About Me
I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of California San Diego, advised by Prof. Julian McAuley. I received my M.S. in Computer Engineering from New York University and B.S. in Statistics and Computer Science/Engineering from Chongqing University.
My research focuses on large language models, reinforcement learning, multimodal learning, and recommender systems, with an emphasis on reasoning, personalization, and agentic workflows. I enjoy working at the intersection of language, vision, music, and sequential decision-making. Specifically, my core research interests span:
- 🧠Reasoning in (M)LLMs: I explore methods to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language and multimodal models, including chain-of-thought reasoning via latent state-transitions (Ctrls), information-theoretic soft prompt tuning (InfoPrompt), coordinated multimodal instruction tuning (CoMMIT), and information-theoretic diagnostics for traceable multimodal reasoning (T&E MLLMs).
- ⚖️ Alignment in (M)LLMs: My work tackles aligning models with human preferences while preserving learned capabilities. I develop preference optimization strategies such as in-context ranking preference optimization (IRPO), adversarial preference optimization for image difference captioning (IDC-APO), alongside offline chain-of-thought evaluation and alignment (OCEAN) and mitigating visual knowledge forgetting during MLLM instruction tuning via modality-decoupled gradient descent(MDGD).
- đź”— Causal Learning & Inference: I leverage causal interventions to structurally debias chain-of-thought processes for knowledge-intensive tasks (DeCoT), apply information-theoretic causal de-biasing for interactive sequence labeling, and develop deconfounded approaches for explainable vision-language retrieval (DeExpRetrieval) and interactive recommendation.
- 🎵 AI for Music: I investigate computational music understanding through temporally-enhanced generative augmentation (FUTGA), contrastive long-form language-audio pretraining (CoLLAP), benchmarking symbolic music reasoning in the wild (WildScore, CSyMR), and audio-centric conversational recommendation (MusicRS).
- 🤖 Agentic Workflows: I design autonomous agents powered by foundation models for multi-page heterogeneous document question-answering (Doc-React), dynamic in-context example selection via efficient knowledge transfer (Dice), self-taught action deliberation (SAND), and agentic paradigms for recommender systems (survey).
- 🔍 Recommendation & Information Retrieval: I work on personalized and conversational recommendation, including collaborative retrieval-augmented long-tail recommendation (CoRAL), neighborhood-based collaborative filtering for conversational recommendation (NBCRS), RL-based cross-domain interactive recommendation (DACIR), and conversational bandits for user preference elicitation (CtoF-ConUCB).
You can find my papers on Google Scholar, DBLP, and ACL Anthology.
🌟 Beyond the ML Research
Outside of research, I have a diverse set of passions that keep me balanced:
- 🎻 Classical Music & Opera: I am a passionate classical music fan and a regular concert and opera goer. My absolute favourite symphony is Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 (particularly the recording by Michael Gielen and SWR), and I have a deep appreciation for operas like Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. 💿 Recommended Recent Recordings (keep updating):
Symphony No. 5
Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Paavo Järvi
Symphonies Nos. 8 & 10
Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, Leif Segerstam
Symphony No. 4
The Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst
Pelleas und Melisande
Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Rafael Payare
Symphony No. 6
London Symphony Orchestra, Gianandrea Noseda
- 🪩 Rave & Clubbing: I am drawn to the immersive energy, vibrant communities, and dynamic soundscapes of the electronic music and clubbing scene. Some Techno/Post-rave Recordings:
Khrysalid
Liminal
Symphony of CAOS
Thru the Ages
Electronic Works 3
- 🥾 Hiking: I am an avid outdoorsman always looking for a rewarding ascent. My trail adventures range from group excursions with the NY Ramblers to tackling challenging, scenic routes like the Ohlone Wilderness Trail, the John Muir Trail, and Mount Diablo. Follow me on Alltrails
News
- Mar 2025: Our paper “Ctrls: Chain-of-thought reasoning via latent state-transition” has been accepted to AISTATS 2026.
- Mar 2025: Our paper “Importance Sampling for Multi-Negative Multimodal Direct Preference Optimization” has been accepted to ICLR 2026.
Selected Publications
†Corresponding author * Equal Contribution
2026
-
Ctrls: Chain-of-thought reasoning via latent state-transition
Junda Wu, Yuxin Xiong, Xintong Li, Sheldon Yu, Zhengmian Hu, Tong Yu, Rui Wang, Xiang Chen, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley.
AISTATS 2026 [Paper] -
Musicrs: Benchmarking audio-centric conversational recommendation
Rohan Surana, Amit Namburi, Gagan Mundada, Abhay Lal, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu†.
ICASSP 2026 [Paper] [Code] -
WS-GRPO: Weakly-Supervised Group-Relative Policy Optimization for Rollout-Efficient Reasoning
Gagan Mundada, Zihan Huang, Rohan Surana, Sheldon Yu, Jennifer Yuntong Zhang, Xintong Li, Tong Yu, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu†.
In submission to ICML 2026 -
AMPS: Adaptive Modality Preference Steering via Functional Entropy
Zihan Huang, Xintong Li, Rohan Surana, Tong Yu, Rui Wang, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang, Junda Wu†.
In submission to ICML 2026
2025
-
Pdb-eval: An evaluation of large multimodal models for description and explanation of personalized driving behavior
Junda Wu, Jessica Echterhoff, Kyungtae Han, Amr Abdelraouf, Rohit Gupta, Julian McAuley.
IV 2025 [Paper] -
WildScore: Benchmarking MLLMs in-the-Wild Symbolic Music Reasoning
Gagan Mundada, Yash Vishe, Amit Namburi, Xin Xu, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu†.
EMNLP 2025 [Paper] [Code] -
CoMMIT: Coordinated Multimodal Instruction Tuning
Xintong Li*, Junda Wu*, Tong Yu, Rui Wang, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Jiuxiang Gu, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang.
EMNLP 2025 [Paper] -
Image Difference Captioning via Adversarial Preference Optimization
Zihan Huang*, Junda Wu*, Rohan Surana, Tong Yu, David Arbour, Ritwik Sinha, Julian McAuley.
EMNLP 2025 [Paper] -
Mitigating Visual Knowledge Forgetting in MLLM Instruction-tuning via Modality-decoupled Gradient Descent
Junda Wu, Yuxin Xiong, Xintong Li, Yu Xia, Ruoyu Wang, Yu Wang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley.
EMNLP 2025 Findings [Paper] -
IRPO: In-context ranking preference optimization
Junda Wu*, Rohan Surana*, Zhouhang Xie, Yiran Shen, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Julian McAuley.
COLM 2025 [Paper] [Code] -
Traceable and Explainable Multimodal Large Language Models: An Information-Theoretic View
Zihan Huang*, Junda Wu*, Rohan Surana, Raghav Jain, Tong Yu, Raghavendra Addanki, David Arbour, Sungchul Kim, Julian McAuley.
COLM 2025 [Paper] [Code] -
Collap: Contrastive long-form language-audio pretraining with musical temporal structure augmentation
Junda Wu, Warren Li, Zachary Novack, Amit Namburi, Carol Chen, Julian McAuley.
ICASSP 2025 [Paper] -
FUTGA-MIR: Enhancing Fine-grained and Temporally-aware Music Understanding with Music Information Retrieval
Junda Wu, Zachary Novack, Amit Namburi, Hao-Wen Dong, Carol Chen, Jiaheng Dai, Julian McAuley.
ICASSP 2025[Code]
-
Doc-React: Multi-page Heterogeneous Document Question-answering
Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Sai Sree Harsha, Akash V. Maharaj, Ruiyi Zhang, Victor Bursztyn, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley, Yunyao Li, Ritwik Sinha.
ACL 2025 [Paper] -
OCEAN: Offline chain-of-thought evaluation and alignment in large language models
Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ruoyu Wang, Yu Xia, Yuxin Xiong, Jianing Wang, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Branislav Kveton, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley.
ICLR 2025 [Paper] -
CSyMR: Benchmarking Compositional Symbolic Muisc Reasoning With MIR Tool Integration
Boyang Wang, Yash Vishe, Xin Xu, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu†.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
Active learning for direct preference optimization
(Alphabetical Order) Branislav Kveton, Xintong Li, Julian McAuley, Ryan A. Rossi, Jingbo Shang, Junda Wu, Tong Yu.
arXiv 2025 [Paper]
2024
-
DeCoT: Debiasing Chain-of-Thought for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks in Large Language Models via Causal Intervention
Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Haoliang Wang, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Anup B. Rao, Julian McAuley.
ACL 2024 [Paper] -
CoRAL: Collaborative Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models Improve Long-tail Recommendation
Junda Wu, Cheng-Chun Chang, Tong Yu, Zhankui He, Jianing Wang, Yupeng Hou, Julian McAuley.
SIGKDD 2024 [Paper] -
Neighborhood-based collaborative filtering for conversational recommendation
Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Hyunsik Jeon, Zhankui He, Harald Steck, Rahul Jha, Dawen Liang, Nathan Kallus, Julian McAuley.
RecSys 2024 [Paper] [Code]
2023
-
InfoPrompt: Information-Theoretic Soft Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Understanding
Junda Wu, Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Zhao Song, Ruiyi Zhang, Handong Zhao, Chaochao Lu, Shuai Li, Ricardo Henao.
NeurIPS 2023 [Paper] [Code] -
Content-aware progressive image compression and syncing
Junda Wu, Haoliang Wang, Tong Yu, Gang Wu, Stefano Petrangeli, Handong Zhao, Sungchul Kim, Viswanathan Swaminathan.
ISM 2023 -
Few-Shot Composition Learning for Image Retrieval with Prompt Tuning
Junda Wu, Rui Wang, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Chaochao Lu, Shuai Li, Ricardo Henao.
AAAI 2023 [Paper] [Code]
2022
-
Context-aware Information-theoretic Causal De-biasing for Interactive Sequence Labeling
Junda Wu, Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Handong Zhao, Shuai Li, Ricardo Henao, Ani Nenkova.
EMNLP 2022 Findings [Paper] -
Dynamics-aware adaptation for reinforcement learning based cross-domain interactive recommendation
Junda Wu, Zhihui Xie, Tong Yu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Shuai Li.
SIGIR 2022 [Paper]
2021
-
Deconfounded and explainable interactive vision-language retrieval of complex scenes
Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Shuai Li.
ACM MM 2021 [Paper] -
Clustering of conversational bandits for user preference learning and elicitation
Junda Wu, Canzhe Zhao, Tong Yu, Jingyang Li, Shuai Li.
CIKM 2021 [Paper]
US Patents
-
Chain-of-thought machine-learning model debiasing
Haoliang Wang, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Junda Wu, Anup B. Rao.
US Patent App. 18/673,547, 2025 -
Transferable clustering of contextual bandits for cloud service resource allocation
Kanak Mahadik, Tong Yu, Junda Wu.
US Patent 12,294,529, 2025 -
Progressive image compression and syncing
Junda Wu, Haoliang Wang, Tong Yu, Stefano Petrangeli, Gang Wu, Viswanathan Swaminathan, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi.
US Patent App. 18/451,201, 2025 -
Dialogue skeleton assisted prompt transfer for dialogue summarization
Tong Yu, Kaige Xie, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Kanak Mahadik, Ani Nenkova.
US Patent App. 18/355,901, 2025 -
Dialogue state aware dialogue summarization
Haoliang Wang, Kaige Xie, Tong Yu, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Kanak Mahadik, Ani Nenkova.
US Patent App. 18/343,389, 2025 -
Contextual query generation
Haoliang Wang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Peng Xu, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Ani Nenkova.
US Patent App. 18/339,694, 2024
Presentations
CV
Educations
-
University of California San Diego, Sep 2023 – Now
Ph.D. in Computer Science -
New York University, Sep 2021 – May 2023
M.S. in Computer Engineering -
🦶 Chongqing University, Sep 2016 – Jul 2020
B.S. in Statistics, Minor in Computer Science and Engineering
Experiences
- Research Scientist Intern
- 🅰️ Adobe Research, San Jose — Jun 2025 – Nov 2025
Deep Research in digital marketing for AEP; Developed hypothesis generation and experimental simulation - 🅰️ Adobe Research, San Jose — Jun 2024 – Nov 2024
Multimodal Retrieval in AI Assistant for AEP; Developed Doc-React algorithm for document question-answering - 🅰️ Adobe Research, San Jose — May 2023 – Aug 2023
Knowledge Graph Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Next Prompt Recommendation - 🅰️ Adobe Research, San Jose — May 2022 – Dec 2022
Progressive Image Compression and Syncing for real-time collaborative image editing
- 🅰️ Adobe Research, San Jose — Jun 2025 – Nov 2025
- Conference and Journal Reviewer
- LLM and NLP: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, COLING, COLM
- Machine Learning: NeurIPS, ICLR, AISTATS, ICML
- Data Mining and Recommendation: KDD, CIKM, SIGIR, WWW, TKDE
Visitors
Full Publication List
Click to expand
2026
-
WS-GRPO: Weakly-Supervised Group-Relative Policy Optimization for Rollout-Efficient Reasoning
Gagan Mundada, Zihan Huang, Rohan Surana, Sheldon Yu, Jennifer Yuntong Zhang, Xintong Li, Tong Yu, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu†.
In submission to ICML 2026 -
AMPS: Adaptive Modality Preference Steering via Functional Entropy
Zihan Huang, Xintong Li, Rohan Surana, Tong Yu, Rui Wang, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang, Junda Wu†.
In submission to ICML 2026 -
Evaluation on Entity Matching in Recommender Systems
Zihan Huang, Rohan Surana, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Julian McAuley.
arXiv 2026 [Paper] [Code] -
SceneAlign: Aligning Multimodal Reasoning to Scene Graphs in Complex Visual Scenes
Chuhan Wang, Xintong Li, Jennifer Yuntong Zhang, Junda Wu, Chengkai Huang, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang.
arXiv 2026 [Paper] -
Large Language Models for Conversational User Simulation: A Comprehensive Survey
Bo Ni, Leyao Wang, Yu Wang, Branislav Kveton, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Xia, Hongjie Chen, Reuben Leura, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley.
EACL 2026 -
Ctrls: Chain-of-thought reasoning via latent state-transition
Junda Wu, Yuxin Xiong, Xintong Li, Sheldon Yu, Zhengmian Hu, Tong Yu, Rui Wang, Xiang Chen, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley.
AISTATS 2026 [Paper] -
Musicrs: Benchmarking audio-centric conversational recommendation
Rohan Surana, Amit Namburi, Gagan Mundada, Abhay Lal, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu†.
ICASSP 2026 [Paper] [Code]
2025
-
CSyMR: Benchmarking Compositional Symbolic Muisc Reasoning With MIR Tool Integration
Boyang Wang, Yash Vishe, Xin Xu, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu†.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
MuseCPBench: an Empirical Study of Music Editing Methods through Music Context Preservation
Yash Vishe, Eric Xue, Xunyi Jiang, Zachary Novack, Junda Wu, Julian McAuley, Xin Xu.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
Listwise Preference Diffusion Optimization for User Behavior Trajectories Prediction
Hongtao Huang, Chengkai Huang, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley, Lina Yao.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
Weakly-supervised vlm-guided partial contrastive learning for visual language navigation
Ruoyu Wang, Tong Yu, Junda Wu, Yao Liu, Julian McAuley, Lina Yao.
IROS 2025 [Paper] -
Importance Sampling for Multi-Negative Multimodal Direct Preference Optimization
Xintong Li, Chuhan Wang, Junda Wu, Rohan Surana, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
A Tutorial on Agentic LLM for Recommender Systems
Chengkai Huang, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley, Lina Yao.
RecSys 2025 [Paper] -
Pluralistic Off-policy Evaluation and Alignment
Chengkai Huang, Junda Wu, Zhouhang Xie, Yu Xia, Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Subrata Mitra, Julian McAuley, Lina Yao.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
Dice: Dynamic in-context example selection in llm agents via efficient knowledge transfer
Ruoyu Wang, Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley, Lina Yao.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
Pdb-eval: An evaluation of large multimodal models for description and explanation of personalized driving behavior
Junda Wu, Jessica Echterhoff, Kyungtae Han, Amr Abdelraouf, Rohit Gupta, Julian McAuley.
IV 2025 [Paper] -
A personalized conversational benchmark: Towards simulating personalized conversations
Li Li, Peilin Cai, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Linxin Song, Tiankai Yang, Yuehan Qin, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Ruiyi Zhang, Zhengmian Hu, Bo Ni, Yuxiao Zhou, Zichao Wang, Yue Huang, Yu Wang, Xiangliang Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Xiyang Hu, Yue Zhao.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
Cacheprune: Neural-based attribution defense against indirect prompt injection attacks
Rui Wang, Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
A survey of foundation model-powered recommender systems: From feature-based, generative to agentic paradigms
Chengkai Huang, Hongtao Huang, Tong Yu, Kaige Xie, Junda Wu, Shuai Zhang, Julian McAuley, Dietmar Jannach, Lina Yao.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
Interactive Visualization Recommendation with Hier-SUCB
Songwen Hu, Ryan A. Rossi, Tong Yu, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Sungchul Kim, Shuai Li.
WWW 2025 [Paper] -
From reviews to dialogues: Active synthesis for zero-shot llm-based conversational recommender system
Rohan Surana, Junda Wu, Zhouhang Xie, Yu Xia, Harald Steck, Dawen Liang, Nathan Kallus, Julian McAuley.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
IRPO: In-context ranking preference optimization
Junda Wu*, Rohan Surana*, Zhouhang Xie, Yiran Shen, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Julian McAuley.
COLM 2025 [Paper] [Code] -
A survey on personalized and pluralistic preference alignment in large language models
Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Yiran Shen, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Aaron Chang, Ryan A. Rossi, Sachin Kumar, Raghav Jain, Tong Yu, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Jingbo Shang, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Julian McAuley.
COLM 2025 [Paper] -
Collap: Contrastive long-form language-audio pretraining with musical temporal structure augmentation
Junda Wu, Warren Li, Zachary Novack, Amit Namburi, Carol Chen, Julian McAuley.
ICASSP 2025 [Paper] -
FUTGA-MIR: Enhancing Fine-grained and Temporally-aware Music Understanding with Music Information Retrieval
Junda Wu, Zachary Novack, Amit Namburi, Hao-Wen Dong, Carol Chen, Jiaheng Dai, Julian McAuley.
ICASSP 2025[Code]
-
Towards agentic recommender systems in the era of multimodal large language models
Chengkai Huang, Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Zixu Yu, Ruhan Wang, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Branislav Kveton, Dongruo Zhou, Julian McAuley, Lina Yao.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
Active learning for direct preference optimization
(Alphabetical Order) Branislav Kveton, Xintong Li, Julian McAuley, Ryan A. Rossi, Jingbo Shang, Junda Wu, Tong Yu.
arXiv 2025 [Paper] -
Traceable and Explainable Multimodal Large Language Models: An Information-Theoretic View
Zihan Huang*, Junda Wu*, Rohan Surana, Raghav Jain, Tong Yu, Raghavendra Addanki, David Arbour, Sungchul Kim, Julian McAuley.
COLM 2025 [Paper] [Code] -
OCEAN: Offline chain-of-thought evaluation and alignment in large language models
Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ruoyu Wang, Yu Xia, Yuxin Xiong, Jianing Wang, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Branislav Kveton, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley.
ICLR 2025 [Paper] -
Personalization of large language models: A survey
Zhehao Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Branislav Kveton, Yijia Shao, Diyi Yang, Hamed Zamani, Franck Dernoncourt, Joe Barrow, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Tyler Derr, Hongjie Chen, Junda Wu, Xiang Chen, Zichao Wang, Subrata Mitra, Nedim Lipka, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Julian McAuley.
TMLR 2025 [Paper] -
Self-updatable large language models by integrating context into model parameters
Yu Wang, Xinshuang Liu, Xiusi Chen, Sean O’Brien, Junda Wu, Julian McAuley.
ICLR 2025 [Paper] [Code] -
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning
Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley.
ACL 2025 [Paper] -
Doc-React: Multi-page Heterogeneous Document Question-answering
Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Sai Sree Harsha, Akash V. Maharaj, Ruiyi Zhang, Victor Bursztyn, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley, Yunyao Li, Ritwik Sinha.
ACL 2025 [Paper] -
SAND: Boosting LLM Agents with Self-Taught Action Deliberation
Yu Xia, Yiran Shen, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley.
EMNLP 2025 [Paper] -
CoMMIT: Coordinated Multimodal Instruction Tuning
Xintong Li*, Junda Wu*, Tong Yu, Rui Wang, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Jiuxiang Gu, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang.
EMNLP 2025 [Paper] -
WildScore: Benchmarking MLLMs in-the-Wild Symbolic Music Reasoning
Gagan Mundada, Yash Vishe, Amit Namburi, Xin Xu, Zachary Novack, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu†.
EMNLP 2025 [Paper] [Code] -
Image Difference Captioning via Adversarial Preference Optimization
Zihan Huang*, Junda Wu*, Rohan Surana, Tong Yu, David Arbour, Ritwik Sinha, Julian McAuley.
EMNLP 2025 [Paper] -
Large Language Models and Causal Inference in Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey
Xiaoyu Liu, Paiheng Xu, Junda Wu, Jiaxin Yuan, Yifan Yang, Yuhang Zhou, Fuxiao Liu, Tianrui Guan, Haoliang Wang, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley, Wei Ai, Furong Huang.
NAACL 2025 Findings [Paper] -
GUI Agents: A Survey
Dang Nguyen, Jian Chen, Yu Wang, Gang Wu, Namyong Park, Zhengmian Hu, Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wu, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Jing Shi, Hongjie Chen, Viet Dac Lai, Zhouhang Xie, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Md. Mehrab Tanjim, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Puneet Mathur, Seunghyun Yoon, Lina Yao, Branislav Kveton, Jihyung Kil, Thien Huu Nguyen, Trung Bui, Tianyi Zhou, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt.
ACL 2025 Findings [Paper] -
Mitigating Visual Knowledge Forgetting in MLLM Instruction-tuning via Modality-decoupled Gradient Descent
Junda Wu, Yuxin Xiong, Xintong Li, Yu Xia, Ruoyu Wang, Yu Wang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley.
EMNLP 2025 Findings [Paper] -
Explainable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: An Empirical Analysis on State-Aware Reasoning Dynamics
Sheldon Yu, Yuxin Xiong, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Ritwik Sinha, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley.
EMNLP 2025 Findings [Paper] -
Knowledge-Aware Query Expansion with Large Language Models for Textual and Relational Retrieval
Yu Xia, Junda Wu, Sungchul Kim, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Haoliang Wang, Julian McAuley.
NAACL 2025 [Paper] -
A Survey on Small Language Models
Chien Van Nguyen, Xuan Shen, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Samyadeep Basu, Zhengmian Hu, Jian Chen, Mihir Parmar, Sasidhar Kunapuli, Joe Barrow, Junda Wu, Ashish Singh, Yu Wang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Nedim Lipka, Ruiyi Zhang, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Namyong Park, Michael Rimer, Zhehao Zhang, Huanrui Yang, Puneet Mathur, Gang Wu, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Thien Huu Nguyen.
RANLP 2025 [Paper]
2024
-
Personalized multimodal large language models: A survey
Junda Wu, Hanjia Lyu, Yu Xia, Zhehao Zhang, Joe Barrow, Ishita Kumar, Mehrnoosh Mirtaheri, Hongjie Chen, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, [… + additional authors].
arXiv 2024 [Paper] -
Neighborhood-based collaborative filtering for conversational recommendation
Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Hyunsik Jeon, Zhankui He, Harald Steck, Rahul Jha, Dawen Liang, Nathan Kallus, Julian McAuley.
RecSys 2024 [Paper] [Code] -
Federated large language models: Current progress and future directions
Yuhang Yao, Jianyi Zhang, Junda Wu, Chengkai Huang, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Ang Li, Lina Yao, Yiran Chen, Carlee Joe-Wong, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley.
arXiv 2024 [Paper] -
List items one by one: A new data source and learning paradigm for multimodal llms
An Yan, Zhengyuan Yang, Junda Wu, Wanrong Zhu, Jianwei Yang, Linjie Li, Kevin Lin, Jianfeng Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Lijuan Wang, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang.
arXiv 2024 [Paper] [Code] -
Interact with the explanations: Causal debiased explainable recommendation system
Xu Liu, Tong Yu, Kaige Xie, Junda Wu, Shuai Li.
WSDM 2024 [Paper] -
DeCoT: Debiasing Chain-of-Thought for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks in Large Language Models via Causal Intervention
Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Haoliang Wang, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Anup B. Rao, Julian McAuley.
ACL 2024 [Paper] -
Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization via Skeleton-Assisted Prompt Transfer in Prompt Tuning
Kaige Xie, Tong Yu, Haoliang Wang, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Kanak Mahadik, Ani Nenkova, Mark O. Riedl.
EACL 2024 [Paper] -
Personalized Federated Learning for Text Classification with Gradient-Free Prompt Tuning
Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Handong Zhao, Junda Wu, Subrata Mitra, Lina Yao, Ricardo Henao.
NAACL 2024 Findings [Paper] -
InstructGraph: Boosting Large Language Models via Graph-centric Instruction Tuning and Preference Alignment
Jianing Wang, Junda Wu, Yupeng Hou, Yao Liu, Ming Gao, Julian McAuley.
ACL 2024 Findings [Paper] [Code] -
FUTGA: Towards Fine-grained Music Understanding through Temporally-enhanced Generative Augmentation
Junda Wu, Zachary Novack, Amit Namburi, Jiaheng Dai, Hao-Wen Dong, Zhouhang Xie, Carol Chen, Julian McAuley.
NLP4MusA 2024 [Paper] [Code] -
CoRAL: Collaborative Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models Improve Long-tail Recommendation
Junda Wu, Cheng-Chun Chang, Tong Yu, Zhankui He, Jianing Wang, Yupeng Hou, Julian McAuley.
KDD 2024 [Paper] -
Visual Prompting in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey
Junda Wu, Zhehao Zhang, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Zhaoyang Xia, Aaron Chang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Ruiyi Zhang, Subrata Mitra, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley.
arXiv 2024 [Paper]
2023
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Content-aware progressive image compression and syncing
Junda Wu, Haoliang Wang, Tong Yu, Gang Wu, Stefano Petrangeli, Handong Zhao, Sungchul Kim, Viswanathan Swaminathan.
ISM 2023 -
User-Regulation Deconfounded Conversational Recommender System with Bandit Feedback
Yu Xia, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Shuai Li.
KDD 2023 [Paper] -
Federated Domain Adaptation for Named Entity Recognition via Distilling with Heterogeneous Tag Sets
Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Subrata Mitra, Ricardo Henao.
ACL 2023 Findings [Paper] -
Few-Shot Composition Learning for Image Retrieval with Prompt Tuning
Junda Wu, Rui Wang, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Chaochao Lu, Shuai Li, Ricardo Henao.
AAAI 2023 [Paper] [Code] -
InfoPrompt: Information-Theoretic Soft Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Understanding
Junda Wu, Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Zhao Song, Ruiyi Zhang, Handong Zhao, Chaochao Lu, Shuai Li, Ricardo Henao.
NeurIPS 2023 [Paper] [Code] -
Clustering of conversational bandits with posterior sampling for user preference learning and elicitation
Qizhi Li, Canzhe Zhao, Tong Yu, Junda Wu, Shuai Li.
UMUAI 2023 [Paper]
2022
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Spatial-temporal aligned multi-agent learning for visual dialog systems
Yong Zhuang, Tong Yu, Junda Wu, Shiqu Wu, Shuai Li.
ACM MM 2022 [Paper] -
Context-aware Information-theoretic Causal De-biasing for Interactive Sequence Labeling
Junda Wu, Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Handong Zhao, Shuai Li, Ricardo Henao, Ani Nenkova.
EMNLP 2022 Findings [Paper] -
Dynamics-aware adaptation for reinforcement learning based cross-domain interactive recommendation
Junda Wu, Zhihui Xie, Tong Yu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Shuai Li.
SIGIR 2022 [Paper]
2021
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Clustering of conversational bandits for user preference learning and elicitation
Junda Wu, Canzhe Zhao, Tong Yu, Jingyang Li, Shuai Li.
CIKM 2021 [Paper] -
Deconfounded and explainable interactive vision-language retrieval of complex scenes
Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Shuai Li.
ACM MM 2021 [Paper] -
Sim-to-real interactive recommendation via off-dynamics reinforcement learning
Junda Wu, Zhihui Xie, Tong Yu, Qizhi Li, Shuai Li.
NeurIPS 2021 Workshop [Paper]
US Patents
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Chain-of-thought machine-learning model debiasing
Haoliang Wang, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Junda Wu, Anup B. Rao.
US Patent App. 18/673,547, 2025 -
Transferable clustering of contextual bandits for cloud service resource allocation
Kanak Mahadik, Tong Yu, Junda Wu.
US Patent 12,294,529, 2025 -
Progressive image compression and syncing
Junda Wu, Haoliang Wang, Tong Yu, Stefano Petrangeli, Gang Wu, Viswanathan Swaminathan, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi.
US Patent App. 18/451,201, 2025 -
Dialogue skeleton assisted prompt transfer for dialogue summarization
Tong Yu, Kaige Xie, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Kanak Mahadik, Ani Nenkova.
US Patent App. 18/355,901, 2025 -
Dialogue state aware dialogue summarization
Haoliang Wang, Kaige Xie, Tong Yu, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Kanak Mahadik, Ani Nenkova.
US Patent App. 18/343,389, 2025 -
Contextual query generation
Haoliang Wang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Peng Xu, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Ani Nenkova.
US Patent App. 18/339,694, 2024