VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Yuchen Zhuang
dblp:191/5231
· DBLP profile ↗
28ranked-venue papers
7as first author
26since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0003-4641-894XORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 26 · 7 first-author · 25 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 2 first-author · 2 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Efficient Evolutionary Search Over Chemical Space with Large Language ModelsabstractMolecular discovery, when formulated as an optimization problem, presents significant computational challenges because optimization objectives can be non-differentiable. Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), often used to optimize black-box objectives in molecular discovery, traverse chemical space by performing random mutations and crossovers, leading to a large number of expensive objective evaluations. In this work, we ameliorate this shortcoming by incorporating chemistry-aware Large Language Models (LLMs) into EAs. Namely, we redesign crossover and mutation operations in EAs using LLMs trained on large corpora of chemical information. We perform extensive empirical studies on both commercial and open-source models on multiple tasks involving property optimization, molecular rediscovery, and structure-based drug design, demonstrating that the joint usage of LLMs with EAs yields superior performance over all baseline models across single- and multi-objective settings. We demonstrate that our algorithm improves both the quality of the final solution and convergence speed, thereby reducing the number of required objective evaluations. Haorui Wang, Marta Skreta, Cher Tian Ser, Wenhao Gao 0001, Felix Strieth-Kalthoff, Chenru Duan, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu 0001, Yanqiao Zhu 0001, Yuanqi Du, Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Kirill Neklyudov, Chao Zhang 0014 |
ICLR | 8 |
| 2025 | Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-TrainingabstractYuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025. Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang 0001, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu 0039, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao 0001, Qing Ping, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li 0018, Ruijie Wang 0004, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Chao Zhang 0014 |
NAACL (Long Papers) | 1 |
| 2025 | Matryoshka Pilot: Learning to Drive Black-Box LLMs with LLMsabstractDespite the impressive generative abilities of black-box large language models (LLMs), their inherent opacity hinders further advancements in capabilities such as reasoning, planning, and personalization.
Existing works aim to enhance LLM capabilities via domain-specific adaptation, which require additional training on accessible model parameters, an infeasible option for black-box LLMs.
To address this challenge, we introduce Matryoshka Pilot (M-Pilot), a lightweight white-box LLM controller that guides a large-scale black-box LLM generator by decomposing complex tasks into a series of intermediate outputs.
Specifically, we consider the black-box LLM as an environment, with M-Pilot serving as a policy to provide intermediate guidance through prompts for driving the black-box LLM.
M-Pilot is trained to pivot the outputs of the black-box LLM aligning with preferences during iterative interaction, which enables controllable multi-turn generation and self-improvement in optimizing intermediate guidance.
Empirical evaluations on diverse tasks demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the capabilities of black-box LLMs in complex, long-horizon tasks. Yuchen Zhuang, Rushi Qiang, Hanjun Dai, Chao Zhang 0014, Bo Dai 0001 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2025 | MLE-Dojo: Interactive Environments for Empowering LLM Agents in Machine Learning EngineeringabstractWe introduce MLE-Dojo, a Gym-style framework for systematically reinforcement learning, evaluating, and improving autonomous large language model (LLM) agents in iterative machine learning engineering (MLE) workflows. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily rely on static datasets or single-attempt evaluations, MLE-Dojo provides an interactive environment enabling agents to iteratively experiment, debug, and refine solutions through structured feedback loops. Built upon 200+ real-world Kaggle challenges, MLE-Dojo covers diverse, open-ended MLE tasks carefully curated to reflect realistic engineering scenarios such as data processing, architecture search, hyperparameter tuning, and code debugging. Its fully executable environment supports comprehensive agent training via both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, facilitating iterative experimentation, realistic data sampling, and real-time outcome verification. Extensive evaluations of eight frontier LLMs reveal that while current models achieve meaningful iterative improvements, they still exhibit significant limitations in autonomously generating long-horizon solutions and efficiently resolving complex errors. Furthermore, MLE-Dojo’s flexible and extensible architecture seamlessly integrates diverse data sources, tools, and evaluation protocols, uniquely enabling model-based agent tuning and promoting interoperability, scalability, and reproducibility. We open-source our framework and benchmarks to foster community-driven innovation towards next-generation MLE agents. Rushi Qiang, Yuchen Zhuang, Dingu Sagar V. K, Rongzhi Zhang, Ian Wong, Sherry Yang 0001, Percy Liang, Chao Zhang 0014, Bo Dai 0001 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2025 | AmorLIP: Efficient Language-Image Pretraining via AmortizationabstractContrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated strong zero-shot performance across diverse downstream text-image tasks. Existing CLIP methods typically optimize a contrastive objective using negative samples drawn from each minibatch. To achieve robust representation learning, these methods require extremely large batch sizes and escalate computational demands to hundreds or even thousands of GPUs. Prior approaches to mitigate this issue often compromise downstream performance, prolong training duration, or face scalability challenges with very large datasets. To overcome these limitations, we propose AmorLIP, an efficient CLIP pretraining framework that amortizes expensive computations involved in contrastive learning through lightweight neural networks, which substantially improves training efficiency and performance. Leveraging insights from a spectral factorization of energy-based models, we introduce novel amortization objectives along with practical techniques to improve training stability. Extensive experiments across 38 downstream tasks demonstrate the superior zero-shot classification and retrieval capabilities of AmorLIP, consistently outperforming standard CLIP baselines with substantial relative improvements of up to 12.24%. Yuchen Zhuang, Niao He, Hanjun Dai, Bo Dai 0001 |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2025 | AceSearcher: Bootstrapping Reasoning and Search for LLMs via Reinforced Self-PlayabstractSearch-augmented LLMs often struggle with complex reasoning tasks due to ineffective multi-hop retrieval and limited reasoning ability. We propose AceSearcher, a cooperative self-play framework that trains a single large language model (LLM) to alternate between two roles: a decomposer that breaks down complex queries and a solver that integrates retrieved contexts for answer generation. AceSearcher couples supervised fine-tuning on a diverse mixture of search, reasoning, and decomposition tasks with reinforcement fine-tuning optimized for final answer accuracy, eliminating the need for intermediate annotations. Extensive experiments on three reasoning-intensive tasks across 10 datasets show that AceSearcher outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average exact match improvement of 7.6%. Remarkably, on document-level finance reasoning tasks, AceSearcher-32B matches the performance of the giant DeepSeek-V3 model using less than 5% of iits parameters. Even at smaller scales (1.5B and 8B), AceSearcher often surpasses existing search-augmented LLMs with up to 9× more parameters, highlighting its exceptional efficiency and effectiveness in tackling complex reasoning tasks. Ran Xu 0002, Yuchen Zhuang, Zihan Dong, Yue Yu 0001, Joyce C. Ho, Linjun Zhang, Haoyu Wang 0003, Wenqi Shi 0002, Carl Yang 0001 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2025 | DF2: Distribution-Free Decision-Focused LearningabstractDecision-focused learning (DFL), which differentiates through the KKT conditions, has recently emerged as a powerful approach for predict-then-optimize problems. However, under probabilistic settings, DFL faces three major bottlenecks: model mismatch error, sample average approximation error, and gradient approximation error. Model mismatch error stems from the misalignment between the model’s parameterized predictive distribution and the true probability distribution. Sample average approximation error arises when using finite samples to approximate the expected optimization objective. Gradient approximation error occurs when the objectives are non-convex and KKT conditions cannot be directly applied. In this paper, we present DF$^2$-the first \textit{distribution-free} decision-focused learning method designed to mitigate these three bottlenecks. Rather than depending on a task-specific forecaster that requires precise model assumptions, our method directly learns the expected optimization function during training. To efficiently learn the function in a data-driven manner, we devise an attention-based model architecture inspired by the distribution-based parameterization of the expected objective. We evaluate DF$^2$ on two synthetic problems and three real-world problems, demonstrating the effectiveness of DF$^2$. Our code can be found at: https://github.com/Lingkai-Kong/DF2. Wenhao Mu, Jiaming Cui, Yuchen Zhuang, B. Aditya Prakash, Bo Dai 0001, Chao Zhang 0014 |
UAI | 4 |
| 2025 | Frame Extraction Person Retrieval Framework Based on Improved YOLOv8s and the Stage-Wise Clustering Person Re-IdentificationabstractABSTRACT Person re‐identification (Re‐ID), a crucial research area in smart city security, faces challenges due to person posture changes, object occlusion and other factors, making it difficult for existing methods to accurately retrieving target person in video surveillance. To resolve this problem, we propose a person retrieval framework that integrates YOLOv8s and person Re‐ID. Improved YOLOv8s is employed to extract person categories from the video on a frame‐by‐frame basis, and when combined with the stage‐wise clustering person Re‐ID network (SCPN), it enables collaborative person retrieval across multiple cameras. Notably, a feature precision (FP) module is added in the YOLOv8s network to form FP‐YOLOv8s, and SCPN incorporates innovative enhancements including the stage‐wise learning rate scheduler, centralized clustering loss and adaptive representation joint attention module into the person Re‐ID baseline model. Comprehensive experiments on COCO, Market‐1501 and DukeMTMC‐ReID datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms several other leading methods. Given the scarcity of image‐video person Re‐ID datasets, we also provide an extended image‐video person (EIVP) dataset, which contains 102 videos and 814 bounding boxes of 57 identities captured by 8 cameras. The video reasoning detection score of this framework reaches 78.8% on this dataset, indicating a 3.2% increase compared to conventional models. Jianjun Zhuang, Yuchen Zhuang |
IET Image Process. | 3 |
| 2024 | Two Birds with One Stone: Enhancing Uncertainty Quantification and Interpretability with Graph Functional Neural ProcessabstractGraph neural networks (GNNs) are powerful tools on graph data. However, their predictions are mis-calibrated and lack interpretability, limiting their adoption in critical applications. To address this issue, we propose a new uncertainty-aware and interpretable graph classification model that combines graph functional neural process and graph generative model. The core of our method is to assume a set of latent rationales which can be mapped to a probabilistic embedding space; the predictive distribution of the classifier is conditioned on such rationale embeddings by learning a stochastic correlation matrix. The graph generator serves to decode the graph structure of the rationales from the embedding space for model interpretability. For efficient model training, we adopt an alternating optimization procedure which mimics the well known Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. The proposed method is general and can be applied to any existing GNN architecture. Extensive experiments on five graph classification datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both uncertainty quantification and GNN interpretability. We also conduct case studies to show that the decoded rationale structure can provide meaningful explanations. Yuchen Zhuang, Haorui Wang, Wenhao Mu, Chao Zhang 0014 |
AISTATS | 3 |
| 2024 | HiGen: Hierarchy-Aware Sequence Generation for Hierarchical Text ClassificationabstractHierarchical text classification (HTC) is a complex subtask under multi-label text classification, characterized by a hierarchical label taxonomy and data imbalance. The best-performing models aim to learn a static representation by combining document and hierarchical label information. However, the relevance of document sections can vary based on the hierarchy level, necessitating a dynamic document representation. To address this, we propose HiGen, a text-generation-based framework utilizing language models to encode dynamic text representations. We introduce a level-guided loss function to capture the relationship between text and label name semantics. Our approach incorporates a task-specific pretraining strategy, adapting the language model to in-domain knowledge and significantly enhancing performance for classes with limited examples. Furthermore, we present a new and valuable dataset called ENZYME, designed for HTC, which comprises articles from PubMed with the goal of predicting Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers. Through extensive experiments on the ENZYME dataset and the widely recognized WOS and NYT datasets, our methodology demonstrates superior performance, surpassing existing approaches while efficiently handling data and mitigating class imbalance. We release our code and dataset here: https://github.com/viditjain99/HiGen. Vidit Jain, Mukund Rungta, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu 0001, Mu Gao, Jeffrey Skolnick, Chao Zhang 0014 |
EACL (1) | 3 |
| 2024 | BMRetriever: Tuning Large Language Models as Better Biomedical Text RetrieversabstractDeveloping effective biomedical retrieval models is important for excelling at knowledge-intensive biomedical tasks but still challenging due to the lack of sufficient publicly annotated biomedical data and computational resources. We present BMRetriever, a series of dense retrievers for enhancing biomedical retrieval via unsupervised pre-training on large biomedical corpora, followed by instruction fine-tuning on a combination of labeled datasets and synthetic pairs. Experiments on 5 biomedical tasks across 11 datasets verify BMRetriever's efficacy on various biomedical applications. BMRetriever also exhibits strong parameter efficiency, with the 410M variant outperforming baselines up to 11.7 times larger, and the 2B variant matching the performance of models with over 5B parameters. The training data and model checkpoints are released at https://huggingface.co/BMRetriever to ensure transparency, reproducibility, and application to new domains. Ran Xu 0002, Wenqi Shi 0002, Yue Yu 0001, Yuchen Zhuang, Yanqiao Zhu 0001, May D. Wang, Joyce C. Ho, Chao Zhang 0014, Carl Yang 0001 |
EMNLP | 4 |
| 2024 | MedAdapter: Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Large Language Models Towards Medical ReasoningabstractDespite their improved capabilities in generation and reasoning, adapting large language models (LLMs) to the biomedical domain remains challenging due to their immense size and privacy concerns. In this study, we propose MedAdapter, a unified post-hoc adapter for test-time adaptation of LLMs towards biomedical applications. Instead of fine-tuning the entire LLM, MedAdapter effectively adapts the original model by fine-tuning only a small BERT-sized adapter to rank candidate solutions generated by LLMs. Experiments on four biomedical tasks across eight datasets demonstrate that MedAdapter effectively adapts both white-box and black-box LLMs in biomedical reasoning, achieving average performance improvements of 18.24% and 10.96%, respectively, without requiring extensive computational resources or sharing data with third parties. MedAdapter also yields enhanced performance when combined with train-time adaptation, highlighting a flexible and complementary solution to existing adaptation methods. Faced with the challenges of balancing model performance, computational resources, and data privacy, MedAdapter provides an efficient, privacy-preserving, cost-effective, and transparent solution for adapting LLMs to the biomedical domain. Wenqi Shi 0002, Ran Xu 0002, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu 0001, Carl Yang 0001, May D. Wang |
EMNLP | 3 |
| 2024 | EHRAgent: Code Empowers Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Tabular Reasoning on Electronic Health RecordsabstractClinicians often rely on data engineers to retrieve complex patient information from electronic health record (EHR) systems, a process that is both inefficient and time-consuming. We propose EHRAgent, a large language model (LLM) agent empowered with accumulative domain knowledge and robust coding capability. EHRAgent enables autonomous code generation and execution to facilitate clinicians in directly interacting with EHRs using natural language. Specifically, we formulate a multi-tabular reasoning task based on EHRs as a tool-use planning process, efficiently decomposing a complex task into a sequence of manageable actions with external toolsets. We first inject relevant medical information to enable EHRAgent to effectively reason about the given query, identifying and extracting the required records from the appropriate tables. By integrating interactive coding and execution feedback, EHRAgent then effectively learns from error messages and iteratively improves its originally generated code. Experiments on three real-world EHR datasets show that EHRAgent outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 29.6% in success rate, verifying its strong capacity to tackle complex clinical tasks with minimal demonstrations. Wenqi Shi 0002, Ran Xu 0002, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu 0001, Jieyu Zhang 0001, Yuanda Zhu, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang 0001, May D. Wang |
EMNLP | 3 |
| 2024 | ToolChain*: Efficient Action Space Navigation in Large Language Models with A* SearchabstractLarge language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful decision-making and planning capabilities in solving complicated real-world problems. LLM-based autonomous agents can interact with diverse tools (e.g., functional APIs) and generate solution plans that execute a series of API function calls in a step-by-step manner. The multitude of candidate API function calls significantly expands the action space, amplifying the critical need for efficient action space navigation. However, existing methods either struggle with unidirectional exploration in expansive action spaces, trapped into a locally optimal solution, or suffer from exhaustively traversing all potential actions, causing inefficient navigation. To address these issues, we propose ToolChain*, an efficient tree search-based planning algorithm for LLM-based agents. It formulates the entire action space as a decision tree, where each node represents a possible API function call involved in a solution plan. By incorporating the A$^*$ search algorithm with task-specific cost function design, it efficiently prunes high-cost branches that may involve incorrect actions, identifying the most low-cost valid path as the solution. Extensive experiments on multiple tool-use and reasoning tasks demonstrate that ToolChain* efficiently balances exploration and exploitation within an expansive action space. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on planning and reasoning tasks by 3.1% and 3.5% on average while requiring 7.35x and 2.31x less time, respectively. Yuchen Zhuang, Xiang Chen 0010, Tong Yu 0001, Saayan Mitra, Victor S. Bursztyn, Ryan Rossi, Somdeb Sarkhel, Chao Zhang 0014 |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2024 | BBox-Adapter: Lightweight Adapting for Black-Box Large Language ModelsabstractAdapting state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and Gemini for specific tasks is challenging. Due to the opacity in their parameters, embeddings, and even output probabilities, existing fine-tuning adaptation methods are inapplicable. Consequently, adapting these black-box LLMs is only possible through their API services, raising concerns about transparency, privacy, and cost. To address these challenges, we introduce BBox-Adapter, a novel lightweight adapter for black-box LLMs. BBox-Adapter distinguishes target and source domain data by treating target data as positive and source data as negative. It employs a ranking-based Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) loss to promote the likelihood of target domain data while penalizing that of the source domain. Furthermore, it features an online adaptation mechanism, which incorporates real-time positive data sampling from ground-truth, human, or AI feedback, coupled with negative data from previous adaptations. Extensive experiments demonstrate BBox-Adapter’s effectiveness and cost efficiency. It improves model performance by up to 6.77% across diverse tasks and domains, while reducing training and inference costs by 31.30x and 1.84x, respectively. Yuchen Zhuang, Wei Wei 0019, Chao Zhang 0014, Bo Dai 0001 |
ICML | 2 |
| 2024 | POLYIE: A Dataset of Information Extraction from Polymer Material Scientific LiteratureabstractJerry Cheung, Yuchen Zhuang, Yinghao Li, Pranav Shetty, Wantian Zhao, Sanjeev Grampurohit, Rampi Ramprasad, Chao Zhang. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024. Jerry Junyang Cheung, Yuchen Zhuang, Pranav Shetty, Wantian Zhao, Sanjeev Grampurohit, Rampi Ramprasad, Chao Zhang 0014 |
NAACL-HLT | 2 |
| 2024 | Aligning Large Language Models with Representation Editing: A Control PerspectiveabstractAligning large language models (LLMs) with human objectives is crucial for real-world applications. However, fine-tuning LLMs for alignment often suffers from unstable training and requires substantial computing resources. Test-time alignment techniques, such as prompting and guided decoding, do not modify the underlying model, and their performance remains dependent on the original model's capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose aligning LLMs through representation editing. The core of our method is to view a pre-trained autoregressive LLM as a discrete-time stochastic dynamical system. To achieve alignment for specific objectives, we introduce external control signals into the state space of this language dynamical system. We train a value function directly on the hidden states according to the Bellman equation, enabling gradient-based optimization to obtain the optimal control signals at test time. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing test-time alignment techniques while requiring significantly fewer resources compared to fine-tuning methods. Our code is available at [https://github.com/Lingkai-Kong/RE-Control](https://github.com/Lingkai-Kong/RE-Control). Haorui Wang, Wenhao Mu, Yuanqi Du, Yuchen Zhuang, Rongzhi Zhang, Kai Wang 0036, Chao Zhang 0014 |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2024 | HYDRA: Model Factorization Framework for Black-Box LLM PersonalizationabstractPersonalization has emerged as a critical research area in modern intelligent systems, focusing on mining users' behavioral history and adapting to their preferences for delivering tailored experiences. Despite the remarkable few-shot capabilities exhibited by black-box large language models (LLMs), the inherent opacity of their model parameters presents significant challenges in aligning the generated output with individual expectations. Existing solutions have primarily focused on prompt design to incorporate user-specific profiles and behaviors; however, such approaches often struggle to generalize effectively due to their inability to capture shared knowledge among all users. To address these challenges, we propose HYDRA, a model factorization framework that captures both user-specific behavior patterns from historical data and shared general knowledge among all users to deliver personalized generation. In order to capture user-specific behavior patterns, we first train a reranker to prioritize the most useful information from top-retrieved relevant historical records.
By combining the prioritized history with the corresponding query, we train an adapter to align the output with individual user-specific preferences, eliminating the reliance on access to inherent model parameters of black-box LLMs. Both the reranker and the adapter can be decomposed into a base model with multiple user-specific heads, resembling a hydra. The base model maintains shared knowledge across users, while the multiple personal heads capture user-specific preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that \method outperforms existing state-of-the-art prompt-based methods by an average relative improvement of 9.01% across five diverse personalization tasks in the LaMP benchmark. Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu 0001, Rushi Qiang, Qifan Wang 0001, Chao Zhang 0014, Bo Dai 0001 |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2023 | G-STO: Sequential Main Shopping Intention Detection via Graph-Regularized Stochastic TransformerabstractSequential recommendation requires understanding the dynamic patterns of users' behaviors, contexts, and preferences from their historical interactions. While most research emphasizes item-level user-item interactions, they often overlook underlying shopping intentions, such as preferences for ballpoint pens or miniatures. Identifying these latent intentions is vital for enhancing shopping experiences on platforms like Amazon. Despite its significance, the area of main shopping intention detection remains under-investigated in the academic literature. To fill this gap, we introduce a graph-regularized stochastic Transformer approach, G-STO. It considers intentions as product sets and user preferences as intention composites, both modeled as stochastic Gaussian embeddings in latent space. We also employ a global intention relational graph as prior knowledge for regularization, ensuring related intentions are distributionally close. These regularized embeddings are then input into Transformer-based models to capture sequential intention transitions. On testing our model with three real-world datasets, it outperformed the baselines by 18.08% in Hit@1, 7.01% in Hit@10, and 6.11% in NDCG@10. Yuchen Zhuang, Chaosheng Dong, Jin Li 0003, Chao Zhang 0014 |
CIKM | 1 |
| 2023 | Autoregressive Diffusion Model for Graph GenerationabstractDiffusion-based graph generative models have recently obtained promising results for graph generation. However, existing diffusion-based graph generative models are mostly one-shot generative models that apply Gaussian diffusion in the dequantized adjacency matrix space. Such a strategy can suffer from difficulty in model training, slow sampling speed, and incapability of incorporating constraints. We propose an *autoregressive diffusion* model for graph generation. Unlike existing methods, we define a node-absorbing diffusion process that operates directly in the discrete graph space. For forward diffusion, we design a *diffusion ordering network*, which learns a data-dependent node absorbing ordering from graph topology. For reverse generation, we design a *denoising network* that uses the reverse node ordering to efficiently reconstruct the graph by predicting the node type of the new node and its edges with previously denoised nodes at a time. Based on the permutation invariance of graph, we show that the two networks can be jointly trained by optimizing a simple lower bound of data likelihood. Our experiments on six diverse generic graph datasets and two molecule datasets show that our model achieves better or comparable generation performance with previous state-of-the-art, and meanwhile enjoys fast generation speed. Jiaming Cui, Yuchen Zhuang, B. Aditya Prakash, Chao Zhang 0014 |
ICML | 4 |
| 2023 | DyGen: Learning from Noisy Labels via Dynamics-Enhanced Generative ModelingabstractLearning from noisy labels is a challenge that arises in many real-world applications where training data can contain incorrect or corrupted labels. When fine-tuning language models with noisy labels, models can easily overfit the label noise, leading to decreased performance. Most existing methods for learning from noisy labels use static input features for denoising, but these methods are limited by the information they can provide on true label distributions and can result in biased or incorrect predictions. In this work, we propose the Dynamics-Enhanced Generative Model (DyGen), which uses dynamic patterns in the embedding space during the fine-tuning process of language models to improve noisy label predictions. DyGen uses the variational auto-encoding framework to infer the posterior distributions of true labels from noisy labels and training dynamics. Additionally, a co-regularization mechanism is used to minimize the impact of potentially noisy labels and priors. DyGen demonstrates an average accuracy improvement of 3.10% on two synthetic noise datasets and 1.48% on three real-world noise datasets compared to the previous state-of-the-art. Extensive experiments and analyses show the effectiveness of each component in DyGen. Our code is available for reproducibility on GitHub. Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu 0001, Xiang Chen 0010, Chao Zhang 0014 |
KDD | 1 |
| 2023 | AdaPlanner: Adaptive Planning from Feedback with Language ModelsabstractLarge language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated the potential in acting as autonomous agents for sequential decision-making tasks. However, most existing methods either take actions greedily without planning or rely on static plans that are not adaptable to environmental feedback. Consequently, the sequential decision-making performance of LLM agents degenerates with problem complexity and plan horizons increase. We propose a closed-loop approach, AdaPlanner, which allows the LLM agent to refine its self-generated plan adaptively in response to environmental feedback. In AdaPlanner, the LLM agent adaptively refines its plan from feedback with both in-plan and out-of-plan refinement strategies. To mitigate hallucination, we develop a code-style LLM prompt structure that facilitates plan generation across a variety of tasks, environments, and agent capabilities. Furthermore, we propose a skill discovery mechanism that leverages successful plans as few-shot exemplars, enabling the agent to plan and refine with fewer task demonstrations. Our experiments in the ALFWorld and MiniWoB++ environments demonstrate that AdaPlanner outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 3.73% and 4.11% while utilizing 2x and 600x fewer samples, respectively. The implementation of AdaPlanner is available at https://github.com/haotiansun14/AdaPlanner. Yuchen Zhuang, Bo Dai 0001, Chao Zhang 0014 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2023 | Large Language Model as Attributed Training Data Generator: A Tale of Diversity and BiasabstractLarge language models (LLMs) have been recently leveraged as training data generators for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. While previous research has explored different approaches to training models using generated data, they generally rely on simple class-conditional prompts, which may limit the diversity of the generated data and inherit systematic biases of LLM. Thus, we investigate training data generation with diversely attributed prompts (e.g., specifying attributes like length and style), which have the potential to yield diverse and attributed generated data. Our investigation focuses on datasets with high cardinality and diverse domains, wherein we demonstrate that attributed prompts outperform simple class-conditional prompts in terms of the resulting model's performance. Additionally, we present a comprehensive empirical study on data generation encompassing vital aspects like bias, diversity, and efficiency, and highlight three key observations: firstly, synthetic datasets generated by simple prompts exhibit significant biases, such as regional bias; secondly, attribute diversity plays a pivotal role in enhancing model performance; lastly, attributed prompts achieve the performance of simple class-conditional prompts while utilizing only 5\% of the querying cost of ChatGPT associated with the latter. The data and code are available on {\url{https://github.com/yueyu1030/AttrPrompt}}. Yue Yu 0001, Yuchen Zhuang, Jieyu Zhang 0001, Yu Meng 0001, Alexander Ratner, Ranjay Krishna, Chao Zhang 0014 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2023 | ToolQA: A Dataset for LLM Question Answering with External ToolsabstractLarge Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various NLP tasks, but they still suffer from challenges such as hallucination and weak numerical reasoning. To overcome these challenges, external tools can be used to enhance LLMs' question-answering abilities. However, current evaluation methods do not distinguish between questions that can be answered using LLMs' internal knowledge and those that require external information through tool use. To address this issue, we introduce a new dataset called ToolQA, which is designed to faithfully evaluate LLMs' ability to use external tools for question answering. Our development of ToolQA involved a scalable, automated process for dataset curation, along with 13 specialized tools designed for interaction with external knowledge in order to answer questions. Importantly, we strive to minimize the overlap between our benchmark data and LLMs' pre-training data, enabling a more precise evaluation of LLMs' tool-use reasoning abilities. We conducted an in-depth diagnosis of existing tool-use LLMs to highlight their strengths, weaknesses, and potential improvements. Our findings set a new benchmark for evaluating LLMs and suggest new directions for future advancements. Our data and code are freely available for the broader scientific community on GitHub. Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu 0001, Chao Zhang 0014 |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2022 | ReSel: N-ary Relation Extraction from Scientific Text and Tables by Learning to Retrieve and SelectabstractWe study the problem of extracting N -ary relation tuples from scientific articles.This task is challenging because the target knowledge tuples can reside in multiple parts and modalities of the document.Our proposed method RESEL decomposes this task into a two-stage procedure that first retrieves the most relevant paragraph/table and then selects the target entity from the retrieved component.For the highlevel retrieval stage, RESEL designs a simple and effective feature set, which captures multilevel lexical and semantic similarities between the query and components.For the low-level selection stage, RESEL designs a cross-modal entity correlation graph along with a multi-view architecture, which models both semantic and document-structural relations between entities.Our experiments on three scientific information extraction datasets show that RESEL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly. 1 Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu 0001, Yingjun Mou, Xiang Chen 0010, Chao Zhang 0014 |
EMNLP | 1 |
| 2022 | End-to-end Stochastic Optimization with Energy-based ModelabstractDecision-focused learning (DFL) was recently proposed for stochastic optimization problems that involve unknown parameters. By integrating predictive modeling with an implicitly differentiable optimization layer, DFL has shown superior performance to the standard two-stage predict-then-optimize pipeline. However, most existing DFL methods are only applicable to convex problems or a subset of nonconvex problems that can be easily relaxed to convex ones. Further, they can be inefficient in training due to the requirement of solving and differentiating through the optimization problem in every training iteration. We propose SO-EBM, a general and efficient DFL method for stochastic optimization using energy-based models. Instead of relying on KKT conditions to induce an implicit optimization layer, SO-EBM explicitly parameterizes the original optimization problem using a differentiable optimization layer based on energy functions. To better approximate the optimization landscape, we propose a coupled training objective that uses a maximum likelihood loss to capture the optimum location and a distribution-based regularizer to capture the overall energy landscape. Finally, we propose an efficient training procedure for SO-EBM with a self-normalized importance sampler based on a Gaussian mixture proposal. We evaluate SO-EBM in three applications: power scheduling, COVID-19 resource allocation, and non-convex adversarial security game, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of SO-EBM. Jiaming Cui, Yuchen Zhuang, B. Aditya Prakash, Chao Zhang 0014 |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2020 | Calibrated Language Model Fine-Tuning for In- and Out-of-Distribution DataabstractFine-tuned pre-trained language models can suffer from severe miscalibration for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) data due to over-parameterization.To mitigate this issue, we propose a regularized fine-tuning method.Our method introduces two types of regularization for better calibration: (1) On-manifold regularization, which generates pseudo on-manifold samples through interpolation within the data manifold.Augmented training with these pseudo samples imposes a smoothness regularization to improve in-distribution calibration.(2) Off-manifold regularization, which encourages the model to output uniform distributions for pseudo off-manifold samples to address the over-confidence issue for OOD data.Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing calibration methods for text classification in terms of expectation calibration error, misclassification detection, and OOD detection on six datasets.Our code can be found at https://github.com/Lingkai-Kong/ Calibrated-BERT-Fine-Tuning. Haoming Jiang, Yuchen Zhuang, Jie Lyu 0005, Tuo Zhao, Chao Zhang 0014 |
EMNLP (1) | 3 |
| 2019 | DNA computing for combinational logic
Chuan Zhang 0001, Lulu Ge, Yuchen Zhuang, Ziyuan Shen, Zaichen Zhang, Xiaohu You 0001 |
Sci. China Inf. Sci. | 3 |