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Alvin Chan

12 accepted papers

2026

To Align or Not to Align: Strategic Multimodal Representation Alignment for Optimal Performance

AAAI 2026technical

Multimodal learning often relies on aligning representations across modalities to enable effective information integration—an approach traditionally assumed to be universally beneficial. However, prior research has primarily taken an observational approach, examining naturally occurring alignment in

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Towards Understanding Modality Interaction in Multimodal Language Models via Partial Information Decomposition

ICML 2026poster

Understanding \emph{modality interaction} in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remains a central challenge for reliable and interpretable deployment. We introduce Partial Information Decomposition (PID) as a unified, decision-level framework that separates \emph{unique}, \emph{redundant}, and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Can LLMs Reason Over Non-Text Modalities in a Training-Free Manner? A Case Study with In-Context Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

The remarkable performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be enhanced with test-time computation, which relies on external tools and even other deep learning models. However, existing approaches for integrating non-text modality representations into LLMs typically require additional costly supe…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

How to Make Large Language Models Generate 100% Valid Molecules?

EMNLP 2025

Molecule generation is key to drug discovery and materials science, enabling the design of novel compounds with specific properties. Large language models (LLMs) can learn to perform a wide range of tasks from just a few examples. However, generating valid molecules using representations like SMILES

2022

How Does Frequency Bias Affect the Robustness of Neural Image Classifiers against Common Corruption and Adversarial Perturbations?

IJCAI 2022poster

Model robustness is vital for the reliable deployment of machine learning models in real-world applications. Recent studies have shown that data augmentation can result in model over-relying on features in the low-frequency domain, sacrificing performance against low-frequency corruptions, highlight…

2021

Beyond Fully-Connected Layers with Quaternions: Parameterization of Hypercomplex Multiplications with $1/n$ Parameters

ICLR 2021spotlight

Recent works have demonstrated reasonable success of representation learning in hypercomplex space. Specifically, “fully-connected layers with quaternions” (quaternions are 4D hypercomplex numbers), which replace real-valued matrix multiplications in fully-connected layers with Hamilton products of…

2021

CoCon: A Self-Supervised Approach for Controlled Text Generation

ICLR 2021poster

Pretrained Transformer-based language models (LMs) display remarkable natural language generation capabilities. With their immense potential, controlling text generation of such LMs is getting attention. While there are studies that seek to control high-level attributes (such as sentiment and topic)…

2021

On Orthogonality Constraints for Transformers

ACL 2021short

Orthogonality constraints encourage matrices to be orthogonal for numerical stability. These plug-and-play constraints, which can be conveniently incorporated into model training, have been studied for popular architectures in natural language processing, such as convolutional neural networks and re…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2021

Self-Instantiated Recurrent Units with Dynamic Soft Recursion

NeurIPS 2021poster

While standard recurrent neural networks explicitly impose a chain structure on different forms of data, they do not have an explicit bias towards recursive self-instantiation where the extent of recursion is dynamic. Given diverse and even growing data modalities (e.g., logic, algorithmic input an…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2020

What It Thinks Is Important Is Important: Robustness Transfers Through Input Gradients

CVPR 2020oral

Adversarial perturbations are imperceptible changes to input pixels that can change the prediction of deep learning models. Learned weights of models robust to such perturbations are previously found to be transferable across different tasks but this applies only if the model architecture for the so…

Cited by 55PDFcodeScholar