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Yefan Zhou

12 accepted papers

2026

Diffusion Language Model Knows the Answer Before It Decodes

ICLR 2026oral

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as an alternative to autoregressive approaches, offering parallel sequence generation and flexible token orders. However, their inference remains slower than that of autoregressive models, primarily due to the cost of bidirectional attention and…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

On the Shelf Life of Finetuned LLM-Judges: Future Proofing, Backward Compatibility, and Question Generalization

ICLR 2026poster

The LLM-as-a-judge paradigm is widely used in both evaluating free-text model responses and reward modeling for model alignment and finetuning. Recently, finetuning judges with judge-specific data has emerged as an often preferred choice over directly prompting frontier models as judges, as the form…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

RL4RLA: Teaching ML to Discover Randomized Linear Algebra Algorithms through Curriculum Design and Graph-based Search

ICML 2026poster

Randomized linear algebra (RLA) algorithms are essential for scaling scientific computing and machine learning, yet their discovery remains mostly a manual process that requires deep expert knowledge and inspiration. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a pathway to automation, standard approach…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Variation in Verification: Understanding Verification Dynamics in Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances have shown that scaling test-time computation enables large language models (LLMs) to solve increasingly complex problems across diverse domains. One effective paradigm for test-time scaling (TTS) involves LLM generators producing multiple solution candidates, with LLM verifiers asse…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

AlphaLoRA: Assigning LoRA Experts Based on Layer Training Quality

EMNLP 2024main

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), are known to enhance training efficiency in Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to the limited parameters of LoRA, recent studies seek to combine LoRA with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to boost performance across various tasks. H…

2024

AlphaPruning: Using Heavy-Tailed Self Regularization Theory for Improved Layer-wise Pruning of Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recent work on pruning large language models (LLMs) has shown that one can eliminate a large number of parameters without compromising performance, making pruning a promising strategy to reduce LLM model size. Existing LLM pruning strategies typically assign uniform pruning ratios across layers, lim…

2024

MD tree: a model-diagnostic tree grown on loss landscape

ICML 2024poster

This paper considers ''model diagnosis'', which we formulate as a classification problem. Given a pre-trained neural network (NN), the goal is to predict the source of failure from a set of failure modes (such as a wrong hyperparameter, inadequate model size, and insufficient data) without knowing t…

2024

Model Balancing Helps Low-data Training and Fine-tuning

EMNLP 2024main

Recent advances in foundation models have emphasized the need to align pre-trained models with specialized domains using small, curated datasets. Studies on these foundation models underscore the importance of low-data training and fine-tuning. This topic, well-known in natural language processing (…

2024

Sharpness-diversity tradeoff: improving flat ensembles with SharpBalance

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recent studies on deep ensembles have identified the sharpness of the local minima of individual learners and the diversity of the ensemble members as key factors in improving test-time performance. Building on this, our study investigates the interplay between sharpness and diversity within deep en…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Temperature Balancing, Layer-wise Weight Analysis, and Neural Network Training

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Regularization in modern machine learning is crucial, and it can take various forms in algorithmic design: training set, model family, error function, regularization terms, and optimizations. In particular, the learning rate, which can be interpreted as a temperature-like parameter within the stati…

2022

Learn to Grasp with Less Supervision: A Data-Efficient Maximum Likelihood Grasp Sampling Loss

ICRA 2022poster

Robotic grasping for a diverse set of objects is essential in many robot manipulation tasks. One promising approach is to learn deep grasping models from large training datasets of object images and grasp labels. However, empirical grasping datasets are typically sparsely labeled (i.e., a small numb…

Cited by 16SourceScholar