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Xian Li

57 accepted papers

2026

Arcadia: Toward a Full-Lifecycle Framework for Embodied Lifelong Learning

CVPR 2026

We contend that embodied learning is fundamentally a lifecycle problem rather than a single-stage optimization. Systems that optimize only one link (data collection, simulation, learning, or deployment) rarely sustain improvement or generalize beyond narrow settings. We introduce Arcadia, a closed-l

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ByteFlow: Language Modeling through Adaptive Byte Compression without a Tokenizer

ICLR 2026poster

Modern language models (LMs) still rely on fixed, pre-defined subword tokenizations. Once a tokenizer is trained, the LM can only operate at this fixed level of granularity, which often leads to brittle and counterintuitive behaviors even in otherwise strong reasoning models. We introduce \textbf{By…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

CoMem: Context Management with A Decoupled Long-Context Model

ICML 2026poster

Context management enables agentic models to solve long-horizon tasks through iterative summarization of previous interaction histories. However, this process typically incurs substantial decoding overhead for the extra summarization tokens, which significantly affect the end-to-end response latency…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

J1: Incentivizing Thinking in LLM-as-a-Judge via Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

The progress of AI is bottlenecked by the quality of evaluation, making powerful LLM-as-a-Judge models a core solution. The efficacy of these judges depends on their chain-of-thought reasoning, creating a critical need for methods that can effectively optimize this reasoning process. In this work, w…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LLM Pretraining with Continuous Concepts

ICLR 2026poster

Next token prediction has been the standard training objective used in large language model pretraining. Representations are learned as a result of optimizing for token-level perplexity. We propose Continuous Concept Mixing (CoCoMix), a novel pretraining framework that combines discrete next token p…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

VAR RL Done Right: Tackling Asynchronous Policy Conflicts in Visual Autoregressive Generation

CVPR 2026

Visual generation is dominated by three paradigms: AutoRegressive (AR), diffusion, and Visual AutoRegressive (VAR) models. Unlike AR and diffusion, VARs operate on heterogeneous input structures across their generation steps, which creates severe asynchronous policy conflicts. This issue becomes par

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

ALERT: An LLM-powered Benchmark for Automatic Evaluation of Recommendation Explanations

NAACL 2025long

Recommendation explanation systems have become increasingly vital with the widespread adoption of recommender systems. However, existing recommendation explanation evaluation benchmarks suffer from limited item diversity, impractical user profiling requirements, and unreliable and unscalable evaluat…

2025

DORM: Preference Data Weights Optimization for Reward Modeling in LLM Alignment

EMNLP 2025

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences relies heavily on high-quality reward models. However, existing approaches struggle with two critical challenges: noisy preference labels and the varying importance of preference samples. We introduce DORM, a method that enhances reward mo

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Forensics-Bench: A Comprehensive Forgery Detection Benchmark Suite for Large Vision Language Models

CVPR 2025poster

Recently, the rapid development of AIGC has significantly boosted the diversities of fake media spread in the Internet, posing unprecedented threats to social security, politics, law, and etc.To detect the ever-increasingly **diverse** malicious fake media in the new era of AIGC, recent studies have…

2025

Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Hierarchical Semantic Alignment and Cooperative Completion

NeurIPS 2025poster

Incomplete multi-view data, where certain views are entirely missing for some samples, poses significant challenges for traditional multi-view clustering methods. Existing deep incomplete multi-view clustering approaches often rely on static fusion strategies or two-stage pipelines, leading to subop…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Learning to Plan & Reason for Evaluation with Thinking-LLM-as-a-Judge

ICML 2025poster

LLM-as-a-Judge models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) sequences intended to capture the step-by-step reasoning process that underlies the final evaluation of a response. However, due to the lack of human-annotated CoTs for evaluation, the required components and structure of effective reasoning trac…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2025

NaturalReasoning: Reasoning in the Wild with 2.8M Challenging Questions

NeurIPS 2025poster

Scaling reasoning capabilities beyond traditional domains such as math and coding is hindered by the lack of diverse and high-quality questions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a scalable approach for generating diverse and challenging reasoning questions, accompanied by reference answers.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

The Automated LLM Speedrunning Benchmark: Reproducing NanoGPT Improvements

NeurIPS 2025poster

Rapidly improving large language models (LLMs) have the potential to assist in scientific progress. One critical skill in this endeavor is the ability to faithfully reproduce existing work. To evaluate the capability of AI agents to reproduce complex code in an active research area, we introduce the…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Train a Unified Multimodal Data Quality Classifier with Synthetic Data

EMNLP 2025

The Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are continually pre-trained on a mixture of image-text caption data and interleaved document data, while the high-quality data filtering towards image-text interleaved document data is under-explored. We propose to train an efficient MLLM as a Unified Mul

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations

ACL 2025long

The rapid advancement of conversational search systems revolutionizes how information is accessed by enabling the multi-turn interaction between the user and the system. Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models. This separation restricts the system from leve…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

A Wide Range of Multi-Stage Stiffness Regulation via Harnessing Phase Variability of Low-Melting-Point Alloy

RA-L 2024

The high rigidity of the low-melting-point alloy (LMPA) renders it suitable for soft robots with heavy loads and extensive workspace requirements. However, its two-stage stiffness adjustment and prolonged response time have limited further application. This research proposes a novel approach to achi

Cited by 8SourceScholar
2024

Better Alignment with Instruction Back-and-Forth Translation

EMNLP 2024finding

We propose a new method, instruction back-and-forth translation, to improve the quality of instruction-tuning data used for aligning large language models (LLMs). Given preprocessed texts from an initial web corpus (e.g. Dolma (Soldaini et al., 2024)), we generate synthetic instructions using the ba…

2024

Branch-Solve-Merge Improves Large Language Model Evaluation and Generation

NAACL 2024long

Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently used for multi-faceted language generation and evaluation tasks that involve satisfying intricate user constraints or taking into account multiple aspects and criteria. However, their performance can fall short, due to the model’s lack of coherence and ina…

2024

Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

Generation of plausible yet incorrect factual information, termed hallucination, is an unsolved issue in large language models. We study the ability of language models to deliberate on the responses they give in order to correct their mistakes. We develop the Chain-of-Verification (CoVe) method wher…

Cited by 390SourcePDFScholar
2024

Data Diversity Matters for Robust Instruction Tuning

EMNLP 2024finding

Recent works have shown that by curating high quality and diverse instruction tuning datasets, we can significantly improve instruction-following capabilities. However, creating such datasets is difficult and most works rely on manual curation or proprietary language models. Automatic data curation…

2024

MEMORYLLM: Towards Self-Updatable Large Language Models

ICML 2024poster

Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) usually remain static after deployment, which might make it hard to inject new knowledge into the model. We aim to build models containing a considerable portion of self-updatable parameters, enabling the model to integrate new knowledge effectively and efficien…

2024

Self-Alignment with Instruction Backtranslation

ICLR 2024oral

We present a scalable method to build a high quality instruction following language model by automatically labelling human-written text with corresponding instructions. Our approach, named instruction backtranslation, starts with a language model finetuned on a small amount of seed data, and a given…

Cited by 230SourcePDFScholar
2024

Self-Rewarding Language Models

ICML 2024poster

We posit that to achieve superhuman agents, future models require superhuman feedback in order to provide an adequate training signal. Current approaches commonly train reward models from human preferences, which may then be bottlenecked by human performance level, and secondly these reward models r…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Shopping MMLU: A Massive Multi-Task Online Shopping Benchmark for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Online shopping is a complex multi-task, few-shot learning problem with a wide and evolving range of entities, relations, and tasks. However, existing models and benchmarks are commonly tailored to specific tasks, falling short of capturing the full complexity of online shopping. Large Language Mode…

2024

Stronger, Lighter, Better: Towards Life-Long Attribute Value Extraction for E-Commerce Products

ACL 2024findings

Attribute value extraction involves identifying the value spans of predetermined attributes in product texts. This area of research has traditionally operated under a closed-world assumption, focusing on products from a static set of categories and their associated attributes. However, products in e…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

To the Globe (TTG): Towards Language-Driven Guaranteed Travel Planning

EMNLP 2024system demonstrations

Travel planning is a challenging and time-consuming task that aims to find an itinerary which satisfies multiple, interdependent constraints regarding flights, accommodations, attractions, and other travel arrangements. In this paper, we propose To the Globe (TTG), a real-time demo system that takes…

2023

Concept2Box: Joint Geometric Embeddings for Learning Two-View Knowledge Graphs

ACL 2023findings

Knowledge graph embeddings (KGE) have been extensively studied to embed large-scale relational data for many real-world applications. Existing methods have long ignored the fact many KGs contain two fundamentally different views: high-level ontology-view concepts and fine-grained instance-view entit…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2023

Knowledge-Selective Pretraining for Attribute Value Extraction

EMNLP 2023long findings

Attribute Value Extraction (AVE) aims to retrieve the values of attributes from the product profiles. The state-of-the-art methods tackle the AVE task through a question-answering (QA) paradigm, where the value is predicted from the context (i.e. product profile) given a query (i.e. attributes). Des…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

PV2TEA: Patching Visual Modality to Textual-Established Information Extraction

ACL 2023findings

Information extraction, e.g., attribute value extraction, has been extensively studied and formulated based only on text. However, many attributes can benefit from image-based extraction, like color, shape, pattern, among others. The visual modality has long been underutilized, mainly due to multimo…

2023

Tab-Cleaner: Weakly Supervised Tabular Data Cleaning via Pre-training for E-commerce Catalog

ACL 2023industry

Product catalogs, conceptually in the form of text-rich tables, are self-reported by individual retailers and thus inevitably contain noisy facts. Verifying such textual attributes in product catalogs is essential to improve their reliability. However, popular methods for processing free-text conten…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Towards A Unified View of Sparse Feed-Forward Network in Pretraining Large Language Model

EMNLP 2023long main

Large and sparse feed-forward layers (S-FFN) such as Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have proven effective in scaling up Transformers model size for pretraining large language models. By only activating part of the FFN parameters conditioning on input, S-FFN improves generalization performance while keepin…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Towards Open-World Product Attribute Mining: A Lightly-Supervised Approach

ACL 2023long

We present a new task setting for attribute mining on e-commerce products, serving as a practical solution to extract open-world attributes without extensive human intervention. Our supervision comes from a high-quality seed attribute set bootstrapped from existing resources, and we aim to expand th…

2022

Ask-and-Verify: Span Candidate Generation and Verification for Attribute Value Extraction

EMNLP 2022industry

The product attribute value extraction (AVE) task aims to capture key factual information from product profiles, and is useful for several downstream applications in e-Commerce platforms. Previous contributions usually formulate this task using sequence labeling or reading comprehension architecture…

2022

Efficient Large Scale Language Modeling with Mixtures of Experts

EMNLP 2022main

Mixture of Experts layers (MoEs) enable efficient scaling of language models through conditional computation. This paper presents a detailed empirical study of how autoregressive MoE language models scale in comparison with dense models in a wide range of settings: in- and out-of-domain language mod…

Cited by 146SourcecodeScholar
2022

Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Generative Language Models

EMNLP 2022main

Large-scale generative language models such as GPT-3 are competitive few-shot learners. While these models are known to be able to jointly represent many different languages, their training data is dominated by English, potentially limiting their cross-lingual generalization. In this work, we train…

2022

Lifting the Curse of Multilinguality by Pre-training Modular Transformers

NAACL 2022long

Multilingual pre-trained models are known to suffer from the curse of multilinguality, which causes per-language performance to drop as they cover more languages. We address this issue by introducing language-specific modules, which allows us to grow the total capacity of the model, while keeping th…

2022

Prototype-Representations for Training Data Filtering in Weakly-Supervised Information Extraction

EMNLP 2022industry

The availability of high quality training data is still a bottleneck for the practical utilization of information extraction models, despite the breakthroughs in zero and few-shot learning techniques. This is further exacerbated for industry applications, where new tasks, domains, and specific use c…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

ToKen: Task Decomposition and Knowledge Infusion for Few-Shot Hate Speech Detection

EMNLP 2022main

Hate speech detection is complex; it relies on commonsense reasoning, knowledge of stereotypes, and an understanding of social nuance that differs from one culture to the next. It is also difficult to collect a large-scale hate speech annotated dataset. In this work, we frame this problem as a few-s…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2022

Unified Speech-Text Pre-training for Speech Translation and Recognition

ACL 2022long

In this work, we describe a method to jointly pre-train speech and text in an encoder-decoder modeling framework for speech translation and recognition. The proposed method utilizes multi-task learning to integrate four self-supervised and supervised subtasks for cross modality learning. A self-supe…

2021

Adaptive Label Noise Cleaning With Meta-Supervision for Deep Face Recognition

ICCV 2021poster

The training of a deep face recognition system usually faces the interference of label noise in the training data. However, it is difficult to obtain a high-precision cleaning model to remove these noises. In this paper, we propose an adaptive label noise cleaning algorithm based on meta-learning fo…

Cited by 14PDFScholar
2021

Distributionally Robust Multilingual Machine Translation

EMNLP 2021main

Multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) learns to translate multiple language pairs with a single model, potentially improving both the accuracy and the memory-efficiency of deployed models. However, the heavy data imbalance between languages hinders the model from performing uniformly across…

2021

Gender bias amplification during Speed-Quality optimization in Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2021short

Is bias amplified when neural machine translation (NMT) models are optimized for speed and evaluated on generic test sets using BLEU? We investigate architectures and techniques commonly used to speed up decoding in Transformer-based models, such as greedy search, quantization, average attention net…

Cited by 48SourcePDFScholar
2021

Improving Speech Translation by Understanding and Learning from the Auxiliary Text Translation Task

ACL 2021long

Pretraining and multitask learning are widely used to improve the speech translation performance. In this study, we are interested in training a speech translation model along with an auxiliary text translation task. We conduct a detailed analysis to understand the impact of the auxiliary task on th…

2021

Improving Zero-Shot Translation by Disentangling Positional Information

ACL 2021long

Multilingual neural machine translation has shown the capability of directly translating between language pairs unseen in training, i.e. zero-shot translation. Despite being conceptually attractive, it often suffers from low output quality. The difficulty of generalizing to new translation direction…

2021

Multilingual Speech Translation from Efficient Finetuning of Pretrained Models

ACL 2021long

We present a simple yet effective approach to build multilingual speech-to-text (ST) translation through efficient transfer learning from a pretrained speech encoder and text decoder. Our key finding is that a minimalistic LNA (LayerNorm and Attention) finetuning can achieve zero-shot crosslingual a…

2021

Pay Better Attention to Attention: Head Selection in Multilingual and Multi-Domain Sequence Modeling

NeurIPS 2021poster

Multi-head attention has each of the attention heads collect salient information from different parts of an input sequence, making it a powerful mechanism for sequence modeling. Multilingual and multi-domain learning are common scenarios for sequence modeling, where the key challenge is to maximize…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2021

Towards Understanding the Behaviors of Optimal Deep Active Learning Algorithms

AISTATS 2021poster

Active learning (AL) algorithms may achieve better performance with fewer data because the model guides the data selection process. While many algorithms have been proposed, there is little study on what the optimal AL algorithm looks like, which would help researchers understand where their models…

2020

Cross-lingual Retrieval for Iterative Self-Supervised Training

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Recent studies have demonstrated the cross-lingual alignment ability of multilingual pretrained language models. In this work, we found that the cross-lingual alignment can be further improved by training seq2seq models on sentence pairs mined using their own encoder outputs. We utilized these findi…

2020

Global-Local GCN: Large-Scale Label Noise Cleansing for Face Recognition

CVPR 2020poster

In the field of face recognition, large-scale web-collected datasets are essential for learning discriminative representations, but they suffer from noisy identity labels, such as outliers and label flips. It is beneficial to automatically cleanse their label noise for improving recognition accuracy…

Cited by 88PDFScholar
2017

Deep Voice: Real-time Neural Text-to-Speech

ICML 2017poster

We present Deep Voice, a production-quality text-to-speech system constructed entirely from deep neural networks. Deep Voice lays the groundwork for truly end-to-end neural speech synthesis. The system comprises five major building blocks: a segmentation model for locating phoneme boundaries, a grap…

Cited by 877SourcePDFScholar