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Yikang Shen

37 accepted papers

2026

Finding the Minimal Parameter Budget for Implicit Reasoning: A Data Complexity Driven Scaling Law for Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Reasoning is a core capability of language models (LMs), yet it remains unclear how much model capacity is necessary to support reasoning during pretraining. In this work, we study the minimal parameter budget required for implicit reasoning, defined as the ability to infer new facts from learned kn…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

API Pack: A Massive Multi-Programming Language Dataset for API Call Generation

ICLR 2025poster

We introduce API Pack, a massive multi-programming language dataset containing over one million instruction-API calls for improving the API call generation capabilities of large language models. Our evaluation highlights three key findings: First, fine-tuning on API Pack enables open-source models t…

2025

LaMAGIC2: Advanced Circuit Formulations for Language Model-Based Analog Topology Generation

ICML 2025poster

Automation of analog topology design is crucial due to customized requirements of modern applications with heavily manual engineering efforts. The state-of-the-art work applies a sequence-to-sequence approach and supervised finetuning on language models to generate topologies given user specificati…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

PaTH Attention: Position Encoding via Accumulating Householder Transformations

NeurIPS 2025poster

The attention mechanism is a core primitive in modern large language models (LLMs) and AI more broadly. Since attention by itself is permutation-invariant, position encoding is essential for modeling structured domains such as language. Rotary position encoding (RoPE) has emerged as the de facto sta…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Scaling Stick-Breaking Attention: An Efficient Implementation and In-depth Study

ICLR 2025poster

The self-attention mechanism traditionally relies on the softmax operator, necessitating positional embeddings like RoPE, or position biases to account for token order. But current methods using still face length generalisation challenges. We investigate an alternative attention mechanism based on t…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF

ACL 2024findings

Large Multimodal Models (LMM) are built across modalities and the misalignment between two modalities can result in “hallucination”, generating textual outputs that are not grounded by the multimodal information in context. To address the multimodal misalignment issue, we adapt the Reinforcement Lea…

2024

CoVLM: Composing Visual Entities and Relationships in Large Language Models Via Communicative Decoding

ICLR 2024poster

A remarkable ability of human beings resides in compositional reasoning, i.e., the capacity to make "infinite use of finite means". However, current large vision-language foundation models (VLMs) fall short of such compositional abilities due to their ``bag-of-words" behaviors and inability to cons…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2024

Easy-to-Hard Generalization: Scalable Alignment Beyond Human Supervision

NeurIPS 2024poster

Current AI alignment methodologies rely on human-provided demonstrations or judgments, and the learned capabilities of AI systems would be upper-bounded by human capabilities as a result. This raises a challenging research question: How can we keep improving the systems when their capabilities have…

2024

FlexAttention for Efficient High-Resolution Vision-Language Models

ECCV 2024poster

"Current high-resolution vision-language models encode images as high-resolution image tokens and exhaustively take all these tokens to compute attention, which significantly increases the computational cost. To address this problem, we propose , a flexible attention mechanism for efficient high-res…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2024

Gated Linear Attention Transformers with Hardware-Efficient Training

ICML 2024poster

Transformers with linear attention allow for efficient parallel training but can simultaneously be formulated as an RNN with 2D (matrix-valued) hidden states, thus enjoying linear-time inference complexity. However, linear attention generally underperforms ordinary softmax attention. Moreover, curre…

2024

LaMAGIC: Language-Model-based Topology Generation for Analog Integrated Circuits

ICML 2024poster

In the realm of electronic and electrical engineering, automation of analog circuit is increasingly vital given the complexity and customized requirements of modern applications. However, existing methods only develop search-based algorithms that require many simulation iterations to design a custom…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2024

Parallelizing Linear Transformers with the Delta Rule over Sequence Length

NeurIPS 2024poster

Transformers with linear attention (i.e., linear transformers) and state-space models have recently been suggested as a viable linear-time alternative to transformers with softmax attention. However, these models still underperform transformers especially on tasks that require in-context retrieval.…

Cited by 51SourcePDFScholar
2024

SALMON: Self-Alignment with Instructable Reward Models

ICLR 2024poster

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on response demonstrations combined with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) constitutes a powerful paradigm for aligning LLM-based AI agents. However, a significant limitation of such an approach is its dependency on high-quality human annotations, making…

2024

Stacking Your Transformers: A Closer Look at Model Growth for Efficient LLM Pre-Training

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

LLMs are computationally expensive to pre-train due to their large scale. Model growth emerges as a promising approach by leveraging smaller models to accelerate the training of larger ones. However, the viability of these model growth methods in efficient LLM pre-training remains underexplored. Th…

2024

The Consensus Game: Language Model Generation via Equilibrium Search

ICLR 2024spotlight

When applied to question answering and other text generation tasks, language models (LMs) may be queried generatively (by sampling answers from their output distribution) or discriminatively (by using them to score or rank a set of candidate answers). These procedures sometimes yield very different…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2024

Visual Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Knowledge-Based Visual Reasoning

AAAI 2024technical

Knowledge-based visual reasoning remains a daunting task since it not only requires machines to interpret the concepts and relationships from visual scenes but also associate them with external world knowledge to conduct a chain of reasoning on open-world questions. Previous works, however, treat vi…

2023

Adaptive Online Replanning with Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Diffusion models have risen a promising approach to data-driven planning, and have demonstrated impressive robotic control, reinforcement learning, and video planning performance. Given an effective planner, an important question to consider is replanning -- when given plans should be regenerated du…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2023

Hyper-Decision Transformer for Efficient Online Policy Adaptation

ICLR 2023poster

Decision Transformers (DT) have demonstrated strong performances in offline reinforcement learning settings, but quickly adapting to unseen novel tasks remains challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a new framework, called Hyper-Decision Transformer (HDT), that can generalize to novel ta…

Cited by 44SourcePDFScholar
2023

Mod-Squad: Designing Mixtures of Experts As Modular Multi-Task Learners

CVPR 2023poster

Optimization in multi-task learning (MTL) is more challenging than single-task learning (STL), as the gradient from different tasks can be contradictory. When tasks are related, it can be beneficial to share some parameters among them (cooperation). However, some tasks require additional parameters…

Cited by 107SourcePDFScholar
2023

Planning with Large Language Models for Code Generation

ICLR 2023poster

Existing large language model-based code generation pipelines typically use beam search or sampling algorithms during the decoding process. Although the programs they generate achieve high token-matching-based scores, they often fail to compile or generate incorrect outputs. The main reason is that…

Cited by 177SourcePDFScholar
2023

Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human Supervision

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Recent AI-assistant agents, such as ChatGPT, predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with human annotations and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align the output of large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, ensuring they are helpful, ethical, and reliable. Ho…

2023

TextPSG: Panoptic Scene Graph Generation from Textual Descriptions

ICCV 2023poster

Panoptic Scene Graph has recently been proposed for comprehensive scene understanding. However, previous works adopt a fully-supervised learning manner, requiring large amounts of pixel-wise densely-annotated data, which is always tedious and expensive to obtain. To address this limitation, we study…

Cited by 12PDFScholar
2023

Transformer-Patcher: One Mistake Worth One Neuron

ICLR 2023poster

Large Transformer-based Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) dominate almost all Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Nevertheless, they still make mistakes from time to time. For a model deployed in an industrial environment, fixing these mistakes quickly and robustly is vital to improve user expe…

2023

Visual Dependency Transformers: Dependency Tree Emerges From Reversed Attention

CVPR 2023poster

Humans possess a versatile mechanism for extracting structured representations of our visual world. When looking at an image, we can decompose the scene into entities and their parts as well as obtain the dependencies between them. To mimic such capability, we propose Visual Dependency Transformers…

2022

Mixture of Attention Heads: Selecting Attention Heads Per Token

EMNLP 2022main

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) networks have been proposed as an efficient way to scale up model capacity and implement conditional computing. However, the study of MoE components mostly focused on the feedforward layer in Transformer architecture. This paper proposes the Mixture of Attention Heads (MoA),…

2022

Prompting Decision Transformer for Few-Shot Policy Generalization

ICML 2022spotlight

Human can leverage prior experience and learn novel tasks from a handful of demonstrations. In contrast to offline meta-reinforcement learning, which aims to achieve quick adaptation through better algorithm design, we investigate the effect of architecture inductive bias on the few-shot learning ca…

2022

Unsupervised Dependency Graph Network

ACL 2022long

Recent work has identified properties of pretrained self-attention models that mirror those of dependency parse structures. In particular, some self-attention heads correspond well to individual dependency types. Inspired by these developments, we propose a new competitive mechanism that encourages…

2021

Explicitly Modeling Syntax in Language Models with Incremental Parsing and a Dynamic Oracle

NAACL 2021long

Syntax is fundamental to our thinking about language. Failing to capture the structure of input language could lead to generalization problems and over-parametrization. In the present work, we propose a new syntax-aware language model: Syntactic Ordered Memory (SOM). The model explicitly models the…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2021

Learning Task Decomposition with Ordered Memory Policy Network

ICLR 2021poster

Many complex real-world tasks are composed of several levels of subtasks. Humans leverage these hierarchical structures to accelerate the learning process and achieve better generalization. In this work, we study the inductive bias and propose Ordered Memory Policy Network (OMPN) to discover subtask…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2021

Long Range Arena : A Benchmark for Efficient Transformers

ICLR 2021poster

Transformers do not scale very well to long sequence lengths largely because of quadratic self-attention complexity. In the recent months, a wide spectrum of efficient, fast Transformers have been proposed to tackle this problem, more often than not claiming superior or comparable model quality to v…

2021

Self-Instantiated Recurrent Units with Dynamic Soft Recursion

NeurIPS 2021poster

While standard recurrent neural networks explicitly impose a chain structure on different forms of data, they do not have an explicit bias towards recursive self-instantiation where the extent of recursion is dynamic. Given diverse and even growing data modalities (e.g., logic, algorithmic input an…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2021

StructFormer: Joint Unsupervised Induction of Dependency and Constituency Structure from Masked Language Modeling

ACL 2021long

There are two major classes of natural language grammars — the dependency grammar that models one-to-one correspondences between words and the constituency grammar that models the assembly of one or several corresponded words. While previous unsupervised parsing methods mostly focus on only inducing…

2019

Ordered Memory

NeurIPS 2019poster

Stack-augmented recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been of interest to the deep learning community for some time. However, the difficulty of training memory models remains a problem obstructing the widespread use of such models. In this paper, we propose the Ordered Memory architecture. Inspired…

2019

Ordered Neurons: Integrating Tree Structures into Recurrent Neural Networks

ICLR 2019oral

Natural language is hierarchically structured: smaller units (e.g., phrases) are nested within larger units (e.g., clauses). When a larger constituent ends, all of the smaller constituents that are nested within it must also be closed. While the standard LSTM architecture allows different neurons to…

2018

Neural Language Modeling by Jointly Learning Syntax and Lexicon

ICLR 2018poster

We propose a neural language model capable of unsupervised syntactic structure induction. The model leverages the structure information to form better semantic representations and better language modeling. Standard recurrent neural networks are limited by their structure and fail to efficiently use…

Cited by 208SourcePDFScholar