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Zefan Cai

18 accepted papers

2026

BabyVision: Visual Reasoning Beyond Language

ICML 2026poster

While humans develop core visual skills long before acquiring language, contemporary Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still rely heavily on linguistic priors to compensate for their fragile visual understanding. We uncovered a crucial fact: state-of-the-art MLLMs consistently fail on basic visual tasks that …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning to Select Visual Tools from Experience

CVPR 2026

We introduce VisualToolAgent (VisTA), a new reinforcement learning framework that empowers visual agents to dynamically explore, select, and compose tools from a diverse library based on empirical performance. Existing methods for tool-augmented visual reasoning either rely on training-free promptin

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Spark of Vision-Language Intelligence: 2-Dimensional Autoregressive Transformer for Efficient Finegrained Image Generation

ICLR 2025poster

This work tackles the information loss bottleneck of vector-quantization (VQ) autoregressive image generation by introducing a novel model architecture called the 2-Dimensional Autoregression (DnD) Transformer. The DnD-Transformer predicts more codes for an image by introducing a new direction, **mo…

2025

AdaptiveStep: Automatically Dividing Reasoning Step through Model Confidence

ICML 2025poster

Current approaches for training Process Reward Models (PRMs) often involve deconposing responses into multiple reasoning steps using rule-based techniques, such as using predefined placeholder tokens or setting the reasoning step's length to a fixed size. These approaches overlook the fact that cert…

2025

LLM Critics Help Catch Bugs in Mathematics: Towards a Better Mathematical Verifier with Natural Language Feedback

ACL 2025finding

In recent progress, mathematical verifiers have achieved success in mathematical reasoning tasks by validating the correctness of solutions generated by policy models. However, existing verifiers are trained with binary classification labels, which are not informative enough for the model to accurat…

2025

No Preference Left Behind: Group Distributional Preference Optimization

ICLR 2025poster

Preferences within a group of people are not uniform but follow a distribution. While existing alignment methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) attempt to steer models to reflect human preferences, they struggle to capture the distributional pluralistic preferences within a group. These m…

2025

Not All Heads Matter: A Head-Level KV Cache Compression Method with Integrated Retrieval and Reasoning

ICLR 2025poster

Key-Value (KV) caching is a common technique to enhance the computational efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs), but its memory overhead grows rapidly with input length. Prior work has shown that not all tokens are equally important for text generation, proposing layer-level KV cache compressio…

2025

Omni-MATH: A Universal Olympiad Level Mathematic Benchmark for Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant breakthroughs in mathematical reasoning capabilities. However, existing benchmarks like GSM8K or MATH are now being solved with high accuracy (e.g., OpenAI o1 achieves 94.8% on MATH dataset), indicating their inadequacy for…

Cited by 50SourcePDFScholar
2025

R-KV: Redundancy-aware KV Cache Compression for Reasoning Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reasoning models have demonstrated impressive performance in self-reflection and chain-of-thought reasoning. However, they often produce excessively long outputs, leading to prohibitively large key-value (KV) caches during inference. While chain-of-thought inference significantly improves performanc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade

NAACL 2024long

In the constant updates of the product dialogue systems, we need to retrain the natural language understanding (NLU) model as new data from the real users would be merged into the existing data accumulated in the last updates. Within the newly added data, new intents would emerge and might have sema…

2024

Improving Event Definition Following For Zero-Shot Event Detection

ACL 2024long

Existing approaches on zero-shot event detection usually train models on datasets annotated with known event types, and prompt them with unseen event definitions. These approaches yield sporadic successes, yet generally fall short of expectations.In this work, we aim to improve zero-shot event detec…

2024

Improving the Robustness of Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Uncertainty-Aware Teacher Learning and Student-Student Collaborative Learning

ACL 2024findings

Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition (DS-NER) effectively alleviates the burden of annotation, but meanwhile suffers from the label noise. Recent works attempt to adopt the teacher-student framework to gradually refine the training labels and improve the overall robustness. However, we argu…

2024

Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators

ACL 2024long

In this paper, we uncover a positional bias in the evaluation paradigm of adopting large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, as a referee to score and compare the quality of responses generated by candidate models. We find that the quality ranking of candidate responses can be easily hacked by simp…

2024

MMICL: Empowering Vision-language Model with Multi-Modal In-Context Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Since the resurgence of deep learning, vision-language models (VLMs) enhanced by large language models (LLMs) have grown exponentially in popularity. However, while LLMs can utilize extensive background knowledge and task information with in-context learning, most VLMs still struggle with understan…

2024

Mitigating Language-Level Performance Disparity in mPLMs via Teacher Language Selection and Cross-lingual Self-Distillation

NAACL 2024long

Large-scale multilingual Pretrained Language Models (mPLMs) yield impressive performance on cross-language tasks, yet significant performance disparities exist across different languages within the same mPLM. Previous studies endeavored to narrow these disparities by supervise fine-tuning the mPLMs…

2024

PCA-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception-Cognition-Action Chain

ACL 2024findings

We present PCA-Bench, a multimodal decision-making benchmark for evaluating the integrated capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Departing from previous benchmarks focusing on simplistic tasks and individual model capability, PCA-Bench introduces three complex scenarios: autonomo…

2023

Compositional Task Representations for Large Language Models

ICLR 2023poster

Large language models have shown a remarkable cross-task generalization ability. Most prior work assumed that prompts effectively extract knowledge from language models to facilitate generalization to new tasks. This perspective led to numerous studies on improving prompts. In contrast, we introduce…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2023

SANTA: Separate Strategies for Inaccurate and Incomplete Annotation Noise in Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition

ACL 2023findings

Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition effectively alleviates the burden of time-consuming and expensive annotation in the supervised setting. But the context-free matching process and the limited coverage of knowledge bases introduce inaccurate and incomplete annotation noise respectively. P…