papers

Publications (21)

cs.CL2024

From Symbolic Tasks to Code Generation: Diversification Yields Better Task Performers

Dylan Zhang, Justin Wang, Francois Charton

Instruction tuning -- tuning large language models on instruction-output pairs -- is a promising technique for making models better adapted to the real world. Yet, the key factors…

cs.CL2025

Improving Influence-based Instruction Tuning Data Selection for Balanced Learning of Diverse Capabilities

Qirun Dai, Dylan Zhang, Jiaqi W. Ma +1

Selecting appropriate training data is crucial for effective instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), which aims to (1) elicit strong capabilities, and (2) achieve…

cs.AI2026

CausaLab: A Scalable Environment for Interactive Causal Discovery Toward AI Scientists

Junlin Yang, Dylan Zhang, Xiangchen Song +7

We introduce CausaLab, a scalable environment for evaluating interactive causal discovery by LLM agents. Unlike prior evaluations, CausaLab evaluates both whether an agent can solv…

cs.CL2023

PACE-LM: Prompting and Augmentation for Calibrated Confidence Estimation with GPT-4 in Cloud Incident Root Cause Analysis

Dylan Zhang, Xuchao Zhang, Chetan Bansal +3

Major cloud providers have employed advanced AI-based solutions like large language models to aid humans in identifying the root causes of cloud incidents. Despite the growing prev…

cs.LG2026

Good SFT Optimizes for SFT, Better SFT Prepares for Reinforcement Learning

Dylan Zhang, Yufeng Xu, Haojin Wang +2

Post-training of reasoning LLMs is a holistic process that typically consists of an offline SFT stage followed by an online reinforcement learning (RL) stage. However, SFT is often…

cs.CL2024

: Improving Code LMs with Execution-Guided On-Policy Preference Learning Driven By Synthetic Test Cases

Dylan Zhang, Shizhe Diao, Xueyan Zou +1

Preference learning provides a promising solution to address the limitations of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for code language models, where the model is not explicitly trained to…