Zijun Wu
2026
Multi-Persona Thinking for Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models
Yuxing Chen | Guoqing Luo | Zijun Wu | Lili Mou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yuxing Chen | Guoqing Luo | Zijun Wu | Lili Mou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit social biases, which can lead to harmful stereotypes and unfair outcomes. We propose Multi-Persona Thinking (MPT), a simple inference-time framework that reduces social bias by encouraging reasoning from multiple perspectives. MPT guides the model to consider contrasting social identities, such as male and female, together with a neutral viewpoint. These viewpoints then interact through an iterative reasoning process to identify and correct biased judgments. This design transforms the potential weakness of persona assignment into a mechanism to mitigate bias. We evaluate MPT on two widely used bias benchmarks with both open-source and closed-source models. Our results show that MPT achieves a lower bias than the existing prompting-based methods while maintaining the core reasoning ability.
Ultra-Low-Dimensional Prompt Tuning via Random Projection
Zijun Wu | Yongchang Hao | Lili Mou
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zijun Wu | Yongchang Hao | Lili Mou
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models achieve state-of-the-art performance but are increasingly costly to fine-tune. Prompt tuning is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that addresses parameter-efficiency by learning prompt embeddings, but these embeddings are typically tied to the model’s hidden dimensionality, limiting parameter saving. In this paper, we propose Ultra-Low-dimensional Prompt Tuning (ULPT), a simple yet effective method that optimizes prompts in a low-dimensional space (e.g., 2D) and uses a frozen random matrix for up-projection. ULPT can achieve 98% reduction in the training parameters compared to vanilla prompt tuning while preserving performance. Our extensive experiments across over 20 NLP tasks demonstrate that ULPT consistently outperforms recent parameter-efficient tuning methods using significantly fewer parameters, making it well-suited as a storage-efficient framework for massive LLM customization.
2025
The Emergence of Chunking Structures with Hierarchical RNN
Zijun Wu | Anup Anand Deshmukh | Yongkang Wu | Jimmy Lin | Lili Mou
Computational Linguistics, Volume 51, Issue 3 - September 2025
Zijun Wu | Anup Anand Deshmukh | Yongkang Wu | Jimmy Lin | Lili Mou
Computational Linguistics, Volume 51, Issue 3 - September 2025
In Natural Language Processing (NLP), predicting linguistic structures, such as parsing and chunking, has mostly relied on manual annotations of syntactic structures. This article introduces an unsupervised approach to chunking, a syntactic task that involves grouping words in a non-hierarchical manner. We present a Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network (HRNN) designed to model word-to-chunk and chunk-to-sentence compositions. Our approach involves a two-stage training process: pretraining with an unsupervised parser and finetuning on downstream NLP tasks. Experiments on multiple datasets reveal a notable improvement of unsupervised chunking performance in both pretraining and finetuning stages. Interestingly, we observe that the emergence of the chunking structure is transient during the neural model’s downstream-task training. This study contributes to the advancement of unsupervised syntactic structure discovery and opens avenues for further research in linguistic theory.1