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Muhan Gao

3 accepted papers

2026

The First Drop of Ink: Nonlinear Impact of Misleading Information in Long-Context Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and agentic systems that accumulate extensive context, understanding how distracting information affects performance in long context becomes critical. Prior work shows that semantically relevant but mis…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ICL CIPHERS: Quantifying ”Learning” in In-Context Learning via Substitution Ciphers

EMNLP 2025

Recent works have suggested that In-Context Learning (ICL) operates in dual modes, i.e. task retrieval (remember learned patterns from pre-training) and task learning (inference-time ”learning” from demonstrations). However, disentangling these the two modes remains a challenging goal. We introduce

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Insights into LLM Long-Context Failures: When Transformers Know but Don’t Tell

EMNLP 2024finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit positional bias, struggling to utilize information from the middle or end of long contexts. Our study explores LLMs’ long-context reasoning by probing their hidden representations. We find that while LLMs encode the position of target information, they often fail…