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Moontae Lee

55 accepted papers

2026

A Debiased Reconstruction-based Framework for Training-Free Detection of AI-Generated Images

CVPR 2026

As recent AI models have successfully generated high-resolution photorealistic images, it has also been socially important to detect whether an image is generated by AI. Since training data for the detection task is often not available due to the diversity of generative models, training-free detecti

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

A Regret Minimization Framework on Preference Learning in Large Language Models

ICML 2026spotlight

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has enabled progress on reasoning-intensive tasks by relying on task-specific verifiers that provide automated correctness signals. However, many realistic language tasks are difficult to equip with reliable verifiers, motivating a growing relian…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

DEER: A Benchmark for Evaluating Deep Research Agents on Expert Report Generation

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in large language models have enabled deep research systems that generate expert-level reports through multi-step reasoning and evidence-based synthesis. However, evaluating such reports remains challenging: report quality is multifaceted, making it difficult to determine what to ass…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Early Decisions Matter: Proximity Bias and Initial Trajectory Shaping in Non-Autoregressive Diffusion Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion-based language models(dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive language models, offering the potential for parallel token generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, harnessing this flexibility for fully non-autoregressive decoding remains an open questi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Hybrid Deep Searcher: Scalable Parallel and Sequential Search Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Large reasoning models (LRMs) combined with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have enabled deep research agents capable of multi-step reasoning with external knowledge retrieval. However, previous methods that extend reasoning with single-query search steps struggle to scale to complex tasks dema…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Process Reward Models That Think

ICML 2026poster

Step-by-step verifiers—also known as process reward models (PRMs)—are a key ingredient for test-time scaling, but training them requires expensive step-level supervision. This work aims to build data-efficient PRMs as verbalized step-wise reward models that verify every step in the solution by gener…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SPRIG: Improving Large Language Model Performance by System Prompt Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in many scenarios, but their performance depends, in part, on the choice of prompt. Past research has focused on optimizing prompts specific to a task. However, much less attention has been given to optimizing the general instructions i…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SafeDPO: A Simple Approach to Direct Preference Optimization with Enhanced Safety

ICLR 2026oral

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, balancing both helpfulness and safety has become a central challenge. A natural approach is to incorporate safety constraints into Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), where recent studies have shown…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The CoT Encyclopedia: Analyzing, Predicting, and Controlling how a Reasoning Model will Think

ICLR 2026poster

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) is an essential ingredient in effective usage of modern large language models, but our understanding of the reasoning strategies underlying these capabilities remains limited. While some prior works have attempted to categorize CoTs using predefined strategy types, such a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

3D Denoisers Are Good 2D Teachers: Molecular Pretraining via Denoising and Cross-Modal Distillation

AAAI 2025technical

Pretraining molecular representations from large unlabeled data is essential for molecular property prediction due to the high cost of obtaining ground-truth labels. While there exist various 2D graph-based molecular pretraining approaches, these methods struggle to show statistically significant ga…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Counterfactual Voting Adjustment for Quality Assessment and Fairer Voting in Online Platforms with Helpfulness Evaluation

ICML 2025poster

Efficient access to high-quality information is vital for online platforms. To promote more useful information, users not only create new content but also evaluate existing content, often through helpfulness voting. Although aggregated votes help service providers rank their user content, these vote…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Learning to Explore and Select for Coverage-Conditioned Retrieval-Augmented Generation

NAACL 2025findings

Interactions with large language models (LLMs) often yield long and detailed responses, leveraging both parametric knowledge and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). While these responses can provide rich insights, they often include redundant or less engaging content not aligned with user interest…

2025

MLRC-Bench: Can Language Agents Solve Machine Learning Research Challenges?

NeurIPS 2025poster

We introduce **MLRC-Bench**, a benchmark designed to quantify how effectively language agents can tackle challenging **M**achine **L**earning (ML) **R**esearch **C**ompetitions, with a focus on open research problems that demand novel methodologies. Unlike prior work, e.g., AI Scientist, which evalu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Mind the Blind Spots: A Focus-Level Evaluation Framework for LLM Reviews

EMNLP 2025

Peer review underpins scientific progress, but it is increasingly strained by reviewer shortages and growing workloads. Large Language Models (LLMs) can automatically draft reviews now, but determining whether LLM-generated reviews are trustworthy requires systematic evaluation. Researchers have eva

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

PANORAMA: A Dataset and Benchmarks Capturing Decision Trails and Rationales in Patent Examination

NeurIPS 2025poster

Patent examination remains an ongoing challenge in the NLP literature even after the advent of large language models (LLMs), as it requires an extensive yet nuanced human judgment on whether a submitted $\textit{claim}$ meets the statutory standards of $\textit{novelty}$ and $\textit{non-obviousness…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Revisiting LLM Value Probing Strategies: Are They Robust and Expressive?

EMNLP 2025

The value orientation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been extensively studied, as it can shape user experiences across demographic groups.However, two key challenges remain: (1) the lack of systematic comparison across value probing strategies, despite the Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) setting

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Shifting from Ranking to Set Selection for Retrieval Augmented Generation

ACL 2025long

Retrieval in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) must ensure that retrieved passages are not only individually relevant but also collectively form a comprehensive set.Existing approaches primarily rerank top-k passages based on their individual relevance, often failing to meet the information needs…

2025

The BiGGen Bench: A Principled Benchmark for Fine-grained Evaluation of Language Models with Language Models

NAACL 2025long

As language models (LMs) become capable of handling a wide range of tasks, their evaluation is becoming as challenging as their development. Most generation benchmarks currently assess LMs using abstract evaluation criteria-like helpfulness and harmlessness-which often lack the flexibility and granu…

2025

Towards Robust and Parameter-Efficient Knowledge Unlearning for LLMs

ICLR 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and memorization capabilities via pretraining on massive textual corpora. However, this poses risk of privacy and copyright violations, highlighting the need for efficient machine unlearning methods that remove sensitive data without re…

2024

Code Models are Zero-shot Precondition Reasoners

NAACL 2024long

One of the fundamental skills required for an agent acting in an environment to complete tasks is the ability to understand what actions are plausible at any given point. This work explores a novel use of code representations to reason about action preconditions for sequential decision making tasks.…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Degeneration-free Policy Optimization: RL Fine-Tuning for Language Models without Degeneration

ICML 2024poster

As the pre-training objectives (e.g., next token prediction) of language models (LMs) are inherently not aligned with task scores, optimizing LMs to achieve higher downstream task scores is essential. One of the promising approaches is to fine-tune LMs through reinforcement learning (RL). However, c…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning to Unlearn: Instance-Wise Unlearning for Pre-trained Classifiers

AAAI 2024technical

Since the recent advent of regulations for data protection (e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation), there has been increasing demand in deleting information learned from sensitive data in pre-trained models without retraining from scratch. The inherent vulnerability of neural networks towards…

2024

Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Proprietary LMs such as GPT-4 are often employed to assess the quality of responses from various LMs. However, concerns including transparency, controllability, and affordability strongly motivate the development of open-source LMs specialized in evaluations. On the other hand, existing open evaluat…

2024

Prospector: Improving LLM Agents with Self-Asking and Trajectory Ranking

EMNLP 2024finding

Large language models (LLMs) have shown the ability to solve complex decision-making tasks beyond natural language processing tasks. LLM agents based on few-shot in-context learning (ICL) achieve surprisingly high performance without training. Despite their simplicity and generalizability, ICL-based…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Semantic Skill Grounding for Embodied Instruction-Following in Cross-Domain Environments

ACL 2024findings

In embodied instruction-following (EIF), the integration of pretrained language models (LMs) as task planners emerges as a significant branch, where tasks are planned at the skill level by prompting LMs with pretrained skills and user instructions. However, grounding these pretrained skills in diffe…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Small Language Models Need Strong Verifiers to Self-Correct Reasoning

ACL 2024findings

Self-correction has emerged as a promising solution to boost the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), where LLMs refine their solutions using self-generated critiques that pinpoint the errors. This work explores whether small (≤ 13B) language models (LMs) have the ability of self-c…

2024

Understanding the Capabilities and Limitations of Large Language Models for Cultural Commonsense

NAACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial commonsense understanding through numerous benchmark evaluations. However, their understanding of cultural commonsense remains largely unexamined. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the capabilities and limitations of s…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2024

When ”A Helpful Assistant” Is Not Really Helpful: Personas in System Prompts Do Not Improve Performances of Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024finding

Prompting serves as the major way humans interact with Large Language Models (LLM). Commercial AI systems commonly define the role of the LLM in system prompts. For example, ChatGPT uses ”You are a helpful assistant” as part of its default system prompt. Despite current practices of adding personas…

2024

YTCommentQA: Video Question Answerability in Instructional Videos

AAAI 2024technical

Instructional videos provide detailed how-to guides for various tasks, with viewers often posing questions regarding the content. Addressing these questions is vital for comprehending the content, yet receiving immediate answers is difficult. While numerous computational models have been developed f…

2024

You don’t need a personality test to know these models are unreliable: Assessing the Reliability of Large Language Models on Psychometric Instruments

NAACL 2024long

The versatility of Large Language Models (LLMs) on natural language understanding tasks has made them popular for research in social sciences. To properly understand the properties and innate personas of LLMs, researchers have performed studies that involve using prompts in the form of questions tha…

2023

Exploring the Benefits of Training Expert Language Models over Instruction Tuning

ICML 2023poster

Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown capabilities to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of finetuning datasets and instructions is the key component in making strong…

2023

Few-shot Reranking for Multi-hop QA via Language Model Prompting

ACL 2023long

We study few-shot reranking for multi-hop QA (MQA) with open-domain questions. To alleviate the need for a large number of labeled question-document pairs for retriever training, we propose PromptRank, which relies on language model prompting for multi-hop path reranking. PromptRank first constructs…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2023

From Heuristic to Analytic: Cognitively Motivated Strategies for Coherent Physical Commonsense Reasoning

EMNLP 2023long main

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown impressive performance in various language tasks. However, they are prone to spurious correlations, and often generate illusory information. In real-world applications, PLMs should justify decisions with formalized, coherent reasoning chains, but this ch…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

GRACE: Discriminator-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

EMNLP 2023long findings

In the context of multi-step reasoning, e.g., with chain-of-thought, language models (LMs) can easily assign a high likelihood to incorrect steps. As a result, decoding strategies that optimize for solution likelihood often yield incorrect solutions. To address this issue, we propose Guiding chain-o…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Grouping Matrix Based Graph Pooling with Adaptive Number of Clusters

AAAI 2023technical

Graph pooling is a crucial operation for encoding hierarchical structures within graphs. Most existing graph pooling approaches formulate the problem as a node clustering task which effectively captures the graph topology. Conventional methods ask users to specify an appropriate number of clusters a…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

Knowledge Unlearning for Mitigating Privacy Risks in Language Models

ACL 2023long

Pretrained Language Models (LMs) memorize a vast amount of knowledge during initial pretraining, including information that may violate the privacy of personal lives and identities. Previous work addressing privacy issues for LMs has mostly focused on data preprocessing and differential privacy meth…

2023

Merging Generated and Retrieved Knowledge for Open-Domain QA

EMNLP 2023long main

Open-domain question answering (QA) systems are often built with retrieval modules. However, retrieving passages from a given source is known to suffer from insufficient knowledge coverage. Alternatively, prompting large language models (LLMs) to generate contextual passages based on their parametri…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Neural Stochastic Differential Games for Time-series Analysis

ICML 2023poster

Modeling spatiotemporal dynamics with neural differential equations has become a major line of research that opens new ways to handle various real-world scenarios (e.g., missing observations, irregular times, etc.). Despite such progress, most existing methods still face challenges in providing a ge…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Projection Regret: Reducing Background Bias for Novelty Detection via Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Novelty detection is a fundamental task of machine learning which aims to detect abnormal (*i.e.* out-of-distribution (OOD)) samples. Since diffusion models have recently emerged as the de facto standard generative framework with surprising generation results, novelty detection via diffusion models…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

QASA: Advanced Question Answering on Scientific Articles

ICML 2023poster

Reasoning is the crux of intellectual thinking. While question answering (QA) tasks are prolific with various computational models and benchmark datasets, they mostly tackle factoid or shallow QA without asking deeper understanding. Dual process theory asserts that human reasoning consists of associ…

2023

Rebalancing Batch Normalization for Exemplar-Based Class-Incremental Learning

CVPR 2023poster

Batch Normalization (BN) and its variants has been extensively studied for neural nets in various computer vision tasks, but relatively little work has been dedicated to studying the effect of BN in continual learning. To that end, we develop a new update patch for BN, particularly tailored for the…

2023

SafeDICE: Offline Safe Imitation Learning with Non-Preferred Demonstrations

NeurIPS 2023poster

We consider offline safe imitation learning (IL), where the agent aims to learn the safe policy that mimics preferred behavior while avoiding non-preferred behavior from non-preferred demonstrations and unlabeled demonstrations. This problem setting corresponds to various real-world scenarios, where…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Unsupervised Task Graph Generation from Instructional Video Transcripts

ACL 2023findings

This work explores the problem of generating task graphs of real-world activities. Different from prior formulations, we consider a setting where text transcripts of instructional videos performing a real-world activity (e.g., making coffee) are provided and the goal is to identify the key steps rel…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

When to Read Documents or QA History: On Unified and Selective Open-domain QA

ACL 2023findings

This paper studies the problem of open-domain question answering, with the aim of answering a diverse range of questions leveraging knowledge resources. Two types of sources, QA-pair and document corpora, have been actively leveraged with the following complementary strength. The former is highly pr…

2022

CEDe: A collection of expert-curated datasets with atom-level entity annotations for Optical Chemical Structure Recognition

NeurIPS 2022accept

Optical Chemical Structure Recognition (OCSR) deals with the translation from chemical images to molecular structures, this being the main way chemical compounds are depicted in scientific documents. Traditionally, rule-based methods have followed a framework based on the detection of chemical entit…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

Path-Aware and Structure-Preserving Generation of Synthetically Accessible Molecules

ICML 2022spotlight

Computational chemistry aims to autonomously design specific molecules with target functionality. Generative frameworks provide useful tools to learn continuous representations of molecules in a latent space. While modelers could optimize chemical properties, many generated molecules are not synthes…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Pure Transformers are Powerful Graph Learners

NeurIPS 2022accept

We show that standard Transformers without graph-specific modifications can lead to promising results in graph learning both in theory and practice. Given a graph, we simply treat all nodes and edges as independent tokens, augment them with token embeddings, and feed them to a Transformer. With an a…

2022

Transferring Pre-trained Multimodal Representations with Cross-modal Similarity Matching

NeurIPS 2022accept

Despite surprising performance on zero-shot transfer, pre-training a large-scale multimodal model is often prohibitive as it requires a huge amount of data and computing resources. In this paper, we propose a method (BeamCLIP) that can effectively transfer the representations of a large pre-trained…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

Transformers meet Stochastic Block Models: Attention with Data-Adaptive Sparsity and Cost

NeurIPS 2022accept

To overcome the quadratic cost of self-attention, recent works have proposed various sparse attention modules, most of which fall under one of two groups: 1) sparse attention under a hand-crafted patterns and 2) full attention followed by a sparse variant of softmax such as $\alpha$-entmax. Unfortun…

2021

On-the-fly Rectification for Robust Large-Vocabulary Topic Inference

ICML 2021spotlight

Across many data domains, co-occurrence statistics about the joint appearance of objects are powerfully informative. By transforming unsupervised learning problems into decompositions of co-occurrence statistics, spectral algorithms provide transparent and efficient algorithms for posterior inferenc…