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Yanjun Qi

22 accepted papers

2026

Preference Optimization via Contrastive Divergence: Your Policy Is Secretly an NLL Estimator

AAAI 2026technical

Existing studies on preference optimization (PO) have been focused on constructing pairwise preference data following simple heuristics, such as maximizing the margin between chosen and rejected responses based on human (or AI) ratings. In this work, we develop a novel PO framework that provides th

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Reward Is Enough: LLMs Are In-Context Reinforcement Learners

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a human-designed framework for solving sequential decision-making problems. In this work, we demonstrate that, surprisingly, RL emerges in LLMs at inference time – a phenomenon known as in-context RL (ICRL). To reveal this capability, we introduce a simple multi-round…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

TaeBench: Improving Quality of Toxic Adversarial Examples

NAACL 2025industry

Toxicity text detectors can be vulnerable to adversarial examples - small perturbations to input text that fool the systems into wrong detection. Existing attack algorithms are time-consuming and often produce invalid or ambiguous adversarial examples, making them less useful for evaluating or impro…

2025

TurboFuzzLLM: Turbocharging Mutation-based Fuzzing for Effectively Jailbreaking Large Language Models in Practice

NAACL 2025industry

Jailbreaking large-language models (LLMs) involves testing their robustness against adversarial prompts and evaluating their ability to withstand prompt attacks that could elicit unauthorized or malicious responses. In this paper, we present TurboFuzzLLM, a mutation-based fuzzing technique for effic…

2024

LaRS: Latent Reasoning Skills for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

EMNLP 2024finding

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a popular in-context learning (ICL) approach for large language models (LLMs), especially when tackling complex reasoning tasks. Traditional ICL approaches construct prompts using examples that contain questions similar to the input question. However, CoT promptin…

2023

Improving Interpretability via Explicit Word Interaction Graph Layer

AAAI 2023technical

Recent NLP literature has seen growing interest in improving model interpretability. Along this direction, we propose a trainable neural network layer that learns a global interaction graph between words and then selects more informative words using the learned word interactions. Our layer, we call…

2023

Towards Building a Robust Toxicity Predictor

ACL 2023industry

Recent NLP literature pays little attention to the robustness of toxicity language predictors, while these systems are most likely to be used in adversarial contexts. This paper presents a novel adversarial attack, \texttt{ToxicTrap}, introducing small word-level perturbations to fool SOTA text clas…

2022

Beyond Data Samples: Aligning Differential Networks Estimation with Scientific Knowledge

AISTATS 2022poster

Learning the differential statistical dependency network between two contexts is essential for many real-life applications, mostly in the high dimensional low sample regime. In this paper, we propose a novel differential network estimator that allows integrating various sources of knowledge beyond d…

2022

ST-MAML : A stochastic-task based method for task-heterogeneous meta-learning

UAI 2022poster

Optimization-based meta-learning typically assumes tasks are sampled from a single distribution - an assumption that oversimplifies and limits the diversity of tasks that meta-learning can model. Handling tasks from multiple distributions is challenging for meta-learning because it adds ambiguity to…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2022

White-box Testing of NLP models with Mask Neuron Coverage

NAACL 2022findings

Recent literature has seen growing interest in using black-box strategies like for testing the behavior of NLP models. Research on white-box testing has developed a number of methods for evaluatinghow thoroughly the internal behavior of deep models is tested, but they are not applicableto NLP models…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2021

Curriculum Labeling: Revisiting Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Learning

AAAI 2021technical

In this paper we revisit the idea of pseudo-labeling in the context of semi-supervised learning where a learning algorithm has access to a small set of labeled samples and a large set of unlabeled samples. Pseudo-labeling works by applying pseudo-labels to samples in the unlabeled set by using a mod…

2021

General Multi-Label Image Classification With Transformers

CVPR 2021poster

Multi-label image classification is the task of predicting a set of labels corresponding to objects, attributes or other entities present in an image. In this work we propose the Classification Transformer (C-Tran), a general framework for multi-label image classification that leverages Transformers…

Cited by 387PDFcodeScholar
2018

A Fast and Scalable Joint Estimator for Integrating Additional Knowledge in Learning Multiple Related Sparse Gaussian Graphical Models

ICML 2018oral

We consider the problem of including additional knowledge in estimating sparse Gaussian graphical models (sGGMs) from aggregated samples, arising often in bioinformatics and neuroimaging applications. Previous joint sGGM estimators either fail to use existing knowledge or cannot scale-up to many tas…

2018

Fast and Scalable Learning of Sparse Changes in High-Dimensional Gaussian Graphical Model Structure

AISTATS 2018poster

We focus on the problem of estimating the change in the dependency structures of two $p$-dimensional Gaussian Graphical models (GGMs). Previous studies for sparse change estimation in GGMs involve expensive and difficult non-smooth optimization. We propose a novel method, DIFFEE for estimating DIFFe…

2017

A Fast and Scalable Joint Estimator for Learning Multiple Related Sparse Gaussian Graphical Models

AISTATS 2017poster

Estimating multiple sparse Gaussian Graphical Models (sGGMs) jointly for many related tasks (large $K$) under a high-dimensional (large $p$) situation is an important task. Most previous studies for the joint estimation of multiple sGGMs rely on penalized log-likelihood estimators that involve expen…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2017

A Theoretical Framework for Robustness of (Deep) Classifiers against Adversarial Samples

ICLR 2017workshop

Most machine learning classifiers, including deep neural networks, are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Such inputs are typically generated by adding small but purposeful modifications that lead to incorrect outputs while imperceptible to human eyes. The goal of this paper is not to introduce a s…

Cited by 39SourceScholar
2017

Attend and Predict: Understanding Gene Regulation by Selective Attention on Chromatin

NeurIPS 2017poster

The past decade has seen a revolution in genomic technologies that enabled a flood of genome-wide profiling of chromatin marks. Recent literature tried to understand gene regulation by predicting gene expression from large-scale chromatin measurements. Two fundamental challenges exist for such lea…