Yixuan Tang
Other people with similar names: Yixuan Tang (HKUST)
Unverified author pages with similar names: Yixuan Tang
2026
Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models
Xiaomeng Hu | Yixuan Tang | Haoze Li | Hao Chen | Qi Zhang | Zhanming Shen | Yiming Zhang | Haobo Wang | Junbo Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xiaomeng Hu | Yixuan Tang | Haoze Li | Hao Chen | Qi Zhang | Zhanming Shen | Yiming Zhang | Haobo Wang | Junbo Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), aligning a general-purpose model with downstream tasks through fine-tuning has become a central research focus. Selecting only high-quality examples for training has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to improve fine-tuning performance. However, prior work concentrates almost exclusively on data preprocessing: filtering and cleaning data before training begins. While the order and composition of training data during training have received little fine-grained attention. To fill this gap, our work proposed Fine-Grained Order Fine-Tuning, a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs. Drawing on curriculum-learning principles, FOT defines data difficulty based on the relevance between the data and the model, and then performs dynamic scheduling of the training order in each epoch according to the difficulty. On both large-scale continued pre-training and small-scale supervised fine-tuning experiments, FOT has achieved an average 2.4% improvement over baselines. Our study offers a new perspective on data governance in the fine-tuning phase.
Iterative Self-Correction for Text-Driven Person Re-Identification with Large Vision-Language Models
Guijin Luo | Zequn Xie | Sihang Cai | Chuxin Wang | Zhou Zhao | Yixuan Tang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Guijin Luo | Zequn Xie | Sihang Cai | Chuxin Wang | Zhou Zhao | Yixuan Tang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Person Re-Identification (ReID) has long struggled with the semantic gap between low-level visual features and high-level identity concepts. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer promising semantic understanding, existing methods typically adopt a static "one-pass" paradigm, converting images to text once for retrieval. This approach suffers from two critical flaws: Information Bottleneck, where converting rich visuals into text causes detail loss, and Open-Loop Failure, where initial hallucinations propagate without recourse. To address this, we propose Auto-ReID, a novel framework that reformulates ReID as an iterative "Think-and-Refine" process. We first introduce a Hierarchical Progressive Tuning strategy to transform a generic VLM into a specialized Re-ID expert. During inference, we deploy a closed-loop architecture comprising a Reasoner for structured attribute extraction, a Hybrid Retriever that anchors dynamic semantic queries with stable visual features to prevent drift, and a Corrector that deconstructs and verifies candidates to iteratively optimize the search. Extensive experiments on ReID datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in complex occlusion scenarios.
Bridging the Pose-Semantic Gap: A Cascade Framework for Text-Based Person Anomaly Search
Zequn Xie | Guijin Luo | Chuxin Wang | Sihang Cai | Tao Jin | Zhou Zhao | Yixuan Tang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zequn Xie | Guijin Luo | Chuxin Wang | Sihang Cai | Tao Jin | Zhou Zhao | Yixuan Tang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Text-based person anomaly search retrieves specific behavioral events from surveillance archives using natural-language queries. Although recent pose-aware methods align geometric structures well, they face a fundamental Pose-Semantic Gap: semantically different actions can share similar skeletal geometries. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can reduce this ambiguity, using them for large-scale retrieval is computationally prohibitive. We propose the Structure-Semantic Decoupled Cascade (SSDC) framework, which decouples retrieval into two stages: (1) Structure-Aware Coarse Retrieval, where a lightweight model quickly filters candidates by skeletal similarity; and (2) Detective Squad Interaction, a multi-agent semantic verification module. The squad consists of a Detective for fast binary filtering, an Analyst for evidence extraction, and a Writer for semantic synthesis. Finally, we re-rank candidates by fusing the synthesized captions with structural priors. Experiments on the PAB benchmark show that SSDC achieves state-of-the-art performance by balancing efficiency and semantic reasoning.
Reasoning Hijacking: The Fragility of Reasoning Alignment in Large Language Models
Yuansen Liu | Yixuan Tang | Anthony Kum Hoe Tung
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuansen Liu | Yixuan Tang | Anthony Kum Hoe Tung
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Current LLM safety research predominantly focuses on mitigating **Goal Hijacking**, preventing attackers from redirecting a model’s high-level objective (e.g., from "summarizing emails" to "phishing users"). In this paper, we argue that this perspective is incomplete and highlight a critical vulnerability in **Reasoning Alignment**. We expose the inherent fragility of current alignment techniques by proposing a new adversarial prompt attack paradigm: **Reasoning Hijacking**. To demonstrate this vulnerability, we instantiate it via the **Criteria Attack**, which subverts model judgments by injecting spurious decision criteria without altering the high-level task goal. Unlike Goal Hijacking, which attempts to override the system prompt, Reasoning Hijacking keeps the task goal intact but manipulates the model’s decision-making logic by injecting spurious reasoning shortcuts. Through extensive experiments on three different tasks (toxic comment, negative review, and spam detection), we demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models are highly fragile, consistently prioritizing injected heuristic shortcuts over rigorous semantic analysis. Crucially, because the model’s explicit intent remains aligned with the user’s instructions, these attacks can bypass defenses designed to detect goal deviation (e.g., SecAlign, StruQ), revealing a fundamental blind spot in the current safety landscape. Data and code are available at [https://github.com/Yuan-Hou/criteria_attack](https://github.com/Yuan-Hou/criteria_attack).
2025
MPCG: Multi-Round Persona-Conditioned Generation for Modeling the Evolution of Misinformation with LLMs
Chong Jun Rong Brian | Yixuan Tang | Anthony Kum Hoe Tung
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Chong Jun Rong Brian | Yixuan Tang | Anthony Kum Hoe Tung
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Misinformation evolves as it spreads, shifting in language, framing, and moral emphasis to adapt to new audiences. However, current misinformation detection approaches implicitly assume that misinformation is static. We introduce MPCG, a multi-round, persona-conditioned framework that simulates how claims are iteratively reinterpreted by agents with distinct ideological perspectives. Our approach uses an uncensored large language model (LLM) to generate persona-specific claims across multiple rounds, conditioningeach generation on outputs from the previous round, enabling the study of misinformation evolution. We evaluate the generated claims through human and LLM-based annotations, cognitive effort metrics (readability, perplexity), emotion evocation metrics (sentiment analysis, morality), clustering, feasibility, and downstream classification. Results show strong agreement between human and GPT-4o-mini annotations, with higher divergence in fluency judgments. Generated claims require greater cognitive effort than the original claims and consistently reflect persona-aligned emotional and moral framing. Clustering and cosine similarity analyses confirmsemantic drift across rounds while preserving topical coherence. Feasibility results show a 77% feasibility rate, confirming suitability for downstream tasks. Classification results reveal that commonly used misinformation detectors experience macro-F1 performance drops of up to 49.7%. The code is available at https://github.com/bcjr1997/MPCG.
The Missing Parts: Augmenting Fact Verification with Half Truth Detection
Yixuan Tang | Jincheng Wang | Anthony Kum Hoe Tung
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yixuan Tang | Jincheng Wang | Anthony Kum Hoe Tung
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Fact verification systems typically assess whether a claim is supported by retrieved evidence, assuming that truthfulness depends solely on what is stated. However, many real-world claims are half-truths, factually correct yet misleading due to the omission of critical context. Existing models struggle with such cases, as they are not designed to reason about omitted information. We introduce the task of half-truth detection, and propose PolitiFact-Hidden, a new benchmark with 15k political claims annotated with sentence-level evidence alignment and inferred claim intent. To address this challenge, we present TRACER, a modular re-assessment framework that identifies omission-based misinformation by aligning evidence, inferring implied intent, and estimating the causal impact of hidden content. TRACER can be integrated into existing fact-checking pipelines and consistently improves performance across multiple strong baselines. Notably, it boosts Half-True classification F1 by up to 16 points, highlighting the importance of modeling omissions for trustworthy fact verification. The benchmark and code are available via https://github.com/tangyixuan/TRACER.
Uncovering the Bigger Picture: Comprehensive Event Understanding Via Diverse News Retrieval
Yixuan Tang | Yuanyuan Shi | Yiqun Sun | Anthony Kum Hoe Tung
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yixuan Tang | Yuanyuan Shi | Yiqun Sun | Anthony Kum Hoe Tung
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Access to diverse perspectives is essential for understanding real-world events, yet most news retrieval systems prioritize textual relevance, leading to redundant results and limited viewpoint exposure. We propose NEWSCOPE, a two-stage framework for diverse news retrieval that enhances event coverage by explicitly modeling semantic variation at the sentence level. The first stage retrieves topically relevant content using dense retrieval, while the second stage applies sentence-level clustering and diversity-aware re-ranking to surface complementary information. To evaluate retrieval diversity, we introduce three interpretable metrics, namely Average Pairwise Distance, Positive Cluster Coverage, and Information Density Ratio, and construct two paragraph-level benchmarks: LocalNews and DSGlobal. Experiments show that NEWSCOPE consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving significantly higher diversity without compromising relevance. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of fine-grained, interpretable modeling in mitigating redundancy and promoting comprehensive event understanding. The data and code are available at https://github.com/tangyixuan/NEWSCOPE.