← Search

Xiangnan He

53 accepted papers

2026

Contrastive Weak-to-Strong Generalization

ICML 2026poster

Weak-to-strong generalization provides a promising paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs) by training stronger models on samples from aligned weaker ones, without requiring human feedback or explicit reward modeling. However, its robustness and generalization are hindered by the noise and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Enhancing Multi-Modal LLMs Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Group Normalization

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) have significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Extending these methods to multimodal settings, however, faces a critical challenge: the instability of std-based norma…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

GuardAlign: Robust Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision–language reasoning tasks, yet ensuring their safety remains a critical challenge. Recent input-side defenses detect unsafe images with CLIP and prepend safety prefixes to prompts, but they still suffer from inaccura…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Look Carefully: Adaptive Visual Reinforcements in Multimodal Large Language Models for Hallucination Mitigation

ICLR 2026poster

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision–language reasoning, yet they remain vulnerable to hallucination, where generated content deviates from the visual evidence. Existing mitigation strategies either demand costly supervision during training or introduc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Mitigating Safety Fallback in Editing-based Backdoor Injection on LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance across natural language tasks, but remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Recent model editing-based approaches enable efficient backdoor injection by directly modifying parameters to map specific triggers to attacker-desired responses. Howe…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

NExT-Guard: Training-Free Streaming Safeguard without Token-Level Labels

ICML 2026poster

Large language models are increasingly deployed in streaming scenarios, rendering conventional post-hoc safeguards ineffective as they fail to interdict unsafe content in real-time. While streaming safeguards based on token-level supervised training could address this, they necessitate expensive ann…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

On the Direction of RLVR Updates for LLM Reasoning: Identification and Exploitation

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models. While existing analyses identify that RLVR-induced changes are sparse, they primarily focus on the **magnitude** of these updates, largely overlooking their **direct…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Principled Steering via Null-space Projection for Jailbreak Defense in Vision-Language Models

CVPR 2026

As vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in open-world scenarios, they can be easily induced by visual jailbreak attacks to generate harmful content, posing serious risks to model safety and trustworthy usage.Recent activation steering methods inject directional vectors into model

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Quantile Advantage Estimation for Entropy-Safe Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) strengthens LLM reasoning but training often oscillates between {entropy collapse} and {entropy explosion}. We trace both hazards to the mean-baseline used in value-free RL (\eg GRPO/DAPO), which improperly penalizes negative-advantage samples un…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Reinforced Latent Reasoning for LLM-based Recommendation

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks, sparking growing interest in their application to preference reasoning in recommendation systems. Existing methods typically rely on fine-tuning with explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) dat…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Think-While-Generating: On-the-Fly Reasoning for Personalized Long-Form Generation

ICLR 2026poster

Preference alignment has enabled large language models (LLMs) to better reflect human expectations, but current methods mostly optimize for population-level preferences, overlooking individual users. Personalization is essential, yet early approaches—such as prompt customization or fine-tuning—strug…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AlphaDPO: Adaptive Reward Margin for Direct Preference Optimization

ICML 2025poster

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences requires balancing policy optimization with computational stability. While recent offline methods like DPO and SimPO bypass reinforcement learning’s complexity, they face critical limitations: DPO relies on static reference models that deg…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AlphaEdit: Null-Space Constrained Knowledge Editing for Language Models

ICLR 2025oral

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations, producing incorrect or outdated knowledge. Hence, model editing methods have emerged to enable targeted knowledge updates. To achieve this, a prevailing paradigm is the locating-then-editing approach, which first locates influential parame…

2025

AnyEdit: Edit Any Knowledge Encoded in Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) often produce incorrect or outdated information, necessitating efficient and precise knowledge updates. Current model editing methods, however, struggle with long-form knowledge in diverse formats, such as poetry, code snippets, and mathematical derivations. These limita…

2025

Customizing In-context Learning for Dynamic Interest Adaption in LLM-based Recommendation

ACL 2025finding

Frequently updating Large Language Model (LLM)-based recommender systems to adapt to dynamic user interests—as done for traditional ones—is impractical due to high training costs, even with acceleration methods. This work explores the possibility of adapting the model to dynamic user interests witho…

2025

DAMA: Data- and Model-aware Alignment of Multi-modal LLMs

ICML 2025poster

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown effectiveness in aligning multi-modal large language models (MLLM) with human preferences. However, existing methods exhibit an imbalanced responsiveness to the data of varying hardness, tending to overfit on the easy-to-distinguish data while underfit…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Larger or Smaller Reward Margins to Select Preferences for LLM Alignment?

ICML 2025poster

Preference learning is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, with the quality of preference datasets playing a crucial role in this process. While existing metrics primarily assess data quality based on either *explicit* or *implicit* reward margins, their single-mar…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Less is More: Improving LLM Alignment via Preference Data Selection

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning large language models with human preferences. While prior work mainly extends DPO from the aspect of the objective function, we instead improve DPO from the largely overlooked but critical aspect of data selection.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Personalized Generation In Large Model Era: A Survey

ACL 2025long

In the era of large models, content generation is gradually shifting to Personalized Generation (PGen), tailoring content to individual preferences and needs. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey on PGen, investigating existing research in this rapidly growing field. We conceptualize P…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Precise, Fast, and Low-cost Concept Erasure in Value Space: Orthogonal Complement Matters

CVPR 2025poster

The success of text-to-image generation enabled by diffusion models has imposed an urgent need to erase unwanted concepts, e.g., copyrighted, offensive, and unsafe ones, from the pre-trained models in a precise, timely, and low-cost manner. The twofold demand of concept erasure requires a precise re…

2025

RePO: Understanding Preference Learning Through ReLU-Based Optimization

NeurIPS 2025poster

Preference learning has become a common approach in various recent methods for aligning large language models with human values. These methods optimize the preference margin between chosen and rejected responses, subject to certain constraints for avoiding over-optimization. In this paper, we report…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Route Sparse Autoencoder to Interpret Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Mechanistic interpretability of large language models (LLMs) aims to uncover the internal processes of information propagation and reasoning. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have demonstrated promise in this domain by extracting interpretable and monosemantic features. However, prior works primarily focu

2025

Towards Robust Alignment of Language Models: Distributionally Robustifying Direct Preference Optimization

ICLR 2025poster

This study addresses the challenge of noise in training datasets for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. We categorize noise into pointwise noise, which includes low-quality data points, and pairwise noise, which encompasse…

2025

Unified Parameter-Efficient Unlearning for LLMs

ICLR 2025poster

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, enabling advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities across a variety of tasks. Fine-tuning these models for specific domains, particularly through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies like…

2024

$\beta$-DPO: Direct Preference Optimization with Dynamic $\beta$

NeurIPS 2024poster

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a compelling approach for training Large Language Models (LLMs) to adhere to human preferences. However, the performance of DPO is sensitive to the fine-tuning of its trade-off parameter $\beta$, as well as to the quality of the preference data. We…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

A3S: A General Active Clustering Method with Pairwise Constraints

ICML 2024poster

Active clustering aims to boost the clustering performance by integrating human-annotated pairwise constraints through strategic querying. Conventional approaches with semi-supervised clustering schemes encounter high query costs when applied to large datasets with numerous classes. To address these…

2024

Be Aware of the Neighborhood Effect: Modeling Selection Bias under Interference

ICLR 2024poster

Selection bias in recommender system arises from the recommendation process of system filtering and the interactive process of user selection. Many previous studies have focused on addressing selection bias to achieve unbiased learning of the prediction model, but ignore the fact that potential outc…

2024

Boosting Few-Shot Learning via Attentive Feature Regularization

AAAI 2024technical

Few-shot learning (FSL) based on manifold regularization aims to improve the recognition capacity of novel objects with limited training samples by mixing two samples from different categories with a blending factor. However, this mixing operation weakens the feature representation due to the linear…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2024

Customizing Language Models with Instance-wise LoRA for Sequential Recommendation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Sequential recommendation systems predict the next interaction item based on users' past interactions, aligning recommendations with individual preferences. Leveraging the strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) in knowledge comprehension and reasoning, recent approaches are eager to apply LLMs t…

2024

Enhance Image Classification via Inter-Class Image Mixup with Diffusion Model

CVPR 2024poster

Text-to-image (T2I) generative models have recently emerged as a powerful tool enabling the creation of photo-realistic images and giving rise to a multitude of applications. However the effective integration of T2I models into fundamental image classification tasks remains an open question. A preva…

2024

Text-like Encoding of Collaborative Information in Large Language Models for Recommendation

ACL 2024long

When adapting Large Language Models for Recommendation (LLMRec), it is crucial to integrate collaborative information. Existing methods achieve this by learning collaborative embeddings in LLMs’ latent space from scratch or by mapping from external models. However, they fail to represent the informa…

2024

Text-to-Image Generation for Abstract Concepts

AAAI 2024technical

Recent years have witnessed the substantial progress of large-scale models across various domains, such as natural language processing and computer vision, facilitating the expression of concrete concepts. Unlike concrete concepts that are usually directly associated with physical objects, expressin…

2024

Towards 3D Molecule-Text Interpretation in Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Language Models (LMs) have greatly influenced diverse domains. However, their inherent limitation in comprehending 3D molecular structures has considerably constrained their potential in the biomolecular domain. To bridge this gap, we focus on 3D molecule-text interpretation, and propose 3D-MoLM: 3D…

2023

Attack Prompt Generation for Red Teaming and Defending Large Language Models

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to red teaming attacks, which can induce LLMs to generate harmful content. Previous research constructs attack prompts via manual or automatic methods, which have their own limitations on construction cost and quality. To address these issues, we propose…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Bi-Directional Distribution Alignment for Transductive Zero-Shot Learning

CVPR 2023poster

It is well-known that zero-shot learning (ZSL) can suffer severely from the problem of domain shift, where the true and learned data distributions for the unseen classes do not match. Although transductive ZSL (TZSL) attempts to improve this by allowing the use of unlabelled examples from the unseen…

2023

Counterfactual Active Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization

ACL 2023long

We study the out-of-distribution generalization of active learning that adaptively selects samples for annotation in learning the decision boundary of classification. Our empirical study finds that increasingly annotating seen samples may hardly benefit the generalization. To address the problem, we…

2023

Discriminative-Invariant Representation Learning for Unbiased Recommendation

IJCAI 2023poster

Selection bias hinders recommendation models from learning unbiased user preference. Recent works empirically reveal that pursuing invariant user and item representation across biased and unbiased data is crucial for counteracting selection bias. However, our theoretical analysis reveals that simply…

2023

Evaluating Post-hoc Explanations for Graph Neural Networks via Robustness Analysis

NeurIPS 2023oral

This work studies the evaluation of explaining graph neural networks (GNNs), which is crucial to the credibility of post-hoc explainability in practical usage. Conventional evaluation metrics, and even explanation methods -- which mainly follow the paradigm of feeding the explanatory subgraph and me…

Cited by 36SourcePDFScholar
2023

Fairly Recommending with Social Attributes: A Flexible and Controllable Optimization Approach

NeurIPS 2023poster

Item-side group fairness (IGF) requires a recommendation model to treat different item groups similarly, and has a crucial impact on information diffusion, consumption activity, and market equilibrium. Previous IGF notions only focus on the direct utility of the item exposures, i.e., the exposure nu…

2023

Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion

NeurIPS 2023poster

Sequential recommendation aims to recommend the next item that matches a user’s interest, based on the sequence of items he/she interacted with before. Scrutinizing previous studies, we can summarize a common learning-to-classify paradigm— given a positive item, a recommender model performs negative…

2023

Removing Hidden Confounding in Recommendation: A Unified Multi-Task Learning Approach

NeurIPS 2023poster

In recommender systems, the collected data used for training is always subject to selection bias, which poses a great challenge for unbiased learning. Previous studies proposed various debiasing methods based on observed user and item features, but ignored the effect of hidden confounding. To addres…

Cited by 36SourcePDFScholar
2023

Understanding Contrastive Learning via Distributionally Robust Optimization

NeurIPS 2023poster

This study reveals the inherent tolerance of contrastive learning (CL) towards sampling bias, wherein negative samples may encompass similar semantics (\eg labels). However, existing theories fall short in providing explanations for this phenomenon. We bridge this research gap by analyzing CL throug…

2023

Unleashing the Power of Graph Data Augmentation on Covariate Distribution Shift

NeurIPS 2023poster

The issue of distribution shifts is emerging as a critical concern in graph representation learning. From the perspective of invariant learning and stable learning, a recently well-established paradigm for out-of-distribution generalization, stable features of the graph are assumed to causally deter…

2022

DebiasGAN: Eliminating Position Bias in News Recommendation with Adversarial Learning

EMNLP 2022finding

Click behaviors are widely used for learning news recommendation models, but they are heavily affected by the biases brought by the news display positions. It is important to remove position biases to train unbiased recommendation model and capture unbiased user interest. In this paper, we propose a…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Discovering Invariant Rationales for Graph Neural Networks

ICLR 2022poster

Intrinsic interpretability of graph neural networks (GNNs) is to find a small subset of the input graph's features --- rationale --- which guides the model prediction. Unfortunately, the leading rationalization models often rely on data biases, especially shortcut features, to compose rationales and…

2022

Learning to Imagine: Integrating Counterfactual Thinking in Neural Discrete Reasoning

ACL 2022long

Neural discrete reasoning (NDR) has shown remarkable progress in combining deep models with discrete reasoning. However, we find that existing NDR solution suffers from large performance drop on hypothetical questions, e.g. “what the annualized rate of return would be if the revenue in 2020 was doub…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2022

Let Invariant Rationale Discovery Inspire Graph Contrastive Learning

ICML 2022spotlight

Leading graph contrastive learning (GCL) methods perform graph augmentations in two fashions: (1) randomly corrupting the anchor graph, which could cause the loss of semantic information, or (2) using domain knowledge to maintain salient features, which undermines the generalization to other domains…

2021

Graph Learning based Recommender Systems: A Review

IJCAI 2021poster

Recent years have witnessed the fast development of the emerging topic of Graph Learning based Recommender Systems (GLRS). GLRS mainly employ advanced graph learning approaches to model users’ preferences and intentions as well as items’ characteristics and popularity for Recommender Systems (RS). D…

2021

Towards Multi-Grained Explainability for Graph Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2021poster

When a graph neural network (GNN) made a prediction, one raises question about explainability: “Which fraction of the input graph is most influential to the model’s decision?” Producing an answer requires understanding the model’s inner workings in general and emphasizing the insights on the decision…

2020

Bilinear Graph Neural Network with Neighbor Interactions

IJCAI 2020poster

Graph Neural Network (GNN) is a powerful model to learn representations and make predictions on graph data. Existing efforts on GNN have largely defined the graph convolution as a weighted sum of the features of the connected nodes to form the representation of the target node. Nevertheless, the ope…

2019

Counterfactual Critic Multi-Agent Training for Scene Graph Generation

ICCV 2019oral

Scene graphs --- objects as nodes and visual relationships as edges --- describe the whereabouts and interactions of objects in an image for comprehensive scene understanding. To generate coherent scene graphs, almost all existing methods exploit the fruitful visual context by modeling message passi…

Cited by 200PDFScholar