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yelong shen

49 accepted papers

2026

Beyond Pass@ 1: Self-Play with Variational Problem Synthesis Sustains RLVR

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a key paradigm for post-training Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly for complex reasoning tasks. However, vanilla RLVR training has been shown to improve Pass@1 performance at the expense of policy entropy, leading…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Shuffle the Context: RoPE-Perturbed Self-Distillation for Long-Context Adaptation

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in settings that require reliable long-context understanding, such as retrieval-augmented generation and multi-document reasoning. A common strategy is to fine-tune pretrained short-context models at the target sequence length. However, we find that …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ThetaEvolve: Test-time Learning on Open Problems

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled breakthroughs in mathematical discovery, exemplified by AlphaEvolve, a closed-source system that evolves programs to improve bounds on open problems. However, it relies on ensembles of frontier LLMs to achieve new bounds and is a pure infe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Adapting LLM Agents with Universal Communication Feedback

NAACL 2025findings

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential for LLM agents. To facilitate the training for these agents with both linguistic feedback and non-linguistic reward signals, we introduce Learning through Communication (LTC). We design a universal buffer to store all the fe…

2025

Decoder-Hybrid-Decoder Architecture for Efficient Reasoning with Long Generation

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in language modeling have demonstrated the effectiveness of State Space Models (SSMs) for efficient sequence modeling. While hybrid architectures such as Samba and the decoder-decoder architecture, YOCO, have shown promising performance gains over Transformers, prior works have not i…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Is Your World Simulator a Good Story Presenter? A Consecutive Events-Based Benchmark for Future Long Video Generation

CVPR 2025poster

The current state-of-the-art video generative models can produce commercial-grade videos with highly realistic details. However, they still struggle to coherently present multiple sequential events in specific short stories, which is foreseeable an essential capability for future long video generati…

2025

Key-Point-Driven Data Synthesis with Its Enhancement on Mathematical Reasoning

AAAI 2025technical

Large language models have shown great potential in complex reasoning tasks, yet their performance is often hampered by the scarcity of high-quality and reasoning-focused training datasets. Addressing this challenge, we propose Key-PointDriven Data Synthesis (KPDDS), a novel data synthesis framework…

2025

MTL-LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation for Multi-Task Learning

AAAI 2025technical

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has been widely employed for domain adaptation, with LoRA being one of the most prominent methods due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, in multi-task learning (MTL) scenarios, LoRA tends to obscure the distinction between tasks by projecting sparse…

2025

PeRL: Permutation-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Interleaved Vision-Language Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Inspired by the impressive reasoning capabilities demonstrated by reinforcement learning approaches like DeepSeek-R1, recent emerging research has begun exploring the use of reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance vision-language models (VLMs) for multimodal reasoning tasks. However, most existing mu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example

NeurIPS 2025poster

We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward using one training example (1-shot RLVR) is effective in incentivizing the math reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Applying RLVR to the base model Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, we identify a single example that elevates model perfo…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Routing Mamba: Scaling State Space Models with Mixture-of-Experts Projection

NeurIPS 2025poster

State Space Models (SSMs) offer remarkable performance gains in efficient sequence modeling, with constant per-step inference-time computation and memory complexity. Recent advances, such as Mamba, further enhance SSMs with input-dependent gating and hardware-aware implementations, positioning them…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Samba: Simple Hybrid State Space Models for Efficient Unlimited Context Language Modeling

ICLR 2025poster

Efficiently modeling sequences with infinite context length has long been a challenging problem. Previous approaches have either suffered from quadratic computational complexity or limited extrapolation ability in length generalization. In this work, we present Samba, a simple hybrid architecture th…

Cited by 43SourcePDFScholar
2025

SwS: Self-aware Weakness-driven Problem Synthesis in Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for training large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical problem solving. A prerequisite for the scalability of RLVR is a high-quality problem set with precise and verifiable answers. However…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquing

ICLR 2024poster

Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have been impressive. However, these models sometimes show inconsistencies and problematic behavior, such as hallucinating facts, generating flawed code, or creating offensive and toxic content. Unlike these models, humans typically utilize externa…

2024

Competition-Level Problems are Effective LLM Evaluators

ACL 2024findings

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, yet there is ongoing debate about these abilities and the potential data contamination problem recently. This paper aims to evaluate the reasoning capacities of LLMs, specifically in solving recent competition-level pr…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2024

Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models

NAACL 2024findings

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve impressive performance on various reasoning tasks by incorporating chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, where step-by-step reasoning is provided to guide LLMs to generate answers to questions, and the question-rationale-answer triplets are utilized as demonstrat…

2024

Ensuring Safe and High-Quality Outputs: A Guideline Library Approach for Language Models

NAACL 2024long

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but also present risks such as biased content generation and privacy issues. One of the current alignment techniques includes principle-driven integration, but it faces challenges arising from the imprecision of manually crafted rules and…

2024

Language Models can be Deductive Solvers

NAACL 2024findings

Logical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and a key component of tasks like problem-solving and decision-making. Recent advancements have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to potentially exhibit reasoning capabilities, but complex logical reasoning remains a challenge. The s…

2024

Not All Tokens Are What You Need for Pretraining

NeurIPS 2024oral

Previous language model pre-training methods have uniformly applied a next-token prediction loss to all training tokens. Challenging this norm, we posit that ''Not all tokens in a corpus are equally important for language model training''. Our initial analysis examines token-level training dynamics…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

Temperature-Centric Investigation of Speculative Decoding with Knowledge Distillation

EMNLP 2024finding

Speculative decoding stands as a pivotal technique to expedite inference in autoregressive (large) language models. This method employs a smaller *draft* model to speculate a block of tokens, which the *target* model then evaluates for acceptance. Despite a wealth of studies aimed at increasing the…

2024

ToRA: A Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent for Mathematical Problem Solving

ICLR 2024poster

Large language models have made significant progress in various language tasks, yet they still struggle with complex mathematics. In this paper, we propose ToRA a series of Tool-integrated Reasoning Agents designed to solve challenging mathematical problems by seamlessly integrating natural language…

2023

AR-Diffusion: Auto-Regressive Diffusion Model for Text Generation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Diffusion models have gained significant attention in the realm of image generation due to their exceptional performance. Their success has been recently expanded to text generation via generating all tokens within a sequence concurrently. However, natural language exhibits a far more pronounced se…

2023

Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models with Iterative Retrieval-Generation Synergy

EMNLP 2023long findings

Retrieval-augmented generation has raise extensive attention as it is promising to address the limitations of large language models including outdated knowledge and hallucinations. However, retrievers struggle to capture relevance, especially for queries with complex information needs. Recent work h…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

In-Context Learning Unlocked for Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

We present Prompt Diffusion, a framework for enabling in-context learning in diffusion-based generative models. Given a pair of task-specific example images, such as depth from/to image and scribble from/to image, and a text guidance, our model automatically understands the underlying task and perfo…

2023

Joint Generator-Ranker Learning for Natural Language Generation

ACL 2023findings

Generate-then-rank is a widely used mechanism for text generation, where a generator produces multiple text candidates and a ranker chooses the best one among the text candidates. However, existing methods usually train the generator and the ranker individually, neglecting the mutual feedback that c…

2023

Synthetic Prompting: Generating Chain-of-Thought Demonstrations for Large Language Models

ICML 2023poster

Large language models can perform various reasoning tasks by using chain-of-thought prompting, which guides them to find answers through step-by-step demonstrations. However, the quality of the prompts depends on the demonstrations given to the models, and creating many of them by hand is costly. We…

Cited by 105SourcePDFScholar
2023

Text Generation with Diffusion Language Models: A Pre-training Approach with Continuous Paragraph Denoise

ICML 2023poster

In this paper, we introduce a novel dIffusion language modEl pre-training framework for text generation, which we call GENIE. GENIE is a large-scale pre-trained diffusion language model that consists of an encoder and a diffusion-based decoder, which can generate text by gradually transforming a ran…

2022

A Good Prompt Is Worth Millions of Parameters: Low-resource Prompt-based Learning for Vision-Language Models

ACL 2022long

Large pre-trained vision-language (VL) models can learn a new task with a handful of examples and generalize to a new task without fine-tuning. However, these VL models are hard to deploy for real-world applications due to their impractically huge sizes and slow inference speed. To solve this limita…

2022

Adversarial Retriever-Ranker for Dense Text Retrieval

ICLR 2022poster

Current dense text retrieval models face two typical challenges. First, it adopts a siamese dual-encoder architecture to encode query and document independently for fast indexing and searching, whereas neglecting the finer-grained term-wise interactions. This results in a sub-optimal recall performa…

2022

CAMERO: Consistency Regularized Ensemble of Perturbed Language Models with Weight Sharing

ACL 2022long

Model ensemble is a popular approach to produce a low-variance and well-generalized model. However, it induces large memory and inference costs, which is often not affordable for real-world deployment. Existing work has resorted to sharing weights among models. However, when increasing the proportio…

2022

CodeRetriever: A Large Scale Contrastive Pre-Training Method for Code Search

EMNLP 2022main

In this paper, we propose the CodeRetriever model, which learns the function-level code semantic representations through large-scale code-text contrastive pre-training. We adopt two contrastive learning schemes in CodeRetriever: unimodal contrastive learning and bimodal contrastive learning. For uni…

2022

Controllable Natural Language Generation with Contrastive Prefixes

ACL 2022findings

To guide the generation of large pretrained language models (LM), previous work has focused on directly fine-tuning the language model or utilizing an attribute discriminator. In this work, we propose a novel lightweight framework for controllable GPT2 generation, which utilizes a set of small attri…

Cited by 100SourcePDFScholar
2022

Finding the Dominant Winning Ticket in Pre-Trained Language Models

ACL 2022findings

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis suggests that for any over-parameterized model, a small subnetwork exists to achieve competitive performance compared to the backbone architecture. In this paper, we study whether there is a winning lottery ticket for pre-trained language models, which allow the practit…

2022

Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with a Unified Knowledge Representation

NAACL 2022long

Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems are challenging to build due to the lack of training data and heterogeneous knowledge sources. Existing systems perform poorly on unseen topics due to limited topics covered in the training data. In addition, it is challenging to generalize to the domains that req…

2022

LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models

ICLR 2022poster

An important paradigm of natural language processing consists of large-scale pre-training on general domain data and adaptation to particular tasks or domains. As we pre-train larger models, full fine-tuning, which retrains all model parameters, becomes less feasible. Using GPT-3 175B as an example…

2022

SimANS: Simple Ambiguous Negatives Sampling for Dense Text Retrieval

EMNLP 2022industry

Sampling proper negatives from a large document pool is vital to effectively train a dense retrieval model. However, existing negative sampling strategies suffer from the uninformative or false negative problem. In this work, we empirically show that according to the measured relevance scores, the n…

2022

Soft-Labeled Contrastive Pre-Training for Function-Level Code Representation

EMNLP 2022finding

Code contrastive pre-training has recently achieved significant progress on code-related tasks. In this paper, we present SCodeR, a Soft-labeled contrastive pre-training framework with two positive sample construction methods to learn functional-level Code Representation. Considering the relevance b…

2021

CoDA: Contrast-enhanced and Diversity-promoting Data Augmentation for Natural Language Understanding

ICLR 2021poster

Data augmentation has been demonstrated as an effective strategy for improving model generalization and data efficiency. However, due to the discrete nature of natural language, designing label-preserving transformations for text data tends to be more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Cited by 98SourcePDFScholar
2021

Generation-Augmented Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering

ACL 2021long

We propose Generation-Augmented Retrieval (GAR) for answering open-domain questions, which augments a query through text generation of heuristically discovered relevant contexts without external resources as supervision. We demonstrate that the generated contexts substantially enrich the semantics o…

2021

Integrated Defense for Resilient Graph Matching

ICML 2021spotlight

A recent study has shown that graph matching models are vulnerable to adversarial manipulation of their input which is intended to cause a mismatching. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of a comprehensive solution for further enhancing the robustness of graph matching against adversarial attacks.…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2021

Poolingformer: Long Document Modeling with Pooling Attention

ICML 2021spotlight

In this paper, we introduce a two-level attention schema, Poolingformer, for long document modeling. Its first level uses a smaller sliding window pattern to aggregate information from neighbors. Its second level employs a larger window to increase receptive fields with pooling attention to reduce b…

2021

UnitedQA: A Hybrid Approach for Open Domain Question Answering

ACL 2021long

To date, most of recent work under the retrieval-reader framework for open-domain QA focuses on either extractive or generative reader exclusively. In this paper, we study a hybrid approach for leveraging the strengths of both models. We apply novel techniques to enhance both extractive and generati…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar
2020

Adversarial Attacks on Deep Graph Matching

NeurIPS 2020poster

Despite achieving remarkable performance, deep graph learning models, such as node classification and network embedding, suffer from harassment caused by small adversarial perturbations. However, the vulnerability analysis of graph matching under adversarial attacks has not been fully investigated y…

Cited by 44SourcePDFScholar
2019

StoryGAN: A Sequential Conditional GAN for Story Visualization

CVPR 2019poster

In this work, we propose a new task called Story Visualization. Given a multi-sentence paragraph, the story is visualized by generating a sequence of images, one for each sentence. In contrast to video generation, story visualization focuses less on the continuity in generated images (frames), but m…

Cited by 280PDFcodeScholar
2018

FusionNet: Fusing via Fully-aware Attention with Application to Machine Comprehension

ICLR 2018poster

This paper introduces a new neural structure called FusionNet, which extends existing attention approaches from three perspectives. First, it puts forward a novel concept of "History of Word" to characterize attention information from the lowest word-level embedding up to the highest semantic-level…

2018

Language-Based Image Editing With Recurrent Attentive Models

CVPR 2018poster

We investigate the problem of Language-Based Image Editing (LBIE). Given a source image and a natural language description, we want to generate a target image by editing the source image based on the description. We propose a generic modeling framework for two sub-tasks of LBIE: language-based image…

2018

M-Walk: Learning to Walk over Graphs using Monte Carlo Tree Search

NeurIPS 2018poster

Learning to walk over a graph towards a target node for a given query and a source node is an important problem in applications such as knowledge base completion (KBC). It can be formulated as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem with a known state transition model. To overcome the challenge of spa…

2015

End-to-end Learning of LDA by Mirror-Descent Back Propagation over a Deep Architecture

NeurIPS 2015poster

We develop a fully discriminative learning approach for supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model using Back Propagation (i.e., BP-sLDA), which maximizes the posterior probability of the prediction variable given the input document. Different from traditional variational learning or Gibbs s…