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Xuan Li

Alumni

Publications

Landscape of Thoughts: Visualizing the Reasoning Process of Large Language Models
Zhanke Zhou
Zhaocheng Zhu
Xuan Li
Mikhail Galkin
Xiao Feng
Sanmi Koyejo
Jian Tang
Bo Han
Numerous applications of large language models (LLMs) rely on their ability to perform step-by-step reasoning. However, the reasoning behavi… (see more)or of LLMs remains poorly understood, posing challenges to research, development, and safety. To address this gap, we introduce landscape of thoughts-the first visualization tool for users to inspect the reasoning paths of chain-of-thought and its derivatives on any multi-choice dataset. Specifically, we represent the states in a reasoning path as feature vectors that quantify their distances to all answer choices. These features are then visualized in two-dimensional plots using t-SNE. Qualitative analysis shows that the landscape of thoughts effectively distinguishes between strong and weak models, correct and incorrect answers, as well as different reasoning tasks. It also uncovers undesirable reasoning patterns, such as low consistency and high uncertainty. Additionally, users can adapt our tool to a model that predicts any property they observe. We showcase this advantage by adapting our tool to a lightweight verifier, which significantly improves reasoning by evaluating the correctness of reasoning paths. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/tmlr-group/landscape-of-thoughts.
2025-07-09
ICML.cc/2025/Workshop/AI4MATH (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Landscape of Thoughts: Visualizing the Reasoning Process of Large Language Models
Zhanke Zhou
Zhaocheng Zhu
Xuan Li
Mikhail Galkin
Xiao Feng
Sanmi Koyejo
Jian Tang
Bo Han
2025-06-30
ICML.cc/2025/Workshop/R2-FM (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Landscape of Thoughts: Visualizing the Reasoning Process of Large Language Models
Zhanke Zhou
Xuan Li
Zhaocheng Zhu
Mikhail Galkin
Xiao Feng
Sanmi Koyejo
Jian Tang
Bo Han
Numerous applications of large language models (LLMs) rely on their ability to perform step-by-step reasoning. However, the reasoning behavi… (see more)or of LLMs remains poorly understood, posing challenges to research, development, and safety. To address this gap, we introduce landscape of thoughts-the first visualization tool for users to inspect the reasoning paths of chain-of-thought and its derivatives on any multi-choice dataset. Specifically, we represent the states in a reasoning path as feature vectors that quantify their distances to all answer choices. These features are then visualized in two-dimensional plots using t-SNE. Qualitative analysis shows that the landscape of thoughts effectively distinguishes between strong and weak models, correct and incorrect answers, as well as different reasoning tasks. It also uncovers undesirable reasoning patterns, such as low consistency and high uncertainty. Additionally, users can adapt our tool to a neural model that predicts any property they observe. We showcase this advantage by adapting our tool to a lightweight verifier, which significantly improves reasoning by evaluating the correctness of reasoning paths.
2025-03-05
ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/LLM_Reason_and_Plan (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Less or More From Teacher: Exploiting Trilateral Geometry For Knowledge Distillation
Chengming Hu
Haolun Wu
Xuan Li
Chen Ma
X. T. Chen
Jun Yan
Boyu Wang
Xue (Steve) Liu
2023-12-22
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Teacher-Student Architecture for Knowledge Distillation: A Survey
Chengming Hu
Xuan Li
Danyang Liu
Haolun Wu
X. T. Chen
Ju Wang
Xue (Steve) Liu
Although Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown a strong capacity to solve large-scale problems in many areas, such DNNs are hard to be depl… (see more)oyed in real-world systems due to their voluminous parameters. To tackle this issue, Teacher-Student architectures were proposed, where simple student networks with a few parameters can achieve comparable performance to deep teacher networks with many parameters. Recently, Teacher-Student architectures have been effectively and widely embraced on various knowledge distillation (KD) objectives, including knowledge compression, knowledge expansion, knowledge adaptation, and knowledge enhancement. With the help of Teacher-Student architectures, current studies are able to achieve multiple distillation objectives through lightweight and generalized student networks. Different from existing KD surveys that primarily focus on knowledge compression, this survey first explores Teacher-Student architectures across multiple distillation objectives. This survey presents an introduction to various knowledge representations and their corresponding optimization objectives. Additionally, we provide a systematic overview of Teacher-Student architectures with representative learning algorithms and effective distillation schemes. This survey also summarizes recent applications of Teacher-Student architectures across multiple purposes, including classification, recognition, generation, ranking, and regression. Lastly, potential research directions in KD are investigated, focusing on architecture design, knowledge quality, and theoretical studies of regression-based learning, respectively. Through this comprehensive survey, industry practitioners and the academic community can gain valuable insights and guidelines for effectively designing, learning, and applying Teacher-Student architectures on various distillation objectives.
2023-08-08
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org