Zitian Gao
2026
Polymorphic Universal Transformer
Yilong Chen | Zitian Gao | Yihao Xiao | Jason Klein Liu | Xinyu Yang | Yifan Luo | Haoming Luo | Zhengmao Ye | Tingwen Liu | Ran Tao | Bryan Dai
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yilong Chen | Zitian Gao | Yihao Xiao | Jason Klein Liu | Xinyu Yang | Yifan Luo | Haoming Luo | Zhengmao Ye | Tingwen Liu | Ran Tao | Bryan Dai
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Although the Universal Transformer (UT) mitigates the diminishing returns of standard LLM scaling by decoupling parameter count from depth, it remains constrained by linear computational costs and rigid weight-sharing mechanisms. These limitations lead to severe functional homogeneity, which subsequently induces over-smoothing, representation rank collapse, and degraded reasoning performance. In this work, we present the first systematic study of Compute Distribution Skew, identifying it as the primary driver of extrapolation failure. This is a pathological phenomenon in ultra-deep recurrent Transformers characterized by a disproportionate distribution of contributions across recurrent steps, resulting in distinct functional states during prefix and suffix processing phases. To address this challenge, we propose the Polymorphic Transformer, which aims to achieve functional polymorphism and depth sparsity within a shared-parameter framework. By integrating conditional sparse subspaces, SiLU Attention, and an uncertainty-aware depth scheduler, our architecture mitigates power-method collapse and effectively decouples logical depth from computational cost. Experiments demonstrate that our model significantly enhances representation rank and robustness, achieving complex reasoning performance comparable to baseline while reducing computation by 64.7%.
2025
WaterSeeker: Pioneering Efficient Detection of Watermarked Segments in Large Documents
Leyi Pan | Aiwei Liu | Yijian Lu | Zitian Gao | Yichen Di | Lijie Wen | Irwin King | Philip S. Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Leyi Pan | Aiwei Liu | Yijian Lu | Zitian Gao | Yichen Di | Lijie Wen | Irwin King | Philip S. Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Watermarking algorithms for large language models (LLMs) have attained high accuracy in detecting LLM-generated text. However, existing methods primarily focus on distinguishing fully watermarked text from non-watermarked text, overlooking real-world scenarios where LLMs generate only small sections within large documents. In this scenario, balancing time complexity and detection performance poses significant challenges. This paper presents WaterSeeker, a novel approach to efficiently detect and locate watermarked segments amid extensive natural text. It first applies an efficient anomaly extraction method to preliminarily locate suspicious watermarked regions. Following this, it conducts a local traversal and performs full-text detection for more precise verification. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that WaterSeeker achieves a superior balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency. Moreover, its localization capability lays the foundation for building interpretable AI detection systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/THU-BPM/WaterSeeker.
2024
MarkLLM: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM Watermarking
Leyi Pan | Aiwei Liu | Zhiwei He | Zitian Gao | Xuandong Zhao | Yijian Lu | Binglin Zhou | Shuliang Liu | Xuming Hu | Lijie Wen | Irwin King | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Leyi Pan | Aiwei Liu | Zhiwei He | Zitian Gao | Xuandong Zhao | Yijian Lu | Binglin Zhou | Shuliang Liu | Xuming Hu | Lijie Wen | Irwin King | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Watermarking for Large Language Models (LLMs), which embeds imperceptible yet algorithmically detectable signals in model outputs to identify LLM-generated text, has become crucial in mitigating the potential misuse of LLMs. However, the abundance of LLM watermarking algorithms, their intricate mechanisms, and the complex evaluation procedures and perspectives pose challenges for researchers and the community to easily understand, implement and evaluate the latest advancements. To address these issues, we introduce MarkLLM, an open-source toolkit for LLM watermarking. MarkLLM offers a unified and extensible framework for implementing LLM watermarking algorithms, while providing user-friendly interfaces to ensure ease of access. Furthermore, it enhances understanding by supporting automatic visualization of the underlying mechanisms of these algorithms. For evaluation, MarkLLM offers a comprehensive suite of 12 tools spanning three perspectives, along with two types of automated evaluation pipelines. Through MarkLLM, we aim to support researchers while improving the comprehension and involvement of the general public in LLM watermarking technology, fostering consensus and driving further advancements in research and application. Our code is available at https://github.com/THU-BPM/MarkLLM.