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Kai Xiong

16 accepted papers

2026

Diagnosing and Remedying Knowledge Deficiencies in LLMs via Label-free Curricular Meaningful Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive generalization ability by learning from extensive unlabeled text. However, they still exhibit reasoning mistakes, which can affect their trustworthiness and reliability. Although users can interact with LLMs and provide diverse and comprehens…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Do LLMs Signal When They’re Right? Evidence from Neuron Agreement

ICML 2026spotlight

Large language models (LLMs) commonly boost reasoning via sample-evaluate-ensemble decoders (e.g., majority voting), achieving label free gains without ground truth. However, prevailing strategies score candidates using only external outputs such as token probabilities, entropies, or self evaluation…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Analyzing the Rapid Generalization of SFT via the Perspective of Attention Head Activation Patterns

ACL 2025long

LLMs’ performance on complex tasks is still unsatisfactory. A key issue is that presently LLMs learn in a data-driven schema, while the instructions about these complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct. On the contrary, a prominent phenomenon is that LLMs can learn rather fast…

2025

Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential across various industries due to their remarkable ability to generalize through instruction tuning. However, the limited availability of domain-specific data significantly hampers their performance on specialized tasks. While existing methods p…

2025

Com2 : A Causal-Guided Benchmark for Exploring Complex Commonsense Reasoning in Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have mastered abundant simple and explicit commonsense knowledge through pre-training, enabling them to achieve human-like performance in simple commonsense reasoning. Nevertheless, LLMs struggle to reason with complex and implicit commonsense knowledge that is derived f…

2025

Efficient and Accurate Prompt Optimization: the Benefit of Memory in Exemplar-Guided Reflection

ACL 2025long

Automatic prompt engineering aims to enhance the generation quality of large language models (LLMs). Recent works utilize feedbacks generated from erroneous cases to guide the prompt optimization. During inference, they may further retrieve several semantically-related exemplars and concatenate them…

2025

Natural Logic at the Core: Dynamic Rewards for Entailment Tree Generation

ACL 2025finding

Entailment trees are essential for enhancing interpretability and transparency in tasks like question answering and natural language understanding. However, existing approaches often lack logical consistency, as they rely on static reward structures or ignore the intricate dependencies within multi-…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

UFO-RL: Uncertainty-Focused Optimization for Efficient Reinforcement Learning Data Selection

NeurIPS 2025poster

A primary impediment to scaling reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) training is the substantial computational cost, predominantly arising from the necessity of multi-sampling for policy optimization and evaluation. This underscores the critical yet challenging nature of effici…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Deciphering the Impact of Pretraining Data on Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning

ACL 2024findings

Through pretraining on a corpus with various sources, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained impressive performance. However, the impact of each component of the pretraining corpus remains opaque. As a result, the organization of the pretraining corpus is still empirical and may deviate from the o…

2024

Intuitive or Dependent? Investigating LLMs’ Behavior Style to Conflicting Prompts

ACL 2024long

This study investigates the behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) when faced with conflicting prompts versus their internal memory. This will not only help to understand LLMs’ decision mechanism but also benefit real-world applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).Drawing on cog…

2024

Meaningful Learning: Enhancing Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models via Generic Fact Guidance

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have developed impressive performance and strong explainability across various reasoning scenarios, marking a significant stride towards mimicking human-like intelligence. Despite this, when tasked with several simple questions supported by a generic fact, LLMs often str…

2024

PACE: Pose Annotations in Cluttered Environments

ECCV 2024poster

"We introduce PACE (Pose Annotations in Cluttered Environments), a large-scale benchmark designed to advance the development and evaluation of pose estimation methods in cluttered scenarios. PACE provides a large-scale real-world benchmark for both instance-level and category-level settings. The ben…

2023

Examining Inter-Consistency of Large Language Models Collaboration: An In-depth Analysis via Debate

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in various applications, but they still face various inconsistency issues. Existing works primarily focus on the inconsistency issues within a single LLM, while we complementarily explore the inter-consistency among multiple LLMs for co…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

ReCo: Reliable Causal Chain Reasoning via Structural Causal Recurrent Neural Networks

EMNLP 2022main

Causal chain reasoning (CCR) is an essential ability for many decision-making AI systems, which requires the model to build reliable causal chains by connecting causal pairs. However, CCR suffers from two main transitive problems: threshold effect and scene drift. In other words, the causal pairs to…

2022

e-CARE: a New Dataset for Exploring Explainable Causal Reasoning

ACL 2022long

Understanding causality has vital importance for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. Beyond the labeled instances, conceptual explanations of the causality can provide deep understanding of the causal fact to facilitate the causal reasoning process. However, such explanation info…

2021

ExCAR: Event Graph Knowledge Enhanced Explainable Causal Reasoning

ACL 2021long

Prior work infers the causation between events mainly based on the knowledge induced from the annotated causal event pairs. However, additional evidence information intermediate to the cause and effect remains unexploited. By incorporating such information, the logical law behind the causality can b…