Bunyamin Sisman
Author directory2026
A Pinch of SFT, A Dash of RL: When Reinforcement Learning Helps Long-Horizon Advertising Agents
Aakash Kolekar | Sahika Genc | Bunyamin Sisman | Shahriar Shariat | Shree Vandana Kachroo | Avishek Saha | Qianli Wu | Ari Singer | Benoit Dumoulin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Aakash Kolekar | Sahika Genc | Bunyamin Sisman | Shahriar Shariat | Shree Vandana Kachroo | Avishek Saha | Qianli Wu | Ari Singer | Benoit Dumoulin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Enterprise analytics agents solve long-horizon tool-use problems over distributed business data, requiring retrieval, reasoning, API calls, code execution, and adaptation to intermediate observations. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) calibrates tool syntax and teacher-supported behavior, whereas reinforcement learning (RL) can explore reward-supported behaviors beyond demonstrations; applied uniformly, however, RL can perturb already-calibrated skills. We study how to balance SFT and RL under production-mirroring beta APIs. We observe that, in our controlled experiment, checkpoint trajectories retrospectively separated into three regimes: Imitation, where SFT captured reliable teacher behavior; Lift, where both stages helped; and Discovery, where useful reward-observable behavior lay outside reliable teacher support. We leverage this prospectively, using teacher support and reward-observable headroom to route features to SFT only, SFT→RL, increased RL allocation, or further environment development. Across 18 subsequent feature-specific experiments, the diagnostic predicted 15/18 observed trajectories. On GPT-OSS 120B, targeted SFT→RL produced positive point estimates on 7/8 advertiser skills relative to a frontier Control; five positive gains had paired 95% confidence intervals excluding zero, while one skill had a confidence-supported regression. The largest gain was non-disclosure (+11.27 points; 95% CI [+9.72, +12.82]). A separate SME audit surfaced that targeted RL reduces standard leakage from 11.8% to 2.9% and adversarial leakage from 22.9% to 6.8% relative to SFT while preserving actionability (86.2% to 85.7%). In a matched uniform-versus-targeted comparison with shared rewards and optimization, targeted RL improved the seven-skill mean delta from +1.62 to +3.57 while using 43% less incremental RL compute.
2021
CoRI: Collective Relation Integration with Data Augmentation for Open Information Extraction
Zhengbao Jiang | Jialong Han | Bunyamin Sisman | Xin Luna Dong
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhengbao Jiang | Jialong Han | Bunyamin Sisman | Xin Luna Dong
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Integrating extracted knowledge from the Web to knowledge graphs (KGs) can facilitate tasks like question answering. We study relation integration that aims to align free-text relations in subject-relation-object extractions to relations in a target KG. To address the challenge that free-text relations are ambiguous, previous methods exploit neighbor entities and relations for additional context. However, the predictions are made independently, which can be mutually inconsistent. We propose a two-stage Collective Relation Integration (CoRI) model, where the first stage independently makes candidate predictions, and the second stage employs a collective model that accesses all candidate predictions to make globally coherent predictions. We further improve the collective model with augmented data from the portion of the target KG that is otherwise unused. Experiment results on two datasets show that CoRI can significantly outperform the baselines, improving AUC from .677 to .748 and from .716 to .780, respectively.
2018
LinkNBed: Multi-Graph Representation Learning with Entity Linkage
Rakshit Trivedi | Bunyamin Sisman | Xin Luna Dong | Christos Faloutsos | Jun Ma | Hongyuan Zha
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Rakshit Trivedi | Bunyamin Sisman | Xin Luna Dong | Christos Faloutsos | Jun Ma | Hongyuan Zha
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Knowledge graphs have emerged as an important model for studying complex multi-relational data. This has given rise to the construction of numerous large scale but incomplete knowledge graphs encoding information extracted from various resources. An effective and scalable approach to jointly learn over multiple graphs and eventually construct a unified graph is a crucial next step for the success of knowledge-based inference for many downstream applications. To this end, we propose LinkNBed, a deep relational learning framework that learns entity and relationship representations across multiple graphs. We identify entity linkage across graphs as a vital component to achieve our goal. We design a novel objective that leverage entity linkage and build an efficient multi-task training procedure. Experiments on link prediction and entity linkage demonstrate substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art relational learning approaches.