Xixun Lin
2026
EA-Agent: A Structured Multi-Step Reasoning Agent for Entity Alignment
Yixuan Nan | Xixun Lin | Yanmin Shang | Ge Zhang | Zheng Fang | Fang Fang | Yanan Cao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yixuan Nan | Xixun Lin | Yanmin Shang | Ge Zhang | Zheng Fang | Fang Fang | Yanan Cao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) that refer to the same real-world object and plays a critical role in knowledge fusion and integration. Traditional EA methods mainly rely on knowledge representation learning, but their performance is often limited under noisy or sparsely supervised scenarios. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been introduced to EA and achieved notable improvements by leveraging rich semantic knowledge. However, existing LLM-based EA approaches typically treat LLMs as black-box decision makers, resulting in limited interpretability, and the direct use of large-scale triples substantially increases inference cost. To address these challenges, we propose EA-Agent, a reasoning-driven agent for EA. EA-Agent formulates EA as a structured reasoning process with multi-step planning and execution, enabling interpretable alignment decisions. Within this process, it introduces attribute and relation triple selectors to filter redundant triples before feeding them into the LLM, effectively addressing efficiency challenges. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that EA-Agent consistently outperforms existing EA methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EA-Agent-5696.
Do LLMs Know Tool Irrelevance? Demystifying Structural Alignment Bias in Tool Invocations
Yilong Liu | Xixun Lin | Pengfei Cao | Ge Zhang | Fang Fang | Yanan Cao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yilong Liu | Xixun Lin | Pengfei Cao | Ge Zhang | Fang Fang | Yanan Cao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in utilizing external tools. In practice, however, LLMs are often exposed to tools that are irrelevant to the user’s query, in which case the desired behavior is to refrain from invocations. In this work, we identify a widespread yet overlooked mechanistic flaw in tool refusal, which we term structural alignment bias: Even when a tool fails to serve the user’s goal, LLMs still tend to invoke it whenever query attributes can be validly assigned to tool parameters. To systematically study this bias, we introduce SABEval, a new dataset that decouples structural alignment from semantic relevance. Our analysis shows that structural alignment bias induces severe tool-invocation errors in LLMs, yet remains largely unaccounted for in existing evaluations. To investigate the internal mechanisms underlying this bias, we propose Contrastive Attention Attribution, which reveals two competing pathways for semantic checking and structural matching. The relative strength of these pathways drives LLMs’ tool invocation decisions. Based on these findings, we further introduce a rebalancing strategy that effectively mitigates structural alignment bias, as demonstrated by extensive experiments, without degrading general tool-use capabilities.
CIA: Inferring the Communication Topology from LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems
Yongxuan Wu | Xixun Lin | He Zhang | Nan Sun | Kun Wang | Chuan Zhou | Shirui Pan | Yanan Cao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yongxuan Wu | Xixun Lin | He Zhang | Nan Sun | Kun Wang | Chuan Zhou | Shirui Pan | Yanan Cao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks. Central to MAS is the communication topology which governs how agents exchange information internally. Consequently, the security of communication topologies has attracted increasing attention. In this paper, we investigate a critical privacy risk: MAS communication topologies can be inferred under a restrictive black-box setting, exposing system vulnerabilities and posing significant intellectual property threats. To explore this risk, we propose Communication Inference Attack (CIA), a novel attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents’ reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the proposed global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision. Extensive experiments on MAS with optimized communication topologies demonstrate the effectiveness of CIA, achieving an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC of up to 0.99, thereby revealing the substantial privacy risk in MAS. The source code is available at https://github.com/aabbbcd/CIA.
2025
Reliably Bounding False Positives: A Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection Framework via Multiscaled Conformal Prediction
Xiaowei Zhu | Yubing Ren | Yanan Cao | Xixun Lin | Fang Fang | Yangxi Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xiaowei Zhu | Yubing Ren | Yanan Cao | Xixun Lin | Fang Fang | Yangxi Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The rapid advancement of large language models has raised significant concerns regarding their potential misuse by malicious actors. As a result, developing effective detectors to mitigate these risks has become a critical priority. However, most existing detection methods focus excessively on detection accuracy, often neglecting the societal risks posed by high false positive rates (FPRs). This paper addresses this issue by leveraging Conformal Prediction (CP), which effectively constrains the upper bound of FPRs. While directly applying CP constrains FPRs, it also leads to a significant reduction in detection performance. To overcome this trade-off, this paper proposes a Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection Framework via Multiscaled Conformal Prediction (MCP), which both enforces the FPR constraint and improves detection performance. This paper also introduces RealDet, a high-quality dataset that spans a wide range of domains, ensuring realistic calibration and enabling superior detection performance when combined with MCP. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MCP effectively constrains FPRs, significantly enhances detection performance, and increases robustness against adversarial attacks across multiple detectors and datasets.
Enhancing Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion via Structure-Aware Alignment-Tuning
Yu Liu | Yanan Cao | Xixun Lin | Yanmin Shang | Shi Wang | Shirui Pan
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yu Liu | Yanan Cao | Xixun Lin | Yanmin Shang | Shi Wang | Shirui Pan
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer new knowledge and make predictions from knowledge graphs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities. LLM-enhanced KGC methods primarily focus on designing task-specific instructions, achieving promising advancements. However, there are still two critical challenges. First, existing methods often ignore the inconsistent representation spaces between natural language and graph structures. Second, most approaches develop separate instructions for different KGC tasks, leading to duplicate works and time-consuming processes. To address these challenges, we propose SAT, a novel framework that enhances LLMs for KGC via structure-aware alignment-tuning. Specifically, we first introduce hierarchical knowledge alignment to align graph embeddings with the natural language space through multi-task contrastive learning. Then, we propose structural instruction tuning to guide LLMs in performing structure-aware reasoning over KGs, using a unified graph instruction combined with a lightweight knowledge adapter. Experimental results on two KGC tasks across four benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially in the link prediction task with improvements ranging from 8.7% to 29.8%