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Yonggang Zhang

52 accepted papers

2026

Bridging the Language Gap: Uncovering and Aligning Shared Circuits for Multi-Hop Reasoning in Multilingual LLMs

AAAI 2026technical

Large language models (LLMs) present a paradox: they can correctly answer a multi-hop factual query in a high-resource language like English, yet fail on the identical query in another language. This raises a fundamental question about the nature of multilingual knowledge: are facts missing, or mere

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Conditional Equivalence of DPO and RLHF: Assumptions, Failure Modes, and Provable Alignment

ICML 2026spotlight

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a popular alternative to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), offering theoretical equivalence with simpler implementation. We prove this equivalence is _conditional_ rather than universal, depending on an implicit assumption frequent…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Decision Boundary-aware Generation for Long-tailed Learning

CVPR 2026

Long-tailed data bias decision boundaries toward head classes and degrade tail class accuracy. Diffusion-based generative augmentation address this problem by generating additional data, while head-to-tail transfer further mitigate the generator bias inherit from long-tailed dataset. However, we sho

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

FedRG: Unleashing the Representation Geometry for Federated Learning with Noisy Clients

CVPR 2026

Federated learning (FL) suffers from performance degradation due to the inevitable presence of noisy annotations in distributed scenarios. Existing approaches have advanced in distinguishing noisy samples from the dataset for label correction by leveraging loss values. However, noisy samples recogni

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Frequency-Dependent Scheduled Schrödinger Bridge for Underwater Acoustic Signal Denoising

AAAI 2026technical

Schrödinger Bridge-based diffusion models have demonstrated promising performance in signal denoising. However, since ground truth signals are unavailable during the sampling process, neural networks must be employed to learn the mapping, which breaks the theoretical coupling between diffusion and s

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Reflect-then-Correct: Rebalancing Task Optimization for Generalizable Meta-Reinforcement Learning via Distributional Value Error Reduction

ICML 2026poster

Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) faces significant challenges in non-parametric settings, where vastly different return scales across diverse tasks cause severe gradient interference. Existing categorical solutions attempt to normalize these scales but often fail due to rigid discretization and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Semantic Voting: A Self-Evaluation-Free Approach for Efficient LLM Self-Improvement on Unverifiable Open-ended Tasks

ICLR 2026poster

The rising cost of acquiring supervised data has driven significant interest in self-improvement for large language models (LLMs). Straightforward unsupervised signals like majority voting have proven effective in generating pseudo-labels for verifiable tasks, while their applicability to unverifiab…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Component-Level Segmentation for Oracle Bone Inscription Decipherment

AAAI 2025technical

Oracle Bone Inscriptions (OBIs), as the earliest systematically organized pictographic script in China, hold significant importance in the study of the origins of Chinese civilization. Of the approximately 4,500 excavated OBI characters, only about one-third have been deciphered, leaving the remaini…

2025

Detecting Generated Images by Fitting Natural Image Distributions

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

The increasing realism of generated images has raised significant concerns about their potential misuse, necessitating robust detection methods. Current approaches mainly rely on training binary classifiers, which depend heavily on the quantity and quality of available generated images. In this work…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Enhancing Target-unspecific Tasks through a Features Matrix

ICML 2025poster

Recent developments in prompt learning of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly improved performance in target-specific tasks. However, these prompting methods often struggle to tackle the target-unspecific or generalizable tasks effectively. It may be attributed to the fact that o…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Epistemic Uncertainty for Generated Image Detection

NeurIPS 2025poster

We introduce a novel framework for AI-generated image detection through epistemic uncertainty, aiming to address critical security concerns in the era of generative models. Our key insight stems from the observation that distributional discrepancies between training and testing data manifest distinc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

FedGPS: Statistical Rectification Against Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Federated Learning (FL) confronts a significant challenge known as data heterogeneity, which impairs model performance and convergence. Existing methods have made notable progress in addressing this issue. However, improving performance in certain heterogeneity scenarios remains an overlooked questi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Hot-pluggable Federated Learning: Bridging General and Personalized FL via Dynamic Selection

ICLR 2025poster

Personalized federated learning (PFL) achieves high performance by assuming clients only meet test data locally, which does not meet many generic federated learning (GFL) scenarios. In this work, we theoretically show that PMs can be used to enhance GFL with a new learning problem named Selective FL…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Interpret and Improve In-Context Learning via the Lens of Input-Label Mappings

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) excel at downstream NLP tasks through in-context learning (ICL) with a few demonstrations of input–label pairs. However, the internal mechanisms behind ICL remain under-explored, particularly the mappings between inputs and labels. In this work, we reverse-engineer ICL b…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Leveraging Submodule Linearity Enhances Task Arithmetic Performance in LLMs

ICLR 2025poster

Task arithmetic is a straightforward yet highly effective strategy for model merging, enabling the resultant model to exhibit multi-task capabilities. Recent research indicates that models demonstrating linearity enhance the performance of task arithmetic. In contrast to existing methods that rely o…

2025

MOS: Model Synergy for Test-Time Adaptation on LiDAR-Based 3D Object Detection

ICLR 2025oral

LiDAR-based 3D object detection is crucial for various applications but often experiences performance degradation in real-world deployments due to domain shifts. While most studies focus on cross-dataset shifts, such as changes in environments and object geometries, practical corruptions from sensor…

2025

Tracing and Dissecting How LLMs Recall Factual Knowledge for Real World Questions

ACL 2025long

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising ability to perform commonsense reasoning, bringing machines closer to human-like understanding. However, deciphering the internal reasoning processes of LLMs remains challenging due to the complex interdependencies among genera…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Unlocker: Disentangle the Deadlock of Learning between Label-noisy and Long-tailed Data

NeurIPS 2025poster

In real world, the observed label distribution of a dataset often mismatches its true distribution due to noisy labels. In this situation, noisy labels learning (NLL) methods directly integrated with long-tail learning (LTL) methods tend to fail due to a dilemma: NLL methods normally rely o…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

ConjNorm: Tractable Density Estimation for Out-of-Distribution Detection

ICLR 2024poster

Post-hoc out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has garnered intensive attention in reliable machine learning. Many efforts have been dedicated to deriving score functions based on logits, distances, or rigorous data distribution assumptions to identify low-scoring OOD samples. Nevertheless, these esti…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2024

Enhancing Multiple Dimensions of Trustworthiness in LLMs via Sparse Activation Control

NeurIPS 2024poster

As the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, enhancing their trustworthiness and aligning them with human preferences has become a critical area of research. Traditional methods rely heavily on extensive data for Reinforcement Learning from Human Fe…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Enhancing One-Shot Federated Learning Through Data and Ensemble Co-Boosting

ICLR 2024poster

One-shot Federated Learning (OFL) has become a promising learning paradigm, enabling the training of a global server model via a single communication round. In OFL, the server model is aggregated by distilling knowledge from all client models (the ensemble), which are also responsible for synthesizi…

2024

FedImpro: Measuring and Improving Client Update in Federated Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Federated Learning (FL) models often experience client drift caused by heterogeneous data, where the distribution of data differs across clients. To address this issue, advanced research primarily focuses on manipulating the existing gradients to achieve more consistent client models. In this paper,…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2024

Federated Learning with Extremely Noisy Clients via Negative Distillation

AAAI 2024technical

Federated learning (FL) has shown remarkable success in cooperatively training deep models, while typically struggling with noisy labels. Advanced works propose to tackle label noise by a re-weighting strategy with a strong assumption, i.e., mild label noise. However, it may be violated in many real…

2024

From Yes-Men to Truth-Tellers: Addressing Sycophancy in Large Language Models with Pinpoint Tuning

ICML 2024poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to prioritize adherence to user prompts over providing veracious responses, leading to the sycophancy issue. When challenged by users, LLMs tend to admit mistakes and provide inaccurate responses even if they initially provided the correct answer. Recent works propo…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

FuseFL: One-Shot Federated Learning through the Lens of Causality with Progressive Model Fusion

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

One-shot Federated Learning (OFL) significantly reduces communication costs in FL by aggregating trained models only once. However, the performance of advanced OFL methods is far behind the normal FL. In this work, we provide a causal view to find that this performance drop of OFL methods comes from…

2024

Interpreting and Improving Large Language Models in Arithmetic Calculation

ICML 2024oral

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential across numerous applications and have shown an emergent ability to tackle complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical computations. However, even for the simplest arithmetic calculations, the intrinsic mechanisms behind LLMs remai…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning to Shape In-distribution Feature Space for Out-of-distribution Detection

NeurIPS 2024poster

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for deploying machine learning models in the open world. To design scoring functions that discern OOD data from the in-distribution (ID) cases from a pre-trained discriminative model, existing methods tend to make rigorous distributional assumptions ei…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

NoiseDiffusion: Correcting Noise for Image Interpolation with Diffusion Models beyond Spherical Linear Interpolation

ICLR 2024spotlight

Image interpolation based on diffusion models is promising in creating fresh and interesting images. Advanced interpolation methods mainly focus on spherical linear interpolation, where images are encoded into the noise space and then interpolated for denoising to images. However, existing methods…

2024

Out-of-Distribution Detection with Negative Prompts

ICLR 2024poster

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is indispensable for open-world machine learning models. Inspired by recent success in large pre-trained language-vision models, e.g., CLIP, advanced works have achieved impressive OOD detection results by matching the *similarity* between image features and featu…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2024

Robust Training of Federated Models with Extremely Label Deficiency

ICLR 2024poster

Federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for collaboratively training machine learning models using distributed data with label deficiency. Advanced FSSL methods predominantly focus on training a single model on each client. However, this approach could lead to a…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

Continual Named Entity Recognition without Catastrophic Forgetting

EMNLP 2023long main

Continual Named Entity Recognition (CNER) is a burgeoning area, which involves updating an existing model by incorporating new entity types sequentially. Nevertheless, continual learning approaches are often severely afflicted by catastrophic forgetting. This issue is intensified in CNER due to the…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

FedFed: Feature Distillation against Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Federated learning (FL) typically faces data heterogeneity, i.e., distribution shifting among clients. Sharing clients' information has shown great potentiality in mitigating data heterogeneity, yet incurs a dilemma in preserving privacy and promoting model performance. To alleviate the dilemma, we…

2023

Hard Sample Matters a Lot in Zero-Shot Quantization

CVPR 2023poster

Zero-shot quantization (ZSQ) is promising for compressing and accelerating deep neural networks when the data for training full-precision models are inaccessible. In ZSQ, network quantization is performed using synthetic samples, thus, the performance of quantized models depends heavily on the quali…

2023

Invariant Learning via Probability of Sufficient and Necessary Causes

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is indispensable for learning models in the wild, where testing distribution typically unknown and different from the training. Recent methods derived from causality have shown great potential in achieving OOD generalization. However, existing methods mainly…

2023

Learning to Augment Distributions for Out-of-distribution Detection

NeurIPS 2023poster

Open-world classification systems should discern out-of-distribution (OOD) data whose labels deviate from those of in-distribution (ID) cases, motivating recent studies in OOD detection. Advanced works, despite their promising progress, may still fail in the open world, owing to the lacking knowledg…

2023

Moderately Distributional Exploration for Domain Generalization

ICML 2023poster

Domain generalization (DG) aims to tackle the distribution shift between training domains and unknown target domains. Generating new domains is one of the most effective approaches, yet its performance gain depends on the distribution discrepancy between the generated and target domains. Distributio…

2023

Pareto Invariant Risk Minimization: Towards Mitigating the Optimization Dilemma in Out-of-Distribution Generalization

ICLR 2023poster

Recently, there has been a growing surge of interest in enabling machine learning systems to generalize well to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) data. Most efforts are devoted to advancing optimization objectives that regularize models to capture the underlying invariance; however, there often are compromi…

2023

SODA: Robust Training of Test-Time Data Adaptors

NeurIPS 2023poster

Adapting models deployed to test distributions can mitigate the performance degradation caused by distribution shifts. However, privacy concerns may render model parameters inaccessible. One promising approach involves utilizing zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) to train a data adaptor to adapt the te…

2022

Adversarial Robustness Through the Lens of Causality

ICLR 2022poster

The adversarial vulnerability of deep neural networks has attracted significant attention in machine learning. As causal reasoning has an instinct for modeling distribution change, it is essential to incorporate causality into analyzing this specific type of distribution change induced by adversarial…

Cited by 105SourcePDFScholar
2022

Learning Causally Invariant Representations for Out-of-Distribution Generalization on Graphs

NeurIPS 2022accept

Despite recent success in using the invariance principle for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on Euclidean data (e.g., images), studies on graph data are still limited. Different from images, the complex nature of graphs poses unique challenges to adopting the invariance principle. In partic…

2022

Meta Convolutional Neural Networks for Single Domain Generalization

CVPR 2022poster

In single domain generalization, models trained with data from only one domain are required to perform well on many unseen domains. In this paper, we propose a new model, termed meta convolutional neural network, to solve the single domain generalization problem in image recognition. The key idea is…

Cited by 60PDFScholar
2022

Towards Lightweight Black-Box Attack Against Deep Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Black-box attacks can generate adversarial examples without accessing the parameters of target model, largely exacerbating the threats of deployed deep neural networks (DNNs). However, previous works state that black-box attacks fail to mislead target models when their training data and outputs are…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2022

Understanding and Improving Graph Injection Attack by Promoting Unnoticeability

ICLR 2022poster

Recently Graph Injection Attack (GIA) emerges as a practical attack scenario on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), where the adversary can merely inject few malicious nodes instead of modifying existing nodes or edges, i.e., Graph Modification Attack (GMA). Although GIA has achieved promising results, li…

2022

Virtual Homogeneity Learning: Defending against Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

ICML 2022spotlight

In federated learning (FL), model performance typically suffers from client drift induced by data heterogeneity, and mainstream works focus on correcting client drift. We propose a different approach named virtual homogeneity learning (VHL) to directly “rectify” the data heterogeneity. In particular…

2022

Watermarking for Out-of-distribution Detection

NeurIPS 2022accept

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to identify OOD data based on representations extracted from well-trained deep models. However, existing methods largely ignore the reprogramming property of deep models and thus may not fully unleash their intrinsic strength: without modifying parameters of…

2021

Class-Disentanglement and Applications in Adversarial Detection and Defense

NeurIPS 2021poster

What is the minimum necessary information required by a neural net $D(\cdot)$ from an image $x$ to accurately predict its class? Extracting such information in the input space from $x$ can allocate the areas $D(\cdot)$ mainly attending to and shed novel insights to the detection and defense of adver…

Cited by 45SourcePDFScholar
2020

Dual-Path Distillation: A Unified Framework to Improve Black-Box Attacks

ICML 2020poster

We study the problem of constructing black-box adversarial attacks, where no model information is revealed except for the feedback knowledge of the given inputs. To obtain sufficient knowledge for crafting adversarial examples, previous methods query the target model with inputs that are perturbed w…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2019

A Novel Progressive Gaussian Approximate Filter with Variable Step Size Based on a Variational Bayesian Approach

ICASSP 2019accepted

The selection of step sizes in the progressive Gaussian approximate filter (PGAF) is important, and it is difficult to select optimal values in practical applications. Furthermore, in the PGAF, significant integral approximation errors are generated by the repeated approximate calculations of the Ga…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2016

A robust Gaussian approximate filter for nonlinear systems with heavy tailed measurement noises

ICASSP 2016accepted

The scale matrix and degrees of freedom (dof) parameter of a Student's t distribution are important for nonlinear robust inference, and it is difficult to determine exact values in practical application due to complex environments. To solve this problem, an improved robust Gaussian approximate (GA)…

Cited by 0SourceScholar