Bei Peng
Author directory2026
Online Self-Weighted Fine-Tuning
Haiquan Wen | Yiwei He | Bei Peng | Guangliang Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Haiquan Wen | Yiwei He | Bei Peng | Guangliang Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) assigns the same explicit loss weight to every expert demonstration, regardless of the model’s changing competence over training queries. Reinforcement learning (RL) based methods adapt update strength using model-generated rollouts, but often require substantially more sampling and can be unstable on hard tasks. We propose Online Self-Weighted Fine-Tuning (OSW-FT), a simple method that augments SFT with online, trajectory-level weighting. For each query, OSW-FT estimates the model’s current success rate using a small number of inference-only rollouts and rescales the standard SFT loss accordingly. The optimization direction remains anchored to the expert trajectory, while the update magnitude adapts online. For binary-verifiable reasoning, we connect this weighting to SFT and RL at the gradient level, inspired by variance-reduction principles. The resulting estimator is unbiased for the exact OSW-FT surrogate update for any finite rollout count, and we analyze convergence with respect to the corresponding surrogate objective. Evaluated across Qwen3 series ranging from 0.6B to 4B on multiple challenging benchmarks (e.g., AIME), OSW-FT consistently improves over SFT on small-to-medium scale models. OSW-FT offers a favorable compute-performance trade-off as a practical approach for fine-tuning small-to-medium LLMs on binary-verifiable reasoning tasks with only 2 online rollouts.
Evaluating Criterion-Conditioned Behaviour of Large Language Models in Content Moderation
Danting Zhang | Bei Peng | Robert Loftin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Danting Zhang | Bei Peng | Robert Loftin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance on standard content moderation benchmarks. However, these benchmarks often aggregate multiple moderation criteria into a single label, making it unclear whether models can disentangle them and reliably apply each criterion when making decisions. To study whether LLMs exhibit criterion-conditioned behaviour, we introduce Diagnostic Evaluation of COntent (DECO), a criterion-independent factorisation of content that enables controlled, criterion-level evaluation. We also introduce pairwise evaluation to compare model outputs across different criteria for the same input. Across four moderation datasets and four LLMs, we find that strong benchmark performance can hide substantial failures at the criterion level. Models struggle most when correct decisions depend not on overall harmfulness, but on the specific aspect of the content that the criterion requires them to assess. Our results highlight a key limitation of current content moderation benchmarks: strong performance on aggregated labels does not provide sufficient evidence that LLMs can reliably evaluate content with respect to individual moderation criteria. These findings call for the development of evaluation methods that explicitly measure criterion-conditioned behaviour.
Synthetic Data Generation for Training Diversified Commonsense Reasoning Models
Tianhui Zhang | Bei Peng | Danushka Bollegala
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tianhui Zhang | Bei Peng | Danushka Bollegala
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Conversational agents are required to respond to their users not only with high quality (i.e. commonsense bearing) responses, but also considering multiple plausible alternative scenarios, reflecting the diversity in their responses. Despite the growing need to train diverse commonsense generators, the progress of this line of work has been significantly hindered by the lack of large-scale high-quality diverse commonsense training datasets. Due to the high annotation costs, existing Generative Commonsense Reasoning (GCR) datasets are created using a small number of human annotators, covering only a narrow set of commonsense scenarios. To address this training resource gap, we propose a two-stage method to create the first-ever synthetic dataset CommonSyn for diversified (GCR). The model fine-tuned on our synthetic data jointly increase both generation diversity and quality compared with vanilla models and the model fine-tuned on human-crafted dataset across different size Large Language Models (LLMs)
2025
Evaluating the Evaluation of Diversity in Commonsense Generation
Tianhui Zhang | Bei Peng | Danushka Bollegala
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tianhui Zhang | Bei Peng | Danushka Bollegala
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In commonsense generation, given a set of input concepts, a model must generate a response that is not only commonsense bearing, but also capturing multiple diverse viewpoints. Numerous evaluation metrics based on form- and content-level overlap have been proposed in prior work for evaluating the diversity of a commonsense generation model. However, it remains unclear as to which metrics are best suited for evaluating the diversity in commonsense generation. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic meta-evaluation of diversity metrics for commonsense generation. We find that form-based diversity metrics tend to consistently overestimate the diversity in sentence sets, where even randomly generated sentences are assigned overly high diversity scores. We then use an Large Language Model (LLM) to create a novel dataset annotated for the diversity of sentences generated for a commonsense generation task, and use it to conduct a meta-evaluation of the existing diversity evaluation metrics. Our experimental results show that content-based diversity evaluation metrics consistently outperform the form-based counterparts, showing high correlations with the LLM-based ratings. We recommend that future work on commonsense generation should use content-based metrics for evaluating the diversity of their outputs.
2024
Improving Diversity of Commonsense Generation by Large Language Models via In-Context Learning
Tianhui Zhang | Bei Peng | Danushka Bollegala
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Tianhui Zhang | Bei Peng | Danushka Bollegala
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Generative Commonsense Reasoning (GCR) requires a model to reason about a situation using commonsense knowledge, while generating coherent sentences. Although the quality of the generated sentences is crucial, the diversity of the generation is equally important because it reflects the model’s ability to use a range of commonsense knowledge facts. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown proficiency in enhancing the generation quality across various tasks through in-context learning (ICL) using given examples without the need for any fine-tuning. However, the diversity aspect in LLM outputs has not been systematically studied before. To address this, we propose a simple method that diversifies the LLM generations, while preserving their quality. Experimental results on three benchmark GCR datasets show that our method achieves an ideal balance between the quality and diversity. Moreover, the sentences generated by our proposed method can be used as training data to improve diversity in existing commonsense generators.
2023
Learning to Predict Concept Ordering for Common Sense Generation
Tianhui Zhang | Danushka Bollegala | Bei Peng
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Tianhui Zhang | Danushka Bollegala | Bei Peng
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)