Ting Liu

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2026

The increasing context window greatly extends the capabilities of large language models, but on the other hand, it incurs an unaffordable memory overhead and computational latency due to the increasing Key-Value (KV) cache size. Recent KV cache compression methods manage to reduce the cache size by dropping irrelevant KVs. However, these methods often fail to identify crucial KVs for generation while excluding others accurately, resulting in severe information loss. To address this gap, we propose **IntentKV**, an intention-aware KV cache eviction method that identifies and retains crucial KVs according to the attention distribution of intention, which semantically reflects the user’s goal and determines which part of the context is relevant. The consistency between the semantics and attention distribution is further substantiated through meticulously designed experiments. On this basis, IntentKV first distinguishes intention tokens from the vanilla context tokens based on their attention distribution distances. Then, the block-wise cumulative attention is calculated via aggregating the intention token attention. Finally, blocks that acquire high cumulative attention are picked and stored in KV cache. We evaluate our method across diverse long-context tasks and models. Results demonstrate that IntentKV can effectively maintain the model performance while reducing the KV cache size from 128K to 2K, leading to a 6.3x increase in decoding speed and 7.8x enhancement in memory efficiency compared to the default setting.
Social bot accounts have long been disseminating disinformation and engaging in malicious activities on social media platforms. Detecting these social bots has become a critical and urgent task, essential for maintaining a healthy online ecosystem. Existing social bot detection research usually provides detection results directly without corresponding supportive explanations, making it difficult to assess the extent to which such predictions are trustworthy. This is a key concern for online moderation. In this work, we explore the detection interpretation and summarize a four-dimensional clue framework from individual and social perspectives. We propose CDRBot, which primarily employs outcome-reward reinforcement learning to train inspectors to generate faithful, grounded, and readable clues from the *User Information*, *Semantic Features*, *Interactive Situation*, and *Behavioral Pattern*. These clues are then integrated to make final predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other baselines in detection performance. The generated clues are faithful, grounded, and readable, and can significantly enhance the performance of large language models in social bot detection.
With the evolution of large language models (LLMs), their robustness against individual simple biases has been enhanced. However, we observe that the ensemble of multiple simple biases still exerts a significant adverse impact on LLMs. Given that real-world data samples are typically confounded by a wide range of biases, LLMs tend to exhibit unstable performance when deployed in high-stakes real-world scenarios such as clinical diagnosis and legal document analysis. However, previous benchmarks are constrained to datasets where each sample is manually injected with only one type of bias. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-bias benchmark where each sample contains multiple types of biases. Experimental results reveal that existing LLMs and debiasing methods perform poorly on this benchmark, highlighting the challenge of eliminating such compounded biases.
Experience-driven self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the autonomy of large language model agents, yet its reliance on self-curated experience introduces underexplored safety risks. In this study, we investigate how experience accumulation and utilization in self-evolving agents affect safety performance across web-based and embodied environments. Notably, experience gathered solely from benign tasks can still compromise safety in high-risk scenarios. Further analysis attributes this degradation to the execution-oriented nature of accumulated experience, which reinforces agents’ tendency to act rather than refuse. In more realistic settings where agents encounter both benign and harmful tasks, refusal-related experience mitigates safety decline but induces over-refusal, revealing a fundamental safety–utility trade-off. Overall, our findings expose inherent limitations of current self-evolving agents and call for more principled strategies to ensure safe and reliable adaptation.
Instruction Following (IF) is a core capability of LLMs, requiring strict adherence to diverse constraints, ranging from verifiable ones (e.g., output length) to unverifiable ones (e.g., tone). Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a paradigm for IF tasks, leveraging LLM-as-a-judge to assess unverifiable constraints. However, we empirically find that this approach remains a significant bottleneck, suffering from severe reward hacking and higher computational overhead. In this work, we first analyze the generalization capabilities of unverifiable constraints and discover that specific constraints exhibit distinct, high-generalization patterns. Motivated by this, we propose TinyJudge, a framework that employs an ensemble of specialized tiny language models (e.g., 0.6B) to provide rewards for soft constraints. By distilling expertise from frontier models into these tiny models, it achieves high-precision, lightweight evaluation. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that TinyJudge outperforms the baselines by ~10% in average performance and 12% in reward precision. Crucially, it also achieves a 3× speedup in total training time. Our work provides a scalable and robust path for aligning LLMs with unverifiable human instructions.
Existing causal datasets primarily focus on the commonsense domain, where the questions mainly involve simple, single-hop direct causal relationships. When models possess the corresponding knowledge, even if they cannot understand the causal relationships, they can directly arrive at the correct answers through knowledge matching. However, LLMs often perform poorly when answering questions with complex causal structures and domain-specific expertise. To address the above challenges, we propose MDC-Bench, a multidisciplinary causal evaluation benchmark. MDC-Bench adopts a three-level causal framework consisting of 4 core causal tasks, while its sample content covers 7 representative disciplines and diverse causal structures. In view of the limited coverage of multidisciplinary knowledge during the pre-training phase, the model cannot answer questions relying on knowledge matching. The diverse causal structures force the models to grasp the internal causal logic. We also increase the task complexity through methods such as compound causal operations, aiming to enhance the discriminability among models. MDC-Bench achieves the improvement in terms of domain specialization, structural diversity, and task complexity. Through extensive evaluation, we observe that even the advanced models have substantial room for improvement. MDC-Bench not only establishes a standardized baseline for causal research but also provides valuable insights for the applying LLMs in multiple domains.
Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) has emerged as a critical technique for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to meet diverse downstream applications. However, recent studies have revealed that IFT can compromise the built-in security mechanisms of LLMs, thereby posing significant security risks. Although defense methods targeting various training stages have been proposed, they either face challenges in practical deployment or exhibit instability and limited performance gains. In our study, we propose a novel SWAT method that introduces a key idea: shifting more of the learning burden onto security-robust parameters. To this end, our study investigates how module-level parameters affect LLMs’ internal security feature space, aiming to uncover robustness patterns in parameters. Guided by this analysis, we identify a robust module set (Mods_Rob) that exhibits minimal effects on LLMs’ security feature space. Leveraging this insight, SWAT proceeds in two phases: (1) a warm-up phase that preferentially trains Mods_Rob to learn low-level features with minimal security risk, followed by (2) standard tuning to achieve optimal task performance. Across diverse knowledge-intensive datasets, scenarios, and LLMs, SWAT substantially reduces security risks without sacrificing task performance gains.
Vectorization via Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) architectures is a cornerstone of high-performance computing. To fully exploit hardware potential, developers often resort to explicit vectorization using intrinsics, as compiler-based auto-vectorization frequently yields suboptimal results due to conservative static analysis. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in general code generation, they struggle with explicit vectorization due to the scarcity of high-quality corpora and the strict semantic constraints of low-level hardware instructions. In this paper, we propose AutoVecCoder, a novel framework designed to empower LLMs with the capability of automated explicit vectorization. AutoVecCoder integrates two core components: VecPrompt, an automated data synthesis pipeline to inject domain-specific intrinsic knowledge; and VecRL, a reinforcement learning framework that aligns code generation with execution efficiency. AutoVecCoder-8B trained by this framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SSE and AVX subsets of SimdBench and, in some cases, generates implementations surpassing standard optimizations, effectively overcoming the inherent bottlenecks of traditional automated vectorization.
While Hybrid Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become the standard paradigm for training LLM agents, effective mechanisms for data allocation between these stages remain largely underexplored. Current data arbitration strategies often rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. Since SFT targets pattern consolidation through imitation while RL drives structural adaptation via exploration, misaligning data with these functional roles causes severe optimization interference. We propose PRISM, a dynamics-aware framework grounded in Schema Theory that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model’s existing knowledge. By analyzing the spatial geometric structure of gradients, PRISM identifies data triggering high spatial concentration as high-conflict signals that require RL for structural restructuring. In contrast, data yielding diffuse updates is routed to SFT for efficient consolidation. Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld demonstrate that PRISM achieves a Pareto improvement, outperforming state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 ×. Our findings suggest that disentangling data based on internal optimization regimes is crucial for scalable and robust agent alignment.
Failures are inevitable when embodied agents execute complex tasks. Visual-language models (VLMs) serve as the core component of embodied agents in perceiving the environment and making decisions. Assessing the capabilities of VLMs in detecting and reasoning about failures has become increasingly important. Previous work primarily considered low-level manipulation failures (e.g., 3cm grasp offsets), neglecting high-level failures arising during long-horizon task execution (e.g., object-dropping failure in the “clean room” task) by embodied agents. In this paper, we propose FAER, a failure-aware benchmark aiming to evaluate the performance of VLMs in terms of failure detection, failure categorization, failure description, and failure correction in long-horizon tasks. FAER comprises 3,323 episodes, spanning 3 scenes, 65 tasks, and 83 objects. We assess the performance of 16 widely utilized VLMs and 4 LLMs for FAER tasks. Experimental results show that nearly all VLMs, even GPT-4o, exhibit limited performance in failure detection with a high false negative rate, meaning that they tend to ignore abnormal events, revealing notable gaps in current models’ capacity to effectively handle failures.
Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its efficacy is primarily confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. Extending GRPO to **open-domain settings** remains a critical challenge, as **unconstrained generation** entails multi-faceted and often conflicting objectives—such as creativity versus factuality—where rigid, static reward scalarization is inherently suboptimal. To address this, we propose **MAESTRO** (**M**eta-learning **A**daptive **E**stimation of **S**calarization **T**rade-offs for **R**eward **O**ptimization), which introduces a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as a semantic bottleneck to perceive task-specific priorities. We formulate this as a contextual bandit problem within a bi-level optimization framework, where a lightweight Conductor network co-evolves with the policy by utilizing group-relative advantages as a meta-reward signal. Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines, while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO, and in some settings even reducing redundant generation.