidelity with only 9.5% of the oracle’s cost and is open-source to facilitate future research. |
Revisiting the Reliability of Language Models in Instruction-Following (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Several benchmarks have been proposed to measure instruction-following accuracy, but these scores do not translate to reliable services in real-world use. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric reliable@k and develop an automated pipeline to generate cousin prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be instantiated with cousin prompts and generates high-quality cousin prompt data. |