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Yan Gao

67 accepted papers

2026

Can Vision–Language Models Assess Graphic Design Aesthetics? A Benchmark, Evaluation, and Dataset Perspective.

ICLR 2026poster

Assessing the aesthetic quality of graphic design is central to visual communication, yet remains underexplored in vision–language models (VLMs). We investigate whether VLMs can evaluate design aesthetics in ways comparable to humans. Prior work faces three key limitations: benchmarks restricted to…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

DAComp: Benchmarking Data Agents across the Full Data Intelligence Lifecycle

ICLR 2026poster

Real-world enterprise data intelligence workflows encompass data engineering that turns raw sources into analytical-ready tables and data analysis that convert those tables into decision-oriented insights. We introduce DAComp, a benchmark of 236 tasks that mirrors these complex workflows. Data engi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

JADE: Bridging the Strategic-Operational Gap in Dynamic Agentic RAG

ICML 2026poster

The evolution of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shifted from static retrieval pipelines to dynamic, agentic workflows where a central planner orchestrates multi-turn reasoning. However, existing paradigms face a critical dichotomy: they either optimize modules jointly within rigid, fixed-g…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning by Analogy: A Causal Framework for Compositional Generalization

CVPR 2026

Compositional generalization -- the ability to understand and generate novel combinations of learned concepts -- enables models to extend their capabilities beyond limited experiences. While effective, the data structures and principles that enable this crucial capability remain poorly understood. W

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Pix2Key: Controllable Open-Vocabulary Retrieval with Semantic Decomposition and Self-Supervised Visual Dictionary Learning

ICML 2026poster

Composed image retrieval uses a reference image plus a natural-language edit to retrieve images that apply the requested change while preserving other relevant visual content. Classic fusion pipelines typically rely on supervised triplets and can lose fine-grained cues, while recent zero-shot approa…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Towards Fine-Grained Code-Switch Speech Translation with Semantic Space Alignment

IJCAI 2026

Code-switching (CS) speech translation (ST) aims to translate speech that alternates between multiple languages into a target language text, posing significant challenges due to the complexity of semantic modeling and the scarcity of CS data. Previous studies mainly rely on the models themselves to

Cited by 0Scholar
2026

WideSearch: Benchmarking Agentic Broad Info-Seeking

ICLR 2026poster

From professional research to everyday planning, many tasks are bottlenecked by wide-scale information seeking, which is more repetitive than cognitively complex. With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated search agents powered by LLMs offer a promising solution to liberat…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

A Dual-Perspective Metaphor Detection Framework Using Large Language Models

ICASSP 2025accepted

Metaphor detection, a critical task in natural language processing, involves identifying whether a particular word in a sentence is used metaphorically. Traditional approaches often rely on supervised learning models that implicitly encode semantic relationships based on metaphor theories. However,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Are Large Language Models Ready for Multi-Turn Tabular Data Analysis?

ICML 2025poster

Conversational Tabular Data Analysis, a collaboration between humans and machines, enables real-time data exploration for informed decision-making. The challenges and costs of collecting realistic conversational logs for tabular data analysis hinder comprehensive quantitative evaluation of Large Lan…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

DEPT: Decoupled Embeddings for Pre-training Language Models

ICLR 2025oral

Language Model pre-training uses broad data mixtures to enhance performance across domains and languages. However, training on such heterogeneous text corpora requires extensive and expensive efforts. Since these data sources vary significantly in lexical, syntactic, and semantic aspects, they cause…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Divide and Orthogonalize: Efficient Continual Learning with Local Model Space Projection

UAI 2025

Continual learning (CL) has gained increasing interest in recent years due to the need for models that can continuously learn new tasks while retaining knowledge from previous ones. However, existing CL methods often require either computationally expensive layer-wise gradient projections or large-s

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

FlowerTune: A Cross-Domain Benchmark for Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results across diverse domains, yet their development remains reliant on vast amounts of publicly available data, raising concerns about data scarcity and the lack of access to domain-specific, sensitive information. Federated Learning (FL)…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

MoDification: Mixture of Depths Made Easy

NAACL 2025long

Long-context efficiency has recently become a trending topic in serving large language models (LLMs). And mixture of depths (MoD) is proposed as a perfect fit to bring down both latency and memory. In this paper, however, we discover that MoD can barely transform existing LLMs without costly trainin…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

RAG-IGBench: Innovative Evaluation for RAG-based Interleaved Generation in Open-domain Question Answering

NeurIPS 2025poster

In real-world scenarios, providing user queries with visually enhanced responses can considerably benefit understanding and memory, underscoring the great value of interleaved image-text generation. Despite recent progress, like the visual autoregressive model that unifies text and image processing…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

RealBench: A Chinese Multi-image Understanding Benchmark Close to Real-world Scenarios

EMNLP 2025

While various multimodal multi-image evaluation datasets have been emerged, but these datasets are primarily based on English, and there has yet to be a Chinese multi-image dataset. To fill this gap, we introduce RealBench, the first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset, which contains 9393 sample

2025

STIMULUS: Achieving Fast Convergence and Low Sample Complexity in Stochastic Multi-Objective Learning

UAI 2025

Recently, multi-objective optimization (MOO) has gained attention for its broad applications in ML, operations research, and engineering. However, MOO algorithm design remains in its infancy and many existing MOO methods suffer from unsatisfactory convergence rate and sample complexity performance.

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment

EMNLP 2025

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing through their remarkable capabilities in understanding and executing diverse tasks. While supervised fine-tuning, particularly in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) scenarios, effectively enhances t

2025

Towards the Law of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models

ACL 2025long

Language model (LM) distillation aims at distilling the knowledge in a large teacher LM to a small student one. As a critical issue facing LM distillation, a superior student often arises from a teacher of a relatively small scale instead of a larger one, especially in the presence of substantial ca…

2025

Understanding the RoPE Extensions of Long-Context LLMs: An Attention Perspective

COLING 2025main

Enabling LLMs to handle lengthy context is currently a research hotspot. Most LLMs are built upon rotary position embedding (RoPE), a popular position encoding method. Therefore, a prominent path is to extrapolate the RoPE trained on comparably short texts to far longer texts. A heavy bunch of effor…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2025

Wide-Horizon Thinking and Simulation-Based Evaluation for Real-World LLM Planning with Multifaceted Constraints

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Unlike reasoning, which often entails a deep sequence of deductive steps, complex real-world planning is characterized by the need to synthesize a broad spectrum of parallel and potentially conflicting information and constraints. For example, in travel planning scenarios, it requires the integratio…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ZigZagKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression for Long-context Modeling based on Layer Uncertainty

COLING 2025main

Large Language models (LLMs) have become a research hotspot. To accelerate the inference of LLMs, storing computed caches in memory has become the standard technique. However, as the inference length increases, growing KV caches might lead to out-of-memory issues. Many existing methods address this…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

AMPO: Automatic Multi-Branched Prompt Optimization

EMNLP 2024main

Prompt engineering is very important to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs). When dealing with complex issues, prompt engineers tend to distill multiple patterns from examples and inject relevant solutions to optimize the prompts, achieving satisfying results. However, existing a…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

AQ-DETR: Low-Bit Quantized Detection Transformer with Auxiliary Queries

AAAI 2024technical

DEtection TRansformer (DETR)-based models have achieved remarkable performance. However, they are accompanied by a large computation overhead cost, which significantly prevents their applications on resource-limited devices. Prior arts attempt to reduce the computational burden of DETR using low-bit…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Breaking Physical and Linguistic Borders: Multilingual Federated Prompt Tuning for Low-Resource Languages

ICLR 2024poster

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a cornerstone in modern natural language processing, with their utility expanding to various applications and languages. However, the fine-tuning of multilingual LLMs, particularly for low-resource languages, is fraught with challenges steming…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2024

DetectBench: Can Large Language Model Detect and Piece Together Implicit Evidence?

EMNLP 2024finding

Detecting evidence within the context is a key step in the process of reasoning task. Evaluating and enhancing the capabilities of LLMs in evidence detection will strengthen context-based reasoning performance. This paper proposes a benchmark called DetectBench for verifying the ability to detect an…

2024

E5: Zero-shot Hierarchical Table Analysis using Augmented LLMs via Explain, Extract, Execute, Exhibit and Extrapolate

NAACL 2024long

Analyzing large hierarchical tables with multi-level headers presents challenges due to their complex structure, implicit semantics, and calculation relationships. While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in flat table analysis, their application to hierarchical t…

2024

Efficient k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation with Dynamic Retrieval

ACL 2024findings

To achieve non-parametric NMT domain adaptation, k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation (kNN-MT) constructs an external datastore to store domain-specific translation knowledge, which derives a kNN distribution to interpolate the prediction distribution of the NMT model via a linear interpolation co…

2024

Finite-Time Convergence and Sample Complexity of Actor-Critic Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2024poster

Reinforcement learning with multiple, potentially conflicting objectives is pervasive in real-world applications, while this problem remains theoretically under-explored. This paper tackles the multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) problem and introduces an innovative actor-critic algorithm…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multi-Scene Generalized Trajectory Global Graph Solver with Composite Nodes for Multiple Object Tracking

AAAI 2024technical

The global multi-object tracking (MOT) system can consider interaction, occlusion, and other ``visual blur'' scenarios to ensure effective object tracking in long videos. Among them, graph-based tracking-by-detection paradigms achieve surprising performance. However, their fully-connected nature pos…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

PyramidInfer: Pyramid KV Cache Compression for High-throughput LLM Inference

ACL 2024findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable comprehension abilities but face challenges in GPU memory usage during inference, hindering their scalability for real-time applications like chatbots. To accelerate inference, we store computed keys and values (KV cache) in the GPU memory. Existing…

2024

StraGo: Harnessing Strategic Guidance for Prompt Optimization

EMNLP 2024finding

Prompt engineering is pivotal for harnessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across diverse applications. While existing prompt optimization methods improve prompt effectiveness, they often lead to prompt drifting, wherein newly generated prompts canadversely impact previously succe…

2024

Text2Analysis: A Benchmark of Table Question Answering with Advanced Data Analysis and Unclear Queries

AAAI 2024technical

Tabular data analysis is crucial in various fields, and large language models show promise in this area. However, current research mostly focuses on rudimentary tasks like Text2SQL and TableQA, neglecting advanced analysis like forecasting and chart generation. To address this gap, we developed the…

2024

Trades++: Enhancing Multi-Object Tracking of Real Low Confidence Targets Using a Pyramid-Like Self-Attention Model

ICASSP 2024accepted

In reality, multi-object tracking (MOT) is used in a wide range of scenarios. Maintaining the motion trajectory of the target, especially in high-density pedestrian scenarios, is often difficult. The tracking quality of most multi-object trackers correlates strongly with the detector quality and the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

VideoLLM-MoD: Efficient Video-Language Streaming with Mixture-of-Depths Vision Computation

NeurIPS 2024poster

A well-known dilemma in large vision-language models (e.g., GPT-4, LLaVA) is that while increasing the number of vision tokens generally enhances visual understanding, it also significantly raises memory and computational costs, especially in long-term, dense video frame streaming scenarios. Althoug…

2024

Vript: A Video Is Worth Thousands of Words

NeurIPS 2024poster

Advancements in multimodal learning, particularly in video understanding and generation, require high-quality video-text datasets for improved model performance. Vript addresses this issue with a meticulously annotated corpus of 12K high-resolution videos, offering detailed, dense, and script-like c…

2023

2INER: Instructive and In-Context Learning on Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

EMNLP 2023long findings

Prompt-based learning has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP) due to its ability to leverage pre-training knowledge for downstream few-shot tasks. In this paper, we propose 2INER, a novel text-to-text framework for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. Our a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Autonomous Drone Racing: Time-Optimal Spatial Iterative Learning Control within a Virtual Tube

ICRA 2023poster

It is often necessary for drones to complete delivery, photography, and rescue in the shortest time to increase efficiency. Many autonomous drone races provide platforms to pursue algorithms to finish races as quickly as possible for the above purpose. Unfortunately, existing methods often fail to k…

Cited by 6SourceScholar
2023

CRT-QA: A Dataset of Complex Reasoning Question Answering over Tabular Data

EMNLP 2023long main

Large language models (LLMs) show powerful reasoning abilities on various text-based tasks. However, their reasoning capability on structured data such as tables has not been systematically explored. In this work, we first establish a comprehensive taxonomy of reasoning and operation types for tabu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Know What I don’t Know: Handling Ambiguous and Unknown Questions for Text-to-SQL

ACL 2023findings

The task of text-to-SQL aims to convert a natural language question into its corresponding SQL query within the context of relational tables. Existing text-to-SQL parsers generate a plausible SQL query for an arbitrary user question, thereby failing to correctly handle problematic user questions. To…

2023

L-DAWA: Layer-wise Divergence Aware Weight Aggregation in Federated Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning

ICCV 2023poster

The ubiquity of camera-enabled devices has led to large amounts of unlabeled image data being produced at the edge. The integration of self-supervised learning (SSL) and federated learning (FL) into one coherent system can potentially offer data privacy guarantees while also advancing the quality an…

Cited by 25PDFcodeScholar
2023

Learning Attribute and Class-Specific Representation Duet for Fine-Grained Fashion Analysis

CVPR 2023poster

Fashion representation learning involves the analysis and understanding of various visual elements at different granularities and the interactions among them. Existing works often learn fine-grained fashion representations at the attribute-level without considering their relationships and inter-depe…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

MultiSpider: Towards Benchmarking Multilingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing

AAAI 2023technical

Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is an important NLP task, which facilitates the interaction between users and the database. Much recent progress in text-to-SQL has been driven by large-scale datasets, but most of them are centered on English. In this work, we present MultiSpider, the largest multilingu…

2023

OvarNet: Towards Open-Vocabulary Object Attribute Recognition

CVPR 2023poster

In this paper, we consider the problem of simultaneously detecting objects and inferring their visual attributes in an image, even for those with no manual annotations provided at the training stage, resembling an open-vocabulary scenario. To achieve this goal, we make the following contributions: (…

2023

Swarm Robotics Search and Rescue: A Bee-Inspired Swarm Cooperation Approach without Information Exchange

ICRA 2023poster

Swarm robotics plays a non-negligible role in actual practice because of its scalability and robustness. Besides some specific studies, there is still a lack of overall approaches to solving the search and rescue problem in a communication-denied environment. This paper presents a bee-inspired swarm…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2023

TACR: A Table Alignment-based Cell Selection Method for HybridQA

ACL 2023findings

Hybrid Question-Answering (HQA), which targets reasoning over tables and passages linked from table cells, has witnessed significant research in recent years. A common challenge in HQA and other passage-table QA datasets is that it is generally unrealistic to iterate over all table rows, columns, an…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Uncovering and Categorizing Social Biases in Text-to-SQL

ACL 2023long

Large pre-trained language models are acknowledged to carry social bias towards different demographics, which can further amplify existing stereotypes in our society and cause even more harm. Text-to-SQL is an important task, models of which are mainly adopted by administrative industries, where unf…

2023

Uncovering and Quantifying Social Biases in Code Generation

NeurIPS 2023poster

With the popularity of automatic code generation tools, such as Copilot, the study of the potential hazards of these tools is gaining importance. In this work, we explore the social bias problem in pre-trained code generation models. We propose a new paradigm to construct code prompts and successful…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2022

End-to-End Speech Recognition from Federated Acoustic Models

ICASSP 2022accepted

Training Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models under federated learning (FL) settings has attracted a lot of attention recently. However, the FL scenarios often presented in the literature are artificial and fail to capture the complexity of real FL systems. In this paper, we construct a challen…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Federated Self-Supervised Learning for Video Understanding

ECCV 2022poster

"The ubiquity of camera-enabled mobile devices has lead to large amounts of unlabelled video data being produced at the edge. Although various self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have been proposed to harvest their latent spatio-temporal representations for task-specific training, practical chall…

2022

Fine-Grained Fashion Representation Learning by Online Deep Clustering

ECCV 2022poster

"Fashion designs are rich in visual details associated with various visual attributes at both global and local levels. As a result, effective modeling and analyzing fashion requires fine-grained representations for individual attributes. In this work, we present a deep learning based online clusteri…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2022

HiTab: A Hierarchical Table Dataset for Question Answering and Natural Language Generation

ACL 2022long

Tables are often created with hierarchies, but existing works on table reasoning mainly focus on flat tables and neglect hierarchical tables. Hierarchical tables challenge numerical reasoning by complex hierarchical indexing, as well as implicit relationships of calculation and semantics. We present…

2022

LogiGAN: Learning Logical Reasoning via Adversarial Pre-training

NeurIPS 2022accept

We present LogiGAN, an unsupervised adversarial pre-training framework for improving logical reasoning abilities of language models. Upon automatic identification of logical reasoning phenomena in massive text corpus via detection heuristics, we train language models to predict the masked-out logica…

2022

NFormer: Robust Person Re-Identification With Neighbor Transformer

CVPR 2022poster

Person re-identification aims to retrieve persons in highly varying settings across different cameras and scenarios, in which robust and discriminative representation learning is crucial. Most research considers learning representations from single images, ignoring any potential interactions between…

Cited by 175PDFcodeScholar
2022

Physically Disentangled Intra- and Inter-Domain Adaptation for Varicolored Haze Removal

CVPR 2022poster

Learning-based image dehazing methods have achieved marvelous progress during the past few years. On one hand, most approaches heavily rely on synthetic data and may face difficulties to generalize well in real scenes, due to the huge domain gap between synthetic and real images. On the other hand,…

Cited by 38PDFcodeScholar
2022

Towards Knowledge-Intensive Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing with Formulaic Knowledge

EMNLP 2022main

In this paper, we study the problem of knowledge-intensive text-to-SQL, in which domain knowledge is necessary to parse expert questions into SQL queries over domain-specific tables. We formalize this scenario by building a new benchmark KnowSQL consisting of domain-specific questions covering vario…

2022

Towards Robustness of Text-to-SQL Models Against Natural and Realistic Adversarial Table Perturbation

ACL 2022long

The robustness of Text-to-SQL parsers against adversarial perturbations plays a crucial role in delivering highly reliable applications. Previous studies along this line primarily focused on perturbations in the natural language question side, neglecting the variability of tables. Motivated by this,…

2022

ZeroFL: Efficient On-Device Training for Federated Learning with Local Sparsity

ICLR 2022poster

When the available hardware cannot meet the memory and compute requirements to efficiently train high performing machine learning models, a compromise in either the training quality or the model complexity is needed. In Federated Learning (FL), nodes are orders of magnitude more constrained than tra…

Cited by 77SourcePDFScholar
2021

Keep the Structure: A Latent Shift-Reduce Parser for Semantic Parsing

IJCAI 2021poster

Traditional end-to-end semantic parsing models treat a natural language utterance as a holonomic structure. However, hierarchical structures exist in natural languages, which also align with the hierarchical structures of logical forms. In this paper, we propose a latent shift-reduce parser, called…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2021

Occluded Video Instance Segmentation: Dataset and ICCV 2021 Challenge

NeurIPS 2021poster

Although deep learning methods have achieved advanced video object recognition performance in recent years, perceiving heavily occluded objects in a video is still a very challenging task. To promote the development of occlusion understanding, we collect a large-scale dataset called OVIS for video i…

Cited by 16SourceScholar
2021

Translating Headers of Tabular Data: A Pilot Study of Schema Translation

EMNLP 2021main

Schema translation is the task of automatically translating headers of tabular data from one language to another. High-quality schema translation plays an important role in cross-lingual table searching, understanding and analysis. Despite its importance, schema translation is not well studied in th…

2020

Compositional Generalization by Learning Analytical Expressions

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Compositional generalization is a basic and essential intellective capability of human beings, which allows us to recombine known parts readily. However, existing neural network based models have been proven to be extremely deficient in such a capability. Inspired by work in cognition which argues c…

2020

RECPARSER: A Recursive Semantic Parsing Framework for Text-to-SQL Task

IJCAI 2020poster

Neural semantic parsers usually fail to parse long and complicated utterances into nested SQL queries, due to the large search space. In this paper, we propose a novel recursive semantic parsing framework called RECPARSER to generate the nested SQL query layer-by-layer. It decomposes the complicated…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2019

C-MIDN: Coupled Multiple Instance Detection Network With Segmentation Guidance for Weakly Supervised Object Detection

ICCV 2019poster

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) that only needs image-level annotations has obtained much attention recently. By combining convolutional neural network with multiple instance learning method, Multiple Instance Detection Network (MIDN) has become the most popular method to address the WSOD…

Cited by 128PDFScholar