Chaokun Wang
Author directory2026
Gradients Know What Outcomes Don’t: Unlocking Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning with Gradient-Aligned Rewards
Leqi Zheng | Jinbo Su | Fang Niu | Chaokun Wang | Weiping Wang | Jiajun Zhang | Shannan Yan | Jie Wu | Zhaolu Kang | Rong Fu | Hang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Leqi Zheng | Jinbo Su | Fang Niu | Chaokun Wang | Weiping Wang | Jiajun Zhang | Shannan Yan | Jie Wu | Zhaolu Kang | Rong Fu | Hang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) drives chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models, yet its binary outcome reward cannot distinguish among correct trajectories. Existing dense reward alternatives, from surface heuristics to process reward models, either ignore the expert solutions already present in training corpora or require expensive offline annotation. We propose Gradient-Aligned Reward (GAR), which operates in the policy’s own gradient space: truncated backpropagation through the output projection layer extracts a compact gradient vector for each rollout, and cosine similarity with an expert-anchor gradient yields a dense, reasoning-aware reward with less than 9% wall-clock overhead. We prove that this cosine admits a multiplicative decomposition into prediction-error and activation-pattern factors, providing a concrete characterization of what the alignment signal measures. On Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B, GAR consistently improves over GRPO and other baselines on competition-level math benchmarks and transfers to GPQA Diamond and MMLU-Pro without domain-specific data. Code and data are available at https://github.com/LQgdwind/GAR .
SciLENS: RL-Driven Autonomous Agents for Scientific Localized Evidence Navigation and Synthesis
Leqi Zheng | Jinbo Su | Yuying Li | Chaokun Wang | Weiping Wang | Haitao Li | Jiajun Zhang | Shannan Yan | Zhaolu Kang | Rong Fu | Jie Wu | Fang Niu | Hang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Leqi Zheng | Jinbo Su | Yuying Li | Chaokun Wang | Weiping Wang | Haitao Li | Jiajun Zhang | Shannan Yan | Zhaolu Kang | Rong Fu | Jie Wu | Fang Niu | Hang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The application of autonomous agents to scientific literature review is often constrained by the reliability of online search infrastructures and linear text generation. To address these limitations, we introduce SciLENS (Scientific Localized Evidence Navigation and Synthesis), an autonomous agent framework operating entirely upon a localized dual-tier data infrastructure for deterministic access to massive academic corpora. To mitigate online dependency, SciLENS utilizes a comprehensive offline toolbox featuring topological graph traversal and structural visualization. This empowers the agent to navigate deep citation networks and organize macro-level trends into structured visual representations, mitigating context exhaustion. To train this system without human annotation, we develop an automated multi-hop data synthesis pipeline validated by cross-model consensus, followed by rubric-based reinforcement learning to align the logical planning of the agent. Evaluations across standard tasks and newly constructed complex synthesis benchmarks demonstrate that SciLENS achieves robust factual precision, outperforming existing open-source baselines and achieving performance comparable to frontier proprietary models. Our source code and data are released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SciLENS-48DB .
Adaptive Text2GQL: Integrating Structural Twig Linking and Evolutionary In-Context Learning
Fang Niu | Chaokun Wang | Hang Zhang | Songyao Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Fang Niu | Chaokun Wang | Hang Zhang | Songyao Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While large language models have revolutionized Text-to-SQL tasks, translating natural language into Graph Query Languages (Text2GQL) remains underexplored due to the topological heterogeneity and syntactic diversity of graph query languages (e.g., Cypher, Gremlin, SPARQL). Existing approaches often struggle with structural hallucinations and lack adaptability in cold-start scenarios. In this paper, we present a unified, training-free Text2GQL framework. First, Structural Twig Linking elevates schema grounding to the identification of semantic substructures (“twigs”), providing robust topological priors. Second, addressing data scarcity, Evolutionary In-Context Learning operates in a Tabula Rasa setting to implicitly construct a self-growing repository of verified examples driven by syntactic utility. Finally, our Adversarial Execution-Guided Correction agent enforces fidelity through synergistic static critique and dynamic verification. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements over baselines in both accuracy and executability across diverse GQLs. The code is available at https://github.com/nf202/Text2Graph.
2025
LAGCL4Rec: When LLMs Activate Interactions Potential in Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation
Leqi Zheng | Chaokun Wang | Canzhi Chen | Jiajun Zhang | Cheng Wu | Zixin Song | Shannan Yan | Ziyang Liu | Hongwei Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Leqi Zheng | Chaokun Wang | Canzhi Chen | Jiajun Zhang | Cheng Wu | Zixin Song | Shannan Yan | Ziyang Liu | Hongwei Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
A core barrier preventing recommender systems from reaching their full potential lies in the inherent limitations of user-item interaction data: (1) Sparse user-item interactions, making it difficult to learn reliable user preferences; (2) Traditional contrastive learning methods often treat negative samples as equally hard or easy, ignoring the informative semantic difficulty during training. (3) Modern LLM-based recommender systems, on the other hand, discard all negative feedback, leading to unbalanced preference modeling. To address these issues, we propose LAGCL4Rec, a framework leveraging Large Language Models to Activate interactions in Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation. Our approach operates through three stages: (i) Data-Level: augmenting sparse interactions with balanced positive and negative samples using LLM-enriched profiles; (ii) Rank-Level: assessing semantic difficulty of negative samples through LLM-based grouping for fine-grained contrastive learning; and (iii) Rerank-Level: reasoning over augmented historical interactions for personalized recommendations. Theoretical analysis proves that LAGCL4Rec achieves effective information utilization with minimal computational overhead. Experiments across multiple benchmarks confirm our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Adaptive and Robust Translation from Natural Language to Multi-model Query Languages
Gengyuan Shi | Chaokun Wang | Liu Yabin | Jiawei Ren
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Gengyuan Shi | Chaokun Wang | Liu Yabin | Jiawei Ren
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Multi-model databases and polystore systems are increasingly studied for managing multi-model data holistically. As their primary interface, multi-model query languages (MMQLs) often exhibit complex grammars, highlighting the need for effective Text-to-MMQL translation methods. Despite advances in natural language translation, no effective solutions for Text-to-MMQL exist. To address this gap, we formally define the Text-to-MMQL task and present the first Text-to-MMQL dataset involving three representative MMQLs. We propose an adaptive Text-to-MMQL framework that includes both a schema embedding module for capturing multi-model schema information and an MMQL representation strategy to generate concise intermediate query formats with error correction in generated queries. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves over a 9% accuracy improvement over our adapted baseline methods.
TeRDy: Temporal Relation Dynamics through Frequency Decomposition for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Ziyang Liu | Chaokun Wang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ziyang Liu | Chaokun Wang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Temporal knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing facts in a knowledge graph by leveraging temporal information. Existing methods often struggle to capture both the long-term changes and short-term variability of relations, which are crucial for accurate prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel method called TeRDy for temporal knowledge graph completion. TeRDy captures temporal relational dynamics by utilizing time-invariant embeddings, along with long-term temporally dynamic embeddings (e.g., enduring political alliances) and short-term temporally dynamic embeddings (e.g., transient political events). These two types of embeddings are derived from low- and high-frequency components via frequency decomposition. Also, we design temporal smoothing and temporal gradient to seamlessly incorporate timestamp embeddings into relation embeddings. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TeRDy outperforms state-of-the-art temporal knowledge graph embedding methods.
2022
Knowledge Distillation based Contextual Relevance Matching for E-commerce Product Search
Ziyang Liu | Chaokun Wang | Hao Feng | Lingfei Wu | Liqun Yang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Ziyang Liu | Chaokun Wang | Hao Feng | Lingfei Wu | Liqun Yang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Online relevance matching is an essential task of e-commerce product search to boost the utility of search engines and ensure a smooth user experience. Previous work adopts either classical relevance matching models or Transformer-style models to address it. However, they ignore the inherent bipartite graph structures that are ubiquitous in e-commerce product search logs and are too inefficient to deploy online. In this paper, we design an efficient knowledge distillation framework for e-commerce relevance matching to integrate the respective advantages of Transformer-style models and classical relevance matching models. Especially for the core student model of the framework, we propose a novel method using k-order relevance modeling. The experimental results on large-scale real-world data (the size is 6 174 million) show that the proposed method significantly improves the prediction accuracy in terms of human relevance judgment. We deploy our method to JD.com online search platform. The A/B testing results show that our method significantly improves most business metrics under price sort mode and default sort mode.