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Ziyan Liu

13 accepted papers

2026

ArborKV: Structure-Aware KV Cache Management for Scaling Tree-based LLM Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Recent progress in LLM reasoning has increasingly shifted from single-pass generation to explicit search over intermediate reasoning states. Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT) organizes inference to tree-structured search with branching and backtracking, but it substantially amplifies the key--value (KV) cache:…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Easy for Children, Hard for AI: The Limits of Multimodal LLMs in Early Childhood Learning

AAAI 2026technical

Early childhood is a critical stage for cognitive development, involving core skills such as visual perception and reasoning. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in various general-purpose tasks, their ability to support early education remains largely underexplor

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Evo-1: Lightweight Vision-Language-Action Model with Preserved Semantic Alignment

CVPR 2026

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful framework that unifies perception, language, and control, enabling robots to perform diverse tasks through multimodal understanding. However, current VLA models typically contain massive parameters and rely heavily on large-scale robot d

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Learning-Guided Integration Contours Construction for Fast Large-Scale Generalized Eigensolvers

ICML 2026poster

Solving large-scale Generalized Eigenvalue Problems (GEPs) is a fundamental yet computationally prohibitive task in science and engineering. As a promising direction, contour integral (CI) methods offer an efficient and parallelizable framework. However, their performance is critically dependent on …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SLQ: Bridging Modalities via Shared Latent Queries for Retrieval with Frozen MLLMs

ICML 2026poster

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) possess intrinsic reasoning and world-knowledge capabilities, yet adapting them for dense retrieval remains challenging. Existing approaches typically rely on invasive parameter updates, such as full fine-tuning and LoRA, which risk disrupting the pre-trained…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ThoughtFold: Folding Reasoning Chains via Introspective Preference Learning

ICML 2026poster

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable progress thanks to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) on Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs). However, since long CoTs naturally contain trial and errors and mainstream RLVR approaches choose outcome-correct CoT trajectories for memoriza…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Watermarking Graph Neural Networks via Explanations for Ownership Protection

ICML 2026poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely deployed in industry, making their intellectual property valuable. However, protecting GNNs from unauthorized use remains a challenge. Watermarking offers a solution by embedding ownership information into models. Existing watermarking methods have two limitat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Benchmarking End-To-End Performance of AI-Based Chip Placement Algorithms

NeurIPS 2025poster

Chip placement is a critical step in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workflow, which aims to arrange chip modules on the canvas to optimize the performance, power, and area (PPA) metrics of final designs. Recent advances show great potential of AI-based algorithms in chip placement. However,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Can Multimodal Large Language Models Understand Spatial Relations?

ACL 2025long

Spatial relation reasoning is a crucial task for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to understand the objective world. However, current benchmarks have issues like relying on bounding boxes, ignoring perspective substitutions, or allowing questions to be answered using only the model’s prior k…

2025

LLaVA-SP: Enhancing Visual Representation with Visual Spatial Tokens for MLLMs

ICCV 2025poster

The architecture of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) commonly connects a vision encoder, often based on CLIP-ViT, to a large language model. While CLIP-ViT works well for capturing global image features, it struggles to model local relationships between adjacent patches, leading to weaker vi…

2025

LaMPlace: Learning to Optimize Cross-Stage Metrics in Macro Placement

ICLR 2025oral

Machine learning techniques have shown great potential in enhancing macro placement, a critical stage in modern chip design. However, existing methods primarily focus on *online* optimization of *intermediate surrogate metrics* that are available at the current placement stage, rather than directly…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

MIND: A Multi-agent Framework for Zero-shot Harmful Meme Detection

ACL 2025long

The rapid expansion of memes on social media has highlighted the urgent need for effective approaches to detect harmful content. However, traditional data-driven approaches struggle to detect new memes due to their evolving nature and the lack of up-to-date annotated data. To address this issue, we…

2024

Reinforcement Learning within Tree Search for Fast Macro Placement

ICML 2024poster

Macro placement is a crucial step in modern chip design, and reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising technique for improving the placement quality. However, existing RL-based techniques are hindered by their low sample efficiency, requiring numerous online rollouts or substan…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar