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Yufeng Zhang

24 accepted papers

2026

Characterizing and Mitigating Reasoning Drift in Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

While chain-of-thought prompting enables powerful multi-step reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), the stochastic nature of the generation process undermines its reliability. In this work, we first analyze thousands of reasoning paths to identify Reasoning Drift, a key failure mode where models…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Cooperative-Competitive Team Play of Real-World Craft Robots

ICRA 2026poster

Multi-agent deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made significant progress in developing intelligent game-playing agents in recent years. However, the efficient training of collective robots using multi-agent RL and the transfer of learned policies to real-world applications remain open research que…

2026

High-Fidelity ANN-to-SNN Conversion via Closed-Loop CKA Distillation

ICML 2026poster

ANN-to-SNN conversion offers energy-efficient inference but faces a fidelity-latency trade-off due to open-loop error accumulation. While conversion-aware training mitigates this, it sacrifices the generality of using off-the-shelf ANNs. We propose a closed-loop fine-tuning framework that calibrates…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

DavIR: Data Selection via Implicit Reward for Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

We introduce DavIR, a model-based data selection method for post-training Large Language Models. DavIR generalizes Reducible Holdout Loss to core-set selection problem of causal language modeling, and quantifies the learnability of a given datum with respect to a pre-trained LLM based on relative re…

2025

Detecting Emotional Incongruity of Sarcasm by Commonsense Reasoning

COLING 2025main

This paper focuses on sarcasm detection, which aims to identify whether given statements convey criticism, mockery, or other negative sentiment opposite to the literal meaning. To detect sarcasm, humans often require a comprehensive understanding of the semantics in the statement and even resort to…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Enhancing Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models via Reasoning Patterns

AAAI 2025technical

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting can encourage language models to engage in multi-step logical reasoning. The quality of the provided demonstrations significantly influences the success of downstream inference tasks. Current unsupervised CoT methods primarily select examples based on the semantics o…

2025

Reward-Augmented Data Enhances Direct Preference Alignment of LLMs

ICML 2025poster

Preference alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved their ability to adhere to human instructions and intentions. However, existing direct alignment algorithms primarily focus on relative preferences and often overlook the qualitative aspects of responses, despite having…

2025

What and How does In-Context Learning Learn? Bayesian Model Averaging, Parameterization, and Generalization

AISTATS 2025poster

In-Context Learning (ICL) ability has been found efficient across a wide range of applications, where the Large Language Models (LLM) learn to complete the tasks from the examples in the prompt without tuning the parameters. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study to understand ICL from a sta…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

BaSIC: BayesNet Structure Learning for Computational Scalable Neural Image Compression

ECCV 2024poster

"Despite superior rate-distortion performance over traditional codecs, Neural Image Compression (NIC) is limited by its computational scalability in practical deployment. Prevailing research focuses on accelerating specific NIC modules but is restricted in controlling overall computational complexit…

2024

Domain Adaptation for Subjective Induction Questions Answering on Products by Adversarial Disentangled Learning

ACL 2024long

This paper focuses on answering subjective questions about products. Different from the factoid question with a single answer span, this subjective one involves multiple viewpoints. For example, the question of ‘how the phone’s battery is?’ not only involves facts of battery capacity but also contai…

2024

Finite-State Autoregressive Entropy Coding for Efficient Learned Lossless Compression

ICLR 2024spotlight

Learned lossless data compression has garnered significant attention recently due to its superior compression ratios compared to traditional compressors. However, the computational efficiency of these models jeopardizes their practicality. This paper proposes a novel system for improving the compres…

2023

On the Properties of Kullback-Leibler Divergence Between Multivariate Gaussian Distributions

NeurIPS 2023poster

Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is one of the most important measures to calculate the difference between probability distributions. In this paper, we theoretically study several properties of KL divergence between multivariate Gaussian distributions. Firstly, for any two $n$-dimensional Gaussian d…

Cited by 52SourcePDFScholar
2022

Learning from Demonstration: Provably Efficient Adversarial Policy Imitation with Linear Function Approximation

ICML 2022spotlight

In generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL), the agent aims to learn a policy from an expert demonstration so that its performance cannot be discriminated from the expert policy on a certain predefined reward set. In this paper, we study GAIL in both online and offline settings with linear f…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2022

Provably Efficient Offline Reinforcement Learning for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes

ICML 2022spotlight

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with possibly infinite state and observation spaces. Under the undercompleteness assumption, the optimal policy in such POMDPs are characterized by a class of finite-memory Bellman operators. In…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2021

A Graph-based Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval

AAAI 2021technical

To retrieve more relevant, appropriate and useful documents given a query, finding clues about that query through the text is crucial. Recent deep learning models regard the task as a term-level matching problem, which seeks exact or similar query patterns in the document. However, we argue that the…

2021

Infinite-Dimensional Optimization for Zero-Sum Games via Variational Transport

ICML 2021spotlight

Game optimization has been extensively studied when decision variables lie in a finite-dimensional space, of which solutions correspond to pure strategies at the Nash equilibrium (NE), and the gradient descent-ascent (GDA) method works widely in practice. In this paper, we consider infinite-dimensio…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2021

Offline Constrained Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning via Pessimistic Dual Value Iteration

NeurIPS 2021poster

In constrained multi-objective RL, the goal is to learn a policy that achieves the best performance specified by a multi-objective preference function under a constraint. We focus on the offline setting where the RL agent aims to learn the optimal policy from a given dataset. This scenario is common…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2021

Provably Efficient Actor-Critic for Risk-Sensitive and Robust Adversarial RL: A Linear-Quadratic Case

AISTATS 2021poster

Risk-sensitivity plays a central role in artificial intelligence safety. In this paper, we study the global convergence of the actor-critic algorithm for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) with exponential utility, which remains challenging for policy optimization as it lacks the linearity…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2021

Wasserstein Flow Meets Replicator Dynamics: A Mean-Field Analysis of Representation Learning in Actor-Critic

NeurIPS 2021poster

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms, empowered by neural networks, have had significant empirical success in recent years. However, most of the existing theoretical support for AC algorithms focuses on the case of linear function approximations, or linearized neural networks, where the feature representat…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2020

Can Temporal-Difference and Q-Learning Learn Representation? A Mean-Field Theory

NeurIPS 2020oral

Temporal-difference and Q-learning play a key role in deep reinforcement learning, where they are empowered by expressive nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. At the core of their empirical successes is the learned feature representation, which embeds rich observations, e.g., ima…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2020

Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning with Neural Network Parameterization: Global Optimality and Convergence Rate

ICML 2020poster

Generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) demonstrates tremendous success in practice, especially when combined with neural networks. Different from reinforcement learning, GAIL learns both policy and reward function from expert (human) demonstration. Despite its empirical success, it remains…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2019

Adaptive Assist-as-needed Control Based on Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning

IROS 2019poster

In robot-assisted rehabilitation, assist-as-needed (AAN) controllers have been proposed to promote subjects’ active participation, which is thought to lead to better training outcomes. Most of these AAN controllers require a patient-specific manual tuning of the parameters defining the underlying fo…

Cited by 37SourceScholar
2019

Unified Visual-Semantic Embeddings: Bridging Vision and Language With Structured Meaning Representations

CVPR 2019oral

We propose the Unified Visual-Semantic Embeddings (Unified VSE) for learning a joint space of visual representation and textual semantics. The model unifies the embeddings of concepts at different levels: objects, attributes, relations, and full scenes. We view the sentential semantics as a combinat…

Cited by 221PDFcodeScholar