Ziji Sheng


2026

Existing adaptive learning systems struggle to simultaneously achieve deep personalization, dynamic adaptability, and content trustworthiness, particularly in logically rigorous STEM fields where Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to "hallucination". This paper introduces LearnerCoMPASS (Cognitive Multi-model Planning Adaptive System), an integrated, end-to-end framework for adaptive learning. At its core, the framework features a novel multi-model path planning algorithm that orchestrates and fuses the outputs of heterogeneous LLM experts to generate and optimize learning sequences. To enable deep personalization, we design a dynamic cognitive diagnosis module that employs an innovative encoder-decoder architecture to generate precise, multi-dimensional cognitive state vectors for learners. To ensure trustworthiness, the system leverages an adaptively constructed dynamic knowledge graph and a Graph-RAG mechanism to provide factual anchors and logical constraints for LLM reasoning, thereby mitigating hallucinations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LearnerCoMPASS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating high-quality personalized learning paths. Furthermore, ablation studies validate the critical contributions of our dynamic cognitive diagnosis and multi-model planning components.

2025

Model merging has emerged as a promising approach for updating large language models (LLMs) by integrating multiple domain-specific models into a cross-domain merged model. Despite its utility and plug-and-play nature, unmonitored mergers can introduce significant security vulnerabilities, such as backdoor attacks and model merging abuse. In this paper, we identify a novel and more realistic attack surface where a malicious merger can extract targeted personally identifiable information (PII) from an aligned model with model merging. Specifically, we propose Merger-as-a-Stealer, a two-stage framework to achieve this attack: First, the attacker fine-tunes a malicious model to force it to respond to any PII-related queries. The attacker then uploads this malicious model to the model merging conductor and obtains the merged model. Second, the attacker inputs direct PII-related queries to the merged model to extract targeted PII. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Merger-as-a-Stealer successfully executes attacks against various LLMs and model merging methods across diverse settings, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Given that this attack enables character-level extraction for targeted PII without requiring any additional knowledge from the attacker, we stress the necessity for improved model alignment and more robust defense mechanisms to mitigate such threats.