Researcher profile

Zihao Fu

Zihao Fu contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Evaluating the Ability of Explanations to Disambiguate Models in a Rashomon Set

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is concerned with producing explanations indicating the inner workings of models. For a Rashomon set of similarly performing models, explanations provide a way of disambiguating the behavior of individual models, helping select models for deployment. However explanations themselves can vary depending on the explainer used, and need to be evaluated. In the paper "Evaluating Model Explanations without Ground Truth", we proposed three principles of explanation evaluation and a new method "AXE" to evaluate the quality of feature-importance explanations. We go on to illustrate how evaluation metrics that rely on comparing model explanations against ideal ground truth explanations obscure behavioral differences within a Rashomon set. Explanation evaluation aligned with our proposed principles would highlight these differences instead, helping select models from the Rashomon set. The selection of alternate models from the Rashomon set can maintain identical predictions but mislead explainers into generating false explanations, and mislead evaluation methods into considering the false explanations to be of high quality. AXE, our proposed explanation evaluation method, can detect this adversarial fairwashing of explanations with a 100% success rate. Unlike prior explanation evaluation strategies such as those based on model sensitivity or ground truth comparison, AXE can determine when protected attributes are used to make predictions.

preprint2026arXiv

Flexi-LoRA with Input-Adaptive Ranks: Efficient Finetuning for Speech and Reasoning Tasks

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) have become essential for deploying large language models, yet their static parameter allocation remains suboptimal for inputs of varying complexity. We present Flexi-LoRA, a novel framework that dynamically adjusts LoRA ranks based on input complexity during both training and inference. Through empirical analysis across question answering, mathematical reasoning, and speech tasks, we demonstrate that maintaining consistency between training and inference dynamics is important for effective adaptation, particularly for sequential reasoning tasks. Our findings reveal that input-dependent parameter allocation achieves higher performance with fewer parameters by optimally matching rank configurations to question complexity. Furthermore, task-specific dependency on rank dynamics varies, with mathematical reasoning tasks exhibiting higher dependency than QA tasks. Successful adaptation manifests not only in correctness but also in reasoning quality and instruction adherence. Flexi-LoRA consistently outperforms static LoRA while using fewer parameters, with performance gains more pronounced on tasks requiring strict reasoning chains. Our approach realizes key benefits of mixture-of-experts frameworks through a more streamlined implementation, reducing parameter redundancy while improving model capabilities. We provide comprehensive empirical studies across diverse tasks, establishing a basis for future work in input-adaptive and efficient fine-tuning approaches.

preprint2026arXiv

SCALPEL: Selective Capability Ablation via Low-rank Parameter Editing for Large Language Model Interpretability Analysis

Large language models excel across diverse domains, yet their deployment in healthcare, legal systems, and autonomous decision-making remains limited by incomplete understanding of their internal mechanisms. As these models integrate into high-stakes systems, understanding how they encode capabilities has become fundamental to interpretability research. Traditional approaches identify important modules through gradient attribution or activation analysis, assuming specific capabilities map to specific components. However, this oversimplifies neural computation: modules may contribute to multiple capabilities simultaneously, while single capabilities may distribute across multiple modules. These coarse-grained analyses fail to capture fine-grained, distributed capability encoding. We present SCALPEL (Selective Capability Ablation via Low-rank Parameter Editing for Large language models), a framework representing capabilities as low-rank parameter subspaces rather than discrete modules. Our key insight is that capabilities can be characterized by low-rank modifications distributed across layers and modules, enabling precise capability removal without affecting others. By training LoRA adapters to reduce distinguishing correct from incorrect answers while preserving general language modeling quality, SCALPEL identifies low-rank representations responsible for particular capabilities while remaining disentangled from others. Experiments across diverse capability and linguistic tasks from BLiMP demonstrate that SCALPEL successfully removes target capabilities while preserving general capabilities, providing fine-grained insights into capability distribution across parameter space. Results reveal that capabilities exhibit low-rank structure and can be selectively ablated through targeted parameter-space interventions, offering nuanced understanding of capability encoding in LLMs.