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Xia Ning

13 accepted papers

2026

Latent Thinking Optimization: Your Latent Reasoning Language Model Secretly Encodes Reward Signals in its Latent Thoughts

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at problem solving by generating chain of thoughts in natural language, but such verbal thinking is computationally costly and prone to overthinking. Recent work instead proposes a latent thinking architecture Huginn-3.5B, which represents intermediate reasoning st…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Understanding Task Vectors in In-Context Learning: Emergence, Functionality, and Limitations

ICLR 2026poster

Task vector is a compelling mechanism for accelerating inference in in-context learning (ICL) by distilling task-specific information into a single, reusable representation. Despite their empirical success, the underlying principles governing their emergence and functionality remain unclear. This wo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Analyzing Fine-Grained Alignment and Enhancing Vision Understanding in Multimodal Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Achieving better alignment between vision embeddings and Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for enhancing the abilities of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), particularly for recent models that rely on powerful pretrained vision encoders and LLMs. A common approach to connect the pretrained vision encode…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists

EMNLP 2025

Despite long-standing efforts in accelerating scientific discovery with AI, building AI co-scientists remains challenging due to limited high-quality data for training and evaluation. To tackle this data scarcity issue, we present AutoSDT, an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding task

2025

Entity Decomposition with Filtering: A Zero-Shot Clinical Named Entity Recognition Framework

NAACL 2025long

Clinical named entity recognition (NER) aims to retrieve important entities within clinical narratives. Recent works have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance in this task. While previous works focus on proprietary LLMs, we investigate how open NER LLMs, trai…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

GeLLM³O: Generalizing Large Language Models for Multi-property Molecule Optimization

ACL 2025long

Despite recent advancements, most computational methods for molecule optimization are constrained to single- or double-property optimization tasks and suffer from poor scalability and generalizability to novel optimization tasks. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable out-of-…

2025

Large Language Models for Controllable Multi-property Multi-objective Molecule Optimization

EMNLP 2025

In real-world drug design, molecule optimization requires selectively improving multiple molecular properties up to pharmaceutically relevant levels, while maintaining others that already meet such criteria. However, existing computational approaches and instruction-tuned LLMs fail to capture such n

2025

SAPIENT: Mastering Multi-turn Conversational Recommendation with Strategic Planning and Monte Carlo Tree Search

NAACL 2025long

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) proactively engage users in interactive dialogues to elicit user preferences and provide personalized recommendations. Existing methods train Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based agent with greedy action selection or sampling strategy, and may suffer from subopt…

2025

ScienceAgentBench: Toward Rigorous Assessment of Language Agents for Data-Driven Scientific Discovery

ICLR 2025poster

The advancements of language language models (LLMs) have piqued growing interest in developing LLM-based language agents to automate scientific discovery end-to-end, which has sparked both excitement and skepticism about the true capabilities of such agents. In this work, we argue that for an agent…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2025

Tooling or Not Tooling? The Impact of Tools on Language Agents for Chemistry Problem Solving

NAACL 2025findings

To enhance large language models (LLMs) for chemistry problem solving, several LLM-based agents augmented with tools have been proposed, such as ChemCrow and Coscientist. However, their evaluations are narrow in scope, leaving a large gap in understanding the benefits of tools across diverse chemist…

2024

eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Data

ICML 2024poster

With tremendous efforts on developing effective e-commerce models, conventional e-commerce models show limited success in generalist e-commerce modeling, and suffer from unsatisfactory performance on new users and new products – a typical out-of-domain generalization challenge. Meanwhile, large lang…