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Yihang Yao

11 accepted papers

2026

Pushing Forward Pareto Frontiers of Proactive Agents with Behavioral Agentic Optimization

ICML 2026poster

Proactive large language model (LLM) agents aim to actively plan, query, and interact over multiple turns, enabling efficient task completion beyond passive instruction following and making them essential for real-world, user-centric applications. Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has recently eme…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Behavior Injection: Preparing Language Models for Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training technique to incentivize the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs can respond very inconsistently to RL finetuning: some show substantial performance gains, while others plateau or even degrade. To unders…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

QuietPaw: Learning Quadrupedal Locomotion with Versatile Noise Preference Alignment

IROS 2025

When operating at their full capacity, quadrupedal robots can produce loud footstep noise, which can be disruptive in human-centered environments like homes, offices, and hospitals. As a result, balancing locomotion performance with noise constraints is crucial for the successful real-world deployme

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2025

Safety is Not Only About Refusal: Reasoning-Enhanced Fine-tuning for Interpretable LLM Safety

ACL 2025finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit weaknesses in traditional safety alignment, which often relies on rigid refusal heuristics or representation engineering to block harmful outputs. While they are effective for direct adversarial attacks, they fall short of…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Your Language Model May Think Too Rigidly: Achieving Reasoning Consistency with Symmetry-Enhanced Training

ACL 2025finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities across various tasks. However, even minor variations in query phrasing, despite preserving the underlying semantic meaning, can significantly affect their performance. To address this, we focus on enhancing LLMs’ awareness…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Feasibility Consistent Representation Learning for Safe Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2024poster

In the field of safe reinforcement learning (RL), finding a balance between satisfying safety constraints and optimizing reward performance presents a significant challenge. A key obstacle in this endeavor is the estimation of safety constraints, which is typically more difficult than estimating a r…

2024

Learning from Sparse Offline Datasets via Conservative Density Estimation

ICLR 2024poster

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising direction for learning policies from pre-collected datasets without requiring further interactions with the environment. However, existing methods struggle to handle out-of-distribution (OOD) extrapolation errors, especially in sparse reward or…

2024

OASIS: Conditional Distribution Shaping for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to train a policy that satisfies con- straints using a pre-collected dataset. Most current methods struggle with the mismatch between imperfect demonstrations and the desired safe and rewarding performance. In this paper, we mitigate this issue from a da…

2023

Constrained Decision Transformer for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2023poster

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a constraint satisfaction policy by interacting with the environment. We aim to tackle a more challenging problem: learning a safe policy from an offline dataset. We study the offline safe RL problem from a novel multi-objective optimization perspective and pr…

2023

Constraint-Conditioned Policy Optimization for Versatile Safe Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) focuses on training reward-maximizing agents subject to pre-defined safety constraints. Yet, learning versatile safe policies that can adapt to varying safety constraint requirements during deployment without retraining remains a largely unexplored and challenging ar…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2023

Towards Robust and Safe Reinforcement Learning with Benign Off-policy Data

ICML 2023poster

Previous work demonstrates that the optimal safe reinforcement learning policy in a noise-free environment is vulnerable and could be unsafe under observational attacks. While adversarial training effectively improves robustness and safety, collecting samples by attacking the behavior agent online c…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar