Linna Zhou
2026
Towards Modern Topic Models: A Survey of Taxonomies and Paradigm Shifts from Algorithm-Centric to LLM-Centered Topic Analysis
Xuan Xu | Zhongliang Yang | Haolun Li | Rui Tian | Beilin Chu | J Song | Yu Li | Shaolin Tan | Linna Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xuan Xu | Zhongliang Yang | Haolun Li | Rui Tian | Beilin Chu | J Song | Yu Li | Shaolin Tan | Linna Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
LLMs have become foundational across many NLP applications, driving a shift from an algorithm-centric to a context-centric paradigm. As an important task in text mining, the landscape of topic modeling (TM) is similarly being reshaped by a growing body of LLM-driven research.We review recent TM developments and categorize existing methods into three groups: Classical Algorithm-Centric, LLM-Assisted, and LLM-Centric. For traditional algorithm-centric methods, we refine prior taxonomies and highlight recent advances. For the LLM-Assisted and LLM-Centric settings, we introduce a new taxonomy that emphasizes the role of LLMs and the design of end-to-end workflows, respectively. We examine two key transformations brought by LLM-centric TM: expanded task scope and a shift from model-level improvements to system-level engineering. We also propose a future roadmap for more optimized LLM-Centric TMs and identify ongoing critical challenges. We aim for this survey to spur closer integration between TM and LLMs and to further drive the progress of modern TM.
AgentMark: Utility-Preserving Behavioral Watermarking for Agents
Kaibo Huang | Jin Tan | Yukun Wei | Wanling Li | Zipei Zhang | Hui Tian | Zhongliang Yang | Linna Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Kaibo Huang | Jin Tan | Yukun Wei | Wanling Li | Zipei Zhang | Hui Tian | Zhongliang Yang | Linna Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to autonomously solve complex tasks, raising urgent needs for IP protection and regulatory provenance. While content watermarking effectively attributes LLM-generated outputs, it fails to directly identify the high-level planning behaviors (e.g., tool and subgoal choices) that govern multi-step execution. Critically, watermarking at the planning-behavior layer faces unique challenges: minor distributional deviations in decision-making can compound during long-term agent operation, degrading utility, and many agents operate as black boxes that are difficult to intervene in directly. To bridge this gap, we propose AgentMark, a behavioral watermarking framework that embeds multi-bit identifiers into planning decisions while preserving utility. It operates by eliciting an explicit behavior distribution from the agent and applying distribution-preserving conditional sampling, enabling deployment under black-box APIs while remaining compatible with action-layer content watermarking. Experiments across embodied, tool-use, and social environments demonstrate practical multi-bit capacity, robust recovery from partial logs, and utility preservation. Code is available at https://github.com/Tooooa/AgentMark.
2025
Semantic Contribution-Aware Adaptive Retrieval for Black-Box Models
Qinhong Lin | Zhongliang Yang | Yuang Cai | Dingfu Yu | Xuan Xu | Yu Li | Linna Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Qinhong Lin | Zhongliang Yang | Yuang Cai | Dingfu Yu | Xuan Xu | Yu Li | Linna Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) plays a critical role in mitigating hallucinations and improving factual accuracy for Large Language Models (LLMs). While dynamic retrieval techniques aim to determine retrieval timing and content based on model intrinsic needs, existing approaches struggle to generalize effectively in black-box model scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose the Semantic Contribution-Aware Adaptive Retrieval (SCAAR) framework. SCAAR iteratively leverages the semantic importance of words in upcoming sentences to dynamically adjust retrieval thresholds and filter information, retaining the top-𝛼% most semantically significant words for constructing retrieval queries. We comprehensively evaluate SCAAR against baseline methods across four long-form, knowledge-intensive generation datasets using four models. Our method achieved the highest score on each dataset with GPT-4o. Extensive experiments also analyze the impact of various hyperparameters within the framework. Our results demonstrate SCAAR’s superior or competitive performance, showcasing its ability to effectively detect model retrieval needs and construct efficient retrieval queries for relevant knowledge about problem-solving in black-box scenarios. Our code is available on https://github.com/linqinhong/SAC.