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Zhouhan Lin

43 accepted papers

2026

AWM: Accurate Weight-Matrix Fingerprint for Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Protecting the intellectual property of large language models (LLMs) is crucial, given the substantial resources required for their training. Consequently, there is an urgent need for both model owners and third parties to determine whether a suspect LLM is trained from scratch or derived from an ex…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Context-level Language Modeling by Learning Predictive Context Embeddings

ICML 2026poster

We propose ContextLM, a framework that implicitly learns multi-token prediction by augmenting standard pretraining with an intrinsic next-context prediction objective. ContextLM builds a language model on top of context embeddings that span multiple tokens, enabling better next-token prediction by p…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Flow of Spans: Generalizing Language Models to Dynamic Span-Vocabulary via GFlowNets

ICLR 2026poster

Standard autoregressive language models generate text token-by-token from a fixed vocabulary, inducing a *tree-structured state space* when viewing token sampling as an action, which limits flexibility and expressiveness. Recent work introduces dynamic vocabulary by sampling retrieved text spans but…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

FlowRL: Matching Reward Distributions for LLM Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of solely maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (e.g., PPO and GRPO), which tend to over-optimize dominant rewa…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

FreqKV: Key-Value Compression in Frequency Domain for Context Window Extension

ICLR 2026poster

Existing key-value (KV) cache compression methods for large language models (LLMs) often rely on token eviction, which risks losing critical local information in both long prefilling and decoding scenarios. When extrapolating beyond the pretrained context length, their performance degrades sharply o…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

MLP Memory: A Retriever-Pretrained Memory for Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Modern approaches to enhancing Large Language Models' factual accuracy and knowledge utilization face a fundamental trade-off: non-parametric retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) provides flexible access to external knowledge but suffers from high inference latency and shallow integration, while par…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

PonderLM-2: Pretraining LLM with Latent Thoughts in Continuous Space

ICML 2026spotlight

The remarkable success of Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which enhances performance by scaling generation steps at test-time, inspires us to ask: can we leverage a similar scaling of computational steps during pretraining to improve the generation of each individual token? To address this, we propose a nov…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

PonderLM: Pretraining Language Models to Ponder in Continuous Space

ICLR 2026poster

Humans ponder before articulating complex sentence elements, enabling deeper cognitive processing through focused effort. In this work, we introduce this pondering process into language models by repeatedly invoking the forward process within a single token generation step. During pondering, instead…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AdaptiveStep: Automatically Dividing Reasoning Step through Model Confidence

ICML 2025poster

Current approaches for training Process Reward Models (PRMs) often involve deconposing responses into multiple reasoning steps using rule-based techniques, such as using predefined placeholder tokens or setting the reasoning step's length to a fixed size. These approaches overlook the fact that cert…

2025

DiVISe: Direct Visual-Input Speech Synthesis Preserving Speaker Characteristics And Intelligibility

NAACL 2025findings

Video-to-speech (V2S) synthesis, the task of generating speech directly from silent video input, is inherently more challenging than other speech synthesis tasks due to the need to accurately reconstruct both speech content and speaker characteristics from visual cues alone. Recently, audio-visual p…

2025

Efficient Long Document Ranking via Adaptive Token Pruning with Query-Document Alignment

ICASSP 2025accepted

Transformer-based models have achieved great success in document ranking, yet they suffer from substantial computational costs due to the quadratic complexity of attention, particularly for Long Document Ranking (LDR). Token pruning is a promising approach to reducing computational costs, while exis…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Gumbel Reranking: Differentiable End-to-End Reranker Optimization

ACL 2025long

RAG systems rely on rerankers to identify relevant documents. However, fine-tuning these models remains challenging due to the scarcity of annotated query-document pairs. Existing distillation-based approaches suffer from training-inference misalignment and fail to capture interdependencies among ca…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

How to Synthesize Text Data without Model Collapse?

ICML 2025poster

Model collapse in synthetic data indicates that iterative training on self-generated data leads to a gradual decline in performance. With the proliferation of AI models, synthetic data will fundamentally reshape the web data ecosystem. Future GPT-$\{n\}$ models will inevitably be trained on a blend…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2025

Memory Decoder: A Pretrained, Plug-and-Play Memory for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong abilities in general language tasks, yet adapting them to specific domains remains a challenge. Current method like Domain Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT) requires costly full-parameter training and suffers from catastrophic forgetting. Meanwhile, Retrieval…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Training LLMs to be Better Text Embedders through Bidirectional Reconstruction

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been explored as powerful text embedders. Existing LLM-based text embedding approaches often leverage the embedding of the final token, typically a reserved special token such as ‘[EOS]‘. However, these tokens have not been intentionally trained to capt

2025

Training-free LLM-generated Text Detection by Mining Token Probability Sequences

ICLR 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality texts across diverse domains. However, the potential misuse of LLMs has raised significant concerns, underscoring the urgent need for reliable detection of LLM-generated texts. Conventional training-bas…

2024

Cluster-wise Graph Transformer with Dual-granularity Kernelized Attention

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

In the realm of graph learning, there is a category of methods that conceptualize graphs as hierarchical structures, utilizing node clustering to capture broader structural information. While generally effective, these methods often rely on a fixed graph coarsening routine, leading to overly homogen…

2024

Extracting Financial Events from Raw Texts via Matrix Chunking

COLING 2024main

Event Extraction (EE) is widely used in the Chinese financial field to provide valuable structured information. However, there are two key challenges for Chinese financial EE in application scenarios. First, events need to be extracted from raw texts, which sets it apart from previous works like the…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

HuRef: HUman-REadable Fingerprint for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Protecting the copyright of large language models (LLMs) has become crucial due to their resource-intensive training and accompanying carefully designed licenses. However, identifying the original base model of an LLM is challenging due to potential parameter alterations. In this study, we introduce…

2024

Leveraging Grammar Induction for Language Understanding and Generation

EMNLP 2024finding

Grammar induction has made significant progress in recent years. However, it is not clear how the application of induced grammar could enhance practical performance in downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce an unsupervised grammar induction method for language understanding and generation. We…

2024

Mirror-Consistency: Harnessing Inconsistency in Majority Voting

EMNLP 2024finding

Self-Consistency, a widely-used decoding strategy, significantly boosts the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it depends on the plurality voting rule, which focuses on the most frequent answer while overlooking all other minority responses. These inconsistent minority…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

PaD: Program-aided Distillation Can Teach Small Models Reasoning Better than Chain-of-thought Fine-tuning

NAACL 2024long

While large language models (LLMs) excel in various natural language processing tasks, their huge size and the inaccessibility of parameters present challenges for practical deployment. Previous studies try to distill task-specific ability from LLMs to smaller models, using data synthesis and chain-…

2024

SH2: Self-Highlighted Hesitation Helps You Decode More Truthfully

EMNLP 2024finding

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate great performance in text generation. However, LLMs are still suffering from hallucinations. In this work, we propose an inference-time method, Self-Highlighted Hesitation (SH2), to help LLMs decode more truthfully. SH2 is based on a simple fact rooted in inf…

2024

Towards Controlled Table-to-Text Generation with Scientific Reasoning

ICASSP 2024accepted

The sheer volume of scientific experimental results and complex technical statements, often presented in tabular formats, presents a formidable barrier to individuals acquiring preferred information. The realms of scientific reasoning and content generation that adhere to user preferences encounter…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Fourier Transformer: Fast Long Range Modeling by Removing Sequence Redundancy with FFT Operator

ACL 2023findings

The transformer model is known to be computationally demanding, and prohibitively costly for long sequences, as the self-attention module uses a quadratic time and space complexity with respect to sequence length. Many researchers have focused on designing new forms of self-attention or introducing…

2023

Ordered GNN: Ordering Message Passing to Deal with Heterophily and Over-smoothing

ICLR 2023poster

Most graph neural networks follow the message passing mechanism. However, it faces the over-smoothing problem when multiple times of message passing is applied to a graph, causing indistinguishable node representations and prevents the model to effectively learn dependencies between farther-away nod…

2023

Tailoring Self-Attention for Graph via Rooted Subtrees

NeurIPS 2023poster

Attention mechanisms have made significant strides in graph learning, yet they still exhibit notable limitations: local attention faces challenges in capturing long-range information due to the inherent problems of the message-passing scheme, while global attention cannot reflect the hierarchical ne…

2023

Text Classification In The Wild: A Large-Scale Long-Tailed Name Normalization Dataset

ICASSP 2023accepted

Real-world data usually exhibits a long-tailed distribution, with a few frequent labels and a lot of few-shot labels. The study of institution name normalization is a perfect application case showing this phenomenon: there are many institutions worldwide, with enormous variations of their names in t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Unsupervised Graph-Text Mutual Conversion with a Unified Pretrained Language Model

ACL 2023long

Graph-to-text (G2T) generation and text-to-graph (T2G) triple extraction are two essential tasks for knowledge graphs. Existing unsupervised approaches become suitable candidates for jointly learning the two tasks due to their avoidance of using graph-text parallel data. However, they adopt multiple…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2022

Block-Skim: Efficient Question Answering for Transformer

AAAI 2022technical

Transformer models have achieved promising results on natural language processing (NLP) tasks including extractive question answering (QA). Common Transformer encoders used in NLP tasks process the hidden states of all input tokens in the context paragraph throughout all layers. However, different f…

2022

Leveraging Unimodal Self-Supervised Learning for Multimodal Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

ACL 2022long

Training Transformer-based models demands a large amount of data, while obtaining aligned and labelled data in multimodality is rather cost-demanding, especially for audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR). Thus it makes a lot of sense to make use of unlabelled unimodal data. On the other side, altho…

2022

RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL

EMNLP 2022main

Relational structures such as schema linking and schema encoding have been validated as a key component to qualitatively translating natural language into SQL queries. However, introducing these structural relations comes with prices: they often result in a specialized model structure, which largely…

2022

Syntax-guided Localized Self-attention by Constituency Syntactic Distance

EMNLP 2022finding

Recent works have revealed that Transformers are implicitly learning the syntactic information in its lower layers from data, albeit is highly dependent on the quality and scale of the training data. However, learning syntactic information from data is not necessary if we can leverage an external sy…

2022

Transkimmer: Transformer Learns to Layer-wise Skim

ACL 2022long

Transformer architecture has become the de-facto model for many machine learning tasks from natural language processing and computer vision. As such, improving its computational efficiency becomes paramount. One of the major computational inefficiency of Transformer based models is that they spend t…

2019

Ordered Memory

NeurIPS 2019poster

Stack-augmented recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been of interest to the deep learning community for some time. However, the difficulty of training memory models remains a problem obstructing the widespread use of such models. In this paper, we propose the Ordered Memory architecture. Inspired…

2018

Focused Hierarchical RNNs for Conditional Sequence Processing

ICML 2018oral

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with attention mechanisms have obtained state-of-the-art results for many sequence processing tasks. Most of these models use a simple form of encoder with attention that looks over the entire sequence and assigns a weight to each token independently. We present a me…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2018

Neural Language Modeling by Jointly Learning Syntax and Lexicon

ICLR 2018poster

We propose a neural language model capable of unsupervised syntactic structure induction. The model leverages the structure information to form better semantic representations and better language modeling. Standard recurrent neural networks are limited by their structure and fail to efficiently use…

Cited by 208SourcePDFScholar
2017

A STRUCTURED SELF-ATTENTIVE SENTENCE EMBEDDING

ICLR 2017poster

This paper proposes a new model for extracting an interpretable sentence embedding by introducing self-attention. Instead of using a vector, we use a 2-D matrix to represent the embedding, with each row of the matrix attending on a different part of the sentence. We also propose a self-attention mec…

Cited by 2949SourceScholar
2016

Architectural Complexity Measures of Recurrent Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2016poster

In this paper, we systematically analyze the connecting architectures of recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Our main contribution is twofold: first, we present a rigorous graph-theoretic framework describing the connecting architectures of RNNs in general. Second, we propose three architecture comple…