Guande Wu
Author directory2026
CLEAR: Context Augmentation from Contrastive Learning of Experience via Agentic Reflection
Linbo Liu | Guande Wu | Han Ding | Yawei Wang | Qiang Zhou | Yuzhe Lu | Zhichao Xu | Huan Song | Panpan Xu | Lin Lee Cheong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Linbo Liu | Guande Wu | Han Ding | Yawei Wang | Qiang Zhou | Yuzhe Lu | Zhichao Xu | Huan Song | Panpan Xu | Lin Lee Cheong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language model agents rely on effective model context to obtain task-relevant information for decision-making. Many existing context engineering approaches primarily rely on the context generated from the past experience and retrieval mechanisms that reuse these context. However, retrieved context from past tasks must be adapted by the execution agent to fit new situations, placing additional reasoning burden on the underlying LLM. To address this limitation, we propose a generative context augmentation framework using Contrastive Learning of Experience via Agentic Reflection (CLEAR). CLEAR first employs a reflection agent to perform contrastive analysis over past execution trajectories and summarize useful context for each observed task. These summaries are then used as supervised fine-tuning data to train a context augmentation model (CAM). Then we further optimize CAM using reinforcement learning, where the reward signal is obtained by running the task execution agent. By learning to generate task-specific knowledge rather than retrieve knowledge from the past, CAM produces context that is better tailored to the current task. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on the AppWorld and WebShop benchmarks. Experimental results show that CLEAR consistently outperforms strong baselines. It improves task completion rate from 72.62% to 81.15% on AppWorld test set and averaged reward from 0.68 to 0.74 on a subset of WebShop, compared with baseline agent.
2024
Your Co-Workers Matter: Evaluating Collaborative Capabilities of Language Models in Blocks World
Guande Wu | Chen Zhao | Claudio Silva | He He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Guande Wu | Chen Zhao | Claudio Silva | He He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Language agents that interact with the world on their own have great potential for automating digital tasks. While large language model (LLM) agents have made progress in understanding and executing tasks such as textual games and webpage control, many real-world tasks also require collaboration with humans or other LLMs in equal roles, which involves intent understanding, task coordination, and communication. To test LLM’s ability to collaborate, we design a blocks-world environment, where two agents, each having unique goals and skills, build a target structure together. To complete the goals, they can act in the world and communicate in natural language. Under this environment, we design increasingly challenging settings to evaluate different collaboration perspectives, from independent to more complex, dependent tasks. We further adopt chain-of-thought prompts that include intermediate reasoning steps to model the partner’s state and identify and correct execution errors. Both human-machine and machine-machine experiments show that LLM agents have strong grounding capacities, and our approach significantly improves the evaluation metric.