Jinghao Zhang


2025

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Personalized Text Generation with Contrastive Activation Steering
Jinghao Zhang | Yuting Liu | Wenjie Wang | Qiang Liu | Shu Wu | Liang Wang | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Personalized text generation aims to infer users’ writing style preferences from their historical texts and generate outputs that faithfully reflect these stylistic characteristics. Existing solutions primarily adopt two paradigms: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). While these approaches have advanced the field, they suffer from two critical limitations: (1) the entanglement of content semantics and stylistic patterns in historical texts impedes accurate modeling of user-specific writing preferences; and (2) scalability challenges arising from both RAG’s inference latency by retrieval operations and PEFT’s parameter storage requirements for per user model. To overcome these limitations, we propose StyleVector, a training-free framework that disentangles and represents personalized writing style as a vector in LLM’s activation space, enabling style-steered generation during inference without requiring costly retrieval or parameter storage. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a significant 8% relative improvement in personalized generation while reducing storage requirements by 1700 × over PEFT method.

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Personalized Generation In Large Model Era: A Survey
Yiyan Xu | Jinghao Zhang | Alireza Salemi | Xinting Hu | Wenjie Wang | Fuli Feng | Hamed Zamani | Xiangnan He | Tat-Seng Chua
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In the era of large models, content generation is gradually shifting to Personalized Generation (PGen), tailoring content to individual preferences and needs. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey on PGen, investigating existing research in this rapidly growing field. We conceptualize PGen from a unified perspective, systematically formalizing its key components, core objectives, and abstract workflows. Based on this unified perspective, we propose a multi-level taxonomy, offering an in-depth review of technical advancements, commonly used datasets, and evaluation metrics across multiple modalities, personalized contexts, and tasks. Moreover, we envision the potential applications of PGen and highlight open challenges and promising directions for future exploration. By bridging PGen research across multiple modalities, this survey serves as a valuable resource for fostering knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration, ultimately contributing to a more personalized digital landscape.

2024

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Stealthy Attack on Large Language Model based Recommendation
Jinghao Zhang | Yuting Liu | Qiang Liu | Shu Wu | Guibing Guo | Liang Wang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recently, the powerful large language models (LLMs) have been instrumental in propelling the progress of recommender systems (RS). However, while these systems have flourished, their susceptibility to security threats has been largely overlooked. In this work, we reveal that the introduction of LLMs into recommendation models presents new security vulnerabilities due to their emphasis on the textual content of items. We demonstrate that attackers can significantly boost an item’s exposure by merely altering its textual content during the testing phase, without requiring direct interference with the model’s training process. Additionally, the attack is notably stealthy, as it does not affect the overall recommendation performance and the modifications to the text are subtle, making it difficult for users and platforms to detect. Our comprehensive experiments across four mainstream LLM-based recommendation models demonstrate the superior efficacy and stealthiness of our approach. Our work unveils a significant security gap in LLM-based recommendation systems and paves the way for future research on protecting these systems.

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Logical Closed Loop: Uncovering Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models
Junfei Wu | Qiang Liu | Ding Wang | Jinghao Zhang | Shu Wu | Liang Wang | Tieniu Tan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024