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Zilong Wang

38 accepted papers

2026

$\texttt{MetaDistill}$: Unlocking the Performance Ceiling for Pretrained Optimizers

ICML 2026poster

Meta Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) has emerged as a promising paradigm by employing meta learning to automatically optimize the configurations of low-level black-box optimizers. Despite its potential, the generalization of MetaBBO remains significantly constrained when facing unseen, complex obje…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Do Not Let Low-Probability Tokens Over-Dominate in RL for LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), with recent innovations such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) demonstrating exceptional effectiveness. In this study, we identify a critical yet underexplored is…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Exploring Interpretability for Visual Prompt Tuning with Cross-layer Concepts

ICLR 2026poster

Visual prompt tuning offers significant advantages for adapting pre-trained visual foundation models to specific tasks. However, current research provides limited insight into the interpretability of this approach, which is essential for enhancing AI reliability and enabling AI-driven knowledge disc…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

GenBreak: Red Teaming Text-to-Image Generation Using Large Language Models

CVPR 2026

Text-to-image (T2I) models such as Stable Diffusion have advanced rapidly and are widely used in content creation. However, these models can be misused to generate harmful content, including nudity or violence, posing significant safety risks. While most platforms employ content moderation systems,

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Joint Adaptation of Uni-modal Foundation Models for Multi-modal Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis

ICLR 2026poster

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and a leading cause of dementia worldwide. Accurate diagnosis requires integrating diverse patient data modalities. With the rapid advancement of foundation models in neurobiology and medicine, integrating foundation models from va…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reasoning-Driven Multimodal LLM for Domain Generalization

ICLR 2026poster

This paper addresses the domain generalization (DG) problem in deep learning. While most DG methods focus on enforcing visual feature invariance, we leverage the reasoning capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and explore the potential of constructing reasoning chains that derives…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfaces

ICLR 2026poster

AI agents may soon become capable of autonomously completing valuable, long-horizon tasks in diverse domains. Current benchmarks either do not measure real-world tasks, or are not sufficiently difficult to meaningfully measure frontier models. To this end, we present Terminal-Bench 1.5: a carefully…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Tuning Medical Foundation Models for Inner Ear Temporal CT Analysis with Plug-and-play Domain Knowledge Aggregator

AAAI 2026technical

High-resolution computed tomography (CT) is essential for diagnosing hearing loss and planning interventions such as cochlear implantation, as it provides detailed visualization of inner-ear anatomy. This paper focuses on advancing AI-based analysis of inner-ear CT scans to support clinical decision

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Cuckoo: An IE Free Rider Hatched by Massive Nutrition in LLM’s Nest

ACL 2025long

Massive high-quality data, both pre-training raw texts and post-training annotations, have been carefully prepared to incubate advanced large language models (LLMs). In contrast, for information extraction (IE), pre-training data, such as BIO-tagged sequences, are hard to scale up. We show that IE m…

2025

From End-to-end to Step-by-step: Learning to Abstract via Abductive Reinforcement Learning

IJCAI 2025

Abstraction is a critical technique in general problem-solving, allowing complex tasks to be decomposed into smaller, manageable sub-tasks. While traditional symbolic planning relies on predefined primitive symbols to construct structured abstractions, its reliance on formal representations limits a

2025

Heterogeneous Graph Dual-structure Optimization Based Attribute-aware for Recommendation

ICASSP 2025accepted

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks(HGNNs) are widely regarded as an effective tool for modeling data with graph structures in recommendation. Current research lacks modeling of user attribute and project attribute distribution preferences, limiting graph structure optimization potential. In respons…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ImageFlowNet: Forecasting Multiscale Image-Level Trajectories of Disease Progression with Irregularly-Sampled Longitudinal Medical Images

ICASSP 2025accepted

Advances in medical imaging technologies have enabled the collection of longitudinal images, which involve repeated scanning of the same patients over time, to monitor disease progression. However, predictive modeling of such data remains challenging due to high dimensionality, irregular sampling, a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

PoisonedEye: Knowledge Poisoning Attack on Retrieval-Augmented Generation based Large Vision-Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Vision-Language Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VLRAG) systems have been widely applied to Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to enhance their generation ability. However, the reliance on external multimodal knowledge databases renders VLRAG systems vulnerable to malicious poisoning attacks. In th…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Speculative RAG: Enhancing Retrieval Augmented Generation through Drafting

ICLR 2025poster

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) combines the generative abilities of large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge sources to provide more accurate and up-to-date responses. Recent RAG advancements focus on improving retrieval outcomes through iterative LLM refinement or self-critique ca…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2025

Training Language Models to Generate Quality Code with Program Analysis Feedback

NeurIPS 2025poster

Code generation with large language models (LLMs), often termed vibe coding, is increasingly adopted in production but fails to ensure code quality, particularly in security (e.g., SQL injection vulnerabilities) and maintainability (e.g., missing type annotations). Existing methods, such as supervis…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Answer is All You Need: Instruction-following Text Embedding via Answering the Question

ACL 2024long

This work aims to build a text embedder that can capture characteristics of texts specified by user instructions clarifying the similarity criterion. While previous methods improve general task awareness by injecting the instruction information into encoding, they fail to be sensitive to clearer cri…

2024

Can LLM Replace Stack Overflow? A Study on Robustness and Reliability of Large Language Model Code Generation

AAAI 2024technical

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown an extraordinary ability to understand natural language and generate programming code. It has been a common practice for software engineers to consult LLMs when encountering coding questions. Although efforts have been made to avoid syntax errors and…

2024

Chain-of-Table: Evolving Tables in the Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding

ICLR 2024poster

Table-based reasoning with large language models (LLMs) is a promising direction to tackle many table understanding tasks, such as table-based question answering and fact verification. Compared with generic reasoning, table-based reasoning requires the extraction of underlying semantics from both fr…

Cited by 107SourcePDFScholar
2024

DOCMASTER: A Unified Platform for Annotation, Training, & Inference in Document Question-Answering

NAACL 2024system demonstrations

The application of natural language processing models to PDF documents is pivotal for various business applications yet the challenge of training models for this purpose persists in businesses due to specific hurdles. These include the complexity of working with PDF formats that necessitate parsing…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Debug like a Human: A Large Language Model Debugger via Verifying Runtime Execution Step by Step

ACL 2024findings

Large language models (LLMs) are leading significant progress in code generation. Beyond one-pass code generation, recent works further integrate unit tests and program verifiers into LLMs to iteratively refine the generated programs. However, these works consider the generated programs as an indivi…

2024

EEG2Video: Towards Decoding Dynamic Visual Perception from EEG Signals

NeurIPS 2024poster

Our visual experience in daily life are dominated by dynamic change. Decoding such dynamic information from brain activity can enhance the understanding of the brain’s visual processing system. However, previous studies predominately focus on reconstructing static visual stimuli. In this paper, we e…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Incubating Text Classifiers Following User Instruction with Nothing but LLM

EMNLP 2024main

In this paper, we aim to generate text classification data given arbitrary class definitions (i.e., user instruction), so one can train a text classifier without any human annotation or raw corpus. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) lead to pioneer attempts to individually generate text…

2024

LMDX: Language Model-based Document Information Extraction and Localization

ACL 2024findings

Large Language Models (LLM) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), improving state-of-the-art and exhibiting emergent capabilities across various tasks. However, their application in extracting information from visually rich documents, which is at the core of many document processing…

2024

Position Engineering: Boosting Large Language Models through Positional Information Manipulation

EMNLP 2024main

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is significantly influenced by the quality of the prompts provided. In response, researchers have developed enormous prompt engineering strategies aimed at modifying the prompt text to enhance task performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel techn…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

TableRAG: Million-Token Table Understanding with Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have notably enhanced their ability to reason with tabular data, primarily through program-aided mechanisms that manipulate and analyze tables. However, these methods often require the entire table as input, leading to scalability challenges due to the po…

2024

Towards Few-shot Entity Recognition in Document Images: A Graph Neural Network Approach Robust to Image Manipulation

COLING 2024main

Recent advances of incorporating layout information, typically bounding box coordinates, into pre-trained language models have achieved significant performance in entity recognition from document images. Using coordinates can easily model the position of each token, but they are sensitive to manipul…

2023

Explaining Adversarial Robustness of Neural Networks from Clustering Effect Perspective

ICCV 2023poster

Adversarial training (AT) is the most commonly used mechanism to improve the robustness of deep neural networks. Recently, a novel adversarial attack against intermediate layers exploits the extra fragility of adversarially trained networks to output incorrect predictions. The result implies the ins…

Cited by 1PDFcodeScholar
2023

Towards Zero-shot Relation Extraction in Web Mining: A Multimodal Approach with Relative XML Path

EMNLP 2023long findings

The rapid growth of web pages and the increasing complexity of their structure poses a challenge for web mining models. Web mining models are required to understand semi-structured web pages, particularly when little is known about the subject or template of a new page. Current methods migrate langu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Formulating Few-shot Fine-tuning Towards Language Model Pre-training: A Pilot Study on Named Entity Recognition

EMNLP 2022finding

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models is a common practice in building NLP models for various tasks, including the case with less supervision. We argue that under the few-shot setting, formulating fine-tuning closer to the pre-training objective shall be able to unleash more benefits from the pre-…

2022

MGDoc: Pre-training with Multi-granular Hierarchy for Document Image Understanding

EMNLP 2022main

Document images are a ubiquitous source of data where the text is organized in a complex hierarchical structure ranging from fine granularity (e.g., words), medium granularity (e.g., regions such as paragraphs or figures), to coarse granularity (e.g., the whole page). The spatial hierarchical relati…

2022

Towards Few-shot Entity Recognition in Document Images: A Label-aware Sequence-to-Sequence Framework

ACL 2022findings

Entity recognition is a fundamental task in understanding document images. Traditional sequence labeling frameworks treat the entity types as class IDs and rely on extensive data and high-quality annotations to learn semantics which are typically expensive in practice. In this paper, we aim to build…

2021

LayoutReader: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Reading Order Detection

EMNLP 2021main

Reading order detection is the cornerstone to understanding visually-rich documents (e.g., receipts and forms). Unfortunately, no existing work took advantage of advanced deep learning models because it is too laborious to annotate a large enough dataset. We observe that the reading order of WORD do…