Guangyu Yang


2025

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Robust Adaptation of Large Multimodal Models for Retrieval Augmented Hateful Meme Detection
Jingbiao Mei | Jinghong Chen | Guangyu Yang | Weizhe Lin | Bill Byrne
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Hateful memes have become a significant concern on the Internet, necessitating robust automated detection systems. While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promise in hateful meme detection, they face notable challenges like sub-optimal performance and limited out-of-domain generalization capabilities. Recent studies further reveal the limitations of both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and in-context learning when applied to LMMs in this setting. To address these issues, we propose a robust adaptation framework for hateful meme detection that enhances in-domain accuracy and cross-domain generalization while preserving the general vision-language capabilities of LMMs. Analysis reveals that our approach achieves improved robustness under adversarial attacks compared to SFT models. Experiments on six meme classification datasets show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming larger agentic systems.Moreover, our method generates higher-quality rationales for explaining hateful content compared to standard SFT, enhancing model interpretability. Code available at https://github.com/JingbiaoMei/RGCL

2024

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Direct Preference Optimization for Neural Machine Translation with Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding
Guangyu Yang | Jinghong Chen | Weizhe Lin | Bill Byrne
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding can significantly improve translation performance of Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, MBR decoding is computationally expensive. We show how the recently developed Reinforcement Learning technique, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), can fine-tune MLLMs to get the gains of MBR without any additional computation in inference. Our method uses only a small monolingual fine-tuning set and yields significantly improved performance on multiple NMT test sets compared to MLLMs without DPO.