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Kexun Zhang

19 accepted papers

2026

HARDTESTGEN: A High-Quality RL Verifier Generation Pipeline for LLM Algorithimic Coding

ICLR 2026poster

Verifiers provide important reward signals for reinforcement learning of large language models (LLMs). However, it is challenging to develop or create reliable verifiers, especially for code generation tasks. A well-disguised wrong solution program may only be detected by carefully human-written edg…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Is Vibe Coding Safe? Benchmarking Vulnerability of Agent-Generated Code in Real-World Tasks

ICML 2026poster

Vibe coding is a new programming paradigm in which human engineers instruct large language model (LLM) agents to complete complex coding tasks with little supervision. Although it is increasingly adopted, are vibe coding outputs really safe to deploy in production? To answer this question, we propos…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

DeFT: Decoding with Flash Tree-attention for Efficient Tree-structured LLM Inference

ICLR 2025spotlight

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed for complex tasks that process multiple generation calls in a tree structure with shared prefixes of tokens, including few-shot prompting, multi-step reasoning, speculative decoding, etc. However, existing inference systems for tree-based applic…

2025

Diversity Empowers Intelligence: Integrating Expertise of Software Engineering Agents

ICLR 2025poster

Large language model (LLM) agents have shown great potential in solving real-world software engineering (SWE) problems. The most advanced open-source SWE agent can resolve over 27% of real GitHub issues in SWE-Bench Lite. However, these sophisticated agent frameworks exhibit varying strengths, excel…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2025

Extrapolating to Unknown Opinions Using LLMs

COLING 2025main

From ice cream flavors to climate change, people exhibit a wide array of opinions on various topics, and understanding the rationale for these opinions can promote healthy discussion and consensus among them. As such, it can be valuable for a large language model (LLM), particularly as an AI assista…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Generalization v.s. Memorization: Tracing Language Models’ Capabilities Back to Pretraining Data

ICLR 2025poster

The impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have sparked debate over whether these models genuinely generalize to unseen tasks or predominantly rely on memorizing vast amounts of pretraining data. To explore this issue, we introduce an extended concept of memorization, distributional…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Human Bias in the Face of AI: Examining Human Judgment Against Text Labeled as AI Generated

ACL 2025finding

As Al advances in text generation, human trust in Al generated content remains constrained by biases that go beyond concerns of accuracy. This study explores how bias shapes the perception of AI versus human generated content. Through three experiments involving text rephrasing, news article summari…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Programming by Example meets Historical Linguistics: A Large Language Model Based Approach to Sound Law Induction

ACL 2025long

Historical linguists have long written “programs” that convert reconstructed words in an ancestor language into their attested descendants via ordered string rewrite functions (called sound laws) However, writing these programs is time-consuming, motivating the development of automated Sound Law Ind…

2025

Revealing the Barriers of Language Agents in Planning

NAACL 2025long

Autonomous planning has been an ongoing pursuit since the inception of artificial intelligence. Based on curated problem solvers, early planning agents could deliver precise solutions for specific tasks but lacked generalization. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) and their powerful reaso…

2025

SWE-Search: Enhancing Software Agents with Monte Carlo Tree Search and Iterative Refinement

ICLR 2025poster

Software engineers operating in complex and dynamic environments must continuously adapt to evolving requirements, learn iteratively from experience, and reconsider their approaches based on new insights. However, current large language model (LLM)-based software agents often follow linear, sequenti…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2025

Scaling LLM Inference Efficiently with Optimized Sample Compute Allocation

NAACL 2025long

Sampling is a basic operation for large language models (LLMs). In reinforcement learning rollouts and meta generation algorithms such as Best-of-N, it is essential to sample correct trajectories within a given compute budget. To find an optimal allocation for sample compute budgets, several choices…

2024

Hire a Linguist!: Learning Endangered Languages in LLMs with In-Context Linguistic Descriptions

ACL 2024findings

How can large language models (LLMs) process and translate endangered languages? Many languages lack a large corpus to train a decent LLM; therefore existing LLMs rarely perform well in unseen, endangered languages. On the contrary, we observe that 2000 endangered languages, though without a large c…

2024

Invisible Image Watermarks Are Provably Removable Using Generative AI

NeurIPS 2024poster

Invisible watermarks safeguard images' copyrights by embedding hidden messages only detectable by owners. They also prevent people from misusing images, especially those generated by AI models. We propose a family of regeneration attacks to remove these invisible watermarks. The proposed attack met…

2024

Understanding Reasoning Ability of Language Models From the Perspective of Reasoning Paths Aggregation

ICML 2024poster

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are able to perform complex reasoning without explicit fine-tuning. To understand how pre-training with a next-token prediction objective contributes to the emergence of such reasoning capability, we propose that we can view an LM as deriving new conclusions by aggr…

2023

ALGO: Synthesizing Algorithmic Programs with Generated Oracle Verifiers

NeurIPS 2023poster

Large language models (LLMs) excel at implementing code from functionality descriptions but struggle with algorithmic problems that require not only implementation but also identification of the suitable algorithm. Moreover, LLM-generated programs lack guaranteed correctness and require human verifi…

2023

Large Language Models Are Partially Primed in Pronoun Interpretation

ACL 2023findings

While a large body of literature suggests that large language models (LLMs) acquire rich linguistic representations, little is known about whether they adapt to linguistic biases in a human-like way. The present study probes this question by asking whether LLMs display human-like referential biases…

2023

ReDi: Efficient Learning-Free Diffusion Inference via Trajectory Retrieval

ICML 2023poster

Diffusion models show promising generation capability for a variety of data. Despite their high generation quality, the inference for diffusion models is still time-consuming due to the numerous sampling iterations required. To accelerate the inference, we propose ReDi, a simple yet learning-free Re…

2022

A Study of Syntactic Multi-Modality in Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation

NAACL 2022long

It is difficult for non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models to capture the multi-modal distribution of target translations due to their conditional independence assumption, which is known as the “multi-modality problem”, including the lexical multi-modality and the syntactic multi-modality. Whil…

2022

Focus on the Action: Learning to Highlight and Summarize Jointly for Email To-Do Items Summarization

ACL 2022findings

Automatic email to-do item generation is the task of generating to-do items from a given email to help people overview emails and schedule daily work. Different from prior research on email summarization, to-do item generation focuses on generating action mentions to provide more structured summarie…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar