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Bairu Hou

9 accepted papers

2026

Adaptive Thinking: Large Language Models Know When to Think in Latent Space

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) test-time computing have introduced the capability to perform intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning (thinking) before generating answers. While increasing the thinking budget yields smooth performance improvements at inference time, the relatio…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Probabilistic Framework for LLM Hallucination Detection via Belief Tree Propagation

NAACL 2025long

We describe Belief Tree Propagation (BTProp), a probabilistic framework for LLM hallucination detection. To judge the truth of a statement, BTProp generates a belief tree by recursively expanding the initial statement into a set of logically related claims, then reasoning globally about the relation…

2025

Instruction-Following Pruning for Large Language Models

ICML 2025poster

With the rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs), structured pruning has become a widely used technique to learn efficient, smaller models from larger ones, delivering superior performance compared to training similarly sized models from scratch. In this paper, we move beyond the traditional s…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

KVLink: Accelerating Large Language Models via Efficient KV Cache Reuse

NeurIPS 2025poster

We describe KVLink, an approach for efficient key-value (KV) cache reuse in large language models (LLMs). In many LLM applications, different inputs can share overlapping context, such as the same retrieved document appearing in multiple queries. However, the LLMs still need to encode the entire con…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Advancing the Robustness of Large Language Models through Self-Denoised Smoothing

NAACL 2024short

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success, their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations, including recent jailbreak attacks, has raised considerable concerns. However, the increasing size of these models and their limited access make improving their robustness a cha…

2024

Decomposing Uncertainty for Large Language Models through Input Clarification Ensembling

ICML 2024oral

Uncertainty decomposition refers to the task of decomposing the total uncertainty of a predictive model into aleatoric (data) uncertainty, resulting from inherent randomness in the data-generating process, and epistemic (model) uncertainty, resulting from missing information in the model's training…

2023

PromptBoosting: Black-Box Text Classification with Ten Forward Passes

ICML 2023poster

We describe PromptBoosting, a query-efficient procedure for building a text classifier from a neural language model (LM) without access to the LM's parameters, gradients, or hidden representations. This form of "black-box" classifier training has become increasingly important as the cost of training…

2023

TextGrad: Advancing Robustness Evaluation in NLP by Gradient-Driven Optimization

ICLR 2023poster

Robustness evaluation against adversarial examples has become increasingly important to unveil the trustworthiness of the prevailing deep models in natural language processing (NLP). However, in contrast to the computer vision domain where the first-order projected gradient descent (PGD) is used as…

2020

Try to Substitute: An Unsupervised Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation Method Based on HowNet

COLING 2020main

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a fundamental natural language processing task. Unsupervised knowledge-based WSD only relies on a lexical knowledge base as the sense inventory and has wider practical use than supervised WSD that requires a mass of sense-annotated data. HowNet is the most widely u…