Shiyu Ji


2025

pdf bib
Lookahead Q-Cache: Achieving More Consistent KV Cache Eviction via Pseudo Query
Yixuan Wang | Shiyu Ji | Yijun Liu | Yuzhuang Xu | Yang Xu | Qingfu Zhu | Wanxiang Che
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Large language models (LLMs) rely on key-value cache (KV cache) to accelerate decoding by reducing redundant computations. However, the KV cache memory usage grows substantially with longer text sequences, posing challenges for efficient deployment. Existing KV cache eviction methods prune tokens using prefilling-stage attention scores, causing inconsistency with actual inference queries, especially under tight memory budgets. In this paper, we propose Lookahead Q-Cache (LAQ), a novel eviction framework that generates low-cost pseudo lookahead queries to better approximate the true decoding-stage queries. By using these lookahead queries as the observation window for importance estimation, LAQ achieves more consistent and accurate KV cache eviction aligned with real inference scenarios. Experimental results on LongBench and Needle-in-a-Haystack benchmarks show that LAQ outperforms existing methods across various budget levels, achieving a 1 4 point improvement on LongBench under limited cache budget. Moreover, LAQ is complementary to existing approaches and can be flexibly combined to yield further improvements.

pdf bib
Enhancing LLM-Based Persuasion Simulations with Cultural and Speaker-Specific Information
Weicheng Ma | Hefan Zhang | Shiyu Ji | Farnoosh Hashemi | Qichao Wang | Ivory Yang | Joice Chen | Juanwen Pan | Michael Macy | Saeed Hassanpour | Soroush Vosoughi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have been used to synthesize persuasive dialogues for studying persuasive behavior. However, existing approaches often suffer from issues such as stance oscillation and low informativeness. To address these challenges, we propose reinforced instructional prompting, a method that ensures speaker characteristics consistently guide all stages of dialogue generation. We further introduce multilingual prompting, which aligns language use with speakers’ native languages to better capture cultural nuances. Our experiments involving speakers from eight countries show that continually reinforcing speaker profiles and cultural context improves argument diversity, enhances informativeness, and stabilizes speaker stances. Moreover, our analysis of inter-group versus intra-group persuasion reveals that speakers engaging within their own cultural groups employ more varied persuasive strategies than in cross-cultural interactions. These findings underscore the importance of speaker and cultural awareness in LLM-based persuasion modeling and suggest new directions for developing more personalized, ethically grounded, and culturally adaptive LLM-generated dialogues.

pdf bib
A Generalizable Rhetorical Strategy Annotation Model Using LLM-based Debate Simulation and Labelling
Shiyu Ji | Farnoosh Hashemi | Joice Chen | Juanwen Pan | Weicheng Ma | Hefan Zhang | Sophia Pan | Ming Cheng | Shubham Mohole | Saeed Hassanpour | Soroush Vosoughi | Michael Macy
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025

Rhetorical strategies are central to persuasive communication, from political discourse and marketing to legal argumentation. However, analysis of rhetorical strategies has been limited by reliance on human annotation, which is costly, inconsistent, difficult to scale. Their associated datasets are often limited to specific topics and strategies, posing challenges for robust model development. We propose a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate and label synthetic debate data based on a four-part rhetorical typology (causal, empirical, emotional, moral). We fine-tune transformer-based classifiers on this LLM-labeled dataset and validate its performance against human-labeled data on this dataset and on multiple external corpora. Our model achieves high performance and strong generalization across topical domains. We illustrate two applications with the fine-tuned model: (1) the improvement in persuasiveness prediction from incorporating rhetorical strategy labels, and (2) analyzing temporal and partisan shifts in rhetorical strategies in U.S. Presidential debates (1960–2020), revealing increased use of affective over cognitive argument in U.S. Presidential debates.

pdf bib
Communication Makes Perfect: Persuasion Dataset Construction via Multi-LLM Communication
Weicheng Ma | Hefan Zhang | Ivory Yang | Shiyu Ji | Joice Chen | Farnoosh Hashemi | Shubham Mohole | Ethan Gearey | Michael Macy | Saeed Hassanpour | Soroush Vosoughi
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown proficiency in generating persuasive dialogue, yet concerns about the fluency and sophistication of their outputs persist. This paper presents a multi-LLM communication framework designed to enhance the generation of persuasive data automatically. This framework facilitates the efficient production of high-quality, diverse linguistic content with minimal human oversight. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that the generated data excels in naturalness, linguistic diversity, and the strategic use of persuasion, even in complex scenarios involving social taboos. The framework also proves adept at generalizing across novel contexts. Our results highlight the framework’s potential to significantly advance research in both computational and social science domains concerning persuasive communication.