Xuan Gong
2026
VCORE: Variance-Controlled Optimization-based Reweighting for Chain-of-Thought Supervision
Xuan Gong | Senmiao Wang | Hanbo Huang | Ruoyu Sun | Shiyu Liang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xuan Gong | Senmiao Wang | Hanbo Huang | Ruoyu Sun | Shiyu Liang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on long chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories has emerged as a crucial technique for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the standard cross-entropy loss treats all tokens equally, ignoring their heterogeneous contributions across a reasoning trajectory. This uniform treatment leads to misallocated supervision and weak generalization, especially in complex, long-form reasoning tasks. To address this, we introduce **V**ariance-**C**ontrolled **O**ptimization-based **RE**weighting (VCORE), a principled framework that reformulates CoT supervision as a constrained optimization problem. By adopting an optimization-theoretic perspective, VCORE enables a principled and adaptive allocation of supervision across tokens, thereby aligning the training objective more closely with the goal of robust reasoning generalization. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that VCORE achieves the strongest overall average performance, with especially clear gains on lower-capacity models. Across both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, VCORE achieves substantial performance gains on mathematical and coding benchmarks, using models from the Qwen3 series (4B, 8B, 32B) and LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct. Moreover, we show that VCORE serves as a more effective initialization for subsequent reinforcement learning, establishing a stronger foundation for advancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.
2024
DAMRO: Dive into the Attention Mechanism of LVLM to Reduce Object Hallucination
Xuan Gong | Tianshi Ming | Xinpeng Wang | Zhihua Wei
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xuan Gong | Tianshi Ming | Xinpeng Wang | Zhihua Wei
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Despite the great success of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), they inevitably suffer from hallucination. As we know, both the visual encoder and the Large Language Model (LLM) decoder in LVLMs are Transformer-based, allowing the model to extract visual information and generate text outputs via attention mechanisms. We find that the attention distribution of LLM decoder on image tokens is highly consistent with the visual encoder and both distributions tend to focus on particular background tokens rather than the referred objects in the image. We attribute to the unexpected attention distribution to an inherent flaw in the visual encoder itself, which misguides LLMs to over emphasize the redundant information and generate object hallucination. To address the issue, we propose DAMRO, a novel training-free strategy that **D**ive into **A**ttention **M**echanism of LVLM to **R**educe **O**bject Hallucination. Specifically, our approach employs classification token (CLS) of ViT to filter out high-attention tokens scattered in the background and then eliminate their influence during decoding stage. We evaluate our method on LVLMs including LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT and InstructBLIP, using various benchmarks such as POPE, CHAIR, MME and GPT-4V Aided Evaluation. The results demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the impact of these outlier tokens, thus effectively alleviating the hallucination of LVLMs.