Xiao-Wen Chang
2026
EvoEdit: Evolving Null-space Alignment for Robust and Efficient Knowledge Editing
Sicheng Lyu | Yu Gu | Xinyu Wang | Jerry Huang | Sitao Luan | Yufei Cui | Xiao-Wen Chang | Peng Lu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Sicheng Lyu | Yu Gu | Xinyu Wang | Jerry Huang | Sitao Luan | Yufei Cui | Xiao-Wen Chang | Peng Lu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large language models (LLMs) require continual updates to rectify outdated or erroneous knowledge. Model editing has emerged as a compelling paradigm for introducing targeted modifications without the computational burden of full retraining. Existing approaches are mainly based on a locate-then-edit framework. However, in sequential editing contexts, where multiple updates are applied over time, they exhibit significant limitations and suffer from catastrophic interference, i.e., new edits compromise previously integrated updates and degrade preserved knowledge. To address these challenges, we introduce EvoEdit, a novel editing strategy that mitigates catastrophic interference through sequential null-space alignment, enabling stable and efficient model editing. By performing sequential null-space alignment for each incoming edit, EvoEdit preserves both original and previously modified knowledge representations and maintains output invariance on preserved knowledge even across long edit sequences, effectively mitigating interference. Evaluations on real-world sequential knowledge-editing benchmarks show that EvoEdit achieves better or comparable performance than prior state-of-the-art locate-then-edit techniques, with up to 3.53× speedup. Overall, these results underscore the necessity of developing more principled approaches for designing LLMs in dynamically evolving information settings, while providing a simple yet effective solution with strong theoretical guarantees.
MARS: Unleashing the Power of Speculative Decoding via Margin-Aware Verification
Jingwei Song | Xinyu Wang | Hanbin Wang | Xiaoxuan Lei | Tianyu Shi | Shixin Han | Eric Yang | Xiao-Wen Chang | Lynn Ai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jingwei Song | Xinyu Wang | Hanbin Wang | Xiaoxuan Lei | Tianyu Shi | Shixin Han | Eric Yang | Xiao-Wen Chang | Lynn Ai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by decoupling generation and verification. While recent methods improve draft quality by tightly coupling the drafter with the target model, the verification mechanism itself remains largely unchanged, relying on strict token-level rejection sampling. In practice, modern LLMs frequently operate in low-margin regimes where the target model exhibits weak preference among top candidates. In such cases, rejecting plausible runner-up tokens yields negligible information gain while incurring substantial rollback cost, leading to a fundamental inefficiency in verification.We propose Margin-Aware Speculative Verification, a training-free and domain-agnostic verification strategy that adapts to the target model’s local decisiveness. Our method conditions verification on decision stability measured directly from the target logits and relaxes rejection only when strict verification provides minimal benefit. Importantly, the approach modifies only the verification rule and is fully compatible with existing target-coupled speculative decoding frameworks. Extensive experiments across model scales ranging from 8B to 235B demonstrate that our method delivers consistent and significant inference speedups over state-of-the-art baselines while preserving generation quality across diverse benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/5SSjw/MARS.
2025
Improving Context Fidelity via Native Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning
Suyuchen Wang | Jinlin Wang | Xinyu Wang | Shiqi Li | Xiangru Tang | Sirui Hong | Xiao-Wen Chang | Chenglin Wu | Bang Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Suyuchen Wang | Jinlin Wang | Xinyu Wang | Shiqi Li | Xiangru Tang | Sirui Hong | Xiao-Wen Chang | Chenglin Wu | Bang Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with context fidelity, producing inconsistent answers when responding to questions based on provided information. Existing approaches either rely on expensive supervised fine-tuning to generate evidence post-answer or train models to perform web searches without necessarily improving utilization of the given context. We propose CARE, a novel native retrieval-augmented reasoning framework that teaches LLMs to explicitly integrate in-context evidence within their reasoning process with the model’s own retrieval capabilities. Our method requires limited labeled evidence data while significantly enhancing both retrieval accuracy and answer generation performance through strategically retrieved in-context tokens in the reasoning chain. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world and counterfactual QA benchmarks demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms supervised fine-tuning, traditional retrieval-augmented generation methods, and external retrieval solutions. This work represents a fundamental advancement in making LLMs more accurate, reliable, and efficient for knowledge-intensive tasks.