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Yizhen Zhang

13 accepted papers

2026

Expert Divergence Learning for MoE-based Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is a powerful technique for scaling language models, yet it often suffers from expert homogenization, where experts learn redundant functionalities, thereby limiting MoE's full potential. To address this, we introduce Expert Divergence Learning, a novel pre-…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

From Narrow to Panoramic Vision: Attention-Guided Cold-Start Reshapes Multimodal Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

The cold-start initialization stage plays a pivotal role in training Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs), yet its mechanisms remain insufficiently understood. To analyze this stage, we introduce the Visual Attention Score (VAS), an attention-based metric that quantifies how much a model attend…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

MeSH: Memory-as-State-Highways for Recursive Transformers

ICLR 2026poster

Recursive transformers reuse parameters and iterate over hidden states multiple times, decoupling compute depth from parameter depth. However, under matched compute, recursive models with fewer parameters often lag behind non-recursive counterparts. By probing hidden states, we trace this performanc…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Multimodal Meta-Verifier with Explicit Structured Recalibration

ICML 2026poster

Visual outcomes are increasingly central to multimodal large language models, making reliable and fine-grained verification essential for scaling generalist foundation models. In this work, we investigate ***multimodal meta-verification***, which leverages verifier-generated rationales rather than d…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

PixelCraft: A Multi-Agent system for High-Fidelity Visual Reasoning on Structured Images

ICLR 2026poster

Structured images (e.g., charts and geometric diagrams) remain challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as perceptual slips can cascade into erroneous conclusions. Intermediate visual cues can steer reasoning; however, existing cue-based methods are constrained with low-fidelity ima…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

See Less, See Right: Bi-directional Perceptual Shaping For Multimodal Reasoning

CVPR 2026

Large vision-language models (VLMs) often benefit from intermediate visual cues, either injected via external tools or generated as latent visual tokens during reasoning, but these mechanisms still overlook fine-grained visual evidence (e.g., polylines in charts), generalize poorly across domains, a

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

VideoZoomer: Reinforcement-Learned Temporal Focusing for Long Video Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language tasks yet remain limited in long video understanding due to the limited context window. Consequently, prevailing approaches tend to rely on uniform frame sampling or static pre-selection, which might overlo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

PeRL: Permutation-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Interleaved Vision-Language Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Inspired by the impressive reasoning capabilities demonstrated by reinforcement learning approaches like DeepSeek-R1, recent emerging research has begun exploring the use of reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance vision-language models (VLMs) for multimodal reasoning tasks. However, most existing mu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Teaching Your Models to Understand Code via Focal Preference Alignment

EMNLP 2025

Preference learning extends the performance of Code LLMs beyond traditional supervised fine-tuning by leveraging relative quality comparisons. In existing approaches, a set of n candidate solutions is evaluated based on test case success rates, with the candidate demonstrating a higher pass rate bei

2023

A Dual-Stream Neural Network Explains the Functional Segregation of Dorsal and Ventral Visual Pathways in Human Brains

NeurIPS 2023poster

The human visual system uses two parallel pathways for spatial processing and object recognition. In contrast, computer vision systems tend to use a single feedforward pathway, rendering them less robust, adaptive, or efficient than human vision. To bridge this gap, we developed a dual-stream vision…

2021

Explainable Semantic Space by Grounding Language to Vision with Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

In natural language processing, most models try to learn semantic representations merely from texts. The learned representations encode the “distributional semantics” but fail to connect to any knowledge about the physical world. In contrast, humans learn language by grounding concepts in perception…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2018

Deep Predictive Coding Network for Object Recognition

ICML 2018oral

Based on the predictive coding theory in neuro- science, we designed a bi-directional and recur- rent neural net, namely deep predictive coding networks (PCN), that has feedforward, feedback, and recurrent connections. Feedback connections from a higher layer carry the prediction of its lower-layer…

Cited by 108SourcePDFScholar
2018

Deep Predictive Coding Network with Local Recurrent Processing for Object Recognition

NeurIPS 2018poster

Inspired by "predictive coding" - a theory in neuroscience, we develop a bi-directional and dynamic neural network with local recurrent processing, namely predictive coding network (PCN). Unlike feedforward-only convolutional neural networks, PCN includes both feedback connections, which carry top-d…

Cited by 80SourcePDFScholar