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Dong Yan

14 accepted papers

2026

Stop Tracking Me! Proactive Defense Against Attribute Inference Attack in LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can infer private user attributes (e.g., age, location, gender) from user-generated text shared online, enabling rapid and large-scale privacy breaches. Existing anonymization-based defenses are coarse-grained, lacking word-level precision…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

3D-Properties: Identifying Challenges in DPO and Charting a Path Forward

ICLR 2025poster

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has gained significant attention, with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) as a standard yet computationally expensive method and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) as a more efficient alternative. While DPO offers simplicity, it remains…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2025

Learning LLM-as-a-Judge for Preference Alignment

ICLR 2025poster

Learning from preference feedback is a common practice for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human value. Conventionally, preference data is learned and encoded into a scalar reward model that connects a value head with an LLM to produce a scalar score as preference. However, scalar models…

2025

Reward Generalization in RLHF: A Topological Perspective

ACL 2025finding

Existing alignment methods share a common topology of information flow, where reward information is collected from humans, modeled with preference learning, and used to tune language models. However, this shared topology has not been systematically characterized, nor have its alternatives been thoro…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

STAIR: Improving Safety Alignment with Introspective Reasoning

ICML 2025oral

Ensuring the safety and harmlessness of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become equally critical as their performance in applications. However, existing safety alignment methods typically suffer from safety-performance trade-offs and susceptibility to jailbreak attacks, primarily due to their relian…

2025

Sequential Preference Optimization: Multi-Dimensional Preference Alignment with Implicit Reward Modeling

AAAI 2025technical

Human preference alignment is critical in building powerful and reliable large language models (LLMs). However, current methods either ignore the multi-dimensionality of human preferences (e.g. helpfulness and harmlessness) or struggle with the complexity of managing multiple reward models. To addre…

2024

Exploring the LLM Journey from Cognition to Expression with Linear Representations

ICML 2024poster

This paper presents an in-depth examination of the evolution and interplay of cognitive and expressive capabilities in large language models (LLMs), with a specific focus on Baichuan-7B and Baichuan-33B, an advanced bilingual (Chinese and English) LLM series. We define and explore the model's cognit…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality

EMNLP 2024finding

In Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), the reward model plays a crucial role in aligning language model outputs with human values. The human preference data used to train the reward model consists of a prompt and a response pair, with humans annotating which response better aligns wit…

2023

On the Reuse Bias in Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning

IJCAI 2023poster

Importance sampling (IS) is a popular technique in off-policy evaluation, which re-weights the return of trajectories in the replay buffer to boost sample efficiency. However, training with IS can be unstable and previous attempts to address this issue mainly focus on analyzing the variance of IS. I…

2022

Policy Learning for Robust Markov Decision Process with a Mismatched Generative Model

AAAI 2022technical

In high-stake scenarios like medical treatment and auto-piloting, it's risky or even infeasible to collect online experimental data to train the agent. Simulation-based training can alleviate this issue, but may suffer from its inherent mismatches from the simulator and real environment. It is there…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2022

Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning via Constraining Conditional Value-at-Risk

IJCAI 2022poster

Though deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has obtained substantial success, it may encounter catastrophic failures due to the intrinsic uncertainty of both transition and observation. Most of the existing methods for safe reinforcement learning can only handle transition disturbance or observation di…

2021

Combining Tree Search and Action Prediction for State-of-the-Art Performance in DouDiZhu

IJCAI 2021poster

AlphaZero has achieved superhuman performance on various perfect-information games, such as chess, shogi and Go. However, directly applying AlphaZero to imperfect-information games (IIG) is infeasible, due to the fact that traditional MCTS methods cannot handle missing information of other players.…

2021

Learning Task-Distribution Reward Shaping with Meta-Learning

AAAI 2021technical

Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment and accelerate Reinforcement Learning. However, designing shaping functions usually requires rich expert knowledge and hand-engineering, and the difficulties are further exacerbated…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2020

Lazy-CFR: fast and near-optimal regret minimization for extensive games with imperfect information

ICLR 2020poster

Counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) methods are effective for solving two-player zero-sum extensive games with imperfect information with state-of-the-art results. However, the vanilla CFR has to traverse the whole game tree in each round, which is time-consuming in large-scale games. In thi…

Cited by 15SourceScholar