Li Shen
Other people with similar names: Li Shen (Dartmouth)
Unverified author pages with similar names: Li Shen
2026
CTRAP: Embedding Collapse Trap to Safeguard Large Language Models from Harmful Fine-Tuning
Biao Yi | Tiansheng Huang | Baolei Zhang | Tong Li | Lihai Nie | Zheli Liu | Li Shen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Biao Yi | Tiansheng Huang | Baolei Zhang | Tong Li | Lihai Nie | Zheli Liu | Li Shen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Fine-tuning-as-a-service, while commercially successful for Large Language Model (LLM) providers, exposes models to harmful fine-tuning attacks. As a widely explored defense paradigm against such attacks, unlearning attempts to remove malicious knowledge from LLMs, thereby essentially preventing them from being used to perform malicious tasks. However, we highlight a critical flaw: the inherent general adaptability of LLMs allows them to easily bypass selective unlearning by rapidly relearning or repurposing their general capabilities for harmful tasks. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose a paradigm shift: instead of selective removal, we advocate for inducing model collapse, effectively forcing the model to ”unlearn everything”, specifically in response to updates characteristic of malicious adaptation. This collapse directly neutralizes the very general capabilities that attackers exploit, tackling the core issue unaddressed by selective unlearning. We introduce the Collapse Trap (CTRAP) as a practical mechanism to implement this concept conditionally. Embedded during alignment, CTRAP pre-configures the model’s reaction to subsequent fine-tuning dynamics. If updates during fine-tuning constitute a persistent attempt to reverse safety alignment, the pre-configured trap triggers a progressive degradation of the model’s core language modeling abilities, ultimately rendering it inert and useless for the attacker. Crucially, this collapse mechanism remains dormant during benign fine-tuning, ensuring the model’s utility and general capabilities are preserved.
2025
Robust Knowledge Editing via Explicit Reasoning Chains for Distractor-Resilient Multi-Hop QA
Yuchen Wu | Liang Ding | Li Shen | Dacheng Tao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Yuchen Wu | Liang Ding | Li Shen | Dacheng Tao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of world knowledge but remain static once trained, making timely integration of emerging facts prohibitively expensive via full retraining. Knowledge-editing techniques have thus emerged to inject or overwrite specific facts into LLMs, yet they either over-rely on superficial cues or incur complex, iterative pipelines that collapse under noisy, multi-hop conditions. We introduce **Reason-KE**, an end-to-end reasoning-chain-based editing framework that steers a pretrained LLM through four structured stages—fact acknowledgment, relevance determination, selective application, and final reasoning—to filter distractors in a single pass. Trained on MQuAKE-CF with up to four irrelevant facts, Reason-KE elevates Qwen2.5-7B’s multi-hop QA accuracy to 90.2% (↑17.6 pp) while suffering merely 6.3% drop under heavy distraction and <1% when answers are leaked. Our quantitative analysis confirms Reason-KE’s resilience and efficiency, establishing a new state of the art for reliable LLM knowledge updates. The code will be released.
DynamicKV: Task-Aware Adaptive KV Cache Compression for Long Context LLMs
Xiabin Zhou | Wenbin Wang | Minyan Zeng | Jiaxian Guo | Xuebo Liu | Li Shen | Min Zhang | Liang Ding
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Xiabin Zhou | Wenbin Wang | Minyan Zeng | Jiaxian Guo | Xuebo Liu | Li Shen | Min Zhang | Liang Ding
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Efficiently managing the KV cache in Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical challenge for long-context processing tasks such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), long text summarization, and multi-document analysis. Extending the context length substantially increases the KV cache size, leading to excessive memory consumption. Existing KV cache compression methods enforce a fixed pattern, neglecting task-specific characteristics, which hampers the effective retention of essential information while discarding less important tokens. In this paper, we introduce a novel Task-Aware KV cache mechanism that dynamically adjusts the KV cache size across different layers based on the characteristics of the tasks. Our approach builds on the significant observation of distinct activation patterns across layers in various tasks, which highlights the need for adaptive strategies tailored to each task’s unique demands. Based on this insight, we propose DynamicKV, a method that dynamically optimizes token retention by adjusting the number of tokens retained at each layer, adapting to the specific task. DynamicKV establishes global and per-layer maximum KV cache budgets, temporarily retaining the maximum budget for the current layer, and periodically updating the KV cache sizes of all preceding layers during inference. Our method demonstrates exceptional performance on the LongBench dataset, retaining only 1.7% of the KV cache while preserving 90%, 87%, 78%, and 83% of the original accuracy for LlaMA-3-8B-Instruct, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2, Qwen2-7B-Instruct, and InternLM-2.5-7B-Chat-1M, respectively. When the retained KV cache size is increased to 6.9%, the performance becomes nearly indistinguishable from that without any KV cache compression. Notably, even under extreme compression (0.9%), DynamicKV surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by 11% in the Needle-in-a-Haystack test using Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2. The code is available at repository https://github.com/DreamMr/DynamicK.