Zhenyu Chen
2026
Train in Vain: Functionality-Preserving Poisoning to Prevent Unauthorized Use of Code Datasets
Yuan Xiao | Jiaming Wang | Yuchen Chen | Wei Song | Jun Sun | Shiqing Ma | Yanzhou Mu | Juan Zhai | Chunrong Fang | Jin Song Dong | Zhenyu Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yuan Xiao | Jiaming Wang | Yuchen Chen | Wei Song | Jun Sun | Shiqing Ma | Yanzhou Mu | Juan Zhai | Chunrong Fang | Jin Song Dong | Zhenyu Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
The widespread availability of large-scale code datasets has accelerated the development of code large language models (CodeLLMs), raising concerns about unauthorized dataset usage. Dataset poisoning offers a proactive defense by reducing the utility of such unauthorized training. However, existing poisoning methods often require full-dataset poisoning and introduce transformations that break code compilability. In this paper, we introduce FunPoison, a functionality-preserving poisoning approach that injects short, compilable weak-use fragments into executed code paths. FunPoison leverages reusable statement-level templates with automatic repair and conservative safety checking to ensure side-effect freedom, while a type-aware synthesis module preserves type correctness, suppresses static-analysis warnings, and improves stealth. Extensive experiments across multiple CodeLLMs and code-generation benchmarks show that FunPoison achieves effective poisoning by contaminating only 10% of the dataset, while maintaining 100% compilability and functional correctness. FunPoison also remains robust against advanced code sanitization techniques, including detection, purification, rewriting, static-analysis, and formatting defenses.
Debiasing LLMs by Masking Unfairness-Driving Attention Heads
Tingxu Han | Wei Song | Ziqi Ding | Ziming Li | Chunrong Fang | Yuekang Li | Dongfang Liu | Zhenyu Chen | Zhenting Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Tingxu Han | Wei Song | Ziqi Ding | Ziming Li | Chunrong Fang | Yuekang Li | Dongfang Liu | Zhenyu Chen | Zhenting Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate decisions in domains where unfair treatment of demographic groups is unacceptable. Existing work probes when biased outputs appear, but gives little insight into the mechanisms that generate them, leaving existing mitigations largely fragile. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation of LLM unfairness and propose DiffHeads—a lightweight debiasing framework for LLMs. We first compare Direct-Answer (DA) prompting to Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting across eight representative open- and closed-source LLMs. DA will trigger the nature-bias component of the LLM and reduce measured unfairness by 391.9%- 534.5% in both one- and two-turn dialogues. Next, we define a token-to-head contribution score that traces each token’s influence back to individual attention heads. This reveals a small cluster of bias heads that activate under DA but stay largely dormant with CoT, providing the first causal link between prompting strategy and bias emergence. Finally, building on this insight, we propose DiffHeads, which identify bias heads through differential activation analysis between DA and CoT and selectively mask only those heads. DiffHeads reduces unfairness by 49.4%, and 40.3% under DA and CoT, respectively, without harming model utility.
2025
Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoning
Tingxu Han | Zhenting Wang | Chunrong Fang | Shiyu Zhao | Shiqing Ma | Zhenyu Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Tingxu Han | Zhenting Wang | Chunrong Fang | Shiyu Zhao | Shiqing Ma | Zhenyu Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Reasoning is critical for large language models (LLMs) to excel in a wide range of tasks. While methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and enhance LLM performance by decomposing problems into intermediate steps, they also incur significant overhead in token usage, leading to increased costs. We find that the reasoning process of current LLMs is unnecessarily lengthy and it can be compressed by including a reasonable token budget in the prompt, but the choice of token budget plays a crucial role in the actual compression effectiveness. We then propose a token-budget-aware LLM reasoning framework that dynamically adjusts the number of reasoning tokens based on the reasoning complexity of each problem. Experiments show that our method effectively reduces token costs in CoT reasoning with only a slight performance reduction, offering a practical solution to balance efficiency and accuracy in LLM reasoning. Code: https://github.com/GeniusHTX/TALE.
2020
Adaptive Attentional Network for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion
Jiawei Sheng | Shu Guo | Zhenyu Chen | Juwei Yue | Lihong Wang | Tingwen Liu | Hongbo Xu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Jiawei Sheng | Shu Guo | Zhenyu Chen | Juwei Yue | Lihong Wang | Tingwen Liu | Hongbo Xu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes. The source code is available at https://github.com/JiaweiSheng/FAAN.