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Runcong Zhao

10 accepted papers

2026

Detecting Contextual Hallucinations in Large Language Models with Frequency-Aware Attention

ICML 2026poster

Hallucination detection is critical for ensuring the reliability of large language models (LLMs) in context-based generation. Prior work has explored intrinsic signals available during generation, among which attention offers a direct view of grounding behavior. However, existing approaches typicall…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Linear Ensembles Wash Away Watermarks: On the Fragility of Distributional Perturbations in LLMs

ICML 2026poster

Watermarking embeds statistical signatures in AI-generated text for detection and attribution. We reveal a fundamental vulnerability: when users access multiple models (today's reality), watermarks trivially fail. Watermarks perturb output distributions away from the original, and in competitive mar…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Pull Requests as a Training Signal for Repo-Level Code Editing

ICML 2026poster

Repository-level code editing requires models to understand complex dependencies and execute precise multi-file modifications across a large codebase. While recent gains on SWE-bench rely heavily on complex agent scaffolding, it remains unclear how much of this capability can be internalised via hig…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Soft Reasoning: Navigating Solution Spaces in Large Language Models through Controlled Embedding Exploration

ICML 2025spotlight

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with complex reasoning due to limited diversity and inefficient search. We propose Soft Reasoning, an embedding-based search framework that optimises the embedding of the first token to guide generation. It combines (1) embedding perturbation for controlled expl…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Sparse Activation Editing for Reliable Instruction Following in Narratives

EMNLP 2025

Complex narrative contexts often challenge language models’ ability to follow instructions, and existing benchmarks fail to capture these difficulties. To address this, we propose Concise-SAE, a training-free framework that improves instruction following by identifying and editing instruction-releva

2024

Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives

ACL 2024findings

Existing datasets for narrative understanding often fail to represent the complexity and uncertainty of relationships in real-life social scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, Conan, designed for extracting and analysing intricate character relation graphs from detective narr…

2024

NarrativePlay: An Automated System for Crafting Visual Worlds in Novels for Role-Playing

AAAI 2024technical

In this demo, we present NarrativePlay -- an innovative system enabling users to role-play a fictional character and interact with dynamically generated narrative environments. Unlike existing predefined sandbox approaches, NarrativePlay centres around the main storyline events extracted from the na…

2024

OpenToM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Theory-of-Mind Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM), machine’s ability to understand and keep track of the mental states of others, is pivotal in developing socially intelligent agents. However, prevalent N-ToM benchmarks have several shortcomings, including the presence of ambiguous and artificial narratives, absence of…

2023

Are NLP Models Good at Tracing Thoughts: An Overview of Narrative Understanding

EMNLP 2023long findings

Narrative understanding involves capturing the author's cognitive processes, providing insights into their knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Although large language models (LLMs) excel in generating grammatically coherent text, their ability to comprehend the author's thoughts remains unc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Disentangling Aspect and Stance via a Siamese Autoencoder for Aspect Clustering of Vaccination Opinions

ACL 2023findings

Mining public opinions about vaccines from social media has been increasingly relevant to analyse trends in public debates and to provide quick insights to policy-makers. However, the application of existing models has been hindered by the wide variety of users’ attitudes and the new aspects continu…