Ning Yang, Hengyu Zhong, Wentao Wang, Baoliang Tian, Yuan Zhou, Haijun Zhang, Jun Wang
The extension of context windows in Large Language Models is typically facilitated by scaling positional encodings followed by Continued Pre-Training (CPT). While effective, this paradigm is notoriously data-hungry and computationally expensive, requiring massive long-text corpora to recalibrate the model to the shifted positional distribution. We propose LinearARD, a restoration distillation method that restores Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE)-scaled students through attention-structure consistency with a frozen native-RoPE teacher. Rather than next-token prediction or opaque hidden-state matching, LinearARD aligns row-wise distributions of dense $Q/Q$, $K/K$, and $V/V$ self-relation matrices from the final attention layer to directly supervise attention dynamics. To remove the quadratic memory bottleneck of $n \times n$ relation maps, we introduce a linear-activation-memory kernel that stores only per-token log-sum-exp statistics and recomputes logits in the backward pass to obtain exact Kullback-Leibler divergence gradients. Across LLaMA2-7B, LLaMA3-8B, and Mistral-7B-v0.1 extended to 32K context, LinearARD recovers 93.1%/94.2%/94.3% of native short-context performance and achieves strong long-context robustness on RULER using only 4.25M tokens---amounting to just 1.6% (a $\sim$60$\times$ reduction) of the 256M-token budget required by state-of-the-art baselines. Under this severely constrained budget, CPT and LongReD remain near zero on RULER, demonstrating that relation-level restoration provides a substantially better efficiency-quality tradeoff. Our code is available at https://github.com/gracefulning/LinearARD.
Jiayu Tang, Guowei Peng, Qiuhao Xie, Yuning Yang, Xiurui Xie University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Guisong Liu
The “Fine-Tuning-as-a-Service” paradigm exposes large language models to catastrophic safety degradation from less harmful samples. Alignment-stage defenses address this by proactively injecting adversarial perturbations to bolster the model’s inherent robustness against harmful drift. However, existing methods rely on perturbation directions that often conflict with harmful gradients, inadvertently facilitating the acquisition of malicious features rather than suppressing them. To address this issue, we propose Orthogonal and Adaptive Safety Alignment Strategy (OASIS) to mathematically decouple safety enforcement from harmful feature acquisition. By projecting perturbations orthogonal to harmful gradients and concentrating optimization on adaptively selected safety-critical layers, OASIS effectively resolves directional conflicts while maximizing parameter efficiency. Extensive experiments on four LLMs across three datasets (SST2, GSM8K, and AGNews) demonstrate that OASIS reduces the Harmful Score by approximately 60% compared to competitive baselines, while maintaining stable downstream task utility.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Dongxu Zhang, Yiding Sun, Cheng Tan Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Wenbiao Yan, Ning Yang Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jihua Zhu Xi'an Jiaotong University, Haijun Zhang
While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning significantly enhances the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), its autoregressive nature incurs prohibitive latency constraints. Current efforts to mitigate this via token compression often fail by blindly applying text-centric metrics to multimodal contexts. We identify a critical failure mode termed Visual Amnesia, where linguistically redundant tokens are erroneously pruned, leading to hallucinations. To address this, we introduce V-Skip that reformulates token pruning as a Visual-Anchored Information Bottleneck (VA-IB) optimization problem. V-Skip employs a dual-path gating mechanism that weighs token importance through both linguistic surprisal and cross-modal attention flow, effectively rescuing visually salient anchors. Extensive experiments on Qwen2-VL and Llama-3.2 families demonstrate that V-Skip achieves a speedup with negligible accuracy loss. Specifically, it preserves fine-grained visual details, outperforming other baselines over 30% on the DocVQA.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表