collaborators

6 papers

cs.AI2026

Quantifying and Optimizing Simplicity via Polynomial Representations

Tianren Zhang, Xiangxin Li, Minghao Xiao +2

Deep networks often exhibit a preference for "simple" solutions, and such a simplicity bias is widely believed to play a key role in generalization. Yet a broadly applicable, quant…

cs.AI2026

DeFacto: Counterfactual Thinking with Images for Enforcing Evidence-Grounded and Faithful Reasoning

Tianrun Xu, Haoda Jing, Ye Li +6

Recent advances in multimodal language models (MLLMs) have made thinking with images a dominant paradigm for multimodal reasoning. However, existing methods still fail to ensure ev…

cs.LG2026

Reconciling In-Context and In-Weight Learning via Dual Representation Space Encoding

Guanyu Chen, Ruichen Wang, Tianren Zhang +1

In-context learning (ICL) is a valuable capability exhibited by Transformers pretrained on diverse sequence tasks. However, previous studies have observed that ICL often conflicts…

cs.LG2025

Exploring the Hidden Reasoning Process of Large Language Models by Misleading Them

Guanyu Chen, Peiyang Wang, Yizhou Jiang +5

Large language models (LLMs) have been able to perform various forms of reasoning tasks in a wide range of scenarios, but are they truly engaging in task abstraction and rule-based…

cs.LG2025

When Do Neural Networks Learn World Models?

Tianren Zhang, Guanyu Chen, Feng Chen

Humans develop world models that capture the underlying generation process of data. Whether neural networks can learn similar world models remains an open problem. In this work, we…

cs.LG2025

Feature contamination: Neural networks learn uncorrelated features and fail to generalize

Tianren Zhang, Chujie Zhao, Guanyu Chen +2

Learning representations that generalize under distribution shifts is critical for building robust machine learning models. However, despite significant efforts in recent years, al…