Chen Chen
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2026
MARD: A Multi-Agent Reinforced Debiasing Framework for Large Language Models
Xiaoqing Cheng | Tao Liu | Tian Lan | Jinwang Song | Chen Chen | Hongying Zan | Wen Zhang | Huajun Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xiaoqing Cheng | Tao Liu | Tian Lan | Jinwang Song | Chen Chen | Hongying Zan | Wen Zhang | Huajun Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mitigating social bias in large language models (LLMs) has become an increasingly important research objective. However, existing methods often rely on prompt-level control or optimize bias-aware guidance and final prediction within a single model, which may lead to coupled optimization and task interference. To address these limitations, we propose MARD, a Multi-Agent Reinforced Debiasing framework that decomposes debiasing into two role-specialized agents. The Bias-Guard Agent identifies stereotype cues and generates bias-control guidance, while the Evidence-Decision Agent produces evidence-grounded predictions without relying on identity-based assumptions. MARD further introduces retrieved group-related references as negative warning signals to expose potential stereotype cues, and adopts an alternating GRPO optimization strategy to improve role specialization. Experiments on five datasets across four task types demonstrate that MARD achieves strong overall debiasing performance. Further analyses highlight the effectiveness of role decoupling, alternating optimization, format control, and retrieved warning references.
Taming "Zombie" Agents: A Markov State-Aware Framework for Resilient Multi-Agent Evolution
Taolin Zhang | Pukun Zhao | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Chen Chen | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Taolin Zhang | Pukun Zhao | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Chen Chen | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advancements in LLM-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable collaborative capabilities across complex tasks. To enhance the overall efficiency, existing methods often rely on aggressive graph topology evolution for agents (e.g., node or edge pruning), which risks prematurely discarding valuable agents due to transient issues such as hallucinations or temporary knowledge gaps. However, such hard pruning overlooks the potential for “zombie” agents to recover and contribute in subsequent discussion rounds. In this paper, we propose AgentRevive, a Markov state-aware framework for resilient multi-agent evolution. Our approach dynamically manages agent collaboration through soft state transitions, implemented via two key components: (1) State-Aware Policy Learning: Agent states are divided into “Active”, “Standby”, and “Terminated”, selectively propagating messages based on agent memory. The policy employs a risk estimator to optimize agent state transitions by assessing hallucination risk, minimizing the influence of unreliable nodes while safeguarding valuable ones. (2) State-Aware Edge Optimization: Subgraph edges are pruned according to states learned from the policy, permanently removing “Terminated” nodes and retaining “Standby” nodes for subsequent rounds to observe potential future contributions. Extensive experiments on general reasoning, domain-specific, and hallucination challenge tasks show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines and significantly reduces token consumption through state-aware agent scheduling.
AMATA: Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment for Knowledge-Intensive Question Answering
Taolin Zhang | Dongyang Li | Chen Chen | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Taolin Zhang | Dongyang Li | Chen Chen | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Despite substantial advances in large language models (LLMs), producing factually consistent responses for knowledge-intensive question answering remains challenging. These difficulties are primarily due to hallucination and the limitations of LLMs in bridging long-tail knowledge gaps. To address this, we propose AMATA, an Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment framework that dynamically integrates external knowledge to improve response interpretability and factual grounding. Our architecture leverages six specialized agents that collaboratively perform structured actions for complex question reasoning. We formalize multi-agent collaboration with external tools as a trajectory preference alignment problem, incorporating question-aware agent customization and inter-agent preference harmonization. AMATA introduces two principal innovations: (1) Intra-Trajectory Preference Learning, which learns objective-oriented preferences to prioritize critical agents, and (2) Inter-Agent Dependency Learning, which captures cross-agent tool dependencies through a novel dependency-aware direct preference optimization technique. Empirical results show that AMATA consistently outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLM-based trajectory systems on five established knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. Further analysis demonstrates the efficiency of our method in reducing token consumption.