Publications
Also on Google Scholar.
Ordered by publication year, then first public release date. * denotes equal contribution. Detailed write-ups are on the Research page.
2026
Last Layer Key-Value Cache is All You Need
Zefan Cai, Sai Bi, Lin Zhang, Yicong Hong, Chongjian Ge, Xun Huang, Jiuxiang Gu, Junjie Hu, Hao Tan
COLM 2026 ER Workshop (Spotlight)
PDF · Details
Test-Time Generation
Zefan Cai, Hao Tan, Yuchen Zhu, Tianyuan Zhang, Sai Bi, Haoyi Qiu, Yicong Hong, Jason Kuen, Haoliang Wang, Haozhe Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Wanrong Zhu, Molei Tao, Wen Xiao, Rajiv Jain, Junjie Hu, Jiuxiang Gu
COLM 2026 ER Workshop (Spotlight)
PDF · Details
Universal Test-Time Training
Zefan Cai*, Qinzhe Hu*, Ziqiao Ma, Hao Tan, Junjie Hu
COLM 2026 ER Workshop (Spotlight)
PDF · Website · Code · Details
Chimera: Designing and Chinchilla-Scaling Hybrid Visual Diffusion Transformers
Chongjian Ge, Hanwen Jiang, Tianyu Wang, Jiuxiang Gu, Yiran Xu, Ziwen Chen, Shaoteng Liu, Jing Shi, Yicong Hong, Zefan Cai, Hailin Jin, Hao Tan
Preprint 2026
PDF
Multi-Head Attention Residuals
Cheng Luo*, Zefan Cai*, Junjie Hu
Preprint 2026
PDF · Website · Code · Checkpoints: MHAR 8B · Checkpoints: CPT control 8B · Details
Test-Time Training with Next-Token Prediction
Xuan Ouyang*, Zefan Cai*, Junjie Hu
Findings of EMNLP 2026
PDF · Code · Details
UniTemp: Unlocking Video Generation in Any Temporal Order via Autoregressive Distillation
Lin Zhang, Sicheng Mo, Zefan Cai, Jinhong Lin, Zihao Lin, Jiuxiang Gu, Krishna Kumar Singh, Yuheng Li, Yin Li
ECCV 2026 (Poster)
PDF · Website · Code · Data · Checkpoints
Delta Attention Residuals
Cheng Luo*, Zefan Cai*, Junjie Hu
Preprint 2026
PDF · Code · Details
BabyVision: Visual Reasoning Beyond Language
Liang Chen, Weichu Xie, Yiyan Liang, Hongfeng He, Haozhe Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Zhiqi Huang, Haoning Wu, Haoyu Lu, Y. Charles, Yiping Bao, Yuantao Fan, Guopeng Li, Haiyang Shen, Xuanzhong Chen, Wendong Xu, Shuzheng Si, Zefan Cai, Wenhao Chai, Ziqi Huang, Fangfu Liu, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang, Ming Wu, Xiaobo Hu, Kaiyuan Chen, Yixin Ren, Yang Liu, Yuan Gong, Kuan Li
ICML 2026
PDF · arXiv · Website · Code · Leaderboard · Data: BabyVision · Data: BabyVision-Gen
MMGR: Multi-Modal Generative Reasoning Benchmark and Evaluation
Zefan Cai, Haoyi Qiu, Tianyi Ma, Haozhe Zhao, Gengze Zhou, Tingting Liao, Xinyan Velocity Yu, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Ke Wan, Shawn Lin, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Minjia Zhang, Wen Xiao, Jiuxiang Gu, Nanyun Peng, Junjie Hu
EMNLP 2026 (Main, Poster)
PDF · Website · Code · Data · Details
From Preferences to Prejudice: The Role of Alignment Tuning in Shaping Social Bias in Video Diffusion Models
Zefan Cai*, Haoyi Qiu*, Haozhe Zhao*, Ke Wan, Jiachen Li, Jiuxiang Gu, Wen Xiao, Nanyun Peng, Junjie Hu
TMLR 2026 · MSLD 2026 (Poster)
PDF · arXiv · Code · Details
MENTOR: Efficient Autoregressive Image Generation with Balanced Multimodal Control
Haozhe Zhao*, Zefan Cai*, Shuzheng Si, Liang Chen, Jiuxiang Gu, Wen Xiao, Minjia Zhang, Junjie Hu
Findings of ACL 2026
PDF · Website · Code · Data: Stage 1 · Data: Stage 2 · Checkpoints · Details
Learning to Select Visual Tools from Experience
Zeyi Huang, Yuyang Ji, Anirudh Sundara Rajan, Zefan Cai, Wen Xiao, Haohan Wang, Junjie Hu, Yong Jae Lee
CVPR 2026
PDF · Website · Code
2025
Scaling Up Audio-Synchronized Visual Animation: An Efficient Training Paradigm
Lin Zhang, Zefan Cai, Yufan Zhou, Shentong Mo, Jinhong Lin, Cheng-En Wu, Yibing Wei, Yijing Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Wen Xiao, Tong Sun, Junjie Hu, Pedro Morgado
Preprint 2025
PDF · Data
A Survey on Latent Reasoning
RuiJie Zhu, Tianhao Peng, Tianhao Cheng, Xingwei Qu, Jinfa Huang, Dawei Zhu, Hao Wang, Kaiwen Xue, Xuanliang Zhang, Yong Shan, Tianle Cai, Taylor Kergan, Assel Kembay, Andrew Smith, Chenghua Lin, Binh Nguyen, Yuqi Pan, Yuhong Chou, Zefan Cai, Zhenhe Wu, Yongchi Zhao, Tianyu Liu, Jian Yang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Chujie Zheng, Chongxuan Li, Yuyin Zhou, Zhoujun Li, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Jason Eshraghian
Preprint 2025
PDF · Resources
R-KV: Redundancy-aware KV Cache Compression for Reasoning Models
Zefan Cai, Wen Xiao, Hanshi Sun, Cheng Luo, Yikai Zhang, Ke Wan, Yucheng Li, Yeyang Zhou, Li-Wen Chang, Jiuxiang Gu, Zhen Dong, Animashree Anandkumar, Abedelkadir Asi, Junjie Hu
NeurIPS 2025
PDF · Website · Code · Video · Twitter · Details
AdaptiveStep: Automatically Dividing Reasoning Step through Model Confidence
Yuliang Liu, Junjie Lu, Chaofeng Qu, Zhaoling Chen, Zefan Cai, Jason Klein Liu, Chonghan Liu, Yunhui Xia, Li Zhao, Jiang Bian, Chuheng Zhang, Wei Shen, Zhouhan Lin
ICML 2025 (Poster)
PDF · arXiv · Code
Data: Eval: Math · Eval: Code · Train: L · Train: M · Train: D
Checkpoints: L · M · D
HeadInfer: Memory-Efficient LLM Inference by Head-wise Offloading
Cheng Luo, Zefan Cai, Hanshi Sun, Jinqi Xiao, Bo Yuan, Wen Xiao, Junjie Hu, Jiawei Zhao, Beidi Chen, Anima Anandkumar
ICML 2025 Workshop on Long-Context Foundation Models
PDF · arXiv · Code · Details
No Preference Left Behind: Group Distributional Preference Optimization
Binwei Yao, Zefan Cai, Yun-Shiuan Chuang, Shanglin Yang, Ming Jiang, Diyi Yang, Junjie Hu
ICLR 2025 (Poster)
PDF · arXiv · Code
Data: MMOQA USA · MMOQA USA (large) · MMOQA PK · MMOQA PK (large) · MMOQA SA · MMOQA SA (large) · Movie reviews · Movie reviews (large)
Not All Heads Matter: A Head-Level KV Cache Compression Method with Integrated Retrieval and Reasoning
Yu Fu, Zefan Cai, Abedelkadir Asi, Wayne Xiong, Yue Dong, Wen Xiao
ICLR 2025 (Poster)
PDF · arXiv · Code · Details · Data: Evaluation · Data: Reasoning
Omni-MATH: A Universal Olympiad Level Mathematic Benchmark for Large Language Models
Bofei Gao, Feifan Song, Zhe Yang, Zefan Cai, Yibo Miao, Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Chenghao Ma, Liang Chen, Runxin Xu, Zhengyang Tang, Benyou Wang, Daoguang Zan, Shanghaoran Quan, Ge Zhang, Lei Sha, Yichang Zhang, Xuancheng Ren, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
ICLR 2025 (Poster)
PDF · arXiv · Website · Code · Data · Checkpoints
COMMA: A Communicative Multimodal Multi-Agent Benchmark
Timothy Ossowski, Danyal Maqbool, Jixuan Chen, Zefan Cai, Tyler J. Bradshaw, Junjie Hu
TMLR 2025
PDF · arXiv · Code
A Spark of Vision-Language Intelligence: 2-Dimensional Autoregressive Transformer for Efficient Finegrained Image Generation
Liang Chen, Sinan Tan, Zefan Cai, Weichu Xie, Haozhe Zhao, Yichi Zhang, Junyang Lin, Jinze Bai, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
ICLR 2025 (Poster)
PDF · arXiv · Code · Checkpoints
LLM Critics Help Catch Bugs in Mathematics: Towards a Better Mathematical Verifier with Natural Language Feedback
Bofei Gao, Zefan Cai, Runxin Xu, Peiyi Wang, Ce Zheng, Runji Lin, Keming Lu, Dayiheng Liu, Chang Zhou, Wen Xiao, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
ACL 2025 (Findings)
PDF · Paper · Code · Data: Feedback · Data: Math-Shepherd
PyramidKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression based on Pyramidal Information Funneling
Zefan Cai, Yichi Zhang, Bofei Gao, Yuliang Liu, Yucheng Li, Tianyu Liu, Keming Lu, Wayne Xiong, Yue Dong, Junjie Hu, Wen Xiao
COLM 2025 (Spotlight)
PDF · arXiv · Website · Code · Twitter · Details
ML-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models and Agents for Machine Learning Tasks on Repository-Level Code
Xiangru Tang*, Yuliang Liu*, Zefan Cai*, Yanjun Shao*, Junjie Lu, Yichi Zhang, Zexuan Deng, Helan Hu, Kaikai An, Ruijun Huang, Shuzheng Si, Sheng Chen, Haozhe Zhao, Liang Chen, Yan Wang, Tianyu Liu, Zhiwei Jiang, Baobao Chang, Yin Fang, Yujia Qin, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yilun Zhao, Arman Cohan, Mark Gerstein
Authors follow the latest arXiv version (v5).
ICLR DL4C Workshop 2025 · ICLR Agentic AI for Science Workshop 2025 (Oral)
PDF · Workshop PDF · Website · Code · Data · Details
2024
Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey
Liang Chen, Zekun Wang, Shuhuai Ren, Lei Li, Haozhe Zhao, Yunshui Li, Zefan Cai, Hongcheng Guo, Lei Zhang, Yizhe Xiong, Yichi Zhang, Ruoyu Wu, Qingxiu Dong, Ge Zhang, Jian Yang, Lingwei Meng, Shujie Hu, Yulong Chen, Junyang Lin, Shuai Bai, Andreas Vlachos, Xu Tan, Minjia Zhang, Wen Xiao, Aaron Yee, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
Preprint 2024
PDF · Resources
Towards a Unified View of Preference Learning for Large Language Models: A Survey
Bofei Gao, Feifan Song, Yibo Miao, Zefan Cai, Zhe Yang, Liang Chen, Helan Hu, Runxin Xu, Qingxiu Dong, Ce Zheng, Shanghaoran Quan, Wen Xiao, Ge Zhang, Daoguang Zan, Keming Lu, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Zeyu Cui, Jian Yang, Lei Sha, Houfeng Wang, Zhifang Sui, Peiyi Wang, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
Preprint 2024
PDF · Website · Resources
Improving the Robustness of Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Uncertainty-Aware Teacher Learning and Student-Student Collaborative Learning
Shuzheng Si, Helan Hu, Haozhe Zhao, Shuang Zeng, Kaikai An, Zefan Cai, Baobao Chang
Findings of ACL 2024
PDF · Paper · Code · Data
Mitigating Language-Level Performance Disparity in mPLMs via Teacher Language Selection and Cross-lingual Self-Distillation
Haozhe Zhao*, Zefan Cai*, Shuzheng Si*, Liang Chen, Yufeng He, Kaikai An, Baobao Chang
NAACL 2024
PDF · Paper · Code · Details
Improving Event Definition Following For Zero-Shot Event Detection
Zefan Cai*, Po-Nien Kung*, Ashima Suvarna, Mingyu Derek Ma, Hritik Bansal, Baobao Chang, P. Jeffrey Brantingham, Wei Wang, Nanyun Peng
ACL 2024 (Main) — Long Paper
PDF · Paper · Code · Data · Details
VeCAF: Vision-language Collaborative Active Finetuning with Training Objective Awareness
Rongyu Zhang*, Zefan Cai*, Huanrui Yang*, Zidong Liu, Denis Gudovskiy, Tomoyuki Okuno, Yohei Nakata, Kurt Keutzer, Baobao Chang, Yuan Du, Li Du, Shanghang Zhang
ACM Multimedia 2024
PDF · Code · Details
PCA-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception-Cognition-Action Chain
Liang Chen, Yichi Zhang, Shuhuai Ren, Haozhe Zhao, Zefan Cai, Yuchi Wang, Peiyi Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
Findings of ACL 2024 · NeurIPS 2023 Foundation Models for Decision Making Workshop
Earlier workshop version: Towards End-to-End Embodied Decision Making with Multi-modal Large Language Model: Explorations with GPT4-Vision and Beyond.
PDF · Paper · Website · Code · Workshop PDF · Workshop arXiv · Data: PCA-Bench V1 · Data: Original v1.0
MMICL: Empowering Vision-language Model with Multi-Modal In-Context Learning
Haozhe Zhao*, Zefan Cai*, Shuzheng Si*, Xiaojian Ma, Kaikai An, Liang Chen, Zixuan Liu, Sheng Wang, Wenjuan Han, Baobao Chang
ICLR 2024 (Poster)
PDF · arXiv · Code · Details
Data: MIC full · MIC sampled
Checkpoints: T5 XXL · T5 XL
Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators
Peiyi Wang, Lei Li, Liang Chen, Zefan Cai, Dawei Zhu, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tianyu Liu, Zhifang Sui
ACL 2024 (Long Papers)
PDF · Paper · Code · Data
DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade
Zefan Cai*, Xin Zheng*, Tianyu Liu*, Xu Wang, Haoran Meng, Jiaqi Han, Gang Yuan, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Baobao Chang
NAACL 2024 (Main) — Long Paper
PDF · Code · Data · Details
2023
Human-in-the-Loop through Chain-of-Thought
Zefan Cai, Baobao Chang, Wenjuan Han
Preprint 2023
PDF · Details
DiffCap: Exploring Continuous Diffusion on Image Captioning
Yufeng He*, Zefan Cai*, Xu Gan, Baobao Chang
Preprint 2023
PDF · Code · Details
SANTA: Separate Strategies for Inaccurate and Incomplete Annotation Noise in Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition
Shuzheng Si*, Zefan Cai*, Shuang Zeng, Guoqiang Feng, Jiaxing Lin, Baobao Chang
Findings of ACL 2023
PDF · Code · Data · Details
Compositional Task Representations for Large Language Models
Nan Shao*, Zefan Cai*, Hanwei Xu, Chonghua Liao, Yanan Zheng, Zhilin Yang
ICLR 2023 (Poster)
PDF · Code · Data: Processed · Data: No prompt · Checkpoints · Details