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Hongcheng Gao

22 accepted papers

2026

ExtendAttack: Attacking Servers of LRMs via Extending Reasoning

AAAI 2026technical

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising performance in complex tasks. However, the resource-consuming reasoning processes may be exploited by attackers to maliciously occupy the resources of the servers, leading to a crash, like the DDoS attack in cyber. To this end, we propose a n

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

How Far Are LLMs from Professional Poker Players? Revisiting Game-Theoretic Reasoning with Agentic Tool Use

ICLR 2026poster

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in high-stakes domains, their ability to reason strategically under uncertainty becomes critical. Poker provides a rigorous testbed, requiring not only strong actions but also principled, game-theoretic reasoning. In this paper, we conduct a s…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MedScope: Incentivizing "Think with Videos" for Clinical Reasoning via Coarse-to-Fine Tool Calling

ICML 2026poster

Long-form clinical videos are central to visual evidence-based decision-making, with growing importance for applications such as surgical robotics and related settings. However, current multimodal large language models typically process videos with passive sampling or weakly grounded inspection, whi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Position: Reasoning After Perception Means Reasoning Without Vision

ICML 2026poster

A common belief in multimodal research is that the perceptual weaknesses of vision--language models can be compensated by stronger language reasoning (e.g., chain-of-thought, in-context learning, or external tools). We challenge this assumption. We argue that for a broad class of visual tasks hard t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

GuardReasoner-VL: Safeguarding VLMs via Reinforced Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

To enhance the safety of VLMs, this paper introduces a novel reasoning-based VLM guard model dubbed GuardReasoner-VL. The core idea is to incentivize the guard model to deliberatively reason before making moderation decisions via online RL. First, we construct GuardReasoner-VLTrain, a reasoning corp…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Is Factuality Enhancement a Free Lunch For LLMs? Better Factuality Can Lead to Worse Context-Faithfulness

ICLR 2025poster

As the modern tools of choice for text understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) are expected to accurately output answers by leveraging the input context. This requires LLMs to possess both context-faithfulness and factual accuracy. While extensive efforts aim to reduce hallucinati…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

Meta-Unlearning on Diffusion Models: Preventing Relearning Unlearned Concepts

ICCV 2025poster

With the rapid progress of diffusion models (DMs), significant efforts are being made to unlearn harmful or copyrighted concepts from pretrained DMs to prevent potential model misuse. However, it is observed that even when DMs are properly unlearned before release, malicious finetuning can compromis…

2025

Representation Entanglement for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Much Easier Than You Think

NeurIPS 2025oral

REPA and its variants effectively mitigate training challenges in diffusion models by incorporating external visual representations from pretrained models, through alignment between the noisy hidden projections of denoising networks and foundational clean image representations. We argue that the ext…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows

ICLR 2025oral

Real-world enterprise text-to-SQL workflows often involve complex cloud or local data across various database systems, multiple SQL queries in various dialects, and diverse operations from data transformation to analytics. We introduce Spider 2.0, an evaluation framework comprising $632$ real-world…

2024

AdaMoE: Token-Adaptive Routing with Null Experts for Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

EMNLP 2024finding

Mixture of experts (MoE) has become the standard for constructing production-level large language models (LLMs) due to its promise to boost model capacity without causing significant overheads. Nevertheless, existing MoE methods usually enforce a constant top-k routing for all tokens, which is argua…

2024

Adaptive Token Biaser: Knowledge Editing via Biasing Key Entities

EMNLP 2024finding

The parametric knowledge memorized by large language models (LLMs) becomes outdated quickly. In-context editing (ICE) is currently the most effective method for updating the knowledge of LLMs. Recent advancements involve enhancing ICE by modifying the decoding strategy, obviating the need for alteri…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Efficient Detection of LLM-generated Texts with a Bayesian Surrogate Model

ACL 2024findings

The detection of machine-generated text, especially from large language models (LLMs), is crucial in preventing serious social problems resulting from their misuse. Some methods train dedicated detectors on specific datasets but fall short in generalizing to unseen test data, while other zero-shot o…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2024

Emu: Generative Pretraining in Multimodality

ICLR 2024poster

We present Emu, a multimodal foundation model that seamlessly generates images and text in multimodal context. This omnivore model can take in any single-modality or multimodal data input indiscriminately (e.g., interleaved image, text and video) through a one-model-for-all autoregressive training p…

2024

Leveraging Catastrophic Forgetting to Develop Safe Diffusion Models against Malicious Finetuning

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in producing images based on textual prompts. Numerous methods have been proposed to ensure these models generate safe images. Early methods attempt to incorporate safety filters into models to mitigate the risk of generating harmful im…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Spider2-V: How Far Are Multimodal Agents From Automating Data Science and Engineering Workflows?

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Data science and engineering workflows often span multiple stages, from warehousing to orchestration, using tools like BigQuery, dbt, and Airbyte. As vision language models (VLMs) advance in multimodal understanding and code generation, VLM-based agents could potentially automate these workflows by…

2024

Token Merging for Training-Free Semantic Binding in Text-to-Image Synthesis

NeurIPS 2024poster

Although text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit remarkable generation capabilities, they frequently fail to accurately bind semantically related objects or attributes in the input prompts; a challenge termed semantic binding. Previous approaches either involve intensive fine-tuning of the entire T2I mod…

2024

Universal Prompt Optimizer for Safe Text-to-Image Generation

NAACL 2024long

Text-to-Image (T2I) models have shown great performance in generating images based on textual prompts. However, these models are vulnerable to unsafe input to generate unsafe content like sexual, harassment and illegal-activity images. Existing studies based on image checker, model fine-tuning and e…

2023

From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework

ACL 2023findings

Textual adversarial attacks can discover models’ weaknesses by adding semantic-preserved but misleading perturbations to the inputs. The long-lasting adversarial attack-and-defense arms race in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is algorithm-centric, providing valuable techniques for automatic robust…

2023

Revisiting Out-of-distribution Robustness in NLP: Benchmarks, Analysis, and LLMs Evaluations

NeurIPS 2023poster

This paper reexamines the research on out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness in the field of NLP. We find that the distribution shift settings in previous studies commonly lack adequate challenges, hindering the accurate evaluation of OOD robustness. To address these issues, we propose a benchmark con…

2022

Exploring the Universal Vulnerability of Prompt-based Learning Paradigm

NAACL 2022findings

Prompt-based learning paradigm bridges the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, and works effectively under the few-shot setting. However, we find that this learning paradigm inherits the vulnerability from the pre-training stage, where model predictions can be misled by inserting certain trigg…

2022

Textual Backdoor Attacks Can Be More Harmful via Two Simple Tricks

EMNLP 2022main

Backdoor attacks are a kind of emergent security threat in deep learning. After being injected with a backdoor, a deep neural model will behave normally on standard inputs but give adversary-specified predictions once the input contains specific backdoor triggers. In this paper, we find two simple t…

2022

Why Should Adversarial Perturbations be Imperceptible? Rethink the Research Paradigm in Adversarial NLP

EMNLP 2022main

Textual adversarial samples play important roles in multiple subfields of NLP research, including security, evaluation, explainability, and data augmentation. However, most work mixes all these roles, obscuring the problem definitions and research goals of the security role that aims to reveal the p…