← Search

Defu Cao

18 accepted papers

2026

Adaptive Collaboration with Humans: Metacognitive Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent LLMs with Continual Learning

ICLR 2026poster

While scaling individual Large Language Models (LLMs) has delivered remarkable progress, the next frontier lies in scaling collaboration through multi-agent systems (MAS). However, purely autonomous MAS remain ``closed-world'' systems, constrained by the static knowledge horizon of pre-trained model…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

PINFDiT: Energy-Based Physics-Informed Diffusion Transformers for General-purpose Time Series Tasks

ICLR 2026poster

Time series analysis underpins scientific advances. While specialized models have advanced various time series tasks, scientific domains face unique challenges: limited samples with complex physical dynamics, missing observations, multi-resolution sampling, and requirements for physical consistency.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
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

``Someone Hid It!'': Query-Agnostic Black-Box Attacks on LLM-Based Retrieval

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) have been serving as effective backbones for retrieval systems, including Retrieval-Augmentation-Generation (RAG), Dense Information Retriever (IR), and Agent Memory Retrieval. Recent studies have demonstrated that such LLM-based Retrieval (LLMR) is vulnerable to adversa…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Neuron-based Multifractal Analysis of Neuron Interaction Dynamics in Large Models

ICLR 2025poster

In recent years, there has been increasing attention on the capabilities of large-scale models, particularly in handling complex tasks that small-scale models are unable to perform. Notably, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated ``intelligent'' abilities such as complex reasoning and abstra…

2024

Active Sequential Posterior Estimation for Sample-Efficient Simulation-Based Inference

NeurIPS 2024poster

Computer simulations have long presented the exciting possibility of scientific insight into complex real-world processes. Despite the power of modern computing, however, it remains challenging to systematically perform inference under simulation models. This has led to the rise of simulation-based…

2024

An Empirical Examination of Balancing Strategy for Counterfactual Estimation on Time Series

ICML 2024poster

Counterfactual estimation from observations represents a critical endeavor in numerous application fields, such as healthcare and finance, with the primary challenge being the mitigation of treatment bias. The balancing strategy aimed at reducing covariate disparities between different treatment gro…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

GPT4MTS: Prompt-based Large Language Model for Multimodal Time-series Forecasting

AAAI 2024technical

Time series forecasting is an essential area of machine learning with a wide range of real-world applications. Most of the previous forecasting models aim to capture dynamic characteristics from uni-modal numerical historical data. Although extra knowledge can boost the time series forecasting perfo…

Cited by 55SourcePDFScholar
2024

Neuro-Inspired Information-Theoretic Hierarchical Perception for Multimodal Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Integrating and processing information from various sources or modalities are critical for obtaining a comprehensive and accurate perception of the real world in autonomous systems and cyber-physical systems. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, we develop the Information-Theoretic Hierarchical Pe…

2024

TEMPO: Prompt-based Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Time Series Forecasting

ICLR 2024poster

The past decade has witnessed significant advances in time series modeling with deep learning. While achieving state-of-the-art results, the best-performing architectures vary highly across applications and domains. Meanwhile, for natural language processing, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (…

2023

Coupled Multiwavelet Operator Learning for Coupled Differential Equations

ICLR 2023poster

Coupled partial differential equations (PDEs) are key tasks in modeling the complex dynamics of many physical processes. Recently, neural operators have shown the ability to solve PDEs by learning the integral kernel directly in Fourier/Wavelet space, so the difficulty of solving the coupled PDEs de…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

Estimating Treatment Effects from Irregular Time Series Observations with Hidden Confounders

AAAI 2023technical

Causal analysis for time series data, in particular estimating individualized treatment effect (ITE), is a key task in many real world applications, such as finance, retail, healthcare, etc. Real world time series, i.e., large-scale irregular or sparse and intermittent time series, raise significan…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2023

SVGformer: Representation Learning for Continuous Vector Graphics Using Transformers

CVPR 2023poster

Advances in representation learning have led to great success in understanding and generating data in various domains. However, in modeling vector graphics data, the pure data-driven approach often yields unsatisfactory results in downstream tasks as existing deep learning methods often require the…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2022

Counterfactual Neural Temporal Point Process for Estimating Causal Influence of Misinformation on Social Media

NeurIPS 2022accept

Recent years have witnessed the rise of misinformation campaigns that spread specific narratives on social media to manipulate public opinions on different areas, such as politics and healthcare. Consequently, an effective and efficient automatic methodology to estimate the influence of the misinfor…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2022

Enhancing Self-Attention with Knowledge-Assisted Attention Maps

NAACL 2022long

Large-scale pre-trained language models have attracted extensive attentions in the research community and shown promising results on various tasks of natural language processing. However, the attention maps, which record the attention scores between tokens in self-attention mechanism, are sometimes…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2020

Spectral Temporal Graph Neural Network for Multivariate Time-series Forecasting

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Multivariate time-series forecasting plays a crucial role in many real-world applications. It is a challenging problem as one needs to consider both intra-series temporal correlations and inter-series correlations simultaneously. Recently, there have been multiple works trying to capture both correl…