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Junbo Zhao

66 accepted papers

2026

Awakening Visual Reasoning: Mitigating Post-Training Failure in Vision-Text Compression

ICML 2026poster

Vision-Text Compression (VTC) offers a scalable path for long-context multimodal modeling by rendering textual data into dense visual tokens. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate high decoding fidelity (OCR) on such inputs, they exhibit a severe reasoning gap: models that reason ro…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

From Parameters to Data: A Task-Parameter-Guided Fine-Tuning Pipeline for Efficient LLM Alignment

ICML 2026poster

Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specialized domains typically incurs high data and computational overhead. While prior efficiency efforts have largely treated data selection and parameter-efficient fine-tuning as isolated processes, our empirical analysis suggests they may be intrinsically …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

On Multi-Step Theorem Prediction via Non-Parametric Structural Priors

ICML 2026poster

Multi-step theorem prediction is a central challenge in automated reasoning. Existing neural–symbolic approaches rely heavily on supervised parametric models, which exhibit limited generalization to evolving theorem libraries. In this work, we explore training-free theorem prediction through the len…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

OptimSyn: Influence-Guided Rubrics Optimization for Synthetic Data Generation

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong downstream performance largely due to abundant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data that imparts problem-solving capabilities. However, as applications expand, high-quality SFT data in knowledge-intensive verticals (e.g., humanities and social sciences, medic…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Seeing, Listening, Remembering, and Reasoning: A Multimodal Agent with Long-Term Memory

ICLR 2026poster

We introduce M3-Agent, a novel multimodal agent framework equipped with long-term memory. Like humans, M3-Agent can process real-time visual and auditory inputs to build and update episodic and semantic memories, gradually accumulating world knowledge. Its memory is organized in an entity-centric, m…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Stop Unnecessary Reflection: Training LRMs for Efficient Reasoning with Adaptive Reflection and Length Coordinated Penalty

ICLR 2026poster

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks by employing test-time scaling. However, they often generate over-long chains-of-thought that, driven by substantial reflections such as repetitive self-questioning and circular reasoning, lead to high…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

TraPO: A Semi-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Framework for Boosting LLM Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in training large reasoning models (LRMs) by leveraging answer-verifiable signals to guide policy optimization, which, however, suffers from high annotation costs. To alleviate this problem, recent work has explored unsupervi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AIGT: AI Generative Table Based on Prompt

COLING 2025main

Tabular data, which accounts for over 80% of enterprise data assets, is vital in various fields. With growing concerns about privacy protection and data-sharing restrictions, generating high-quality synthetic tabular data has become essential. Recent advancements show that large language models (LLM…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Adaptation of Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

Aligning general-purpose large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks often incurs significant training adjustment costs. Prior research has explored various avenues to enhance alignment efficiency, primarily through minimal-data training or data-driven activations to identify key attention head…

2025

Bridging the Semantic Gap Between Text and Table: A Case Study on NL2SQL

ICLR 2025poster

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized numerous domains, yet these models still exhibit weakness in understanding structured tabular data. Although the growing context window promises to accommodate a larger volume of table contents, it does not inherently improve the model's ab…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

CYCLE-INSTRUCT: Fully Seed-Free Instruction Tuning via Dual Self-Training and Cycle Consistency

EMNLP 2025

Instruction tuning is vital for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intent, but current methods typically rely on costly human-annotated seed data or powerful external teacher models. While instruction back-translation techniques reduce this dependency, they remain fundamentally tethere

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

D.Va: Validate Your Demonstration First Before You Use It

ACL 2025long

In-context learning (ICL) has demonstrated significant potential in enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) during inference. It’s well-established that ICL heavily relies on selecting effective demonstrations to achieve outputs that better align with the expected results. As for…

2025

DataMan: Data Manager for Pre-training Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

The performance emergence of large language models (LLMs) driven by data scaling laws makes the selection of pre-training data increasingly important. However, existing methods rely on limited heuristics and human intuition, lacking comprehensive and clear guidelines. To address this, we are inspir…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Ensembling Prompting Strategies for Zero-Shot Hierarchical Text Classification with Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Hierarchical text classification aims to classify documents into multiple labels within a hierarchical taxonomy, making it an essential yet challenging task in natural language processing. Recently, using Large Language Models (LLM) to tackle hierarchical text classification in a zero-shot manner ha

2025

Harnessing Feature Resonance under Arbitrary Target Alignment for Out-of-Distribution Node Detection

NeurIPS 2025poster

Out-of-distribution (OOD) node detection in graphs is a critical yet challenging task. Most existing approaches rely heavily on fine-grained labeled data to obtain a pre-trained supervised classifier, inherently assuming the existence of a well-defined pretext classification task. However, when such…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Jailbreaking Prompt Attack: A Controllable Adversarial Attack against Diffusion Models

NAACL 2025findings

Text-to-image (T2I) models can be maliciously used to generate harmful content such as sexually explicit, unfaithful, and misleading or Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) images. Previous attacks largely depend on the availability of the diffusion model or involve a lengthy optimization process. In this work,…

2025

Large Margin Representation Learning for Robust Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition

ACL 2025long

Cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) aims to build an NER model that generalizes to the low-resource target language with labeled data from the high-resource source language. Current state-of-the-art methods typically combine self-training mechanism with contrastive learning paradigm, in ord…

2025

LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning with the emergence of reasoning models like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Recent research focuses on integrating reasoning capabilities into the realm of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via outcome-supervised reinf

2025

LongTableBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Table Reasoning across Real-World Formats and Domains

EMNLP 2025

We introduce LongTableBench , a benchmark for evaluating long-context reasoning over semi-structured tables across diverse formats, tasks, and domains. It comprises 5,950 QA instances spanning 7 table formats (e.g., Markdown, HTML, SQL), 18 domains, and input lengths up to 128K tokens, including mul

2025

POLO: An LLM-Powered Project-Level Code Performance Optimization Framework

IJCAI 2025

Program performance optimization is essential for achieving high execution efficiency, yet it remains a challenging task that requires expertise in both software and hardware. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on high-quality code from platforms like GitHub and other open-source sources, have sh

2025

Pi-GPS: Enhancing Geometry Problem Solving by Unleashing the Power of Diagrammatic Information

ICCV 2025poster

Geometry problem solving has garnered increasing attention due to its potential applications in intelligent education field. Inspired by the observation that text often introduces ambiguities that diagrams can clarify, this paper presents Pi-GPS, a novel framework that unleashes the power of diagram…

2025

Prompt Candidates, then Distill: A Teacher-Student Framework for LLM-driven Data Annotation

ACL 2025long

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for data annotation, markedly reducing the labor costs associated with downstream applications. However, existing methods mostly adopt an aggressive strategy by prompting LLM to determine a single gold label for each unla…

2025

RPDR: A Round-trip Prediction-Based Data Augmentation Framework for Long-Tail Question Answering

EMNLP 2025

Long-tail question answering presents significant challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to their limited ability to acquire and accurately recall less common knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have shown great promise in mitigating this limitation by integrating extern

2025

RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysis

ACL 2025finding

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is an increasing need for challenging benchmarks to evaluate their capabilities in handling complex tabular data. However, existing benchmarks are either based on outdated data setups or focus solely on simple, flat table structures.…

2025

Revisiting Convolution Architecture in the Realm of DNA Foundation Models

ICLR 2025poster

In recent years, A variety of methods based on Transformer and state space model (SSM) architectures have been proposed, advancing foundational DNA language models. However, there is a lack of comparison between these recent approaches and the classical architecture—convolutional networks (CNNs)—on…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Towards Reverse Engineering of Language Models: A Survey

EMNLP 2025

With the continuous development of language models and the widespread availability of various types of accessible interfaces, large language models (LLMs) have been applied to an increasing number of fields. However, due to the vast amounts of data and computational resources required for model deve

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Towards Robust Incremental Learning Under Ambiguous Supervision

IJCAI 2025

Traditional Incremental Learning (IL) targets to handle sequential fully-supervised learning problems where novel classes emerge from time to time. However, due to inherent annotation uncertainty and ambiguity, collecting high-quality annotated data in a dynamic learning system can be extremely expe

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

A Separation and Alignment Framework for Black-Box Domain Adaptation

AAAI 2024technical

Black-box domain adaptation (BDA) targets to learn a classifier on an unsupervised target domain while assuming only access to black-box predictors trained from unseen source data. Although a few BDA approaches have demonstrated promise by manipulating the transferred labels, they largely overlook t…

2024

Data Contamination Calibration for Black-box LLMs

ACL 2024findings

The rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) tightly associate with the expansion of the training data size. However, the unchecked ultra-large-scale training sets introduce a series of potential risks like data contamination, i.e. the benchmark data is used for training. In this work, we…

2024

Embedding and Gradient Say Wrong: A White-Box Method for Hallucination Detection

EMNLP 2024main

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language generation. Compared to previous small-scale models, they are capable of generating fluent output based on the provided prefix or prompt. However, one critical challenge — the *hallucinati…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Energy-based Automated Model Evaluation

ICLR 2024poster

The conventional evaluation protocols on machine learning models rely heavily on a labeled, i.i.d-assumed testing dataset, which is not often present in real-world applications. The Automated Model Evaluation (AutoEval) shows an alternative to this traditional workflow, by forming a proximal predict…

2024

FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents

EMNLP 2024finding

LLM-based agents have emerged as promising tools, which are crafted to fulfill complex tasks by iterative planning and action. However, these agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. To address this, preliminary attemp…

2024

Learning Geometry-Aware Representations for New Intent Discovery

ACL 2024long

New intent discovery (NID) is an important problem for deploying practical dialogue systems, which trains intent classifiers on a semi-supervised corpus where unlabeled user utterances contain both known and novel intents. Most existing NID algorithms place hope on the sample similarity to cluster u…

2024

Locating What You Need: Towards Adapting Diffusion Models to OOD Concepts In-the-Wild

NeurIPS 2024poster

The recent large-scale text-to-image generative models have attained unprecedented performance, while people established *adaptor* modules like LoRA and DreamBooth to extend this performance to even more unseen concept tokens. However, we empirically find that this workflow often fails to accurately…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey

ACL 2024findings

Within the evolving landscape of deep learning, the dilemma of data quantity and quality has been a long-standing problem. The recent advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a data-centric solution to alleviate the limitations of real-world data with synthetic data generation. However, current…

2024

Positive-Unlabeled Learning by Latent Group-Aware Meta Disambiguation

CVPR 2024poster

Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning aims to train a binary classifier using minimal positive data supplemented by a substantially larger pool of unlabeled data in the specific absence of explicitly annotated negatives. Despite its straightforward nature as a binary classification task the currently bes…

2024

RECOST: External Knowledge Guided Data-efficient Instruction Tuning

ACL 2024findings

In the current landscape of large language models (LLMs), the process of instruction tuning serves as an essential step. Considering the high computing power overhead, data-efficient instruction tuning was proposed to reduce the training data size in this process, aiming at selecting high-quality in…

2024

Targeted Representation Alignment for Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning

CVPR 2024poster

Open-world Semi-Supervised Learning aims to classify unlabeled samples utilizing information from labeled data while unlabeled samples are not only from the labeled known categories but also from novel categories previously unseen. Despite the promise current approaches solely rely on hazardous simi…

2024

Unbiased Multi-Label Learning from Crowdsourced Annotations

ICML 2024poster

This work studies the novel Crowdsourced Multi-Label Learning (CMLL) problem, where each instance is related to multiple true labels but the model only receives unreliable labels from different annotators. Although a few Crowdsourced Multi-Label Inference (CMLI) methods have been developed, they req…

2023

CAME: Contrastive Automated Model Evaluation

ICCV 2023poster

The Automated Model Evaluation (AutoEval) framework entertains the possibility of evaluating a trained machine learning model without resorting to a labeled testing set. Despite the promise and some decent results, the existing AutoEval methods heavily rely on computing distribution shifts between…

Cited by 9PDFcodeScholar
2023

Debiased and Denoised Entity Recognition from Distant Supervision

NeurIPS 2023poster

While distant supervision has been extensively explored and exploited in NLP tasks like named entity recognition, a major obstacle stems from the inevitable noisy distant labels tagged unsupervisedly. A few past works approach this problem by adopting a self-training framework with a sample-selectio…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Dynamic Ensemble of Low-Fidelity Experts: Mitigating NAS “Cold-Start”

AAAI 2023technical

Predictor-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) employs an architecture performance predictor to improve the sample efficiency. However, predictor-based NAS suffers from the severe ``cold-start'' problem, since a large amount of architecture-performance data is required to get a working predictor.…

2023

FreeAL: Towards Human-Free Active Learning in the Era of Large Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

Collecting high-quality labeled data for model training is notoriously time-consuming and labor-intensive for various NLP tasks. While copious solutions, such as active learning for small language models (SLMs) and prevalent in-context learning in the era of large language models (LLMs), have been p…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Latent Processes Identification From Multi-View Time Series

IJCAI 2023poster

Understanding the dynamics of time series data typically requires identifying the unique latent factors for data generation, a.k.a., latent processes identification. Driven by the independent assumption, existing works have made great progress in handling single-view data. However, it is a non-trivi…

2023

Learning a Data-Driven Policy Network for Pre-Training Automated Feature Engineering

ICLR 2023top-25%

Feature engineering is widely acknowledged to be pivotal in tabular data analysis and prediction. Automated feature engineering (AutoFE) emerged to automate this process managed by experienced data scientists and engineers conventionally. In this area, most — if not all — prior work adopted an ident…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

ProMix: Combating Label Noise via Maximizing Clean Sample Utility

IJCAI 2023poster

Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) has become an appealing topic, as imperfectly annotated data are relatively cheaper to obtain. Recent state-of-the-art approaches employ specific selection mechanisms to separate clean and noisy samples and then apply Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) techniques for imp…

2023

Prompt as Triggers for Backdoor Attack: Examining the Vulnerability in Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

The prompt-based learning paradigm, which bridges the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP tasks, particularly in few-shot settings. Despite being widely applied, prompt-based learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Textual backdoor atta…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

SPA: A Graph Spectral Alignment Perspective for Domain Adaptation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a pivotal form in machine learning to extend the in-domain model to the distinctive target domains where the data distributions differ. Most prior works focus on capturing the inter-domain transferability but largely overlook rich intra-domain structures, whic…

2023

Towards Controlled Data Augmentations for Active Learning

ICML 2023poster

The mission of active learning is to identify the most valuable data samples, thus attaining decent performance with much fewer samples. The data augmentation techniques seem straightforward yet promising to enhance active learning by extending the exploration of the input space, which helps locate…

2022

PiCO: Contrastive Label Disambiguation for Partial Label Learning

ICLR 2022oral

Partial label learning (PLL) is an important problem that allows each training example to be labeled with a coarse candidate set, which well suits many real-world data annotation scenarios with label ambiguity. Despite the promise, the performance of PLL often lags behind the supervised counterpart…

2022

SoLar: Sinkhorn Label Refinery for Imbalanced Partial-Label Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Partial-label learning (PLL) is a peculiar weakly-supervised learning task where the training samples are generally associated with a set of candidate labels instead of single ground truth. While a variety of label disambiguation methods have been proposed in this domain, they normally assume a clas…

2022

TA-GATES: An Encoding Scheme for Neural Network Architectures

NeurIPS 2022accept

Neural architecture search tries to shift the manual design of neural network (NN) architectures to algorithmic design. In these cases, the NN architecture itself can be viewed as data and needs to be modeled. A better modeling could help explore novel architectures automatically and open the black…

2022

Towards Unifying the Label Space for Aspect- and Sentence-based Sentiment Analysis

ACL 2022findings

The aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained task that aims to determine the sentiment polarity towards targeted aspect terms occurring in the sentence. The development of the ABSA task is very much hindered by the lack of annotated data. To tackle this, the prior works have studied…

2021

Joining datasets via data augmentation in the label space for neural networks

ICML 2021spotlight

Most, if not all, modern deep learning systems restrict themselves to a single dataset for neural network training and inference. In this article, we are interested in systematic ways to join datasets that are made of similar purposes. Unlike previous published works that ubiquitously conduct the da…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2021

Semi-supervised Vein Segmentation of Ultrasound Images for Autonomous Venipuncture

IROS 2021poster

Venipuncture is an indispensable procedure for both diagnosis and treatment. In this paper, unlike existing solutions that fully or partially rely on professional assistance, a compact robotic system integrating both novel hardware and software developments is introduced. The hardware consists of a…

Cited by 7SourceScholar
2016

Disentangling factors of variation in deep representation using adversarial training

NeurIPS 2016poster

We propose a deep generative model for learning to distill the hidden factors of variation within a set of labeled observations into two complementary codes. One code describes the factors of variation relevant to solving a specified task. The other code describes the remaining factors of variation…

Cited by 574SourcePDFScholar