Papers by Ziwen Zhang
Detoxifying Large Language Models via Knowledge Editing (2024.acl-long)
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Mengru Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Ziwen Xu, Zekun Xi, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Qishen Zhang, Linyi Yang, Jindong Wang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) are limiting, but knowledge editing can be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a baseline method to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) they propose supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces toxicity of large language models with one instance of tuning . it reduces the toxicity, while minimizing the toxins, the authors show . |
Beyond Prompt Engineering: Robust Behavior Control in LLMs via Steering Target Atoms (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has explored the use of sparse autoencoders (SAE) to disentangle knowledge in high-dimensional spaces for steering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that isolates and manipulates disentangled knowledge components to enhance safety by using sparse autoencoders to disentangle knowledge in high-dimensional spaces for steering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to isolate and manipulate disentangled knowledge components to enhance safety in large reasoning models. |
EasyEdit: An Easy-to-use Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Peng Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Bozhong Tian, Zekun Xi, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu, Mengru Wang, Shengyu Mao, Xiaohan Wang, Siyuan Cheng, Kangwei Liu, Yuansheng Ni, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to outdated/noisy data. |
| Approach: | They propose an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for Large Language Models that allows users to easily edit updated knowledge and adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization. |
TS-CLIP: Time Series Understanding by CLIP (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated remarkable success in aligning vision and language. |
| Approach: | They propose a synonym bank mechanism that generates synonym embeddings as alignment targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 51 datasets. |
How Controllable Are Large Language Models? A Unified Evaluation across Behavioral Granularities (2026.acl-long)
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Ziwen Xu, Kewei Xu, Haoming Xu, Haiwen Hong, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Ningyu Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen, Shumin Deng
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive domains, yet their unpredictable behaviors pose significant risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating LLM controllability across three domains: language features, sentiment, and personality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework offers a principled and interpretable framework for safe and controllable LLM behavior serving as a foundation for future research. |
Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention for Chinese NER (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a computationally difficult task in Chinese since there is no natural delimiter between words in sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention mechanism to select the most relevant characters to enhance Transformer architecture for Chinese named entity recognition. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four benchmark Chinese NER datasets show the proposed mechanism improves performance. |
EasyInstruct: An Easy-to-use Instruction Processing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Yixin Ou, Ningyu Zhang, Honghao Gui, Ziwen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Runnan Fang, Lei Li, Zhen Bi, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved performance across tasks and domains . instruction tuning is a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of LLMs - but there is no standard open-source instruction processing framework available for the community . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source instruction tuning framework for Large Language Models that modularizes instruction generation, selection, prompting and their combination and interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is open-source and available on Github. |
Knowledge Mechanisms in Large Language Models: A Survey and Perspective (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Shumin Deng, Peng Wang, Xiang Chen, Jia-Chen Gu, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Using large language models, we can understand knowledge mechanisms in LLMs for learning, storage, utilization, and evolution. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze knowledge mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) they examine utilization, evolution, and the potential dark knowledge (hypothesis) they hope to help understand knowledge in LLMs and provide insights for future research . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to analyze the evolution of parametric knowledge in LLMs. |
EasyEdit2: An Easy-to-use Steering Framework for Editing Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Ziwen Xu, Shuxun Wang, Kewei Xu, Haoming Xu, Mengru Wang, Xinle Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities, however, they may still generate unreliable or unsafe outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows plug-and-play adjustability for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The framework is designed to enable plug-and-play adjustability for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors. |
Why Steering Works: Toward a Unified View of Language Model Parameter Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
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Ziwen Xu, Chenyan WU, Hengyu Sun, Haiwen Hong, Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Shumin Deng, Zhixuan Chu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs) are often studied in isolation, obscuring connections and making comparison difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference and utility, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves preference while preserving utility. |