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Zhao-rong Lai

19 accepted papers

2026

$\ell_1$ Latent Distance based Continuous-time Graph Representation

ICLR 2026poster

Continuous-time graph representation (CTGR) is a widely-used methodology in machine learning, physics, bioinformatics, and social networks. The sequential survival process in a latent space with the squared $\ell_2$ distance is an important ultra-low-dimensional embedding for CTGR. However, the squa…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

A Causal Marriage between VLM and IRM from Understanding to Reasoning

CVPR 2026

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP exhibit extraordinary out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, while the theoretical foundations underlying this robustness remain largely unexplored. This work establishes a connection between CLIP and Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM), the principled paradi

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

A Unified Total Variation Framework for Membrane Potential Perturbation Dynamic

ICLR 2026poster

Membrane potential perturbation dynamic (MPPD) is an emerging approach to capture perturbation intensity and stabilize the performance of spiking neural networks (SNN). It discards the neuronal reset part to intuitively reduce fluctuations of dynamics, but this treatment may be insufficient in pertu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Image-to-Brain Signal Generation for Visual Prosthesis with CLIP Guided Multimodal Diffusion Models

ICML 2026poster

Visual prostheses hold great promise for restoring vision in blind individuals. While researchers have successfully utilized M/EEG signals to evoke visual perceptions during the brain decoding stage of visual prostheses, the complementary process of converting images into M/EEG signals in the brain …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Spectral Bridge Variational Inference: Dynamic LoRA via Bures-Wasserstein Gradient Flows

ICML 2026poster

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is essential for adapting Large Language Models, yet existing methods typically struggle to balance model capacity with computational efficiency. Standard approaches often enforce rigid low-rank constraints, while dynamic alternatives incur significant memory o…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

De-singularity Subgradient for the q-th-Powered lₚ-Norm Weber Location Problem

AAAI 2025technical

The Weber location problem is widely used in several artificial intelligence scenarios. However, the gradient of the objective does not exist at a considerable set of singular points. Recently, a de-singularity subgradient method has been proposed to fix this problem, but it can only handle the q-th…

2025

Language Models as Implicit Tree Search

ICML 2025poster

Despite advancing language model (LM) alignment, direct preference optimization (DPO) falls short in LM reasoning with the free lunch from reinforcement learning (RL). As the breakthrough, this work proposes a new RL-free preference optimization method aiming to achieve DPO along with learning anoth…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Out-of-distribution Generalization for Total Variation based Invariant Risk Minimization

ICLR 2025poster

Invariant risk minimization is an important general machine learning framework that has recently been interpreted as a total variation model (IRM-TV). However, how to improve out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in the IRM-TV setting remains unsolved. In this paper, we extend IRM-TV to a Lagrang…

2025

Quadratic Coreset Selection: Certifying and Reconciling Sequence and Token Mining for Efficient Instruction Tuning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Instruction-Tuning (IT) was recently found the impressive data efficiency in post-training large language models (LLMs). While the pursuit of efficiency predominantly focuses on sequence-level curation, often overlooking the nuanced impact of critical tokens and the inherent risks of token noise and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

A De-singularity Subgradient Approach for the Extended Weber Location Problem

IJCAI 2024poster

The extended Weber location problem is a classical optimization problem that has inspired some new works in several machine learning scenarios recently. However, most existing algorithms may get stuck due to the singularity at the data points when the power of the cost function 1\<= q<2, such as the…

2024

Diagnosing and Rectifying Fake OOD Invariance: A Restructured Causal Approach

AAAI 2024technical

Invariant representation learning (IRL) encourages the prediction from invariant causal features to labels deconfounded from the environments, advancing the technical roadmap of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Despite spotlights around, recent theoretical result verified that some causal f…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

On the Logic of Theory Change Iteration of KM-Update, Revised

IJCAI 2024poster

Belief revision and update, two significant types of belief change, both focus on how an agent modifies her beliefs in presence of new information. The most striking difference between them is that the former studies the change of beliefs in a static world while the latter concentrates on a dynamica…

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2022

Knowledge Compilation Meets Logical Separability

AAAI 2022technical

Knowledge compilation is an alternative solution to address demanding reasoning tasks with high complexity via converting knowledge bases into a suitable target language. Interestingly, the notion of logical separability, proposed by Levesque, offers a general explanation for the tractability of cla…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2020

Automatic Synthesis of Generalized Winning Strategies of Impartial Combinatorial Games Using SMT Solvers

IJCAI 2020poster

Strategy representation and reasoning has recently received much attention in artificial intelligence. Impartial combinatorial games (ICGs) are a type of elementary and fundamental games in game theory. One of the challenging problems of ICGs is to construct winning strategies, particularly, general…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar