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Rui Hou

27 accepted papers

2026

High Accuracy, Less Talk (HALT): Reliable LLMs through Capability-Aligned Finetuning

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) currently respond to every prompt. However, they can produce incorrect answers when they lack knowledge or capability -- a problem known as hallucination. We instead propose post-training an LLM to generate content only when confident in its correctness and to otherwise…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reinforcing Structured Chain-of-Thought for Video Understanding

CVPR 2026

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promise in video understanding. However, their reasoning often suffers from thinking drift and weak temporal comprehension, even when enhanced by Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Moreover, existing R

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Systematic Examination of Preference Learning through the Lens of Instruction-Following

NAACL 2025long

In this work we systematically investigate how specific attributes of preference datasets affect the alignment and downstream performance of LLMs in instruction-following tasks. We use a novel synthetic data generation pipeline to generate 48,000 unique instruction-following prompts with combination…

2025

Jack of All Trades, Master of None: PMP-Guided Adaptive Multi-Teacher Distillation with Meta-Learning

ICASSP 2025accepted

To enhance the robustness and accuracy of the small model, existing approaches combine adversarial training with knowledge distillation, introducing a comprehensive single-teacher model to improve the performance of the student model (small model). However, due to the limited knowledge of a teacher…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Law of the Weakest Link: Cross Capabilities of Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

The development and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) have largely focused on individual capabilities. However, this overlooks the intersection of multiple abilities across different types of expertise that are often required for real-world tasks, which we term **cross capabilities**. To sy…

2025

Layer Swapping for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer in Large Language Models

ICLR 2025spotlight

Model merging, such as model souping, is the practice of combining different models with the same architecture together without further training. In this work, we present a model merging methodology that addresses the difficulty of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for target tasks in non-Eng…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

LoRATEE: A Secure and Efficient Inference Framework for Multi-Tenant LoRA LLMs Based on TEE

ICASSP 2025accepted

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach that adaptes pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to multi-tenant tasks by generating a variety of LoRA adapters. However, this approach faces significant security challenges and is particularly susceptible to malicious ser…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

RanDoctor: System-Level Ransomware Detection with ProbSparse Self-Attention

ICASSP 2025accepted

Ransomware attacks pose significant threats and have caused substantial economic losses across various industries worldwide. Existing defense mechanisms typically focus on detecting ransomware in environments free from interference by other legitimate programs. However, in real-world applications, r…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SCE: Semantic Consistency Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning

EMNLP 2025

Multi-hop reasoning with reinforcement learning has proven effective in discovering inference paths in incomplete knowledge graphs. However, a major challenge remains: spurious paths (incorrect reasoning paths that accidentally lead to correct answers) often arise due to reward mechanisms that prior

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Self-Generated Critiques Boost Reward Modeling for Language Models

NAACL 2025long

Reward modeling is crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, especially in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, current reward models mainly produce scalar scores and struggle to incorporate critiques in a natural language format. We hypothesize…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2024

Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models

NAACL 2024long

We present an effective recipe to train strong long-context LLMs that are capable of utilizing massive context windows of up to 32,000 tokens. Our models are built through continual pretraining from Llama 2 checkpoints with longer text sequences and on a dataset where long texts are upsampled. We pe…

Cited by 231SourcePDFScholar
2024

Jack of All Tasks Master of Many: Designing General-Purpose Coarse-to-Fine Vision-Language Model

CVPR 2024highlight

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to process visual inputs has given rise to general-purpose vision systems unifying various vision-language (VL) tasks by instruction tuning. However due to the enormous diversity in input-output formats in the vision domain existing general-purpose models…

2024

MART: Improving LLM Safety with Multi-round Automatic Red-Teaming

NAACL 2024long

Red-teaming is a common practice for mitigating unsafe behaviors in Large Language Models (LLMs), which involves thoroughly assessing LLMs to identify potential flaws and addressing them with responsible and accurate responses.While effective, manual red-teaming is costly, and existing automatic red…

Cited by 99SourcePDFScholar
2024

Synergetic Interaction Network with Cross-task Attention for Joint Relational Triple Extraction

COLING 2024main

Joint entity-relation extraction remains a challenging task in information retrieval, given the intrinsic difficulty in modelling the interdependence between named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) sub-tasks. Most existing joint extraction models encode entity and relation featur…

2024

Synergistic Anchored Contrastive Pre-training for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

AAAI 2024technical

Few-shot Relation Extraction (FSRE) aims to extract relational facts from a sparse set of labeled corpora. Recent studies have shown promising results in FSRE by employing Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) within the framework of supervised contrastive learning, which considers both instances and l…

2023

A Study on Knowledge Distillation from Weak Teacher for Scaling Up Pre-trained Language Models

ACL 2023findings

Distillation from Weak Teacher (DWT) is a method of transferring knowledge from a smaller, weaker teacher model to a larger student model to improve its performance. Previous studies have shown that DWT can be effective in the vision domain and natural language processing (NLP) pre-training stage. S…

2023

Co-training and Co-distillation for Quality Improvement and Compression of Language Models

EMNLP 2023long findings

Knowledge Distillation (KD) compresses computationally expensive pre-trained language models (PLMs) by transferring their knowledge to smaller models, allowing their use in resource-constrained or real-time settings. However, most smaller models fail to surpass the performance of the original larger…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Learning Easily Updated General Purpose Text Representations with Adaptable Task-Specific Prefix

EMNLP 2023short findings

Many real-world applications require making multiple predictions from the same text. Fine-tuning a large pre-trained language model for each downstream task causes computational burdens in the inference time due to several times of forward passes. To amortize the computational cost, freezing the lan…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Progressive Prompts: Continual Learning for Language Models

ICLR 2023poster

We introduce Progressive Prompts – a simple and efficient approach for continual learning in language models. Our method allows forward transfer and resists catastrophic forgetting, without relying on data replay or a large number of task-specific parameters. Progressive Prompts learns a new soft pr…

2023

Residual Prompt Tuning: improving prompt tuning with residual reparameterization

ACL 2023findings

Prompt tuning is one of the successful approaches for parameter-efficient tuning of pre-trained language models. Despite being arguably the most parameter-efficient (tuned soft prompts constitute <0.1% of total parameters), it typically performs worse than other efficient tuning methods and is quite…

2023

RoAST: Robustifying Language Models via Adversarial Perturbation with Selective Training

EMNLP 2023long findings

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (LMs) has become the de facto standard in many NLP tasks. Nevertheless, fine-tuned LMs are still prone to robustness issues, such as adversarial robustness and model calibration. Several perspectives of robustness for LMs have been studied independently, but l…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

XLM-V: Overcoming the Vocabulary Bottleneck in Multilingual Masked Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

Large multilingual language models typically rely on a single vocabulary shared across 100+ languages. As these models have increased in parameter count and depth, vocabulary size has remained largely unchanged. This \textit{vocabulary bottleneck} limits the representational capabilities of multilin…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

IDPG: An Instance-Dependent Prompt Generation Method

NAACL 2022long

Prompt tuning is a new, efficient NLP transfer learning paradigm that adds a task-specific prompt in each input instance during the model training stage. It freezes the pre-trained language model and only optimizes a few task-specific prompts. In this paper, we propose a conditional prompt generatio…

Cited by 59SourcePDFScholar
2022

UniPELT: A Unified Framework for Parameter-Efficient Language Model Tuning

ACL 2022long

Recent parameter-efficient language model tuning (PELT) methods manage to match the performance of fine-tuning with much fewer trainable parameters and perform especially well when training data is limited. However, different PELT methods may perform rather differently on the same task, making it no…

2020

Real-Time Panoptic Segmentation From Dense Detections

CVPR 2020oral

Panoptic segmentation is a complex full scene parsing task requiring simultaneous instance and semantic segmentation at high resolution. Current state-of-the-art approaches cannot run in real-time, and simplifying these architectures to improve efficiency severely degrades their accuracy. In this pa…

Cited by 94PDFScholar
2020

Semantically-Guided Representation Learning for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth

ICLR 2020poster

Self-supervised learning is showing great promise for monocular depth estimation, using geometry as the only source of supervision. Depth networks are indeed capable of learning representations that relate visual appearance to 3D properties by implicitly leveraging category-level patterns. In this w…

Cited by 285SourcecodeScholar