Quoc Phong Dao, Hoang Son Nguyen, Pham Khanh Chi, Linh Ngo Van Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diep, Thien Huu Nguyen University of Oregon, Trung Le Monash University
Knowledge Distillation (KD) has established itself as a pivotal technique for compressing large pre-trained language models. However, existing methods that force a student to strictly mimic the teacher’s sentence embeddings or internal features often incur prohibitive computational costs and yield suboptimal performance due to the inherent capacity gap. To address these challenges, we propose TALAS (Teacher-Anchored Layer Alignment with Sharpness-aware minimization), a unified framework that synergizes hierarchical (multi-layer) alignment with robust optimization. First, we introduce a Teacher-Anchored mechanism that selectively distills final sentence embeddings only into the student’s upper layers, thereby reducing overhead while respecting capacity constraints. Second, we bridge the semantic gap in lower layers via Layer-Aligned Self-Distillation, which propagates knowledge top-down using internal geometric relational constraints in the embedding space. Finally, to prevent the student from memorizing point-wise teacher noise, we integrate Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization (ASAM) into the training objective, guiding the model towards flat minima for enhanced generalization. Empirical results on standard sentence embedding benchmarks demonstrate that TALAS consistently outperforms strong distillation baselines while achieving superior training efficiency in terms of computational cost and memory footprint.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zeyu Zhang Amazon AGI, Kexuan Sun Amazon, Zheng Tang Amazon, Jens-S. Vöckler Amazon, Thien Huu Nguyen University of Oregon, Thuy Vu Amazon AGI
Knowledge Graph (KG) retrieval is a promising augmentation to address knowledge gaps and hallucinations in LLMs. As KGs in practice are stored in graph databases (e.g., Wikidata, Freebase), accurate retrieval requires translating natural language questions into structured queries (query generation). A key challenge of query generation is Text-to-Cypher, which generates Cypher queries for property graphs (e.g., Neo4j), a paradigm increasingly adopted in industry for their scalable architectures and expressive schemas. However, compared to other query generation tasks such as Text-to-SQL or Text-to-SPARQL, Text-to-Cypher remains underexplored due to scarce public KGs and datasets. Existing datasets are small, domain-limited, and lack diversity, constraining LLM progress. To address this, we introduce CypherSmith, an instruction-tuning dataset over 12\times larger than prior public Text-to-Cypher datasets, spanning diverse domains to better support LLM fine-tuning. Our key distinction lies in fully leveraging open-source LLMs for large-scale synthetic data generation and introducing a novel likelihood-based filtering technique to ensure high-quality Text-to-Cypher data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CypherSmith, achieving state-of-the-art LLM performance.
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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, 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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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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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Thang Le Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Huy Huu Nguyen, Anh Tuan Luu Nanyang Technological University, Thamar Solorio Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and University of Houston, Thien Huu Nguyen University of Oregon
Information extraction (IE) systems rely on structured data for training, but such annotated data is highly imbalanced across languages, with low-resource languages receiving little attention. Label projection techniques aim to bridge this gap by transferring structured annotations from high-resource to low-resource languages. However, existing methods are either inaccurate or too slow for large-scale use. This work aims to address this problem by developing a more effective method that remains sufficiently efficient for large-scale projection. In particular, we propose to synthesize alignment sequence pairs and fine-tune an encoder model with span alignment objective, while controlling data influence during training. Experimental results across 50+ languages show that our framework consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods while maintaining fast inference speed. In addition, we introduce EXP - the first benchmark for explicit evaluation of label projection, thereby reducing confounders and non-determinism in method assessment.
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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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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表