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Zixiao Zhu

8 accepted papers

2026

Fine-Grained Activation Steering: Steering Less, Achieving More

ICLR 2026poster

Activation steering has emerged as a cost-effective paradigm for modifying large language model (LLM) behaviors. Existing methods typically intervene at the block level, steering the bundled activations of selected attention heads, feedforward networks, or residual streams. However, we reveal that b…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Logit Separability-Driven Samples and Multiple Class-Related Words Selection for Advancing In-Context Learning

NAACL 2025long

Effective organization of in-context learning (ICL) demonstrations is key to improving the quality of large language model (LLM) responses. To create better sample-label pairs that instruct LLM understanding, we introduce logit separability, a criterion to assess the clarity of both samples and clas…

2025

Restoring Pruned Large Language Models via Lost Component Compensation

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Pruning is a widely used technique to reduce the size and inference cost of large language models (LLMs), but it often causes performance degradation. To mitigate this, existing restoration methods typically employ parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), such as LoRA, to recover the pruned model's p…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

EDEntail: An Entailment-based Few-shot Text Classification with Extensional Definition

NAACL 2024findings

Few-shot text classification has seen significant advancements, particularly with entailment-based methods, which typically use either class labels or intensional definitions of class labels in hypotheses for label semantics expression. In this paper, we propose EDEntail, a method that employs exten…

2024

FreeCtrl: Constructing Control Centers with Feedforward Layers for Learning-Free Controllable Text Generation

ACL 2024long

Controllable text generation (CTG) seeks to craft texts adhering to specific attributes, traditionally employing learning-based techniques such as training, fine-tuning, or prefix-tuning with attribute-specific datasets. These approaches, while effective, demand extensive computational and data reso…

2024

LLMs Learn Task Heuristics from Demonstrations: A Heuristic-Driven Prompting Strategy for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction

ACL 2024long

In this study, we explore in-context learning (ICL) in document-level event argument extraction (EAE) to alleviate the dependency on large-scale labeled data for this task. We introduce the Heuristic-Driven Link-of-Analogy (HD-LoA) prompting tailored for the EAE task. Specifically, we hypothesize an…

2024

UniBias: Unveiling and Mitigating LLM Bias through Internal Attention and FFN Manipulation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various tasks using the in-context learning (ICL) paradigm. However, their effectiveness is often compromised by inherent bias, leading to prompt brittleness—sensitivity to design settings such as example selection, order, and…

2024

Unveiling and Manipulating Prompt Influence in Large Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Prompts play a crucial role in guiding the responses of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the intricate role of individual tokens in prompts, known as input saliency, in shaping the responses remains largely underexplored. Existing saliency methods either misalign with LLM generation objectives…