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Jiancan Wu

21 accepted papers

2026

Delayed Feedback Modeling with Influence Functions

AAAI 2026technical

In online advertising under the cost-per-conversion (CPA) model, accurate conversion rate (CVR) prediction is crucial. A major challenge is delayed feedback, where conversions may occur long after user interactions, leading to incomplete recent data and biased model training. Existing solutions part

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Mitigating Reward Hacking in LLM-based Recommendation: A Preference Optimization Approach

ICML 2026poster

Post-training adaptation has become the central paradigm for leveraging large language models (LLMs) in recommendation. While recent preference optimization methods, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), enhance pairwise preference discrimination, they remain vulnerable to \emph{reward hacki…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

On the Direction of RLVR Updates for LLM Reasoning: Identification and Exploitation

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models. While existing analyses identify that RLVR-induced changes are sparse, they primarily focus on the **magnitude** of these updates, largely overlooking their **direct…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Quantile Advantage Estimation for Entropy-Safe Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) strengthens LLM reasoning but training often oscillates between {entropy collapse} and {entropy explosion}. We trace both hazards to the mean-baseline used in value-free RL (\eg GRPO/DAPO), which improperly penalizes negative-advantage samples un…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AlphaDPO: Adaptive Reward Margin for Direct Preference Optimization

ICML 2025poster

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences requires balancing policy optimization with computational stability. While recent offline methods like DPO and SimPO bypass reinforcement learning’s complexity, they face critical limitations: DPO relies on static reference models that deg…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recommenders aim to rank items from a discrete item corpus in line with user interests, yet suffer from extremely sparse user preference data. Recent advances in diffusion models have inspired diffusion-based recommenders, which alleviate sparsity by injecting noise during a forward process to preve…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

LaMP-Val: Large Language Models Empower Personalized Valuation in Auction

EMNLP 2025

Auctions are a vital economic mechanism used to determine the market value of goods or services through competitive bidding within a specific framework. However, much of the current research primarily focuses on the bidding algorithms used within auction mechanisms. This often neglects the potential

2025

Larger or Smaller Reward Margins to Select Preferences for LLM Alignment?

ICML 2025poster

Preference learning is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, with the quality of preference datasets playing a crucial role in this process. While existing metrics primarily assess data quality based on either *explicit* or *implicit* reward margins, their single-mar…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders

NeurIPS 2025poster

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generative sequential recommendation, which typically generate next items to recommend guided by user interaction histories with a multi-step denoising process. However, the multi-step process relies on discrete approximations, introducing dis…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Personal Travel Solver: A Preference-Driven LLM-Solver System for Travel Planning

ACL 2025long

Personal travel planning is a challenging task that aims to find a feasible plan that not only satisfies diverse constraints but also meets the demands of the user’s explicit and implicit preferences. In this paper, we study how to integrate the user’s implicit preference into the progress of travel…

2025

RePO: Understanding Preference Learning Through ReLU-Based Optimization

NeurIPS 2025poster

Preference learning has become a common approach in various recent methods for aligning large language models with human values. These methods optimize the preference margin between chosen and rejected responses, subject to certain constraints for avoiding over-optimization. In this paper, we report…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Robust Preference Optimization via Dynamic Target Margins

ACL 2025finding

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring their safety and reliability in practical applications. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as an efficient method that directly optimizes models using preference pairs, significantly reducing resource demands. Howeve…

2025

Think before Recommendation: Autonomous Reasoning-enhanced Recommender

NeurIPS 2025poster

The core task of recommender systems is to learn user preferences from historical user-item interactions. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), recent research has explored leveraging the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to enhance rating prediction tasks. However, existing disti…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Towards Robust Alignment of Language Models: Distributionally Robustifying Direct Preference Optimization

ICLR 2025poster

This study addresses the challenge of noise in training datasets for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. We categorize noise into pointwise noise, which includes low-quality data points, and pairwise noise, which encompasse…

2025

Unified Parameter-Efficient Unlearning for LLMs

ICLR 2025poster

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, enabling advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities across a variety of tasks. Fine-tuning these models for specific domains, particularly through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies like…

2024

$\beta$-DPO: Direct Preference Optimization with Dynamic $\beta$

NeurIPS 2024poster

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a compelling approach for training Large Language Models (LLMs) to adhere to human preferences. However, the performance of DPO is sensitive to the fine-tuning of its trade-off parameter $\beta$, as well as to the quality of the preference data. We…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Customizing Language Models with Instance-wise LoRA for Sequential Recommendation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Sequential recommendation systems predict the next interaction item based on users' past interactions, aligning recommendations with individual preferences. Leveraging the strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) in knowledge comprehension and reasoning, recent approaches are eager to apply LLMs t…

2024

MuggleMath: Assessing the Impact of Query and Response Augmentation on Math Reasoning

ACL 2024long

In math reasoning with large language models (LLMs), fine-tuning data augmentation by query evolution and diverse reasoning paths is empirically verified effective, profoundly narrowing the gap between open-sourced LLMs and cutting-edge proprietary LLMs. In this paper, we conduct an investigation fo…

2023

Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion

NeurIPS 2023poster

Sequential recommendation aims to recommend the next item that matches a user’s interest, based on the sequence of items he/she interacted with before. Scrutinizing previous studies, we can summarize a common learning-to-classify paradigm— given a positive item, a recommender model performs negative…

2023

Understanding Contrastive Learning via Distributionally Robust Optimization

NeurIPS 2023poster

This study reveals the inherent tolerance of contrastive learning (CL) towards sampling bias, wherein negative samples may encompass similar semantics (\eg labels). However, existing theories fall short in providing explanations for this phenomenon. We bridge this research gap by analyzing CL throug…

2023

Unleashing the Power of Graph Data Augmentation on Covariate Distribution Shift

NeurIPS 2023poster

The issue of distribution shifts is emerging as a critical concern in graph representation learning. From the perspective of invariant learning and stable learning, a recently well-established paradigm for out-of-distribution generalization, stable features of the graph are assumed to causally deter…