Chenhong He
Author directory2026
PersonaForge: Realistic Multi-Turn User Simulation for Agentic Systems
Hanglong Lv | Dawei Zhu | Lei Li | Bowen Ye | Huaqiu Liu | Yifan Song | Bofei Gao | Weimin Xiong | Jinhao Dong | Chenhong He | Lingpeng Kong | Qi Liu | Tong Yang | Fuli Luo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Hanglong Lv | Dawei Zhu | Lei Li | Bowen Ye | Huaqiu Liu | Yifan Song | Bofei Gao | Weimin Xiong | Jinhao Dong | Chenhong He | Lingpeng Kong | Qi Liu | Tong Yang | Fuli Luo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models are increasingly used as agentic workflow executors, yet existing training data and benchmarks largely assume informationally complete, single-turn queries. Our analysis of 16K real-world sessions shows that 75.9% of interactions are multi-turn, revealing a substantial gap between how users interact with agents and how such systems are trained and evaluated. We introduce PersonaForge, a user simulation framework for synthesizing realistic multi-turn user–agent interactions. PersonaForge combines a four-dimensional persona space, SOUL-driven behavioral control calibrated to real-user statistics, and Reverse Deep Construction grounded in authentic seed queries. Using PersonaForge, we construct a 6.3K-record training dataset and PersonaForge-Bench, a manually annotated 138-task benchmark spanning over 20 professional domains with four-dimensional scoring. Experiments on Qwen3.5-27B show that PersonaForge training improves the composite score by +4.1%, with gains across all four dimensions and the largest improvements in Task Completion (+6.0%) and Response Quality (+6.8%). Further analyses show that PersonaForge-trained agents use fewer turns and tool calls, suggesting improved interaction efficiency, while ablations confirm the contribution of SOUL components and adaptive simulation. Together, PersonaForge and PersonaForge-Bench establish a foundation for training and evaluating agents under realistic multi-turn user interaction.
Semantic Head Specialization Guides Hybrid ViT Attention for Multimodal LLMs
Chenhong He | Lei Li | Shicheng Li | Hanglong Lv | Lingpeng Kong | Qi Liu | Tong Yang | Shuhuai Ren
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Chenhong He | Lei Li | Shicheng Li | Hanglong Lv | Lingpeng Kong | Qi Liu | Tong Yang | Shuhuai Ren
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hybrid attention dominates frontier LLMs, yet Vision Transformers (ViTs) in multimodal LLMs lack a satisfactory hybrid design, with no consensus on why certain attention patterns work better. To fill this gap, we study ViT attention heads and find they differentiate into object- and background-specialist roles, a pattern most pronounced under full attention; we call this Semantic Head Specialization (SHS). We propose SHS-Index to quantify this specialization, show that it distinguishes full-attention from chunk-window ViTs, and find that it strongly tracks downstream benchmark performance. We then identify three structural factors that shape SHS—window interaction, token serialization, and local softmax allocation—and use them as design principles for hybrid attention. Guided by these factors, we design Ariadne Attention, a hybrid that matches full attention on 22 image and video tasks at 6.5 × less attention compute. Our findings establish head specialization as a measurable property for diagnosing and designing principled hybrid ViT attention at the multimodal-LLM scale.