Xinfeng Li
2026
MDTeamGPT: Mitigating Context Collapse and Enabling Self-Evolution in Medical Multi-Agent Reasoning
Kai Chen | Xinfeng Li | Tianpei Yang | Hewei Wang | Guang Yang | Jing Huo | Yang Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Kai Chen | Xinfeng Li | Tianpei Yang | Hewei Wang | Guang Yang | Jing Huo | Yang Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in multi-disciplinary team (MDT) medical consultations. However, long, multi-round, multi-role interaction trajectories inevitably lead to severe information dilution and context window overload, triggering context collapse which destabilizes reasoning. Furthermore, prior systems typically rely on unstructured trajectory history storage without structurally distilling key information or reflecting on errors, severely limiting continuous learning capabilities. We propose MDTeamGPT, a context-resilient and self-evolving multi-agent framework. Mechanistically, we introduce a specialized Lead Physician mechanism combined with a Residual Context architecture to compress and reorganize multi-round consensus, effectively mitigating context overload and reducing computational costs. For memory, we design a Dual Knowledge Base system comprising a CorrectKB for verified trajectories and a ChainKB for reflective error analysis, enabling self-evolution via retrieval from both successes and failures. We evaluated our framework on standard text datasets (MedQA, PubMedQA), multimodal benchmarks (VQA-RAD, SLAKE), and collected more complex clinical problems. Experimental results show that MDTeamGPT substantially outperforms existing baselines across both text-based and multimodal tasks, while also demonstrating superior diagnostic performance and stability in complex clinical scenarios.
AudioStealer: Extracting Audio Prompts via Shapley Value-Guided Query Search
Yingbin Jin | Xingjian Du | Hanjun Luo | Zihao Wang | Haibo Hu | XiaoFeng Wang | Xinfeng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yingbin Jin | Xingjian Du | Hanjun Luo | Zihao Wang | Haibo Hu | XiaoFeng Wang | Xinfeng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
As text-to-music models gain widespread adoption, the prompts used to guide these systems have become valuable intellectual property. This shift has given rise to a new form of attack: prompt stealing, aiming to reconstruct the high-value prompts that guide the music generation. However, unlike prior work in text and image generation, prompt stealing in text-to-music systems faces unique challenges due to the entangled and diffuse nature of semantic representations in audio, which complicates the decoupling of specific textual tokens from acoustic outputs. To address these challenges, we present AudioStealer, the first targeted study of prompt inversion in the audio domain. AudioStealer operates via a two-stage black-box attack framework: first, a heuristic search guided by audio-language embeddings identifies initial candidates; then, these candidates are refined using a game-theoretic strategy based on Shapley value estimation to attribute precise semantic contributions. Our method requires no direct access to the target model and relies solely on a shadow model, making it broadly applicable. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that AudioStealer recovers prompts with high textual consistency to the ground truth, while the regenerated audio maintains strong perceptual similarity to the target recordings. These results expose critical vulnerabilities in the text-to-audio market ecosystem and underscore the urgent need for intellectual property protections in generative audio technologies.
Mitigating Over-Refusal in Aligned Large Language Models via Inference-Time Activation Energy
Eric Hanchen Jiang | Weixuan Ou | Run Liu | Shengyuan Pang | Guancheng Wan | Ranjie Duan | Wei Dong | Kai-Wei Chang | XiaoFeng Wang | Ying Nian Wu | Xinfeng Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Eric Hanchen Jiang | Weixuan Ou | Run Liu | Shengyuan Pang | Guancheng Wan | Ranjie Duan | Wei Dong | Kai-Wei Chang | XiaoFeng Wang | Ying Nian Wu | Xinfeng Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Safety alignment of large language models currently faces a central challenge: existing alignment techniques often prioritize mitigating responses to harmful prompts at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly refuse benign requests. A key goal of safe alignment is therefore to improve safety while simultaneously minimizing false refusals. In this work, we introduce Energy Landscape Steering (ELS), a novel, fine-tuning free framework designed to resolve this challenge through dynamic, inference-time intervention. We trained a lightweight, external Energy-Based Model (EBM) to assign high energy to undesirable (false refusal or jailbreak) states and low energy to desirable (helpful response or safe reject) ones. During inference, the EBM maps the LLM’s internal activations to an energy landscape, and we use the gradient of the energy function to steer the hidden states toward low-energy regions in real time. This dynamically guides the model toward desirable behavior without modifying its parameters. By decoupling behavioral control from the model’s core knowledge, ELS provides a flexible and computationally efficient solution. Extensive experiments across diverse models demonstrate its effectiveness: raising compliance on the ORB-H benchmark from 57.3% to 82.6% while maintaining the baseline safety performance. Our work establishes a promising paradigm for building LLMs that simultaneously achieve high safety and low false refusal rates.
Dynamic Generation of Multi LLM Agents Communication Topologies with Graph Diffusion Models
Eric Hanchen Jiang | Levina Li | Frank Wan | Xiao Liang | Sophia Yin | Yuchen Wu | Xinfeng Li | Yizhou Sun | Wei Wang | Kai-Wei Chang | Ying Nian Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Eric Hanchen Jiang | Levina Li | Frank Wan | Xiao Liang | Sophia Yin | Yuchen Wu | Xinfeng Li | Yizhou Sun | Wei Wang | Kai-Wei Chang | Ying Nian Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The efficiency of multi-agent systems driven by large language models (LLMs) largely hinges on their communication topology. However, designing an optimal topology is a non-trivial challenge, as it requires balancing competing objectives such as task performance, communication cost, and robustness. Existing frameworks often rely on static or hand-crafted topologies, which inherently fail to adapt to diverse task requirements, leading to either excessive token consumption for simple problems or performance bottlenecks for complex ones. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel generative framework called Guided Topology Diffusion (GTD). Inspired by conditional discrete graph diffusion models, GTD formulates topology synthesis as an iterative construction process. At each step, the generation is steered by a lightweight proxy model that predicts multi-objective rewards (e.g., accuracy, utility, cost), enabling real-time, gradient-free optimization towards task-adaptive topologies. This iterative, guided synthesis process distinguishes GTD from single-step generative frameworks, enabling it to better navigate complex design trade-offs. We validated GTD across multiple benchmarks, and experiments show that this framework can generate highly task-adaptive, sparse, and efficient communication topologies, significantly outperforming existing methods in LLM agent collaboration. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/diffusion_agent-953C.
2025
Safety in Large Reasoning Models: A Survey
Cheng Wang | Yue Liu | Baolong Bi | Duzhen Zhang | Zhong-Zhi Li | Yingwei Ma | Yufei He | Shengju Yu | Xinfeng Li | Junfeng Fang | Jiaheng Zhang | Bryan Hooi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Cheng Wang | Yue Liu | Baolong Bi | Duzhen Zhang | Zhong-Zhi Li | Yingwei Ma | Yufei He | Shengju Yu | Xinfeng Li | Junfeng Fang | Jiaheng Zhang | Bryan Hooi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have exhibited extraordinary prowess in tasks like mathematics and coding, leveraging their advanced reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, as these capabilities progress, significant concerns regarding their vulnerabilities and safety have arisen, which can pose challenges to their deployment and application in real-world settings. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of LRMs, meticulously exploring and summarizing the newly emerged safety risks, attacks, and defense strategies specific to these powerful reasoning-enhanced models. By organizing these elements into a detailed taxonomy, this work aims to offer a clear and structured understanding of the current safety landscape of LRMs, facilitating future research and development to enhance the security and reliability of these powerful models.
Pierce the Mists, Greet the Sky: Decipher Knowledge Overshadowing via Knowledge Circuit Analysis
Haoming Huang | Yibo Yan | Jiahao Huo | Xin Zou | Xinfeng Li | Kun Wang | Xuming Hu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Haoming Huang | Yibo Yan | Jiahao Huo | Xin Zou | Xinfeng Li | Kun Wang | Xuming Hu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their remarkable capabilities, are hampered by hallucinations. A particularly challenging variant, knowledge overshadowing, occurs when one piece of activated knowledge inadvertently masks another relevant piece, leading to erroneous outputs even with high-quality training data. Current understanding of overshadowing is largely confined to inference-time observations, lacking deep insights into its origins and internal mechanisms during model training. Therefore, we introduce **PhantomCircuit, a novel framework designed to comprehensively analyze and detect knowledge overshadowing.** By innovatively employing knowledge circuit analysis, PhantomCircuit dissects the function of key components in the circuit and how the attention pattern dynamics contribute to the overshadowing phenomenon and its evolution throughout the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate PhantomCircuit’s effectiveness in identifying such instances, offering novel insights into this elusive hallucination and providing the research community with a new methodological lens for its potential mitigation. Our code can be found in https://github.com/halfmorepiece/PhantomCircuit.
DynamicNER: A Dynamic, Multilingual, and Fine-Grained Dataset for LLM-based Named Entity Recognition
Hanjun Luo | Yingbin Jin | Yiran Wang | Xinfeng Li | Tong Shang | Xuecheng Liu | Ruizhe Chen | Kun Wang | Hanan Salam | Qingsong Wen | Zuozhu Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hanjun Luo | Yingbin Jin | Yiran Wang | Xinfeng Li | Tong Shang | Xuecheng Liu | Ruizhe Chen | Kun Wang | Hanan Salam | Qingsong Wen | Zuozhu Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have spurred a growing interest in their application to Named Entity Recognition (NER) methods. However, existing datasets are primarily designed for traditional machine learning methods and are inadequate for LLM-based methods, in terms of corpus selection and overall dataset design logic. Moreover, the prevalent fixed and relatively coarse-grained entity categorization in existing datasets fails to adequately assess the superior generalization and contextual understanding capabilities of LLM-based methods, thereby hindering a comprehensive demonstration of their broad application prospects. To address these limitations, we propose DynamicNER, the first NER dataset designed for LLM-based methods with dynamic categorization, introducing various entity types and entity type lists for the same entity in different context, leveraging the generalization of LLM-based NER better. The dataset is also multilingual and multi-granular, covering 8 languages and 155 entity types, with corpora spanning a diverse range of domains. Furthermore, we introduce CascadeNER, a novel NER method based on a two-stage strategy and lightweight LLMs, achieving higher accuracy on fine-grained tasks while requiring fewer computational resources. Experiments show that DynamicNER serves as a robust and effective benchmark for LLM-based NER methods. Furthermore, we also conduct analysis for traditional methods and LLM-based methods on our dataset. Our code and dataset are openly available at https://github.com/Astarojth/DynamicNER.
2024
RAGLAB: A Modular and Research-Oriented Unified Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Xuanwang Zhang | Yun-Ze Song | Yidong Wang | Shuyun Tang | Xinfeng Li | Zhengran Zeng | Zhen Wu | Wei Ye | Wenyuan Xu | Yue Zhang | Xinyu Dai | Shikun Zhang | Qingsong Wen
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Xuanwang Zhang | Yun-Ze Song | Yidong Wang | Shuyun Tang | Xinfeng Li | Zhengran Zeng | Zhen Wu | Wei Ye | Wenyuan Xu | Yue Zhang | Xinyu Dai | Shikun Zhang | Qingsong Wen
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate human-level capabilities in dialogue, reasoning, and knowledge retention. However, even the most advanced LLMs face challenges such as hallucinations and real-time updating of their knowledge. Current research addresses this bottleneck by equipping LLMs with external knowledge, a technique known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). However, two key issues constrained the development of RAG. First, there is a growing lack of comprehensive and fair comparisons between novel RAG algorithms. Second, open-source tools such as LlamaIndex and LangChain employ high-level abstractions, which results in a lack of transparency and limits the ability to develop novel algorithms and evaluation metrics. To close this gap, we introduce RAGLAB, a modular and research-oriented open-source library. RAGLAB reproduces 6 existing algorithms and provides a comprehensive ecosystem for investigating RAG algorithms. Leveraging RAGLAB, we conduct a fair comparison of 6 RAG algorithms across 10 benchmarks. With RAGLAB, researchers can efficiently compare the performance of various algorithms and develop novel algorithms.
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- Kai-Wei Chang 2
- Eric Hanchen Jiang 2
- Yingbin Jin 2
- Hanjun Luo 2
- Kun Wang 2
- XiaoFeng Wang 2
- Qingsong Wen 2
- Ying Nian Wu 2
- Baolong Bi 1
- Kai Chen 1
- Ruizhe Chen 1
- Xinyu Dai 1
- Wei Dong 1
- Xingjian Du 1
- Ranjie Duan 1
- Junfeng Fang 1
- Yang Gao 1
- Yufei He 1
- Bryan Hooi 1
- Xuming Hu 1
- Haibo Hu 1
- Haoming Huang 1
- Jing Huo 1
- Jiahao Huo 1
- Zhong-Zhi Li 1
- Levina Li 1
- Xiao Liang (梁霄) 1
- Yue Liu 1
- Xuecheng Liu 1
- Zuozhu Liu 1
- Run Liu 1
- Yingwei MA 1
- Weixuan Ou 1
- Shengyuan Pang 1
- Hanan Salam 1
- Tong Shang 1
- Yun-Ze Song 1
- Yizhou Sun 1
- Shuyun Tang 1
- Guancheng Wan 1
- Frank Wan 1
- Hewei Wang 1
- Cheng Wang 1
- Zihao Wang 1
- Yiran Wang 1
- Yidong Wang 1
- Wei Wang 1
- Zhen Wu 1
- Yuchen Wu 1
- Wenyuan Xu 1
- Yibo Yan 1
- Tianpei Yang 1
- Guang Yang 1
- Wei Ye 1
- Sophia Yin 1
- Shengju Yu 1
- Zhengran Zeng 1
- Duzhen Zhang 1
- Jiaheng Zhang 1
- Xuanwang Zhang 1
- Yue Zhang 1
- Shikun Zhang 1
- Xin Zou 1