Ding Chen
Author directory2026
xVerify: Efficient Answer Verifier for Reasoning Model Evaluations
Ding Chen | Qingchen Yu | Pengyuan Wang | Mengting Hu | Wentao Zhang | Zhengren Wang | Bo Tang | Feiyu Xiong | Xinchi Li | Chao Wang | Mingchuan Yang | Zhiyu li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Ding Chen | Qingchen Yu | Pengyuan Wang | Mengting Hu | Wentao Zhang | Zhengren Wang | Bo Tang | Feiyu Xiong | Xinchi Li | Chao Wang | Mingchuan Yang | Zhiyu li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
With the release of OpenAI’s o1 model, reasoning models that adopt slow-thinking strategies have become increasingly common. Their outputs often contain complex reasoning, intermediate steps, and self-reflection, making existing evaluation methods and reward models inadequate. In particular, they struggle to judge answer equivalence and to reliably extract final answers from long, complex responses. To address this challenge, we propose xVerify, an efficient answer verifier for evaluating reasoning models. xVerify shows strong equivalence judgment capabilities, enabling accurate comparison between model outputs and reference answers across diverse question types. To train and evaluate xVerify, we construct the VAR dataset, consisting of multi-round annotated QA pairs generated by multiple LLMs across challenging reasoning tasks. Experimental results on both test and generalization sets show that all xVerify variants achieve over 95% F1 score and accuracy. Notably, the smallest model, xVerify-0.5B-I, outperforms all evaluation methods except GPT-4o, while xVerify-3B-Ib surpasses GPT-4o in overall performance. In addition, reinforcement learning experiments using xVerify as the reward model yield an 18.4% improvement for Qwen2.5-7B compared with direct generation, exceeding the gains achieved with Math Verify as the reward. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of xVerify. All xVerify resources are available on [GitHub](https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/xVerify).
HaluMem: Evaluating Hallucinations in Memory Systems of Agents
Ding Chen | Simin Niu | Li Kehang | Peng Liu | Xiangping Zheng | Bo Tang | Xinchi Li | Feiyu Xiong | Zhiyu li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ding Chen | Simin Niu | Li Kehang | Peng Liu | Xiangping Zheng | Bo Tang | Xinchi Li | Feiyu Xiong | Zhiyu li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Memory systems are essential for enabling long-term learning and sustained interaction in AI systems such as LLMs and agents. However, memory storage and retrieval often suffer from hallucinations, including fabrication, errors, conflicts, and omissions. Existing evaluations mainly rely on end-to-end question answering, making it difficult to identify which memory operation causes hallucinations. To address this, we propose the Hallucination in Memory Benchmark (HaluMem), the first operation-level benchmark for evaluating hallucinations in memory systems. HaluMem defines three tasks (memory extraction, memory updating, and memory question answering) to comprehensively reveal hallucination behaviors across different operational stages of interaction. To support evaluation, we construct user-centric, multi-turn human-AI interaction datasets, HaluMem-Medium and HaluMem-Long, containing about 15k memory points and 3.5k questions. The datasets feature long dialogues, with average lengths of 1.5k and 2.6k turns and context sizes exceeding 1M tokens, enabling evaluation across varying context scales and task complexities. Experiments on HaluMem show that current memory systems tend to introduce and accumulate hallucinations during extraction and updating, which then propagate to question answering. These findings highlight the need for interpretable and constrained memory operation mechanisms to improve memory reliability. All resources are available at GitHub.
Inside Out: Evolving User-Centric Core Memory Trees for Long-Term Personalized Dialogue Systems
Jihao Zhao | Ding Chen | Zhaoxin Fan | Kerun Xu | Mengting Hu | Bo Tang | Feiyu Xiong | Zhiyu li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jihao Zhao | Ding Chen | Zhaoxin Fan | Kerun Xu | Mengting Hu | Bo Tang | Feiyu Xiong | Zhiyu li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Existing long-term personalized dialogue systems struggle to reconcile unbounded interaction streams with finite context constraints, often succumbing to memory noise accumulation, reasoning degradation, and persona inconsistency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Inside Out, a framework that utilizes a globally maintained PersonaTree as the carrier of long-term user profiling. By constraining the trunk with an initial schema and updating the branches and leaves, PersonaTree enables controllable growth, achieving memory compression while preserving consistency. Moreover, we train a lightweight MemListener via reinforcement learning with process-based rewards to produce structured, executable, and interpretable ADD, UPDATE, DELETE, NO_OP operations, thereby supporting the dynamic evolution of the personalized tree. During response generation, PersonaTree is directly leveraged to enhance outputs in latency-sensitive scenarios; when users require more details, the agentic mode is triggered to introduce details on-demand under the constraints of the PersonaTree. Experiments show that PersonaTree outperforms full-text concatenation and various personalized memory systems in suppressing contextual noise and maintaining persona consistency. Notably, the small MemListener model achieves memory-operation decision performance comparable to, or even surpassing, powerful reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1-0528 and Gemini-3-Pro.
2025
GuessArena: Guess Who I Am? A Self-Adaptive Framework for Evaluating LLMs in Domain-Specific Knowledge and Reasoning
Qingchen Yu | Zifan Zheng | Ding Chen | Simin Niu | Bo Tang | Feiyu Xiong | Zhiyu Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Qingchen Yu | Zifan Zheng | Ding Chen | Simin Niu | Bo Tang | Feiyu Xiong | Zhiyu Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has traditionally relied on static benchmarks, a paradigm that poses two major limitations: (1) predefined test sets lack adaptability to diverse application domains, and (2) standardized evaluation protocols often fail to capture fine-grained assessments of domain-specific knowledge and contextual reasoning abilities. To overcome these challenges, we propose GuessArena, an adaptive evaluation framework grounded in adversarial game-based interactions. Inspired by the interactive structure of the Guess Who I Am? game, our framework seamlessly integrates dynamic domain knowledge modeling with progressive reasoning assessment to improve evaluation fidelity. Empirical studies across five vertical domains-finance, healthcare, manufacturing, information technology, and education-demonstrate that GuessArena effectively distinguishes LLMs in terms of domain knowledge coverage and reasoning chain completeness. Compared to conventional benchmarks, our method provides substantial advantages in interpretability, scalability, and scenario adaptability.