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Zhichen Dong

8 accepted papers

2026

Attention Illuminates LLM Reasoning: The Uncovered Preplan-and-Anchor Rhythm Enables Fine-Grained Policy Optimization

ICML 2026poster

The reasoning patterns of large language models (LLMs) remain opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically assigns uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work treats attention as a natural substrate for interpreting LLM reaso…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

How Does Reasoning Flow? Tracing Attention-Induced Information Flow for Targeted RL in LLMs

ICML 2026poster

Token-level credit assignment remains a key obstacle for reinforcement learning (RL) in large language models (LLMs), where RL recipes typically treat all tokens equally, failing to distinguish decisive reasoning steps from routine formatting or fluent filler. Recent attempts leverage model-internal…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Attacks, Defenses and Evaluations for LLM Conversation Safety: A Survey

NAACL 2024long

Large Language Models (LLMs) are now commonplace in conversation applications. However, their risks of misuse for generating harmful responses have raised serious societal concerns and spurred recent research on LLM conversation safety. Therefore, in this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview…

2024

Emulated Disalignment: Safety Alignment for Large Language Models May Backfire!

ACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) undergo safety alignment to ensure safe conversations with humans. However, this paper introduces a training-free attack method capable of reversing safety alignment, converting the outcomes of stronger alignment into greater potential for harm by accessing only LLM outp…

2024

L2P-MIP: Learning to Presolve for Mixed Integer Programming

ICLR 2024poster

Modern solvers for solving mixed integer programming (MIP) often rely on the branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithm which could be of high time complexity, and presolving techniques are well designed to simplify the instance as pre-processing before B&B. However, such presolvers in existing literature or…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Towards Imitation Learning to Branch for MIP: A Hybrid Reinforcement Learning based Sample Augmentation Approach

ICLR 2024poster

Branch-and-bound (B\&B) has long been favored for tackling complex Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problems, where the choice of branching strategy plays a pivotal role. Recently, Imitation Learning (IL)-based policies have emerged as potent alternatives to traditional rule-based approaches. However…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Weak-to-Strong Search: Align Large Language Models via Searching over Small Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models are usually fine-tuned to align with human preferences. However, fine-tuning a large language model can be challenging. In this work, we introduce $\textit{weak-to-strong search}$, framing the alignment of a large language model as a test-time greedy search to maximize the log-…