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Nevin L. Zhang

19 accepted papers

2026

InSight-o3: Empowering Multimodal Foundation Models with Generalized Visual Search

ICLR 2026poster

The ability for AI agents to "think with images" requires a sophisticated blend of reasoning and perception. However, current open multimodal agents still largely fall short on the reasoning aspect that are crucial for real-world tasks like analyzing documents with dense charts/diagrams or navigatin…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

COSDA: Counterfactual-based Susceptibility Risk Framework for Open-Set Domain Adaptation

ICML 2025poster

Open-Set Domain Adaptation (OSDA) aims to transfer knowledge from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain that contains unknown categories, thus facing the challenges of domain shift and unknown category recognition. While recent works have demonstrated the potential of causality fo…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Resilient Test-Time Adaptation by Mitigating Batch-Normalization Overfitting

ICASSP 2025accepted

Test-time domain adaptation adjusts a source domain model to accommodate previously unseen domain shifts in a target domain during inference. In real-world scenarios, domain shifts continually evolve, and test data are often non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.). Existing methods…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Test-Time Adaptation on Noisy Data via Model-Pruning-Based Filtering and Flatness-Aware Entropy Minimization

AAAI 2025technical

Test-time adaptation (TTA) deals with domain shifts during inference by training models based on only unlabeled test samples. Test samples may include noisy samples, which degrade domain adaptation. Existing methods rely on the model's output prediction to detect and filter noisy samples, and furthe…

2024

Dual Risk Minimization: Towards Next-Level Robustness in Fine-tuning Zero-Shot Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Fine-tuning foundation models often compromises their robustness to distribution shifts. To remedy this, most robust fine-tuning methods aim to preserve the pre-trained features. However, not all pre-trained features are robust and those methods are largely indifferent to which ones to preserve. We…

2024

Tree-Instruct: A Preliminary Study of the Intrinsic Relationship between Complexity and Alignment

COLING 2024main

Training large language models (LLMs) with open-domain instruction data has yielded remarkable success in aligning to end tasks and human preferences. Extensive research has highlighted the importance of the quality and diversity of instruction data. However, the impact of data complexity, as a cruc…

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…

2023

Causal Document-Grounded Dialogue Pre-training

EMNLP 2023long main

The goal of document-grounded dialogue (DocGD) is to generate a response by anchoring the evidence in a supporting document in accordance with the dialogue context. This entails four causally interconnected variables. While task-specific pre-training has significantly enhanced performances on numero…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Local Temperature Beam Search: Avoid Neural Text DeGeneration via Enhanced Calibration

ACL 2023findings

Previous studies have constantly observed that a language model repeats itself, creating repetitions in an output sequence. To cope with the issue, stochastic decoding schemes have been the de facto approaches; the strategies add randomness in inference, hence avoiding the “self-loop”. However, the…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Two-stage holistic and contrastive explanation of image classification

UAI 2023poster

The need to explain the output of a deep neural network classifier is now widely recognized. While previous methods typically explain a single class in the output, we advocate explaining the whole output, which is a probability distribution over multiple classes. A whole-output explanation can help…

2023

ViT-CX: Causal Explanation of Vision Transformers

IJCAI 2023poster

Despite the popularity of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and eXplainable AI (XAI), only a few explanation methods have been designed specially for ViTs thus far. They mostly use attention weights of the [CLS] token on patch embeddings and often produce unsatisfactory saliency maps. This paper proposes a…

2022

Empathetic and Emotionally Positive Conversation Systems with an Emotion-specific Query-Response Memory

EMNLP 2022finding

Emotional conversation systems generate responses for the input queries considering the speaker’s emotions in a conversation. Existing emotional conversation systems output emotional responses according to either a given emotion or the user’s emotion reflected in the input queries. Following a given…

2022

Prompt Conditioned VAE: Enhancing Generative Replay for Lifelong Learning in Task-Oriented Dialogue

EMNLP 2022main

Lifelong learning (LL) is vital for advanced task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems. To address the catastrophic forgetting issue of LL, generative replay methods are widely employed to consolidate past knowledge with generated pseudo samples. However, most existing generative replay methods use only…

2022

Semi-Supervised Lifelong Language Learning

EMNLP 2022finding

Lifelong learning aims to accumulate knowledge and alleviate catastrophic forgetting when learning tasks sequentially. However, existing lifelong language learning methods only focus on the supervised learning setting. Unlabeled data, which can be easily accessed in real-world scenarios, are underex…

2021

DeepRapper: Neural Rap Generation with Rhyme and Rhythm Modeling

ACL 2021long

Rap generation, which aims to produce lyrics and corresponding singing beats, needs to model both rhymes and rhythms. Previous works for rap generation focused on rhyming lyrics, but ignored rhythmic beats, which are important for rap performance. In this paper, we develop DeepRapper, a Transformer-…

2021

Enhancing Content Preservation in Text Style Transfer Using Reverse Attention and Conditional Layer Normalization

ACL 2021long

Text style transfer aims to alter the style (e.g., sentiment) of a sentence while preserving its content. A common approach is to map a given sentence to content representation that is free of style, and the content representation is fed to a decoder with a target style. Previous methods in filterin…

2021

Learning from My Friends: Few-Shot Personalized Conversation Systems via Social Networks

AAAI 2021technical

Personalized conversation models (PCMs) generate responses according to speaker preferences. Existing personalized conversation tasks typically require models to extract speaker preferences from user descriptions or their conversation histories, which are scarce for newcomers and inactive users. In…

2019

Learning Latent Superstructures in Variational Autoencoders for Deep Multidimensional Clustering

ICLR 2019poster

We investigate a variant of variational autoencoders where there is a superstructure of discrete latent variables on top of the latent features. In general, our superstructure is a tree structure of multiple super latent variables and it is automatically learned from data. When there is only one lat…

Cited by 75SourcePDFScholar
2015

Bayesian Adaptive Matrix Factorization With Automatic Model Selection

CVPR 2015poster

Low-rank matrix factorization has long been recognized as a fundamental problem in many computer vision applications. Nevertheless, the reliability of existing matrix factorization methods is often hard to guarantee due to challenges brought by such model selection issues as selecting the noise mode…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar