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Yanshuai Cao

15 accepted papers

2025

Can LLMs Reason Abstractly Over Math Word Problems Without CoT? Disentangling Abstract Formulation From Arithmetic Computation

EMNLP 2025

Final-answer-based metrics are commonly used for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on math word problems, often taken as proxies for reasoning ability. However, such metrics conflate two distinct sub-skills: abstract formulation (capturing mathematical relationships using expressions) and arit

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

EBBS: An Ensemble with Bi-Level Beam Search for Zero-Shot Machine Translation

AAAI 2025technical

The ability of zero-shot translation emerges when we train a multilingual model with certain translation directions; the model can then directly translate in unseen directions. Alternatively, zero-shot translation can be accomplished by pivoting through a third language (e.g., English). In our work,…

2024

Do LLMs Build World Representations? Probing Through the Lens of State Abstraction

NeurIPS 2024poster

How do large language models (LLMs) encode the state of the world, including the status of entities and their relations, as described by a text? While existing work directly probes for a complete state of the world, our research explores whether and how LLMs abstract this world state in their intern…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Ensemble Distillation for Unsupervised Constituency Parsing

ICLR 2024poster

We investigate the unsupervised constituency parsing task, which organizes words and phrases of a sentence into a hierarchical structure without using linguistically annotated data. We observe that existing unsupervised parsers capture different aspects of parsing structures, which can be leveraged…

2024

Jump Starting Bandits with LLM-Generated Prior Knowledge

EMNLP 2024main

We present substantial evidence demonstrating the benefits of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit framework. Contextual bandits have been widely used in recommendation systems to generate personalized suggestions based on user-specific contexts. We show that…

2024

Leveraging Environment Interaction for Automated PDDL Translation and Planning with Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various natural language tasks, but they often struggle with planning problems that require structured reasoning. To address this limitation, the conversion of planning problems into the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) has…

2023

An Equal-Size Hard EM Algorithm for Diverse Dialogue Generation

ICLR 2023poster

Open-domain dialogue systems aim to interact with humans through natural language texts in an open-ended fashion. Despite the recent success of super large dialogue systems such as ChatGPT, using medium-to-small-sized dialogue systems remains the common practice as they are more lightweight and acce…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2021

Code Generation from Natural Language with Less Prior Knowledge and More Monolingual Data

ACL 2021short

Training datasets for semantic parsing are typically small due to the higher expertise required for annotation than most other NLP tasks. As a result, models for this application usually need additional prior knowledge to be built into the architecture or algorithm. The increased dependency on human…

2021

Optimizing Deeper Transformers on Small Datasets

ACL 2021long

It is a common belief that training deep transformers from scratch requires large datasets. Consequently, for small datasets, people usually use shallow and simple additional layers on top of pre-trained models during fine-tuning. This work shows that this does not always need to be the case: with p…

2020

Evaluating Lossy Compression Rates of Deep Generative Models

ICML 2020poster

The field of deep generative modeling has succeeded in producing astonishingly realistic-seeming images and audio, but quantitative evaluation remains a challenge. Log-likelihood is an appealing metric due to its grounding in statistics and information theory, but it can be challenging to estimate f…

2020

On Variational Learning of Controllable Representations for Text without Supervision

ICML 2020poster

The variational autoencoder (VAE) can learn the manifold of natural images on certain datasets, as evidenced by meaningful interpolating or extrapolating in the continuous latent space. However, on discrete data such as text, it is unclear if unsupervised learning can discover similar latent space t…

2018

Improving GAN Training via Binarized Representation Entropy (BRE) Regularization

ICLR 2018poster

We propose a novel regularizer to improve the training of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The motivation is that when the discriminator D spreads out its model capacity in the right way, the learning signals given to the generator G are more informative and diverse, which helps G to explore…