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Yangjun Ruan

11 accepted papers

2025

APPL: A Prompt Programming Language for Harmonious Integration of Programs and Large Language Model Prompts

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable of handling diverse tasks with the aid of well-crafted prompts and integration of external tools, but as task complexity rises, the workflow involving LLMs can be complicated and thus challenging to implement and maintain. To address this…

2025

MixMin: Finding Data Mixtures via Convex Minimization

ICML 2025poster

Modern machine learning pipelines are increasingly combining and mixing data from diverse and disparate sources, e.g., pre-training large language models. Yet, finding the optimal data mixture is a challenging and open problem. We formalize this data mixing problem as a bi-level objective: the best…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Graph-based Uncertainty Metrics for Long-form Language Model Generations

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved text generation capabilities, but these systems are still known to hallucinate, and granular uncertainty estimation for long-form LLM generations remains challenging. In this work, we propose Graph Uncertainty -- which…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox

ICLR 2024spotlight

Recent advances in Language Model (LM) agents and tool use, exemplified by applications like ChatGPT Plugins, enable a rich set of capabilities but also amplify potential risks—such as leaking private data or causing financial losses. Identifying these risks is labor-intensive, necessitating impleme…

2024

Observational Scaling Laws and the Predictability of Langauge Model Performance

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Understanding how language model performance varies with scale is critical to benchmark and algorithm development. Scaling laws are one approach to building this understanding, but the requirement of training models across many different scales has limited their use. We propose an alternative, obser…

Cited by 35SourcePDFScholar
2023

Weighted Ensemble Self-Supervised Learning

ICLR 2023poster

Ensembling has proven to be a powerful technique for boosting model performance, uncertainty estimation, and robustness in supervised learning. Advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) enable leveraging large unlabeled corpora for state-of-the-art few-shot and supervised learning performance. In t…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2022

Augment with Care: Contrastive Learning for Combinatorial Problems

ICML 2022spotlight

Supervised learning can improve the design of state-of-the-art solvers for combinatorial problems, but labelling large numbers of combinatorial instances is often impractical due to exponential worst-case complexity. Inspired by the recent success of contrastive pre-training for images, we conduct a…

2021

Improving Lossless Compression Rates via Monte Carlo Bits-Back Coding

ICML 2021oral

Latent variable models have been successfully applied in lossless compression with the bits-back coding algorithm. However, bits-back suffers from an increase in the bitrate equal to the KL divergence between the approximate posterior and the true posterior. In this paper, we show how to remove this…

2020

Learning to Learn by Zeroth-Order Oracle

ICLR 2020poster

In the learning to learn (L2L) framework, we cast the design of optimization algorithms as a machine learning problem and use deep neural networks to learn the update rules. In this paper, we extend the L2L framework to zeroth-order (ZO) optimization setting, where no explicit gradient information i…

Cited by 20SourcecodeScholar
2019

FastSpeech: Fast, Robust and Controllable Text to Speech

NeurIPS 2019poster

Neural network based end-to-end text to speech (TTS) has significantly improved the quality of synthesized speech. Prominent methods (e.g., Tacotron 2) usually first generate mel-spectrogram from text, and then synthesize speech from the mel-spectrogram using vocoder such as WaveNet. Compared with t…