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Ninghao Liu

31 accepted papers

2026

AutoSCORE: Enhancing Automated Scoring with Multi-Agent Large Language Models via Structured Component Recognition

AAAI 2026technical

Automated scoring plays a crucial role in education by reducing the reliance on human raters and offering scalable and immediate evaluation of student work. While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in this task, their use as end-to-end raters faces challenges such as low accura

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Beyond Scalars: Evaluating and Understanding LLM Reasoning via Geometric Progress and Stability

ICML 2026poster

Evaluating LLM reliability via scalar probabilities often fails to capture the structural dynamics of reasoning. We introduce TRACED, a framework that assesses reasoning quality through theoretically grounded geometric kinematics. By decomposing reasoning traces into Progress (displacement) and Stab…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Less is Enough: Synthesizing Diverse Data in Feature Space of LLMs

ICML 2026oral

The diversity of post-training data is critical for effective downstream performance in large language models (LLMs). Many existing approaches to constructing post-training data quantify diversity using text-based metrics that capture linguistic variation, but such metrics provide only weak signals …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Survey on Sparse Autoencoders: Interpreting the Internal Mechanisms of Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque. Recently, mechanistic interpretability has attracted significant attention from the research community as a means to understand the inner workings of LLMs. Among various me

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Beyond Input Activations: Identifying Influential Latents by Gradient Sparse Autoencoders

EMNLP 2025

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for interpreting and steering the internal representations of large language models (LLMs). However, conventional approaches to analyzing SAEs typically rely solely on input-side activations, without considering the influence between

2025

Concept-Centric Token Interpretation for Vector-Quantized Generative Models

ICML 2025poster

Vector-Quantized Generative Models (VQGMs) have emerged as powerful tools for image generation. However, the key component of VQGMs---the codebook of discrete tokens---is still not well understood, e.g., which tokens are critical to generate an image of a certain concept? This paper introduces Conce…

2025

EAP-GP: Mitigating Saturation Effect in Gradient-based Automated Circuit Identification

NeurIPS 2025poster

Understanding the internal mechanisms of transformer-based language models remains challenging. Mechanistic interpretability based on circuit discovery aims to reverse engineer neural networks by analyzing their internal processes at the level of computational subgraphs. In this paper, we revisit ex…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Enhancing Cognition and Explainability of Multimodal Foundation Models with Self-Synthesized Data

ICLR 2025poster

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), or Vision-Language Models (VLMs), have shown impressive capabilities in a wide range of visual tasks. However, they often struggle with fine-grained visual reasoning, failing to identify domain-specific objectives and provide justifiable explanations for their predict…

2025

LMOD: A Large Multimodal Ophthalmology Dataset and Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models

NAACL 2025findings

The prevalence of vision-threatening eye diseases is a significant global burden, with many cases remaining undiagnosed or diagnosed too late for effective treatment. Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have the potential to assist in understanding anatomical information, diagnosing eye diseases, a…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2025

Language Ranker: A Metric for Quantifying LLM Performance Across High and Low-Resource Languages

AAAI 2025technical

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies on extensive text corpora, which are often unevenly distributed across languages. This imbalance results in LLMs performing significantly better on high-resource languages like English, German, and French, while their capabilities in low-resourc…

2025

MQuAKE-Remastered: Multi-Hop Knowledge Editing Can Only Be Advanced with Reliable Evaluations

ICLR 2025spotlight

Large language models (LLMs) can give out erroneous answers to factually rooted questions either as a result of undesired training outcomes or simply because the world has moved on after a certain knowledge cutoff date. Under such scenarios, *knowledge editing* often comes to the rescue by deliverin…

2025

Mutual Effort for Efficiency: A Similarity-based Token Pruning for Vision Transformers in Self-Supervised Learning

ICLR 2025poster

Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a compelling solution to the challenge of extensive labeled data requirements in traditional supervised learning. With the proven success of Vision Transformers (ViTs) in supervised tasks, there is increasing interest in adapting them for SSL frameworks. However…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Automated Natural Language Explanation of Deep Visual Neurons with Large Models (Student Abstract)

AAAI 2024technical

Interpreting deep neural networks through examining neurons offers distinct advantages when it comes to exploring the inner workings of Deep Neural Networks. Previous research has indicated that specific neurons within deep vision networks possess semantic meaning and play pivotal roles in model per…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

BadSAM: Exploring Security Vulnerabilities of SAM via Backdoor Attacks (Student Abstract)

AAAI 2024technical

Image segmentation is foundational to computer vision applications, and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has become a leading base model for these tasks. However, SAM falters in specialized downstream challenges, leading to various customized SAM models. We introduce BadSAM, a backdoor attack tailor…

2024

Efficient Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Molecular Graph Transformer Models

ICLR 2024poster

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has received increasing attention in computer vision since it can effectively eliminate the sharp local minima from the training trajectory and mitigate generalization degradation. However, SAM requires two sequential gradient computations during the optimization o…

2024

Enhancing Explainable Rating Prediction through Annotated Macro Concepts

ACL 2024long

Generating recommendation reasons for recommendation results is a long-standing problem because it is challenging to explain the underlying reasons for recommending an item based on user and item IDs. Existing models usually learn semantic embeddings for each user and item, and generate the reasons…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

From Language Modeling to Instruction Following: Understanding the Behavior Shift in LLMs after Instruction Tuning

NAACL 2024long

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, where instruction tuning is the critical step in aligning LLMs with user intentions. In this work, we investigate how the instruction tuning adjusts pre-trained models with a focus on intrinsic changes. Specifically, we first develop sev…

2024

Improving Interpretation Faithfulness for Vision Transformers

ICML 2024spotlight

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for various vision tasks. One reason behind the success lies in their ability to provide plausible innate explanations for the behavior of neural architectures. However, ViTs suffer from issues with explanation faithfulness, as th…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Mitigating Shortcuts in Language Models with Soft Label Encoding

COLING 2024main

Recent research has shown that large language models rely on spurious correlations in the data for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this work, we aim to answer the following research question: Can we reduce spurious correlations by modifying the ground truth labels of the training data…

2024

Molecular Data Programming: Towards Molecule Pseudo-labeling with Systematic Weak Supervision

CVPR 2024poster

The premise for the great advancement of molecular machine learning is dependent on a considerable amount of labeled data. In many real-world scenarios the labeled molecules are limited in quantity or laborious to derive. Recent pseudo-labeling methods are usually designed based on a single domain k…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

PokeMQA: Programmable knowledge editing for Multi-hop Question Answering

ACL 2024long

Multi-hop question answering (MQA) is one of the challenging tasks to evaluate machine’s comprehension and reasoning abilities, where large language models (LLMs) have widely achieved the human-comparable performance. Due to the dynamics of knowledge facts in real world, knowledge editing has been e…

2024

Rethinking Independent Cross-Entropy Loss For Graph-Structured Data

ICML 2024poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have exhibited prominent performance in learning graph-structured data. Considering node classification task, based on the i.i.d assumption among node labels, the traditional supervised learning simply sums up cross-entropy losses of the independent training nodes and ap…

2023

Black-box Backdoor Defense via Zero-shot Image Purification

NeurIPS 2023poster

Backdoor attacks inject poisoned samples into the training data, resulting in the misclassification of the poisoned input during a model's deployment. Defending against such attacks is challenging, especially for real-world black-box models where only query access is permitted. In this paper, we pro…

2023

DIVISION: Memory Efficient Training via Dual Activation Precision

ICML 2023poster

Activation compressed training provides a solution towards reducing the memory cost of training deep neural networks (DNNs). However, state-of-the-art work combines a search of quantization bit-width with the training, which makes the procedure complicated and less transparent. To this end, we propo…

2023

Interpreting Unfairness in Graph Neural Networks via Training Node Attribution

AAAI 2023technical

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as the leading paradigm for solving graph analytical problems in various real-world applications. Nevertheless, GNNs could potentially render biased predictions towards certain demographic subgroups. Understanding how the bias in predictions arises is criti…

2022

DEGREE: Decomposition Based Explanation for Graph Neural Networks

ICLR 2022poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are gaining extensive attention for their application in graph data. However, the black-box nature of GNNs prevents users from understanding and trusting the models, thus hampering their applicability. Whereas explaining GNNs remains a challenge, most existing methods fa…

2022

G-Mixup: Graph Data Augmentation for Graph Classification

ICML 2022oral

This work develops mixup for graph data. Mixup has shown superiority in improving the generalization and robustness of neural networks by interpolating features and labels between two random samples. Traditionally, Mixup can work on regular, grid-like, and Euclidean data such as image or tabular dat…

2021

Dynamic Memory based Attention Network for Sequential Recommendation

AAAI 2021technical

Sequential recommendation has become increasingly essential in various online services. It aims to model the dynamic preferences of users from their historical interactions and predict their next items. The accumulated user behavior records on real systems could be very long. This rich data brings o…

Cited by 77SourcePDFScholar
2020

Learning sparse codes from compressed representations with biologically plausible local wiring constraints

NeurIPS 2020poster

Sparse coding is an important method for unsupervised learning of task-independent features in theoretical neuroscience models of neural coding. While a number of algorithms exist to learn these representations from the statistics of a dataset, they largely ignore the information bottlenecks present…