Yujun Yan
2026
Representation Interventions Enable Lifelong Knowledge Memory Control in LLMs
Xuyuan Liu | Shengyu Chen | Xinshuai Dong | Yanchi Liu | Xujiang Zhao | Haoyu Wang | Yujun Yan | Haifeng Chen | Zhengzhang Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xuyuan Liu | Shengyu Chen | Xinshuai Dong | Yanchi Liu | Xujiang Zhao | Haoyu Wang | Yujun Yan | Haifeng Chen | Zhengzhang Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) often produce incorrect or outdated content. Updating their knowledge efficiently and accurately without costly retraining is a major challenge. This problem is particularly challenging for complex, unstructured knowledge in lifelong settings, where many edits must coexist without interference. We introduce **RILKE** (**R**epresentation **I**ntervention for **L**ifelong **K**nowledg**E** Control), a robust and scalable method that treats knowledge control as interventions within the model’s representation space. Leveraging representation-space expressiveness, we identify two key properties enabling RILKE to achieve fine-grained control over complex, unstructured knowledge while maintaining general utility with frozen base weights. During training, RILKE learns paraphrase-robust and edit-localized modules that limit each update to a low-dimensional subspace to minimize cross-edit interference. In inference, a query-adaptive router selects the appropriate module to guide the model’s generation. Across LLaMA and Qwen models, RILKE scales effectively to large-scale benchmarks, demonstrating high edit success and strong paraphrase generalization while preserving general utility with modest memory overhead. These results show RILKE is an effective and scalable solution for lifelong knowledge control in LLMs.
2025
Judging with Many Minds: Do More Perspectives Mean Less Prejudice? On Bias Amplification and Resistance in Multi-Agent Based LLM-as-Judge
Chiyu Ma | Enpei Zhang | Yilun Zhao | Wenjun Liu | Yaning Jia | Peijun Qing | Lin Shi | Arman Cohan | Yujun Yan | Soroush Vosoughi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Chiyu Ma | Enpei Zhang | Yilun Zhao | Wenjun Liu | Yaning Jia | Peijun Qing | Lin Shi | Arman Cohan | Yujun Yan | Soroush Vosoughi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
LLM-as-Judge has emerged as a scalable alternative to human evaluation, enabling large language models (LLMs) to provide reward signals in trainings. While recent work has explored multi-agent extensions such as multi-agent debate and meta-judging to enhance evaluation quality, the question of how intrinsic biases manifest in these settings remains underexplored. In this study, we conduct a systematic analysis of four diverse bias types: position bias, verbosity bias, chain-of-thought bias, and bandwagon bias. We evaluate these biases across two widely adopted multi-agent LLM-as-Judge frameworks: Multi-Agent-Debate and LLM-as-Meta-Judge. Our results show that debate framework amplifies biases sharply after the initial debate, and this increased bias is sustained in subsequent rounds, while meta-judge approaches exhibit greater resistance. We further investigate the incorporation of PINE, a leading single-agent debiasing method, as a bias-free agent within these systems. The results reveal that this bias-free agent effectively reduces biases in debate settings but provides less benefit in meta-judge scenarios. Our work provides a comprehensive study of bias behavior in multi-agent LLM-as-Judge systems and highlights the need for targeted bias mitigation strategies in collaborative evaluation settings.
GENUINE: Graph Enhanced Multi-level Uncertainty Estimation for Large Language Models
Tuo Wang | Adithya Kulkarni | Tyler Cody | Peter A. Beling | Yujun Yan | Dawei Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Tuo Wang | Adithya Kulkarni | Tyler Cody | Peter A. Beling | Yujun Yan | Dawei Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Uncertainty estimation is essential for enhancing the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in high-stakes applications. Existing methods often overlook semantic dependencies, relying on token-level probability measures that fail to capture structural relationships within the generated text. We propose GENUINE: Graph ENhanced mUlti-level uncertaINty Estimation for Large Language Models, a structure-aware framework that leverages dependency parse trees and hierarchical graph pooling to refine uncertainty quantification. By incorporating supervised learning, GENUINE effectively models semantic and structural relationships, improving confidence assessments. Extensive experiments across NLP tasks show that GENUINE achieves up to 29% higher AUROC than semantic entropy-based approaches and reduces calibration errors by over 15%, demonstrating the effectiveness of graph-based uncertainty modeling. The code is available at https://github.com/ODYSSEYWT/GUQ.
Spectral Insights into Data-Oblivious Critical Layers in Large Language Models
Xuyuan Liu | Lei Hsiung | Yaoqing Yang | Yujun Yan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Xuyuan Liu | Lei Hsiung | Yaoqing Yang | Yujun Yan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Understanding how feature representations evolve across layers in large language models (LLMs) is key to improving their interpretability and robustness. While recent studies have identified critical layers linked to specific functions or behaviors, these efforts typically rely on data-dependent analyses of fine-tuned models, limiting their use to post-hoc settings. In contrast, we introduce a data-oblivious approach to identify intrinsic critical layers in pre-fine-tuned LLMs by analyzing representation dynamics via Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA). We show that layers with significant shifts in representation space are also those most affected during fine-tuning—a pattern that holds consistently across tasks for a given model. Our spectral analysis further reveals that these shifts are driven by changes in the top principal components, which encode semantic transitions from rationales to conclusions.We further apply these findings to two practical scenarios: efficient domain adaptation, where fine-tuning critical layers leads to greater loss reduction compared to non-critical layers; and backdoor defense, where freezing them reduces attack success rates by up to 40%.