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