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Carl Yang

51 accepted papers

2026

Alternating Reinforcement Learning for Rubric-Based Reward Modeling in Non-Verifiable LLM Post-Training

ICML 2026poster

Standard reward models typically predict scalar scores that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of response quality in non-verifiable domains, such as creative writing or open-ended instruction following. To address this limitation, we propose Rubric-ARM, a framework that jointly optimizes a rub…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Bootstrapped Exploration with Causal Reasoning: A Training Paradigm for Adaptive Forecasting Agent

ICML 2026poster

Time series forecasting is critical in domains such as finance, energy, and healthcare, yet real-world datasets often exhibit non-stationarity, noise, missing values, and distribution shifts, posing severe challenges for generalization. In practice, industry solutions typically rely on customized fo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Incentivizing Agentic Reasoning in LLM Judges via Tool-Integrated Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used as judges to evaluate response quality, providing a scalable alternative to human evaluation. However, most LLM judges operate solely on intrinsic text-based reasoning, limiting their ability to verify complex constraints or perform accurate computation.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MedAgentGym: A Scalable Agentic Training Environment for Code-Centric Reasoning in Biomedical Data Science

ICLR 2026oral

We introduce MedAgentGym, a scalable and interactive training environment designed to enhance coding-based biomedical reasoning capabilities in large language model (LLM) agents. MedAgentGym comprises 72,413 task instances across 129 categories derived from 12 authentic real-world biomedical scenari…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Position: Beyond Prediction: Toward Verifiable Physiological Waveform Reasoning with Foundation Models and Agentic LLMs

ICML 2026poster

Physiological waveforms (e.g., ECG, PPG, EEG) encode clinically meaningful information in fine-grained morphology, precise timing, and cross-channel dynamics, yet most machine learning systems still treat them as generic time series and optimize end-to-end prediction. In this position paper, **we ar…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SE-Diff: Simulator and Experience Enhanced Diffusion Model for Comprehensive ECG Generation

ICLR 2026poster

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a leading cause of mortality worldwide. Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are the most widely used non-invasive tool for cardiac assessment, yet large, well-annotated ECG corpora are scarce due to cost, privacy, and workflow constraints. Generating ECGs can aid mechanistic un…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Scaling Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Tool-Integrated Reasoning in VLMs

CVPR 2026

While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong image understanding, their ability to "think with images," i.e., to reason through multi-step visual interactions, remains limited. We introduce VISTA-Gym, a scalable training environment for incentivizing tool-integrated visual reasoning

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Seeing Through the Brain: New Insights from Decoding Visual Stimuli with fMRI

ICLR 2026oral

Understanding how the brain encodes visual information is a central challenge in neuroscience and machine learning. A promising approach is to reconstruct visual stimuli—essentially images—from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) signals. This involves two stages: transforming fMRI signals…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Transferable Graph Condensation from the Causal Perspective

AAAI 2026technical

The increasing scale of graph datasets has significantly improved the performance of graph representation learning methods, but it has also introduced substantial training challenges. Graph dataset condensation techniques have emerged to compress large datasets into smaller yet information-rich data

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AceSearcher: Bootstrapping Reasoning and Search for LLMs via Reinforced Self-Play

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Search-augmented LLMs often struggle with complex reasoning tasks due to ineffective multi-hop retrieval and limited reasoning ability. We propose AceSearcher, a cooperative self-play framework that trains a single large language model (LLM) to alternate between two roles: a decomposer that breaks d…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BoxLM: Unifying Structures and Semantics of Medical Concepts for Diagnosis Prediction in Healthcare

ICML 2025poster

Language Models (LMs) have advanced diagnosis prediction by leveraging the semantic understanding of medical concepts in Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Despite these advancements, existing LM-based methods often fail to capture the structures of medical concepts (e.g., hierarchy structure from do…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Contrastive Unlearning: A Contrastive Approach to Machine Unlearning

IJCAI 2025

Machine unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of a subset of training samples (i.e., unlearning samples) from a trained model. Effectively and efficiently removing the unlearning samples without negatively impacting the overall model performance is challenging. Existing works mainly exploit inp

2025

Don’t Forget the Enjoin: FocalLoRA for Instruction Hierarchical Alignment in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent studies reveal that large language models (LLMs) often struggle to resolve conflicting instructions embedded within hierarchical prompts, resulting in decreased compliance with system-level directives and compromising the reliability of safety-critical applications. While earlier approaches a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

EAGLES: Towards Effective, Efficient, and Economical Federated Graph Learning via Unified Sparsification

ICML 2025poster

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) has gained significant attention as a privacy-preserving approach to collaborative learning, but the computational demands increase substantially as datasets grow and Graph Neural Network (GNN) layers deepen. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{EAGLES}$, a…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Explainable Text Classification with LLMs: Enhancing Performance through Dialectical Prompting and Explanation-Guided Training

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success across a range of natural language processing tasks. However, they still underperform in text classification tasks compared to fine-tuned small models. This can be linked to complexities in addressing context-dependent expressions and com

2025

FedSPA: Generalizable Federated Graph Learning under Homophily Heterogeneity

CVPR 2025poster

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) has emerged as a solution to address real-world privacy concerns and data silos in graph learning, which relies on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Nevertheless, the homophily level discrepancies within the local graph data of clients, termed homophily heterogeneity, sign…

2025

GC4NC: A Benchmark Framework for Graph Condensation on Node Classification with New Insights

NeurIPS 2025poster

Graph condensation (GC) is an emerging technique designed to learn a significantly smaller graph that retains the essential information of the original graph. This condensed graph has shown promise in accelerating graph neural networks while preserving performance comparable to those achieved with t…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

GuardAgent: Safeguard LLM Agents via Knowledge-Enabled Reasoning

ICML 2025poster

The rapid advancement of large language model (LLM) agents has raised new concerns regarding their safety and security. In this paper, we propose GuardAgent, the first guardrail agent to protect target agents by dynamically checking whether their actions satisfy given safety guard requests. Specific…

2025

Piecing It All Together: Verifying Multi-Hop Multimodal Claims

COLING 2025main

Existing claim verification datasets often do not require systems to perform complex reasoning or effectively interpret multimodal evidence. To address this, we introduce a new task: multi-hop multimodal claim verification. This task challenges models to reason over multiple pieces of evidence from…

2025

Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines

EMNLP 2025

GUI agents powered by vision-language models (VLMs) show promise in automating complex digital tasks. However, their effectiveness in real-world applications is often limited by scarce training data and the inherent complexity of these tasks, which frequently require long-tailed knowledge covering r

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains

NAACL 2025long

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the question answering (QA) abilities of large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge. However, adapting general-purpose RAG systems to specialized fields such as science and medicine poses unique challenges due to distribution shifts a…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Subgraph Federated Learning for Local Generalization

ICLR 2025oral

Federated Learning (FL) on graphs enables collaborative model training to enhance performance without compromising the privacy of each client. However, existing methods often overlook the mutable nature of graph data, which frequently introduces new nodes and leads to shifts in label distribution. S…

2024

BMRetriever: Tuning Large Language Models as Better Biomedical Text Retrievers

EMNLP 2024main

Developing effective biomedical retrieval models is important for excelling at knowledge-intensive biomedical tasks but still challenging due to the lack of sufficient publicly annotated biomedical data and computational resources. We present BMRetriever, a series of dense retrievers for enhancing b…

2024

Biomedical Visual Instruction Tuning with Clinician Preference Alignment

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recent advancements in multimodal foundation models have showcased impressive capabilities in understanding and reasoning with visual and textual information. Adapting these foundation models trained for general usage to specialized domains like biomedicine requires large-scale domain-specific instr…

2024

Deep Graph Neural Networks via Posteriori-Sampling-based Node-Adaptative Residual Module

NeurIPS 2024poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a type of neural network that can learn from graph-structured data through neighborhood information aggregation, have shown superior performance in various downstream tasks. However, as the number of layers increases, node representations becomes indistinguishable, whic…

2024

EHRAgent: Code Empowers Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Tabular Reasoning on Electronic Health Records

EMNLP 2024main

Clinicians often rely on data engineers to retrieve complex patient information from electronic health record (EHR) systems, a process that is both inefficient and time-consuming. We propose EHRAgent, a large language model (LLM) agent empowered with accumulative domain knowledge and robust coding c…

2024

Knowledge-Infused Prompting: Assessing and Advancing Clinical Text Data Generation with Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

Clinical natural language processing faces challenges like complex medical terminology and clinical contexts. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in this domain. Yet, their direct deployment can lead to privacy issues and are constrained by resources. To address this challenge,…

2024

MedAdapter: Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Large Language Models Towards Medical Reasoning

EMNLP 2024main

Despite their improved capabilities in generation and reasoning, adapting large language models (LLMs) to the biomedical domain remains challenging due to their immense size and privacy concerns. In this study, we propose MedAdapter, a unified post-hoc adapter for test-time adaptation of LLMs toward…

2024

RAM-EHR: Retrieval Augmentation Meets Clinical Predictions on Electronic Health Records

ACL 2024short

We present RAM-EHR, a Retrieval AugMentation pipeline to improve clinical predictions on Electronic Health Records (EHRs). RAM-EHR first collects multiple knowledge sources, converts them into text format, and uses dense retrieval to obtain information related to medical concepts. This strategy addr…

2024

Unveiling Implicit Deceptive Patterns in Multi-Modal Fake News via Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning

AAAI 2024technical

In the current Internet landscape, the rampant spread of fake news, particularly in the form of multi-modal content, poses a great social threat. While automatic multi-modal fake news detection methods have shown promising results, the lack of explainability remains a significant challenge. Existing…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

Better with Less: A Data-Active Perspective on Pre-Training Graph Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2023poster

Pre-training on graph neural networks (GNNs) aims to learn transferable knowledge for downstream tasks with unlabeled data, and it has recently become an active research area. The success of graph pre-training models is often attributed to the massive amount of input data. In this paper, however, we…

2023

MuG: A Multimodal Classification Benchmark on Game Data with Tabular, Textual, and Visual Fields

EMNLP 2023long findings

Previous research has demonstrated the advantages of integrating data from multiple sources over traditional unimodal data, leading to the emergence of numerous novel multimodal applications. We propose a multimodal classification benchmark MuG with eight datasets that allows researchers to evaluate…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Neighborhood-Regularized Self-Training for Learning with Few Labels

AAAI 2023technical

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) with limited supervision has been a popular research topic as it can significantly alleviate the annotation burden. Self-training has been successfully applied in semi-supervised learning tasks, but one drawback of self-training is that it is vulnerable to the la…

2023

Open Visual Knowledge Extraction via Relation-Oriented Multimodality Model Prompting

NeurIPS 2023poster

Images contain rich relational knowledge that can help machines understand the world. Existing methods on visual knowledge extraction often rely on the pre-defined format (e.g., sub-verb-obj tuples) or vocabulary (e.g., relation types), restricting the expressiveness of the extracted knowledge. In t…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

PV2TEA: Patching Visual Modality to Textual-Established Information Extraction

ACL 2023findings

Information extraction, e.g., attribute value extraction, has been extensively studied and formulated based only on text. However, many attributes can benefit from image-based extraction, like color, shape, pattern, among others. The visual modality has long been underutilized, mainly due to multimo…

2023

WalkLM: A Uniform Language Model Fine-tuning Framework for Attributed Graph Embedding

NeurIPS 2023poster

Graphs are widely used to model interconnected entities and improve downstream predictions in various real-world applications. However, real-world graphs nowadays are often associated with complex attributes on multiple types of nodes and even links that are hard to model uniformly, while the widely…

2022

Data-Free Adversarial Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks

IJCAI 2022poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in modeling graph structured data, owing to its impressive performance in a wide range of practical applications. Recently, knowledge distillation (KD) for GNNs has enabled remarkable progress in graph model compression and knowledge transfer. Howev…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2022

Efficient Federated Learning on Knowledge Graphs via Privacy-preserving Relation Embedding Aggregation

EMNLP 2022finding

Federated learning (FL) can be essential in knowledge representation, reasoning, and data mining applications over multi-source knowledge graphs (KGs). A recent study FedE first proposes an FL framework that shares entity embeddings of KGs across all clients. However, entity embedding sharing from F…

2022

SAIS: Supervising and Augmenting Intermediate Steps for Document-Level Relation Extraction

NAACL 2022long

Stepping from sentence-level to document-level, the research on relation extraction (RE) confronts increasing text length and more complicated entity interactions. Consequently, it is more challenging to encode the key information sources—relevant contexts and entity types. However, existing methods…

2021

Exploiting Data Sparsity in Secure Cross-Platform Social Recommendation

NeurIPS 2021poster

Social recommendation has shown promising improvements over traditional systems since it leverages social correlation data as an additional input. Most existing work assumes that all data are available to the recommendation platform. However, in practice, user-item interaction data (e.g.,rating) and…

Cited by 44SourcePDFScholar
2021

Graph Entropy Guided Node Embedding Dimension Selection for Graph Neural Networks

IJCAI 2021poster

Graph representation learning has achieved great success in many areas, including e-commerce, chemistry, biology, etc. However, the fundamental problem of choosing the appropriate dimension of node embedding for a given graph still remains unsolved. The commonly used strategies for Node Embedding Di…

2021

Secure Deep Graph Generation with Link Differential Privacy

IJCAI 2021poster

Many data mining and analytical tasks rely on the abstraction of networks (graphs) to summarize relational structures among individuals (nodes). Since relational data are often sensitive, we aim to seek effective approaches to generate utility-preserved yet privacy-protected structured data. In thi…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2021

Subgraph Federated Learning with Missing Neighbor Generation

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

Graphs have been widely used in data mining and machine learning due to their unique representation of real-world objects and their interactions. As graphs are getting bigger and bigger nowadays, it is common to see their subgraphs separately collected and stored in multiple local systems. Therefore…

2021

TAXOGAN: Hierarchical Network Representation Learning via Taxonomy Guided Generative Adversarial Networks (Extended Abstract)

IJCAI 2021poster

Network representation learning aims at transferring node proximity in networks into distributed vectors, which can be leveraged in various downstream applications. Recent research has shown that nodes in a network can often be organized in latent hierarchical structures, but without a particular un…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2021

Transfer Learning of Graph Neural Networks with Ego-graph Information Maximization

NeurIPS 2021poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved superior performance in various applications, but training dedicated GNNs can be costly for large-scale graphs. Some recent work started to study the pre-training of GNNs. However, none of them provide theoretical insights into the design of their framework…

2021

Understanding Structural Vulnerability in Graph Convolutional Networks

IJCAI 2021poster

Recent studies have shown that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks on the graph structure. Although multiple works have been proposed to improve their robustness against such structural adversarial attacks, the reasons for the success of the attacks remain uncle…

2020

When Do GNNs Work: Understanding and Improving Neighborhood Aggregation

IJCAI 2020poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be powerful in a wide range of graph-related tasks. While there exists various GNN models, a critical common ingredient is neighborhood aggregation, where the embedding of each node is updated by referring to the embedding of its neighbors. This paper…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2019

Conditional Structure Generation through Graph Variational Generative Adversarial Nets

NeurIPS 2019poster

Graph embedding has been intensively studied recently, due to the advance of various neural network models. Theoretical analyses and empirical studies have pushed forward the translation of discrete graph structures into distributed representation vectors, but seldom considered the reverse direction…