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Zexue He

21 accepted papers

2026

Benchmarking Agent Memory in Interdependent Multi-Session Agentic Tasks

ICML 2026poster

Existing evaluations of agents with memory typically assess **memorization** and **action** in isolation. One class of benchmarks evaluates memorization by testing recall of past conversations or text but fails to capture how memory is used to guide future decisions. Another class focuses on agents …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

BiasFreeBench: a Benchmark for Mitigating Bias in Large Language Model Responses

ICLR 2026poster

Existing studies on bias mitigation methods for large language models (LLMs) use diverse baselines and metrics to evaluate debiasing performance, leading to inconsistent comparisons among them. Moreover, their evaluations are mostly based on the comparison between LLMs' probabilities of biased and u…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Composition-Grounded Instruction Synthesis for Visual Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Pretrained multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong performance on diverse multimodal tasks, but remain limited in reasoning capabilities for domains where annotations are difficult to collect. In this work, we focus on artificial image domains such as charts, rendered documents,…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Discovering Hierarchical Software Engineering Agents via Bandit Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to software engineering (SWE), but they struggle on real-world tasks that are long-horizon and often out of distribution. Current systems typically adopt monolithic designs where a single model attempts to interpret ambiguous issues, navigate lar…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

DocHop: Benchmarking Out-of-domain Multi-hop Reasoning in Information-Dense Documents

ICML 2026poster

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on structured visual understanding tasks such as chart and document question answering. However, existing benchmarks typically evaluate these domains in isolation, overlooking realistic settings where numerical evidence in cha…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SPARC: Separating Perception And Reasoning Circuits for Test-time Scaling of VLMs

ICML 2026poster

Despite recent successes, *test-time scaling* $-$i.e., dynamically expanding the token budget during inference as needed$-$ remains brittle for vision-language models (VLMs): unstructured chains-of-thought about images entangle perception and reasoning, leading to long, disorganized contexts where s…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

M+: Extending MemoryLLM with Scalable Long-Term Memory

ICML 2025poster

Equipping large language models (LLMs) with latent-space memory has attracted increasing attention as they can extend the context window of existing language models. However, retaining information from the distant past remains a challenge. For example, MemoryLLM (Wang et al., 2024a), as a representa…

2024

Cognitive Bias in Decision-Making with LLMs

EMNLP 2024finding

Large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential as tools to support an expanding range of decision-making tasks. Given their training on human (created) data, LLMs have been shown to inherit societal biases against protected groups, as well as be subject to bias functionally resembling cogn…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2024

Deciphering Compatibility Relationships with Textual Descriptions via Extraction and Explanation

AAAI 2024technical

Understanding and accurately explaining compatibility relationships between fashion items is a challenging problem in the burgeoning domain of AI-driven outfit recommendations. Present models, while making strides in this area, still occasionally fall short, offering explanations that can be element…

2023

InterFair: Debiasing with Natural Language Feedback for Fair Interpretable Predictions

EMNLP 2023short main

Debiasing methods in NLP models traditionally focus on isolating information related to a sensitive attribute (e.g., gender or race). We instead argue that a favorable debiasing method should use sensitive information 'fairly,' with explanations, rather than blindly eliminating it. This fair balance…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Learning Concise and Descriptive Attributes for Visual Recognition

ICCV 2023poster

Recent advances in foundation models present new opportunities for interpretable visual recognition -- one can first query Large Language Models (LLMs) to obtain a set of attributes that describe each class, then apply vision-language models to classify images via these attributes. Pioneering work s…

Cited by 101PDFcodeScholar
2023

MedEval: A Multi-Level, Multi-Task, and Multi-Domain Medical Benchmark for Language Model Evaluation

EMNLP 2023long main

Curated datasets for healthcare are often limited due to the need of human annotations from experts. In this paper, we present MedEval, a multi-level, multi-task, and multi-domain medical benchmark to facilitate the development of language models for healthcare. MedEval is comprehensive and consists…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Synthetic Pre-Training Tasks for Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2023findings

Pre-training models with large crawled corpora can lead to issues such as toxicity and bias, as well as copyright and privacy concerns. A promising way of alleviating such concerns is to conduct pre-training with synthetic tasks and data, since no real-world information is ingested by the model. Our…

2023

Targeted Data Generation: Finding and Fixing Model Weaknesses

ACL 2023long

Even when aggregate accuracy is high, state-of-the-art NLP models often fail systematically on specific subgroups of data, resulting in unfair outcomes and eroding user trust. Additional data collection may not help in addressing these weaknesses, as such challenging subgroups may be unknown to user…

2023

“Nothing Abnormal”: Disambiguating Medical Reports via Contrastive Knowledge Infusion

AAAI 2023technical

Sharing medical reports is essential for patient-centered care. A recent line of work has focused on automatically generating reports with NLP methods. However, different audiences have different purposes when writing/reading medical reports – for example, healthcare professionals care more about pa…

2022

Controlling Bias Exposure for Fair Interpretable Predictions

EMNLP 2022finding

Recent work on reducing bias in NLP models usually focuses on protecting or isolating information related to a sensitive attribute (like gender or race). However, when sensitive information is semantically entangled with the task information of the input, e.g., gender information is predictive for a…

2022

Leashing the Inner Demons: Self-Detoxification for Language Models

AAAI 2022technical

Language models (LMs) can reproduce (or amplify) toxic language seen during training, which poses a risk to their practical application. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to study this phenomenon. We analyze the impact of prompts, decoding strategies and training corpora on the output…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2021

Detect and Perturb: Neutral Rewriting of Biased and Sensitive Text via Gradient-based Decoding

EMNLP 2021finding

Written language carries explicit and implicit biases that can distract from meaningful signals. For example, letters of reference may describe male and female candidates differently, or their writing style may indirectly reveal demographic characteristics. At best, such biases distract from the mea…

2021

Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Chest X-Ray Report Generation

EMNLP 2021finding

Radiology report generation aims at generating descriptive text from radiology images automatically, which may present an opportunity to improve radiology reporting and interpretation. A typical setting consists of training encoder-decoder models on image-report pairs with a cross entropy loss, whic…

Cited by 87SourcePDFScholar
2019

Learning Robust Representations by Projecting Superficial Statistics Out

ICLR 2019oral

Despite impressive performance as evaluated on i.i.d. holdout data, deep neural networks depend heavily on superficial statistics of the training data and are liable to break under distribution shift. For example, subtle changes to the background or texture of an image can break a seemingly powerful…

Cited by 270SourcePDFScholar