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Yunhua Zhou

23 accepted papers

2026

Evolution of Concepts in Language Model Pre-Training

ICLR 2026poster

Language models obtain extensive capabilities through pre-training. However, the pre-training dynamics remains a black box. In this work, we track linear interpretable feature evolution across pre-training snapshots using a sparse dictionary learning method called crosscoders. We find that most feat…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Exploring Visual Pretraining for Learning Language Intelligence

CVPR 2026

While the most fundamental pretraining paradigm typically trains modality-specific models on their respective datasets, the Platonic Representation Hypothesis that representations eventually align across modalities as data and model scale suggests an intriguing possibility: large language models (LL

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

BitStack: Any-Size Compression of Large Language Models in Variable Memory Environments

ICLR 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized numerous applications, yet their deployment remains challenged by memory constraints on local devices. While scaling laws have enhanced LLM capabilities, the primary bottleneck has shifted from $\textit{capability}$ to $\textit{availability}$, emphasi…

2025

Capability Salience Vector: Fine-grained Alignment of Loss and Capabilities for Downstream Task Scaling Law

ACL 2025long

Scaling law builds the relationship between training computation and validation loss, enabling researchers to effectively predict the loss trending of models across different levels of computation. However, a gap still remains between validation loss and the model’s downstream capabilities, making i…

2025

Data Mixing Laws: Optimizing Data Mixtures by Predicting Language Modeling Performance

ICLR 2025poster

Pretraining data of large language models composes multiple domains (e.g., web texts, academic papers, codes), whose mixture proportions crucially impact the competence of outcome models. While existing endeavors rely on heuristics or qualitative strategies to tune the proportions, we discover the q…

2025

Firewall Routing: Blocking Leads to Better Hybrid Inference for LLMs

EMNLP 2025

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet the high computational costs and latency associated with deploying such models continue to pose critical bottlenecks, limiting their broader applic

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Implicit Reward as the Bridge: A Unified View of SFT and DPO Connections

NeurIPS 2025poster

Post-training processes are essential phases in grounding pre-trained language models to real-world tasks, with learning from demonstrations or preference signals playing a crucial role in this adaptation. We present a unified theoretical framework bridging Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and preferenc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Pre-Trained Policy Discriminators are General Reward Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

We offer a novel perspective on reward modeling by formulating it as a policy discriminator, which quantifies the difference between two policies to generate a reward signal, guiding the training policy towards a target policy with desired behaviors. Based on this conceptual insight, we propose a sc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Revisiting the Test-Time Scaling of o1-like Models: Do they Truly Possess Test-Time Scaling Capabilities?

ACL 2025long

The advent of test-time scaling in large language models (LLMs), exemplified by OpenAI’s o1 series, has advanced reasoning capabilities by scaling computational resource allocation during inference. While successors like QwQ, Deepseek-R1 (R1) and LIMO replicate these advancements, whether these mode…

2025

Towards Universality: Studying Mechanistic Similarity Across Language Model Architectures

ICLR 2025poster

The hypothesis of \textit{Universality} in interpretability suggests that different neural networks may converge to implement similar algorithms on similar tasks. In this work, we investigate two mainstream architectures for language modeling, namely Transformers and Mambas, to explore the extent of…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling

ACL 2024long

We introduce AnyGPT, an any-to-any multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for the unified processing of various modalities, including speech, text, images, and music. AnyGPT can be trained stably without any alterations to the current large language model (LLM) architecture…

2024

Code Needs Comments: Enhancing Code LLMs with Comment Augmentation

ACL 2024findings

The programming skill is one crucial ability for Large Language Models (LLMs), necessitating a deep understanding of programming languages (PLs) and their correlation with natural languages (NLs). We examine the impact of pre-training data on code-focused LLMs’ performance by assessing the comment d…

2024

DenoSent: A Denoising Objective for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Learning

AAAI 2024technical

Contrastive-learning-based methods have dominated sentence representation learning. These methods regularize the representation space by pulling similar sentence representations closer and pushing away the dissimilar ones and have been proven effective in various NLP tasks, e.g., semantic textual si…

2024

Memorize Step by Step: Efficient Long-Context Prefilling with Incremental Memory and Decremental Chunk

EMNLP 2024main

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant advancements, with models like Claude and Gemini capable of processing contexts up to 1 million tokens. However, efficiently handling long sequences remains challenging, particularly during the prefilling stage when input lengths e…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

The Open-World Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for OOD Intent Classification

COLING 2024main

Most existing methods of Out-of-Domain (OOD) intent classification rely on extensive auxiliary OOD corpora or specific training paradigms. However, they are underdeveloped in the underlying principle that the models should have differentiated confidence in In- and Out-of-domain intent. In this work,…

2024

Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-k Router of MoE

EMNLP 2024main

Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models are popular for training large language models due to their computational efficiency. However, the commonly used top-k routing mechanism suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs due to the unbalanced routing. Some experts are overflow, where the exc…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Two Birds One Stone: Dynamic Ensemble for OOD Intent Classification

ACL 2023long

Out-of-domain (OOD) intent classification is an active field of natural language understanding, which is of great practical significance for intelligent devices such as the Task-Oriented Dialogue System. It mainly contains two challenges: it requires the model to know what it knows and what it does…

2023

UTC-IE: A Unified Token-pair Classification Architecture for Information Extraction

ACL 2023long

Information Extraction (IE) spans several tasks with different output structures, such as named entity recognition, relation extraction and event extraction. Previously, those tasks were solved with different models because of diverse task output structures. Through re-examining IE tasks, we find th…

2022

BBTv2: Towards a Gradient-Free Future with Large Language Models

EMNLP 2022main

Most downstream adaptation methods tune all or part of the parameters of pre-trained models (PTMs) through gradient descent, where the tuning cost increases linearly with the growth of the model size.By contrast, gradient-free methods only require the forward computation of the PTM to tune the promp…

2022

What Dense Graph Do You Need for Self-Attention?

ICML 2022spotlight

Transformers have made progress in miscellaneous tasks, but suffer from quadratic computational and memory complexities. Recent works propose sparse transformers with attention on sparse graphs to reduce complexity and remain strong performance. While effective, the crucial parts of how dense a grap…