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Minhao Cheng

36 accepted papers

2026

Adaptive Code Watermarking Through Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026poster

As LLMs increasingly generate production code, protecting intellectual property demands watermarking techniques that respect code's strict syntactic constraints. In this work, we introduce CodeTracer, an innovative adaptive code watermarking framework underpinned by a reinforcement learning training…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

WebSailor-V2: Bridging the Chasm to Proprietary Agents via Synthetic Data and Scalable Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

To significantly advance the capabilities of open-source web agents, we present WebSailor-V2, a complete post-training pipeline encompassing data construction, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our methodology features two key innovations: (1) On the data front, we devel…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CLIPErase: Efficient Unlearning of Visual-Textual Associations in CLIP

ACL 2025long

Machine unlearning (MU) has gained significant attention as a means to remove the influence of specific data from a trained model without requiring full retraining. While progress has been made in unimodal domains like text and image classification, unlearning in multimodal models remains relatively…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Improving Your Model Ranking on Chatbot Arena by Vote Rigging

ICML 2025poster

Chatbot Arena is an open platform for evaluating LLMs by pairwise battles, in which users vote for their preferred response from two randomly sampled anonymous models. While Chatbot Arena is widely regarded as a reliable LLM ranking leaderboard, we show that crowdsourced voting can be *rigged* to im…

2025

Is Your Multimodal Language Model Oversensitive to Safe Queries?

ICLR 2025poster

Humans are prone to cognitive distortions — biased thinking patterns that lead to exaggerated responses to specific stimuli, albeit in very different contexts. This paper demonstrates that advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit similar tendencies. While these models are designed t…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LaRA: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Long-Context LLMs – No Silver Bullet for LC or RAG Routing

ICML 2025poster

As Large Language Model (LLM) context windows expand, the necessity of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for integrating external knowledge is debated. Existing RAG vs. long-context (LC) LLM comparisons are often inconclusive due to benchmark limitations. We introduce LaRA, a novel benchmark with…

2025

SeedLoRA: A Fusion Approach to Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

ICML 2025poster

Despite Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)'s popularity for fine-tuning large models, it often exhibits a noticeable performance gap compared to full fine-tuning, particularly in complex tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation. Motivated by this discrepancy, we propose a novel fusion approa…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Sparse MeZO: Less Parameters for Better Performance in Zeroth-Order LLM Fine-Tuning

NeurIPS 2025poster

While fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for specific tasks often yields impressive results, it comes at the cost of memory inefficiency due to back-propagation in gradient-based training. Memory-efficient Zeroth-order (MeZO) optimizers, recently proposed to address this issue, only require fo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

The Crystal Ball Hypothesis in diffusion models: Anticipating object positions from initial noise

ICLR 2025poster

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in text-to-image generation tasks, yet the influence of initial noise remains largely unexplored. In this study, we identify specific regions within the initial noise image, termed trigger patches, that play a key role in inducing object generation i…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Boosting the Adversarial Robustness of Graph Neural Networks: An OOD Perspective

ICLR 2024poster

Current defenses against graph attacks often rely on certain properties to eliminate structural perturbations by identifying adversarial edges from normal edges. However, this dependence makes defenses vulnerable to adaptive (white-box) attacks from adversaries with the same knowledge. Adversarial t…

2024

DrAttack: Prompt Decomposition and Reconstruction Makes Powerful LLMs Jailbreakers

EMNLP 2024finding

Safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) are still vulnerable to some manual and automated jailbreak attacks, which adversarially trigger LLMs to output harmful content. However, existing jailbreaking methods usually view a harmful prompt as a whole but they are not effective at reducing LLMs’ at…

2024

GuardEmb: Dynamic Watermark for Safeguarding Large Language Model Embedding Service Against Model Stealing Attack

EMNLP 2024finding

Large language model (LLM) companies provide Embedding as a Service (EaaS) to assist the individual in efficiently dealing with downstream tasks such as text classification and recommendation. However, recent works reveal the risk of the model stealing attack, posing a financial threat to EaaS provi…

2024

One Prompt is not Enough: Automated Construction of a Mixture-of-Expert Prompts

ICML 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong generalization capabilities to novel tasks when prompted with language instructions and in-context demos. Since this ability sensitively depends on the quality of prompts, various methods have been explored to automate the instruction design. While these m…

2024

Uncovering, Explaining, and Mitigating the Superficial Safety of Backdoor Defense

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) as they allow attackers to manipulate model predictions with backdoor triggers. To address these security vulnerabilities, various backdoor purification methods have been proposed to purify compromised models. Typically, these…

2024

When and How do negative prompts take effect?

ECCV 2024poster

"The concept of negative prompts, emerging from conditional generation models like Stable Diffusion, allows users to specify what to exclude from the generated images.Despite the widespread use of negative prompts, their intrinsic mechanisms remain largely unexplored. This paper presents the first c…

2023

Boosting Accuracy and Robustness of Student Models via Adaptive Adversarial Distillation

CVPR 2023poster

Distilled student models in teacher-student architectures are widely considered for computational-effective deployment in real-time applications and edge devices. However, there is a higher risk of student models to encounter adversarial attacks at the edge. Popular enhancing schemes such as adversa…

2023

FedDM: Iterative Distribution Matching for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning

CVPR 2023poster

Federated learning (FL) has recently attracted increasing attention from academia and industry, with the ultimate goal of achieving collaborative training under privacy and communication constraints. Existing iterative model averaging based FL algorithms require a large number of communication round…

Cited by 122SourcePDFScholar
2023

Identification of the Adversary from a Single Adversarial Example

ICML 2023poster

Deep neural networks have been shown vulnerable to adversarial examples. Even though many defense methods have been proposed to enhance the robustness, it is still a long way toward providing an attack-free method to build a trustworthy machine learning system. In this paper, instead of enhancing th…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

PTP: Boosting Stability and Performance of Prompt Tuning with Perturbation-Based Regularizer

EMNLP 2023long main

Recent studies show that prompt tuning can better leverage the power of large language models than fine-tuning on downstream natural language understanding tasks. However, the existing prompt tuning methods have training instability issues, as the variance of scores under different random seeds is q…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Towards Stable Backdoor Purification through Feature Shift Tuning

NeurIPS 2023poster

It has been widely observed that deep neural networks (DNN) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks where attackers could manipulate the model behavior maliciously by tampering with a small set of training samples. Although a line of defense methods is proposed to mitigate this threat, they either requir…

2022

CAT: Customized Adversarial Training for Improved Robustness

IJCAI 2022poster

Adversarial training has become one of the most effective methods for improving robustness of neural networks. However, it often suffers from poor generalization on both clean and perturbed data. Current robust training method always use a uniformed perturbation strength for every samples to generat…

Cited by 129SourcePDFScholar
2022

Concurrent Adversarial Learning for Large-Batch Training

ICLR 2022poster

Large-batch training has become a commonly used technique when training neural networks with a large number of GPU/TPU processors. As batch size increases, stochastic optimizers tend to converge to sharp local minima, leading to degraded test performance. Current methods usually use extensive data a…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Efficient Non-Parametric Optimizer Search for Diverse Tasks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Efficient and automated design of optimizers plays a crucial role in full-stack AutoML systems. However, prior methods in optimizer search are often limited by their scalability, generability, or sample efficiency. With the goal of democratizing research and application of optimizer search, we prese…

2022

Random Sharpness-Aware Minimization

NeurIPS 2022accept

Currently, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is proposed to seek the parameters that lie in a flat region to improve the generalization when training neural networks. In particular, a minimax optimization objective is defined to find the maximum loss value centered on the weight, out of the purpose…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2021

DrNAS: Dirichlet Neural Architecture Search

ICLR 2021poster

This paper proposes a novel differentiable architecture search method by formulating it into a distribution learning problem. We treat the continuously relaxed architecture mixing weight as random variables, modeled by Dirichlet distribution. With recently developed pathwise derivatives, the Dirichl…

2021

RANK-NOSH: Efficient Predictor-Based Architecture Search via Non-Uniform Successive Halving

ICCV 2021poster

Predictor-based algorithms have achieved remarkable performance in the Neural Architecture Search (NAS) tasks. However, these methods suffer from high computation costs, as training the performance predictor usually requires training and evaluating hundreds of architectures from scratch. Previous wo…

Cited by 20PDFScholar
2021

Rethinking Architecture Selection in Differentiable NAS

ICLR 2021oral

Differentiable Neural Architecture Search is one of the most popular Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods for its search efficiency and simplicity, accomplished by jointly optimizing the model weight and architecture parameters in a weight-sharing supernet via gradient-based algorithms. At the e…

2021

Self-Progressing Robust Training

AAAI 2021technical

Enhancing model robustness under new and even adversarial environments is a crucial milestone toward building trustworthy machine learning systems. Current robust training methods such as adversarial training explicitly uses an ``attack'' (e.g., l_infty-norm bounded perturbation) to generate adversa…

2020

Sign-OPT: A Query-Efficient Hard-label Adversarial Attack

ICLR 2020poster

We study the most practical problem setup for evaluating adversarial robustness of a machine learning system with limited access: the hard-label black-box attack setting for generating adversarial examples, where limited model queries are allowed and only the decision is provided to a queried data…

Cited by 305SourcecodeScholar
2019

Query-Efficient Hard-label Black-box Attack: An Optimization-based Approach

ICLR 2019poster

We study the problem of attacking machine learning models in the hard-label black-box setting, where no model information is revealed except that the attacker can make queries to probe the corresponding hard-label decisions. This is a very challenging problem since the direct extension of state-of-t…

2018

Learning from Group Comparisons: Exploiting Higher Order Interactions

NeurIPS 2018poster

We study the problem of learning from group comparisons, with applications in predicting outcomes of sports and online games. Most of the previous works in this area focus on learning individual effects---they assume each player has an underlying score, and the ''ability'' of the team is modeled by…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar