← Search

Nan Du

32 accepted papers

2025

Adapting to Non-Stationary Environments: Multi-Armed Bandit Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Knowledge Graphs

AAAI 2025technical

Despite the superior performance of Large language models on many NLP tasks, they still face significant limitations in memorizing extensive world knowledge. Recent studies have demonstrated that leveraging the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, combined with Knowledge Graphs that enca…

2025

Advancing General Multimodal Capability of Vision-language Models with Pyramid-descent Visual Position Encoding

ACL 2025finding

Vision-language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in advancing general artificial intelligence, yet the irrational encoding of visual positions persists in inhibiting the models’ comprehensive perception performance across different levels of granularity. In this work, we propose Pyra…

2025

CodeTool: Enhancing Programmatic Tool Invocation of LLMs via Process Supervision

ACL 2025long

Tool invocation significantly enhances the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet challenges persist, particularly in complex task scenarios. Current methods, such as instruction-enhanced reasoning and supervised fine-tuning, often result in unnecessarily long reasoning paths and face dif…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

CogniBench: A Legal-inspired Framework and Dataset for Assessing Cognitive Faithfulness of Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Faithfulness hallucinations are claims generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) not supported by contexts provided to the LLM. Lacking assessment standards, existing benchmarks focus on “factual statements” that rephrase source materials while overlooking “cognitive statements” that involve making…

2025

EC-DIT: Scaling Diffusion Transformers with Adaptive Expert-Choice Routing

ICLR 2025poster

Diffusion transformers have been widely adopted for text-to-image synthesis. While scaling these models up to billions of parameters shows promise, the effectiveness of scaling beyond current sizes remains underexplored and challenging. By explicitly exploiting the computational heterogeneity of ima…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Instruction-Following Pruning for Large Language Models

ICML 2025poster

With the rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs), structured pruning has become a widely used technique to learn efficient, smaller models from larger ones, delivering superior performance compared to training similarly sized models from scratch. In this paper, we move beyond the traditional s…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MBA-RAG: a Bandit Approach for Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Question Complexity

COLING 2025main

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven to be highly effective in boosting the generative performance of language model in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing RAG framework either indiscriminately perform retrieval or rely on rigid single-label classifiers to select retrieval method…

2025

S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning

ACL 2025long

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of LLM test-time scaling. However, existing approaches to incentivize LLMs’ deep thinking abilities generally require large-scale data or significant training efforts. Meanwhile, it remains unclear how to improve the thinking abilities of less power…

2025

ToolExpNet: Optimizing Multi-Tool Selection in LLMs with Similarity and Dependency-Aware Experience Networks

ACL 2025finding

Tool learning enhances Large Language Models’ (LLMs) dynamic interaction with external tools, improving their ability to solve complex problems. However, current empirical methods, which primarily focus on isolated tools learning, still struggle with accurate multi-tool selection due to issues like…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

"MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training"

ECCV 2024poster

"In this work, we discuss building performant Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In particular, we study the importance of various architecture components and data choices. Through careful and comprehensive ablations of the image encoder, the vision language connector, and various pre-trainin…

2024

Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game

ACL 2024findings

Human preference alignment is essential to improve the interaction quality of large language models (LLMs). Existing alignment methods depend on manually annotated preference data to guide the LLM optimization directions. However, continuously updating LLMs for alignment raises a distribution gap be…

2024

Chunk, Align, Select: A Simple Long-sequence Processing Method for Transformers

ACL 2024long

Although dominant in natural language processing, transformer-based models still struggle with long-sequence processing, due to the computational costs of their self-attention operations, which increase exponentially as the length of the input sequence grows. To address this challenge, we propose a…

2024

Mixture-of-Experts Meets Instruction Tuning: A Winning Combination for Large Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a neural architecture design that adds learnable parameters to Large Language Models (LLMs) without increasing computational complexity (FLOPs). Instruction tuning is a technique for training LLMs to follow instructions. We advocate combining these two approaches,…

Cited by 78SourcePDFScholar
2024

On Diversified Preferences of Large Language Model Alignment

EMNLP 2024finding

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has been recognized as the key to improving LLMs’ interaction quality. However, in this pluralistic world, human preferences can be diversified due to annotators’ different tastes, which hinders the effectiveness of LLM alignment methods.…

2024

Self-playing Adversarial Language Game Enhances LLM Reasoning

NeurIPS 2024poster

We explore the potential of self-play training for large language models (LLMs) in a two-player adversarial language game called Adversarial Taboo. In this game, an attacker and a defender communicate around a target word only visible to the attacker. The attacker aims to induce the defender to spea…

2023

Brainformers: Trading Simplicity for Efficiency

ICML 2023poster

Transformers are central to recent successes in natural language processing and computer vision. Transformers have a mostly uniform backbone where layers alternate between feed-forward and self-attention in order to build a deep network. Here we investigate this design choice and find that more comp…

Cited by 37SourcePDFScholar
2023

Conditional Adapters: Parameter-efficient Transfer Learning with Fast Inference

NeurIPS 2023poster

We propose Conditional Adapter (CoDA), a parameter-efficient transfer learning method that also improves inference efficiency. CoDA generalizes beyond standard adapter approaches to enable a new way of balancing speed and accuracy using conditional computation. Starting with an existing dense pretra…

Cited by 63SourcePDFScholar
2023

DoReMi: Optimizing Data Mixtures Speeds Up Language Model Pretraining

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

The mixture proportions of pretraining data domains (e.g., Wikipedia, books, web text) greatly affect language model (LM) performance. In this paper, we propose Domain Reweighting with Minimax Optimization (DoReMi), which first trains a small proxy model using group distributionally robust optimizat…

2023

Lifelong Language Pretraining with Distribution-Specialized Experts

ICML 2023poster

Pretraining on a large-scale corpus has become a standard method to build general language models (LMs). Adapting a model to new data distributions targeting different downstream tasks poses significant challenges. Naive fine-tuning may incur catastrophic forgetting when the over-parameterized LMs o…

Cited by 59SourcePDFScholar
2023

Massively Multilingual Shallow Fusion with Large Language Models

ICASSP 2023accepted

While large language models (LLM) have made impressive progress in natural language processing, it remains unclear how to utilize them in improving automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this work, we propose to train a single multilingual language model (LM) for shallow fusion in multiple languages…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models

ICLR 2023top-5%

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across tasks in language understanding and interactive decision making, their abilities for reasoning (e.g. chain-of-thought prompting) and acting (e.g. action plan generation) have primarily been studied as separate topics…

2022

Finetuned Language Models are Zero-Shot Learners

ICLR 2022oral

This paper explores a simple method for improving the zero-shot learning abilities of language models. We show that instruction tuning—finetuning language models on a collection of datasets described via instructions—substantially improves zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. We take a 137B parame…

2022

GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts

ICML 2022spotlight

Scaling language models with more data, compute and parameters has driven significant progress in natural language processing. For example, thanks to scaling, GPT-3 was able to achieve strong results on in-context learning tasks. However, training these large dense models requires significant amount…

Cited by 765SourcePDFScholar
2022

Mixture-of-Experts with Expert Choice Routing

NeurIPS 2022accept

Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models allow the number of parameters to greatly increase while keeping the amount of computation for a given token or a given sample unchanged. However, a poor expert routing strategy (e.g. one resulting in load imbalance) can cause certain experts to be…

Cited by 336SourcePDFScholar
2020

Entity Synonym Discovery via Multipiece Bilateral Context Matching

IJCAI 2020poster

Being able to automatically discover synonymous entities in an open-world setting benefits various tasks such as entity disambiguation or knowledge graph canonicalization. Existing works either only utilize entity features, or rely on structured annotations from a single piece of context where the e…

2018

Learning Temporal Point Processes via Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2018spotlight

Social goods, such as healthcare, smart city, and information networks, often produce ordered event data in continuous time. The generative processes of these event data can be very complex, requiring flexible models to capture their dynamics. Temporal point processes offer an elegant framework for…

2016

Coevolutionary Latent Feature Processes for Continuous-Time User-Item Interactions

NeurIPS 2016poster

Matching users to the right items at the right time is a fundamental task in recommendation systems. As users interact with different items over time, users' and items' feature may evolve and co-evolve over time. Traditional models based on static latent features or discretizing time into epochs can…

Cited by 74SourcePDFScholar
2015

Back to the Past: Source Identification in Diffusion Networks from Partially Observed Cascades

AISTATS 2015poster

When a piece of malicious information becomes rampant in an information diffusion network, can we identify the source node that originally introduced the piece into the network and infer the time when it initiated this? Being able to do so is critical for curtailing the spread of malicious informati…

Cited by 106SourcePDFScholar
2015

Time-Sensitive Recommendation From Recurrent User Activities

NeurIPS 2015poster

By making personalized suggestions, a recommender system is playing a crucial role in improving the engagement of users in modern web-services. However, most recommendation algorithms do not explicitly take into account the temporal behavior and the recurrent activities of users. Two central but les…

Cited by 173SourcePDFScholar