Alexander Taylor
Author directoryAlso published as: Alexander K Taylor
2026
HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness
Xiaoxuan Wang | Haixin Wang | Alexander K Taylor | Jason Cong | Yizhou Sun | Wei Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xiaoxuan Wang | Haixin Wang | Alexander K Taylor | Jason Cong | Yizhou Sun | Wei Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents for long-horizon tasks, yet their performance is shaped not only by model capability and environment design, but also by the harness that mediates agent–environment interaction. Existing harnesses are largely manually engineered, making them difficult to scale as trajectories grow longer and interactions become more complex. In this work, we ask whether harness engineering can be formulated as an end-to-end learnable generation problem. We introduce HarnessBridge, a lightweight learnable harness policy that parameterizes the agent–environment interface as a bidirectional projection. HarnessBridge learns two bidirectional projections: observation projection, which distills raw trajectories into compact, decision-relevant states, and action projection, which converts proposed actions into executable transitions or trajectory-grounded rejections. We train HarnessBridge on a harness supervision dataset via unified instruction tuning. On Terminal-Bench 2.0 and SWE-bench Verified, HarnessBridge matches or surpasses strong specialized harnesses while substantially reducing token usage and trajectory length, and generalizes from smaller generators to larger commercial models. Our code is released at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HarnessBridge-6CDC.
TaoAnalysisBench: Do Automated Theorem Prover LLMs Generalize Beyond MathLib?
Alexander K Taylor | Junyi Zhang | Ethan Ji | Vigyan Sahai | Haikang Deng | Yuanzhou Chen | Yifan Yuan | Di Wu | Jia-Chen Gu | Kai-Wei Chang | Nanyun Peng | Amit Sahai | Wei Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Alexander K Taylor | Junyi Zhang | Ethan Ji | Vigyan Sahai | Haikang Deng | Yuanzhou Chen | Yifan Yuan | Di Wu | Jia-Chen Gu | Kai-Wei Chang | Nanyun Peng | Amit Sahai | Wei Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks largely consist of problems formalized in MathLib, so current ATP training and evaluation are heavily biased toward MathLib’s definitional framework. However, frontier mathematics is often exploratory and prototype-heavy, relying on bespoke constructions that deviate from standard libraries. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of current ATP systems when applied to a novel definitional framework. We introduce TaoAnalysisBench, an undergraduate-level benchmark derived from the exercises and definitional frameworks given in Terence Tao’s Analysis I, which formalizes analysis by constructing core mathematical concepts from scratch, without relying on standard Mathlib definitions, as well as by mixing from-scratch and MathLib constructions. For fair evaluation, we build an agentic pipeline that automatically extracts a compilable, self-contained local environment for each problem. To isolate the effect of definitional frameworks, we additionally translate every problem into a mathematically equivalent Mathlib formulation, yielding paired TaoAnalysisBench-Mathlib statements for direct comparison. While state-of-the-art ATP models perform capably within the MathLib framework, performance drops by an average of 2.18x on the definitionally equivalent Tao formulation. This indicates that the main bottleneck is limited generalization across definitional frameworks rather than task difficulty. TaoAnalysisBench thus highlights a gap between benchmark performance and applicability, and provides a concrete foundation for developing and testing provers better aligned with research mathematics.
2024
The PGNSC Benchmark: How Do We Predict Where Information Spreads?
Alexander Taylor | Wei Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Alexander Taylor | Wei Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Social networks have become ideal vehicles for news dissemination because posted content is easily able to reach users beyond a news outlet’s direct audience. Understanding how information is transmitted among communities of users is a critical step towards understanding the impact social networks have on real-world events. Two significant barriers in this vein of work are identifying user clusters and meaningfully characterizing these communities. Thus, we propose the PGNSC benchmark, which builds information pathways based on the audiences of influential news sources and uses their content to characterize the communities. We present methods of aggregating these news-source-centric communities and for constructing the community feature representations that are used sequentially to construct information pathway prediction pipelines. Lastly, we perform extensive experiments to demonstrate the performance of baseline pipeline constructions and to highlight the possibilities for future work.
2023
DICE: Data-Efficient Clinical Event Extraction with Generative Models
Mingyu Derek Ma | Alexander Taylor | Wei Wang | Nanyun Peng
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Mingyu Derek Ma | Alexander Taylor | Wei Wang | Nanyun Peng
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Event extraction for the clinical domain is an under-explored research area. The lack of training data along with the high volume of domain-specific terminologies with vague entity boundaries makes the task especially challenging. In this paper, we introduce DICE, a robust and data-efficient generative model for clinical event extraction. DICE frames event extraction as a conditional generation problem and introduces a contrastive learning objective to accurately decide the boundaries of biomedical mentions. DICE also trains an auxiliary mention identification task jointly with event extraction tasks to better identify entity mention boundaries, and further introduces special markers to incorporate identified entity mentions as trigger and argument candidates for their respective tasks. To benchmark clinical event extraction, we compose MACCROBAT-EE, the first clinical event extraction dataset with argument annotation, based on an existing clinical information extraction dataset MACCROBAT. Our experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performances of DICE for clinical and news domain event extraction, especially under low data settings.