publications

2026

1. Early Decisions Matter: Proximity Bias and Initial Trajectory Shaping in Non-Autoregressive Diffusion Language Models

   Jiyeon Kim,  Sungik Choi,  Yongrae Jo,  Moontae Lee,  Minjoon Seo

   ICML 2026

   Abs Paper

   Diffusion-based language models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, harnessing this flexibility for fully non-autoregressive decoding remains an open question, particularly for reasoning and planning tasks. In this work, we investigate non-autoregressive decoding in dLLMs by systematically analyzing its inference dynamics along the temporal axis. Specifically, we uncover an inherent failure mode in confidence-based non-autoregressive generation stemming from a strong proximity bias-the tendency for the denoising order to concentrate on spatially adjacent tokens. This local dependency leads to spatial error propagation, rendering the entire trajectory critically contingent on the initial unmasking position. Leveraging this insight, we present a minimal-intervention approach that guides early token selection, employing a lightweight planner and end-of-sequence temperature annealing. We thoroughly evaluate our method on various reasoning and planning tasks and observe substantial overall improvement over existing heuristic baselines without significant computational overhead.

2. Can Large Language Models Keep Up? Benchmarking Online Adaptation to Continual Knowledge Streams

   Jiyeon Kim*,  Hyunji Lee*,  Dylan Zhou*,  Sue Hyun Park,  Seunghyun Yoon,  Trung Bui,  Franck Dernoncourt,  Sungmin Cha,  Minjoon Seo

   ACL 2026 Main

   Abs Paper

   LLMs operating in dynamic real-world contexts often encounter knowledge that evolves continuously or emerges incrementally. To remain accurate and effective, models must adapt to newly arriving information on the fly. We introduce Online Adaptation to Continual Knowledge Streams(OAKS) to evaluate this capability, establishing a benchmark for online adaptation over streaming, continually updating knowledge. Specifically, the benchmark is structured as a sequence of fine-grained context chunks where facts change dynamically across time intervals. OAKS comprises two datasets: OAKS-BABI and OAKS-Novel, where individual facts evolve multiple times across context chunks. These datasets include dense annotations to measure whether models track changes accurately. Evaluating 14 models with varied inference approaches, we observe significant limitations in current methodologies. Both state-of-the-art models and agentic memory systems fail to adapt robustly on OAKS, demonstrating delays in state-tracking and susceptibility to distraction within streaming environments.

2025

1. Understanding and Enhancing Mamba-Transformer Hybrids for Memory Recall and Language Modeling

   Hyunji Lee,  Wenhao Yu,  Hongming Zhang,  Kaixin Ma,  Jiyeon Kim,  Dong Yu,  Minjoon Seo

   EMNLP BabyLM Workshop 2025

   Abs Paper

   Hybrid models that combine state space models (SSMs) with attention mechanisms have shown strong performance by leveraging the efficiency of SSMs and the high recall ability of attention. However, the architectural design choices behind these hybrid models remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we analyze hybrid architectures through the lens of memory utilization and overall performance, and propose a complementary method to further enhance their effectiveness. We first examine the distinction between sequential and parallel integration of SSM and attention layers. Our analysis reveals several interesting findings, including that sequential hybrids perform better on shorter contexts, whereas parallel hybrids are more effective for longer contexts. We also introduce a data-centric approach of continually training on datasets augmented with paraphrases, which further enhances recall while preserving other capabilities. It generalizes well across different base models and outperforms architectural modifications aimed at enhancing recall. Our findings provide a deeper understanding of hybrid SSM-attention models and offer practical guidance for designing architectures tailored to various use cases. Our findings provide a deeper understanding of hybrid SSM-attention models and offer practical guidance for designing architectures tailored to various use cases.

2. Video Parallel Scaling: Aggregating Diverse Frame Subsets for VideoLLMs

   Hyungjin Chung,  Hyelin Nam,  Jiyeon Kim,  Hyojun Go,  Byeongjun Park,  Junho Kim,  Joonseok Lee,  Seongsu Ha,  Byung-Hoon Kim

   CVPR 2026 Findings

   Abs Paper Code

   Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) face a critical bottleneck: increasing the number of input frames to capture fine-grained temporal detail leads to prohibitive computational costs and performance degradation from long context lengths. We introduce Video Parallel Scaling (VPS), an inference-time method that expands a model’s perceptual bandwidth without increasing its context window. VPS operates by running multiple parallel inference streams, each processing a unique, disjoint subset of the video’s frames. By aggregating the output probabilities from these complementary streams, VPS integrates a richer set of visual information than is possible with a single pass. We theoretically show that this approach effectively contracts the Chinchilla scaling law by leveraging uncorrelated visual evidence, thereby improving performance without additional training. Extensive experiments across various model architectures and scales (2B-32B) on benchmarks such as Video-MME and EventHallusion demonstrate that VPS consistently and significantly improves performance. It scales more favorably than other parallel alternatives (e.g. Self-consistency) and is complementary to other decoding strategies, offering a memory-efficient and robust framework for enhancing the temporal reasoning capabilities of VideoLLMs.

3. Latent Reasoning via Sentence Embedding Prediction

   Hyeonbin Hwang*,  Byeongguk Jeon*,  Seungone Kim,  Jiyeon Kim,  Hoyeon Chang,  Sohee Yang,  Seungpil Won,  Dohaeng Lee,  Youbin Ahn,  Minjoon Seo

   Oral, RAM 2: Reasoning, Attention & Memory @COLM 2025 Workshop

   Abs Paper

   Autoregressive language models (LMs) generate one token at a time, yet human reasoning operates over higher-level abstractions - sentences, propositions, and concepts. This contrast raises a central question- Can LMs likewise learn to reason over structured semantic units rather than raw token sequences? In this work, we investigate whether pretrained LMs can be lifted into such abstract reasoning spaces by building on their learned representations. We present a framework that adapts a pretrained token-level LM to operate in sentence space by autoregressively predicting continuous embeddings of next sentences. We explore two embedding paradigms inspired by classical representation learning: 1) semantic embeddings, learned via autoencoding to preserve surface meaning; and 2) contextual embeddings, trained via next-sentence prediction to encode anticipatory structure. We evaluate both under two inference regimes: Discretized, which decodes each predicted embedding into text before re-encoding; and Continuous, which reasons entirely in embedding space for improved efficiency. Across four domains - mathematics, logic, commonsense, and planning - contextual embeddings under continuous inference show competitive performance with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) while reducing inference-time FLOPs on average by half. We also present early signs of scalability and modular adaptation. Finally, to visualize latent trajectories, we introduce SentenceLens, a diagnostic tool that decodes intermediate model states into interpretable sentences. Together, our results indicate that pretrained LMs can effectively transition to abstract, structured reasoning within latent embedding spaces.

4. Knowledge Entropy Decay during Language Model Pretraining Hinders New Knowledge Acquisition

   Jiyeon Kim*,  Hyunji Lee*,  Hyowon Cho,  Joel Jang,  Hyeonbin Hwang,  Seungpil Won,  Youbin Ahn,  Dohaeng Lee,  Minjoon Seo

   ICLR 2025 Oral

   Best Paper, Towards Knowledgeable Foundation Models @AAAI 2025 Workshop

   Abs Paper Code

   In this work, we investigate how a model’s tendency to broadly integrate its parametric knowledge evolves throughout pretraining, and how this behavior affects overall performance, particularly in terms of knowledge acquisition and forgetting. We introduce the concept of knowledge entropy, which quantifies the range of memory sources the model engages with; high knowledge entropy indicates that the model utilizes a wide range of memory sources, while low knowledge entropy suggests reliance on specific sources with greater certainty. Our analysis reveals a consistent decline in knowledge entropy as pretraining advances. We also find that the decline is closely associated with a reduction in the model’s ability to acquire and retain knowledge, leading us to conclude that diminishing knowledge entropy (smaller number of active memory sources) impairs the model’s knowledge acquisition and retention capabilities. We find further support for this by demonstrating that increasing the activity of inactive memory sources enhances the model’s capacity for knowledge acquisition and retention.

5. How Does Vision-Language Adaptation Impact the Safety of Vision Language Models?

   Seongyun Lee*,  Geewook Kim*,  Jiyeon Kim*,  Hyunji Lee,  Hoyeon Chang,  Sue Hyun Park,  Minjoon Seo

   ICLR 2025

   Abs Paper

   Vision-Language adaptation (VL adaptation) transforms Large Language Models (LLMs) into Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for multimodal tasks, but this process often compromises the inherent safety capabilities embedded in the original LLMs. Despite potential harmfulness due to weakened safety measures, in-depth analysis on the effects of VL adaptation on safety remains under-explored. This study examines how VL adaptation influences safety and evaluates the impact of safety fine-tuning methods. Our analysis reveals that safety degradation occurs during VL adaptation, even when the training data is safe. While safety tuning techniques like supervised fine-tuning with safety datasets or reinforcement learning from human feedback mitigate some risks, they still lead to safety degradation and a reduction in helpfulness due to over-rejection issues. Further analysis of internal model weights suggests that VL adaptation may impact certain safety-related layers, potentially lowering overall safety levels. Additionally, our findings demonstrate that the objectives of VL adaptation and safety tuning are divergent, which often results in their simultaneous application being suboptimal. To address this, we suggest the weight merging approach as an optimal solution effectively reducing safety degradation while maintaining helpfulness. These insights help guide the development of more reliable and secure LVLMs for real-world applications.

2024

1. ListT5: Listwise Reranking with Fusion-in-Decoder Improves Zero-shot Retrieval

   Soyoung Yoon,  Eunbi Choi,  Jiyeon Kim,  Hyeongu Yun,  Yireun Kim,  Seung-won Hwang

   ACL 2024 Oral

   Abs Paper

   We propose ListT5, a novel reranking approach based on Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) that handles multiple candidate passages at both train and inference time. We also introduce an efficient inference framework for listwise ranking based on m-ary tournament sort with output caching. We evaluate and compare our model on the BEIR benchmark for zero-shot retrieval task, demonstrating that ListT5 (1) outperforms the state-of-the-art RankT5 baseline with a notable +1.3 gain in the average NDCG@10 score, (2) has an efficiency comparable to pointwise ranking models and surpasses the efficiency of previous listwise ranking models, and (3) overcomes the lost-in-the-middle problem of previous listwise rerankers. Our code, model checkpoints, and the evaluation framework will be fully open-sourced.