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Yanbo Wang

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18 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Adaptive Distraction: Probing LLM Contextual Robustness with Automated Tree Search

Yanbo Wang
Zixiang Xu
Yue Huang
Gao Chujie
Siyuan Wu
Jiayi Ye
Pin-Yu Chen
Xiuying Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to maintain their original performance when faced with semantically coherent but task-irrelevant contextual information. Although prior studies have explored this issue using fixed-template or retrieval-based distractions, such static methods show limited effectiveness against contemporary models. To address this problem, we propose a dynamic distraction generation framework based on tree search, where the generation process is guided by model behavior. Without modifying the original question or answer, the method efficiently produces challenging adaptive distractions across multiple datasets, enabling systematic stress testing of LLMs’ contextual robustness. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that the generated distractions lead to an average performance drop of over 45\% for mainstream models. Further comparisons of mitigation strategies show that prompt-based optimization methods yield limited gains, whereas post-training approaches (e. g. , DPO) significantly enhance the model's contextual robustness. The results indicate that these issues do not stem from knowledge deficits in LLMs, but from a fundamental inability to maintain consistent reasoning under contextual distraction, posing a major challenge to the reliability of LLMs in real-world applications.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

AdaReasoner: Adaptive Reasoning Enables More Flexible Thinking

Xiangqi Wang
Yue Huang
Yanbo Wang
Xiaonan Luo
Kehan Guo
Yujun Zhou
Xiangliang Zhang

LLMs often need effective configurations, like temperature and reasoning steps, to handle tasks requiring sophisticated reasoning and problem-solving, ranging from joke generation to mathematical reasoning. Existing prompting approaches usually adopt general-purpose, fixed configurations that work “well enough” across tasks but seldom achieve task-specific optimality. To address this gap, we introduce AdaReasoner, an LLM-agnostic plugin designed for any LLM to automate adaptive reasoning configurations for tasks requiring different types of thinking. AdaReasoner is trained using a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, combining a factorized action space with a targeted exploration strategy, along with a pretrained reward model to optimize the policy model for reasoning configurations with only a few-shot guide. AdaReasoner is backed by theoretical guarantees and experiments of fast convergence and a sublinear policy gap. Across six different LLMs and a variety of reasoning tasks, it consistently outperforms standard baselines, preserves out-of-distribution robustness, and yield gains on knowledge-intensive tasks through tailored prompts.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

ChemOrch: Empowering LLMs with Chemical Intelligence via Groundbreaking Synthetic Instructions

Yue Huang
Zhengzhe Jiang
Xiaonan Luo
Kehan Guo
Haomin Zhuang
Yujun Zhou
Zhengqing Yuan
Xiaoqi Sun

Empowering large language models (LLMs) with chemical intelligence remains a challenge due to the scarcity of high-quality, domain-specific instruction-response datasets and the misalignment of existing synthetic data generation pipelines with the inherently hierarchical and rule-governed structure of chemical information. To address this, we propose ChemOrch, a framework that synthesizes chemically grounded instruction–response pairs through a two-stage process: task-controlled instruction generation and tool-aware response construction. ChemOrch enables controllable diversity and levels of difficulty for the generated tasks and ensures response precision through tool planning & distillation, and tool-based self-repair mechanisms. The effectiveness of ChemOrch is evaluated based on: 1) the \textbf{high quality} of generated instruction data, demonstrating superior diversity and strong alignment with chemical constraints; 2) the \textbf{dynamic generation of evaluation tasks} that more effectively reveal LLM weaknesses in chemistry; and 3) the significant \textbf{improvement of LLM chemistry capabilities} when the generated instruction data are used for fine-tuning. Our work thus represents a critical step toward scalable and verifiable chemical intelligence in LLMs. The code is available at \url{https: //anonymous. 4open. science/r/ChemOrch-854A}.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Compositional Scene Understanding through Inverse Generative Modeling

Yanbo Wang
Justin Dauwels
Yilun Du

Generative models have demonstrated remarkable abilities in generating high-fidelity visual content. In this work, we explore how generative models can further be used not only to synthesize visual content but also to understand the properties of a scene given a natural image. We formulate scene understanding as an inverse generative modeling problem, where we seek to find conditional parameters of a visual generative model to best fit a given natural image. To enable this procedure to infer scene structure from images substantially different than those seen during training, we further propose to build this visual generative model compositionally from smaller models over pieces of a scene. We illustrate how this procedure enables us to infer the set of objects in a scene, enabling robust generalization to new test scenes with an increased number of objects of new shapes. We further illustrate how this enables us to infer global scene factors, likewise enabling robust generalization to new scenes. Finally, we illustrate how this approach can be directly applied to existing pretrained text-to-image generative models for zero-shot multi-object perception. Code and visualizations are at https: //energy-based-model. github. io/compositional-inference.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

DyFlow: Dynamic Workflow Framework for Agentic Reasoning

Yanbo Wang
Zixiang Xu
Yue Huang
Xiangqi Wang
Zirui Song
Lang Gao
Chenxi Wang
Robert Tang

Agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in complex reasoning tasks, but building efficient and generalizable workflows remains a major challenge. Most existing approaches rely on manually designed processes, which limits their adaptability across different tasks. While a few methods attempt automated workflow generation, they are often tied to specific datasets or query types and make limited use of intermediate feedback, reducing system robustness and reasoning depth. Moreover, their operations are typically predefined and inflexible. To address these limitations, we propose DyFlow, a dynamic workflow generation framework that adaptively constructs and adjusts reasoning procedures based on task requirements and real-time intermediate feedback, thereby enhancing cross-task generalization. DyFlow consists of two core components: a designer and an executor. The designer decomposes complex problems into a sequence of sub-goals defined by high-level objectives and dynamically plans the next steps based on intermediate outputs and feedback. These plans are then carried out by the executor, which executes each operation using dynamic operators with context-aware parameterization, enabling flexible and semantically grounded reasoning. We systematically evaluate DyFlow across diverse domains, including social reasoning, biomedical tasks, mathematical problem solving, and code generation. Results demonstrate that DyFlow significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving substantial Pass@k improvements and exhibiting robust generalization across diverse domains.

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ICRA Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Fine-Grained Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Fined-Grained Prompts: Task, Dataset and Benchmark

Ying Liu
Yijing Hua
Haojiang Chai
Yanbo Wang
TengQi Ye

Open-vocabulary detectors are proposed to locate and recognize objects in novel classes. However, variations in vision-aware language vocabulary data used for open-vocabulary learning can lead to unfair and unreliable evaluations. Recent evaluation methods have attempted to address this issue by incorporating object properties or adding locations and characteristics to the captions. Nevertheless, since these properties and locations depend on the specific details of the images instead of classes, detectors can not make accurate predictions without precise descriptions provided through human annotation. This paper introduces 3F-OVD, a novel task that extends supervised fine-grained object detection to the open-vocabulary setting. Our task is intuitive and challenging, requiring a deep understanding of Fine-grained captions and careful attention to Fine-grained details in images in order to accurately detect Fine-grained objects. Additionally, due to the scarcity of qualified fine-grained object detection datasets, we have created a new dataset, NEU-171K, tailored for both supervised and open-vocabulary settings. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detectors on our dataset for both settings. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective post-processing technique. Our data, annotations and codes are available at https://github.com/tengerye/3FOVD.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Griffin: Towards a Graph-Centric Relational Database Foundation Model

Yanbo Wang
Xiyuan Wang
Quan Gan
Minjie Wang
Qibin Yang
David P. Wipf
Muhan Zhang

We introduce Griffin, the first foundation model attemptation designed specifically for Relational Databases (RDBs). Unlike previous smaller models focused on single RDB tasks, Griffin unifies the data encoder and task decoder to handle diverse tasks. Additionally, we enhance the architecture by incorporating a cross-attention module and a novel aggregator. Griffin utilizes pretraining on both single-table and RDB datasets, employing advanced encoders for categorical, numerical, and metadata features, along with innovative components such as cross-attention modules and enhanced message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) to capture the complexities of relational data. Evaluated on large-scale, heterogeneous, and temporal graphs extracted from RDBs across various domains (spanning over 150 million nodes), Griffin demonstrates superior or comparable performance to individually trained models, excels in low-data scenarios, and shows strong transferability with similarity and diversity in pretraining across new datasets and tasks, highlighting its potential as a universally applicable foundation model for RDBs. Code available at https: //github. com/yanxwb/Griffin.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

4DBInfer: A 4D Benchmarking Toolbox for Graph-Centric Predictive Modeling on RDBs

Minjie Wang
Quan Gan
David Wipf
Zhenkun Cai
Ning Li
Jianheng Tang
Yanlin Zhang
Zizhao Zhang

Given a relational database (RDB), how can we predict missing column values in some target table of interest? Although RDBs store vast amounts of rich, informative data spread across interconnected tables, the progress of predictive machine learning models as applied to such tasks arguably falls well behind advances in other domains such as computer vision or natural language processing. This deficit stems, at least in part, from the lack of established/public RDB benchmarks as needed for training and evaluation purposes. As a result, related model development thus far often defaults to tabular approaches trained on ubiquitous single-table benchmarks, or on the relational side, graph-based alternatives such as GNNs applied to a completely different set of graph datasets devoid of tabular characteristics. To more precisely target RDBs lying at the nexus of these two complementary regimes, we explore a broad class of baseline models predicated on: (i) converting multi-table datasets into graphs using various strategies equipped with efficient subsampling, while preserving tabular characteristics; and (ii) trainable models with well-matched inductive biases that output predictions based on these input subgraphs. Then, to address the dearth of suitable public benchmarks and reduce siloed comparisons, we assemble a diverse collection of (i) large-scale RDB datasets and (ii) coincident predictive tasks. From a delivery standpoint, we operationalize the above four dimensions (4D) of exploration within a unified, scalable open-source toolbox called 4DBInfer; please see https: //github. com/awslabs/multi-table-benchmark.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

An Empirical Study of Realized GNN Expressiveness

Yanbo Wang
Muhan Zhang

Research on the theoretical expressiveness of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has developed rapidly, and many methods have been proposed to enhance the expressiveness. However, most methods do not have a uniform expressiveness measure except for a few that strictly follow the $k$-dimensional Weisfeiler-Lehman ($k$-WL) test hierarchy, leading to difficulties in quantitatively comparing their expressiveness. Previous research has attempted to use datasets for measurement, but facing problems with difficulty (any model surpassing 1-WL has nearly 100% accuracy), granularity (models tend to be either 100% correct or near random guess), and scale (only several essentially different graphs involved). To address these limitations, we study the realized expressive power that a practical model instance can achieve using a novel expressiveness dataset, BREC, which poses greater difficulty (with up to 4-WL-indistinguishable graphs), finer granularity (enabling comparison of models between 1-WL and 3-WL), a larger scale (consisting of 800 1-WL-indistinguishable graphs that are non-isomorphic to each other). We synthetically test 23 models with higher-than-1-WL expressiveness on BREC. Our experiment gives the first thorough measurement of the realized expressiveness of those state-of-the-art beyond-1-WL GNN models and reveals the gap between theoretical and realized expressiveness. Dataset and evaluation codes are released at: https: //github. com/GraphPKU/BREC.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Compositional Image Decomposition with Diffusion Models

Jocelin Su
Nan Liu 0010
Yanbo Wang
Joshua B. Tenenbaum
Yilun Du

Given an image of a natural scene, we are able to quickly decompose it into a set of components such as objects, lighting, shadows, and foreground. We can then envision a scene where we combine certain components with those from other images, for instance a set of objects from our bedroom and animals from a zoo under the lighting conditions of a forest, even if we have never encountered such a scene before. In this paper, we present a method to decompose an image into such compositional components. Our approach, Decomp Diffusion, is an unsupervised method which, when given a single image, infers a set of different components in the image, each represented by a diffusion model. We demonstrate how components can capture different factors of the scene, ranging from global scene descriptors like shadows or facial expression to local scene descriptors like constituent objects. We further illustrate how inferred factors can be flexibly composed, even with factors inferred from other models, to generate a variety of scenes sharply different than those seen in training time. Code and visualizations are at https: //energy-based-model. github. io/decomp-diffusion.

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IROS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

PS-Loc: Robust LiDAR Localization with Prior Structural Reference

Rui Li
Wentao Zhao
Tianchen Deng
Yanbo Wang
Jingchuan Wang

Prior structural reference like floor plan is readily accessible in indoor scene, which exhibits the potential of improving localization quality without the requirements of a previously-built high-precision map. This paper introduces a novel optimal transport-based framework for prior structural reference-based localization, aiming to improve the robustness for the robot localization. Leveraging the spacial relations of structures, a matching method based on optimal transport theory is proposed and it improves the robustness of matching results in dynamic scene and rapid rotation conditions. Additionally, this paper handles metric inaccuracies in the known structural reference by implementing an prior guided plane adjustment-based updating strategy. This strategy combines prior and observational information to jointly optimize the structural information within a sliding window. The performance of the framework is validated through real-world experiments, demonstrating superior accuracy and robustness to disturbances from dynamic occlusion and rapid rotation compared to common state-of-the-art SLAM and localization methods.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

XMask3D: Cross-modal Mask Reasoning for Open Vocabulary 3D Semantic Segmentation

Ziyi Wang
Yanbo Wang
Xumin Yu
Jie Zhou
Jiwen Lu

Existing methodologies in open vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation primarily concentrate on establishing a unified feature space encompassing 3D, 2D, and textual modalities. Nevertheless, traditional techniques such as global feature alignment or vision-language model distillation tend to impose only approximate correspondence, struggling notably with delineating fine-grained segmentation boundaries. To address this gap, we propose a more meticulous mask-level alignment between 3D features and the 2D-text embedding space through a cross-modal mask reasoning framework, XMask3D. In our approach, we developed a mask generator based on the denoising UNet from a pre-trained diffusion model, leveraging its capability for precise textual control over dense pixel representations and enhancing the open-world adaptability of the generated masks. We further integrate 3D global features as implicit conditions into the pre-trained 2D denoising UNet, enabling the generation of segmentation masks with additional 3D geometry awareness. Subsequently, the generated 2D masks are employed to align mask-level 3D representations with the vision-language feature space, thereby augmenting the open vocabulary capability of 3D geometry embeddings. Finally, we fuse complementary 2D and 3D mask features, resulting in competitive performance across multiple benchmarks for 3D open vocabulary semantic segmentation. Code is available at https: //github. com/wangzy22/XMask3D.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

High-Resolution GAN Inversion for Degraded Images in Large Diverse Datasets

Yanbo Wang
Chuming Lin
Donghao Luo
Ying Tai
Zhizhong Zhang
Yuan Xie

The last decades are marked by massive and diverse image data, which shows increasingly high resolution and quality. However, some images we obtained may be corrupted, affecting the perception and the application of downstream tasks. A generic method for generating a high-quality image from the degraded one is in demand. In this paper, we present a novel GAN inversion framework that utilizes the powerful generative ability of StyleGAN-XL for this problem. To ease the inversion challenge with StyleGAN-XL, Clustering \& Regularize Inversion (CRI) is proposed. Specifically, the latent space is firstly divided into finer-grained sub-spaces by clustering. Instead of initializing the inversion with the average latent vector, we approximate a centroid latent vector from the clusters, which generates an image close to the input image. Then, an offset with a regularization term is introduced to keep the inverted latent vector within a certain range. We validate our CRI scheme on multiple restoration tasks (i.e., inpainting, colorization, and super-resolution) of complex natural images, and show preferable quantitative and qualitative results. We further demonstrate our technique is robust in terms of data and different GAN models. To our best knowledge, we are the first to adopt StyleGAN-XL for generating high-quality natural images from diverse degraded inputs. Code is available at https://github.com/Booooooooooo/CRI.

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Slot-VAE: Object-Centric Scene Generation with Slot Attention

Yanbo Wang
Letao Liu
Justin Dauwels

Slot attention has shown remarkable object-centric representation learning performance in computer vision tasks without requiring any supervision. Despite its object-centric binding ability brought by compositional modelling, as a deterministic module, slot attention lacks the ability to generate novel scenes. In this paper, we propose the Slot-VAE, a generative model that integrates slot attention with the hierarchical VAE framework for object-centric structured scene generation. For each image, the model simultaneously infers a global scene representation to capture high-level scene structure and object-centric slot representations to embed individual object components. During generation, slot representations are generated from the global scene representation to ensure coherent scene structures. Our extensive evaluation of the scene generation ability indicates that Slot-VAE outperforms slot representation-based generative baselines in terms of sample quality and scene structure accuracy.

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ICRA Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Pose Based on Monocular Camera and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)

Yanbo Wang
Hanwen Yang
Jianwei Cai
Guangming Wang 0001
Jingchuan Wang
Yi Huang

The main content of the research in this paper is the estimation of depth and pose based on monocular vision and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). The usual depth estimation network and pose estimation network require depth ground truth or pose ground truth as a supervised signal for training, while the depth ground truth and pose ground truth are hard to obtain, and monocular vision based depth estimation cannot predict absolute depth. In this paper, with the help of IMU, which is inexpensive and widely used, we can obtain angular velocity and acceleration information. Two new supervision signals are proposed and the calculation expressions are given. Among them, the model trained with acceleration constraint shows a good ability to estimate the absolute depth during the test. It can be considered that the model can estimate the absolute depth. We also derive the method of estimating the scale factor during the test from the acceleration constraint, and also achieve good results as the acceleration constraint does. In addition, this paper also studies the method of using IMU information as pose network input and as selecting conditions. Moreover, it analyzes and discusses the experimental results. At the same time, we also evaluate the effect of the pose estimation of the relevant models. This article starts by reviewing the achievements and deficiencies of the work in this field, combines the use of IMU, puts forward three new methods such as a new loss function, and conducts a test analysis and discussion of relevant indicators on the KITTI data set.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

TwiBot-22: Towards Graph-Based Twitter Bot Detection

Shangbin Feng
Zhaoxuan Tan
Herun Wan
Ningnan Wang
Zilong Chen
Binchi Zhang
Qinghua Zheng
Wenqian Zhang

Twitter bot detection has become an increasingly important task to combat misinformation, facilitate social media moderation, and preserve the integrity of the online discourse. State-of-the-art bot detection methods generally leverage the graph structure of the Twitter network, and they exhibit promising performance when confronting novel Twitter bots that traditional methods fail to detect. However, very few of the existing Twitter bot detection datasets are graph-based, and even these few graph-based datasets suffer from limited dataset scale, incomplete graph structure, as well as low annotation quality. In fact, the lack of a large-scale graph-based Twitter bot detection benchmark that addresses these issues has seriously hindered the development and evaluation of novel graph-based bot detection approaches. In this paper, we propose TwiBot-22, a comprehensive graph-based Twitter bot detection benchmark that presents the largest dataset to date, provides diversified entities and relations on the Twitter network, and has considerably better annotation quality than existing datasets. In addition, we re-implement 35 representative Twitter bot detection baselines and evaluate them on 9 datasets, including TwiBot-22, to promote a fair comparison of model performance and a holistic understanding of research progress. To facilitate further research, we consolidate all implemented codes and datasets into the TwiBot-22 evaluation framework, where researchers could consistently evaluate new models and datasets. The TwiBot-22 Twitter bot detection benchmark and evaluation framework are publicly available at \url{https: //twibot22. github. io/}.

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IJCAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Towards Compact Single Image Super-Resolution via Contrastive Self-distillation

Yanbo Wang
Shaohui Lin
Yanyun Qu
Haiyan Wu
Zhizhong Zhang
Yuan Xie
Angela Yao

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are highly successful for super-resolution (SR) but often require sophisticated architectures with heavy memory cost and computational overhead significantly restricts their practical deployments on resource-limited devices. In this paper, we proposed a novel contrastive self-distillation (CSD) framework to simultaneously compress and accelerate various off-the-shelf SR models. In particular, a channel-splitting super-resolution network can first be constructed from a target teacher network as a compact student network. Then, we propose a novel contrastive loss to improve the quality of SR images and PSNR/SSIM via explicit knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed CSD scheme effectively compresses and accelerates several standard SR models such as EDSR, RCAN and CARN. Code is available at https: //github. com/Booooooooooo/CSD.

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YNIMG Journal 2012 Journal Article

Multi-stage segmentation of white matter hyperintensity, cortical and lacunar infarcts

Yanbo Wang
Joseree Ann Catindig
Saima Hilal
Hock Wei Soon
Eric Ting
Tien Yin Wong
Narayanaswamy Venketasubramanian
Christopher Chen

Cerebral abnormalities such as white matter hyperintensity (WMH), cortical infarct (CI), and lacunar infarct (LI) are of clinical importance and frequently present in patients with stroke and dementia. Up to date, there are limited algorithms available to automatically delineate these cerebral abnormalities partially due to their complex appearance in MR images. In this paper, we describe an automated multi-stage segmentation approach for labeling the WMH, CI, and LI using multi-modal MR images. We first automatically segment brain tissues (white matter, gray matter, and CSF) based on the T1-weighted image and then identify hyperintense voxels based on the fluid attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) image. We finally label the WMH, CI, and LI based on the T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and FLAIR images. The segmentation accuracy is evaluated using a community-based sample of 272 old adults. Our results show that the automated segmentation of the WMH, CI, and LI is comparable with manual labeling in terms of spatial location, volume, and the number of lacunes. Additionally, the WMH volume is highly correlated with the visual grading score based on the Age-Related White Matter Changes (ARWMC) protocol. The evaluations against the manual labeling and ARWMC visual grading suggest that our algorithm provides reasonable segmentation accuracy for the WMH, CI, and LI.

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