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SHIZHE DIAO

43 accepted papers

2026

BroRL: Scaling Reinforcement Learning via Broadened Exploration

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key ingredient for unlocking complex reasoning capabilities in large language models. Recent work ProRL \citep{liu2025prorl} has shown promise in scaling RL by increasing the number of training steps. However, performance plateau…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Efficient-DLM: From Autoregressive to Diffusion Language Models, and Beyond in Speed

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion language models (dLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm enabling parallel generation, but their learning efficiency lags behind that of autoregressive (AR) language models when trained from scratch. To this end, we study AR-to-dLM conversion, which transforms pretrained AR models into …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Fast-dLLM v2: Efficient Block-Diffusion LLM

ICLR 2026poster

Autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language tasks, yet their inherent sequential decoding limits inference efficiency. In this work, we propose Fast-dLLM v2, a carefully designed block diffusion language model (dLLM) t…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Fast-dLLM: Training-free Acceleration of Diffusion LLM by Enabling KV Cache and Parallel Decoding

ICLR 2026poster

Diffusion-based large language models (Diffusion LLMs) have shown promise for non-autoregressive text generation. However, the practical inference speed of open-sourced Diffusion LLMs often lags behind autoregressive models due to the lack of Key-Value (KV) Cache and quality degradation when decodin…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

GAR: Generative Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Formal Theorem Proving

ICLR 2026poster

Solving math problems through verifiable languages such as Lean has significantly impacted both the mathematics and computer science communities. Current state-of-the-art models are often trained with expensive online Reinforcement Learning (RL) or expert iteration. However, these approaches rely on…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

GDPO: Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization for Multi-reward RL Optimization

ICML 2026poster

As language models become increasingly capable, users expect them to provide not only accurate responses but also behaviors aligned with diverse human preferences across a variety of scenarios. To achieve this, Reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines have begun incorporating multiple rewards, each cap…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Golden Goose: A Simple Trick to Synthesize Unlimited RLVR Tasks from Unverifiable Internet Text

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a cornerstone for unlocking complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, scaling up RL is bottlenecked by limited existing verifiable data, where improvements increasingly saturate over prolonged training. To overcome this, …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining, and many of these …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ProfBench: Multi-Domain Rubrics requiring Professional Knowledge to Answer and Judge

ICLR 2026poster

Evaluating progress in large language models (LLMs) is often constrained by the challenge of verifying responses, limiting assessments to tasks like mathematics, programming, and short-form question-answering. However, many real-world applications require evaluating LLMs in processing professional d…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

ToolOrchestra: Elevating Intelligence via Efficient Model and Tool Orchestration

ICML 2026poster

Large language models are powerful generalists, yet solving deep and complex problems such as those of the Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) remains both conceptually challenging and computationally expensive. We show that small orchestrators managing other models and a variety of tools are able to both pu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Toward More Reliable Agent Evaluation: A Component-Based Benchmark Auditing Pipeline

ICML 2026poster

Reliable evaluation of large language model (LLM) agents depends critically on benchmark validity. However, agent benchmarks are increasingly complex and often contain hidden flaws arising from interactions among user instructions, environments, tools, ground-truth trajectories, and evaluation proto…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

GPAS: Accelerating Convergence of LLM Pretraining via Gradient-Preserving Activation Scaling

NeurIPS 2025poster

Modern Large Language Models, such as the LLaMA, Qwen and DeepSeek series, predominantly adopt the Pre-LayerNorm (Pre-LN) Transformer architecture. While being stable during pretraining and scalable to large model sizes, Pre-LN suffers from an exponential growth in activation variance across layers,…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Grounded-VideoLLM: Sharpening Fine-grained Temporal Grounding in Video Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Despite their impressive performance in coarse-grained video understanding, Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) still face challenges in fine-grained temporal grounding, including ineffective temporal modeling and inadequate timestamp representations. In this work, we introduce Grounded-VideoLL

2025

Hymba: A Hybrid-head Architecture for Small Language Models

ICLR 2025spotlight

We propose Hymba, a family of small language models featuring a hybrid-head parallel architecture that integrates attention mechanisms and state space models (SSMs) within the same layer, offering parallel and complementary processing of the same inputs. In this hybrid-head module, attention heads p…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2025

LongMamba: Enhancing Mamba's Long-Context Capabilities via Training-Free Receptive Field Enlargement

ICLR 2025poster

State space models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to Transformer models for language modeling, offering linear computational complexity and constant memory usage as context length increases. However, despite their efficiency in handling long contexts, recent studies have shown that…

2025

MA-LoT: Model-Collaboration Lean-based Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning enhances Formal Theorem Proving

ICML 2025poster

Solving mathematical problems using computer-verifiable languages like Lean has significantly impacted the mathematical and computer science communities. State-of-the-art methods utilize a single Large Language Model (LLM) to generate complete proof or perform tree search, but they fail to balance t…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Nemotron-CLIMB: Clustering-based Iterative Data Mixture Bootstrapping for Language Model Pre-training

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Pre-training datasets are typically collected from web content and lack inherent domain divisions. For instance, widely used datasets like Common Crawl do not include explicit domain labels, while manually curating labeled datasets such as The Pile is labor-intensive. Consequently, identifying an op…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Nemotron-Flash: Towards Latency-Optimal Hybrid Small Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Efficient deployment of small language models (SLMs) is essential for numerous real-world applications with stringent latency constraints.While previous work on SLM design has primarily focused on reducing the number of parameters to achieve parameter-optimal SLMs, parameter efficiency does not nece…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ProRL: Prolonged Reinforcement Learning Expands Reasoning Boundaries in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in reasoning-centric language models have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a promising method for aligning models with verifiable rewards. However, it remains contentious whether RL truly expands a model’s reasoning capabilities or merely amplifies high-reward outputs alrea…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

UGPhysics: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Undergraduate Physics Reasoning with Large Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex reasoning tasks, particularly in mathematics. However, the domain of physics reasoning presents unique challenges that have received significantly less attention. Existing benchmarks often fall short in evaluat…

2024

Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

The increasing scale of large language models (LLMs) brings emergent abilities to various complex tasks requiring reasoning, such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning. It is known that the effective design of task-specific prompts is critical for LLMs’ ability to produce high-quality answers. In…

Cited by 212SourcePDFScholar
2024

Arithmetic Control of LLMs for Diverse User Preferences: Directional Preference Alignment with Multi-Objective Rewards

ACL 2024long

Fine-grained control over large language models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge, hindering their adaptability to diverse user needs. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) shows promise in aligning LLMs, its reliance on scalar rewards often limits its ability to capture diver…

2024

FIRST: Teach A Reliable Large Language Model Through Efficient Trustworthy Distillation

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent in our daily lives, leading to an expectation for LLMs to be trustworthy —- both accurate and well-calibrated (the prediction confidence should align with its ground truth correctness likelihood). Nowadays, fine-tuning has become the mo…

2024

LISA: Layerwise Importance Sampling for Memory-Efficient Large Language Model Fine-Tuning

NeurIPS 2024poster

The machine learning community has witnessed impressive advancements since large language models (LLMs) first appeared. Yet, their massive memory consumption has become a significant roadblock to large-scale training. For instance, a 7B model typically requires at least 60 GB of GPU memory with full…

2024

LMFlow: An Extensible Toolkit for Finetuning and Inference of Large Foundation Models

NAACL 2024system demonstrations

Foundation models have demonstrated a great ability to achieve general human-level intelligence far beyond traditional approaches. As the technique keeps attracting attention from the AI community, more and more foundation models have become publicly available.However, most of those models exhibit a…

2024

Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF

EMNLP 2024main

LLMs acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. To investigate alignment tax, we conducted experiments with existing RLHF algor…

2024

Plum: Prompt Learning using Metaheuristics

ACL 2024findings

Since the emergence of large language models, prompt learning has become a popular method for optimizing and customizing these models. Special prompts, such as Chain-of-Thought, have even revealed previously unknown reasoning capabilities within these models. However, the progress of discovering eff…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2024

R-Tuning: Instructing Large Language Models to Say ‘I Don’t Know’

NAACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized numerous domains with their impressive performance but still face their challenges. A predominant issue is the propensity for these models to generate non-existent facts, a concern termed hallucination. Our research is motivated by the observation tha…

2024

SaySelf: Teaching LLMs to Express Confidence with Self-Reflective Rationales

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) often generate inaccurate or fabricated information and generally fail to indicate their confidence, which limits their broader applications. Previous work has elicited confidence from LLMs by direct or self-consistency prompting, or constructing specific datasets for su…

2024

The Instinctive Bias: Spurious Images lead to Illusion in MLLMs

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) have recently experienced remarkable progress, where the advent of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has endowed LLMs with visual capabilities, leading to impressive performances in various multi-modal tasks. However, those powerful MLLMs such as GPT-4V still fai…

2024

TheoremLlama: Transforming General-Purpose LLMs into Lean4 Experts

EMNLP 2024main

Proving mathematical theorems using computer-verifiable formal languages like Lean significantly impacts mathematical reasoning. One approach to formal theorem proving involves generating complete proofs using Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Natural Language (NL) proofs. However, due to the sc…

2024

VeraCT Scan: Retrieval-Augmented Fake News Detection with Justifiable Reasoning

ACL 2024system demonstrations

The proliferation of fake news poses a significant threat not only by disseminating misleading information but also by undermining the very foundations of democracy. The recent advance of generative artificial intelligence has further exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine news from fab…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Automatic Prompt Augmentation and Selection with Chain-of-Thought from Labeled Data

EMNLP 2023long findings

Chain-of-thought (CoT) advances the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) and achieves superior performance in complex reasoning tasks. However, most CoT studies rely on carefully designed human-annotated rational chains to prompt LLMs, posing challenges for real-world applications whe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Doolittle: Benchmarks and Corpora for Academic Writing Formalization

EMNLP 2023long main

Improving the quality of academic writing is a meaningful but challenging task. Conventional methods of language refinement focus on narrow, specific linguistic features within isolated sentences, such as grammatical errors and improper word use. We propose a more general task, Academic Writing Form…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters: Decoupling and Injecting Domain Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Models’ Memories

ACL 2023long

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities to understand texts in the generic domain while struggling in a specific domain. Although continued pre-training on a large domain-specific corpus is effective, it is costly to tune all the parameters on the domain. In this paper, we…

2023

On the Difference of BERT-style and CLIP-style Text Encoders

ACL 2023findings

Masked language modeling (MLM) has been one of the most popular pretraining recipes in natural language processing, e.g., BERT, one of the representative models. Recently, contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) has also attracted attention, especially its vision models that achieve excellent…

2023

Towards Unifying Medical Vision-and-Language Pre-Training via Soft Prompts

ICCV 2023poster

Medical vision-and-language pre-training (Med-VLP) has shown promising improvements on many downstream medical tasks owing to its applicability to extracting generic representations from medical images and texts. Practically, there exist two typical types, i.e., the fusion-encoder type and the dual-…

Cited by 39PDFcodeScholar
2023

Write and Paint: Generative Vision-Language Models are Unified Modal Learners

ICLR 2023poster

Recent advances in vision-language pre-training have pushed the state-of-the-art on various vision-language tasks, making machines more capable of multi-modal writing (image-to-text generation) and painting (text-to-image generation). However, few studies investigate if these two essential capabilit…

2022

VLUE: A Multi-Task Multi-Dimension Benchmark for Evaluating Vision-Language Pre-training

ICML 2022spotlight

Recent advances in vision-language pre-training (VLP) have demonstrated impressive performance in a range of vision-language (VL) tasks. However, there exist several challenges for measuring the community’s progress in building general multi-modal intelligence. First, most of the downstream VL datas…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2021

Efficient Neural Network Training via Forward and Backward Propagation Sparsification

NeurIPS 2021poster

Sparse training is a natural idea to accelerate the training speed of deep neural networks and save the memory usage, especially since large modern neural networks are significantly over-parameterized. However, most of the existing methods cannot achieve this goal in practice because the chain rule…

2021

Taming Pre-trained Language Models with N-gram Representations for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation

ACL 2021long

Large pre-trained models such as BERT are known to improve different downstream NLP tasks, even when such a model is trained on a generic domain. Moreover, recent studies have shown that when large domain-specific corpora are available, continued pre-training on domain-specific data can further impr…