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Lina Yao

48 accepted papers

2026

Does a Hybrid Space-Aware Randomized Defense Improve Empirical and Certified Adversarial Robustness?

ICML 2026poster

We introduce Hybrid Space-aware Stochastic Convolution Attention Noise (HySCAN), a hybrid randomized defense that helps close the long-standing gap between provable robustness under ℓ2 certificates and empirical robustness against strong ℓ∞ attacks, while maintaining strong generalization across div…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Little By Little: Continual Learning via Incremental Mixture of Rank-1 Associative Memory Experts

ICML 2026poster

Continual learning (CL) with large pre-trained models is challenged by task interference and catastrophic forgetting. Existing LoRA-based Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods mitigate forgetting by adding new task-specific adapters and freezing old ones, but often suffer from redundancy, interference, a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ParaMETA: Towards Learning Disentangled Paralinguistic Speaking Styles Representations from Speech

AAAI 2026technical

Learning representative embeddings for different types of speaking styles, such as emotion, age, and gender, is critical for both recognition tasks (e.g., cognitive computing and human-computer interaction) and generative tasks (e.g., style-controllable speech generation). In this work, we introduce

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Reward-Preserving Counterfactual State Editing for Offline Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026poster

Transformer sequence models such as Decision Transformer can learn strong offline policies from logged trajectories, but they can suffer from causal confusion: reliance on spurious correlations that predict reward in the data but do not reflect the true causal mechanisms of the environment. We propo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Unifying Stable Optimization and Reference Regularization in RLHF

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has advanced alignment capabilities significantly but remains hindered by two core challenges: reward hacking and stable optimization. Current solutions independently address these issues through separate regularization strategies, specifically a KL-…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

WS-GRPO: Weakly-Supervised Group-Relative Policy Optimization for Rollout-Efficient Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is effective for training language models on complex reasoning. However, since the objective is defined relative to a group of sampled trajectories, extended deliberation can create more chances to realize relative gains, leading to inefficient reasoning and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

What Makes a Good Representation for Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction?

ICML 2026poster

Single-cell perturbation modeling is fundamental for understanding and predicting cellular responses to genetic perturbations. However, existing approaches, from causal representation learning to foundation models, often struggle with an overlooked challenge: gene expression is dominated by perturba…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Adapting Text-to-Image Generation with Feature Difference Instruction for Generic Image Restoration

CVPR 2025poster

Diffusion-based Text-to-Image (T2I) models have demonstrated significant potential in image restoration. However, existing models continue to grapple with challenges such as complex training and prompt design. We introduce a new perspective for improving image restoration by injecting knowledge from…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

CollageNoter: Real-Time and Adaptive Collage Layout Design for Screenshot-Based E-Note-Taking

AAAI 2025technical

To enhance the processing of complex multi-modal documents (e.g. e-books, long web pages, etc.), it is an efficient way for users to take digital screenshots of key parts and reorganize them into a new collage E-Note. Existing methods for assisting collage layout design primarily employ a semantic…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Diffusion Policies for Risk-Averse Behavior Modeling in Offline Reinforcement Learning

IROS 2025

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents distinct challenges as it relies solely on observational data. A central concern in this context is ensuring the safety of the learned policy by quantifying uncertainties associated with various actions and environmental stochasticity. Traditional approac

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2025

Embedding-Informed Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models

COLING 2025main

Retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) have been remarkably competent in various NLP tasks. However, it was observed by previous works that retrieval is not always helpful, especially when the LLM is already knowledgable on the query to answer. Motivated by this, Adaptive Retrieval-Augment…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Federated In-Context Learning: Iterative Refinement for Improved Answer Quality

ICML 2025poster

For question-answering (QA) tasks, in-context learning (ICL) enables language models (LMs) to generate responses without modifying their parameters by leveraging examples provided in the input. However, the effectiveness of ICL heavily depends on the availability of high-quality examples, which are…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Jailbreaking the Non-Transferable Barrier via Test-Time Data Disguising

CVPR 2025poster

Non-transferable learning (NTL) has been proposed to protect model intellectual property (IP) by creating a "non-transferable barrier" to restrict generalization from authorized to unauthorized domains. Recently, well-designed attack, which restores the unauthorized-domain performance by fine-tuning…

2025

Listwise Preference Diffusion Optimization for User Behavior Trajectories Prediction

NeurIPS 2025poster

Forecasting multi-step user behavior trajectories requires reasoning over structured preferences across future actions, a challenge overlooked by traditional sequential recommendation. This problem is critical for applications such as personalized commerce and adaptive content delivery, where antici…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Mining your own secrets: Diffusion Classifier Scores for Continual Personalization of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

ICLR 2025poster

Personalized text-to-image diffusion models have grown popular for their ability to efficiently acquire a new concept from user-defined text descriptions and a few images. However, in the real world, a user may wish to personalize a model on multiple concepts but one at a time, with no access to the…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Mitigating Visual Knowledge Forgetting in MLLM Instruction-tuning via Modality-decoupled Gradient Descent

EMNLP 2025

Recent MLLMs have demonstrated strong visual understanding and reasoning after large-scale multimodal pre-training. However, instruction-tuning is typically text-driven with limited visual supervision, leading to significant visual forgetting and degradation of pre-trained visual knowledge. Existing

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2025

OCEAN: Offline Chain-of-thought Evaluation and Alignment in Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

Offline evaluation of LLMs is crucial in understanding their capacities, though current methods remain underexplored in existing research. In this work, we focus on the offline evaluation of the chain-of-thought capabilities and show how to optimize LLMs based on the proposed evaluation method. To e…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SAND: Boosting LLM Agents with Self-Taught Action Deliberation

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are commonly tuned with supervised finetuning on ReAct-style expert trajectories or preference optimization over pairwise rollouts. Most of these methods focus on imitating specific expert behaviors or promoting chosen reasoning thoughts and actions over rejected on

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Self-Expansion of Pre-trained Models with Mixture of Adapters for Continual Learning

CVPR 2025poster

Continual learning (CL) aims to continually accumulate knowledge from a non-stationary data stream without catastrophic forgetting of learned knowledge, requiring a balance between stability and adaptability. Relying on the generalizable representation in pre-trained models (PTMs), PTM-based CL meth…

2025

Shot2Story: A New Benchmark for Comprehensive Understanding of Multi-shot Videos

ICLR 2025poster

A short clip of video may contain progression of multiple events and an interesting story line. A human need to capture both the event in every shot and associate them together to understand the story behind it. In this work, we present a new multi-shot video understanding benchmark \dataset with de…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2025

Weakly-supervised VLM-guided Partial Contrastive Learning for Visual Language Navigation

IROS 2025

Visual Language Navigation (VLN) is a fundamental task within the field of Embodied AI, focusing on the ability of agents to navigate complex environments based on natural language instructions. Despite the progress made by existing methods, these methods often present some common challenges. First,

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2024

CLAP4CLIP: Continual Learning with Probabilistic Finetuning for Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Continual learning (CL) aims to help deep neural networks to learn new knowledge while retaining what has been learned. Owing to their powerful generalizability, pre-trained vision-language models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) have lately gained traction as practical CL ca…

2024

Context-based and Diversity-driven Specificity in Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

CVPR 2024poster

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen attribute-object pairs based on a limited set of observed examples. Current CZSL methodologies despite their advancements tend to neglect the distinct specificity levels present in attributes. For instance given images of sliced strawb…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2024

Distribution-Conditioned Adversarial Variational Autoencoder for Valid Instrumental Variable Generation

AAAI 2024technical

Instrumental variables (IVs), widely applied in economics and healthcare, enable consistent counterfactual prediction in the presence of hidden confounding factors, effectively addressing endogeneity issues. The prevailing IV-based counterfactual prediction methods typically rely on the availability…

2024

Exploring Soft Prompt Initialization Strategy for Few-Shot Continual Text Classification

ICASSP 2024accepted

Few-shot continual learning (FSCL) is a challenging setting as it requires models to learn new knowledge with a few examples over time, and fast adapt to new tasks without forgetting previous knowledge. Prompt-tuning, as an efficient learning approach for language models, has shown competitive perfo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Learning with Mixture of Prototypes for Out-of-Distribution Detection

ICLR 2024poster

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to detect testing samples far away from the in-distribution (ID) training data, which is crucial for the safe deployment of machine learning models in the real world. Distance-based OOD detection methods have emerged with enhanced deep representation learning…

2024

Masked Distillation Advances Self-Supervised Transformer Architecture Search

ICLR 2024poster

Transformer architecture search (TAS) has achieved remarkable progress in automating the neural architecture design process of vision transformers. Recent TAS advancements have discovered outstanding transformer architectures while saving tremendous labor from human experts. However, it is still cum…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Personalized Federated Learning for Text Classification with Gradient-Free Prompt Tuning

NAACL 2024findings

In this paper, we study personalized federated learning for text classification with Pretrained Language Models (PLMs). We identify two challenges in efficiently leveraging PLMs for personalized federated learning: 1) Communication. PLMs are usually large in size, e.g., with hundreds of millions of…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Speaking in Wavelet Domain: A Simple and Efficient Approach to Speed up Speech Diffusion Model

EMNLP 2024main

Recently, Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have attained leading performances across a diverse range of generative tasks. However, in the field of speech synthesis, although DDPMs exhibit impressive performance, their prolonged training duration and substantial inference costs hinder…

2024

Unraveling the Impact of Heterophilic Structures on Graph Positive-Unlabeled Learning

ICML 2024poster

While Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning is vital in many real-world scenarios, its application to graph data still remains under-explored. We unveil that a critical challenge for PU learning on graph lies on the edge heterophily, which directly violates the $\textit{irreducibility assumption}$ for $\…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

HTML: Hybrid Temporal-scale Multimodal Learning Framework for Referring Video Object Segmentation

ICCV 2023poster

Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) is to segment the object instance from a given video, according to the textual description of this object. However, in the open world, the object descriptions are often diversified in contents and flexible in lengths. This leads to the key difficulty in RVO…

Cited by 30PDFScholar
2023

Mask Propagation for Efficient Video Semantic Segmentation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Video Semantic Segmentation (VSS) involves assigning a semantic label to each pixel in a video sequence. Prior work in this field has demonstrated promising results by extending image semantic segmentation models to exploit temporal relationships across video frames; however, these approaches often…

2023

NPCL: Neural Processes for Uncertainty-Aware Continual Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Continual learning (CL) aims to train deep neural networks efficiently on streaming data while limiting the forgetting caused by new tasks. However, learning transferable knowledge with less interference between tasks is difficult, and real-world deployment of CL models is limited by their inabilit…

2023

PateGail: A Privacy-Preserving Mobility Trajectory Generator with Imitation Learning

AAAI 2023technical

Generating human mobility trajectories is of great importance to solve the lack of large-scale trajectory data in numerous applications, which is caused by privacy concerns. However, existing mobility trajectory generation methods still require real-world human trajectories centrally collected as th…

2022

Attentional Gated Res2net for Multivariate Time Series Classification

ICASSP 2022accepted

Multivariate time series classification is a critical problem in data mining with broad applications. We design a novel convolutional neural network architecture, Attentional Gated Res2Net, for robust multivariate time series classification. AGRes2Net uses hierarchical residual-like connections to a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Dual-AI: Dual-Path Actor Interaction Learning for Group Activity Recognition

CVPR 2022oral

Learning spatial-temporal relation among multiple actors is crucial for group activity recognition. Different group activities often show the diversified interactions between actors in the video. Hence, it is often difficult to model complex group activities from a single view of spatial-temporal ac…

Cited by 79PDFScholar
2021

Task Aligned Generative Meta-learning for Zero-shot Learning

AAAI 2021technical

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) refers to the problem of learning to classify instances from novel classes (unseen) that are absent in the training set (seen). Most ZSL methods infer the correlation between visual features and attributes to train the classifier for unseen classes. They may have a strong bi…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2020

Adaptive Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network for Traffic Forecasting

NeurIPS 2020poster

Modeling complex spatial and temporal correlations in the correlated time series data is indispensable for understanding the traffic dynamics and predicting the future status of an evolving traffic system. Recent works focus on designing complicated graph neural network architectures to capture shar…

2020

Zero-Shot Object Detection via Learning an Embedding from Semantic Space to Visual Space

IJCAI 2020poster

Zero-shot object detection (ZSD) has received considerable attention from the community of computer vision in recent years. It aims to simultaneously locate and categorize previously unseen objects during inference. One crucial problem of ZSD is how to accurately predict the label of each object pro…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar