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Qingru Zhang

14 accepted papers

2025

Ask a Strong LLM Judge when Your Reward Model is Uncertain

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reward model (RM) plays a pivotal role in reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, classical RMs trained on human preferences are vulnerable to reward hacking and generalize poorly to out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. By contrast, strong…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

DORM: Preference Data Weights Optimization for Reward Modeling in LLM Alignment

EMNLP 2025

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences relies heavily on high-quality reward models. However, existing approaches struggle with two critical challenges: noisy preference labels and the varying importance of preference samples. We introduce DORM, a method that enhances reward mo

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Think-RM: Enabling Long-Horizon Reasoning in Generative Reward Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a powerful post-training paradigm for aligning large language models with human preferences. A core challenge in RLHF is constructing accurate reward signals, where the conventional Bradley-Terry reward models (BT RMs) often suffer from se…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Win Fast or Lose Slow: Balancing Speed and Accuracy in Latency-Sensitive Decisions of LLMs

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across diverse reasoning and generation tasks, and are increasingly deployed as agents in dynamic environments such as code generation and recommendation systems. However, many real-world applications, such as high-frequency trading and…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Robust Reinforcement Learning from Corrupted Human Feedback

NeurIPS 2024poster

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) provides a principled framework for aligning AI systems with human preference data. For various reasons, e.g., personal bias, context ambiguity, lack of training, etc, human annotators may give incorrect or inconsistent preference labels. To tackle…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Tell Your Model Where to Attend: Post-hoc Attention Steering for LLMs

ICLR 2024poster

In human-written articles, we often leverage the subtleties of text style, such as bold and italics, to guide the attention of readers. These textual emphases are vital for the readers to grasp the conveyed information. When interacting with large language models (LLMs), we have a similar need -- s…

2023

Adaptive Budget Allocation for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

ICLR 2023poster

Fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on downstream tasks has become an important paradigm in NLP. However, common practice fine-tunes all of the parameters in a pre-trained model, which becomes prohibitive when a large number of downstream tasks are present. Therefore, many fine-tuning meth…

2023

Efficient Long-Range Transformers: You Need to Attend More, but Not Necessarily at Every Layer

EMNLP 2023long findings

Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. These models leverage the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. However, the (full) attention mechanism incurs high computational cost…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Less is More: Task-aware Layer-wise Distillation for Language Model Compression

ICML 2023poster

Layer-wise distillation is a powerful tool to compress large models (i.e. teacher models) into small ones (i.e., student models). The student distills knowledge from the teacher by mimicking the hidden representations of the teacher at every intermediate layer. However, layer-wise distillation is di…

2023

LoSparse: Structured Compression of Large Language Models based on Low-Rank and Sparse Approximation

ICML 2023poster

Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in various natural language tasks, but they are often prohibitively large, requiring massive memories and computational resources. To re- duce the size and complexity of these models, we propose LoSparse (Low-Rank and Sparse ap- proximation), a nov…

2023

Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Adversarial Regularization: Theoretical Foundation and Stable Algorithms

NeurIPS 2023poster

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has shown promising results across several domains. Despite this promise, MARL policies often lack robustness and are therefore sensitive to small changes in their environment. This presents a serious concern for the real world deployment of MARL algorithms,…

2022

MoEBERT: from BERT to Mixture-of-Experts via Importance-Guided Adaptation

NAACL 2022long

Pre-trained language models have demonstrated superior performance in various natural language processing tasks. However, these models usually contain hundreds of millions of parameters, which limits their practicality because of latency requirements in real-world applications. Existing methods trai…

2022

PLATON: Pruning Large Transformer Models with Upper Confidence Bound of Weight Importance

ICML 2022spotlight

Large Transformer-based models have exhibited superior performance in various natural language processing and computer vision tasks. However, these models contain enormous amounts of parameters, which restrict their deployment to real-world applications. To reduce the model size, researchers prune t…

2021

A Biased Graph Neural Network Sampler with Near-Optimal Regret

NeurIPS 2021poster

Graph neural networks (GNN) have recently emerged as a vehicle for applying deep network architectures to graph and relational data. However, given the increasing size of industrial datasets, in many practical situations, the message passing computations required for sharing information across GNN…