Gu Simiu
Author directory2026
RealWorldShop: Benchmarking and Improving Conversational Shopping Agents in Real-World E-commerce
Xinwei Yang | Kelong Mao | Yudong Guo | Sulong Xu | Gu Simiu | Chen Huang | Wenqiang Lei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xinwei Yang | Kelong Mao | Yudong Guo | Sulong Xu | Gu Simiu | Chen Huang | Wenqiang Lei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models are reshaping e-commerce from static recommenders into interactive shopping assistants, yet real-world shopping requires session-level decision support: users reveal and revise constraints, coordinate multiple goals, and expect product-grounded recommendations over a full conversation. Existing benchmarks are mostly outcome-oriented or execution-oriented, leaving this evolving decision process under-evaluated. We introduce RealWorldShop, a benchmark built on 3.28M grounded products, structured shopping episodes, a profile-grounded and action-controlled user simulator, and role-play evaluation. Our analysis shows that current systems produce locally plausible responses but struggle with state tracking, constraint updating, and grounded convergence, especially under ambiguous intent, bundle, and multi-intent scenarios. We further propose RealShop_Agent, an executable session-control framework with explicit state management, shopping-flow control, catalog-grounded retrieval, and runtime guards. Experiments show that RealShop_Agent consistently outperforms strong baselines on RealWorldShop.
A Better Spur Should Start From Each Objective
Shanwen Mao | Hao Zhang | Guangtao Nie | Zhiheng Li | Huimu Wang | Sulong Xu | Gu Simiu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shanwen Mao | Hao Zhang | Guangtao Nie | Zhiheng Li | Huimu Wang | Sulong Xu | Gu Simiu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Real-world Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) often suffers from **sparse rewards**, **reward conflicts**, and late-stage **reward tug-of-war**, causing traditional linear scalarization to experience severe metric oscillations. To address optimization conflicts among multiple objectives in real-world deployment scenarios, we propose Multi-Marginal Preference Optimization (MMPO), a fine-grained framework that intervenes at the data, gradient, and constraint levels rather than relying on coarse-grained global scalarization. Specifically, MMPO performs exposure debiasing to mitigate sparse and biased rewards, applies priority-aware orthogonal projection to decouple conflicting gradients, and introduces self-prompted gradient constraints to prevent dominant objectives from overwhelming weaker ones. Experiments on real-world e-commerce datasets show that MMPO improves training stability and consistently achieves better performance across conflicting metrics. Moreover, it generalizes robustly to broader tasks such as ToolRL and code generation, demonstrating its effectiveness as a practical paradigm for multi-objective alignment.
2024
UEGP: Unified Expert-Guided Pre-training for Knowledge Rekindle
Yutao Mou | Kexiang Wang | Jianhe Lin | Dehong Ma | Jun Fan | Daiting Shi | Zhicong Cheng | Gu Simiu | Dawei Yin | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Yutao Mou | Kexiang Wang | Jianhe Lin | Dehong Ma | Jun Fan | Daiting Shi | Zhicong Cheng | Gu Simiu | Dawei Yin | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Pre-training and fine-tuning framework has become the standard training paradigm for NLP tasks and is also widely used in industrial-level applications. However, there are still a limitation with this paradigm: simply fine-tuning with task-specific objectives tends to converge to local minima, resulting in a sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we first propose a new paradigm: knowledge rekindle, which aims to re-incorporate the fine-tuned expert model into the training cycle and break through the performance upper bounds of experts without introducing additional annotated data. Then we further propose a unified expert-guided pre-training (UEGP) framework for knowledge rekindle. Specifically, we reuse fine-tuned expert models for various downstream tasks as knowledge sources and inject task-specific prior knowledge to pre-trained language models (PLMs) by means of knowledge distillation. In this process, we perform multi-task learning with knowledge distillation and masked language modeling (MLM) objectives. We also further explored whether mixture-of-expert guided pre-training (MoEGP) can further enhance the effect of knowledge rekindle. Experiments and analysis on eight datasets in GLUE benchmark and a industrial-level search re-ranking dataset show the effectiveness of our method.