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Xiaoying Zhang

13 accepted papers

2026

Advancing LLM Reasoning with Natural Language and Numerical Feedback

ICML 2026spotlight

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) using numerical rewards have significantly enhanced the complex reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, we identify three fundamental limitations of purely numerical feedback: performance plateaus, ineffective spontaneous self-r…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Generative Universal Verifier as Multimodal Meta-Reasoner

ICLR 2026oral

We introduce *Generative Universal Verifier*, a novel concept and plugin designed for next-generation multimodal reasoning in vision-language models and unified multimodal models, providing the fundamental capability of reflection and refinement on visual outcomes during the reasoning and generation…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

LLaVA-UHD v2: Exploiting Hierarchical Vision Granularity in MLLMs via Inverse Semantic Pyramid

AAAI 2026technical

Vision transformers (ViTs) are widely employed in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for visual encoding. However, they exhibit inferior performance on tasks regarding fine-grained visual perception. We attribute this to the inner limitations of ViTs in capturing diverse visual semantic level

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Self-Tuning: Instructing LLMs to Effectively Acquire New Knowledge through Self-Teaching

ACL 2025finding

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to provide up-to-date information due to their one-time training and the constantly evolving nature of the world. To keep LLMs current, existing approaches typically involve continued pre-training on new documents. However, they frequently face difficultie…

2025

Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Games

EMNLP 2025

Alignment of large language models (LLM) is a process that ensures the model’s responses to user prompts align with human intentions and social values. This optimization typically relies on pre-collected prompts. The collection of these prompts often either requires careful human interventions or pr

2025

Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Inspired by DeepSeek-R1's success in eliciting reasoning abilities through rule-based reinforcement learning (RL), we introduce Video-R1 as the first attempt to systematically explore the R1 paradigm for incentivizing video reasoning within multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, directly…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Mitigating Reward Overoptimization via Lightweight Uncertainty Estimation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been pivotal in aligning Large Language Models with human values but often suffers from overoptimization due to its reliance on a proxy reward model. To mitigate this limitation, we first propose a lightweight uncertainty quantification method th…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Rethinking Machine Ethics – Can LLMs Perform Moral Reasoning through the Lens of Moral Theories?

NAACL 2024findings

Making moral judgments is an essential step toward developing ethical AI systems. Prevalent approaches are mostly implemented in a bottom-up manner, which uses a large set of annotated data to train models based on crowd-sourced opinions about morality. These approaches have been criticized for pote…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2024

Self-Alignment for Factuality: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLMs via Self-Evaluation

ACL 2024long

Despite showing impressive abilities, large language models (LLMs) often struggle with factual inaccuracies, i.e., ”hallucinations”, even when they hold relevant knowledge. To mitigate these hallucinations, current approaches typically necessitate high-quality human factuality annotations. In this w…

Cited by 35SourcePDFScholar
2024

User-Creator Feature Polarization in Recommender Systems with Dual Influence

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recommender systems serve the dual purpose of presenting relevant content to users and helping content creators reach their target audience. The dual nature of these systems naturally influences both users and creators: users' preferences are affected by the items they are recommended, while creator…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

SGP-TOD: Building Task Bots Effortlessly via Schema-Guided LLM Prompting

EMNLP 2023long findings

Building and maintaining end-to-end task bots using minimal human effort is a long-standing challenge in dialog research. In this work, we introduce SGP-TOD, Schema-Guided Prompting for building Task-Oriented Dialog systems effortlessly based on large language models (LLMs). Utilizing the predefined…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Uncertainty-Aware Instance Reweighting for Off-Policy Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Off-policy learning, referring to the procedure of policy optimization with access only to logged feedback data, has shown importance in various important real-world applications, such as search engines and recommender systems. While the ground-truth logging policy is usually unknown, previous work…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Fldp: Flexible Strategy For Local Differential Privacy

ICASSP 2022accepted

Local differential privacy (LDP), a technique applying unbiased statistical estimations instead of real data, is often adopted in data collection. In particular, this technique is used in frequency oracles (FO) because it can protect each user’s privacy and prevent leakage of sensitive information.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar