Jesson Wang, Shawn Li, Wei Yang, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Charith Peris, Yue Zhao
Manipulating next-token probabilities during generation can bypass the safety alignment of large language models. Existing approaches, however, rely on access to model weights or numerical token probabilities and therefore do not apply to interfaces that return only sampled text. Reconstructing probabilities from sampled outputs offers a possible alternative, but finite sampling produces sparse and noisy estimates, while repeating this process at every generation step incurs substantial query costs. Our empirical observations suggest that large distributional changes along successful jailbreak trajectories are concentrated at a small subset of positions, motivating selective control. We introduce \method{}, a framework for jailbreaking through text-only continuation interfaces that permit repeated sampling and assistant-prefix continuation. Sample-Based Distribution Reconstruction combines sampled outputs with a prior over unobserved actions to obtain a usable control signal. Risk-Gated Residual Control uses the evolving response prefix to decide when to reconstruct and modify the distribution, concentrating sampling costs at selected positions. Speculative Multi-Token Execution further amortizes target calls by verifying and accepting draft prefixes that require no intervention. Across four target endpoints and three benchmarks, \method{} achieves the highest mean score most comparisons against baselines.
Yifan Li, Seunghyun Yoon, Viet Dac Lai, Franck Dernoncourt, Jason Kuen, Yu Kong, Trung Bui
Vision Transformers (ViTs) based vision foundation models (VFMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse vision tasks, but suffer from quadratic complexity that limits scalability to long sequences. Existing linear attention approaches for ViTs are typically trained from scratch, requiring substantial computational resources, while linearization-based methods developed for large language model decoders do not transfer well to ViTs. To address these challenges, we propose ViT-AdaLA, a novel framework for effectively adapting and transferring prior knowledge from VFMs to linear attention ViTs. ViT-AdaLA consists of three stages: attention alignment, feature alignment, and supervised fine-tuning. In the attention alignment stage, we align vanilla linear attention with the original softmax-based attention in each block to approximate the behavior of softmax attention. However, residual approximation errors inevitably accumulate across layers. We mitigate this by fine-tuning the linearized ViT to align its final-layer features with a frozen softmax VFM teacher. Finally, the adapted prior knowledge is transferred to downstream tasks through supervised fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on classification and segmentation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of ViT-AdaLA over various state-of-the-art linear attention counterpart.
Chien Van Nguyen University of Oregon, Huy Huu Nguyen, Ruiyi Zhang, Hanieh Deilamsalehy Adobe Systems, Puneet Mathur Adobe Systems, Viet Dac Lai Adobe Systems, Haoliang Wang Adobe Research, Jayakumar Subramanian Adobe Systems 等 13 位作者
We propose Lizard, a linearization framework that transforms pretrained Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) into subquadratic architectures. Transformers faces severe computational and memory bottlenecks with long sequences due to the quadratic complexity of softmax attention and the growing Key-Value (KV) cache that makes inference memory-bound by context length. Lizard addresses these limitations by introducing a subquadratic attention mechanism that closely approximates softmax attention while preserving model quality. Unlike prior linearization methods constrained by fixed, non-adaptive structures, Lizard augments the architecture with compact, learnable modules that enable adaptive memory control and robust length generalization. Moreover, we introduce a hardware-aware algorithm that solves numerical instability in gated attention to accelerate training. Extensive experiments show that Lizard achieves near-lossless recovery of its teacher model’s performance, significantly outperforming previous methods by up to 9.4 - 24.5 points on the 5-shot MMLU benchmark and demonstrating superior associative recall.
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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
Chien Van Nguyen University of Oregon, Ryan A. Rossi, Linh Ngo Van Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Franck Dernoncourt Adobe Research, Thien Huu Nguyen University of Oregon
Transformer inference becomes increasingly memory-bound as the Key–Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length. While subquadratic architectures offer constant-memory inference, they rely on aggressive state compression that degrades performance on complex reasoning tasks. We propose Octopus, a framework that confers fixed-memory inference onto pretrained Transformers without the information loss of linearization. Octopus retrofits attention layers with Gated Selective Attention, a learnable module that enforces an adaptive sparsity policy over the context history. By dynamically scoring and retaining only high-utility KV states, this mechanism transforms the unbounded cache into a compact, evolving memory budget that filters out uninformative noise. Empirically, on the GSM8K benchmark, it outperforms state-of-the-art linearized baselines by over 36 points under identical memory constraints. Remarkably, Octopus also surpasses its own full-cache teacher, demonstrating that learned sparse retention serves as an effective regularizer for long-horizon reasoning.
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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
Jiyeon Kim Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Hyunji Lee Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dylan Zhou Google, Sue Hyun Park KRAFTON Inc., Seunghyun Yoon Adobe Research, Trung Bui Adobe Research, Franck Dernoncourt Adobe Research, Sungmin Cha Meta Superintelligence Labs 等 9 位作者
LLMs operating in dynamic real-world contexts often encounter knowledge that evolves continuously or emerges incrementally. To remain accurate and effective, models must adapt to newly arriving information on the fly. We introduce Online Adaptation to Continual Knowledge Streams(OAKS) to evaluate this capability, establishing a benchmark for online adaptation over streaming, continually updating knowledge. Specifically, the benchmark is structured as a sequence of fine-grained context chunks where facts change dynamically across time intervals. OAKS comprises two datasets: OAKS-BABI and OAKS-Novel, where individual facts evolve multiple times across context chunks. These datasets include dense annotations to measure whether models track changes accurately. Evaluating 14 models with varied inference approaches, we observe significant limitations in current methodologies. Both state-of-the-art models and agentic memory systems fail to adapt robustly on OAKS, demonstrating delays in state-tracking and susceptibility to distraction within streaming environments. We will open-source the code and datasets.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Hieu Man University of Oregon, Van-Cuong Pham University of Oregon, Nghia Trung Ngo University of Oregon, Franck Dernoncourt Adobe Research, Thien Huu Nguyen University of Oregon
Learning robust representations of authorial style is crucial for authorship attribution and AI-generated text detection. However, existing methods often struggle with content-style entanglement, where models learn spurious correlations between authors’ writing styles and topics, leading to poor generalization across domains. To address this challenge, we propose Explainable Authorship Variational Autoencoder (EAVAE), a novel framework that explicitly disentangles style from content through architectural separation-by-design. EAVAE first pretrains style encoders using supervised contrastive learning on diverse authorship data, then finetunes with a Variational Autoencoder (VEA) architecture using separate encoders for style and content representations. Disentanglement is enforced through a novel discriminator that not only distinguishes whether pairs of style/content representations belong to the same or different authors/content sources, but also generates natural language explanation for their decision, simultaneously mitigating confounding information and enhancing interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EAVAE. On authorship attribution, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on various datasets, including Amazon Reviews, PAN21, and HRS. For AI-generated text detection, EAVAE excels in few-shot learning over the M4 dataset.
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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
Abhinav Sharma, Brian Zhang, Deepti Guntur University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Zhiyang Zuo MavenBio, Shreyas Chaudhari University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Wenlong Zhao University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Franck Dernoncourt Adobe Research, Puneet Mathur Adobe Systems 等 10 位作者
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems face challenges with complex, multi-hop questions, and iterative agentic frameworks such as Search-R1 (Jin et al., 2025) have been proposed to address these complexities. However, such approaches can introduce inefficiencies, including repetitive retrieval of previously processed information and challenges in contextualizing retrieved results effectively within the current generation prompt. Such issues can lead to unnecessary retrieval turns, suboptimal reasoning, inaccurate answers, and increased token consumption. In this paper, we investigate test-time modifications to Search-R1’s open-source Qwen2.5-7B pipeline to mitigate these identified shortcomings. Specifically, we explore the integration of two components and their combination: a contextualization module to better integrate relevant information from retrieved documents into reasoning, and a de-duplication module that replaces previously retrieved documents with the next most relevant ones. We evaluate our approaches using the HotpotQA (Yang et al., 2018) and the Natural Questions (Kwiatkowski et al., 2019) datasets, reporting the exact match (EM) score, an LLM-as-a-Judge assessment of answer correctness, and the average number of turns. Our best-performing variant (contextualization) achieves a 5.6% increase in EM score and reduces the average number of turns by 10.5% compared to the Search-R1 baseline. While contextualization itself introduces additional LLM calls, our results demonstrate improved answer accuracy and reduced retrieval load.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop) · 2026 · 正式发表