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Zecheng Wang

9 accepted papers

2026

BabyVLM-V2: Toward Developmentally Grounded Pretraining and Benchmarking of Vision Foundation Models

CVPR 2026

Early children's developmental trajectories set up a natural goal for sample-efficient pretraining of vision foundation models. We introduce BabyVLM-V2, a developmentally grounded framework for infant-inspired vision-language modeling that extensively improves upon BabyVLM-V1 through a longitudinal,

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

How Stable is the Next Token? A Geometric View of LLM Prediction Stability

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities yet suffer from sensitivity to slight input context variations, hampering reliability. Conventional metrics like accuracy and perplexity fail to assess local prediction robustness, as normalized output probabilities can obscure the underly…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Maximizing Intermediate Checkpoint Value in LLM Pretraining with Bayesian Optimization

ICML 2025poster

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and Gemini, underscores the intense demand for resources during their training processes, posing significant challenges due to substantial computational and environmental costs. In this paper, we introduce a novel checkpoint merg…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

VPO: Reasoning Preferences Optimization Based on $\mathcal{V}$-Usable Information

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used preference optimization algorithm in large language model (LLM) alignment, which reparameterizes the reward function in reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) without requiring a separate reward model. However, during the DPO training…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Analyzing Chain-of-thought Prompting in Black-Box Large Language Models via Estimated V-information

COLING 2024main

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting combined with large language models (LLM) has shown great potential in improving performance on challenging reasoning tasks. While understanding why CoT prompting is effective is crucial for the application and improvement of CoT prompting, few studies have addressed…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Pre-training with Synthetic Data Helps Offline Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Recently, it has been shown that for offline deep reinforcement learning (DRL), pre-training Decision Transformer with a large language corpus can improve downstream performance (Reid et al., 2022). A natural question to ask is whether this performance gain can only be achieved with language pre-tra…

2024

Pruning via Merging: Compressing LLMs via Manifold Alignment Based Layer Merging

EMNLP 2024main

While large language models (LLMs) excel in many domains, their complexity and scale challenge deployment in resource-limited environments. Current compression techniques, such as parameter pruning, often fail to effectively utilize the knowledge from pruned parameters. To address these challenges,…

2022

Robust Unstructured Knowledge Access in Conversational Dialogue with ASR Errors

ICASSP 2022accepted

Performance of spoken language understanding (SLU) can be degraded with automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors. We propose a novel approach to improve SLU robustness by randomly corrupting clean training text with an ASR error simulator, followed by self-correcting the errors and minimizing the t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar