Yifan Sun
Papers on this page may belong to the following people: Yifan Sun, Yifan Sun, Yifan Sun
2025
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning
Jingyan Shen | Jiarui Yao | Rui Yang | Yifan Sun | Feng Luo | Rui Pan | Tong Zhang | Han Zhao
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jingyan Shen | Jiarui Yao | Rui Yang | Yifan Sun | Feng Luo | Rui Pan | Tong Zhang | Han Zhao
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reward modeling is a key step in building safe foundation models when applying reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align Large Language Models (LLMs). However, reward modeling based on the Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumes a global reward function, failing to capture the inherently diverse and heterogeneous human preferences. Hence, such oversimplification limits LLMs from supporting personalization and pluralistic alignment. Theoretically, we show that when human preferences follow a mixture distribution of diverse subgroups, a single BT model has an irreducible error. While existing solutions, such as fine-grained annotations via prompting or structured preference elicitation, help address this issue, they are costly and constrained by predefined attributes, failing to fully capture the richness of human values. In this work, we introduce MiCRo, a two-stage framework that enhances personalized preference learning by leveraging large-scale binary preference datasets without requiring explicit fine-grained annotations. In the first stage, MiCRo employs a mixture of preferences to model diverse human preferences, enabling a flexible representation of diverse value systems. In the second stage, MiCRo integrates an online routing strategy that dynamically adapts mixture weights based on specific context to resolve ambiguity, allowing for efficient and scalable preference adaptation with minimal additional supervision. Experiments on multiple preference datasets demonstrate that MiCRo effectively captures diverse human preferences and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream tasks.
BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving
Ran Xin | Chenguang Xi | Jie Yang | Feng Chen | Hang Wu | Xia Xiao | Yifan Sun | Shen Zheng | Ming Ding
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ran Xin | Chenguang Xi | Jie Yang | Feng Chen | Hang Wu | Xia Xiao | Yifan Sun | Shen Zheng | Ming Ding
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have spurred growing interest in automatic theorem proving using Lean4, where effective tree search methods are crucial for navigating the underlying large proof search spaces. While the existing approaches primarily rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search (BFS) remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate whether BFS can achieve competitive performance in large-scale theorem proving tasks. We present BFS-Prover, a scalable expert iteration framework, featuring three key innovations. First, we implement strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. Second, we improve the sample efficiency of BFS through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) applied to state-tactic pairs automatically annotated with compiler error feedback, refining the LLM’s policy to prioritize productive expansions. Third, we employ length normalization in BFS to encourage exploration of deeper proof paths. BFS-Prover achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and therefore challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods, demonstrating that BFS can achieve competitive performance when properly scaled.
2022
Multiplex Anti-Asian Sentiment before and during the Pandemic: Introducing New Datasets from Twitter Mining
Hao Lin | Pradeep Nalluri | Lantian Li | Yifan Sun | Yongjun Zhang
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis
Hao Lin | Pradeep Nalluri | Lantian Li | Yifan Sun | Yongjun Zhang
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis
COVID-19 has disproportionately threatened minority communities in the U.S, not only in health but also in societal impact. However, social scientists and policymakers lack critical data to capture the dynamics of the anti-Asian hate trend and to evaluate its scale and scope. We introduce new datasets from Twitter related to anti-Asian hate sentiment before and during the pandemic. Relying on Twitter’s academic API, we retrieve hateful and counter-hate tweets from the Twitter Historical Database. To build contextual understanding and collect related racial cues, we also collect instances of heated arguments, often political, but not necessarily hateful, discussing Chinese issues. We then use the state-of-the-art hate speech classifiers to discern whether these tweets express hatred. These datasets can be used to study hate speech, general anti-Asian or Chinese sentiment, and hate linguistics by social scientists as well as to evaluate and build hate speech or sentiment analysis classifiers by computational scholars.