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Pan Li

84 accepted papers

2026

$\nabla$-Reasoner: LLM Reasoning via Test-Time Gradient Descent in Textual Space

ICLR 2026poster

Scaling inference-time compute for Large Language Models (LLMs) has unlocked unprecedented reasoning capabilities. However, existing inference-time scaling methods typically rely on inefficient and suboptimal discrete search algorithms or trial-and-error prompting to improve the online policy. In th…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

AR-Nav Benchmark: Augmented Reality Navigation with Vision and Language

AAAI 2026technical

Augmented Reality (AR) navigation has emerged as a transformative tool for spatial intelligence, enabling users to interactively explore complex environments through wearable and mobile AR devices. However, current AR navigation systems struggle with low indoor localization accuracy, weak semantic u

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Beyond Test-Time Training: Learning to Reason via Hardware-Efficient Optimal Control

ICML 2026poster

Associative memory has long underpinned the design of sequential models. Beyond recall, humans reason by *projecting future states and selecting goal-directed actions*, a capability that modern language models increasingly require but do not natively encode. While prior work uses reinforcement learn…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Chain-of-Search: Parameter-Efficient Reasoning for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

AAAI 2026technical

Zero-shot object navigation tasks agents with locating target objects in unseen environments—a core capability of embodied intelligence. While recent vision-language navigation methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for multimodal reasoning, they suffer from two key limitations: (1) semantic

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Implicit Turn-Wise Policy Optimization for Proactive User-LLM Interaction

ICML 2026poster

Multi-turn human-AI collaboration is fundamental to deploying interactive services such as adaptive tutoring, conversational recommendation, and professional consultation. However, optimizing these interactions via reinforcement learning is hindered by the sparsity of verifiable intermediate rewards…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Measuring Physical-World Privacy Awareness of Large Language Models: An Evaluation Benchmark

ICLR 2026poster

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in embodied agents creates an urgent need to measure their privacy awareness in the physical world. Existing evaluation methods, however, are confined to natural language based scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce EAPrivacy, a comprehensive evalu…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

MoEEdit: Efficient and Routing-Stable Knowledge Editing for Mixture-of-Experts LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Knowledge editing (KE) is crucial for making precise modifications to factual knowledge within large language models (LLMs). Existing KE methods, however, are primarily designed for dense architectures, limiting their applicability to the increasingly popular sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

NeuroMamba: A Universal Spatiotemporal Module for Robust Perception in Degraded Sensory Streams

ICML 2026poster

In open-world intelligent systems, processing continuous sensory streams disrupted by heterogeneous degradation sources presents a fundamental challenge: reconciling the inherent tension between observational completeness and reconstruction fidelity. Methods that prioritize completeness by bridging …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

On Information Self-Locking in Reinforcement Learning for Active Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has achieved significant success in training large language model (LLM) agents for complex reasoning tasks. However, in active reasoning where agents need to strategically ask questions to acquire task-relevant information, we find that LLM agen…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ParamMem: Augmenting Language Agents with Parametric Reflective Memory

ICML 2026poster

Self-reflection enables language agents to iteratively refine solutions, yet often produces repetitive outputs that limit reasoning performance. Recent studies have attempted to address this limitation through various approaches, among which increasing reflective diversity has shown promise. Our emp…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Privacy Amplification in Differentially Private Zeroth-Order Optimization with Hidden States

ICML 2026poster

Zeroth-order optimization has emerged as a promising approach for fine-tuning large language models on domain-specific data, particularly under differential privacy (DP) and memory constraints. While first-order methods have been extensively studied from a privacy perspective, the privacy analysis a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reducing Belief Deviation in Reinforcement Learning for Active Reasoning

ICLR 2026oral

Active reasoning requires large language models (LLMs) to interact with external sources and strategically gather information to solve problems. Central to this process is belief tracking: maintaining a coherent understanding of the problem state and the missing information toward the solution. Howe…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

RoboMatch: A Unified Mobile-Manipulation Teleoperation Platform with Auto-Matching Network Architecture for Long-Horizon Tasks

ICRA 2026poster

This paper presents RoboMatch, a novel unified teleoperation platform for mobile manipulation with an auto-matching network architecture, designed to tackle long-horizon tasks in dynamic environments. Our system enhances teleoperation performance, data collection efficiency, task accuracy, and opera…

2026

Scalable Spatio-Temporal SE(3) Diffusion for Long-Horizon Protein Dynamics

ICLR 2026poster

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations remain the gold standard for studying protein dynamics, but their computational cost limits access to biologically relevant timescales. Recent generative models have shown promise in accelerating simulations, yet they struggle with long-horizon generation due to a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Trojan Knowledge: Bypassing Commercial LLM Guardrails via Harmless Prompt Weaving and Adaptive Tree Search

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that bypass safety guardrails. Existing approaches overwhelmingly operate within the prompt-optimization paradigm; the resulting prompts typically retain malicious semantic signals that modern guardrails are primed to detect. In con…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

When Do Graph Foundation Models Transfer? A Data-Centric Theory

ICML 2026poster

Graph foundation models (GFMs) aim to reuse a single backbone across diverse graph domains, yet their transfer is often uneven and can exhibit negative transfer. While most prior work improves transfer through architectural or adaptation choices, we ask a data-centric question: *which properties of …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Model Stealing Attack Against Multi-Exit Networks

ICASSP 2025accepted

Compared to traditional neural networks with a single output channel, a multi-exit network has multiple exits that allow for early outputs from the model's intermediate layers, thus significantly improving computational efficiency while maintaining similar main task accuracy. Existing model stealing…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Differentially Private Relational Learning with Entity-level Privacy Guarantees

NeurIPS 2025poster

Learning with relational and network-structured data is increasingly vital in sensitive domains where protecting the privacy of individual entities is paramount. Differential Privacy (DP) offers a principled approach for quantifying privacy risks, with DP-SGD emerging as a standard mechanism for pri…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Do LLMs Really Forget? Evaluating Unlearning with Knowledge Correlation and Confidence Awareness

NeurIPS 2025poster

Machine unlearning techniques aim to mitigate unintended memorization in large language models (LLMs). However, existing approaches predominantly focus on the explicit removal of isolated facts, often overlooking latent inferential dependencies and the non-deterministic nature of knowledge within LL…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

FAEDKV: Infinite-Window Fourier Transform for Unbiased KV Cache Compression

EMNLP 2025

The efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) in long-context tasks is often hampered by the substantial memory footprint and computational demands of the Key-Value (KV) cache. Current compression strategies, including token eviction and learned projections, frequently lead to biased representations—

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Generalization Principles for Inference over Text-Attributed Graphs with Large Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been introduced to graph learning, aiming to extend their zero-shot generalization success to tasks where labeled graph data is scarce. Among these applications, inference over text-attributed graphs (TAGs) presents unique challenges: existing methods strug…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Graph-KV: Breaking Sequence via Injecting Structural Biases into Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Modern large language models (LLMs) are inherently auto-regressive, requiring input to be serialized into flat sequences regardless of their structural dependencies. This serialization hinders the model’s ability to leverage structural inductive biases, especially in tasks such as retrieval-augmente…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

LayerDAG: A Layerwise Autoregressive Diffusion Model for Directed Acyclic Graph Generation

ICLR 2025spotlight

Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) serve as crucial data representations in domains such as hardware synthesis and compiler/program optimization for computing systems. DAG generative models facilitate the creation of synthetic DAGs, which can be used for benchmarking computing systems while preserving i…

2025

Optimal Distributed Training With Co-Adaptive Data Parallelism in Heterogeneous Environments

IJCAI 2025

The computational power required for training deep learning models has been skyrocketing in the past decade as they scale with big data, and has become a very expensive and scarce resource. Therefore, distributed training, which can leverage distributed available computational power, is vital for ef

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Pruning Weights but Not Truth: Safeguarding Truthfulness While Pruning LLMs

EMNLP 2025

Neural network pruning has emerged as a promising approach for deploying LLMs in low-resource scenarios while preserving downstream task performance. However, for the first time, we reveal that such pruning disrupts LLMs’ internal activation features crucial for lie detection, where probing classifi

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Quantized but Deceptive? A Multi-Dimensional Truthfulness Evaluation of Quantized LLMs

EMNLP 2025

Quantization enables efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) in resource-constrained environments by significantly reducing memory and computation costs. While quantized LLMs often maintain performance on perplexity and zero-shot tasks, their impact on truthfulness—whether generating tr

2025

Rethinking Addressing in Language Models via Contextualized Equivariant Positional Encoding

ICML 2025poster

Transformers rely on both content-based and position-based addressing mechanisms to make predictions, but existing positional encoding techniques often diminish the effectiveness of position-based addressing. Many current methods enforce rigid patterns in attention maps, limiting the ability to mode…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Risk-Aware Task Migration for Multiplex Unmanned Swarm Networks in Adversarial Environments

IJCAI 2025

With the rapid development and deep integration of artificial intelligence and automation technologies, autonomous unmanned swarms dynamically organize into multiplex network structures based on diverse task requirements in adversarial environments. Frequent task variations lead to load imbalances a

2025

RoFt-Mol: Benchmarking Robust Fine-tuning with Molecular Graph Foundation Models

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

In the era of foundation models, fine-tuning pre-trained models for specific downstream tasks has become crucial. This drives the need for robust fine-tuning methods to address challenges such as model overfitting and sparse labeling. Molecular graph foundation models (MGFMs) face unique difficultie…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Simple is Effective: The Roles of Graphs and Large Language Models in Knowledge-Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

ICLR 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities but face limitations such as hallucinations and outdated knowledge. Knowledge Graph (KG)-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses these issues by grounding LLM outputs in structured external knowledge from KGs. However,…

2025

Towards Universal Debiasing for Language Models-based Tabular Data Generation

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising results in tabular data generation. However, inherent historical biases in tabular datasets often cause LLMs to exacerbate fairness issues, particularly when multiple advantaged and protected features are involved. In this work, we introduce a uni

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Underestimated Privacy Risks for Minority Populations in Large Language Model Unlearning

ICML 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) embed sensitive, human-generated data, prompting the need for unlearning methods. Although certified unlearning offers strong privacy guarantees, its restrictive assumptions make it unsuitable for LLMs, giving rise to various heuristic approaches typically assessed throu…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Understanding and Mitigating Bottlenecks of State Space Models through the Lens of Recency and Over-smoothing

ICLR 2025poster

Structured State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as alternatives to transformers. While SSMs are often regarded as effective in capturing long-sequence dependencies, we rigorously demonstrate that they are inherently limited by strong recency bias. Our empirical studies also reveal that this bias i…

2025

When Truthful Representations Flip Under Deceptive Instructions?

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) tend to follow maliciously crafted instructions to generate deceptive responses, posing safety challenges. How deceptive instructions alter the internal representations of LLM compared to truthful ones remains poorly understood beyond output analysis. To bridge this gap,

2024

A Non-parametric Graph Clustering Framework for Multi-View Data

AAAI 2024technical

Multi-view graph clustering (MVGC) derives encouraging grouping results by seamlessly integrating abundant information inside heterogeneous data, and has captured surging focus recently. Nevertheless, the majority of current MVGC works involve at least one hyper-parameter, which not only requires…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2024

Certified Machine Unlearning via Noisy Stochastic Gradient Descent

NeurIPS 2024poster

``The right to be forgotten'' ensured by laws for user data privacy becomes increasingly important. Machine unlearning aims to efficiently remove the effect of certain data points on the trained model parameters so that it can be approximately the same as if one retrains the model from scratch. We p…

2024

Differentially Private Graph Diffusion with Applications in Personalized PageRanks

NeurIPS 2024poster

Graph diffusion, which iteratively propagates real-valued substances among the graph, is used in numerous graph/network-involved applications. However, releasing diffusion vectors may reveal sensitive linking information in the data such as transaction information in financial network data. However,…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

GeSS: Benchmarking Geometric Deep Learning under Scientific Applications with Distribution Shifts

NeurIPS 2024poster

Geometric deep learning (GDL) has gained significant attention in scientific fields, for its proficiency in modeling data with intricate geometric structures. Yet, very few works have delved into its capability of tackling the distribution shift problem, a prevalent challenge in many applications.…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Langevin Unlearning: A New Perspective of Noisy Gradient Descent for Machine Unlearning

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Machine unlearning has raised significant interest with the adoption of laws ensuring the ``right to be forgotten''. Researchers have provided a probabilistic notion of approximate unlearning under a similar definition of Differential Privacy (DP), where privacy is defined as statistical indistingui…

2024

Locality-Sensitive Hashing-Based Efficient Point Transformer with Applications in High-Energy Physics

ICML 2024oral

This study introduces a novel transformer model optimized for large-scale point cloud processing in scientific domains such as high-energy physics (HEP) and astrophysics. Addressing the limitations of graph neural networks and standard transformers, our model integrates local inductive bias and achi…

2024

MSAGPT: Neural Prompting Protein Structure Prediction via MSA Generative Pre-Training

NeurIPS 2024poster

Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) plays a pivotal role in unveiling the evolutionary trajectories of protein families. The accuracy of protein structure predictions is often compromised for protein sequences that lack sufficient homologous information to construct high-quality MSA. Although various…

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

Polynomial Width is Sufficient for Set Representation with High-dimensional Features

ICLR 2024poster

Set representation has become ubiquitous in deep learning for modeling the inductive bias of neural networks that are insensitive to the input order. DeepSets is the most widely used neural network architecture for set representation. It involves embedding each set element into a latent space with d…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Training Compute-Optimal Protein Language Models

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

We explore optimally training protein language models, an area of significant interest in biological research where guidance on best practices is limited. Most models are trained with extensive compute resources until performance gains plateau, focusing primarily on increasing model sizes rather tha…

2023

Differentially Private Decoupled Graph Convolutions for Multigranular Topology Protection

NeurIPS 2023poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven to be highly effective in solving real-world learning problems that involve graph-structured data. However, GNNs can also inadvertently expose sensitive user information and interactions through their model predictions. To address these privacy concerns, Diff…

2023

Equivariant Hypergraph Diffusion Neural Operators

ICLR 2023poster

Hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) using neural networks to encode hypergraphs provide a promising way to model higher-order relations in data and further solve relevant prediction tasks built upon such higher-order relations. However, higher-order relations in practice contain complex patterns and a…

2023

Extensible and Efficient Proxy for Neural Architecture Search

ICCV 2023poster

Efficient or near-zero-cost proxies were proposed recently to address the demanding computational issues of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) in designing deep neural networks (DNNs), where each candidate architecture network only requires one iteration of backpropagation. The values obtained from pr…

Cited by 6PDFcodeScholar
2023

Interpretable Geometric Deep Learning via Learnable Randomness Injection

ICLR 2023poster

Point cloud data is ubiquitous in scientific fields. Recently, geometric deep learning (GDL) has been widely applied to solve prediction tasks with such data. However, GDL models are often complicated and hardly interpretable, which poses concerns to scientists who are to deploy these models in scie…

2023

Structural Re-weighting Improves Graph Domain Adaptation

ICML 2023poster

In many real-world applications, graph-structured data used for training and testing have differences in distribution, such as in high energy physics (HEP) where simulation data used for training may not match real experiments. Graph domain adaptation (GDA) is a method used to address these differen…

2022

Better Trigger Inversion Optimization in Backdoor Scanning

CVPR 2022oral

Backdoor attacks aim to cause misclassification of a subject model by stamping a trigger to inputs. Backdoors could be injected through malicious training and naturally exist. Deriving backdoor trigger for a subject model is critical to both attack and defense. A popular trigger inversion method is…

Cited by 104PDFScholar
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

Interpretable and Generalizable Graph Learning via Stochastic Attention Mechanism

ICML 2022spotlight

Interpretable graph learning is in need as many scientific applications depend on learning models to collect insights from graph-structured data. Previous works mostly focused on using post-hoc approaches to interpret pre-trained models (graph neural networks in particular). They argue against inher…

2022

Understanding Non-linearity in Graph Neural Networks from the Bayesian-Inference Perspective

NeurIPS 2022accept

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown superiority in many prediction tasks over graphs due to their impressive capability of capturing nonlinear relations in graph-structured data. However, for node classification tasks, often, only marginal improvement of GNNs has been observed in practice over t…

2022

Unsupervised Learning for Combinatorial Optimization with Principled Objective Relaxation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Using machine learning to solve combinatorial optimization (CO) problems is challenging, especially when the data is unlabeled. This work proposes an unsupervised learning framework for CO problems. Our framework follows the standard relaxation-plus-rounding approach and adopts neural networks to pa…

2021

A Simple Feature Augmentation for Domain Generalization

ICCV 2021poster

The topical domain generalization (DG) problem asks trained models to perform well on an unseen target domain with different data statistics from the source training domains. In computer vision, data augmentation has proven one of the most effective ways of better exploiting the source data to impro…

Cited by 246PDFScholar
2021

Adaptive Universal Generalized PageRank Graph Neural Network

ICLR 2021poster

In many important graph data processing applications the acquired information includes both node features and observations of the graph topology. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are designed to exploit both sources of evidence but they do not optimally trade-off their utility and integrate them in a ma…

2021

Adversarial Graph Augmentation to Improve Graph Contrastive Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Self-supervised learning of graph neural networks (GNN) is in great need because of the widespread label scarcity issue in real-world graph/network data. Graph contrastive learning (GCL), by training GNNs to maximize the correspondence between the representations of the same graph in its different a…

Cited by 408SourcePDFScholar
2021

Generic Neural Architecture Search via Regression

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

Most existing neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms are dedicated to and evaluated by the downstream tasks, e.g., image classification in computer vision. However, extensive experiments have shown that, prominent neural architectures, such as ResNet in computer vision and LSTM in natural langu…

2021

Inductive Representation Learning in Temporal Networks via Causal Anonymous Walks

ICLR 2021poster

Temporal networks serve as abstractions of many real-world dynamic systems. These networks typically evolve according to certain laws, such as the law of triadic closure, which is universal in social networks. Inductive representation learning of temporal networks should be able to capture such laws…

Cited by 327SourcePDFScholar
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…

2021

Striking a Balance Between Stability and Plasticity for Class-Incremental Learning

ICCV 2021poster

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims at continuously updating a trained model with new classes (plasticity) without forgetting previously learned old ones (stability). Contemporary studies resort to storing representative exemplars for rehearsal or preventing consolidated model parameters from drif…

Cited by 71PDFcodeScholar
2020

Distance Encoding: Design Provably More Powerful Neural Networks for Graph Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2020poster

Learning representations of sets of nodes in a graph is crucial for applications ranging from node-role discovery to link prediction and molecule classification. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in graph representation learning. However, expressive power of GNNs is limited by…

2019

$HS^2$: Active learning over hypergraphs with pointwise and pairwise queries

AISTATS 2019poster

We propose a hypergraph-based active learning scheme which we term $HS^2$; $HS^2$ generalizes the previously reported algorithm $S^2$ originally proposed for graph-based active learning with pointwise queries. Our $HS^2$ method can accommodate hypergraph structures and allows one to ask both pointwi…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2019

Conditional Structure Generation through Graph Variational Generative Adversarial Nets

NeurIPS 2019poster

Graph embedding has been intensively studied recently, due to the advance of various neural network models. Theoretical analyses and empirical studies have pushed forward the translation of discrete graph structures into distributed representation vectors, but seldom considered the reverse direction…

2019

Optimizing Generalized PageRank Methods for Seed-Expansion Community Detection

NeurIPS 2019poster

Landing probabilities (LP) of random walks (RW) over graphs encode rich information regarding graph topology. Generalized PageRanks (GPR), which represent weighted sums of LPs of RWs, utilize the discriminative power of LP features to enable many graph-based learning studies. Previous work in the ar…

Cited by 85SourcePDFScholar
2018

Revisiting Decomposable Submodular Function Minimization with Incidence Relations

NeurIPS 2018poster

We introduce a new approach to decomposable submodular function minimization (DSFM) that exploits incidence relations. Incidence relations describe which variables effectively influence the component functions, and when properly utilized, they allow for improving the convergence rates of DSFM solver…

2018

Submodular Hypergraphs: p-Laplacians, Cheeger Inequalities and Spectral Clustering

ICML 2018oral

We introduce submodular hypergraphs, a family of hypergraphs that have different submodular weights associated with different cuts of hyperedges. Submodular hypergraphs arise in cluster- ing applications in which higher-order structures carry relevant information. For such hypergraphs, we define the…