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Ruotian Ma

19 accepted papers

2026

RLVER: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Emotion Rewards for Empathetic Agents

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) excel at logical and algorithmic reasoning, yet their emotional intelligence (EQ) still lags far behind their cognitive prowess. While reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced in other domains, its application to dialogue—especially for emotion…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Think Fast and Slow: Step-Level Cognitive Depth Adaptation for LLM Agents

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-turn decision-making tasks. However, current agents typically rely on fixed cognitive patterns: non-thinking models generate immediate responses, while thinking models engage in deep reasoning uniformly. This rigid…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning

ACL 2025long

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of LLM test-time scaling. However, existing approaches to incentivize LLMs’ deep thinking abilities generally require large-scale data or significant training efforts. Meanwhile, it remains unclear how to improve the thinking abilities of less power…

2025

SPC: Evolving Self-Play Critic via Adversarial Games for LLM Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Evaluating the step-by-step reliability of large language model (LLM) reasoning, such as Chain-of-Thought, remains challenging due to the difficulty and cost of obtaining high-quality step-level supervision. In this paper, we introduce Self-Play Critic (SPC), a novel approach where a critic model ev…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Two Experts Are All You Need for Steering Thinking: Reinforcing Cognitive Effort in MoE Reasoning Models Without Additional Training

NeurIPS 2025poster

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures within Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive reasoning capabilities by selectively activating experts to facilitate structured cognitive processes. Despite notable advances, existing reasoning models often suffer from cognitive inefficiencies l…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Making Harmful Behaviors Unlearnable for Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential to empower various domains and are often customized by fine-tuning for the requirements of different applications. However, the powerful learning ability of LLMs not only enables them to learn new tasks but also makes them vulnerable to learnin…

2024

Unveiling and Consulting Core Experts in Retrieval-Augmented MoE-based LLMs

EMNLP 2024main

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly improved the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. While existing research seeks to enhance RAG performance by retrieving higher-quality documents or designing RAG-specific LLMs, the internal mechanisms within L…

2023

Coarse-to-fine Few-shot Learning for Named Entity Recognition

ACL 2023findings

Recently, Few-shot Named Entity Recognition has received wide attention with the growing need for NER models to learn new classes with minimized annotation costs. However, one common yet understudied situation is to transfer a model trained with coarse-grained classes to recognize fine-grained class…

2023

Learning “O” Helps for Learning More: Handling the Unlabeled Entity Problem for Class-incremental NER

ACL 2023long

As the categories of named entities rapidly increase, the deployed NER models are required to keep updating toward recognizing more entity types, creating a demand for class-incremental learning for NER. Considering the privacy concerns and storage constraints, the standard paradigm for class-increm…

2023

TextMixer: Mixing Multiple Inputs for Privacy-Preserving Inference

EMNLP 2023long findings

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are often deployed as cloud services, enabling users to upload textual data and perform inference remotely. However, users' personal text often contains sensitive information, and sharing such data directly with the service providers can lead to serious privacy l…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

TextObfuscator: Making Pre-trained Language Model a Privacy Protector via Obfuscating Word Representations

ACL 2023findings

In real-world applications, pre-trained language models are typically deployed on the cloud, allowing clients to upload data and perform compute-intensive inference remotely. To avoid sharing sensitive data directly with service providers, clients can upload numerical representations rather than pla…

2023

Towards Building More Robust NER datasets: An Empirical Study on NER Dataset Bias from a Dataset Difficulty View

EMNLP 2023long main

Recently, many studies have illustrated the robustness problem of Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems: the NER models often rely on superficial entity patterns for predictions, without considering evidence from the context. Consequently, even state-of-the-art NER models generalize poorly to out-o…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Difference in Multilingual BERT: How Good is It and How Does It Affect Transfer?

EMNLP 2022main

Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has demonstrated considerable cross-lingual syntactic ability, whereby it enables effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer of syntactic knowledge. The transfer is more successful between some languages, but it is not well understood what leads to this variation and whethe…

2022

Making Parameter-efficient Tuning More Efficient: A Unified Framework for Classification Tasks

COLING 2022main

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated superior performance in industrial applications. Recent studies have explored parameter-efficient PLM tuning, which only updates a small amount of task-specific parameters while achieving both high efficiency and comparable performance again…

2022

Searching for Optimal Subword Tokenization in Cross-domain NER

IJCAI 2022poster

Input distribution shift is one of the vital problems in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). The most popular UDA approaches focus on domain-invariant representation learning, trying to align the features from different domains into a similar feature distribution. However, these approaches ignore…

2022

Template-free Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER

NAACL 2022long

Prompt-based methods have been successfully applied in sentence-level few-shot learning tasks, mostly owing to the sophisticated design of templates and label words. However, when applied to token-level labeling tasks such as NER, it would be time-consuming to enumerate the template queries over all…

2022

TextFusion: Privacy-Preserving Pre-trained Model Inference via Token Fusion

EMNLP 2022main

Recently, more and more pre-trained language models are released as a cloud service. It allows users who lack computing resources to perform inference with a powerful model by uploading data to the cloud. The plain text may contain private information, as the result, users prefer to do partial compu…

2021

Backdoor Attacks on Pre-trained Models by Layerwise Weight Poisoning

EMNLP 2021main

Pre-Trained Models have been widely applied and recently proved vulnerable under backdoor attacks: the released pre-trained weights can be maliciously poisoned with certain triggers. When the triggers are activated, even the fine-tuned model will predict pre-defined labels, causing a security threat…

Cited by 143SourcePDFScholar
2021

SENT: Sentence-level Distant Relation Extraction via Negative Training

ACL 2021long

Distant supervision for relation extraction provides uniform bag labels for each sentence inside the bag, while accurate sentence labels are important for downstream applications that need the exact relation type. Directly using bag labels for sentence-level training will introduce much noise, thus…