Chenyang Zhao


2025

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VLASCD: A Visual Language Action Model for Simultaneous Chatting and Decision Making
Zuojin Tang | Bin Hu | Chenyang Zhao | De Ma | Gang Pan | Bin Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent large pretrained models such as LLMs (e.g., GPT series) and VLAs (e.g., OpenVLA) have achieved notable progress on multimodal tasks, yet they are built upon a multi-input single-output (MISO) paradigm. We show that this paradigm fundamentally limits performance in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) scenarios, where parallel task execution is required. In MISO architectures, tasks compete for a shared output channel, creating mutual exclusion effects that cause unbalanced optimization and degraded performance. To address this gap, we introduce MIMO-VLA (VLASCD), a unified training framework that enables concurrent multi-task outputs, exemplified by simultaneous dialogue generation and decision-making. Inspired by human cognition, MIMO-VLA eliminates interference between tasks and supports efficient parallel processing. Experiments on the CARLA autonomous driving platform demonstrate that MIMO-VLA substantially outperforms state-of-the-art MISO-based LLMs, reinforcement learning models, and VLAs in MIMO settings, establishing a new direction for multimodal and multitask learning.

2023

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Prompt2Model: Generating Deployable Models from Natural Language Instructions
Vijay Viswanathan | Chenyang Zhao | Amanda Bertsch | Tongshuang Wu | Graham Neubig
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Large language models (LLMs) enable system builders today to create competent NLP systems through prompting, where they only need to describe the task in natural language and provide a few examples. However, in other ways, LLMs are a step backward from traditional special-purpose NLP models; they require extensive computational resources for deployment and can be gated behind APIs. In this paper, we propose Prompt2Model, a general-purpose method that takes a natural language task description like the prompts provided to LLMs, and uses it to train a special-purpose model that is conducive to deployment. This is done through a multi-step process of retrieval of existing datasets and pretrained models, dataset generation using LLMs, and supervised fine-tuning on these retrieved and generated datasets. Over three tasks, we demonstrate that given the same few-shot prompt as input, Prompt2Model trains models that outperform the results of a strong LLM, gpt-3.5-turbo, by an average of 20% while being up to 700 times smaller. We also show that this data can be used to obtain reliable performance estimates of model performance, enabling model developers to assess model reliability before deployment. Prompt2Model is available open-source at https://github.com/neulab/prompt2model. Our demo video is posted at youtu.be/LYYQ_EhGd-Q.