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Jifan Zhang

13 accepted papers

2025

Bridging the Creativity Understanding Gap: Small-Scale Human Alignment Enables Expert-Level Humor Ranking in LLMs

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant limitations in understanding creative content, as demonstrated by Hessel et al. (2023)’s influential work on the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest (NYCCC). Their study exposed a substantial gap between LLMs and humans in humor comprehension, estab

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

From Prototypes to General Distributions: An Efficient Curriculum for Masked Image Modeling

CVPR 2025poster

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has emerged as a powerful self-supervised learning paradigm for visual representation learning, enabling models to acquire rich visual representations by predicting masked portions of images from their visible regions. While this approach has shown promising results, we h…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Improved Algorithm for Deep Active Learning under Imbalance via Optimal Separation

ICML 2025poster

Class imbalance severely impacts machine learning performance on minority classes in real-world applications. While various solutions exist, active learning offers a fundamental fix by strategically collecting balanced, informative labeled examples from abundant unlabeled data. We introduce DIRECT,…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Improving Task Diversity in Label Efficient Supervised Finetuning of LLMs

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, but developing high-performing models for specialized applications often requires substantial human annotation — a process that is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive. In this paper, we address

2025

Topology-Aware Conformal Prediction for Stream Networks

NeurIPS 2025poster

Stream networks, a unique class of spatiotemporal graphs, exhibit complex directional flow constraints and evolving dependencies, making uncertainty quantification a critical yet challenging task. Traditional conformal prediction methods struggle in this setting due to the need for joint predictions…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

An Experimental Design Framework for Label-Efficient Supervised Finetuning of Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

Supervised finetuning (SFT) on instruction datasets has played a crucial role in achieving the remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities observed in modern large language models (LLMs). However, the annotation efforts required to produce high quality responses for instructions are becoming pr…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2024

Humor in AI: Massive Scale Crowd-Sourced Preferences and Benchmarks for Cartoon Captioning

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

We present a novel multimodal preference dataset for creative tasks, consisting of over 250 million human votes on more than 2.2 million captions, collected through crowdsourcing rating data for The New Yorker's weekly cartoon caption contest over the past eight years. This unique dataset supports t…

2023

Algorithm Selection for Deep Active Learning with Imbalanced Datasets

NeurIPS 2023poster

Label efficiency has become an increasingly important objective in deep learning applications. Active learning aims to reduce the number of labeled examples needed to train deep networks, but the empirical performance of active learning algorithms can vary dramatically across datasets and applicatio…

2023

Recurrent Fine-Grained Self-Attention Network for Video Crowd Counting

ICASSP 2023accepted

Striking a balance between exploring the spatio-temporal correlation and controlling model complexity is vital for video-based crowd counting methods. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Fine-Grained Self-Attention Network (RFSNet) to achieve efficient and accurate counting in video scenes via the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Improved Algorithms for Agnostic Pool-based Active Classification

ICML 2021spotlight

We consider active learning for binary classification in the agnostic pool-based setting. The vast majority of works in active learning in the agnostic setting are inspired by the CAL algorithm where each query is uniformly sampled from the disagreement region of the current version space. The sampl…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar