Yuanjie Zhu
2026
LLM-MemCluster: Empowering Large Language Models with Dynamic Memory for Text Clustering
Yuanjie Zhu | Liangwei Yang | Ke Xu | Weizhi Zhang | Zihe Song | Jindong Wang | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Towards Knowledgeable Foundation Models (KnowFM 2026)
Yuanjie Zhu | Liangwei Yang | Ke Xu | Weizhi Zhang | Zihe Song | Jindong Wang | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Towards Knowledgeable Foundation Models (KnowFM 2026)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping unsupervised learning by offering an unprecedented ability to perform text clustering based on their deep semantic understanding. However, their direct application is fundamentally limited by a lack of stateful memory for iterative refinement and the difficulty of managing cluster granularity. As a result, existing methods often rely on complex pipelines with external modules, sacrificing a truly end-to-end approach. We introduce LLM-MemCluster, a novel framework that reconceptualizes clustering as a fully LLM-native task. It leverages a Dynamic Memory to instill state awareness and a Dual-Prompt Strategy to enable the model to reason about and determine the number of clusters. Evaluated on several benchmark datasets, our tuning-free framework significantly and consistently outperforms strong baselines. LLM-MemCluster presents an effective, interpretable, and truly end-to-end paradigm for LLM-based text clustering.
Why LLMs Hallucinate on Structured Knowledge: A Mechanistic Analysis of Reasoning over Linearized Representations
Shanghao Li | Jinda Han | Yibo Wang | Yuanjie Zhu | Zihe Song | Langzhou He | Kenan Kamel A Alghythee | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shanghao Li | Jinda Han | Yibo Wang | Yuanjie Zhu | Zihe Song | Langzhou He | Kenan Kamel A Alghythee | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In many reasoning tasks, large language models (LLMs) rely on structured external knowledge, such as graphs and tables, which is typically linearized into sequential token representations. However, even when sufficient knowledge is available, LLMs can still produce hallucinated outputs, and the underlying mechanisms behind such failures remain poorly understood. We investigate these mechanisms and find that hallucinations arise from systematic internal dynamics rather than random noise. First, attention disproportionately concentrates toward shortcut-like structural cues rather than distributing across the full context. Second, feed-forward representations fail to ground the provided knowledge, causing the model to revert to parametric memory. Moreover, our results indicate that hallucination is consistently associated with failures in semantic grounding within feed-forward layers, while attention allocation exhibits greater task-dependent variability. Finally, we show that these mechanistic patterns generalize beyond single-hop graphs to multi-hop and tabular settings, enabling effective hallucination detection across structured knowledge formats.