Yifan Wang, Shiyu Li Tencent, Peiming Li, Xiaochen Yang University of Glasgow, Zheng Wei Tencent Technology (Beijing) Company Limited, Yang Tang Tencent
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in unlocking the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although CoT prompting enhances reasoning, its verbosity imposes substantial computational overhead. Recent works often focus exclusively on outcome alignment and lack supervision on the intermediate reasoning process. These deficiencies obscure the analyzability of the latent reasoning chain. To address these challenges, we introduce Render-of-Thought (RoT), the first framework to reify the reasoning chain by rendering textual steps into images, making the latent rationale explicit and traceable. Specifically, we leverage the vision encoders of existing Vision Language Models (VLMs) as semantic anchors to align the vision embeddings with the textual space. This design ensures plug-and-play implementation without incurring additional pre-training overhead. Extensive experiments on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves 3-4\times token compression and substantial inference acceleration compared to explicit CoT. Furthermore, it demonstrates a competitive efficiency-accuracy Pareto exploration compared to other methods, validating the feasibility of this paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/TencentBAC/RoT
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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
Xiqiao Xiong, Ouxiang Li, Zhuo Liu, Moxin Li, Wentao Shi, Fengbin Zhu, Qifan Wang Meta AI, Fuli Feng University of Science and Technology of China
Large language models have seen widespread adoption, yet they remain vulnerable to multi-turn jailbreak attacks, threatening their safe deployment. This has led to the task of training automated multi-turn attackers to probe model safety vulnerabilities. However, existing approaches typically rely on turn-level optimization, which is insufficient for learning long-term attack strategies. To bridge this gap, we formulate this task as a multi-turn reinforcement learning problem, directly optimizing the harmfulness of the final-turn response as the outcome reward. To address the sparse supervision of the outcome reward, we introduce TROJail, which employs two process rewards to evaluate the utility of intermediate prompts and integrate them into advantage estimation. These rewards (1) penalize overly harmful prompts that trigger the model’s refusal mechanism, and (2) encourage steering the semantic relevance of responses toward the targeted harmful content. Experimental results show improved attack success rates across multiple models and benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TROJail. Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful content.
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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
Yifan Wang University of Science and Technology of China, Binbinliu, Fengze Liu ByteDance, Yuanfan Guo Huawei Technologies Ltd., Jiyao Deng, Xuecheng Wu, Weidong Zhou, Xiaohuan Zhou 等 9 位作者
The data mixture used in the pre-training of a language model is a cornerstone of its final performance. Static data mixing strategies in Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training are often suboptimal as they fail to adapt to the model’s evolving learning states. Conversely, fully online dynamic updates, while adaptive, incur prohibitive computational costs. To bridge this gap, we propose TiKMiX, an efficient semi-dynamic data mixing framework. Our approach is grounded in a key observation of influence ranking invariance: the relative importance of data domains exhibits strong temporal stability over long training intervals. Leveraging this insight, we propose Group Influence, an efficient approach for quantifying domain impact, and formulate data mixing as a periodic, low-overhead influence maximization problem. Compared with REGMIX, the proposed method reduces computational overhead by 80% and achieves an average performance gain of 2% across nine downstream benchmarks, thereby effectively mitigating data under-digestion.
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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
Shanwen Tan Sichuan University, Ziyang Dong, Wei Ju Sichuan University and Peking University, Yiwei Fu, Hao Wu Tencent, Kun Wang, Yifan Wang University of International Business and Economics, Ziyue Qiao Great Bay University
This paper investigates the problem of safe decoding for Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference, particularly under jailbreak attacks. Previous approaches typically either detect malicious content or regulate the decoding alignment of LLMs to mitigate such attacks. Although effective in defending against attacks, these methods often over-reject benign content, limiting their generalizability in real-world scenarios where harmful and benign information coexist. Towards this end, we propose an innovative framework named Sequence-level risk Accumulation for calibrating test-time alignment (SEAT). Specifically, SEAT introduces a reward-guided branch decoding paradigm to incorporate safety awareness during generation. To balance the detection of harmful content with the accurate response to benign information, SEAT employs a sequence-level risk monitor that smooths risk signals over the entire sequence, preventing over-confident refusals for certain tokens. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on four attack benchmarks and two neutral datasets, comparing SEAT with eight state-of-the-art baselines. Consequently, the results demonstrate that SEAT achieves superior performance both in defending against jailbreak attacks and in generating high-quality responses on neutral datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShanwenTan/SEAT.
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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
Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency
Andy Zou, Long Phan, Sarah Chen, James Campbell, Phillip Guo, Richard Ren, Alexander Pan, Xuwang Yin 等 21 位作者
AI 速览：该论文提出并刻画了表征工程（RepE）这一新兴领域，以群体级表征为中心，为理解和控制深度神经网络中的高层认知现象提供新方法。
In this paper, we identify and characterize the emerging area of representation engineering (RepE), an approach to enhancing the transparency of AI systems that draws on insights from cognitive neuroscience. RepE places population-level representations, rather than neurons or circuits, at the center of analysis, equipping us with novel methods for monitoring and manipulating high-level cognitive phenomena in deep neural networks (DNNs). We provide baselines and an initial analysis of RepE techniques, showing that they offer simple yet effective solutions for improving our understanding and control of large language models. We showcase how these methods can provide traction on a wide range of safety-relevant problems, including honesty, harmlessness, power-seeking, and more, demonstrating the promise of top-down transparency research. We hope that this work catalyzes further exploration of RepE and fosters advancements in the transparency and safety of AI systems.