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zhifeng Chen

29 accepted papers

2026

Adaptive Thinking: Large Language Models Know When to Think in Latent Space

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) test-time computing have introduced the capability to perform intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning (thinking) before generating answers. While increasing the thinking budget yields smooth performance improvements at inference time, the relatio…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Hilbert: Recursively Building Formal Proofs with Informal Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive mathematical reasoning abilities, but their solutions frequently contain errors that cannot be automatically verified. Formal theorem proving systems such as Lean 4 offer automated verification with complete accuracy, motivating recent efforts to b…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MANZANO: A Simple and Scalable Unified Multimodal Model with a Hybrid Vision Tokenizer

ICLR 2026poster

Unified multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) that can both understand and generate visual content hold immense potential. However, existing open-source models often suffer from a performance trade-off between these capabilities. We present Manzano, a simple and scalable unified framework that sub…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SO-Bench: A Structural Output Evaluation of Multimodal LLM

CVPR 2026

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world, agentic settings where outputs must not only be correct, but also conform to pre-defined data schemas. Despite recent progress in structured generation in textual domain, there is still no benchmark that systematically

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Controlled Decoding from Language Models

ICML 2024poster

KL-regularized reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular alignment framework to control the language model responses towards high reward outcomes. We pose a tokenwise RL objective and propose a modular solver for it, called *controlled decoding (CD)*. CD exerts control through a separate *prefix scor…

Cited by 86SourcePDFScholar
2024

Stylus: Automatic Adapter Selection for Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024oral

Beyond scaling base models with more data or parameters, fine-tuned adapters provide an alternative way to generate high fidelity, custom images at reduced costs. As such, adapters have been widely adopted by open-source communities, accumulating a database of over 100K adapters—most of which are hi…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Brainformers: Trading Simplicity for Efficiency

ICML 2023poster

Transformers are central to recent successes in natural language processing and computer vision. Transformers have a mostly uniform backbone where layers alternate between feed-forward and self-attention in order to build a deep network. Here we investigate this design choice and find that more comp…

Cited by 37SourcePDFScholar
2023

Lifelong Language Pretraining with Distribution-Specialized Experts

ICML 2023poster

Pretraining on a large-scale corpus has become a standard method to build general language models (LMs). Adapting a model to new data distributions targeting different downstream tasks poses significant challenges. Naive fine-tuning may incur catastrophic forgetting when the over-parameterized LMs o…

Cited by 59SourcePDFScholar
2023

Massively Multilingual Shallow Fusion with Large Language Models

ICASSP 2023accepted

While large language models (LLM) have made impressive progress in natural language processing, it remains unclear how to utilize them in improving automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this work, we propose to train a single multilingual language model (LM) for shallow fusion in multiple languages…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts

ICML 2022spotlight

Scaling language models with more data, compute and parameters has driven significant progress in natural language processing. For example, thanks to scaling, GPT-3 was able to achieve strong results on in-context learning tasks. However, training these large dense models requires significant amount…

Cited by 765SourcePDFScholar
2022

Mixture-of-Experts with Expert Choice Routing

NeurIPS 2022accept

Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models allow the number of parameters to greatly increase while keeping the amount of computation for a given token or a given sample unchanged. However, a poor expert routing strategy (e.g. one resulting in load imbalance) can cause certain experts to be…

Cited by 336SourcePDFScholar
2022

Scalable Scene Flow From Point Clouds in the Real World

RA-L 2022

Autonomous vehicles operate in highly dynamic environments necessitating an accurate assessment of which aspects of a scene are moving and where they are moving to. A popular approach to 3D motion estimation, termed scene flow, is to employ 3D point cloud data from consecutive LiDAR scans, although

Cited by 62SourceScholar
2022

Scene Transformer: A unified architecture for predicting future trajectories of multiple agents

ICLR 2022poster

Predicting the motion of multiple agents is necessary for planning in dynamic environments. This task is challenging for autonomous driving since agents (e.g., vehicles and pedestrians) and their associated behaviors may be diverse and influence one another. Most prior work have focused on predictin…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2021

GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding

ICLR 2021poster

Neural network scaling has been critical for improving the model quality in many real-world machine learning applications with vast amounts of training data and compute. Although this trend of scaling is affirmed to be a sure-fire approach for better model quality, there are challenges on the path s…

Cited by 1282SourcePDFScholar
2020

A Streaming On-Device End-To-End Model Surpassing Server-Side Conventional Model Quality and Latency

ICASSP 2020accepted

Thus far, end-to-end (E2E) models have not been shown to outperform state-of-the-art conventional models with respect to both quality, i.e., word error rate (WER), and latency, i.e., the time the hypothesis is finalized after the user stops speaking. In this paper, we develop a first-pass Recurrent…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset

CVPR 2020poster

The research community has increasing interest in autonomous driving research, despite the resource intensity of obtaining representative real world data. Existing self-driving datasets are limited in the scale and variation of the environments they capture, even though generalization within and bet…

Cited by 3735PDFScholar
2020

Streaming Object Detection for 3-D Point Clouds

ECCV 2020poster

Autonomous vehicles operate in a dynamic environment, where the speed with which a vehicle can perceive and react impacts the safety and efficacy of the system. LiDAR provides a central and prominent sensory modality that informs many existing perceptual systems including object detection, segmentat…

2019

GPipe: Efficient Training of Giant Neural Networks using Pipeline Parallelism

NeurIPS 2019poster

Scaling up deep neural network capacity has been known as an effective approach to improving model quality for several different machine learning tasks. In many cases, increasing model capacity beyond the memory limit of a single accelerator has required developing special algorithms or infrastructu…

2019

Hierarchical Generative Modeling for Controllable Speech Synthesis

ICLR 2019poster

This paper proposes a neural end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) model which can control latent attributes in the generated speech that are rarely annotated in the training data, such as speaking style, accent, background noise, and recording conditions. The model is formulated as a conditional generati…

Cited by 297SourcePDFScholar
2018

An Analysis of Incorporating an External Language Model into a Sequence-to-Sequence Model

ICASSP 2018accepted

Attention-based sequence-to-sequence models for automatic speech recognition jointly train an acoustic model, language model, and alignment mechanism. Thus, the language model component is only trained on transcribed audio-text pairs. This leads to the use of shallow fusion with an external language…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

Improving the Performance of Online Neural Transducer Models

ICASSP 2018accepted

Having a sequence-to-sequence model which can operate in an online fashion is important for streaming applications such as Voice Search. Neural transducer is a streaming sequence-to-sequence model, but has shown a significant degradation in performance compared to non-streaming models such as Listen…

Cited by 50SourceScholar
2018

Minimum Word Error Rate Training for Attention-Based Sequence-to-Sequence Models

ICASSP 2018accepted

Sequence-to-sequence models, such as attention-based models in automatic speech recognition (ASR), are typically trained to optimize the cross-entropy criterion which corresponds to improving the log-likelihood of the data. However, system performance is usually measured in terms of word error rate…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

Multi-Dialect Speech Recognition with a Single Sequence-to-Sequence Model

ICASSP 2018accepted

Sequence-to-sequence models provide a simple and elegant solution for building speech recognition systems by folding separate components of a typical system, namely acoustic (AM), pronunciation (PM) and language (LM) models into a single neural network. In this work, we look at one such sequence-to-…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning Wavenet on MEL Spectrogram Predictions

ICASSP 2018accepted

This paper describes Tacotron 2, a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text. The system is composed of a recurrent sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network that maps character embeddings to mel-scale spectrograms, followed by a modified WaveNet model acting as a voc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

No Need for a Lexicon? Evaluating the Value of the Pronunciation Lexica in End-to-End Models

ICASSP 2018accepted

For decades, context-dependent phonemes have been the dominant sub-word unit for conventional acoustic modeling systems. This status quo has begun to be challenged recently by end-to-end models which seek to combine acoustic, pronunciation, and language model components into a single neural network.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

State-of-the-Art Speech Recognition with Sequence-to-Sequence Models

ICASSP 2018accepted

Attention-based encoder-decoder architectures such as Listen, Attend, and Spell (LAS), subsume the acoustic, pronunciation and language model components of a traditional automatic speech recognition (ASR) system into a single neural network. In previous work, we have shown that such architectures ar…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

Transfer Learning from Speaker Verification to Multispeaker Text-To-Speech Synthesis

NeurIPS 2018poster

We describe a neural network-based system for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis that is able to generate speech audio in the voice of many different speakers, including those unseen during training. Our system consists of three independently trained components: (1) a speaker encoder network, trained on…

Cited by 1086SourcePDFScholar
2016

Reward Augmented Maximum Likelihood for Neural Structured Prediction

NeurIPS 2016poster

A key problem in structured output prediction is enabling direct optimization of the task reward function that matters for test evaluation. This paper presents a simple and computationally efficient method that incorporates task reward into maximum likelihood training. We establish a connection betw…

Cited by 263SourcePDFScholar