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Xingdi Yuan

22 accepted papers

2026

Gistify: Codebase-Level Understanding via Runtime Execution

ICLR 2026poster

As coding agents are increasingly deployed in large codebases, the need to automatically design challenging, codebase-level evaluation is central. We propose Gistify, a task where a coding LLM must create a single, minimal, self-contained file that can reproduce a specific functionality of a codebas…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Llama See, Llama Do: A Mechanistic Perspective on Contextual Entrainment and Distraction in LLMs

ACL 2025long

We observe a novel phenomenon, *contextual entrainment*, across a wide range of language models (LMs) and prompt settings, providing a new mechanistic perspective on how LMs become distracted by “irrelevant” contextual information in the input prompt. Specifically, LMs assign significantly higher lo…

2024

Can Language Models Serve as Text-Based World Simulators?

ACL 2024short

Virtual environments play a key role in benchmarking advances in complex planning and decision-making tasks but are expensive and complicated to build by hand. Can current language models themselves serve as world simulators, correctly predicting how actions change different world states, thus bypas…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2024

Enhancing Agent Learning through World Dynamics Modeling

EMNLP 2024finding

Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast amounts of internet data, have developed a broad understanding of the world, enhancing the decision-making capabilities of embodied agents. This success is largely due to the comprehensive and in-depth domain knowledge within their training datasets. How…

2024

Language-guided Skill Learning with Temporal Variational Inference

ICML 2024poster

We present an algorithm for skill discovery from expert demonstrations. The algorithm first utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) to propose an initial segmentation of the trajectories. Following that, a hierarchical variational inference framework incorporates the LLM-generated segmentation informa…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

OPEx: A Component-Wise Analysis of LLM-Centric Agents in Embodied Instruction Following

ACL 2024long

Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) is a crucial task in embodied learning, requiring agents to interact with their environment through egocentric observations to fulfill natural language instructions. Recent advancements have seen a surge in employing large language models (LLMs) within a framewor…

2024

Policy Improvement using Language Feedback Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce Language Feedback Models (LFMs) that identify desirable behaviour --- actions that help achieve tasks specified in the instruction - for imitation learning in instruction following. To train LFMs, we obtain feedback from Large Language Models (LLMs) on visual trajectories verbalized to…

2024

Think Before You Act: Decision Transformers with Working Memory

ICML 2024poster

Decision Transformer-based decision-making agents have shown the ability to generalize across multiple tasks. However, their performance relies on massive data and computation. We argue that this inefficiency stems from the forgetting phenomenon, in which a model memorizes its behaviors in parameter…

2023

ByteSized32: A Corpus and Challenge Task for Generating Task-Specific World Models Expressed as Text Games

EMNLP 2023long main

In this work we investigate the capacity of language models to generate explicit, interpretable, and interactive world models of scientific and common-sense reasoning tasks. We operationalize this as a task of generating text games, expressed as hundreds of lines of Python code. To facilitate this…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

General-to-Specific Transfer Labeling for Domain Adaptable Keyphrase Generation

ACL 2023findings

Training keyphrase generation (KPG) models require a large amount of annotated data, which can be prohibitively expensive and often limited to specific domains. In this study, we first demonstrate that large distribution shifts among different domains severely hinder the transferability of KPG model…

2023

It Takes Two to Tango: Navigating Conceptualizations of NLP Tasks and Measurements of Performance

ACL 2023findings

Progress in NLP is increasingly measured through benchmarks; hence, contextualizing progress requires understanding when and why practitioners may disagree about the validity of benchmarks. We develop a taxonomy of disagreement, drawing on tools from measurement modeling, and distinguish between two…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

Joint Prompt Optimization of Stacked LLMs using Variational Inference

NeurIPS 2023poster

Large language models (LLMs) can be seen as atomic units of computation mapping sequences to a distribution over sequences. Thus, they can be seen as stochastic language layers in a language network, where the learnable parameters are the natural language prompts at each layer. By stacking two such…

2023

Selecting Better Samples from Pre-trained LLMs: A Case Study on Question Generation

ACL 2023findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have in recent years demonstrated impressive prowess in natural language generation. A common practice to improve generation diversity is to sample multiple outputs from the model. However, partly due to the inaccessibility of LLMs, there lacks a simple and robust way of…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2022

Asking for Knowledge (AFK): Training RL Agents to Query External Knowledge Using Language

ICML 2022spotlight

To solve difficult tasks, humans ask questions to acquire knowledge from external sources. In contrast, classical reinforcement learning agents lack such an ability and often resort to exploratory behavior. This is exacerbated as few present-day environments support querying for knowledge. In order…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2021

ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learning

ICLR 2021poster

Given a simple request like Put a washed apple in the kitchen fridge, humans can reason in purely abstract terms by imagining action sequences and scoring their likelihood of success, prototypicality, and efficiency, all without moving a muscle. Once we see the kitchen in question, we can update our…

2021

An Empirical Study on Neural Keyphrase Generation

NAACL 2021long

Recent years have seen a flourishing of neural keyphrase generation (KPG) works, including the release of several large-scale datasets and a host of new models to tackle them. Model performance on KPG tasks has increased significantly with evolving deep learning research. However, there lacks a comp…

2021

Bringing Structure into Summaries: a Faceted Summarization Dataset for Long Scientific Documents

ACL 2021short

Faceted summarization provides briefings of a document from different perspectives. Readers can quickly comprehend the main points of a long document with the help of a structured outline. However, little research has been conducted on this subject, partially due to the lack of large-scale faceted s…

2020

Graph Policy Network for Transferable Active Learning on Graphs

NeurIPS 2020poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been attracting increasing popularity due to their simplicity and effectiveness in a variety of fields. However, a large number of labeled data is generally required to train these networks, which could be very expensive to obtain in some domains. In this paper, we…

2020

Learning Dynamic Belief Graphs to Generalize on Text-Based Games

NeurIPS 2020poster

Playing text-based games requires skills in processing natural language and sequential decision making. Achieving human-level performance on text-based games remains an open challenge, and prior research has largely relied on hand-crafted structured representations and heuristics. In this work, we i…

2019

Building Dynamic Knowledge Graphs from Text using Machine Reading Comprehension

ICLR 2019poster

We propose a neural machine-reading model that constructs dynamic knowledge graphs from procedural text. It builds these graphs recurrently for each step of the described procedure, and uses them to track the evolving states of participant entities. We harness and extend a recently proposed machine…

Cited by 95SourcePDFScholar
2018

Rapid Adaptation with Conditionally Shifted Neurons

ICML 2018oral

We describe a mechanism by which artificial neural networks can learn rapid adaptation - the ability to adapt on the fly, with little data, to new tasks - that we call conditionally shifted neurons. We apply this mechanism in the framework of metalearning, where the aim is to replicate some of the f…

Cited by 366SourcePDFScholar