collaborators

14 papers

cs.AI2026

CausalFlip: A Benchmark for LLM Causal Judgment Beyond Semantic Matching

Yuzhe Wang, Yaochen Zhu, Jundong Li

As large language models (LLMs) witness increasing deployment in complex, high-stakes decision-making scenarios, it becomes imperative to ground their reasoning in causality rather…

cs.CL2026

Implicit Reasoning for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation

Yinhan He, Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar +3

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge. Yet reliably invoking this kn…

cs.IR2026

Mult-DPO: Multinomial Direct Preference Optimization for Recommender Systems

Yaochen Zhu, Harald Steck, James McInerney +4

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a simple and effective alignment strategy for large language models (LLMs) based on pairwise preferences. In recommender systems, however, u…

cs.CL2026

IAPO: Information-Aware Policy Optimization for Token-Efficient Reasoning

Yinhan He, Yaochen Zhu, Mingjia Shi +5

Large language models increasingly rely on long chains of thought to improve accuracy, yet such gains come with substantial inference-time costs. We revisit token-efficient post-tr…

cs.CL2026

Probing to Refine: Reinforcement Distillation of LLMs via Explanatory Inversion

Zhen Tan, Chengshuai Zhao, Song Wang +3

Distilling robust reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, computationally efficient student models remains an unresolved challenge. Despite recent ad…

cs.CV2026

Saliency-Aware Multi-Route Thinking: Revisiting Vision-Language Reasoning

Mingjia Shi, Yinhan He, Yaochen Zhu +1

Vision-language models (VLMs) aim to reason by jointly leveraging visual and textual modalities. While allocating additional inference-time computation has proven effective for lar…