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Fengzhuo Zhang

11 accepted papers

2026

Annealed Relaxation of Speculative Decoding for Faster Autoregressive Image Generation

AAAI 2026technical

Despite significant progress in auto-regressive image generation, inference remains slow due to the sequential nature of AR models and the ambiguity of image tokens, even when using speculative decoding. Recent works attempt to address this with relaxed speculative decoding but lack theoretical grou

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Finite-Time Analysis of Actor-Critic Methods with Deep Neural Network Approximation

ICLR 2026poster

Actor–critic (AC) algorithms underpin many of today’s most successful reinforcement learning (RL) applications, yet their finite-time convergence in realistic settings remains largely underexplored. Existing analyses often rely on oversimplified formulations and are largely confined to linear functi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Muon Outperforms Adam in Tail-End Associative Memory Learning

ICLR 2026poster

The Muon optimizer is consistently faster than Adam in training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the mechanism underlying its success remains unclear. This paper demystifies this mechanism through the lens of associative memory. By ablating the transformer components optimized by Muon, we reveal th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BanditSpec: Adaptive Speculative Decoding via Bandit Algorithms

ICML 2025poster

Speculative decoding has emerged as a popular method to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) while retaining their superior text generation performance. Previous methods either adopt a fixed speculative decoding configuration regardless of the prefix tokens, or train draft models…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Sparse-to-Dense: A Free Lunch for Lossless Acceleration of Video Understanding in LLMs

ACL 2025short

Due to the auto-regressive nature of current video large language models (Video-LLMs), the inference latency increases as the input sequence length grows, posing challenges for the efficient processing of video sequences that are usually very long. We observe that during decoding, the attention scor…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

What and How does In-Context Learning Learn? Bayesian Model Averaging, Parameterization, and Generalization

AISTATS 2025poster

In-Context Learning (ICL) ability has been found efficient across a wide range of applications, where the Large Language Models (LLM) learn to complete the tasks from the examples in the prompt without tuning the parameters. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study to understand ICL from a sta…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

When Attention Sink Emerges in Language Models: An Empirical View

ICLR 2025spotlight

Auto-regressive language Models (LMs) assign significant attention to the first token, even if it is not semantically important, which is known as **attention sink**. This phenomenon has been widely adopted in applications such as streaming/long context generation, KV cache optimization, inference a…

2024

From Words to Actions: Unveiling the Theoretical Underpinnings of LLM-Driven Autonomous Systems

ICML 2024poster

In this work, from a theoretical lens, we aim to understand why large language model (LLM) empowered agents are able to solve decision-making problems in the physical world. To this end, consider a hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) model where the LLM Planner and the Actor perform high-level…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2022

Relational Reasoning via Set Transformers: Provable Efficiency and Applications to MARL

NeurIPS 2022accept

The cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) with permutation invariant agents framework has achieved tremendous empirical successes in real-world applications. Unfortunately, the theoretical understanding of this MARL problem is lacking due to the curse of many agents and the limited e…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar