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Hanqi Yan

17 accepted papers

2026

Beyond Perplexity: Let the Reader Select Retrieval Summaries via Spectrum Projection Score

AAAI 2026technical

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown improved generation performance through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) following the retriever-reader paradigm, which supplements model inputs with externally retrieved knowledge. However, prior work often evaluates RAG holistically, assessing the retrie

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Stop the Flip-Flop: Context-Preserving Verification for Fast Revocable Diffusion Decoding

ICML 2026poster

Parallel diffusion decoding can accelerate diffusion language model inference by unmasking multiple tokens per step, but aggressive parallelism often harms quality. Revocable decoding mitigates this by rechecking earlier tokens, yet we observe that existing verification schemes frequently trigger fl…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

When Thinking Backfires: Mechanistic Insights into Reason-induced Misalignment

ICLR 2026poster

With the growing accessibility and wide adoption of large language models, concerns about their safety and alignment with human values have become paramount. In this paper, we identify a concerning phenomenon: Reasoning-Induced Misalignment (RIM), in which misalignment emerges when reasoning capabil…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Beyond Prompting: An Efficient Embedding Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have recently pushed open-domain question answering (ODQA) to new frontiers. However, prevailing retriever–reader pipelines often depend on multiple rounds of prompt-level instructions, leading to high computational overhead, instability, and suboptimal retrieval coverag…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

CODI: Compressing Chain-of-Thought into Continuous Space via Self-Distillation

EMNLP 2025

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by encouraging step-by-step reasoning in natural language. However, leveraging a latent continuous space for reasoning may offer benefits in terms of both efficiency and robustness. Prior implicit CoT methods attempt to bypass la

2025

Constrain Alignment with Sparse Autoencoders

ICML 2025poster

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences remains a key challenge. While post-training techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have achieved notable success, they often experience computational inefficienci…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Drift: Enhancing LLM Faithfulness in Rationale Generation via Dual-Reward Probabilistic Inference

ACL 2025long

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to complex reasoning tasks, achieving both accurate task performance and faithful explanations becomes crucial. However, LLMs often generate unfaithful explanations, partly because they do not consistently adhere closely to the provided contex…

2025

Position: LLMs Need a Bayesian Meta-Reasoning Framework for More Robust and Generalizable Reasoning

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) excel in many reasoning tasks but continue to face significant challenges, such as lack of robustness in reasoning, struggling with cross-task generalization, and inefficiencies in scaling up reasoning capabilities. Current training paradigms, including next-token predi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Soft Reasoning: Navigating Solution Spaces in Large Language Models through Controlled Embedding Exploration

ICML 2025spotlight

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with complex reasoning due to limited diversity and inefficient search. We propose Soft Reasoning, an embedding-based search framework that optimises the embedding of the first token to guide generation. It combines (1) embedding perturbation for controlled expl…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Addressing Order Sensitivity of In-Context Demonstration Examples in Causal Language Models

ACL 2024findings

In-context learning has become a popular paradigm in natural language processing. However, its performance can be significantly influenced by the order of in-context demonstration examples. In this paper, we found that causal language models (CausalLMs) are more sensitive to this order compared to p…

2024

Encourage or Inhibit Monosemanticity? Revisit Monosemanticity from a Feature Decorrelation Perspective

EMNLP 2024main

To better interpret the intrinsic mechanism of large language models (LLMs), recent studies focus on monosemanticity on its basic units. A monosemantic neuron is dedicated to a single and specific concept, which forms a one-to-one correlation between neurons and concepts. Despite extensive research…

2024

Mirror: Multiple-perspective Self-Reflection Method for Knowledge-rich Reasoning

ACL 2024long

While Large language models (LLMs) have the capability to iteratively reflect on their own outputs, recent studies have observed their struggles with knowledge-rich problems without access to external resources. In addition to the inefficiency of LLMs in self-assessment, we also observe that LLMs st…

2024

The Mystery of In-Context Learning: A Comprehensive Survey on Interpretation and Analysis

EMNLP 2024main

Understanding in-context learning (ICL) capability that enables large language models (LLMs) to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples is of utmost importance. This importance stems not only from the better utilization of this capability across various tasks, but also from the proactive…

2024

Weak Reward Model Transforms Generative Models into Robust Causal Event Extraction Systems

EMNLP 2024main

The inherent ambiguity of cause and effect boundaries poses a challenge in evaluating causal event extraction tasks. Traditional metrics like Exact Match and BertScore poorly reflect model performance, so we trained evaluation models to approximate human evaluation, achieving high agreement. We used…

2023

Counterfactual Generation with Identifiability Guarantees

NeurIPS 2023poster

Counterfactual generation lies at the core of various machine learning tasks, including image translation and controllable text generation. This generation process usually requires the identification of the disentangled latent representations, such as content and style, that underlie the observed da…

2022

Addressing token uniformity in transformers via singular value transformation

UAI 2022poster

Token uniformity is commonly observed in transformer-based models, in which different tokens share a large proportion of similar information after going through stacked multiple self-attention layers in a transformer. In this paper, we propose to use the distribution of singular values of outputs of…

2021

Position Bias Mitigation: A Knowledge-Aware Graph Model for Emotion Cause Extraction

ACL 2021long

The Emotion Cause Extraction (ECE) task aims to identify clauses which contain emotion-evoking information for a particular emotion expressed in text. We observe that a widely-used ECE dataset exhibits a bias that the majority of annotated cause clauses are either directly before their associated em…