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Dongrui Liu

35 accepted papers

2026

Accelerating Diffusion Large Language Models with SlowFast Sampling: The Three Golden Principles

ICLR 2026poster

Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional autoregressive LLMs by enabling parallel token generation and significantly reducing inference latency. However, existing sampling strategies for dLLMs, such as confidence-based or semi-autoregressive deco…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Benchmarking Multimodal Knowledge Conflict for Large Multimodal Models

AAAI 2026technical

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) face notable challenges when encountering multimodal knowledge conflicts, particularly under retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks, where the contextual information from external sources may contradict the model’s internal parametric knowledge, leading to unr

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Beyond External Monitors: Enhancing Transparency of Large Language Models for Easier Monitoring

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly capable, but the mechanisms of their thinking and decision-making processes remain unclear. Chain-of-thoughts (CoTs) have been commonly utilized to externalize LLMs' thinking, but this strategy fails to accurately reflect LLMs' thinking process.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Can LLMs Reason Soundly in Law? Auditing Inference Patterns for Legal Judgment

ICLR 2026poster

This paper presents a method to analyze the inference patterns used by Large Language Models (LLMs) for judgment in a case study on legal LLMs, so as to identify potential incorrect representations of the LLM, according to human domain knowledge. Unlike traditional evaluations on language generation…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Conditional Advantage Estimation for Reinforcement Learning in Large Reasoning Models

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable progress in enhancing LLMs’ reasoning capabilities on tasks with clear correctness criteria, such as mathematical reasoning tasks. Several training metrics, such as entropy or response leng…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

ExGRPO: Learning to Reason from Prior Successes

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is an emerging paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. However, standard on-policy training discards rollout experiences after a single update, leading to computational inefficiency and instability. While prior work…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

IS-Bench: Evaluating Interactive Safety of VLM-Driven Embodied Agents in Daily Household Tasks

AAAI 2026technical

Flawed planning from VLM-driven embodied agents poses significant safety hazards, hindering their deployment in real-world household tasks. However, existing static, termination-oriented evaluation paradigms fail to adequately assess risks within these interactive environments, since they cannot sim

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

OrthAlign: Orthogonal Subspace Decomposition for Non-Interfering Multi-Objective Alignment

ICLR 2026poster

Large language model (LLM) alignment faces a critical dilemma when addressing multiple human preferences: improvements in one dimension frequently come at the expense of others, creating unavoidable trade-offs between competing objectives like helpfulness and harmlessness. While prior work mainly fo…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

PACEbench: A Framework for Evaluating Practical AI Cyber-Exploitation Capabilities

ICLR 2026poster

The increasing autonomy of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates a rigorous evaluation of their potential to aid in cyber offense. Existing benchmarks often lack real-world complexity and are thus unable to accurately assess LLMs' cybersecurity capabilities. To address this gap, we introduce PAC…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Position: Preparing for AI Systems That Deceive Developers

ICML 2026poster

AI systems may exhibit deceptive behaviors that mislead developers about their capabilities, propensities, or actions. Such deception can take distinct forms across the development lifecycle: training subversion, evaluation gaming, and control evasion. We argue that the AI community should prioritiz…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reasoning over Boundaries: Enhancing Specification Alignment via Test-time Deliberation

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in diverse real-world applications, each governed by bespoke behavioral and safety specifications (spec) custom-tailored by users or organizations. These specifications, categorized into safety-spec and behavioral-spec, vary across scenarios and …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Devil behind the mask: An emergent safety vulnerability of Diffusion LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful alternative to autoregressive LLMs, offering faster inference and greater interactivity via parallel decoding and bidirectional modeling. However, despite strong performance in code generation and text infilling, we i…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Towards Self-Evolving Agent Benchmarks : Validatable Agent Trajectory via Test-Time Exploration

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and agent system designs have empowered agents with unprecedented levels of capability. However, existing agent benchmarks are showing a trend of rapid ceiling-hitting by newly developed agents, making it difficult to meet the demands for evaluating ag…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Your Agent May Misevolve: Emergent Risks in Self-evolving LLM Agents

ICLR 2026poster

Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled a new class of \textbf{\textit{self-evolving agents}} that autonomously improve through interaction with the environment, demonstrating strong capabilities. However, self-evolution also introduces novel risks overlooked by current safety research…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Cooperative or Competitive? Understanding the Interaction between Attention Heads From A Game Theory Perspective

ACL 2025long

Despite the remarkable success of attention-based large language models (LLMs), the precise interaction mechanisms between attention heads remain poorly understood. In contrast to prevalent methods that focus on individual head contributions, we rigorously analyze the intricate interplay among atten…

2025

Decouple-Then-Merge: Finetune Diffusion Models as Multi-Task Learning

CVPR 2025poster

Diffusion models are trained by learning a sequence of models that reverse each step of noise corruption. Typically, the model parameters are fully shared across multiple timesteps to enhance training efficiency. However, since the denoising tasks differ at each timestep, the gradients computed at d…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Demystifying Reasoning Dynamics with Mutual Information: Thinking Tokens are Information Peaks in LLM Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex problem-solving, yet their internal reasoning mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the reasoning trajectories of LRMs from an information-theoretic perspective. By tracking how mutual in…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

EvoBench: Towards Real-world LLM-Generated Text Detection Benchmarking for Evolving Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

With the widespread of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been an increasing need to detect LLM-generated texts, prompting extensive research in this area. However, existing detection methods mainly evaluate on static benchmarks, which neglect the evolving nature of LLMs. Relying on existing st…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LED-Merging: Mitigating Safety-Utility Conflicts in Model Merging with Location-Election-Disjoint

ACL 2025long

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for specialized tasks incurs substantial computational and data costs. While model merging offers a training-free solution to integrate multiple task-specific models, existing methods suffer from safety-utility conflicts where enhanced general cap…

2025

LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts

ACL 2025long

Safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) have gained significant attention due to their exposure to potentially harmful data during pre-training. In this paper, we identify a new safety vulnerability in LLMs: their susceptibility to natural distribution shifts between attack prompts and origi…

2025

REEF: Representation Encoding Fingerprints for Large Language Models

ICLR 2025oral

Protecting the intellectual property of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) is very important, because training LLMs costs extensive computational resources and data. Therefore, model owners and third parties need to identify whether a suspect model is a subsequent development of the victim mod…

2025

The LLM Already Knows: Estimating LLM-Perceived Question Difficulty via Hidden Representations

EMNLP 2025

Estimating the difficulty of input questions as perceived by large language models (LLMs) is essential for accurate performance evaluation and adaptive inference. Existing methods typically rely on repeated response sampling, auxiliary models, or fine-tuning the target model itself, which may incur

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Tug of War Within: Mitigating the Fairness-Privacy Conflicts in Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Ensuring awareness of fairness and privacy in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical. Interestingly, we discover a counter-intuitive trade-off phenomenon that enhancing an LLM’s privacy awareness through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) methods significantly decreases its fairness awareness with thous…

2025

VLSBench: Unveiling Visual Leakage in Multimodal Safety

ACL 2025long

Safety concerns of Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have gradually become an important problem in various applications. Surprisingly, previous works indicate a counterintuitive phenomenon that using textual unlearning to align MLLMs achieves comparable safety performances with MLLMs aligned…

2025

X-Boundary: Establishing Exact Safety Boundary to Shield LLMs from Jailbreak Attacks without Compromising Usability

EMNLP 2025

With the widespread application of large language models (LLMs) across various domains, techniques for enhancing their security have progressed rapidly. In this paper, we reveal that although existing defense methods can improve the robustness of LLMs against jailbreaks, they compromise usability, i

2024

Explaining Generalization Power of a DNN Using Interactive Concepts

AAAI 2024technical

This paper explains the generalization power of a deep neural network (DNN) from the perspective of interactions. Although there is no universally accepted definition of the concepts encoded by a DNN, the sparsity of interactions in a DNN has been proved, i.e., the output score of a DNN can be well…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2024

Identifying Semantic Induction Heads to Understand In-Context Learning

ACL 2024findings

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed analysis of the operations of attention heads and aim to better…

2024

MLP Can Be A Good Transformer Learner

CVPR 2024poster

Self-attention mechanism is the key of the Transformer but often criticized for its computation demands. Previous token pruning works motivate their methods from the view of computation redundancy but still need to load the full network and require same memory costs. This paper introduces a novel st…

2024

Towards Tracing Trustworthiness Dynamics: Revisiting Pre-training Period of Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

Ensuring the trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs) is crucial. Most studies concentrate on fully pre-trained LLMs to better understand and improve LLMs’ trustworthiness. In this paper, to reveal the untapped potential of pre-training, we pioneer the exploration of LLMs’ trustworthiness dur…

2024

Towards the Dynamics of a DNN Learning Symbolic Interactions

NeurIPS 2024poster

This study proves the two-phase dynamics of a deep neural network (DNN) learning interactions. Despite the long disappointing view of the faithfulness of post-hoc explanation of a DNN, a series of theorems have been proven [27] in recent years to show that for a given input sample, a small set of in…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

Towards the Difficulty for a Deep Neural Network to Learn Concepts of Different Complexities

NeurIPS 2023poster

This paper theoretically explains the intuition that simple concepts are more likely to be learned by deep neural networks (DNNs) than complex concepts. In fact, recent studies have observed [24, 15] and proved [26] the emergence of interactive concepts in a DNN, i.e., it is proven that a DNN usuall…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2021

Interpreting Representation Quality of DNNs for 3D Point Cloud Processing

NeurIPS 2021poster

In this paper, we evaluate the quality of knowledge representations encoded in deep neural networks (DNNs) for 3D point cloud processing. We propose a method to disentangle the overall model vulnerability into the sensitivity to the rotation, the translation, the scale, and local 3D structures. Besi…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar