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Yihong Chen
Postdoc, started 2025
Yihong Chen is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning (OATML) group, working with Yarin Gal. Her research focuses on AI safety, with an emphasis on controllable and interpretable generative models, and understanding how knowledge is structured, abstracted, and modified in large language models.
Prior to joining Oxford, Yihong completed her PhD in Computer Science at University College London through the FAIR–UCL PhD Programme. During her doctoral studies, she was also a PhD Student Researcher at Meta AI (FAIR). She received her early academic training in Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University.
Publications while at OATML • News items mentioning Yihong Chen • Reproducibility and Code • Blog Posts
Publications while at OATML:
Rethinking Data Curation in LLM Training: Online Reweighting Offers Better Generalization than Offline Methods
Data curation is a critical yet under-explored area in large language model (LLM) training. Existing methods, such as data selection and mixing, operate in an offline paradigm, detaching themselves from training. This separation introduces engineering overhead and makes the curation brittle: the entire pipeline must be re-run under model/task shifts. Moreover, offline methods alter data size through hard filtering or resampling, often sacrificing data diversity and harming generalization. We propose to rethink data curation as an online reweighting problem, where sample importance is dynamically adjusted during training via loss weighting rather than static pre-processing. Specifically, we introduce ADAPT (Adaptive Data reweighting for Pretraining and FineTuning), a dynamic online framework that reweights training samples with adaptive per-sample learning rates guided by similarity-based quality signals, without changing the number of training samples. Unlike offline methods that e... [full abstract]
Wanru Zhao, Yihong Chen, Yuzhi Tang, Wentao Ma, Shengchao Hu, Shell Xu Hu, Alex Iacob, Abhinav Mehrotra, Nicholas D.Lane
arxiv
[paper]
Decomposing LLM Computation with Jets
Large language models are becoming general knowledge engines for diverse applications. However, their computations are deeply entangled after training, resisting modularization which complicates interpretability, auditing, and long-term maintenance. We introduce Jet Expansions, a framework for expanding computational graphs using jet operators that generalize truncated Taylor series. Our method systematically decomposes language models into explicit input-to-output computational paths and complementary remainders. This functional decomposition provides a principled, knife-like operator for cutting through entanglement in LLMs, enabling scalable model inspection. We demonstrate how Jet Expansions ground and subsume the popular interpretability technique Logit Lens, reveal a (super-)exponential path structure with respect to recursive residual depth, and support several interpretability applications, including sketching a transformer language model with -gram statistics extracted fro... [full abstract]
Yihong Chen, XiangXiang Xu, Pontus Stenetorp, Sebastian Riedel, Luca Franceshi
OpenReview
[paper]