Erchao Zhao
Author directory2026
Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills
Jingwei Ni | Yihao Liu | Xinpeng Liu | Yutao Sun | Mengyu Zhou | Pengyu Cheng | Dexin Wang | Erchao Zhao | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jingwei Ni | Yihao Liu | Xinpeng Liu | Yutao Sun | Mengyu Zhou | Pengyu Cheng | Dexin Wang | Erchao Zhao | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on domain-specific skills, yet manually authoring such skills does not scale, and skills generated purely from parametric knowledge often miss critical operational pitfalls. We introduce Trace2Skill, a framework that consolidates broad execution trajectories in parallel into a unified skill directory through inductive reasoning over agent experience. Trace2Skill supports both deepening existing human-written skills and creating useful skills from weak LLM-generated drafts. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Trace2Skill across diverse domains, including office workflows, math reasoning, and vision QA. Importantly, the evolved skills are not merely memorized artifacts of the trajectories used to create them: they often transfer across model scales, across model families, and to out-of-distribution settings. For example, skills evolved from Qwen3.5-35B trajectories improve a Qwen3.5-122B agent by up to 57.65 percentage points on WikiTableQuestions. Further analyses show that Trace2Skill outperforms sequential skill editing and ReasoningBank-style retrieval memories, compresses recurring failures and workarounds into standard operating procedures (SoPs), and yields portable skills that can be reused without parameter updates or test-time retrieval.
MARCH: Multi-Agent Reinforced Check for Hallucination
Zhuo Li | Yupeng Zhang | Pengyu Cheng | Jiajun Song | Mengyu Zhou | Hao Li | Shujie Hu | Yu Qin | Erchao Zhao | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhuo Li | Yupeng Zhang | Pengyu Cheng | Jiajun Song | Mengyu Zhou | Hao Li | Shujie Hu | Yu Qin | Erchao Zhao | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Hallucination remains a critical bottleneck for large language models (LLMs), undermining their reliability in real-world applications, especially in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. While existing hallucination detection methods employ LLM-as-a-judge to verify LLM outputs against retrieved evidence, they suffer from inherent confirmation bias, where the verifier inadvertently reproduces the errors of the original generation. To address this, we introduce Multi-Agent Reinforced self-Check for Hallucination (MARCH), a framework that enforces rigorous factual alignment by leveraging deliberate information asymmetry. MARCH orchestrates a collaborative pipeline of three specialized agents: a Solver, a Proposer, and a Checker. The Solver generates an initial RAG response, which the Proposer decomposes into claim-level verifiable atomic propositions. Crucially, the Checker validates these propositions against retrieved evidence in isolation, deprived of the Solver’s original output. This well-crafted information asymmetry scheme breaks the cycle of self-confirmation bias. By training this pipeline with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), we enable the agents to co-evolve and optimize factual adherence. Extensive experiments across hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that MARCH substantially reduces hallucination rates. Notably, an 8B-parameter LLM equipped with MARCH achieves performance competitive with powerful closed-source models. MARCH paves a scalable path for factual self-improvement of LLMs through co-evolution. The code is at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/MARCH.