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Yao Ma

22 accepted papers

2026

Adversarial Déjà Vu: Jailbreak Dictionary Learning for Stronger Generalization to Unseen Attacks

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that bypass safety guardrails to elicit harmful outputs. Defending against novel jailbreaks represents a critical challenge in AI safety. Adversarial training---designed to make models robust against worst-case perturbations---has been the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Unifying and Optimizing Data Values for Selection via Sequential Decision-Making

ICML 2026spotlight

Data selection has emerged as a crucial downstream application of data valuation, yet the theoretical foundations for using data values in selection remain underexplored. We reformulate data selection as a sequential decision-making problem where the optimal selection sequence arises from dynamic pr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Survey to Recent Progress Towards Understanding In-Context Learning

NAACL 2025findings

In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to learn from a few examples provided in the prompt, enabling downstream generalization without the requirement for gradient updates. Despite encouragingly empirical success, the underlying mechanism of ICL remains uncl…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Diagnosing and Addressing Pitfalls in KG-RAG Datasets: Toward More Reliable Benchmarking

NeurIPS 2025poster

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) systems rely on high-quality benchmarks to evaluate complex multi-hop reasoning. However, despite their widespread use, popular datasets such as WebQSP and CWQ suffer from critical quality issues, including inaccurate or incomplete ground-truth annotations,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Lessons Learned: A Multi-Agent Framework for Code LLMs to Learn and Improve

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent studies show that LLMs possess different skills and specialize in different tasks. In fact, we observe that their varied performance occur in several levels of granularity. For example, in the code optimization task, code LLMs excel at different optimization categories and no one dominates ot…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Precedence-Constrained Winter Value for Effective Graph Data Valuation

ICLR 2025poster

Data valuation is essential for quantifying data’s worth, aiding in assessing data quality and determining fair compensation. While existing data valuation methods have proven effective in evaluating the value of Euclidean data, they face limitations when applied to the increasingly popular graph-st…

2025

Shapley-Guided Utility Learning for Effective Graph Inference Data Valuation

ICLR 2025poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various graph-based machine learning tasks, yet evaluating the importance of neighbors of testing nodes remains largely unexplored due to the challenge of assessing data importance without test labels. To address this gap, we p…

2025

Understanding and Enhancing Message Passing on Heterophilic Graphs via Compatibility Matrix

NeurIPS 2025poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in graph mining tasks thanks to their message-passing mechanism, which aligns with the homophily assumption. However, connected nodes can also exhibit inconsistent behaviors, termed heterophilic patterns, sparking interest in heterophilic GNNs (HTGNNs). Although th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Efficient Pointwise-Pairwise Learning-to-Rank for News Recommendation

EMNLP 2024finding

News recommendation is a challenging task that involves personalization based on the interaction history and preferences of each user. Recent works have leveraged the power of pretrained language models (PLMs) to directly rank news items by using inference approaches that predominately fall into thr…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

PDHG-Unrolled Learning-to-Optimize Method for Large-Scale Linear Programming

ICML 2024poster

Solving large-scale linear programming (LP) problems is an important task in various areas such as communication networks, power systems, finance and logistics. Recently, two distinct approaches have emerged to expedite LP solving: (i) First-order methods (FOMs); (ii) Learning to optimize (L2O). In…

2024

Position: Graph Foundation Models Are Already Here

ICML 2024spotlight

Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) are emerging as a significant research topic in the graph domain, aiming to develop graph models trained on extensive and diverse data to enhance their applicability across various tasks and domains. Developing GFMs presents unique challenges over traditional Graph Neu…

2024

Revisiting Link Prediction: a data perspective

ICLR 2024poster

Link prediction, a fundamental task on graphs, has proven indispensable in various applications, e.g., friend recommendation, protein analysis, and drug interaction prediction. However, since datasets span a multitude of domains, they could have distinct underlying mechanisms of link formation. Evid…

2023

Are Message Passing Neural Networks Really Helpful for Knowledge Graph Completion?

ACL 2023long

Knowledge graphs (KGs) facilitate a wide variety of applications. Despite great efforts in creation and maintenance, even the largest KGs are far from complete. Hence, KG completion (KGC) has become one of the most crucial tasks for KG research. Recently, considerable literature in this space has ce…

2023

Demystifying Structural Disparity in Graph Neural Networks: Can One Size Fit All?

NeurIPS 2023poster

Recent studies on Graph Neural Networks(GNNs) provide both empirical and theoretical evidence supporting their effectiveness in capturing structural patterns on both homophilic and certain heterophilic graphs. Notably, most real-world homophilic and heterophilic graphs are comprised of a mixture of…

2023

Distance-Based Propagation for Efficient Knowledge Graph Reasoning

EMNLP 2023long main

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict unseen edges in knowledge graphs (KGs), resulting in the discovery of new facts. A new class of methods have been proposed to tackle this problem by aggregating path information. These methods have shown tremendous ability in the task of KGC. However…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Evaluating Graph Neural Networks for Link Prediction: Current Pitfalls and New Benchmarking

NeurIPS 2023poster

Link prediction attempts to predict whether an unseen edge exists based on only a portion of the graph. A flurry of methods has been created in recent years that attempt to make use of graph neural networks (GNNs) for this task. Furthermore, new and diverse datasets have also been created to better…

2022

Automated Self-Supervised Learning for Graphs

ICLR 2022poster

Graph self-supervised learning has gained increasing attention due to its capacity to learn expressive node representations. Many pretext tasks, or loss functions have been designed from distinct perspectives. However, we observe that different pretext tasks affect downstream tasks differently cross…

2021

Graph Neural Networks with Adaptive Residual

NeurIPS 2021poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown the power in graph representation learning for numerous tasks. In this work, we discover an interesting phenomenon that although residual connections in the message passing of GNNs help improve the performance, they immensely amplify GNNs' vulnerability agains…

2018

Gradient Descent for Sparse Rank-One Matrix Completion for Crowd-Sourced Aggregation of Sparsely Interacting Workers

ICML 2018oral

We consider worker skill estimation for the single coin Dawid-Skene crowdsourcing model. In practice skill-estimation is challenging because worker assignments are sparse and irregular due to the arbitrary, and uncontrolled availability of workers. We formulate skill estimation as a rank-one correla…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar
2016

Theoretical Comparisons of Positive-Unlabeled Learning against Positive-Negative Learning

NeurIPS 2016poster

In PU learning, a binary classifier is trained from positive (P) and unlabeled (U) data without negative (N) data. Although N data is missing, it sometimes outperforms PN learning (i.e., ordinary supervised learning). Hitherto, neither theoretical nor experimental analysis has been given to explain…

Cited by 152SourcePDFScholar