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Dylan Zhang

8 accepted papers

2026

Good SFT Optimizes for SFT, Better SFT Prepares for Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026poster

Post-training of reasoning LLMs is a holistic process that typically consists of an offline SFT stage followed by an online reinforcement learning (RL) stage. However, SFT is often optimized in isolation to maximize SFT performance alone. We show that, after identical RL training, models initialized…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Building A Proof-Oriented Programmer That Is 64% Better Than GPT-4o Under Data Scarcity

ACL 2025finding

Existing LMs struggle with proof-oriented programming due to data scarcity, which manifest in two key ways: (1) a lack of sufficient corpora for proof-oriented programming languages such as F*, and (2) the absence of large-scale, project-level proof-oriented implementations that can teach the model…

2025

Diversification Catalyzes Language Models’ Instruction Generalization To Unseen Semantics

ACL 2025finding

Instruction-tuned language models excel in knowledge, reasoning, and instruction-following. While knowledge and reasoning are well-explored, the factors enabling generalization to unseen instructions remain underexplored due to challenges in isolating instruction-following dynamics.In this work, we…

2025

Improving Influence-based Instruction Tuning Data Selection for Balanced Learning of Diverse Capabilities

EMNLP 2025

Selecting appropriate training data is crucial for instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), which aims to (1) elicit strong capabilities, and (2) achieve balanced performance across different tasks. Influence-based methods show promise in achieving (1), by estimating the contribution

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ScaleBiO: Scalable Bilevel Optimization for LLM Data Reweighting

ACL 2025long

Bilevel optimization has shown its utility across various machine learning settings, yet most algorithms in practice require second-order information, making it challenging to scale them up. Only recently, a paradigm of first-order algorithms has emerged in the theoretical literature, capable of eff…

2024

SciCode: A Research Coding Benchmark Curated by Scientists

NeurIPS 2024poster

Since language models (LMs) now outperform average humans on many challenging tasks, it is becoming increasingly difficult to develop challenging, high-quality, and realistic evaluations. We address this by examining LM capabilities to generate code for solving real scientific research problems. Inc…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2024

Visual Prompting in LLMs for Enhancing Emotion Recognition

EMNLP 2024main

Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) are transforming the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing; however, the potential of using visual prompts for emotion recognition in these models remains largely unexplored and untapped. Traditional methods in VLLMs struggle with spatia…