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Tianle Cai

29 accepted papers

2026

Beyond Problem Solving: UOJ-Bench for Evaluating Code Generation, Hacking, and Repair in Competitive Programming

ICML 2026poster

Despite strong performance in competitive programming, the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in supporting human learning in the same setting remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce **UOJ-Bench**, a benchmark designed to evaluate not only the problem-solving ability of LLMs, but al…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

FutureX: An Advanced Live Benchmark for LLM Agents in Future Prediction

ICLR 2026poster

Future prediction is a complex task for LLM agents, requiring a high level of analytical thinking, information gathering, contextual understanding, and decision-making under uncertainty. Agents must not only gather and interpret vast amounts of dynamic information but also integrate diverse data sou…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Generalization Spectrum: A Chromatographic Approach to Evaluating Learning Algorithms

ICML 2026poster

Traditional evaluations measure a learning algorithm's final performance on an i.i.d. test set, reducing learning to a single aggregate score. This approach obscures a fundamental question: to what extent does learning from a specific example generalize to others? Such per-sample generalization—akin…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Optimal Token Baseline: Variance Reduction for Long-Horizon LLM-RL

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffers from training collapse in long-horizon tasks due to exploding gradient variance. To mitigate this, baseline is commonly introduced for advantage computation; however, traditional value models remain difficult to optimize, and stan…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CommVQ: Commutative Vector Quantization for KV Cache Compression

ICML 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in applications requiring long context lengths, but the key-value (KV) cache often becomes a memory bottleneck on GPUs as context grows. To address this, we propose Commutative Vector Quantization (CommVQ) to significantly reduce memory usage for lo…

2025

MATH-Perturb: Benchmarking LLMs' Math Reasoning Abilities against Hard Perturbations

ICML 2025poster

Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on challenging mathematical reasoning tasks, which has triggered the discussion of whether the performance is achieved by true reasoning capability or memorization. To investigate this question, prior work has constructed mathematical be…

2025

Radial Attention: $\mathcal O(n \log n)$ Sparse Attention for Long Video Generation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-quality video generation, but the additional temporal dimension significantly increases computational costs, making training and inference on long videos prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we identify a phenomenon we term Spatiotemporal Ener…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

SVDQuant: Absorbing Outliers by Low-Rank Component for 4-Bit Diffusion Models

ICLR 2025spotlight

Diffusion models can effectively generate high-quality images. However, as they scale, rising memory demands and higher latency pose substantial deployment challenges. In this work, we aim to accelerate diffusion models by quantizing their weights and activations to 4 bits. At such an aggressive le…

2025

Training-Free Activation Sparsity in Large Language Models

ICLR 2025spotlight

Activation sparsity can enable practical inference speedups in large language models (LLMs) by reducing the compute and memory-movement required for matrix multiplications during the forward pass. However, existing methods face limitations that inhibit widespread adoption. Some approaches are tail…

2025

Unnatural Languages Are Not Bugs but Features for LLMs

ICML 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been observed to process non-human-readable text sequences, such as jailbreak prompts, often viewed as a bug for aligned LLMs. In this work, we present a systematic investigation challenging this perception, demonstrating that unnatural languages - strings that appe…

2024

Accelerating Greedy Coordinate Gradient and General Prompt Optimization via Probe Sampling

NeurIPS 2024poster

Safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a central issue given their rapid progress and wide applications. Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) is shown to be effective in constructing prompts containing adversarial suffixes to break the presumingly safe LLMs, but the optimization of GCG is tim…

2024

BitDelta: Your Fine-Tune May Only Be Worth One Bit

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained in two phases: pre-training on large internet-scale datasets, and fine-tuning for downstream tasks. Given the higher computational demand of pre-training, it is intuitive to assume that fine-tuning adds less new information to the model, and is thus…

2024

DistriFusion: Distributed Parallel Inference for High-Resolution Diffusion Models

CVPR 2024highlight

Diffusion models have achieved great success in synthesizing high-quality images. However generating high-resolution images with diffusion models is still challenging due to the enormous computational costs resulting in a prohibitive latency for interactive applications. In this paper we propose Dis…

2024

FlexAttention for Efficient High-Resolution Vision-Language Models

ECCV 2024poster

"Current high-resolution vision-language models encode images as high-resolution image tokens and exhaustively take all these tokens to compute attention, which significantly increases the computational cost. To address this problem, we propose , a flexible attention mechanism for efficient high-res…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2024

Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads

ICML 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) employ auto-regressive decoding that requires sequential computation, with each step reliant on the previous one's output. This creates a bottleneck as each step necessitates moving the full model parameters from High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) to the accelerator's cache. Wh…

2024

SnapKV: LLM Knows What You are Looking for Before Generation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in processing extensive contexts, with the Key-Value (KV) cache playing a vital role in enhancing their performance. However, the growth of the KV cache in response to increasing input length poses challenges to memory and time efficiency. T…

2023

What Makes Convolutional Models Great on Long Sequence Modeling?

ICLR 2023poster

Convolutional models have been widely used in multiple domains. However, most existing models only use local convolution, making the model unable to handle long-range dependencies efficiently. Attention overcomes this problem by aggregating global information based on the pair-wise attention score b…

2021

Do Transformers Really Perform Badly for Graph Representation?

NeurIPS 2021poster

The Transformer architecture has become a dominant choice in many domains, such as natural language processing and computer vision. Yet, it has not achieved competitive performance on popular leaderboards of graph-level prediction compared to mainstream GNN variants. Therefore, it remains a mystery…

2021

GraphNorm: A Principled Approach to Accelerating Graph Neural Network Training

ICML 2021spotlight

Normalization is known to help the optimization of deep neural networks. Curiously, different architectures require specialized normalization methods. In this paper, we study what normalization is effective for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). First, we adapt and evaluate the existing methods from othe…

Cited by 230SourcePDFScholar
2021

Stable, Fast and Accurate: Kernelized Attention with Relative Positional Encoding

NeurIPS 2021poster

The attention module, which is a crucial component in Transformer, cannot scale efficiently to long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Many works focus on approximating the dot-then-exponentiate softmax function in the original attention, leading to sub-quadratic or even linear-complexity Tr…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar
2021

Towards Certifying L-infinity Robustness using Neural Networks with L-inf-dist Neurons

ICML 2021spotlight

It is well-known that standard neural networks, even with a high classification accuracy, are vulnerable to small $\ell_\infty$-norm bounded adversarial perturbations. Although many attempts have been made, most previous works either can only provide empirical verification of the defense to a partic…

2021

Towards a Theoretical Framework of Out-of-Distribution Generalization

NeurIPS 2021poster

Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is one of the central problems in modern machine learning. Recently, there is a surge of attempts to propose algorithms that mainly build upon the idea of extracting invariant features. Although intuitively reasonable, theoretical understanding of wha…

Cited by 135SourcePDFScholar
2020

Locally Differentially Private (Contextual) Bandits Learning

NeurIPS 2020poster

We study locally differentially private (LDP) bandits learning in this paper. First, we propose simple black-box reduction frameworks that can solve a large family of context-free bandits learning problems with LDP guarantee. Based on our frameworks, we can improve previous best results for private…

2020

Sanity-Checking Pruning Methods: Random Tickets can Win the Jackpot

NeurIPS 2020poster

Network pruning is a method for reducing test-time computational resource requirements with minimal performance degradation. Conventional wisdom of pruning algorithms suggests that: (1) Pruning methods exploit information from training data to find good subnetworks; (2) The architecture of the prune…

2019

Convergence of Adversarial Training in Overparametrized Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2019spotlight

Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, i.e. inputs that are imperceptibly perturbed from natural data and yet incorrectly classified by the network. Adversarial training \cite{madry2017towards}, a heuristic form of robust optimization that alternates between minimization and maximiz…

Cited by 159SourcePDFScholar