Sanglu Lu
2026
Thermometer of Thoughts: Enhancing LLM’s Exploration via Attention Temperature Modulation
Zhiyuan Yu | Shijian Xiao | Cam-Tu Nguyen | Zhangyue Yin | Lekai Xing | Wenzhong Li | Sanglu Lu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhiyuan Yu | Shijian Xiao | Cam-Tu Nguyen | Zhangyue Yin | Lekai Xing | Wenzhong Li | Sanglu Lu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Improving the exploration of reasoning is essential for advancing Large Language Models’ (LLMs) problem-solving performance. Current methods primarily rely on output-level stochasticity, which decode within fixed reasoning patterns of LLM and suffer from insufficient exploration. In this paper, we introduce adjusting attention temperature to directly modulate the model’s internal focus during reasoning, which enables a dynamic shift between exploratory and focused processing. We reveal that moderate adjustments preserve LLM’s reasoning capability while producing problem hardness-dependent benefits: higher temperatures facilitate solving complex tasks by encouraging wider exploration, whereas lower temperatures mitigate overthinking on simpler problems. Leveraging this insight, we propose a two-stage inference strategy: first, attention temperature scaling modulates the LLM’s reasoning patterns to diversify the reasoning traces; then, a difficulty-aware aggregation scheme is introduced to effectively identify the most reliable solution from the generated candidates. Extensive evaluations show that our method improves Pass@10 by 6.78–14.20% and aggregation accuracy by 9.74% across 7 reasoning benchmarks.
2025
PVTNL: Prompting Vision Transformers with Natural Language for Generalizable Person Re-identification
Wangning | Lei Xie | Sanglu Lu | Shiwei Gan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Wangning | Lei Xie | Sanglu Lu | Shiwei Gan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Domain generalization person re-identification (DG-ReID) aims to train models on source domains and generalize to unseen target domains.While patch-based Vision Transformers have achieved success in capturing fine-grained visual features, they often overlook global semantic structure and suffer from feature entanglement, leading to overfitting across domains. Meanwhile, natural language provides high-level semantic abstraction but lacks spatial precision for fine-grained alignment.We propose PVTNL (Prompting Vision Transformers with Natural Language), a novel framework for generalizable person re-identification. PVTNL leverages the pre-trained vision-language model BLIP to extract aligned visual and textual embeddings. Specifically, we utilize body-part cues to segment images into semantically coherent regions and align them with corresponding natural language descriptions. These region-level textual prompts are encoded and injected as soft prompts into the Vision Transformer to guide localized feature learning. Notably, our language module is retained during inference, enabling persistent semantic grounding that enhances cross-domain generalization.Extensive experiments on standard DG-ReID benchmarks demonstrate that PVTNL achieves state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of body-part-level alignment, soft language prompting, and the benefit of preserving language guidance at inference time.