Siqi Fan
2026
HiSVD: Principled Low-Rank Approximation of LLMs via Hierarchical Modeling of Information Capacity and Spectral Structure
Zhuo Chen | Minghao Li | Xiaoqian Ma | Siqi Fan | Xiusheng Huang | Zhang Liujie | Weihang Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhuo Chen | Minghao Li | Xiaoqian Ma | Siqi Fan | Xiusheng Huang | Zhang Liujie | Weihang Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) enables hardware-agnostic LLM compression via low-rank approximation, yet optimal rank allocation remains a bottleneck. Existing methods predominantly derive layer importance from performance-oriented proxies. Yet, these metrics fail to distinguish between representational importance and structural compressibility, consequently obscuring the fine-grained influence of spectral distribution shape. We demonstrate this disconnect through spectral analysis, revealing that layers with similar information capacity can exhibit markedly different singular value decay behaviors, corresponding to varying degrees of redundancy in the spectral tail. This imperfect coupling implies that allocation strategies driven solely by importance leave significant compression opportunities underexploited. To address this gap, we propose HiSVD, a hierarchical rank allocation framework with two stages: (1) Capacity-Anchored Baseline Allocation, which preserves representational stability by aligning rank budgets with information capacity; and (2) Redundancy-Aware Refinement, which modulates this baseline using tail redundancy to penalize structural excess. Experiments on LLMs demonstrate that HiSVD achieves superior compression efficiency, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by effectively exploiting this spectral heterogeneity.
If an LLM Were a Character, Would It Know Its Own Story? Evaluating Lifelong Learning in LLMs
Siqi Fan | Xiusheng Huang | Yiqun Yao | Xuezhi Fang | Kang Liu | Peng Han | Shuo Shang | Aixin Sun | Yequan Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Siqi Fan | Xiusheng Huang | Yiqun Yao | Xuezhi Fang | Kang Liu | Peng Han | Shuo Shang | Aixin Sun | Yequan Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) can carry out human-like dialogue, but unlike humans, they are stateless due to the superposition property. However, during multi-turn, multi-agent interactions, LLMs begin to exhibit consistent, character-like behaviors—hinting at a form of emergent lifelong learning. Despite this, existing benchmarks often fail to capture these dynamics, primarily focusing on static, open-ended evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce LifeState-BENCH, a benchmark designed to assess lifelong learning in LLMs. It features two episodic datasets—Hamlet and a synthetic script collection—rich in narrative structure and character interactions. Our fact-checking evaluation probes models’ self-awareness, episodic memory retrieval, and relationship tracking, across both parametric and non-parametric approaches. Experiments on models like Llama3.1-8B, GPT-4-turbo, and DeepSeek R1, we demonstrate that non-parametric methods significantly outperform parametric ones in managing stateful learning. However, all models exhibit challenges with catastrophic forgetting as interactions extend, highlighting the need for further advancements in lifelong learning.
2025
Exploiting Contextual Knowledge in LLMs through 𝒱-usable Information based Layer Enhancement
Xiaowei Yuan | Zhao Yang | Ziyang Huang | Yequan Wang | Siqi Fan | Yiming Ju | Jun Zhao | Kang Liu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xiaowei Yuan | Zhao Yang | Ziyang Huang | Yequan Wang | Siqi Fan | Yiming Ju | Jun Zhao | Kang Liu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks, yet they often struggle with context-faithfulness generations that properly reflect contextual knowledge. While existing approaches focus on enhancing the decoding strategies, they ignore the fundamental mechanism of how contextual information is processed within LLMs’ internal states. As a result, LLMs remain limited in their ability to fully leverage contextual knowledge. In this paper, we propose Context-aware Layer Enhancement (CaLE), a novel intervention method that enhances the utilization of contextual knowledge within LLMs’ internal representations. By employing 𝒱-usable information analysis, CaLE strategically amplifies the growth of contextual information at an optimal layer, thereby enriching representations in the final layer. Our experiments demonstrate that CaLE effectively improves context-faithful generation in Question-Answering tasks, particularly in scenarios involving unknown or conflicting contextual knowledge.
Position-Aware Depth Decay Decoding (D3): Boosting Large Language Model Inference Efficiency
Siqi Fan | Xuezhi Fang | Xingrun Xing | Peng Han | Shuo Shang | Yequan Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Siqi Fan | Xuezhi Fang | Xingrun Xing | Peng Han | Shuo Shang | Yequan Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Due to the large number of parameters, the inference phase of Large Language Models (LLMs) is resource-intensive. Unlike traditional model compression, which needs retraining, recent dynamic computation methods show that not all components are required for inference, enabling a training-free pipeline.In this paper, we focus on the dynamic depth of LLM generation. A token-position aware layer skipping framework is proposed to save 1.5x times operations efficiently while maintaining performance.We first observed that tokens predicted later have lower perplexity and thus require less computation. Then, we propose a training-free algorithm called Position-Aware Depth Decay Decoding (), which leverages a power-law decay function, ⌊ L × (𝛼i) ⌋, to determine the number of layers to retain when generating token Ti. Remarkably, without any retraining, the achieves success across a wide range of generation tasks for the first time.Experiments on large language models (the Llama) with 7 ∼ 70 billion parameters show that can achieve an average 1.5x speedup compared with the full-inference pipeline while maintaining comparable performance with nearly no performance drop (<1%) on the GSM8K and BBH benchmarks.
2024
Mitigating Training Imbalance in LLM Fine-Tuning via Selective Parameter Merging
Yiming Ju | Ziyi Ni | Xingrun Xing | Zhixiong Zeng | Hanyu Zhao | Siqi Fan | Zheng Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yiming Ju | Ziyi Ni | Xingrun Xing | Zhixiong Zeng | Hanyu Zhao | Siqi Fan | Zheng Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that the order of training data can lead to significant training imbalances, potentially resulting in performance degradation. Consequently, we propose to mitigate this imbalance by merging SFT models fine-tuned with different data orders, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness of SFT. Additionally, we introduce a novel technique, “parameter-selection merging,” which outperforms traditional weighted-average methods on five datasets. Further, through analysis and ablation studies, we validate the effectiveness of our method and identify the sources of performance improvements.