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Muhan Zhang

55 accepted papers

2026

Coevolutionary Continuous Discrete Diffusion: Make Your Diffusion Language Model a Latent Reasoner

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion language models, especially masked discrete diffusion models, have achieved great success recently. While there are some theoretical and primary empirical results showing the advantages of latent reasoning with looped transformers or continuous CoT, continuous diffusion models typically un…

Cited by 21SourceScholar
2026

LIFT: A Novel Framework for Enhancing Long-Context Understanding of LLMs via Long Input Fine-Tuning

ICML 2026poster

Long context understanding remains challenging for large language models due to their limited context windows. This paper introduces Long Input Fine-Tuning (LIFT), a novel framework for long-context modeling that can enhance the long-context performance of arbitrary short-context LLMs by dynamically…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Relational In-Context Learning via Synthetic Pre-training with Structural Prior

ICML 2026poster

Relational Databases (RDBs) are the backbone of modern business, yet they have missed the Foundation Model revolution. Unlike text or images, high-quality RDB data is private and scarce, rendering the standard approach of ``pre-training on the internet'' infeasible. Consequently, existing solutions …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SHINE: A Scalable In-Context Hypernetwork for Mapping Context to LoRA in a Single Pass

ICML 2026poster

We propose SHINE (Scalable Hyper In-context NEtwork), a scalable hypernetwork that can map diverse meaningful contexts into high-quality LoRA adapters for large language models (LLM). By reusing the frozen LLM's own parameters in an in-context hypernetwork design and introducing architectural innova…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Beyond Single-Task: Robust Multi-Task Length Generalization for LLMs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Length generalization—the ability to solve problems longer than those seen during training—remains a critical challenge for large language models (LLMs). Previous work modifies positional encodings (PEs) and data formats to improve length generalization on specific symbolic tasks such as addition an…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

GOFA: A Generative One-For-All Model for Joint Graph Language Modeling

ICLR 2025poster

Foundation models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs) or Large Vision Models (LVMs), have emerged as one of the most powerful tools in the respective fields. However, unlike text and image data, graph data do not have a definitive structure, posing great challenges to developing a Graph Foundation…

2025

Geometric Representation Condition Improves Equivariant Molecule Generation

ICML 2025spotlight

Recent advances in molecular generative models have demonstrated great promise for accelerating scientific discovery, particularly in drug design. However, these models often struggle to generate high-quality molecules, especially in conditional scenarios where specific molecular properties must be…

2025

Griffin: Towards a Graph-Centric Relational Database Foundation Model

ICML 2025poster

We introduce Griffin, the first foundation model attemptation designed specifically for Relational Databases (RDBs). Unlike previous smaller models focused on single RDB tasks, Griffin unifies the data encoder and task decoder to handle diverse tasks. Additionally, we enhance the architecture by inc…

2025

HD-PiSSA: High-Rank Distributed Orthogonal Adaptation

EMNLP 2025

Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods for large language models (LLMs), such as LoRA and PiSSA, constrain model updates to low-rank subspaces, limiting their expressiveness and leading to suboptimal performance on complex tasks. To address this, we introduce **H**igh-rank **D**istr

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LoRASuite: Efficient LoRA Adaptation Across Large Language Model Upgrades

NeurIPS 2025poster

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently updated, LoRA weights trained on earlier versions quickly become obsolete. The conventional practice of retraining LoRA weights from scratch on the latest model is costly, time-consuming, and environmentally detrimental, particularly as the diversity of…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

LooGLE v2: Are LLMs Ready for Real World Long Dependency Challenges?

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) are equipped with increasingly extended context windows recently, yet their long context understanding capabilities over long dependency tasks remain fundamentally limited and underexplored. This gap is especially significant in many real-world long-context applications…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Number Cookbook: Number Understanding of Language Models and How to Improve It

ICLR 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) can solve an increasing number of complex reasoning tasks while making surprising mistakes in basic numerical understanding and processing (such as $9.11 > 9.9$). The latter ability is essential for tackling complex arithmetic and mathematical problems and serves as a fo…

2025

OCN: Effectively Utilizing Higher-Order Common Neighbors for Better Link Prediction

NeurIPS 2025poster

Common Neighbors (CNs) and their higher-order variants are important pairwise features widely used in state-of-the-art link prediction methods. However, existing methods often struggle with the repetition across different orders of CNs and fail to fully leverage their potential. We identify that the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

On the Completeness of Invariant Geometric Deep Learning Models

ICLR 2025poster

Invariant models, one important class of geometric deep learning models, are capable of generating meaningful geometric representations by leveraging informative geometric features in point clouds. These models are characterized by their simplicity, good experimental results and computational effici…

2025

PHYBench: Holistic Evaluation of Physical Perception and Reasoning in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Current benchmarks for evaluating the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant limitations: task oversimplification, data contamination, and flawed evaluation items. These deficiencies necessitate more rigorous assessment methods. To address these limitations, we intro…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

TransMLA: Migrating GQA Models to MLA with Full DeepSeek Compatibility and Speedup

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Modern large-language models often face communication bottlenecks on current hardware rather than computational limitations. *Multi-head latent attention (MLA)* addresses this by compressing the key-value cache using low-rank matrices, while the Absorb operation prevents the KV cache from reverting…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

4DBInfer: A 4D Benchmarking Toolbox for Graph-Centric Predictive Modeling on RDBs

NeurIPS 2024poster

Given a relational database (RDB), how can we predict missing column values in some target table of interest? Although RDBs store vast amounts of rich, informative data spread across interconnected tables, the progress of predictive machine learning models as applied to such tasks arguably falls we…

2024

Case-Based or Rule-Based: How Do Transformers Do the Math?

ICML 2024poster

Despite the impressive performance in a variety of complex tasks, modern large language models (LLMs) still have trouble dealing with some math problems that are simple and intuitive for humans, such as addition. While we can easily learn basic *rules* of addition and apply them to new problems of a…

2024

LooGLE: Can Long-Context Language Models Understand Long Contexts?

ACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) are typically limited to processing texts within context window size, which has spurred significant research efforts into enhancing LLMs’ long-context understanding as well as developing high-quality benchmarks to evaluate the ability. However, prior datasets suffer from…

2024

Mars: Situated Inductive Reasoning in an Open-World Environment

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on massive corpora have shown remarkable success in knowledge-intensive tasks. Yet, most of them rely on pre-stored knowledge. Inducing new general knowledge from a specific environment and performing reasoning with the acquired knowledge—situated inductive reaso…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

On the Stability of Expressive Positional Encodings for Graphs

ICLR 2024poster

Designing effective positional encodings for graphs is key to building powerful graph transformers and enhancing message-passing graph neural networks. Although widespread, using Laplacian eigenvectors as positional encodings faces two fundamental challenges: (1) *Non-uniqueness*: there are many dif…

2024

One For All: Towards Training One Graph Model For All Classification Tasks

ICLR 2024spotlight

Designing a single model to address multiple tasks has been a long-standing objective in artificial intelligence. Recently, large language models have demonstrated exceptional capability in solving different tasks within the language domain. However, a unified model for various graph tasks remains u…

2024

PiSSA: Principal Singular Values and Singular Vectors Adaptation of Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

To parameter-efficiently fine-tune (PEFT) large language models (LLMs), the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) method approximates the model changes $\Delta W \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ through the product of two matrices $A \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times r}$ and $B \in \mathbb{R}^{r \times n}$, where $r \ll \m…

2024

Rethinking the Power of Graph Canonization in Graph Representation Learning with Stability

ICLR 2024poster

The expressivity of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been studied broadly in recent years to reveal the design principles for more powerful GNNs. Graph canonization is known as a typical approach to distinguish non-isomorphic graphs, yet rarely adopted when developing expressive GNNs. This paper pro…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

RulE: Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Rule Embedding

ACL 2024findings

Knowledge graph reasoning is an important problem for knowledge graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel and principled framework called RulE (stands for Rule Embedding) to effectively leverage logical rules to enhance KG reasoning. Unlike knowledge graph embedding methods, RulE learns rule embeddi…

2024

Unifying Generation and Prediction on Graphs with Latent Graph Diffusion

NeurIPS 2024poster

In this paper, we propose the first framework that enables solving graph learning tasks of all levels (node, edge and graph) and all types (generation, regression and classification) using one formulation. We first formulate prediction tasks including regression and classification into a generic (co…

2024

VQGraph: Rethinking Graph Representation Space for Bridging GNNs and MLPs

ICLR 2024poster

GNN-to-MLP distillation aims to utilize knowledge distillation (KD) to learn computationally-efficient multi-layer perceptron (student MLP) on graph data by mimicking the output representations of teacher GNN. Existing methods mainly make the MLP to mimic the GNN predictions over a few class labels.…

2023

Boosting the Cycle Counting Power of Graph Neural Networks with I$^2$-GNNs

ICLR 2023poster

Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) are a widely used class of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The limited representational power of MPNNs inspires the study of provably powerful GNN architectures. However, knowing one model is more powerful than another gives little insight about what functions t…

2023

CktGNN: Circuit Graph Neural Network for Electronic Design Automation

ICLR 2023poster

The electronic design automation of analog circuits has been a longstanding challenge in the integrated circuit field due to the huge design space and complex design trade-offs among circuit specifications. In the past decades, intensive research efforts have only been paid to automate the transisto…

2023

Distance-Restricted Folklore Weisfeiler-Leman GNNs with Provable Cycle Counting Power

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

The ability of graph neural networks (GNNs) to count certain graph substructures, especially cycles, is important for the success of GNNs on a wide range of tasks. It has been recently used as a popular metric for evaluating the expressive power of GNNs. Many of the proposed GNN models with provable…

2023

Extending the Design Space of Graph Neural Networks by Rethinking Folklore Weisfeiler-Lehman

NeurIPS 2023poster

Message passing neural networks (MPNNs) have emerged as the most popular framework of graph neural networks (GNNs) in recent years. However, their expressive power is limited by the 1-dimensional Weisfeiler-Lehman (1-WL) test. Some works are inspired by $k$-WL/FWL (Folklore WL) and design the corres…

2023

Facilitating Graph Neural Networks with Random Walk on Simplicial Complexes

NeurIPS 2023poster

Node-level random walk has been widely used to improve Graph Neural Networks. However, there is limited attention to random walk on edge and, more generally, on $k$-simplices. This paper systematically analyzes how random walk on different orders of simplicial complexes (SC) facilitates GNNs in thei…

2023

From Relational Pooling to Subgraph GNNs: A Universal Framework for More Expressive Graph Neural Networks

ICML 2023poster

Relational pooling is a framework for building more expressive and permutation-invariant graph neural networks. However, there is limited understanding of the exact enhancement in the expressivity of RP and its connection with the Weisfeiler-Lehman hierarchy. Starting from RP, we propose to explicit…

2023

MAG-GNN: Reinforcement Learning Boosted Graph Neural Network

NeurIPS 2023poster

While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) recently became powerful tools in graph learning tasks, considerable efforts have been spent on improving GNNs' structural encoding ability. A particular line of work proposed subgraph GNNs that use subgraph information to improve GNNs' expressivity and achieved gr…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2022

3DLinker: An E(3) Equivariant Variational Autoencoder for Molecular Linker Design

ICML 2022oral

Deep learning has achieved tremendous success in designing novel chemical compounds with desirable pharmaceutical properties. In this work, we focus on a new type of drug design problem — generating a small “linker” to physically attach two independent molecules with their distinct functions. The ma…

2022

Equivariant and Stable Positional Encoding for More Powerful Graph Neural Networks

ICLR 2022poster

Graph neural networks (GNN) have shown great advantages in many graph-based learning tasks but often fail to predict accurately for a task-based on sets of nodes such as link/motif prediction and so on. Many works have recently proposed to address this problem by using random node features or node…

2022

Geodesic Graph Neural Network for Efficient Graph Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently been applied to graph learning tasks and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. However, many competitive methods run GNNs multiple times with subgraph extraction and customized labeling to capture information that is hard for normal GNNs to learn. Such…

2022

How Powerful are K-hop Message Passing Graph Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

The most popular design paradigm for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is 1-hop message passing---aggregating information from 1-hop neighbors repeatedly. However, the expressive power of 1-hop message passing is bounded by the Weisfeiler-Lehman (1-WL) test. Recently, researchers extended 1-hop message p…

2022

PACE: A Parallelizable Computation Encoder for Directed Acyclic Graphs

ICML 2022spotlight

Optimization of directed acyclic graph (DAG) structures has many applications, such as neural architecture search (NAS) and probabilistic graphical model learning. Encoding DAGs into real vectors is a dominant component in most neural-network-based DAG optimization frameworks. Currently, most popula…

2022

Rethinking Knowledge Graph Evaluation Under the Open-World Assumption

NeurIPS 2022accept

Most knowledge graphs (KGs) are incomplete, which motivates one important research topic on automatically complementing knowledge graphs. However, evaluation of knowledge graph completion (KGC) models often ignores the incompleteness---facts in the test set are ranked against all unknown triplets wh…

2021

Decoupling the Depth and Scope of Graph Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2021poster

State-of-the-art Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have limited scalability with respect to the graph and model sizes. On large graphs, increasing the model depth often means exponential expansion of the scope (i.e., receptive field). Beyond just a few layers, two fundamental challenges emerge: 1. degra…

2021

Labeling Trick: A Theory of Using Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Node Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

In this paper, we provide a theory of using graph neural networks (GNNs) for multi-node representation learning (where we are interested in learning a representation for a set of more than one node, such as link). We know that GNN is designed to learn single-node representations. When we want to lea…

2019

D-VAE: A Variational Autoencoder for Directed Acyclic Graphs

NeurIPS 2019poster

Graph structured data are abundant in the real world. Among different graph types, directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are of particular interest to machine learning researchers, as many machine learning models are realized as computations on DAGs, including neural networks and Bayesian networks. In this…