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Zhikun Xu

10 accepted papers

2026

CORE: Concept-Oriented Reinforcement for Bridging the Definition–Application Gap in Mathematical Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) often solve drill-style math exercises yet fail to apply the concept right when the problem requires genuine understanding. Popular outcome-based RL pipelines reinforce final answers but provide little fine-grained conceptual signal, so models improve at pattern reuse ra…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Atomic Thinking of LLMs: Decoupling and Exploring Mathematical Reasoning Abilities

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in mathematical reasoning capabilities. However, we argue that current large-scale reasoning models primarily rely on scaling up training datasets with diverse mathematical problems and long thinking chains, which raises question…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Let LLMs Take on the Latest Challenges! A Chinese Dynamic Question Answering Benchmark

COLING 2025main

How to better evaluate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the focal point and hot topic in current LLMs research. Previous work has noted that due to the extremely high cost of iterative updates of LLMs, they are often unable to answer the latest dynamic questions well. To promote t…

2025

One Example Shown, Many Concepts Known! Counterexample-Driven Conceptual Reasoning in Mathematical LLMs

ICML 2025poster

Leveraging mathematical Large Language Models (LLMs) for proof generation is a fundamental topic in LLMs research. We argue that the ability of current LLMs to prove statements largely depends on whether they have encountered the relevant proof process during training. This reliance limits their dee…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

QA‐LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA

EMNLP 2025

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) with principles like helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness typically relies on scalar rewards that obscure which objectives drive the training signal. We introduce QA-LIGN, which decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluation

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ToW: Thoughts of Words Improve Reasoning in Large Language Models

NAACL 2025long

We introduce thoughts of words (ToW), a novel training-time data-augmentation method for next-word prediction. ToW views next-word prediction as a core reasoning task and injects fine-grained thoughts explaining what the next word should be and how it is related to the previous contexts in pre-train…

2025

V-ALPHASOCIAL: Benchmark and Self-Reflective Chain-of-Thought Generation for Visual Social Commonsense Reasoning

ACL 2025finding

Social commonsense reasoning naturally involves both the verbal and non-verbal cues of a social interaction. It is important for Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to leverage both textual and visual information in performing tasks like social understanding and reasoning. However, while current LLM…

2023

Evaluating Open-QA Evaluation

NeurIPS 2023poster

This study focuses on the evaluation of the Open Question Answering (Open-QA) task, which can directly estimate the factuality of large language models (LLMs). Current automatic evaluation methods have shown limitations, indicating that human evaluation still remains the most reliable approach. We i…

2023

Exploiting Abstract Meaning Representation for Open-Domain Question Answering

ACL 2023findings

The Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) task involves retrieving and subsequently generating answers from fine-grained relevant passages within a database. Current systems leverage Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) to model the relationship between questions and passages. However, the diversity in…