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Bowen Tan

13 accepted papers

2026

Contact-Anchored Policies: Contact Conditioning Creates Strong Robot Utility Models

RSS 2026poster

The prevalent paradigm in robot learning attempts to generalize across environments, embodiments, and tasks with language prompts at runtime. A fundamental tension limits this approach: language is often too abstract to guide the concrete physical understanding required for robust manipulation. In t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Synthesizing Privacy-Preserving Text Data via Finetuning *without* Finetuning Billion-Scale LLMs

ICML 2025poster

Synthetic data offers a promising path to train models while preserving data privacy. Differentially private (DP) finetuning of large language models (LLMs) as data generator is effective, but is impractical when computation resources are limited. Meanwhile, prompt-based methods such as private evol…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

$\texttt{Model-GLUE}$: Democratized LLM Scaling for A Large Model Zoo in the Wild

NeurIPS 2024poster

As Large Language Models (LLMs) excel across tasks and specialized domains, scaling LLMs based on existing models has gained significant attention, which is challenged by potential performance drop when combining disparate models. Various techniques have been proposed to aggregate pre-trained LLMs,…

2024

RedCoast: A Lightweight Tool to Automate Distributed Training of LLMs on Any GPU/TPUs

NAACL 2024system demonstrations

The recent progress of AI can be largely attributed to large language models (LLMs). However, their escalating memory requirements introduce challenges for machine learning (ML) researchers and engineers. Addressing this requires developers to partition a large model to distribute it across multiple…

2023

BertNet: Harvesting Knowledge Graphs with Arbitrary Relations from Pretrained Language Models

ACL 2023findings

It is crucial to automatically construct knowledge graphs (KGs) of diverse new relations to support knowledge discovery and broad applications. Previous KG construction methods, based on either crowdsourcing or text mining, are often limited to a small predefined set of relations due to manual cost…

2023

Cappy: Outperforming and Boosting Large Multi-Task LMs with a Small Scorer

NeurIPS 2023poster

Large language models (LLMs) such as T0, FLAN, and OPT-IML excel in multi-tasking under a unified instruction-following paradigm, where they also exhibit remarkable generalization abilities to unseen tasks. Despite their impressive performance, these LLMs, with sizes ranging from several billion to…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

MFAT: A Multi-Level Feature Aggregated Transformer for Person Re-Identification

ICASSP 2023accepted

Recently, with the development of the Transformer, re-identification (ReID) has great success in various applications. Existing works prefer to utilize the Transformer’s highest-level information as its discriminative feature, which focuses on a few concentrated parts or areas. However, in ReID file…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Efficient (Soft) Q-Learning for Text Generation with Limited Good Data

EMNLP 2022finding

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial attacks or generating prompts to control language models. R…

2021

Compression, Transduction, and Creation: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Natural Language Generation

EMNLP 2021main

Natural language generation (NLG) spans a broad range of tasks, each of which serves for specific objectives and desires different properties of generated text. The complexity makes automatic evaluation of NLG particularly challenging. Previous work has typically focused on a single task and develop…

2021

On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19

ACL 2021short

Under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVID19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. Because of the shortage of medical professionals, many people cannot receive online consultations timely. To address this problem, we aim to develop a medical dialog system that can…

2021

Progressive Generation of Long Text with Pretrained Language Models

NAACL 2021long

Large-scale language models (LMs) pretrained on massive corpora of text, such as GPT-2, are powerful open-domain text generators. However, as our systematic examination reveals, it is still challenging for such models to generate coherent long passages of text (e.g., 1000 tokens), especially when th…

2019

Learning Data Manipulation for Augmentation and Weighting

NeurIPS 2019poster

Manipulating data, such as weighting data examples or augmenting with new instances, has been increasingly used to improve model training. Previous work has studied various rule- or learning-based approaches designed for specific types of data manipulation. In this work, we propose a new method that…

2018

Policy Adaptation for Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Dialogue Management

ICASSP 2018accepted

Policy optimization is the core part of statistical dialogue management. Deep reinforcement learning has been successfully used for dialogue policy optimization for a static pre-defined domain. However, when the domain changes dynamically, e.g. a new previously unseen concept (or slot) which can be…

Cited by 0SourceScholar