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Wenbo Fei

Publications and source records attributed to Wenbo Fei.

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BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model--benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness--informativeness trade-off.

cs.CL

Maximin Learning of Individualized Treatment Effect on Multi-Domain Outcomes

Precision mental health requires treatment decisions that account for heterogeneous symptoms reflecting multiple clinical domains. However, existing methods for estimating individualized treatment effects (ITE) rely on a single summary outcome or a specific set of observed symptoms or measures, which are sensitive to symptom selection and limit generalizability to unmeasured yet clinically relevant domains. We propose DRIFT, a new maximin framework for estimating robust ITEs from high-dimensional item-level data by leveraging latent factor representations and adversarial learning. DRIFT learns latent constructs via generalized factor analysis, then constructs an anchored on-target uncertainty set that extrapolates beyond the observed measures to approximate the broader hyper-population of potential outcomes. By optimizing worst-case performance over this uncertainty set, DRIFT yields ITEs that are robust to underrepresented or unmeasured domains. We further show that DRIFT is invariant to admissible reparameterizations of the latent factors and admits a closed-form maximin solution, with theoretical guarantees for identification and convergence. In analyses of a randomized controlled trial for major depressive disorder (EMBARC), DRIFT demonstrates superior performance and improved generalizability to external multi-domain outcomes, including side effects and self-reported symptoms not used during training.

cs.LG

MATES: Multi-view Aggregated Two-Sample Test

The two-sample test is a fundamental problem in statistics with a wide range of applications. In the realm of high-dimensional data, nonparametric methods have gained prominence due to their flexibility and minimal distributional assumptions. However, many existing methods tend to be more effective when the two distributions differ primarily in their first and/or second moments. In many real-world scenarios, distributional differences may arise in higher-order moments, rendering traditional methods less powerful. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework to aggregate information from multiple moments to build a test statistic. Each moment is regarded as one view of the data and contributes to the detection of some specific type of discrepancy, thus allowing the test statistic to capture more complex distributional differences. The novel multi-view aggregated two-sample test (MATES) leverages a graph-based approach, where the test statistic is constructed from the weighted similarity graphs of the pooled sample. Under mild conditions on the multi-view weighted similarity graphs, we establish theoretical properties of MATES, including a distribution-free limiting distribution under the null hypothesis, which enables straightforward type-I error control. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate that MATES effectively distinguishes subtle differences between distributions. We further validate the method on the S&P100 data, showcasing its power in detecting complex distributional variations.

stat.ME