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Siyan Zhao

11 accepted papers

2026

Inpainting-Guided Policy Optimization for Diffusion Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Masked diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as promising alternatives to autoregressive LLMs, offering competitive performance while supporting unique generation capabilities such as inpainting. We explore how inpainting can inform RL algorithm design for dLLMs. Aligning LLMs with re…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

SPG: Sandwiched Policy Gradient for Masked Diffusion Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) are emerging as an efficient alternative to autoregressive models due to their ability to decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, aligning dLLMs with human preferences or task-specific rewards via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging because their i…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Knowledge distillation improves large language model (LLM) reasoning by compressing the knowledge of a teacher LLM to train smaller LLMs. On-policy distillation advances this approach by having the student sample its own trajectories while a teacher LLM provides dense token-level supervision, addres…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Do LLMs Recognize Your Preferences? Evaluating Personalized Preference Following in LLMs

ICLR 2025oral

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as chatbots, yet their ability to personalize responses to user preferences remains limited. We introduce PrefEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to infer, memorize and adhere to user preferences in long-context conversational setting…

2025

MedMax: Mixed-Modal Instruction Tuning for Training Biomedical Assistants

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advancements in mixed-modal generative have opened new avenues for developing unified biomedical assistants capable of analyzing biomedical images, answering complex questions about them, and generating multimodal patient reports. However, existing datasets face challenges such as small sizes…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Prepacking: A Simple Method for Fast Prefilling and Increased Throughput in Large Language Models

AISTATS 2025poster

During inference for transformer-based large language models (LLM), prefilling is the computation of the key-value (KV) cache for input tokens in the prompt prior to autoregressive generation. For longer input prompt lengths, prefilling will incur a significant overhead on decoding time. In this wor…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

d1: Scaling Reasoning in Diffusion Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities that benefits from online reinforcement learning (RL). These capabilities have primarily been demonstrated within the left-to-right autoregressive (AR) generation paradigm. In contrast, non-autoregressive paradigms…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Group Preference Optimization: Few-Shot Alignment of Large Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Many applications of large language models (LLMs), ranging from chatbots to creative writing, require nuanced subjective judgments that can differ significantly across different groups. Existing alignment algorithms can be expensive to align for each group, requiring prohibitive amounts of group-spe…

2024

Probing the Decision Boundaries of In-context Learning in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

In-context learning is an emergent paradigm in large language models (LLMs) that enables them to generalize to new tasks and domains by simply prompting these models with a few exemplars without explicit parameter updates. Many attempts have been made to understand in-context learning in LLMs as a f…

2023

Decision Stacks: Flexible Reinforcement Learning via Modular Generative Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Reinforcement learning presents an attractive paradigm to reason about several distinct aspects of sequential decision making, such as specifying complex goals, planning future observations and actions, and critiquing their utilities. However, the combined integration of these capabilities poses com…