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Ping Yu

14 accepted papers

2026

Hybrid Reinforcement: when reward is sparse, better to be dense

ICLR 2026poster

Post-training for reasoning in large language models has increasingly relied on verifiable rewards: deterministic checkers that provide $0$–$1$ correctness signals. While reliable, such binary feedback is brittle—many tasks admit partially correct or alternative answers that verifiers under-credit,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

J1: Incentivizing Thinking in LLM-as-a-Judge via Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

The progress of AI is bottlenecked by the quality of evaluation, making powerful LLM-as-a-Judge models a core solution. The efficacy of these judges depends on their chain-of-thought reasoning, creating a critical need for methods that can effectively optimize this reasoning process. In this work, w…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

RESTRAIN: From Spurious Votes to Signals — Self-Training RL with Self-Penalization

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning with human-annotated data has boosted chain-of-thought reasoning in large reasoning models, but these gains come at high costs in labeled data while faltering on harder tasks. A natural next step is experience-driven learning, where models improve without curated labels by ada…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Efficient Tool Use with Chain-of-Abstraction Reasoning

COLING 2025main

To achieve faithful reasoning that aligns with human expectations, large language models (LLMs) need to ground their reasoning to real-world knowledge (e.g., web facts, math and physical rules). Tools help LLMs access this external knowledge, but there remains challenges for fine-tuning LLM agents (…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar
2025

Following Length Constraints in Instructions

EMNLP 2025

Aligned instruction following models can better fulfill user requests than their unaligned counterparts. However, it has been shown that there is a length bias in evaluation of such models, and that training algorithms tend to exploit this bias by learning longer responses. In this work we show how

2025

R.I.P.: Better Models by Survival of the Fittest Prompts

ICML 2025poster

Training data quality is one of the most important drivers of final model quality. In this work, we introduce a method for evaluating data integrity based on the assumption that low-quality input prompts result in high variance and low quality responses. This is achieved by measuring the rejected re…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Self-Alignment with Instruction Backtranslation

ICLR 2024oral

We present a scalable method to build a high quality instruction following language model by automatically labelling human-written text with corresponding instructions. Our approach, named instruction backtranslation, starts with a language model finetuned on a small amount of seed data, and a given…

Cited by 230SourcePDFScholar
2024

The ART of LLM Refinement: Ask, Refine, and Trust

NAACL 2024long

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generative abilities, but can they judge the quality of their own generations and self-improve?A popular concept, referred to as *self-refinement*, postulates that LLMs can detect and correct the errors in their generations when asked to do s…

2023

ALERT: Adapt Language Models to Reasoning Tasks

ACL 2023long

Recent advancements in large language models have enabled them to perform well on complex tasks that require step-by-step reasoning with few-shot learning. However, it is unclear whether these models are applying reasoning skills they have learnt during pre-training , or if they are simply memorizin…

2020

Bayesian Meta Sampling for Fast Uncertainty Adaptation

ICLR 2020poster

Meta learning has been making impressive progress for fast model adaptation. However, limited work has been done on learning fast uncertainty adaption for Bayesian modeling. In this paper, we propose to achieve the goal by placing meta learning on the space of probability measures, inducing the conc…

Cited by 25SourcecodeScholar
2020

Feature Quantization Improves GAN Training

ICML 2020poster

The instability in GANs’ training has been a long-standing problem despite remarkable research efforts. We identify that instability issues stem from difficulties of performing feature matching with mini-batch statistics, due to a fragile balance between the fixed target distribution and the progres…