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Zhilin Wang

22 accepted papers

2026

Characterizing, Evaluating, and Optimizing Complex Reasoning

ICML 2026oral

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) increasingly rely on reasoning traces with complex internal structures. However, existing work lacks a unified answer to three fundamental questions: (1) what defines high-quality reasoning, (2) how to reliably evaluate long, implicitly structured reasoning traces, and …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Evaluating Parameter Efficient Methods for RLVR

ICML 2026poster

We systematically evaluate Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods under the paradigm of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). RLVR incentivizes language models to enhance their reasoning capabilities through verifiable feedback; however, while methods like LoRA are commonly …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ProfBench: Multi-Domain Rubrics requiring Professional Knowledge to Answer and Judge

ICLR 2026poster

Evaluating progress in large language models (LLMs) is often constrained by the challenge of verifying responses, limiting assessments to tasks like mathematics, programming, and short-form question-answering. However, many real-world applications require evaluating LLMs in processing professional d…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

RLBFF: Binary Flexible Feedback to bridge between Human Feedback & Verifiable Rewards

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are the main RL paradigms used in LLM post-training, each offering distinct advantages. However, RLHF struggles with interpretability and reward hacking because it relies on human judgments th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reasoning over Boundaries: Enhancing Specification Alignment via Test-time Deliberation

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in diverse real-world applications, each governed by bespoke behavioral and safety specifications (spec) custom-tailored by users or organizations. These specifications, categorized into safety-spec and behavioral-spec, vary across scenarios and …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Will AI Tell Lies to Save Sick Children? Litmus-Testing AI Values Prioritization with AIRiskDilemmas

ICLR 2026poster

Detecting AI risks becomes more challenging as stronger models emerge and find novel methods such as Alignment Faking to circumvent these detection attempts. Inspired by how risky behaviors in humans (i.e., illegal activities that may hurt others) are sometimes guided by strongly-held values, we bel…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Diverging Preferences: When do Annotators Disagree and do Models Know?

ICML 2025poster

We examine diverging preferences in human-labeled preference datasets. We develop a taxonomy of disagreement sources spanning ten categories across four high-level classes and find that the majority of disagreements are due to factors such as task underspecification or response style. Our findings c…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2025

HLMEA: Unsupervised Entity Alignment Based on Hybrid Language Models

AAAI 2025technical

Entity alignment (EA) is crucial for integrating knowledge graphs (KGs) constructed from diverse sources. Conventional unsupervised EA approaches attempt to eliminate human intervention but often suffer from accuracy limitations. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), leveraging their capabi…

2025

HelpSteer2-Preference: Complementing Ratings with Preferences

ICLR 2025poster

Reward models are critical for aligning models to follow instructions, and are typically trained following one of two popular paradigms: Bradley-Terry style or Regression style. However, there is a lack of evidence that either approach is better than the other, when adequately matched for data. This…

Cited by 32SourcePDFScholar
2025

HelpSteer3-Preference: Open Human-Annotated Preference Data across Diverse Tasks and Languages

NeurIPS 2025poster

Preference datasets are essential for training general-domain, instruction-following language models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Each subsequent data release raises expectations for future data collection, meaning there is a constant need to advance the quality and divers…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

HelpSteer3: Human-Annotated Feedback and Edit Data to Empower Inference-Time Scaling in Open-Ended General-Domain Tasks

ACL 2025long

Inference-Time Scaling has been critical to the success of recent models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1. However, many techniques used to train models for inference-time scaling require tasks to have answers that can be verified, limiting their application to domains such as math, coding and logi…

2025

Lost in Literalism: How Supervised Training Shapes Translationese in LLMs

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in machine translation, demonstrating impressive performance across diverse languages. However, translationese—characterized by overly literal and unnatural translations—remains a persistent challenge in LLM-based translation systems. Des…

2025

Partial Order-centered Hyperbolic Representation Learning for Few-shot Relation Extraction

COLING 2025main

Prototype network-based methods have made substantial progress in few-shot relation extraction (FSRE) by enhancing relation prototypes with relation descriptions. However, the distribution of relations and instances in distinct representation spaces isolates the constraints of relations on instances…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Unveiling Attractor Cycles in Large Language Models: A Dynamical Systems View of Successive Paraphrasing

ACL 2025long

Dynamical systems theory provides a framework for analyzing iterative processes and evolution over time. Within such systems, repetitive transformations can lead to stable configurations, known as attractors, including fixed points and limit cycles. Applying this perspective to large language models…

2024

Data, Data Everywhere: A Guide for Pretraining Dataset Construction

EMNLP 2024main

The impressive capabilities of recent language models can be largely attributed to the multi-trillion token pretraining datasets that they are trained on. However, model developers fail to disclose their construction methodology which has lead to a lack of open information on how to develop effectiv…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

HelpSteer 2: Open-source dataset for training top-performing reward models

NeurIPS 2024poster

High-quality preference datasets are essential for training reward models that can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) in generating high-quality responses aligned with human preferences. As LLMs become stronger and better aligned, permissively licensed preference datasets, such as Open A…

2024

HelpSteer: Multi-attribute Helpfulness Dataset for SteerLM

NAACL 2024long

Existing open-source helpfulness preference datasets do not specify what makes some responses more helpful and others less so. Models trained on these datasets can incidentally learn to model dataset artifacts (e.g. preferring longer but unhelpful responses only due to their length). To alleviate th…

Cited by 71SourcePDFScholar
2024

MAGE: Machine-generated Text Detection in the Wild

ACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved human-level text generation, emphasizing the need for effective deepfake text detection to mitigate risks like the spread of fake news and plagiarism. Existing research has been constrained by evaluating detection methods o specific domains or particular la…

2024

Spotting AI’s Touch: Identifying LLM-Paraphrased Spans in Text

ACL 2024findings

AI-generated text detection has attracted increasing attention as powerful language models approach human-level generation. Limited work is devoted to detecting (partially) AI-paraphrased texts. However, AI paraphrasing is commonly employed in various application scenarios for text refinement and di…

2023

Just Like a Human Would, Direct Access to Sarcasm Augmented with Potential Result and Reaction

ACL 2023long

Sarcasm, as a form of irony conveying mockery and contempt, has been widespread in social media such as Twitter and Weibo, where the sarcastic text is commonly characterized as an incongruity between the surface positive and negative situation. Naturally, it has an urgent demand to automatically ide…

2023

SteerLM: Attribute Conditioned SFT as an (User-Steerable) Alternative to RLHF

EMNLP 2023long findings

Model alignment with human preferences is an essential step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) helpful and consistent with human values. It typically consists of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) stages. However, RLHF faces inherent limitations st…

Cited by 0SourceScholar