Dianbo Liu
2026
Decoupling Generalization and Adaptation in Meta-Learning for Large Language Models
Nitin Vetcha | Binqian Xu | Dianbo Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Nitin Vetcha | Binqian Xu | Dianbo Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks remains expensive, even with parameter-efficient methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). In this regard, meta-learning approaches such as Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for LLMs (MAML-en-LLM) and Amortized Bayesian Meta-Learning for LoRA (ABMLL) have emerged as promising solutions for rapid downstream LLM adaptation. However, these methods fundamentally couple two distinct objectives: learning generalizable initializations and enabling efficient task adaptation. We argue that this coupling limits both the quality of learned representations and adaptation efficiency. In this paper, we introduce **DeGAML-LLM** (**De**coupled **G**eneralization and **A**daptation in **M**eta-**L**earning for **LLM**s), a novel framework that explicitly separates these two objectives through dedicated parameter spaces. Specifically, we maintain a generalization module that learns task-agnostic representations across the task distribution, and an adaptation module that specializes in rapid task-specific adjustment. Extensive experiments on common-sense reasoning, mathematics, logic, social, medical and coding benchmarks across model scales demonstrate that DeGAML-LLM outperforms existing meta-learning and standard multi-task baselines.
2021
hBERT + BiasCorp - Fighting Racism on the Web
Olawale Onabola | Zhuang Ma | Xie Yang | Benjamin Akera | Ibraheem Abdulrahman | Jia Xue | Dianbo Liu | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Olawale Onabola | Zhuang Ma | Xie Yang | Benjamin Akera | Ibraheem Abdulrahman | Jia Xue | Dianbo Liu | Yoshua Bengio
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Subtle and overt racism is still present both in physical and online communities today and has impacted many lives in different segments of the society. In this short piece of work, we present how we’re tackling this societal issue with Natural Language Processing. We are releasing BiasCorp, a dataset containing 139,090 comments and news segment from three specific sources - Fox News, BreitbartNews and YouTube. The first batch (45,000 manually annotated) is ready for publication. We are currently in the final phase of manually labeling the remaining dataset using Amazon Mechanical Turk. BERT has been used widely in several downstream tasks. In this work, we present hBERT, where we modify certain layers of the pretrained BERT model with the new Hopfield Layer. hBert generalizes well across different distributions with the added advantage of a reduced model complexity. We are also releasing a JavaScript library 3 and a Chrome Extension Application, to help developers make use of our trained model in web applications (say chat application) and for users to identify and report racially biased contents on the web respectively
2019
Two-stage Federated Phenotyping and Patient Representation Learning
Dianbo Liu | Dmitriy Dligach | Timothy Miller
Proceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task
Dianbo Liu | Dmitriy Dligach | Timothy Miller
Proceedings of the 18th BioNLP Workshop and Shared Task
A large percentage of medical information is in unstructured text format in electronic medical record systems. Manual extraction of information from clinical notes is extremely time consuming. Natural language processing has been widely used in recent years for automatic information extraction from medical texts. However, algorithms trained on data from a single healthcare provider are not generalizable and error-prone due to the heterogeneity and uniqueness of medical documents. We develop a two-stage federated natural language processing method that enables utilization of clinical notes from different hospitals or clinics without moving the data, and demonstrate its performance using obesity and comorbities phenotyping as medical task. This approach not only improves the quality of a specific clinical task but also facilitates knowledge progression in the whole healthcare system, which is an essential part of learning health system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of federated machine learning in clinical NLP.