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Ning Miao

8 accepted papers

2026

BED-LLM: Intelligent Information Gathering with LLMs and Bayesian Experimental Design

ICLR 2026poster

We propose a general-purpose approach for improving the ability of large language models (LLMs) to intelligently and adaptively gather information from a user or other external source using the framework of sequential Bayesian experimental design (BED). This enables LLMs to act as effective multi-tu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Step-Level Sparse Autoencoder for Reasoning Process Interpretation

ICML 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful tool for interpretability, existing approaches p…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

SelfCheck: Using LLMs to Zero-Shot Check Their Own Step-by-Step Reasoning

ICLR 2024poster

The recent progress in large language models (LLMs), especially the invention of chain-of-thought prompting, has made it possible to automatically answer questions by stepwise reasoning. However, when faced with more complicated problems that require non-linear thinking, even the strongest LLMs make…

2023

Learning Instance-Specific Augmentations by Capturing Local Invariances

ICML 2023poster

We introduce InstaAug, a method for automatically learning input-specific augmentations from data. Previous methods for learning augmentations have typically assumed independence between the original input and the transformation applied to that input. This can be highly restrictive, as the invarianc…

2022

On Incorporating Inductive Biases into VAEs

ICLR 2022poster

We explain why directly changing the prior can be a surprisingly ineffective mechanism for incorporating inductive biases into variational auto-encoders (VAEs), and introduce a simple and effective alternative approach: Intermediary Latent Space VAEs (InteL-VAEs). InteL-VAEs use an intermediary set…

2020

Dispersed Exponential Family Mixture VAEs for Interpretable Text Generation

ICML 2020poster

Deep generative models are commonly used for generating images and text. Interpretability of these models is one important pursuit, other than the generation quality. Variational auto-encoder (VAE) with Gaussian distribution as prior has been successfully applied in text generation, but it is hard t…

2020

Improving Maximum Likelihood Training for Text Generation with Density Ratio Estimation

AISTATS 2020poster

Autoregressive neural sequence generative models trained by Maximum Likelihood Estimation suffer the exposure bias problem in practical finite sample scenarios. The crux is that the number of training samples for Maximum Likelihood Estimation is usually limited and the input data distributions are d…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar