← Search

Yaochen Zhu

11 accepted papers

2026

ConvRec-R1: Training LLM-based Conversational Recommender Systems with Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping the recommender system paradigm by enabling users to express preferences and receive recommendations through conversations. Yet, aligning LLMs to the recommendation task remains challenging: pretrained LLMs often generate out-of-catalog items, violate requi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

IAPO: Information-Aware Policy Optimization for Token-Efficient Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Large language models increasingly rely on long chains of thought to improve accuracy, yet such gains come with substantial inference-time costs. We revisit token-efficient post-training and argue that existing sequence-level reward-shaping methods offer limited control over how reasoning effort is …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Causal Effect Estimation with Mixed Latent Confounders and Post-treatment Variables

ICLR 2025poster

Causal inference from observational data has attracted considerable attention among researchers. One main obstacle is the handling of confounders. As direct measurement of confounders may not be feasible, recent methods seek to address the confounding bias via proxy variables, i.e., covariates postu…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

CoRAG: Enhancing Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation through a Cooperative Retriever Architecture

EMNLP 2025

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is introduced to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge. However, conventional RAG approaches treat retrieved documents as independent units, often overlooking their interdependencies. Hybrid-RAG, a recently proposed paradigm that

2025

Hierarchical Demonstration Order Optimization for Many-shot In-Context Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a technique where large language models (LLMs) leverage multiple demonstrations (i.e., examples) to perform tasks. With the recent expansion of LLM context windows, many-shot ICL (generally with more than 50 demonstrations) can lead to significant performance improvement…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

LLM-based Conversational Recommendation Agents with Collaborative Verbalized Experience

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in conversational recommender systems (CRS). However, effectively utilizing historical conversations remains a significant challenge. Current approaches either retrieve few-shot examples or extract global rules to enhan

2025

Learning from Diverse Reasoning Paths with Routing and Collaboration

EMNLP 2025

Advances in large language models (LLMs) significantly enhance reasoning capabilities but their deployment is restricted in resource-constrained scenarios. Knowledge distillation addresses this by transferring knowledge from powerful teacher models to compact and transparent students.However, effect

2025

SemCoT: Accelerating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Semantically-Aligned Implicit Tokens

NeurIPS 2025poster

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) enhances the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks by encouraging step-by-step solutions. However, the verbosity of CoT reasoning hinders its mass deployment in efficiency-critical applications. Recently, implicit CoT approaches have emerged, which enc…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Towards Global-level Mechanistic Interpretability: A Perspective of Modular Circuits of Large Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Mechanistic interpretability (MI) research aims to understand large language models (LLMs) by identifying computational circuits, subgraphs of model components with associated functional interpretations, that explain specific behaviors. Current MI approaches focus on discovering task-specific circui…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Explaining Graph Neural Networks with Large Language Models: A Counterfactual Perspective on Molecule Graphs

EMNLP 2024finding

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become successful in molecular property prediction tasks such as toxicity analysis. However, due to the black-box nature of GNNs, their outputs can be concerning in high-stakes decision-making scenarios, e.g., drug discovery. Facing such an issue, G…

2024

Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Large Language Models via Path Selection

ACL 2024findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown unprecedented performance in various real-world applications. However, they are known to generate factually inaccurate outputs, a.k.a. the hallucination problem. In recent years, incorporating external knowledge extracted from Knowledge Graphs (KGs) has become…