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Yifei Shen

31 accepted papers

2026

Benefits and Pitfalls of Reinforcement Learning for Language Model Planning: A Theoretical Perspective

ICLR 2026poster

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits and limitations through a tractable graph-based abstraction,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Improving Diffusion Models for Class-imbalanced Training Data via Capacity Manipulation

ICLR 2026oral

While diffusion models have achieved remarkable performance in image generation, they often struggle with the imbalanced datasets frequently encountered in real-world applications, resulting in significant performance degradation on minority classes. In this paper, we identify model capacity allocat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

OLion: Approaching the Hadamard Ideal by Intersecting Spectral and L inf Implicit Biases

ICML 2026poster

Many optimizers can be interpreted as steepest-descent methods under norm-induced geometries, and thus inherit corresponding implicit biases. We introduce Orthogonal Lion which combines spectral control from orthogonalized update directions with $\ell_\infty$-style coordinate control from sign updat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

VidGuard-R1: AI-Generated Video Detection and Explanation via Reasoning MLLMs and RL

ICLR 2026poster

With the rapid advancement of AI-generated videos, there is an urgent need for effective detection tools to mitigate societal risks such as misinformation and reputational harm. In addition to accurate classification, it is essential that detection models provide interpretable explanations to ensure…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Accelerating Block Coordinate Descent for LLM Finetuning via Landscape Expansion

NeurIPS 2025poster

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) is a resource-intensive task for researchers in academia, with memory constraints posing a key bottleneck. A classic optimization method, block coordinate descent (BCD), significantly reduces memory cost by segmenting the trainable parameters into multiple blo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Habitizing Diffusion Planning for Efficient and Effective Decision Making

ICML 2025poster

Diffusion models have shown great promise in decision-making, also known as diffusion planning. However, the slow inference speeds limit their potential for broader real-world applications. Here, we introduce **Habi**, a general framework that transforms powerful but slow diffusion planning models…

2025

How Do Large Language Models Understand Graph Patterns? A Benchmark for Graph Pattern Comprehension

ICLR 2025poster

Benchmarking the capabilities and limitations of large language models (LLMs) in graph-related tasks is becoming an increasingly popular and crucial area of research. Recent studies have shown that LLMs exhibit a preliminary ability to understand graph structures and node features. However, the pote…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2025

Large Multi-modal Models Can Interpret Features in Large Multi-modal Models

ICCV 2025poster

Recent advances in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) lead to significant breakthroughs in both academia and industry. One question that arises is how we, as humans, can understand their internal neural representations. This paper takes an initial step towards addressing this question by presenting a ve…

2025

Omni-DNA: A Genomic Model Supporting Sequence Understanding, Long-context, and Textual Annotation

NeurIPS 2025poster

The interpretation of genomic sequences is crucial for understanding biological processes. To handle the growing volume of DNA sequence data, Genomic Foundation Models (GFMs) have been developed by adapting architectures and training paradigms from Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite their remarka…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SciVer: Evaluating Foundation Models for Multimodal Scientific Claim Verification

ACL 2025long

We introduce SciVer, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the ability of foundation models to verify claims within a multimodal scientific context.SciVer consists of 3,000 expert-annotated examples over 1,113 scientific papers, covering four subsets, each representing a common reaso…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Toward Relative Positional Encoding in Spiking Transformers

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are bio-inspired networks that mimic how neurons in the brain communicate through discrete spikes, which have great potential in various tasks due to their energy efficiency and temporal processing capabilities. SNNs with self-attention mechanisms (spiking Transformers…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Towards Graph Foundation Models: Training on Knowledge Graphs Enables Transferability to General Graphs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Inspired by the success of large language models, there is a trend toward developing graph foundation models to conduct diverse downstream tasks in various domains. However, current models often require extra fine-tuning to apply their learned structural and semantic representations to new graphs, w…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

What Makes a Good Diffusion Planner for Decision Making?

ICLR 2025spotlight

Diffusion models have recently shown significant potential in solving decision-making problems, particularly in generating behavior plans -- also known as diffusion planning. While numerous studies have demonstrated the impressive performance of diffusion planning, the mechanisms behind the key comp…

2025

When Do LLMs Help With Node Classification? A Comprehensive Analysis

ICML 2025poster

Node classification is a fundamental task in graph analysis, with broad applications across various fields. Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled LLM-based approaches for this task. Although many studies demonstrate the impressive performance of LLM-based methods, the lac…

2024

ALPINE: Unveiling The Planning Capability of Autoregressive Learning in Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Planning is a crucial element of both human intelligence and contemporary large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we initiate a theoretical investigation into the emergence of planning capabilities in Transformer-based LLMs via their next-word prediction mechanisms. We model planning as a netwo…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Can Graph Learning Improve Planning in LLM-based Agents?

NeurIPS 2024poster

Task planning in language agents is emerging as an important research topic alongside the development of large language models (LLMs). It aims to break down complex user requests in natural language into solvable sub-tasks, thereby fulfilling the original requests. In this context, the sub-tasks can…

2024

LoRASC: Expressive and Generalizable Low-rank Adaptation for Large Models via Slow Cascaded Learning

EMNLP 2024finding

Efficient fine-tuning plays a fundamental role in modern large models, with low-rank adaptation emerging as a particularly promising approach. However, the existing variants of LoRA are hampered by limited expressiveness, a tendency to overfit, and sensitivity to hyperparameter settings. This paper…

2024

Training-free Multi-objective Diffusion Model for 3D Molecule Generation

ICLR 2024poster

Searching for novel and diverse molecular candidates is a critical undertaking in drug and material discovery. Existing approaches have successfully adapted the diffusion model, the most effective generative model in image generation, to create 1D SMILES strings, 2D chemical graphs, or 3D molecular…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

Understanding and Improving Training-free Loss-based Diffusion Guidance

NeurIPS 2024poster

Adding additional guidance to pretrained diffusion models has become an increasingly popular research area, with extensive applications in computer vision, reinforcement learning, and AI for science. Recently, several studies have proposed training-free loss-based guidance by using off-the-shelf net…

2023

CircuitNet: A Generic Neural Network to Realize Universal Circuit Motif Modeling

ICML 2023poster

The successes of artificial neural networks (ANNs) are largely attributed to mimicking the human brain structures. Recent advances in neuroscience revealed that neurons interact with each other through various kinds of connectivity patterns to process information, in which the common connectivity pa…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

ImageBrush: Learning Visual In-Context Instructions for Exemplar-Based Image Manipulation

NeurIPS 2023poster

While language-guided image manipulation has made remarkable progress, the challenge of how to instruct the manipulation process faithfully reflecting human intentions persists. An accurate and comprehensive description of a manipulation task using natural language is laborious and sometimes even im…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar
2023

Improved Belief Propagation Decoding of Turbo Codes

ICASSP 2023accepted

Turbo codes have been successfully adopted in 4G LTE, which can approach the channel capacity with Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) decoding. With the evolution from 4G LTE to 5G NR, there is a demand to design a unified channel decoder that supports both LTE Turbo codes and NR low-density parity-che…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Learning Decomposed Spatial Relations for Multi-Variate Time-Series Modeling

AAAI 2023technical

Modeling multi-variate time-series (MVTS) data is a long-standing research subject and has found wide applications. Recently, there is a surge of interest in modeling spatial relations between variables as graphs, i.e., first learning one static graph for each dataset and then exploiting the graph s…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2023

SIMPLE: Specialized Model-Sample Matching for Domain Generalization

ICLR 2023poster

In domain generalization (DG), most existing methods aspire to fine-tune a specific pretrained model through novel DG algorithms. In this paper, we propose an alternative direction, i.e., to efficiently leverage a pool of pretrained models without fine-tuning. Through extensive empirical and theoret…

2023

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts are Domain Generalizable Learners

ICLR 2023top-5%

Human visual perception can easily generalize to out-of-distributed visual data, which is far beyond the capability of modern machine learning models. Domain generalization (DG) aims to close this gap, with existing DG methods mainly focusing on the loss function design. In this paper, we propose to…

2022

Invariant Information Bottleneck for Domain Generalization

AAAI 2022technical

Invariant risk minimization (IRM) has recently emerged as a promising alternative for domain generalization. Nevertheless, the loss function is difficult to optimize for nonlinear classifiers and the original optimization objective could fail when pseudo-invariant features and geometric skews exist.…

2021

Recognizing Vector Graphics without Rasterization

NeurIPS 2021poster

In this paper, we consider a different data format for images: vector graphics. In contrast to raster graphics which are widely used in image recognition, vector graphics can be scaled up or down into any resolution without aliasing or information loss, due to the analytic representation of the prim…

2021

Reinforcement Learning Enhanced Explainer for Graph Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2021poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently emerged as revolutionary technologies for machine learning tasks on graphs. In GNNs, the graph structure is generally incorporated with node representation via the message passing scheme, making the explanation much more challenging. Given a trained GNN mod…

Cited by 81SourcePDFScholar
2020

Bipartite Belief Propagation Polar Decoding With Bit-Flipping

ICASSP 2020accepted

For the scenarios with high throughput requirements, the belief propagation (BP) decoding is one of the most promising decoding strategies for polar codes. By pruning the redundant variable nodes (VNs) and check nodes (CNs) in the original factor graph, the graph is condensed to a sparse bipartite g…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Complete Dictionary Learning via $\ell_p$-norm Maximization

UAI 2020poster

Dictionary learning is a classic representation learning method that has been widely applied in signal processing and data analytics. In this paper, we investigate a family of $\ell_p$-norm ($p>2,p \in N$) maximization approaches for the complete dictionary learning problem from theoretical and algo…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar