LGSep 15, 2024
Enhancing Data Quality through Self-learning on Imbalanced Financial Risk DataXu Sun, Zixuan Qin, Shun Zhang et al.
In the financial risk domain, particularly in credit default prediction and fraud detection, accurate identification of high-risk class instances is paramount, as their occurrence can have significant economic implications. Although machine learning models have gained widespread adoption for risk prediction, their performance is often hindered by the scarcity and diversity of high-quality data. This limitation stems from factors in datasets such as small risk sample sizes, high labeling costs, and severe class imbalance, which impede the models' ability to learn effectively and accurately forecast critical events. This study investigates data pre-processing techniques to enhance existing financial risk datasets by introducing TriEnhance, a straightforward technique that entails: (1) generating synthetic samples specifically tailored to the minority class, (2) filtering using binary feedback to refine samples, and (3) self-learning with pseudo-labels. Our experiments across six benchmark datasets reveal the efficacy of TriEnhance, with a notable focus on improving minority class calibration, a key factor for developing more robust financial risk prediction systems.
63.2CRApr 11
Mask-Free Privacy Extraction and Rewriting: A Domain-Aware Approach via Prototype LearningXiaodong Li, Yuhua Wang, Qingchen Yu et al.
Client-side privacy rewriting is crucial for deploying LLMs in privacy-sensitive domains. However, existing approaches struggle to balance privacy and utility. Full-text methods often distort context, while span-level approaches rely on impractical manual masks or brittle static dictionaries. Attempts to automate localization via prompt-based LLMs prove unreliable, as they suffer from unstable instruction following that leads to privacy leakage and excessive context scrubbing. To address these limitations, we propose DAMPER (Domain-Aware Mask-free Privacy Extraction and Rewriting). DAMPER operationalizes latent privacy semantics into compact Domain Privacy Prototypes via contrastive learning, enabling precise, autonomous span localization. Furthermore, we introduce a Prototype-Guided Preference Alignment, which leverages learned prototypes as semantic anchors to construct preference pairs, optimizing a domain-compliant rewriting policy without human annotations. At inference time, DAMPER integrates a sampling-based Exponential Mechanism to provide rigorous span-level Differential Privacy (DP) guarantees. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAMPER significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving a superior privacy-utility trade-off.
AIOct 11, 2025
The Achilles' Heel of LLMs: How Altering a Handful of Neurons Can Cripple Language AbilitiesZixuan Qin, Kunlin Lyu, Qingchen Yu et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become foundational tools in natural language processing, powering a wide range of applications and research. Many studies have shown that LLMs share significant similarities with the human brain. Recent neuroscience research has found that a small subset of biological neurons in the human brain are crucial for core cognitive functions, which raises a fundamental question: do LLMs also contain a small subset of critical neurons? In this paper, we investigate this question by proposing a Perturbation-based Causal Identification of Critical Neurons method to systematically locate such critical neurons in LLMs. Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) LLMs contain ultra-sparse critical neuron sets. Disrupting these critical neurons can cause a 72B-parameter model with over 1.1 billion neurons to completely collapse, with perplexity increasing by up to 20 orders of magnitude; (2) These critical neurons are not uniformly distributed, but tend to concentrate in the outer layers, particularly within the MLP down\_proj components; (3) Performance degradation exhibits sharp phase transitions, rather than a gradual decline, when these critical neurons are disrupted. Through comprehensive experiments across diverse model architectures and scales, we provide deeper analysis of these phenomena and their implications for LLM robustness and interpretability. These findings can offer guidance for developing more robust model architectures and improving deployment security in safety-critical applications.