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Weilin Zhao

11 accepted papers

2026

DSSA: Dense-Sparse Switchable Attention for Seamless Short-to-Long Adaptation

ICLR 2026poster

Long-sequence processing is a critical capability for modern large language models. However, the self-attention mechanism in the standard Transformer architecture faces severe computational and memory bottlenecks when processing long sequences. While trainable sparse attention methods offer a promis…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Flexibility Trap: Rethinking the Value of Arbitrary Order in Diffusion Language Models

ICML 2026oral

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) break the rigid left-to-right constraint of traditional LLMs, enabling token generation in arbitrary orders. Intuitively, this flexibility implies a solution space that strictly supersets the fixed autoregressive trajectory, theoretically unlocking superior re…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

APB: Accelerating Distributed Long-Context Inference by Passing Compressed Context Blocks across GPUs

ACL 2025long

While long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language model (LLM) applications, its prefill speed remains a significant bottleneck. Current approaches, including sequence parallelism strategies and compute reduction through approximate attention mechanisms, still fall short of deliver…

2025

FR-Spec: Accelerating Large-Vocabulary Language Models via Frequency-Ranked Speculative Sampling

ACL 2025long

Speculative sampling has emerged as an important technique for accelerating the auto-regressive generation process of large language models (LLMs) by utilizing a draft-then-verify mechanism to produce multiple tokens per forward pass. While state-of-the-art speculative sampling methods use only a si…

2025

Fusing Highly Specialized Language Models for Comprehensive Expertise

ACL 2025long

Underlying data distributions of natural language, programming code, and mathematical symbols vary vastly, presenting a complex challenge for large language models (LLMs) that strive to achieve high performance across all three domains simultaneously. Achieving a very high level of proficiency for a…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Seq1F1B: Efficient Sequence-Level Pipeline Parallelism for Large Language Model Training

NAACL 2025long

Training large language models (LLMs) heavily relies on distributed training strategies, among which pipeline parallelism (PP) plays a crucial role. As training sequences extend to 32k or even 128k tokens, current PP methods face severe bottlenecks, including substantial pipeline bubbles and high me…

2024

Beyond the Turn-Based Game: Enabling Real-Time Conversations with Duplex Models

EMNLP 2024main

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly permeate daily lives, there is a growing demand for real-time interactions that mirror human conversations. Traditional turn-based chat systems driven by LLMs prevent users from verbally interacting with the system while generating responses.To overcome t…

2024

Ouroboros: Generating Longer Drafts Phrase by Phrase for Faster Speculative Decoding

EMNLP 2024main

Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) with no compromise in model performance. It achieves this goal by using an existing smaller model for drafting and then employing the target LLM to verify the draft in a low-cost para…

2024

Predicting Emergent Abilities with Infinite Resolution Evaluation

ICLR 2024poster

The scientific scale-up of large language models (LLMs) necessitates a comprehensive understanding of their scaling properties. However, the existing literature on the scaling properties only yields an incomplete answer: optimization loss decreases predictably as the model size increases, in line wi…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

H3T: Efficient Integration of Memory Optimization and Parallelism for Large-scale Transformer Training

NeurIPS 2023poster

In recent years, big models based on Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many artificial intelligence (AI) tasks. Despite the success of these Transformer-based models, their huge parameter size poses a serious challenge to their training, both from the storage and computation…

2022

Moderate-fitting as a Natural Backdoor Defender for Pre-trained Language Models

NeurIPS 2022accept

Despite the great success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in a large set of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, there has been a growing concern about their security in real-world applications. Backdoor attack, which poisons a small number of training samples by inserting backdoor trigger…