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Xiaokang Zhang

12 accepted papers

2026

Is Spurious Correlation Removal Always Learnable?

ICML 2026poster

Invariant learning can fail even when the invariant structure is statistically identifiable. We show an inherent computational barrier: under the Planted Clique hypothesis, there exist samplable linear-Gaussian multi-environment instances with a one-dimensional invariant subspace ($k=1$) that are le…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Scaling Agentic Verifier for Competitive Coding

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong coding capabilities but still struggle to solve competitive programming problems correctly in a single attempt. Execution-based re-ranking offers a promising test-time scaling strategy, yet existing methods are constrained by either difficult tes…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CoT-based Synthesizer: Enhancing LLM Performance through Answer Synthesis

ACL 2025long

Current inference scaling methods, such as Self-consistency and Best-of-N, have proven effective in improving the accuracy of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on the quality of candidate responses and are unable to produce correct answers when all candidates are i…

2025

Dynamic Scaling of Unit Tests for Code Reward Modeling

ACL 2025long

Current large language models (LLMs) often struggle to produce accurate responses on the first attempt for complex reasoning tasks like code generation. Prior research tackles this challenge by generating multiple candidate solutions and validating them with LLM-generated unit tests. The execution r…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

P2 Law: Scaling Law for Post-Training After Model Pruning

ACL 2025long

Pruning has become a widely adopted technique for reducing the hardware requirements of large language models (LLMs). To recover model performance after pruning, post-training is commonly employed to mitigate the resulting performance degradation. While post-training benefits from larger datasets, o…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SAM Decoding: Speculative Decoding via Suffix Automaton

ACL 2025long

Speculative decoding (SD) has been demonstrated as an effective technique for lossless LLM inference acceleration.Retrieval-based SD methods, one kind of model-free method, have yielded promising speedup, but they often rely on single retrieval resources, inefficient retrieval methods, and are const…

2025

TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios

ACL 2025finding

We introduce TableLLM, a robust large language model (LLM) with 8 billion parameters, purpose-built for proficiently handling tabular data manipulation tasks, whether they are embedded within documents or spreadsheets, catering to real-world office scenarios. We propose a distant supervision method…

2025

Uncovering the Impact of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Direct Preference Optimization: Lessons from Text-to-SQL

ACL 2025long

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation. However, when applied to Text-to-SQL datasets, it often fails to improve performance and can even degrade it. Our investigation reveals the root cause: unlike math and co…

2024

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition as Label-balanced Multi-label Learning

ICML 2024poster

Rooting in the scarcity of most attributes, realistic pedestrian attribute datasets exhibit unduly skewed data distribution, from which two types of model failures are delivered: (1) label imbalance: model predictions lean greatly towards the side of majority labels; (2) semantics imbalance: model i…

2024

SpreadsheetBench: Towards Challenging Real World Spreadsheet Manipulation

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

We introduce SpreadsheetBench, a challenging spreadsheet manipulation benchmark exclusively derived from real-world scenarios, designed to immerse current large language models (LLMs) in the actual workflow of spreadsheet users. Unlike existing benchmarks that rely on synthesized queries and simpli…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Transferable and Efficient Non-Factual Content Detection via Probe Training with Offline Consistency Checking

ACL 2024long

This paper proposes PiNose, which trains a probing model on offline self-consistency checking results, thereby circumventing the need for human-annotated data and achieving transferability across diverse data distributions. As the consistency check process is offline, PiNose reduces the computationa…

2022

Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering

ACL 2022long

Recent works on knowledge base question answering (KBQA) retrieve subgraphs for easier reasoning. The desired subgraph is crucial as a small one may exclude the answer but a large one might introduce more noises. However, the existing retrieval is either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, c…