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Hongzhou Lin

13 accepted papers

2026

Goedel-Prover-V2: Scaling Formal Theorem Proving with Scaffolded Data Synthesis and Self-Correction

ICLR 2026poster

Automated theorem proving (ATP) --- the task of generating a proof that passes automated proof verification given a math question in formal language --- is a critical challenge at the intersection of mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). We introduce Goedel-Prover-V2, a family of two languag…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

QuestA: Expanding Reasoning Capacity in LLMs via Question Augmentation

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for training large language models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks. Yet recent studies question RL’s ability to incentivize reasoning capacity beyond the base model. This raises a key challenge: how can RL be adapted to solve harder reasoning p…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

From Sparse Dependence to Sparse Attention: Unveiling How Chain-of-Thought Enhances Transformer Sample Efficiency

ICLR 2025poster

Chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning performance of large language models (LLM). While current theoretical studies often attribute this improvement to increased expressiveness and computational capacity, we argue that expressiveness is not the primary limitation in the LLM re…

2025

Ineq-Comp: Benchmarking Human-Intuitive Compositional Reasoning in Automated Theorem Proving of Inequalities

NeurIPS 2025poster

LLM-based formal proof assistants (e.g., in Lean) hold great promise for automating mathematical discovery. But beyond syntactic correctness, do these systems truly understand mathematical structure as humans do? We investigate this question in context of mathematical inequalities---specifically the…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Task Generalization with Autoregressive Compositional Structure: Can Learning from $D$ Tasks Generalize to $D^T$ Tasks?

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable task generalization, solving tasks they were never explicitly trained on with only a few demonstrations. This raises a fundamental question: When can learning from a small set of tasks generalize to a large task family? In this paper, we investigate t…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

UNDIAL: Self-Distillation with Adjusted Logits for Robust Unlearning in Large Language Models

NAACL 2025long

Mitigating the retention of sensitive or private information in large language models is essential for enhancing privacy and safety. Existing unlearning methods, like Gradient Ascent and Negative Preference Optimization, directly tune models to remove unwanted information. However, these methods oft…

2022

Beyond Worst-Case Analysis in Stochastic Approximation: Moment Estimation Improves Instance Complexity

ICML 2022spotlight

We study oracle complexity of gradient based methods for stochastic approximation problems. Though in many settings optimal algorithms and tight lower bounds are known for such problems, these optimal algorithms do not achieve the best performance when used in practice. We address this theory-practi…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2021

Delayed Gradient Averaging: Tolerate the Communication Latency for Federated Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Federated Learning is an emerging direction in distributed machine learning that en-ables jointly training a model without sharing the data. Since the data is distributed across many edge devices through wireless / long-distance connections, federated learning suffers from inevitable high communicat…

Cited by 76SourcePDFScholar
2020

Complexity of Finding Stationary Points of Nonconvex Nonsmooth Functions

ICML 2020poster

We provide the first non-asymptotic analysis for finding stationary points of nonsmooth, nonconvex functions. In particular, we study the class of Hadamard semi-differentiable functions, perhaps the largest class of nonsmooth functions for which the chain rule of calculus holds. This class contains…

2020

IDEAL: Inexact DEcentralized Accelerated Augmented Lagrangian Method

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

We introduce a framework for designing primal methods under the decentralized optimization setting where local functions are smooth and strongly convex. Our approach consists of approximately solving a sequence of sub-problems induced by the accelerated augmented Lagrangian method, thereby providing…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2018

Catalyst for Gradient-based Nonconvex Optimization

AISTATS 2018poster

We introduce a generic scheme to solve nonconvex optimization problems using gradient-based algorithms originally designed for minimizing convex functions. Even though these methods may originally require convexity to operate, the proposed approach allows one to use them without assuming any knowled…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar