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Zhaowei Zhu

22 accepted papers

2026

Detecting Errors in AI-Generated Annotations: When and Why Semantic Neighbors Help

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have emerged as efficient annotators for tasks such as generation and classification. While these models offer significant cost and speed advantages over human annotation, a critical challenge remains: existing self-evaluation methods, s…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Label Smoothing Improves Machine Unlearning

ICLR 2026poster

The objective of machine unlearning (MU) is to eliminate previously learned data from a model. However, it can be challenging to strike a balance between computation cost and performance when using existing MU techniques. Taking inspiration from the influence of label smoothing on model confidence a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reassessing Layer Pruning in LLMs: New Insights and Methods

ICLR 2026poster

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains, their considerable scale necessitates substantial computational resources, posing significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Layer pruning, as a simple yet effective compre…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Robust Learning from Noisily Labeled Long-Tailed Data via Fairness Regularizer

AAAI 2026technical

Both long-tailed and noisily labeled data frequently appear in real-world applications and impose significant challenges for learning. Most prior works treat either problem in an isolated way and do not explicitly consider the coupling effects of the two. Our empirical observation reveals that such

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Task-Aware Data Selection via Proxy-Label Enhanced Distribution Matching for LLM Finetuning

ICLR 2026poster

Task-specific fine-tuning of foundation models is critically dependent on the quality and relevance of the instruction data. While prevailing data selection methods rely exclusively on instruction instances X to approximate the target distribution, we argue that selection should align with the joint…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Improving Data Efficiency via Curating LLM-Driven Rating Systems

ICLR 2025poster

Instruction tuning is critical for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, and recent studies have demonstrated that small amounts of human-curated data can outperform larger datasets, challenging traditional data scaling laws. While LLM-based data quality rating systems offer a c…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

Token Cleaning: Fine-Grained Data Selection for LLM Supervised Fine-Tuning

ICML 2025poster

Recent studies show that in supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of large language models (LLMs), data quality matters more than quantity. While most data cleaning methods concentrate on filtering entire samples, the quality of individual tokens within a sample can vary significantly. After pre-training, e…

2024

Fairness without Harm: An Influence-Guided Active Sampling Approach

NeurIPS 2024poster

The pursuit of fairness in machine learning (ML), ensuring that the models do not exhibit biases toward protected demographic groups, typically results in a compromise scenario. This compromise can be explained by a Pareto frontier where given certain resources (e.g., data), reducing the fairness vi…

2024

FedFixer: Mitigating Heterogeneous Label Noise in Federated Learning

AAAI 2024technical

Federated Learning (FL) heavily depends on label quality for its performance. However, the label distribution among individual clients is always both noisy and heterogeneous. The high loss incurred by client-specific samples in heterogeneous label noise poses challenges for distinguishing between cl…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2024

Unmasking and Improving Data Credibility: A Study with Datasets for Training Harmless Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Language models have shown promise in various tasks but can be affected by undesired data during training, fine-tuning, or alignment. For example, if some unsafe conversations are wrongly annotated as safe ones, the model fine-tuned on these samples may be harmful. Therefore, the correctness of anno…

2023

Mitigating Memorization of Noisy Labels via Regularization between Representations

ICLR 2023poster

Designing robust loss functions is popular in learning with noisy labels while existing designs did not explicitly consider the overfitting property of deep neural networks (DNNs). As a result, applying these losses may still suffer from overfitting/memorizing noisy labels as training proceeds. In t…

2023

Weak Proxies are Sufficient and Preferable for Fairness with Missing Sensitive Attributes

ICML 2023poster

Evaluating fairness can be challenging in practice because the sensitive attributes of data are often inaccessible due to privacy constraints. The go-to approach that the industry frequently adopts is using off-the-shelf proxy models to predict the missing sensitive attributes, e.g. Meta (Alao et al…

2022

Beyond Images: Label Noise Transition Matrix Estimation for Tasks with Lower-Quality Features

ICML 2022spotlight

The label noise transition matrix, denoting the transition probabilities from clean labels to noisy labels, is crucial for designing statistically robust solutions. Existing estimators for noise transition matrices, e.g., using either anchor points or clusterability, focus on computer vision tasks t…

2022

Learning with Noisy Labels Revisited: A Study Using Real-World Human Annotations

ICLR 2022poster

Existing research on learning with noisy labels mainly focuses on synthetic label noise. The synthetic noise, though has clean structures which greatly enabled statistical analyses, often fails to model the real-world noise patterns. The recent literature has observed several efforts to offer real-w…

2021

Clusterability as an Alternative to Anchor Points When Learning with Noisy Labels

ICML 2021spotlight

The label noise transition matrix, characterizing the probabilities of a training instance being wrongly annotated, is crucial to designing popular solutions to learning with noisy labels. Existing works heavily rely on finding “anchor points” or their approximates, defined as instances belonging to…

2021

Learning with Instance-Dependent Label Noise: A Sample Sieve Approach

ICLR 2021poster

Human-annotated labels are often prone to noise, and the presence of such noise will degrade the performance of the resulting deep neural network (DNN) models. Much of the literature (with several recent exceptions) of learning with noisy labels focuses on the case when the label noise is independen…