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Teng Xiao

25 accepted papers

2026

Adaptive Code Watermarking Through Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026poster

As LLMs increasingly generate production code, protecting intellectual property demands watermarking techniques that respect code's strict syntactic constraints. In this work, we introduce CodeTracer, an innovative adaptive code watermarking framework underpinned by a reinforcement learning training…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Can Simple Denoising Improve Uniform State Diffusion Models?

ICML 2026poster

Recent Uniform-state Diffusion Models (USDMs), initialized from a uniform prior, offer the promise of fast text generation due to their inherent self-correction ability compared to masked diffusion models. However, they still rely on complex loss formulations with additional computational overhead, …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

From Mathematical Reasoning to Code: Generalization of Process Reward Models in Test-Time Scaling

AAAI 2026technical

Recent advancements in improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models have underscored the efficacy of Process Reward Models (PRMs) in addressing intermediate errors through structured feedback mechanisms. This study analyzes PRMs from multiple perspectives, including training methodo

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Scaling and Transferability of Annealing Strategies in Large Language Model Training

AAAI 2026technical

Learning rate scheduling is crucial for training large language models, yet understanding the optimal annealing strategies across different model configurations remains challenging. In this work, we investigate the transferability of annealing dynamics in large language model training and refine a g

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

DSPO: Direct Score Preference Optimization for Diffusion Model Alignment

ICLR 2025oral

Diffusion-based Text-to-Image (T2I) models have achieved impressive success in generating high-quality images from textual prompts. While large language models (LLMs) effectively leverage Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for fine-tuning on human preference data without the need for reward models…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

Dialogue-RAG: Enhancing Retrieval for LLMs via Node-Linking Utterance Rewriting

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have demonstrated significant potential on tasks across multiple domains. However, ellipses and coreferences, as common phenomena in dialogue scenes, pose challenges to LLMs’ understanding and RAG’s retrieval accuracy. The…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Inference-time Alignment in Continuous Space

NeurIPS 2025poster

Aligning large language models with human feedback at inference time has received increasing attention due to its flexibility. Existing methods rely on generating multiple responses from the base policy for search using a reward model, which can be considered as searching in a discrete response spac…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

InfoPO: On Mutual Information Maximization for Large Language Model Alignment

NAACL 2025long

We study the post-training of large language models (LLMs) with human preference data. Recently, direct preference optimization and its variants have shown considerable promise in aligning language models, eliminating the need for reward models and online sampling. Despite these benefits, these meth…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

On a Connection Between Imitation Learning and RLHF

ICLR 2025poster

This work studies the alignment of large language models with preference data from an imitation learning perspective. We establish a close theoretical connection between reinforcement learning from human feedback RLHF and imitation learning (IL), revealing that RLHF implicitly performs imitation le…

2025

Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models via Group Preference Reward Shaping

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) require alignment via reinforcement learning (RL) to effectively perform task-specific objectives, such as human preference alignment and enhanced reasoning. While Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is widely adopted, its computational overhead, stemming from additional

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Revisiting Scaling Laws for Language Models: The Role of Data Quality and Training Strategies

ACL 2025long

Traditional scaling laws in natural language processing suggest that increasing model size and training data enhances performance. However, recent studies reveal deviations, particularly in large language models, where performance improvements decelerate—a phenomenon known as sub-scaling. This paper…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SimPER: A Minimalist Approach to Preference Alignment without Hyperparameters

ICLR 2025poster

Existing preference optimization objectives for language model alignment require additional hyperparameters that must be extensively tuned to achieve optimal performance, increasing both the complexity and time required for fine-tuning large language models. In this paper, we propose a simple yet ef…

2025

Simple Distillation for One-Step Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Diffusion models have established themselves as leading techniques for image generation. However, their reliance on an iterative denoising process results in slow sampling speeds, which limits their applicability to interactive and creative applications. An approach to overcoming this limitation inv…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Cal-DPO: Calibrated Direct Preference Optimization for Language Model Alignment

NeurIPS 2024poster

We study the problem of aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference data. Contrastive preference optimization has shown promising results in aligning LLMs with available preference data by optimizing the implicit reward associated with the policy. However, the contrastive objective f…

2024

Efficient Contrastive Learning for Fast and Accurate Inference on Graphs

ICML 2024poster

Graph contrastive learning has made remarkable advances in settings where there is a scarcity of task-specific labels. Despite these advances, the significant computational overhead for representation inference incurred by existing methods that rely on intensive message passing makes them unsuitable…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

How to Leverage Demonstration Data in Alignment for Large Language Model? A Self-Imitation Learning Perspective

EMNLP 2024main

This paper introduces a novel generalized self-imitation learning GSIL framework, which effectively and efficiently aligns large language models with offline demonstration data. We develop GSIL by deriving a surrogate objective of imitation learning with density ratio estimates, facilitating the use…

2024

In-Context Sharpness as Alerts: An Inner Representation Perspective for Hallucination Mitigation

ICML 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate, e.g., making factual errors, yet our understanding of why they make these errors remains limited. In this study, we aim to understand the underlying mechanisms of LLM hallucinations from the perspective of *inner representations*. We discover a pa…

2024

Learning to Reweight for Generalizable Graph Neural Network

AAAI 2024technical

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) show promising results for graph tasks. However, existing GNNs' generalization ability will degrade when there exist distribution shifts between testing and training graph data. The fundamental reason for the severe degeneration is that most GNNs are designed based on th…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2023

Certifiably Robust Graph Contrastive Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a popular unsupervised graph representation learning method. However, it has been shown that GCL is vulnerable to adversarial attacks on both the graph structure and node attributes. Although empirical approaches have been proposed to enhance the robus…

2023

Simple and Asymmetric Graph Contrastive Learning without Augmentations

NeurIPS 2023poster

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has shown superior performance in representation learning in graph-structured data. Despite their success, most existing GCL methods rely on prefabricated graph augmentation and homophily assumptions. Thus, they fail to generalize well to heterophilic graphs where co…

2019

Semi-supervisedly Co-embedding Attributed Networks

NeurIPS 2019poster

Deep generative models (DGMs) have achieved remarkable advances. Semi-supervised variational auto-encoders (SVAE) as a classical DGM offers a principled framework to effective generalize from small labelled data to large unlabelled ones, but it is difficult to incorporate rich unstructured relations…