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Shikun Zhang

68 accepted papers

2026

ASKD: Reinforcement Learning-Style Knowledge Distillation with Quality-Adaptive Skewness

AAAI 2026technical

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely adopted technique for transferring the capabilities of large teacher models to smaller student models, thereby significantly reducing inference costs and memory consumption. However, existing KD methods are all constrained by an inherent greedy optimization ob

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Fresco: Frequency-Spatial Consistent Optimization for Fine-Grained Head Avatar Modeling

CVPR 2026

We propose Fresco, a unified optimization pipeline designed to mitigate early over-sharpening, and cross-view drifting in head avatar reconstruction. Fresco combines a Laplacian-pyramid-based frequency curriculum with UV-space consistency regularization to progressively enhance reconstruction qualit

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

From Blind Spots to Gains: Diagnostic-Driven Iterative Training for Large Multimodal Models

ICML 2026poster

As Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) scale up and reinforcement learning (RL) methods mature, LMMs have made notable progress in complex reasoning and decision making. Yet training still relies on static data and fixed recipes, making it difficult to diagnose capability blind spots or provide dynamic, …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Modeling Uncertainty Trends for Timely Retrieval in Dynamic RAG

AAAI 2026technical

Dynamic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows large language models (LLMs) to fetch external knowledge on demand, offering greater adaptability than static RAG. A central challenge in this setting lies in determining the optimal timing for retrieval. Existing methods often trigger retrieval ba

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Rethinking the Sampling Criteria in Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning: A Competence-Difficulty Alignment Perspective

AAAI 2026technical

The low sampling efficiency during the rollout phase poses a significant challenge to scaling reinforcement learning for large language model reasoning. Existing methods attempt to improve efficiency by scheduling problems based on problem difficulties. However, these approaches suffer from unstabl

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Tailoring the Training: Difficulty-Aware Learning Strategy Allocation for Large Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Although reinforcement learning (RL) enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), it is primarily learned from the model's self-generated distribution, limiting its ability to acquire reasoning skills beyond its initial knowledge. To overcome this, we propose a Difficulty-Awa…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Temporal Self-Rewarding Language Models: Decoupling Chosen-Rejected via Past-Future

ICML 2026poster

Self-Rewarding Language Models propose an architecture in which the Large Language Models(LLMs) both generates responses and evaluates its own outputs via LLM-as-a-Judge prompting, dynamically improving its generative capabilities through iterative Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). However, our …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

TrustJudge: Inconsistencies of LLM-as-a-Judge and How to Alleviate Them

ICLR 2026poster

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) as automated evaluators (LLM-as-a-judge) has revealed critical inconsistencies in current evaluation frameworks. We identify two fundamental types of inconsistencies: (1) \textit{Score-Comparison Inconsistency}, where lower-rated responses outperform high…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

What Do Agents Learn from Trajectory-SFT: Semantics or Interfaces?

ICML 2026spotlight

Large language models are increasingly evaluated as interactive agents, yet standard agent benchmarks conflate two qualitatively distinct sources of success: semantic tool-use and interface-specific interaction pattern memorization. Because both mechanisms can yield identical task success on the ori…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

All-Optical Nonlinear Diffractive Deep Network for Ultrafast Image Denoising

CVPR 2025highlight

Image denoising poses a significant challenge in image processing, aiming to remove noise and artifacts from input images. However, current denoising algorithms implemented on electronic chips frequently encounter latency issues and demand substantial computational resources. In this paper, we intro…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Boosting Resilience of Large Language Models through Causality-Driven Robust Optimization

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable achievements across diverse applications; however, they remain plagued by spurious correlations and the generation of hallucinated content. Despite extensive efforts to enhance the resilience of LLMs, existing approaches either rely on indiscrimi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Can You Really Trust Code Copilot? Evaluating Large Language Models from a Code Security Perspective

ACL 2025long

Code security and usability are both essential for various coding assistant applications driven by large language models (LLMs). Current code security benchmarks focus solely on single evaluation task and paradigm, such as code completion and generation, lacking comprehensive assessment across dimen…

2025

GETMusic: Generating Music Tracks with a Unified Representation and Diffusion Framework

IJCAI 2025

Symbolic music generation aims to create musical notes, which can help users compose music, such as generating target instrument tracks based on provided source tracks. In practical scenarios where there’s a predefined ensemble of tracks and various composition needs, an efficient and effective gene

2025

HaDeMiF: Hallucination Detection and Mitigation in Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

The phenomenon of knowledge hallucinations has raised substantial concerns about the security and reliability of deployed large language models (LLMs). Current methods for detecting hallucinations primarily depend on manually designed individual metrics, such as prediction uncertainty and consistenc…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MPL: Multiple Programming Languages with Large Language Models for Information Extraction

ACL 2025finding

Recent research in information extraction (IE) focuses on utilizing code-style inputs to enhance structured output generation. The intuition behind this is that the programming languages (PLs) inherently exhibit greater structural organization than natural languages (NLs). This structural advantage…

2025

Reasoning Through Execution: Unifying Process and Outcome Rewards for Code Generation

ICML 2025poster

Large Language Models excel at code generation yet struggle with complex programming tasks that demand sophisticated reasoning. To bridge this gap, traditional process supervision relies on learned reward models requiring costly training data and suffering from reward misalignment, while outcome su…

2025

SAEMark: Steering Personalized Multilingual LLM Watermarks with Sparse Autoencoders

NeurIPS 2025poster

Watermarking LLM-generated text is critical for content attribution and misinformation prevention, yet existing methods compromise text quality and require white-box model access with logit manipulation or training, which exclude API-based models and multilingual scenarios. We propose SAEMark, an **…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SampleMix: A Sample-wise Pre-training Data Mixing Strategy by Coordinating Data Quality and Diversity

EMNLP 2025

Existing pretraining data mixing methods for large language models (LLMs) typically follow a domain-wise methodology, a top-down process that first determines domain weights and then performs uniform data sampling across each domain. However, these approaches neglect significant inter-domain overlap

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Supportiveness-based Knowledge Rewriting for Retrieval-augmented Language Modeling

NAACL 2025findings

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) have recently shown great potential in mitigating the limitations of implicit knowledge in LLMs, such as untimely updating of the latest expertise and unreliable retention of long-tail knowledge. However, since the external knowledge base, as well as the r…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

SymDPO: Boosting In-Context Learning of Large Multimodal Models with Symbol Demonstration Direct Preference Optimization

CVPR 2025poster

As language models continue to scale, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited emerging capabilities in In-Context Learning (ICL), enabling them to solve language tasks by prefixing a few in-context demonstrations (ICDs) as context. Inspired by these advancements, researchers have extended these…

2025

VLM-R³: Region Recognition, Reasoning, and Refinement for Enhanced Multimodal Chain-of-Thought

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recently, reasoning-based MLLMs have achieved a degree of success in generating long-form textual reasoning chains. However, they still struggle with complex tasks that necessitate dynamic and iterative focusing on and revisiting of visual regions to achieve precise grounding of textual reasoning in…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

AutoSurvey: Large Language Models Can Automatically Write Surveys

NeurIPS 2024poster

This paper introduces AutoSurvey, a speedy and well-organized methodology for automating the creation of comprehensive literature surveys in rapidly evolving fields like artificial intelligence. Traditional survey paper creation faces challenges due to the vast volume and complexity of information,…

2024

Boosting Model Resilience via Implicit Adversarial Data Augmentation

IJCAI 2024poster

Data augmentation plays a pivotal role in enhancing and diversifying training data. Nonetheless, consistently improving model performance in varied learning scenarios, especially those with inherent data biases, remains challenging. To address this, we propose to augment the deep features of samples…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Enhancing In-Context Learning via Implicit Demonstration Augmentation

ACL 2024long

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) enables large pre-trained language models (PLMs) to make predictions for unseen inputs without updating parameters. Despite its potential, ICL’s effectiveness heavily relies on the quality, quantity, and permutation of demonstrations, commonly leading to su…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

FreeEval: A Modular Framework for Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation of Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024system demonstrations

The rapid growth of evaluation methodologies and datasets for large language models (LLMs) has created a pressing need for their unified integration. Meanwhile, concerns about data contamination and bias compromise the trustworthiness of evaluation findings, while the efficiency of evaluation proces…

2024

Hallucination Augmented Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Large Language Model

CVPR 2024poster

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have been shown to efficiently integrate natural language with visual information to handle multi-modal tasks. However MLLMs still face a fundamental limitation of hallucinations where they tend to generate erroneous or fabricated information. In this paper…

2024

KIEval: A Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

Automatic evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs) are hindered by data contamination, leading to inflated assessments of their effectiveness. Existing strategies, which aim to detect contaminated texts, focus on quantifying contamination status instead of accurately gauging model perform…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2024

Labels Need Prompts Too: Mask Matching for Natural Language Understanding Tasks

AAAI 2024technical

Textual label names (descriptions) are typically semantically rich in many natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this paper, we incorporate the prompting methodology, which is widely used to enrich model input, into the label side for the first time. Specifically, we propose a Mask Matching…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

MaVEn: An Effective Multi-granularity Hybrid Visual Encoding Framework for Multimodal Large Language Model

NeurIPS 2024poster

This paper presents MaVEn, an innovative Multi-granularity Visual Encoding framework designed to enhance the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in multi-image reasoning. Current MLLMs primarily focus on single-image visual understanding, limiting their ability to interpret and…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

NaturalSpeech 3: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis with Factorized Codec and Diffusion Models

ICML 2024oral

While recent large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models have achieved significant progress, they still fall shorts in speech quality, similarity, and prosody. Considering that speech intricately encompasses various attributes (e.g., content, prosody, timbre, and acoustic details) that pose significant…

Cited by 172SourcePDFScholar
2024

PURE: Aligning LLM via Pluggable Query Reformulation for Enhanced Helpfulness

EMNLP 2024finding

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences is a significant challenge. Training-based methods, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO), require substantial resources and are impractical for API-based LLMs. Post-p…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

PandaLM: An Automatic Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Instruction Tuning Optimization

ICLR 2024poster

Instruction tuning large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging task, owing to the complexity of hyperparameter selection and the difficulty involved in evaluating the tuned models. To determine the optimal hyperparameters, an automatic, robust, and reliable evaluation benchmark is essential.…

2024

RAGLAB: A Modular and Research-Oriented Unified Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

EMNLP 2024system demonstrations

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate human-level capabilities in dialogue, reasoning, and knowledge retention. However, even the most advanced LLMs face challenges such as hallucinations and real-time updating of their knowledge. Current research addresses this bottleneck by equipping LLMs with…

2024

Refining Corpora from a Model Calibration Perspective for Chinese Spelling Correction

ACL 2024findings

Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) commonly lacks large-scale high-quality corpora, due to the labor-intensive labeling of spelling errors in real-life human writing or typing scenarios. Two data augmentation methods are widely adopted: (1) *Random Replacement* with the guidance of confusion sets and…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

SG-Bench: Evaluating LLM Safety Generalization Across Diverse Tasks and Prompt Types

NeurIPS 2024poster

Ensuring the safety of large language model (LLM) applications is essential for developing trustworthy artificial intelligence. Current LLM safety benchmarks have two limitations. First, they focus solely on either discriminative or generative evaluation paradigms while ignoring their interconnectio…

2024

TiMix: Text-Aware Image Mixing for Effective Vision-Language Pre-training

AAAI 2024technical

Self-supervised Multi-modal Contrastive Learning (SMCL) remarkably advances modern Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models by aligning visual and linguistic modalities. Due to noises in web-harvested text-image pairs, however, scaling up training data volume in SMCL presents considerable obstacles…

2024

What Makes a Good Order of Examples in In-Context Learning

ACL 2024findings

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning capabilities via in-context learning (ICL), ICL performance is known to be highly sensitive to the order of examples provided. To identify appropriate orders, recent studies propose heuristic methods to evaluate ord…

2023

BUS: Efficient and Effective Vision-Language Pre-Training with Bottom-Up Patch Summarization.

ICCV 2023poster

Vision Transformer (ViT) based Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models recently demonstrated impressive performance in various tasks. However, the lengthy visual token sequences used in these models can lead to inefficient and ineffective performance. Existing methods to address these issues lack t…

Cited by 7PDFScholar
2023

Exploiting Pseudo Image Captions for Multimodal Summarization

ACL 2023findings

Multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO) faces a challenging semantic gap between visual and textual modalities due to the lack of reference images for training. Our pilot investigation indicates that image captions, which naturally connect texts and images, can significantly benefit M…

2023

IDEA: An Invariant Perspective for Efficient Domain Adaptive Image Retrieval

NeurIPS 2023poster

In this paper, we investigate the problem of unsupervised domain adaptive hashing, which leverage knowledge from a label-rich source domain to expedite learning to hash on a label-scarce target domain. Although numerous existing approaches attempt to incorporate transfer learning techniques into dee…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Improving Knowledge Graph Completion with Generative Hard Negative Mining

ACL 2023findings

Contrastive learning has recently shown great potential to improve text-based knowledge graph completion (KGC). In this paper, we propose to learn a more semantically structured entity representation space in text-based KGC via hard negatives mining. Specifically, we novelly leverage a sequence-to-s…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

Parameter-efficient Tuning of Large-scale Multimodal Foundation Model

NeurIPS 2023poster

Driven by the progress of large-scale pre-training, parameter-efficient transfer learning has gained immense popularity across different subfields of Artificial Intelligence. The core is to adapt the model to downstream tasks with only a small set of parameters. Recently, researchers have leveraged…

2023

Prototypical Mixing and Retrieval-Based Refinement for Label Noise-Resistant Image Retrieval

ICCV 2023poster

Label noise is pervasive in real-world applications, which influences the optimization of neural network models. This paper investigates a realistic but understudied problem of image retrieval under label noise, which could lead to severe overfitting or memorization of noisy samples during optimizat…

Cited by 5PDFcodeScholar
2023

Reviewing Labels: Label Graph Network with Top-k Prediction Set for Relation Extraction

AAAI 2023technical

The typical way for relation extraction is fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on task-specific datasets, then selecting the label with the highest probability of the output distribution as the final prediction. However, the usage of the Top-k prediction set for a given sample is commonly…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2023

Sequence Generation with Label Augmentation for Relation Extraction

AAAI 2023technical

Sequence generation demonstrates promising performance in recent information extraction efforts, by incorporating large-scale pre-trained Seq2Seq models. This paper investigates the merits of employing sequence generation in relation extraction, finding that with relation names or synonyms as genera…

2023

Vision Language Pre-training by Contrastive Learning with Cross-Modal Similarity Regulation

ACL 2023long

In this paper, we reconsider the problem of (partial) false negative samples from the Mutual Information (MI) Maximization perspective, the traditional contrastive loss (like InfoNCE loss) will equally push away the anchor of all positive samples and negative samples regardless of their possible sem…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Exploiting Hybrid Semantics of Relation Paths for Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

COLING 2022main

Answering natural language questions on knowledge graphs (KGQA) remains a great challenge in terms of understanding complex questions via multi-hop reasoning. Previous efforts usually exploit large-scale entity-related text corpus or knowledge graph (KG) embeddings as auxiliary information to facili…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

Frequency-Aware Contrastive Learning for Neural Machine Translation

AAAI 2022technical

Low-frequency word prediction remains a challenge in modern neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Recent adaptive training methods promote the output of infrequent words by emphasizing their weights in the overall training objectives. Despite the improved recall of low-frequency words, their pre…

2022

Museformer: Transformer with Fine- and Coarse-Grained Attention for Music Generation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Symbolic music generation aims to generate music scores automatically. A recent trend is to use Transformer or its variants in music generation, which is, however, suboptimal, because the full attention cannot efficiently model the typically long music sequences (e.g., over 10,000 tokens), and the e…

2022

TRIPS: Efficient Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Text-Relevant Image Patch Selection

EMNLP 2022main

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have been widely used in large-scale Vision and Language Pre-training (VLP) models. Though previous VLP works have proved the effectiveness of ViTs, they still suffer from computational efficiency brought by the long visual sequence. To tackle this problem, in this paper,…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2021

Capturing Event Argument Interaction via A Bi-Directional Entity-Level Recurrent Decoder

ACL 2021long

Capturing interactions among event arguments is an essential step towards robust event argument extraction (EAE). However, existing efforts in this direction suffer from two limitations: 1) The argument role type information of contextual entities is mainly utilized as training signals, ignoring the…

2021

Improving Embedding-based Large-scale Retrieval via Label Enhancement

EMNLP 2021finding

Current embedding-based large-scale retrieval models are trained with 0-1 hard label that indicates whether a query is relevant to a document, ignoring rich information of the relevance degree. This paper proposes to improve embedding-based retrieval from the perspective of better characterizing the…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2021

Improving Event Detection by Exploiting Label Hierarchy

ICASSP 2021accepted

Event types are hierarchical, yet most existing methods for event detection classify candidate triggers into fine-grained event types directly, without considering the rich semantic correlations in the hierarchy of event types. To fully utilize such information to improve the detection of fine-grain…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Multi-Hop Transformer for Document-Level Machine Translation

NAACL 2021long

Document-level neural machine translation (NMT) has proven to be of profound value for its effectiveness on capturing contextual information. Nevertheless, existing approaches 1) simply introduce the representations of context sentences without explicitly characterizing the inter-sentence reasoning…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2021

Multi-view Inference for Relation Extraction with Uncertain Knowledge

AAAI 2021technical

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are widely used to facilitate relation extraction (RE) tasks. While most previous RE methods focus on leveraging deterministic KGs, uncertain KGs, which assign a confidence score for each relation instance, can provide prior probability distributions of relational facts as val…

2021

Point, Disambiguate and Copy: Incorporating Bilingual Dictionaries for Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2021long

This paper proposes a sophisticated neural architecture to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. By introducing three novel components: Pointer, Disambiguator, and Copier, our method PDC achieves the following merits inherently compared with previous effort…

2021

QuadrupletBERT: An Efficient Model For Embedding-Based Large-Scale Retrieval

NAACL 2021long

The embedding-based large-scale query-document retrieval problem is a hot topic in the information retrieval (IR) field. Considering that pre-trained language models like BERT have achieved great success in a wide variety of NLP tasks, we present a QuadrupletBERT model for effective and efficient re…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2021

SongMASS: Automatic Song Writing with Pre-training and Alignment Constraint

AAAI 2021technical

Automatic song writing aims to compose a song (lyric and/or melody) by machine, which is an interesting topic in both academia and industry. In automatic song writing, lyric-to-melody generation and melody-to-lyric generation are two important tasks, both of which usually suffer from the following c…

2021

Unsupervised Out-of-Domain Detection via Pre-trained Transformers

ACL 2021long

Deployed real-world machine learning applications are often subject to uncontrolled and even potentially malicious inputs. Those out-of-domain inputs can lead to unpredictable outputs and sometimes catastrophic safety issues. Prior studies on out-of-domain detection require in-domain task labels and…

2020

Graph Enhanced Dual Attention Network for Document-Level Relation Extraction

COLING 2020main

Document-level relation extraction requires inter-sentence reasoning capabilities to capture local and global contextual information for multiple relational facts. To improve inter-sentence reasoning, we propose to characterize the complex interaction between sentences and potential relation instanc…

Cited by 83SourcePDFScholar
2020

Stacking Networks Dynamically for Image Restoration Based on the Plug-and-Play Framework

ECCV 2020poster

Recently, stacked networks show powerful performance in Image Restoration, such as challenging motion deblurring problems. However, the number of stacking levels is a hyper-parameter fine-tuned manually, making the stacking levels static during training without theoretical explanations for optimal s…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2019

Long Text Analysis Using Sliced Recurrent Neural Networks with Breaking Point Information Enrichment

ICASSP 2019accepted

Sliced recurrent neural networks (SRNNs) are the state-of-the-art efficient solution for long text analysis tasks; however, their slicing operations inevitably result in long-term dependency loss in lower-level networks and thus limit their accuracy. Therefore, we propose a breaking point informatio…

Cited by 0SourceScholar