← Search

Lifu Huang

58 accepted papers

2026

Endowing Vision-Language Models with System 2 Thinking for Fine-grained Visual Recognition

AAAI 2026technical

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at extracting salient visual features from query images, thus exhibiting promising visual recognition performance. However, VLMs would encounter significant degradation in fine-grained scenarios due to their deficiency in distinguishing nuanced differences among c

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining, and many of these …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

TokenSeek: Memory Efficient Fine Tuning via Instance-Aware Token Ditching

ICLR 2026poster

Fine tuning has been regarded as a de facto approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but the high training memory consumption inherited from LLMs makes this process inefficient. Among existing memory efficient approaches, activation-related optimization has proven part…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Unleashing Implicit Rewards: Prefix-Value Learning for Distribution-Level Optimization

ICML 2026poster

Process reward models (PRMs) provide fine-grained reward signals along the reasoning process, improving credit assignment beyond outcome-only rewards. Training reliable PRMs often relies on step annotations or heavy verification pipelines, making them expensive to scale and refresh during online RL.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AAAR-1.0: Assessing AI’s Potential to Assist Research

ICML 2025poster

Numerous studies have assessed the proficiency of AI systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), in facilitating everyday tasks such as email writing, question answering, and creative content generation. However, researchers face unique challenges and opportunities in leveraging LLMs for the…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AR-RAG: Autoregressive Retrieval Augmentation for Image Generation

NeurIPS 2025poster

We introduce Autoregressive Retrieval Augmentation (AR-RAG), a novel paradigm that enhances image generation by autoregressively incorporating k-nearest neighbor retrievals at the patch level. Unlike prior methods that perform a single, static retrieval before generation and condition the entire ge…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

All You Need is One: Capsule Prompt Tuning with a Single Vector

NeurIPS 2025poster

Prompt-based learning has emerged as a parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) approach to facilitate Large Language Model (LLM) adaptation to downstream tasks by conditioning generation with task-aware guidance. Despite its successes, current prompt-based learning methods heavily rely on laborious gr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

DiPT: Enhancing LLM Reasoning through Diversified Perspective-Taking

NAACL 2025findings

Existing work on improving language model reasoning typically explores a single solution path, which can be prone to errors. Inspired by perspective-taking in social studies, this paper introduces DiPT, a novel approach that complements current reasoning methods by explicitly incorporating diversifi…

2025

Grounded-VideoLLM: Sharpening Fine-grained Temporal Grounding in Video Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Despite their impressive performance in coarse-grained video understanding, Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) still face challenges in fine-grained temporal grounding, including ineffective temporal modeling and inadequate timestamp representations. In this work, we introduce Grounded-VideoLL

2025

Inference Compute-Optimal Video Vision Language Models

ACL 2025long

This work investigates the optimal allocation of inference compute across three key scaling factors in video vision language models: language model size, frame count, and the number of visual tokens per frame. While prior works typically focuses on optimizing model efficiency or improving performanc…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MEPT: Mixture of Expert Prompt Tuning as a Manifold Mapper

EMNLP 2025

Considering deep neural networks as manifold mappers, the pretrain-then-fine-tune paradigm can be interpreted as a two-stage process: pretrain establishes a broad knowledge base, and fine-tune adjusts the model parameters to activate specific neural pathways to align with the target manifold. Althou

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MetaScientist: A Human-AI Synergistic Framework for Automated Mechanical Metamaterial Design

NAACL 2025system demonstrations

The discovery of novel mechanical metamaterials, whose properties are dominated by their engineered structures rather than chemical composition, is a knowledge-intensive and resource-demanding process. To accelerate the design of novel metamaterials, we present MetaScientist, a human-in-the-loop sys…

2025

Modality-Specialized Synergizers for Interleaved Vision-Language Generalists

ICLR 2025poster

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have led to the emergence of Vision-Language Generalists (VLGs) capable of understanding and generating both text and images. However, seamlessly generating an arbitrary sequence of text and images remains a challenging task for the current VLGs.…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Persona-SQ: A Personalized Suggested Question Generation Framework For Real-world Documents

NAACL 2025system demonstrations

Suggested questions (SQs) provide an effective initial interface for users to engage with their documents in AI-powered reading applications. In practical reading sessions, users have diverse backgrounds and reading goals, yet current SQ features typically ignore such user information, resulting in…

2025

Probabilistic Token Alignment for Large Language Model Fusion

NeurIPS 2025poster

Training large language models (LLMs) from scratch can yield models with unique functionalities and strengths, but it is costly and often leads to redundant capabilities. A more cost-effective alternative is to fuse existing pre-trained LLMs with different architectures into a more powerful model. H…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

R2I-Bench: Benchmarking Reasoning-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

EMNLP 2025

Reasoning is a fundamental capability often required in real-world text-to-image (T2I) generation, e.g., generating “a bitten apple that has been left in the air for more than a week” necessitates understanding temporal decay and commonsense concepts. While recent T2I models have made impressive pro

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Re-Imagining Multimodal Instruction Tuning: A Representation View

ICLR 2025poster

Multimodal instruction tuning has proven to be an effective strategy for achieving zero-shot generalization by fine-tuning pre-trained Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with instruction-following data. However, as the scale of LMMs continues to grow, fully fine-tuning these models has become highly par…

2025

SPARTUN3D: Situated Spatial Understanding of 3D World in Large Language Model

ICLR 2025poster

Integrating the 3D world into large language models (3D-based LLMs) has been a promising research direction for 3D scene understanding. However, current 3D-based LLMs fall short in situated understanding due to two key limitations: 1) existing 3D datasets are constructed from a global perspective of…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2025

Sycophancy Mitigation Through Reinforcement Learning with Uncertainty-Aware Adaptive Reasoning Trajectories

EMNLP 2025

Despite the remarkable capabilities of large language models, current training paradigms inadvertently foster sycophancy—alignment with user-provided information, regardless of factual accuracy. In this paper, we introduce SMART (Sycophancy Mitigation through Adaptive Reasoning Trajectories), reconc

2025

UniHGKR: Unified Instruction-aware Heterogeneous Knowledge Retrievers

NAACL 2025long

Existing information retrieval (IR) models often assume a homogeneous structure for knowledge sources and user queries, limiting their applicability in real-world settings where retrieval is inherently heterogeneous and diverse. In this paper, we introduce UniHGKR, a unified instruction-aware hetero…

2024

AMD: Automatic Multi-step Distillation of Large-scale Vision Models

ECCV 2024poster

"Transformer-based architectures have become the de-facto standard models for diverse vision tasks owing to their superior performance. As the size of these transformer-based models continues to scale up, model distillation becomes extremely important in real-world deployments, particularly on devic…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

DA-Code: Agent Data Science Code Generation Benchmark for Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

We introduce DA-Code, a code generation benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs on agent-based data science tasks. This benchmark features three core elements: First, the tasks within DA-Code are inherently challenging, setting them apart from traditional code generation tasks and demanding a…

2024

Debate as Optimization: Adaptive Conformal Prediction and Diverse Retrieval for Event Extraction

EMNLP 2024finding

We propose a multi-agent debate as optimization (DAO) system for event extraction, where the primary objective is to iteratively refine the large language models (LLMs) outputs through debating without parameter tuning. In DAO, we introduce two novel modules: the Diverse-RAG (DRAG) module and the Ad…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

EAVE: Efficient Product Attribute Value Extraction via Lightweight Sparse-layer Interaction

EMNLP 2024finding

Product attribute value extraction involves identifying the specific values associated with various attributes from a product profile. While existing methods often prioritize the development of effective models to improve extraction performance, there has been limited emphasis on extraction efficien…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Facing the Elephant in the Room: Visual Prompt Tuning or Full finetuning?

ICLR 2024poster

As the scale of vision models continues to grow, the emergence of Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) as a parameter-efficient transfer learning technique has gained attention due to its superior performance compared to traditional full-finetuning. However, the conditions favoring VPT (the "when") and the un…

2024

Holistic Evaluation for Interleaved Text-and-Image Generation

EMNLP 2024main

Interleaved text-and-image generation has been an intriguing research direction, where the models are required to generate both images and text pieces in an arbitrary order. Despite the emerging advancements in interleaved generation, the progress in its evaluation still significantly lags behind. E…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

InternalInspector I2: Robust Confidence Estimation in LLMs through Internal States

EMNLP 2024finding

Despite their vast capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with generating reliable outputs, frequently producing high-confidence inaccuracies known as hallucinations. Addressing this challenge, our research introduces InternalInspector, a novel framework designed to enhance confid…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

M2PT: Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Zero-shot Instruction Learning

EMNLP 2024main

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a wide range of domains, with increasing emphasis on enhancing their zero-shot generalization capabilities for unseen tasks across various modalities. Instruction tuning has emerged as an effective strategy for achiev…

2024

MULTISCRIPT: Multimodal Script Learning for Supporting Open Domain Everyday Tasks

AAAI 2024technical

Automatically generating scripts (i.e. sequences of key steps described in text) from video demonstrations and reasoning about the subsequent steps are crucial to the modern AI virtual assistants to guide humans to complete everyday tasks, especially unfamiliar ones. However, current methods for gen…

2024

Multimodal Instruction Tuning with Conditional Mixture of LoRA

ACL 2024long

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in diverse tasks across different domains, with an increasing focus on improving their zero-shot generalization capabilities for unseen multimodal tasks. Multimodal instruction tuning has emerged as a successful strate…

2024

Navigating the Dual Facets: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Sequential Memory Editing in Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

Memory Editing (ME) has emerged as an efficient method to modify erroneous facts or inject new facts into Large Language Models (LLMs). Two mainstream ME methods exist: parameter-modifying ME and parameter-preserving ME (integrating extra modules while preserving original parameters). Regrettably, p…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Position: TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models

ICML 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have gained considerable attention for their excellent natural language processing capabilities. Nonetheless, these LLMs present many challenges, particularly in the realm of trustworthiness. This paper introduces TrustLLM, a comprehensive study of trustworthiness in LLM…

Cited by 95SourcePDFScholar
2024

RE2: Region-Aware Relation Extraction from Visually Rich Documents

NAACL 2024long

Current research in form understanding predominantly relies on large pre-trained language models, necessitating extensive data for pre-training. However, the importance of layout structure (i.e., the spatial relationship between the entity blocks in the visually rich document) to relation extraction…

2024

Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning

ACL 2024findings

Despite vision-language models’ (VLMs) remarkable capabilities as versatile visual assistants, two substantial challenges persist within the existing VLM frameworks: (1) lacking task diversity in pretraining and visual instruction tuning, and (2) annotation error and bias in GPT-4 synthesized instru…

Cited by 34SourcePDFScholar
2024

X-Eval: Generalizable Multi-aspect Text Evaluation via Augmented Instruction Tuning with Auxiliary Evaluation Aspects

NAACL 2024long

Natural Language Generation (NLG) typically involves evaluating the generated text in various aspects (e.g., consistency and naturalness) to obtain a comprehensive assessment. However, multi-aspect evaluation remains challenging as it may require the evaluator to generalize to any given evaluation a…

2024

X-Shot: A Unified System to Handle Frequent, Few-shot and Zero-shot Learning Simultaneously in Classification

ACL 2024findings

In recent years, few-shot and zero-shot learning, which learn to predict labels with limited annotated instances, have garnered significant attention. Traditional approaches often treat frequent-shot (freq-shot; labels with abundant instances), few-shot, and zero-shot learning as distinct challenges…

2023

APrompt: Attention Prompt Tuning for Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

With the continuous growth of large language models, the process of fine-tuning these models for new tasks has become increasingly parameter-intensive. Prompt tuning, a method that involves tuning a small set of soft prompts, has emerged as an effective and efficient approach for adapting large pre-…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Learning from a Friend: Improving Event Extraction via Self-Training with Feedback from Abstract Meaning Representation

ACL 2023findings

Data scarcity has been the main factor that hinders the progress of event extraction. To overcome this issue, we propose a Self-Training with Feedback (STF) framework that leverages the large-scale unlabeled data and acquires feedback for each new event prediction from the unlabeled data by comparin…

2023

MultiInstruct: Improving Multi-Modal Zero-Shot Learning via Instruction Tuning

ACL 2023long

Instruction tuning, a new learning paradigm that fine-tunes pre-trained language models on tasks specified through instructions, has shown promising zero-shot performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, it has yet to be explored for vision and multimodal tasks. In this work, w…

2023

Multimedia Generative Script Learning for Task Planning

ACL 2023findings

Goal-oriented generative script learning aims to generate subsequent steps to reach a particular goal, which is an essential task to assist robots or humans in performing stereotypical activities. An important aspect of this process is the ability to capture historical states visually, which provide…

2023

RoAST: Robustifying Language Models via Adversarial Perturbation with Selective Training

EMNLP 2023long findings

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (LMs) has become the de facto standard in many NLP tasks. Nevertheless, fine-tuned LMs are still prone to robustness issues, such as adversarial robustness and model calibration. Several perspectives of robustness for LMs have been studied independently, but l…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Teamwork Is Not Always Good: An Empirical Study of Classifier Drift in Class-incremental Information Extraction

ACL 2023findings

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to develop a learning system that can continually learn new classes from a data stream without forgetting previously learned classes. When learning classes incrementally, the classifier must be constantly updated to incorporate new classes, and the drift in deci…

2023

The Art of SOCRATIC QUESTIONING: Recursive Thinking with Large Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables large language models to solve complex reasoning problems by generating intermediate steps. However, confined by its inherent single-pass and sequential generation process, CoT heavily relies on the initial decisions, causing errors in early steps to accumula…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

Efficient Federated Learning on Knowledge Graphs via Privacy-preserving Relation Embedding Aggregation

EMNLP 2022finding

Federated learning (FL) can be essential in knowledge representation, reasoning, and data mining applications over multi-source knowledge graphs (KGs). A recent study FedE first proposes an FL framework that shares entity embeddings of KGs across all clients. However, entity embedding sharing from F…

2022

Extracting Temporal Event Relation with Syntax-guided Graph Transformer

NAACL 2022findings

Extracting temporal relations (e.g., before, after, and simultaneous) among events is crucial to natural language understanding. One of the key challenges of this problem is that when the events of interest are far away in text, the context in-between often becomes complicated, making it challenging…

2022

Incremental Prompting: Episodic Memory Prompt for Lifelong Event Detection

COLING 2022main

Lifelong event detection aims to incrementally update a model with new event types and data while retaining the capability on previously learned old types. One critical challenge is that the model would catastrophically forget old types when continually trained on new data. In this paper, we introdu…

2022

MOCHA: A Multi-Task Training Approach for Coherent Text Generation from Cognitive Perspective

EMNLP 2022main

Teaching neural models to generate narrative coherent texts is a critical problem. Recent pre-trained language models have achieved promising results, but there is still a gap between human written texts and machine-generated outputs. In this work, we propose a novel multi-task training strategy for…

2022

MuMuQA: Multimedia Multi-Hop News Question Answering via Cross-Media Knowledge Extraction and Grounding

AAAI 2022technical

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in building question answering (QA) models that reason across multiple modalities, such as text and images. However, QA using images is often limited to just picking the answer from a pre-defined set of options. In addition, images in the real world, e…

2022

PLANET: Dynamic Content Planning in Autoregressive Transformers for Long-form Text Generation

ACL 2022long

Despite recent progress of pre-trained language models on generating fluent text, existing methods still suffer from incoherence problems in long-form text generation tasks that require proper content control and planning to form a coherent high-level logical flow. In this work, we propose PLANET, a…

Cited by 42SourcePDFScholar
2022

Query and Extract: Refining Event Extraction as Type-oriented Binary Decoding

ACL 2022findings

Event extraction is typically modeled as a multi-class classification problem where event types and argument roles are treated as atomic symbols. These approaches are usually limited to a set of pre-defined types. We propose a novel event extraction framework that uses event types and argument roles…

Cited by 70SourcePDFScholar
2021

How Knowledge Graph and Attention Help? A Qualitative Analysis into Bag-level Relation Extraction

ACL 2021long

Knowledge Graph (KG) and attention mechanism have been demonstrated effective in introducing and selecting useful information for weakly supervised methods. However, only qualitative analysis and ablation study are provided as evidence. In this paper, we contribute a dataset and propose a paradigm t…

2021

The Future is not One-dimensional: Complex Event Schema Induction by Graph Modeling for Event Prediction

EMNLP 2021main

Event schemas encode knowledge of stereotypical structures of events and their connections. As events unfold, schemas are crucial to act as a scaffolding. Previous work on event schema induction focuses either on atomic events or linear temporal event sequences, ignoring the interplay between events…