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Zichao Li

20 accepted papers

2026

Hierarchical Retrieval at Scale: Bridging Transparency and Efficiency

ICML 2026poster

Information retrieval is a core component of many intelligent systems as it enables conditioning of outputs on new and large-scale datasets. While effective, the standard practice of encoding data into high-dimensional representations for similarity search entails large memory and compute footprints…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Spinning Straw into Gold: Relabeling LLM Agent Trajectories in Hindsight for Successful Demonstrations

ICLR 2026poster

Large language model agents operate in partially observable, long-horizon settings where obtaining supervision remains a major bottleneck. We address this by leveraging a source of supervision overlooked in existing post-training methods: ``unintended yet successful'' goals embedded within agent rol…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Tackling Length Inflation Without Trade-offs: Group Relative Reward Rescaling for Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement learning significantly enhances LLM capabilities but suffers from a critical issue: length inflation, where models adopt verbosity or inefficient reasoning to maximize rewards. Prior approaches struggle to address this challenge in a general and lossless manner, primarily because addit…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BigDocs: An Open Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks

ICLR 2025poster

Multimodal AI has the potential to significantly enhance document-understanding tasks, such as processing receipts, understanding workflows, extracting data from documents, and summarizing reports. Code generation tasks that require long-structured outputs can also be enhanced by multimodality. Desp…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Cheems: A Practical Guidance for Building and Evaluating Chinese Reward Models from Scratch

ACL 2025long

Reward models (RMs) are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, most RM research is centered on English and relies heavily on synthetic resources, which leads to limited and less reliable datasets and benchmarks for Chinese. To address this gap, we introduc…

2025

From Isolated Conversations to Hierarchical Schemas: Dynamic Tree Memory Representation for LLMs

ICLR 2025poster

Recent advancements in large language models have significantly improved their context windows, yet challenges in effective long-term memory management remain. We introduce MemTree, an algorithm that leverages a dynamic, tree-structured memory representation to optimize the organization, retrieval,…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

READoc: A Unified Benchmark for Realistic Document Structured Extraction

ACL 2025finding

Document Structured Extraction (DSE) aims to extract structured content from raw documents. Despite the emergence of numerous DSE systems, their unified evaluation remains inadequate, significantly hindering the field’s advancement. This problem is largely attributed to existing benchmark paradigms,…

2025

The Devil Is in the Details: Tackling Unimodal Spurious Correlations for Generalizable Multimodal Reward Models

ICML 2025poster

Multimodal Reward Models (MM-RMs) are crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, particularly as LLMs increasingly interact with multimodal data. However, we find that MM-RMs trained on existing datasets often struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution data due to t…

2025

WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation

EMNLP 2025

We present WebMMU, a multilingual benchmark that evaluates three core web tasks: (1) website visual question answering, (2) code editing involving HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and (3) mockup-to-code generation. Unlike prior benchmarks that treat these tasks separately, WebMMU unifies them using expert-annot

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Do LLMs Build World Representations? Probing Through the Lens of State Abstraction

NeurIPS 2024poster

How do large language models (LLMs) encode the state of the world, including the status of entities and their relations, as described by a text? While existing work directly probes for a complete state of the world, our research explores whether and how LLMs abstract this world state in their intern…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Seg2Act: Global Context-aware Action Generation for Document Logical Structuring

EMNLP 2024main

Document logical structuring aims to extract the underlying hierarchical structure of documents, which is crucial for document intelligence. Traditional approaches often fall short in handling the complexity and the variability of lengthy documents. To address these issues, we introduce Seg2Act, an…

2023

Evaluating Dependencies in Fact Editing for Language Models: Specificity and Implication Awareness

EMNLP 2023long findings

The potential of using a large language model (LLM) as a knowledge base (KB) has sparked significant interest. To maintain the knowledge acquired by LLMs, we need to ensure that the editing of learned facts respects internal logical constraints, which are known as dependency of knowledge. Existing w…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Tied-Augment: Controlling Representation Similarity Improves Data Augmentation

ICML 2023poster

Data augmentation methods have played an important role in the recent advance of deep learning models, and have become an indispensable component of state-of-the-art models in semi-supervised, self-supervised, and supervised training for vision. Despite incurring no additional latency at test time,…

2023

f-Divergence Minimization for Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation

ACL 2023long

Knowledge distillation (KD) is the process of transferring knowledge from a large model to a small one. It has gained increasing attention in the natural language processing community, driven by the demands of compressing ever-growing language models. In this work, we propose an FDISTILL framework,…

2022

Text Revision By On-the-Fly Representation Optimization

AAAI 2022technical

Text revision refers to a family of natural language generation tasks, where the source and target sequences share moderate resemblance in surface form but differentiate in attributes, such as text formality and simplicity. Current state-of-the-art methods formulate these tasks as sequence-to-sequen…

2022

Using Interactive Feedback to Improve the Accuracy and Explainability of Question Answering Systems Post-Deployment

ACL 2022findings

Most research on question answering focuses on the pre-deployment stage; i.e., building an accurate model for deployment. In this paper, we ask the question: Can we improve QA systems further post-deployment based on user interactions? We focus on two kinds of improvements: 1) improving the QA syste…

2021

Can Shape Structure Features Improve Model Robustness Under Diverse Adversarial Settings?

ICCV 2021poster

Recent studies show that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are vulnerable under various settings, including adversarial attacks, common corruptions, and backdoor attacks. Motivated by the findings that human visual system pays more attention to global structure (e.g., shapes) for recognition whil…

Cited by 26PDFcodeScholar
2020

Towards Adaptive Residual Network Training: A Neural-ODE Perspective

ICML 2020poster

In pursuit of resource-economical machine learning, attempts have been made to dynamically adjust computation workloads in different training stages, i.e., starting with a shallow network and gradually increasing the model depth (and computation workloads) during training. However, there is neither…

2020

Unsupervised Text Generation by Learning from Search

NeurIPS 2020poster

In this work, we propose TGLS, a novel framework for unsupervised Text Generation by Learning from Search. We start by applying a strong search algorithm (in particular, simulated annealing) towards a heuristically defined objective that (roughly) estimates the quality of sentences. Then, a conditio…