Author name cluster

Jinlong Pang

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

5 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Evaluating LLM-contaminated Crowdsourcing Data Without Ground Truth

Yichi Zhang
Jinlong Pang
Zhaowei Zhu
Yang Liu

The recent success of generative AI highlights the crucial role of high-quality human feedback in building trustworthy AI systems. However, the increasing use of large language models (LLMs) by crowdsourcing workers poses a significant challenge: datasets intended to reflect human input may be compromised by LLM-generated responses. Existing LLM detection approaches often rely on high-dimensional training data such as text, making them unsuitable for structured annotation tasks like multiple-choice labeling. In this work, we investigate the potential of peer prediction --- a mechanism that evaluates the information within workers' responses --- to mitigate LLM-assisted cheating in crowdsourcing with a focus on annotation tasks. Our method quantifies the correlations between worker answers while conditioning on (a subset of) LLM-generated labels available to the requester. Building on prior research, we propose a training-free scoring mechanism with theoretical guarantees under a novel model that accounts for LLM collusion. We establish conditions under which our method is effective and empirically demonstrate its robustness in detecting low-effort cheating on real-world crowdsourcing datasets.

PDF Details

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Improving Data Efficiency via Curating LLM-Driven Rating Systems

Jinlong Pang
Jiaheng Wei
Ankit Shah 0001
Zhaowei Zhu
Yaxuan Wang
Chen Qian 0001
Yang Liu 0018
Yujia Bao

Instruction tuning is critical for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, and recent studies have demonstrated that small amounts of human-curated data can outperform larger datasets, challenging traditional data scaling laws. While LLM-based data quality rating systems offer a cost-effective alternative to human annotation, they often suffer from inaccuracies and biases, even in powerful models like GPT-4. In this work, we introduce $DS^2$, a **D**iversity-aware **S**core curation method for **D**ata **S**election. By systematically modeling error patterns through a score transition matrix, $DS^2$ corrects LLM-based scores and promotes diversity in the selected data samples. Our approach shows that a curated subset (just 3.3\% of the original dataset) outperforms full-scale datasets (300k samples) across various machine-alignment benchmarks, and matches or surpasses human-aligned datasets such as LIMA with the same sample size (1k samples). These findings challenge conventional data scaling assumptions, highlighting that redundant, low-quality samples can degrade performance and reaffirming that ``more can be less''.

Details

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

LLM Unlearning via Loss Adjustment with Only Forget Data

Yaxuan Wang
Jiaheng Wei
Chris Yuhao Liu
Jinlong Pang
Quan Liu
Ankit Shah 0001
Yujia Bao
Yang Liu 0018

Unlearning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for ensuring ethical and responsible AI use, especially in addressing privacy leak, bias, safety, and evolving regulations. Existing approaches to LLM unlearning often rely on retain data or a reference LLM, yet they struggle to adequately balance unlearning performance with overall model utility. This challenge arises because leveraging explicit retain data or implicit knowledge of retain data from a reference LLM to fine-tune the model tends to blur the boundaries between the forgotten and retain data, as different queries often elicit similar responses. In this work, we propose eliminating the need to retain data or the reference LLM for response calibration in LLM unlearning. Recognizing that directly applying gradient ascent on the forget data often leads to optimization instability and poor performance, our method guides the LLM on what not to respond to, and importantly, how to respond, based on the forget data. Hence, we introduce Forget data only Loss AjustmenT (FLAT), a "flat" loss adjustment approach which addresses these issues by maximizing $f$-divergence between the available template answer and the forget answer only w.r.t. the forget data. The variational form of the defined $f$-divergence theoretically provides a way of loss adjustment by assigning different importance weights for the learning w.r.t. template responses and the forgetting of responses subject to unlearning. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach not only achieves superior unlearning performance compared to existing methods but also minimizes the impact on the model’s retained capabilities, ensuring high utility across diverse tasks, including copyrighted content unlearning on Harry Potter dataset and MUSE Benchmark, and entity unlearning on the TOFU dataset.

Details

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Token Cleaning: Fine-Grained Data Selection for LLM Supervised Fine-Tuning

Jinlong Pang
Na Di
Zhaowei Zhu
Jiaheng Wei
Hao Cheng
Chen Qian 0001
Yang Liu 0018

Recent studies show that in supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models (LLMs), data quality matters more than quantity. While most data cleaning methods concentrate on filtering entire samples, the quality of individual tokens within a sample can vary significantly. After pre-training, even in high-quality samples, patterns or phrases that are not task-related can be redundant, uninformative, or even harmful. Continuing to fine-tune on these patterns may offer limited benefit and even degrade downstream task performance. In this paper, we investigate token quality from a noisy-label perspective and propose a generic token cleaning pipeline for SFT tasks. Our method filters out uninformative tokens while preserving those carrying key task-specific information. Specifically, we first evaluate token quality by examining the influence of model updates on each token, then apply a threshold-based separation. The token influence can be measured in a single pass with a fixed reference model or iteratively with self-evolving reference models. The benefits and limitations of both methods are analyzed theoretically by error upper bounds. Extensive experiments show that our framework consistently improves downstream performance. Code is available at https: //github. com/UCSC-REAL/TokenCleaning.

Details

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Fairness without Harm: An Influence-Guided Active Sampling Approach

Jinlong Pang
Jialu Wang
Zhaowei Zhu
Yuanshun Yao
Chen Qian
Yang Liu

The pursuit of fairness in machine learning (ML), ensuring that the models do not exhibit biases toward protected demographic groups, typically results in a compromise scenario. This compromise can be explained by a Pareto frontier where given certain resources (e. g. , data), reducing the fairness violations often comes at the cost of lowering the model accuracy. In this work, we aim to train models that mitigate group fairness disparity without causing harm to model accuracy. Intuitively, acquiring more data is a natural and promising approach to achieve this goal by reaching a better Pareto frontier of the fairness-accuracy tradeoff. The current data acquisition methods, such as fair active learning approaches, typically require annotating sensitive attributes. However, these sensitive attribute annotations should be protected due to privacy and safety concerns. In this paper, we propose a tractable active data sampling algorithm that does not rely on training group annotations, instead only requiring group annotations on a small validation set. Specifically, the algorithm first scores each new example by its influence on fairness and accuracy evaluated on the validation dataset, and then selects a certain number of examples for training. We theoretically analyze how acquiring more data can improve fairness without causing harm, and validate the possibility of our sampling approach in the context of risk disparity. We also provide the upper bound of generalization error and risk disparity as well as the corresponding connections. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. Our code is available at github. com/UCSC-REAL/FairnessWithoutHarm.

PDF Details DOI