TRACE: Discovering Task-Specific Parameter via Adaptation-Aware Probing for Continual Fine-Tuning

In real-world deployment, LLMs are often adapted continually across tasks to keep LLMs up-to-date in production, where new fine-tuning should preserve previously learned skills. However, indiscriminately mixing tasks can dilute task specialization, while sequential fine-tuning (full-parameter or low rank adaptation) often causes catastrophic forgetting due to destructive overwriting. Replay-based continual tuning and maintaining separate task-specific adapters can mitigate forgetting, but introduce additional compute, storage, and management overhead. Recognizing the redundancy of LLM parameters for any single task, we reframe continual task adaptation as task-specific parameter discovery via adaptation-aware probing: a short warm-start probe exposes a task's adaptation trace, enabling us to identify and isolate the small subset of parameters essential for each task to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Building on this view, we introduce TRACE, a novel approach for discovering Task-specific paRameters via Adaptation-aware probing for Continual finE-tuning. We perform a short warm-start fine-tune to derive task-specific core parameters by comparing the warm-started and pre-trained models. Core parameters are identified via two strategies: importance scoring (L$_2$ norm and Fisher Information) and specificity analysis (cosine similarity of parameter updates). In continual fine-tuning settings, only the active task's core parameters are updated while others remain frozen, preserving prior knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple standard benchmarks to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. Additionally, we validate the generalization of our method through a cross-model and scale transferability study, demonstrating a "small-to-large" paradigm that guides the fine-tuning of large-scale models under resource constraints.

Advancing Graph Few-Shot Learning via In-Context Learning

Graph few-shot learning, which aims to classify nodes from novel classes with only a few labeled examples, is a widely studied problem in graph learning. However, existing methods often face two key limitations. First, the predominant graph few-shot learning paradigm relies on supervised tasks, failing to leverage the vast number of unlabeled nodes in the graph. Second, many approaches require complex task adaptation or fine-tuning during inference, limiting their efficiency and applicability. Inspired by the powerful in-context learning capabilities of large language models, we propose a novel model named VISION for adVancIng graph few-Shot learning via In-cOntext LearNing to address these challenges. Our model reframes graph few-shot learning as a fine-tuning-free sequence reasoning problem. At its core is a context-aware network that initializes nodes with role embeddings and employs a dual-context fusion module to synergistically integrate local topological structures and global task-level dependencies. This allows our model to dynamically generate class-aware representations for the query set conditioned on the support set context in a single forward pass. To effectively train our model, we introduce an unsupervised task generator that creates structure-adaptive features and constructs diverse pseudo-tasks from abundant unlabeled data. Our method unifies unsupervised meta-learning with graph in-context learning, achieving efficient inference. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model. Our public code can be found

Harmful Visual Content Manipulation Matters in Misinformation Detection Under Multimedia Scenarios

Nowadays, the widespread dissemination of misinformation across numerous social media platforms has led to severe negative effects on society. To address this challenge, the automatic detection of misinformation, particularly under multimedia scenarios, has gained significant attention from both academic and industrial communities, leading to the emergence of a research task known as Multimodal Misinformation Detection (MMD). Typically, current MMD approaches focus on capturing the semantic relationships and inconsistency between various modalities but often overlook certain critical indicators within multimodal content. Recent research has shown that manipulated features within visual content in social media articles serve as valuable clues for MMD. Meanwhile, we argue that the potential intentions behind the manipulation, e.g., harmful and harmless, also matter in MMD. Therefore, in this study, we aim to identify such multimodal misinformation by capturing two types of features: manipulation features, which represent if visual content has been manipulated, and intention features, which assess the nature of these manipulations, distinguishing between harmful and harmless intentions. Unfortunately, the manipulation and intention labels that supervise these features to be discriminative are unknown. To address this, we introduce two weakly supervised indicators as substitutes by incorporating supplementary datasets focused on image manipulation detection and framing two different classification tasks as positive and unlabeled learning issues. With this framework, we introduce an innovative MMD approach, titled Harmful Visual Content Manipulation Matters in MMD (HAVC-M4 D). Comprehensive experiments conducted on four prevalent MMD datasets indicate that HAVC-M4 D significantly and consistently enhances the performance of existing MMD methods.

Learning from Label Proportions with Dual-proportion Constraints

Learning from Label Proportions (LLP) is a weakly supervised problem in which the training data comprise bags, that is, groups of instances, each annotated only with bag-level class label proportions, and the objective is to learn a classifier that predicts instance-level labels. This setting is widely applicable when privacy constraints limit access to instance-level annotations or when fine-grained labeling is costly or impractical. In this work, we introduce a method that leverages Dual proportion Constraints (LLP-DC) during training, enforcing them at both the bag and instance levels. Specifically, the bag-level training aligns the mean prediction with the given proportion, and the instance-level training aligns hard pseudo-labels that satisfy the proportion constraint, where a minimum-cost maximum-flow algorithm is used to generate hard pseudo-labels. Extensive experimental results across various benchmark datasets empirically validate that LLP-DC consistently improves over previous LLP methods across datasets and bag sizes. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/TianhaoMa5/CV PR2026_Findings_LLP_DC.

Robust Misinformation Detection by Visiting Potential Commonsense Conflict

The development of Internet technology has led to an increased prevalence of misinformation, causing severe negative effects across diverse domains. To mitigate this challenge, Misinformation Detection (MD), aiming to detect online misinformation automatically, emerges as a rapidly growing research topic in the community. In this paper, we propose a novel plug-and-play augmentation method for the MD task, namely Misinformation Detection with Potential Commonsense Conflict (MD-PCC). We take inspiration from the prior studies indicating that fake articles are more likely to involve commonsense conflict. Accordingly, we construct commonsense expressions for articles, serving to express potential commonsense conflicts inferred by the difference between extracted commonsense triplet and golden ones inferred by the well-established commonsense reasoning tool COMET. These expressions are then specified for each article as augmentation. Any specific MD methods can be then trained on those commonsense-augmented articles. Besides, we also collect a novel commonsense-oriented dataset named CoMis, whose all fake articles are caused by commonsense conflict. We integrate MD-PCC with various existing MD backbones and compare them across both 4 public benchmark datasets and CoMis. Empirical results demonstrate that MD-PCC can consistently outperform the existing MD baselines.

Dual-level Mixup for Graph Few-shot Learning with Fewer Tasks

Graph neural networks have been demonstrated as a powerful paradigm for effectively learning graph-structured data on the web and mining content from it.Current leading graph models require a large number of labeled samples for training, which unavoidably leads to overfitting in few-shot scenarios. Recent research has sought to alleviate this issue by simultaneously leveraging graph learning and meta-learning paradigms. However, these graph meta-learning models assume the availability of numerous meta-training tasks to learn transferable meta-knowledge. Such assumption may not be feasible in the real world due to the difficulty of constructing tasks and the substantial costs involved. Therefore, we propose a SiMple yet effectIve approach for graph few-shot Learning with fEwer tasks, named SMILE. We introduce a dual-level mixup strategy, encompassing both within-task and across-task mixup, to simultaneously enrich the available nodes and tasks in meta-learning. Moreover, we explicitly leverage the prior information provided by the node degrees in the graph to encode expressive node representations. Theoretically, we demonstrate that SMILE can enhance the model generalization ability. Empirically, SMILE consistently outperforms other competitive models by a large margin across all evaluated datasets with in-domain and cross-domain settings. Our anonymous code can be found here.

A Simple Graph Contrastive Learning Framework for Short Text Classification

Short text classification has gained significant attention in the information age due to its prevalence and real-world applications. Recent advancements in graph learning combined with contrastive learning have shown promising results in addressing the challenges of semantic sparsity and limited labeled data in short text classification. However, existing models have certain limitations. They rely on explicit data augmentation techniques to generate contrastive views, resulting in semantic corruption and noise. Additionally, these models only focus on learning the intrinsic consistency between the generated views, neglecting valuable discriminative information from other potential views. To address these issues, we propose a Simple graph contrastive learning framework for Short Text Classification (SimSTC). Our approach involves performing graph learning on multiple text-related component graphs to obtain multi-view text embeddings. Subsequently, we directly apply contrastive learning on these embeddings. Notably, our method eliminates the need for data augmentation operations to generate contrastive views while still leveraging the benefits of multi-view contrastive learning. Despite its simplicity, our model achieves outstanding performance, surpassing large language models on various datasets.

Boosting Short Text Classification with Multi-Source Information Exploration and Dual-Level Contrastive Learning

Short text classification, as a research subtopic in natural language processing, is more challenging due to its semantic sparsity and insufficient labeled samples in practical scenarios. We propose a novel model named MI-DELIGHT for short text classification in this work. Specifically, it first performs multi-source information (i.e., statistical information, linguistic information, and factual information) exploration to alleviate the sparsity issues. Then, the graph learning approach is adopted to learn the representation of short texts, which are presented in graph forms. Moreover, we introduce a dual-level (i.e., instance-level and cluster-level) contrastive learning auxiliary task to effectively capture different-grained contrastive information within massive unlabeled data. Meanwhile, previous models merely perform the main task and auxiliary tasks in parallel, without considering the relationship among tasks. Therefore, we introduce a hierarchical architecture to explicitly model the correlations between tasks. We conduct extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets, demonstrating that MI-DELIGHT significantly surpasses previous competitive models. It even outperforms popular large language models on several datasets.

Enhancing Unsupervised Graph Few-shot Learning via Set Functions and Optimal Transport

Graph few-shot learning has garnered significant attention for its ability to rapidly adapt to downstream tasks with limited labeled data, sparking considerable interest among researchers. Recent advancements in graph few-shot learning models have exhibited superior performance across diverse applications. Despite their successes, several limitations still exist. First, existing models in the meta-training phase predominantly focus on instance-level features within tasks, neglecting crucial set-level features essential for distinguishing between different categories. Second, these models often utilize query sets directly on classifiers trained with support sets containing only a few labeled examples, overlooking potential distribution shifts between these sets and leading to suboptimal performance. Finally, previous models typically require necessitate abundant labeled data from base classes to extract transferable knowledge, which is typically infeasible in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel model named STAR, which leverages Set funcTions and optimAl tRansport for enhancing unsupervised graph few-shot learning. Specifically, STAR utilizes expressive set functions to obtain set-level features in an unsupervised manner and employs optimal transport principles to align the distributions of support and query sets, thereby mitigating distribution shift effects. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that STAR can capture more task-relevant information and enhance generalization capabilities. Empirically, extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of STAR. Our code can be found here.

Instance-adaptive Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting emerges as a simple and effective strategy for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) in real-world reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, the efficacy of a singular, task-level prompt uniformly applied across the whole of instances is inherently limited since one prompt cannot be a good partner for all, a more appropriate approach should consider the interaction between the prompt and each instance meticulously. This work introduces an instance-adaptive prompting algorithm as an alternative zero-shot CoT reasoning scheme by adaptively differentiating good and bad prompts. Concretely, we first employ analysis on LLMs through the lens of information flow to detect the mechanism under zero-shot CoT reasoning, in which we discover that information flows from question to prompt and question to rationale jointly influence the reasoning results most. We notice that a better zero-shot CoT reasoning needs the prompt to obtain semantic information from the question then the rationale aggregates sufficient information from the question directly and via the prompt indirectly. On the contrary, lacking any of those would probably lead to a bad one. Stem from that, we further propose an instance-adaptive prompting strategy (IAP) for zero-shot CoT reasoning. Experiments conducted with LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3, and Qwen on math, logic, and commonsense reasoning tasks (e.g., GSM8K, MMLU, Causal Judgement) obtain consistent improvement, demonstrating that the instance-adaptive zero-shot CoT prompting performs better than other task-level methods with some curated prompts or sophisticated procedures, showing the significance of our findings in the zero-shot CoT reasoning mechanism.