Teng Xiao

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Pennsylvania State University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Vasant Honavar. I am interested in machine learning, reinforcement learning, language models. Specifically, I am currently working on: (i) AI Alignment with Human Values and Preferences. (ii) Reasoning and Planning for Autonomous Decision Making.

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Recent Publications

Full list on Google Scholar. * indicates co-first authors
Direct Imitation Learning: RLHF Secretly Performs Imitation Learning
Teng Xiao, Yige Yuan, Mingxiao Li, Zhengyu Chen, Vasant G Honavar
ICLR, 2025. [Code]

SimPER: A Minimalist Approach to Preference Alignment without Hyperparameters
Teng Xiao, Yige Yuan*, Zhengyu Chen, Mingxiao Li, Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Vasant G Honavar
ICLR, 2025. [Code]

DSPO: Direct Score Preference Optimization for Diffusion Model Alignment
Huaisheng Zhu, Teng Xiao, Vasant G Honavar
ICLR, 2025. [Code]

InfoPO: On Mutual Information Maximization for Large Language Model Alignment
Teng Xiao, Zhen Ge, Sujay Sanghavi, Tian Wang, Julian Katz-Samuels, Marc Versage, Qingjun Cui, Trishul Chilimbi
NAACL, 2025. [Code]

Cal-DPO: Calibrated Direct Preference Optimization for Language Model Alignment
Teng Xiao, Yige Yuan, Huaisheng Zhu, Mingxiao Li, Vasant G Honavar.
NeurIPS, 2024. [Code]

How to Leverage Demonstration Data in Alignment for Large Language Model? A Self-Imitation Learning Perspective
Teng Xiao, Mingxiao Li, Yige Yuan, Huaisheng Zhu, Chao Cui, Vasant G Honavar.
EMNLP, 2024. [Code]

3M-Diffusion: Latent Multi-Modal Diffusion for Text-Based Generation of Molecular Graphs
Huaisheng Zhu*, Teng Xiao*, Vasant G Honavar.
COLM, 2024. [Code]

Efficient Contrastive Learning for Fast and Accurate Inference on Graphs
Teng Xiao, Huaisheng Zhu, Zhiwei Zhang, Zhimeng Guo, Charu C. Aggarwal, Suhang Wang, Vasant G Honavar.
ICML, 2024. [Code]

In-Context Sharpness as Alerts: An Inner Representation Perspective for Hallucination Mitigation
Shiqi Chen, Miao Xiong, Junteng Liu, Zhengxuan Wu, Teng Xiao, Siyang Gao, Junxian He.
ICML, 2024. [Code]

Academic Services


Program Committee Member & Reviewer: NeurIPS (2022, 2023, 2024), ICML (2023, 2024, 2025), ICLR (2022, 2024, 2025), AAAI (2022, 2023), WSDM (2023, 2024, 2025), ACL ARR (2024), SIGIR (2021, 2022, 2023), RecSys (2023), CIKM (2023), TheWebConf (2022, 2023), LoG (2024), COLM (2024)

Journal Reviewer: ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, ACM Transactions on Information Systems


Jon Barron makes this nice template