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Li Dong

67 accepted papers

2026

Benefits and Pitfalls of Reinforcement Learning for Language Model Planning: A Theoretical Perspective

ICLR 2026poster

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits and limitations through a tractable graph-based abstraction,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Deferred Poisoning: Making the Model More Vulnerable via Hessian Singularization

AAAI 2026technical

Recent studies have shown that deep learning models are very vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Many defense methods have been proposed to address this issue. However, traditional poisoning attacks are not as threatening as commonly believed. This is because they often cause differences in how the mod

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Induce, Align, Predict: Zero-Shot Stance Detection via Cognitive Inductive Reasoning

AAAI 2026technical

Zero-shot stance detection (ZSSD) seeks to determine the stance of text toward previously unseen targets, a task critical for analyzing dynamic and polarized online discourse with limited labeled data. While large language models (LLMs) offer zero-shot capabilities, prompting-based approaches often

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Multimodal Latent Language Modeling with Next-Token Diffusion

ICML 2026spotlight

Multimodal generative models require a unified approach to handle both discrete data (e.g., text and code) and continuous data (e.g., image, audio, video). In this work, we propose Latent Language Modeling (LatentLM), which seamlessly integrates continuous and discrete data using causal Transformers…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SlideSparse: Fast and Flexible (2N-2):2N Structured Sparsity

ICML 2026poster

NVIDIA's 2:4 Sparse Tensor Cores deliver $2\times$ throughput but demand 50% pruning—a ratio that collapses LLM reasoning accuracy (Qwen3: 54%→15%). Milder $(2N-2):2N$ patterns (e.g., 6:8, 25% pruning) preserve accuracy yet receive *no* hardware support, falling back to dense execution. We present *…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Sparse Attention Adaptation for Long Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

We introduce SeerAttention-R, a sparse attention framework specifically tailored for the long decoding of reasoning models. Extended from SeerAttention, SeerAttention-R retains the design of learning attention sparsity through a self-distilled gating mechanism, while removing query pooling to accomm…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

VibeVoice: Expressive Podcast Generation with Next-Token Diffusion

ICLR 2026oral

Generating long-form, multi-speaker conversational audio like podcasts poses significant challenges for traditional Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, particularly in scalability, speaker consistency, and natural turn-taking. We present VibeVoice , a novel model designed to synthesize expressive, long-fo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Data Selection via Optimal Control for Language Models

ICLR 2025oral

This work investigates the selection of high-quality pre-training data from massive corpora to enhance LMs' capabilities for downstream usage. We formulate data selection as a generalized Optimal Control problem, which can be solved theoretically by Pontryagin's Maximum Principle (PMP), yielding a…

2025

Imagine While Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought

ICML 2025poster

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven highly effective for enhancing complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Yet, it struggles in complex spatial reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, human cognition extends beyond language alone, enabling the re…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2025

Learning Robust Image Watermarking with Lossless Cover Recovery

ICCV 2025poster

Watermarking as a traceable authentication technology has been widely applied in image copyright protection. However, most existing watermarking methods embed watermarks by adding irremovable perturbations to the cover image, causing permanent distortion. To address this issue, we propose a novel wa…

2025

MoE-CAP: Benchmarking Cost, Accuracy and Performance of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Systems

NeurIPS 2025poster

The sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is increasingly favored for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) efficiently, but it depends on heterogeneous compute and memory resources. These factors jointly affect system Cost, Accuracy, and Performance (CAP), making trade-offs inevitable. Existi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

New User Event Prediction Through the Lens of Causal Inference

AISTATS 2025poster

Modeling and analysis for event series generated by users of heterogeneous behavioral patterns are closely involved in our daily lives, including credit card fraud detection, online platform user recommendation, and social network analysis. The most commonly adopted approach to this task is to assi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Self-Boosting Large Language Models with Synthetic Preference Data

ICLR 2025poster

Through alignment with human preferences, Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced significantly in generating honest, harmless, and helpful responses. However, collecting high-quality preference data is a resource-intensive and creativity-demanding process, especially for the continual improvemen…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2025

Think Only When You Need with Large Hybrid-Reasoning Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown substantially improved reasoning capabilities over traditional Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating extended thinking processes prior to producing final responses. However, excessively lengthy thinking introduces substantial overhead in terms…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

BioCLIP: A Vision Foundation Model for the Tree of Life

CVPR 2024poster

Images of the natural world collected by a variety of cameras from drones to individual phones are increasingly abundant sources of biological information. There is an explosion of computational methods and tools particularly computer vision for extracting biologically relevant information from imag…

2024

Cross-Target Stance Detection by Exploiting Target Analytical Perspectives

ICASSP 2024accepted

Cross-target stance detection (CTSD) is an important task, which infers the attitude of the destination target by utilizing annotated data derived from the source target. One important approach in CTSD is to extract domain-invariant features to bridge the knowledge gap between multiple targets. Howe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

EDDA: An Encoder-Decoder Data Augmentation Framework for Zero-Shot Stance Detection

COLING 2024main

Stance detection aims to determine the attitude expressed in text towards a given target. Zero-shot stance detection (ZSSD) has emerged to classify stances towards unseen targets during inference. Recent data augmentation techniques for ZSSD increase transferable knowledge between targets through te…

2024

Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World

ICLR 2024poster

We introduce Kosmos-2, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), enabling new capabilities of perceiving object descriptions (e.g., bounding boxes) and grounding text to the visual world. Specifically, we represent text spans (i.e., referring expressions and noun phrases) as links in Markdown, i.e.,…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar
2024

KOSMOS-E : Learning to Follow Instruction for Robotic Grasping

IROS 2024poster

Tuning on instruction-following data has been shown to enhance the capabilities and controllability of language models, but the idea is less explored in the robotic field. In this work, we introduce KOSMOS-E, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that leverages instruction-following robotic grasp…

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2024

Kosmos-G: Generating Images in Context with Multimodal Large Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Recent advancements in subject-driven image generation have made significant strides. However, current methods still fall short in diverse application scenarios, as they require test-time tuning and cannot accept interleaved multi-image and text input. These limitations keep them far from the ultima…

2024

Mind's Eye of LLMs: Visualization-of-Thought Elicits Spatial Reasoning in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive performance in language comprehension and various reasoning tasks. However, their abilities in spatial reasoning, a crucial aspect of human cognition, remain relatively unexplored. Human possess a remarkable ability to create mental images of un…

2024

You Only Cache Once: Decoder-Decoder Architectures for Language Models

NeurIPS 2024oral

We introduce a decoder-decoder architecture, YOCO, for large language models, which only caches key-value pairs once. It consists of two components, i.e., a cross-decoder stacked upon a self-decoder. The self-decoder efficiently encodes global key-value (KV) caches that are reused by the cross-decod…

2023

A Length-Extrapolatable Transformer

ACL 2023long

Position modeling plays a critical role in Transformers. In this paper, we focus on length extrapolation, i.e., training on short texts while evaluating longer sequences. We define attention resolution as an indicator of extrapolation. Then we propose two designs to improve the above metric of Trans…

2023

Augmenting Language Models with Long-Term Memory

NeurIPS 2023poster

Existing large language models (LLMs) can only afford fix-sized inputs due to the input length limit, preventing them from utilizing rich long-context information from past inputs. To address this, we propose a framework, Language Models Augmented with Long-Term Memory (LongMem), which enables LLMs…

Cited by 186SourcePDFScholar
2023

Beyond English-Centric Bitexts for Better Multilingual Language Representation Learning

ACL 2023long

In this paper, we elaborate upon recipes for building multilingual representation models that are not only competitive with existing state-of-the-art models but are also more parameter efficient, thereby promoting better adoption in resource-constrained scenarios and practical applications. We show…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

Corrupted Image Modeling for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training

ICLR 2023top-25%

We introduce Corrupted Image Modeling (CIM) for self-supervised visual pre-training. CIM uses an auxiliary generator with a small trainable BEiT to corrupt the input image instead of using artificial [MASK] tokens, where some patches are randomly selected and replaced with plausible alternatives sam…

Cited by 93SourcePDFScholar
2023

Extensible Prompts for Language Models on Zero-shot Language Style Customization

NeurIPS 2023poster

We propose eXtensible Prompt (X-Prompt) for prompting a large language model (LLM) beyond natural language (NL). X-Prompt instructs an LLM with not only NL but also an extensible vocabulary of imaginary words. Registering new imaginary words allows us to instruct the LLM to comprehend concepts that…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

GanLM: Encoder-Decoder Pre-training with an Auxiliary Discriminator

ACL 2023long

Pre-trained models have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). However, existing pre-training methods underutilize the benefits of language understanding for generation. Inspired by the idea of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we propose a GAN-style model for encode…

2023

Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for Vision and Vision-Language Tasks

CVPR 2023poster

A big convergence of language, vision, and multimodal pretraining is emerging. In this work, we introduce a general-purpose multimodal foundation model BEiT-3, which achieves excellent transfer performance on both vision and vision-language tasks. Specifically, we advance the big convergence from th…

Cited by 621SourcePDFScholar
2023

Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

A big convergence of language, multimodal perception, action, and world modeling is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. In this work, we introduce KOSMOS-1, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that can perceive general modalities, learn in context (i.e., few-shot), and follow ins…

2023

Magneto: A Foundation Transformer

ICML 2023poster

A big convergence of model architectures across language, vision, speech, and multimodal is emerging. However, under the same name ''Transformers'', the above areas use different implementations for better performance, e.g., Post-LayerNorm for BERT, and Pre-LayerNorm for GPT and vision Transformers.…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

Non-Contrastive Learning Meets Language-Image Pre-Training

CVPR 2023poster

Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) serves as a de-facto standard to align images and texts. Nonetheless, the loose correlation between images and texts of web-crawled data renders the contrastive objective data inefficient and craving for a large training batch size. In this work, we exp…

2023

Prototypical Calibration for Few-shot Learning of Language Models

ICLR 2023poster

In-context learning of GPT-like models has been recognized as fragile across different hand-crafted templates, and demonstration permutations. In this work, we propose prototypical calibration to adaptively learn a more robust decision boundary for zero- and few-shot classification, instead of greed…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2023

Semi-Offline Reinforcement Learning for Optimized Text Generation

ICML 2023poster

Existing reinforcement learning (RL) mainly utilize online or offline settings. The online methods explore the environment with expensive time cost, and the offline methods efficiently obtain reward signals by sacrificing the exploration capability. We propose semi-offline RL, a novel paradigm that…

2023

Visually-Augmented Language Modeling

ICLR 2023poster

Human language is grounded on multimodal knowledge including visual knowledge like colors, sizes, and shapes. However, current large-scale pre-trained language models rely on the text-only self-supervised training with massive text data, which precludes them from utilizing relevant visual informatio…

2023

Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers

ACL 2023findings

Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning (ICL) ability. With a few demonstration input-label pairs, they can predict the label for an unseen input without parameter updates. Despite the great success in performance, its working mechanism still remains an open questi…

2022

AdaPrompt: Adaptive Model Training for Prompt-based NLP

EMNLP 2022finding

Prompt-based learning, with its capability to tackle zero-shot and few-shot NLP tasks, has gained much attention in the community.The main idea is to bridge the gap between NLP downstream tasks and language modeling (LM), by mapping these tasks into natural language prompts, which are then filled by…

2022

CLIP Models are Few-Shot Learners: Empirical Studies on VQA and Visual Entailment

ACL 2022long

CLIP has shown a remarkable zero-shot capability on a wide range of vision tasks. Previously, CLIP is only regarded as a powerful visual encoder. However, after being pre-trained by language supervision from a large amount of image-caption pairs, CLIP itself should also have acquired some few-shot a…

2022

CROP: Zero-shot Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition with Multilingual Labeled Sequence Translation

EMNLP 2022finding

Named entity recognition (NER) suffers from the scarcity of annotated training data, especially for low-resource languages without labeled data. Cross-lingual NER has been proposed to alleviate this issue by transferring knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages via aligned cr…

2022

Controllable Natural Language Generation with Contrastive Prefixes

ACL 2022findings

To guide the generation of large pretrained language models (LM), previous work has focused on directly fine-tuning the language model or utilizing an attribute discriminator. In this work, we propose a novel lightweight framework for controllable GPT2 generation, which utilizes a set of small attri…

Cited by 100SourcePDFScholar
2022

Knowledge Neurons in Pretrained Transformers

ACL 2022long

Large-scale pretrained language models are surprisingly good at recalling factual knowledge presented in the training corpus. In this paper, we present preliminary studies on how factual knowledge is stored in pretrained Transformers by introducing the concept of knowledge neurons. Specifically, we…

2022

On the Representation Collapse of Sparse Mixture of Experts

NeurIPS 2022accept

Sparse mixture of experts provides larger model capacity while requiring a constant computational overhead. It employs the routing mechanism to distribute input tokens to the best-matched experts according to their hidden representations. However, learning such a routing mechanism encourages token c…

2022

StableMoE: Stable Routing Strategy for Mixture of Experts

ACL 2022long

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) technique can scale up the model size of Transformers with an affordable computational overhead. We point out that existing learning-to-route MoE methods suffer from the routing fluctuation issue, i.e., the target expert of the same input may change along with training,…

2022

Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution

CVPR 2022poster

We present techniques for scaling Swin Transformer [??] up to 3 billion parameters and making it capable of training with images of up to 1,536x1,536 resolution. By scaling up capacity and resolution, Swin Transformer sets new records on four representative vision benchmarks: 84.0% top-1 accuracy on…

Cited by 2410PDFcodeScholar
2022

THE-X: Privacy-Preserving Transformer Inference with Homomorphic Encryption

ACL 2022findings

As more and more pre-trained language models adopt on-cloud deployment, the privacy issues grow quickly, mainly for the exposure of plain-text user data (e.g., search history, medical record, bank account). Privacy-preserving inference of transformer models is on the demand of cloud service users. T…

2022

VLMo: Unified Vision-Language Pre-Training with Mixture-of-Modality-Experts

NeurIPS 2022accept

We present a unified Vision-Language pretrained Model (VLMo) that jointly learns a dual encoder and a fusion encoder with a modular Transformer network. Specifically, we introduce Multiway Transformer, where each block contains a pool of modality-specific experts and a shared self-attention layer. B…

2022

XLM-E: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training via ELECTRA

ACL 2022long

In this paper, we introduce ELECTRA-style tasks to cross-lingual language model pre-training. Specifically, we present two pre-training tasks, namely multilingual replaced token detection, and translation replaced token detection. Besides, we pretrain the model, named as XLM-E, on both multilingual…

2021

Allocating Large Vocabulary Capacity for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training

EMNLP 2021main

Compared to monolingual models, cross-lingual models usually require a more expressive vocabulary to represent all languages adequately. We find that many languages are under-represented in recent cross-lingual language models due to the limited vocabulary capacity. To this end, we propose an algori…

2021

Consistency Regularization for Cross-Lingual Fine-Tuning

ACL 2021long

Fine-tuning pre-trained cross-lingual language models can transfer task-specific supervision from one language to the others. In this work, we propose to improve cross-lingual fine-tuning with consistency regularization. Specifically, we use example consistency regularization to penalize the predict…

2021

Improving Pretrained Cross-Lingual Language Models via Self-Labeled Word Alignment

ACL 2021long

The cross-lingual language models are typically pretrained with masked language modeling on multilingual text or parallel sentences. In this paper, we introduce denoising word alignment as a new cross-lingual pre-training task. Specifically, the model first self-label word alignments for parallel se…

2021

InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training

NAACL 2021long

In this work, we present an information-theoretic framework that formulates cross-lingual language model pre-training as maximizing mutual information between multilingual-multi-granularity texts. The unified view helps us to better understand the existing methods for learning cross-lingual represen…

Cited by 371SourcePDFScholar
2021

Self-Attention Attribution: Interpreting Information Interactions Inside Transformer

AAAI 2021technical

The great success of Transformer-based models benefits from the powerful multi-head self-attention mechanism, which learns token dependencies and encodes contextual information from the input. Prior work strives to attribute model decisions to individual input features with different saliency measur…

2021

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer of Neural Machine Translation with Multilingual Pretrained Encoders

EMNLP 2021main

Previous work mainly focuses on improving cross-lingual transfer for NLU tasks with a multilingual pretrained encoder (MPE), or improving the performance on supervised machine translation with BERT. However, it is under-explored that whether the MPE can help to facilitate the cross-lingual transfera…

2021

mT6: Multilingual Pretrained Text-to-Text Transformer with Translation Pairs

EMNLP 2021main

Multilingual T5 pretrains a sequence-to-sequence model on massive monolingual texts, which has shown promising results on many cross-lingual tasks. In this paper, we improve multilingual text-to-text transfer Transformer with translation pairs (mT6). Specifically, we explore three cross-lingual text…

2020

MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers

NeurIPS 2020poster

Pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) and its variants) have achieved remarkable success in varieties of NLP tasks. However, these models usually consist of hundreds of millions of parameters which brings challenges for fine-tuning and online serving in real-life applications…

2020

Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks

ECCV 2020poster

Large-scale pre-training methods of learning cross-modal representations on image-text pairs are becoming popular for vision-language tasks. While existing methods simply concatenate image region features and text features as input to the model to be pre-trained and use self-attention to learn image…

2020

UniLMv2: Pseudo-Masked Language Models for Unified Language Model Pre-Training

ICML 2020poster

We propose to pre-train a unified language model for both autoencoding and partially autoregressive language modeling tasks using a novel training procedure, referred to as a pseudo-masked language model (PMLM). Given an input text with masked tokens, we rely on conventional masks to learn inter-rel…

2019

Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation

NeurIPS 2019poster

This paper presents a new Unified pre-trained Language Model (UniLM) that can be fine-tuned for both natural language understanding and generation tasks. The model is pre-trained using three types of language modeling tasks: unidirectional, bidirectional, and sequence-to-sequence prediction. The uni…