Chao Ma
Author directory2026
PAC: Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning of LLMs
Yuanqiang Yu | Yanzhao Zheng | Zhentao Zhang | Tianze Xu | Chao Ma | Jihuai Zhu | Jiashun Liu | Xinle Deng | Baohua Dong | Hangcheng Zhu | Ruohui Huang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuanqiang Yu | Yanzhao Zheng | Zhentao Zhang | Tianze Xu | Chao Ma | Jihuai Zhu | Jiashun Liu | Xinle Deng | Baohua Dong | Hangcheng Zhu | Ruohui Huang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to improve the reasoning abilities of LLMs, while training data span heterogeneous tasks. However, most RL post-training pipelines rely on fixed or manually designed task mixtures, even though task usefulness changes as training progresses. Online curriculum methods often define learnability by update magnitude, ignoring whether the update translates into reward gains, which can misallocate rollout budget toward tasks with large but ineffective updates. We propose PAC, a Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for multi-task RL of LLMs that combines two task-level signals: advantage-derived learnability, which measures the magnitude of the policy update a task can induce, and recent reward gains, which show whether those updates have improved task performance. A Bayesian Thompson Sampling controller uses these signals to allocate rollouts across tasks during GRPO training. We evaluate PAC under two settings: a multi-level reasoning setting and a multi-domain reasoning setting. PAC improves sample efficiency and final performance: it reaches comparable validation scores with fewer rollout steps and achieves higher final averages than random sampling and advantage-based curriculum baselines in both settings. These results show that jointly tracking advantage signals and actual reward gains yields an effective online curriculum for LLM post-training.
Counterfactual Constraint-Conditioned On-Policy Distillation for Multi-Constraint Instruction Following
Yanzhao Zheng | Yuanqiang Yu | Tianze Xu | Chao Ma | Zhentao Zhang | Jihuai Zhu | Baohua Dong | Hangcheng Zhu | Ruohui Huang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yanzhao Zheng | Yuanqiang Yu | Tianze Xu | Chao Ma | Zhentao Zhang | Jihuai Zhu | Baohua Dong | Hangcheng Zhu | Ruohui Huang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Multi-constraint instruction following requires a model to respond to a query under many simultaneously active constraints. Even strong instruction-tuned models still routinely violate some of them. Existing approaches either augment supervision with sequence- or token-level RL rewards from external verifiers or learned graders, or use on-policy distillation (OPD) against a single full-context teacher whose probability mass becomes diluted as more constraints become simultaneously active. We propose CC-OPD (Counterfactual Constraint-Conditioned On-Policy Distillation), which inverts the standard supervision-generation direction in distillation. Rather than enriching the teacher with information beyond what the student sees, CC-OPD ablates each constraint from the teacher’s conditioning in turn, and constructs the per-constraint signal from the resulting per-token probability differentials. The resulting per-token leave-one-out log-likelihood shifts are summed, clipped, and added to the vanilla OPD reward as a token-level shaping term. All shaping terms are obtained from the frozen teacher, without an external verifier during distillation, and the reward equals vanilla OPD wherever the aggregate shift is zero. Across two Qwen model pairs and seven benchmarks, CC-OPD achieves the highest average among all evaluated student-training methods. A 1.5B student trained with CC-OPD surpasses its own 7B RL-trained teacher on the MulDimIF benchmark.
2025
Deploying Multi-task Online Server with Large Language Model
Yincen Qu | Hengyue Liu | Kun Wang | Xiangying Dai | Xiaoou Lu | Hui Zhou | Chao Ma
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track
Yincen Qu | Hengyue Liu | Kun Wang | Xiangying Dai | Xiaoou Lu | Hui Zhou | Chao Ma
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track
In the industry, numerous tasks are deployed online. Traditional approaches often tackle each task separately by its own network, which leads to excessive costs for developing and scaling models, especially in the context of large language models. Although multi-task methods can save costs through parameter sharing, they often struggle to outperform single-task methods in real-world applications. To tackle these challenges, we present a three-stage multi-task learning framework for large language models. It involves task filtering, followed by fine-tuning on high-resource tasks, and finally fine-tuning on all tasks. We conducted comprehensive experiments in single-task and multi-task settings. Our approach, exemplified on different benchmarks, demonstrates that it is able to achieve performance comparable to the single-task method while reducing up to 90.9% of its overhead.
2018
Joint Neural Entity Disambiguation with Output Space Search
Hamed Shahbazi | Xiaoli Fern | Reza Ghaeini | Chao Ma | Rasha Mohammad Obeidat | Prasad Tadepalli
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Hamed Shahbazi | Xiaoli Fern | Reza Ghaeini | Chao Ma | Rasha Mohammad Obeidat | Prasad Tadepalli
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
In this paper, we present a novel model for entity disambiguation that combines both local contextual information and global evidences through Limited Discrepancy Search (LDS). Given an input document, we start from a complete solution constructed by a local model and conduct a search in the space of possible corrections to improve the local solution from a global view point. Our search utilizes a heuristic function to focus more on the least confident local decisions and a pruning function to score the global solutions based on their local fitness and the global coherences among the predicted entities. Experimental results on CoNLL 2003 and TAC 2010 benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our model.
2016
Improving Users’ Demographic Prediction via the Videos They Talk about
Yuan Wang | Yang Xiao | Chao Ma | Zhen Xiao
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuan Wang | Yang Xiao | Chao Ma | Zhen Xiao
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
2014
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Co-authors
- Baohua Dong 2
- Xiaoli Fern 2
- Zhu Hangcheng 2
- Ruohui Huang 2
- Prasad Tadepalli 2
- Tianze Xu 2
- Yuanqiang Yu 2
- Zhentao Zhang 2
- Yanzhao Zheng 2
- Jihuai Zhu 2
- Xiang Dai 1
- Xinle Deng 1
- Tom Dietterich 1
- Janardhan Rao Doppa 1
- Reza Ghaeini 1
- Hengyue Liu 1
- Jiashun Liu 1
- Xiaoou Lu 1
- Prashanth Mannem 1
- Rasha Mohammad Obeidat 1
- J. Walker Orr 1
- Yincen Qu 1
- Hamed Shahbazi 1
- Kun Wang 1
- Yuan Wang 1
- Yang Xiao 1
- Zhen Xiao 1
- Hui Zhou 1