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Songyang Gao

24 accepted papers

2026

Achieving Expert-Level Agent from Foundation Model via Complexity Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Synthetic Data

ICLR 2026poster

Large language model (LLM) agents exhibit strong mathematical problem-solving abilities and can even solve International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) level problems with the assistance of formal proof systems. However, due to weak heuristics for auxiliary constructions, AI for geometry problem solvin…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Imitation Game: Turing Machine Imitator is Length Generalizable Reasoner

ICLR 2026poster

Length generalization, the ability to solve problems of longer sequences than those observed during training, poses a core challenge of Transformer-based large language models (LLMs). Although existing studies have predominantly focused on data-driven approaches for particular arithmetic operations…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ThoughtFold: Folding Reasoning Chains via Introspective Preference Learning

ICML 2026poster

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable progress thanks to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) on Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs). However, since long CoTs naturally contain trial and errors and mainstream RLVR approaches choose outcome-correct CoT trajectories for memoriza…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising foundation to build generally-capable agents (LLM-based agents) that can handle multi-turn decision-making tasks across various environments. However, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for com…

2025

Alleviating Shifted Distribution in Human Preference Alignment through Meta-Learning

AAAI 2025technical

The capability of the reward model (RM) is crucial for the success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in aligning with human preferences. However, as training progresses, the output space distribution of the policy model shifts. The RM, initially trained on responses sampled from t…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Are Your LLMs Capable of Stable Reasoning?

ACL 2025finding

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has shown remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks. However, a significant disparity exists between benchmark performances and real-world applications. We attribute this gap primarily to current evaluation protocols and metrics, which inade…

2025

Capability Salience Vector: Fine-grained Alignment of Loss and Capabilities for Downstream Task Scaling Law

ACL 2025long

Scaling law builds the relationship between training computation and validation loss, enabling researchers to effectively predict the loss trending of models across different levels of computation. However, a gap still remains between validation loss and the model’s downstream capabilities, making i…

2025

CompassVerifier: A Unified and Robust Verifier for LLMs Evaluation and Outcome Reward

EMNLP 2025

Answer verification is crucial not only for evaluating large language models (LLMs) by matching their unstructured outputs against standard answers, but also serves as the reward model to guide LLM optimization. Most evaluation frameworks rely on regularized matching or employ general LLMs for answe

2025

Pre-Trained Policy Discriminators are General Reward Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

We offer a novel perspective on reward modeling by formulating it as a policy discriminator, which quantifies the difference between two policies to generate a reward signal, guiding the training policy towards a target policy with desired behaviors. Based on this conceptual insight, we propose a sc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Semi-off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language Slow-Thinking Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Enhancing large vision-language models (LVLMs) with visual slow-thinking reasoning is crucial for solving complex multimodal tasks. However, since LVLMs are mainly trained with vision-language alignment, it is difficult to adopt on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) to develop the slow thinking abil…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ToolEyes: Fine-Grained Evaluation for Tool Learning Capabilities of Large Language Models in Real-world Scenarios

COLING 2025main

Existing evaluations of tool learning primarily focus on validating the alignment of selected tools for large language models (LLMs) with expected outcomes. However, these approaches rely on a limited set of scenarios where answers can be pre-determined. Furthermore, a sole emphasis on outcomes disr…

2024

Inverse-Q*: Token Level Reinforcement Learning for Aligning Large Language Models Without Preference Data

EMNLP 2024finding

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human intentions, yet it often relies on complex methodologies like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) that require extensive hyper-parameter tuning and present challenges in sample efficien…

2024

Linear Alignment: A Closed-form Solution for Aligning Human Preferences without Tuning and Feedback

ICML 2024poster

The success of AI assistants based on Language Models (LLMs) hinges on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to comprehend and align with user intentions. However, traditional alignment algorithms, such as PPO, are hampered by complex annotation and training requirements. This reliance l…

2024

LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin

ACL 2024long

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a crucial step for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to align with human instructions and enhance their capabilities in downstream tasks. Substantially increasing instruction data is a direct solution to align the model with a broader range of downstream tas…

2024

Navigating the OverKill in Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

Large language models are meticulously aligned to be both helpful and harmless. However, recent research points to a potential overkill which means models may refuse to answer benign queries. In this paper, we investigate the factors for overkill by exploring how models handle and determine the safe…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2024

RoTBench: A Multi-Level Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models in Tool Learning

EMNLP 2024main

Tool learning has generated widespread interest as a vital means of interaction between Large Language Models (LLMs) and the physical world. Current research predominantly emphasizes LLMs’ capacity to utilize tools in well-structured environments while overlooking their stability when confronted wit…

2024

ToolSword: Unveiling Safety Issues of Large Language Models in Tool Learning Across Three Stages

ACL 2024long

Tool learning is widely acknowledged as a foundational approach or deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios. While current research primarily emphasizes leveraging tools to augment LLMs, it frequently neglects emerging safety considerations tied to their application. To fill th…

2023

DSRM: Boost Textual Adversarial Training with Distribution Shift Risk Minimization

ACL 2023long

Adversarial training is one of the best-performing methods in improving the robustness of deep language models. However, robust models come at the cost of high time consumption, as they require multi-step gradient ascents or word substitutions to obtain adversarial samples. In addition, these genera…

2023

Farewell to Aimless Large-scale Pretraining: Influential Subset Selection for Language Model

ACL 2023findings

Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. However, pretraining has recently shifted toward larger models and larger data, which has resulted in significant computational and energy costs. In this paper, we propose Influence Subset Selec…

2023

On the Universal Adversarial Perturbations for Efficient Data-free Adversarial Detection

ACL 2023findings

Detecting adversarial samples that are carefully crafted to fool the model is a critical step to socially-secure applications. However, existing adversarial detection methods require access to sufficient training data, which brings noteworthy concerns regarding privacy leakage and generalizability.…

2023

RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms

EMNLP 2023long findings

Reports of human-like behaviors in foundation models are growing, with psychological theories providing enduring tools to investigate these behaviors. However, current research tends to directly apply these human-oriented tools without verifying the faithfulness of their outcomes. In this paper, we…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement

EMNLP 2023long findings

To enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of large language models, researchers have extensively explored prompting methods, notably the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method which explicitly elicits human-like rationales. However, they have inadvertently overlooked the potential of enhancing model r…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

Decorrelate Irrelevant, Purify Relevant: Overcome Textual Spurious Correlations from a Feature Perspective

COLING 2022main

Natural language understanding (NLU) models tend to rely on spurious correlations (i.e., dataset bias) to achieve high performance on in-distribution datasets but poor performance on out-of-distribution ones. Most of the existing debiasing methods often identify and weaken these samples with biased…

2022

Kernel-Whitening: Overcome Dataset Bias with Isotropic Sentence Embedding

EMNLP 2022main

Dataset bias has attracted increasing attention recently for its detrimental effect on the generalization ability of fine-tuned models. The current mainstream solution is designing an additional shallow model to pre-identify biased instances. However, such two-stage methods scale up the computationa…