Hanrong Zhang
Author directory2026
AutoCRAT: Within-trajectory Joint Control of Stochasticity and Compute for LLM Reasoning
Hanjun Luo | Qiushi Liu | Jingya Zhang | Haihong Pang | Jiaheng Wen | Yifei. Ma | Yu Yao | Chengxi Zhang | Hanrong Zhang | Yankai Chen | Hanan Salam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Hanjun Luo | Qiushi Liu | Jingya Zhang | Haihong Pang | Jiaheng Wen | Yifei. Ma | Yu Yao | Chengxi Zhang | Hanrong Zhang | Yankai Chen | Hanan Salam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning performance, which depends critically on inference-time decisions. Yet these decisions are commonly handled by static, one-size-fits-all policies, limiting adaptation to diverse tasks and reasoning stages. Recent adaptive methods partially address this limitation, but they primarily adapt either decoding stochasticity (how the model explores) or reasoning compute (how long the model reasons) in isolation, leaving their interaction within a single reasoning trajectory unmodeled. To address this challenge, we shift toward a within-trajectory joint control view, and instantiate it in AutoCRAT, a decoder-side controller for frozen backbones. Using only signals available during decoding, AutoCRAT jointly adjusts sampling stochasticity and reasoning budget during generation. AutoCRAT operates over a discrete action space and updates control decisions only at semantic boundaries, improving stability while remaining responsive to the evolving reasoning process. Comprehensive evaluation across 6 benchmarks demonstrates that AutoCRAT (I) uses 13.8-52.7% fewer inference tokens on average than recommended static configurations, (II) surpasses recommended static and adaptive single-axis baselines by 1.5-4.5% in relative accuracy, and (III) enjoys strong cross-backbone transferability.
Unveiling Language Routing Isolation in Multilingual MoE Models for Interpretable Subnetwork Adaptation
Kening Zheng | Wei-Chieh Huang | Jiahao Huo | Zhonghao Li | Henry Peng Zou | Yibo Yan | Xin Zou | Jungang Li | Hanrong Zhang | Xuming Hu | Philip S. Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Kening Zheng | Wei-Chieh Huang | Jiahao Huo | Zhonghao Li | Henry Peng Zou | Yibo Yan | Xin Zou | Jungang Li | Hanrong Zhang | Xuming Hu | Philip S. Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models exhibit striking performance disparities across languages, yet the internal mechanisms driving these gaps remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of expert routing patterns in MoE models, revealing a phenomenon we term *Language Routing Isolation*, in which high- and low-resource languages tend to activate largely disjoint expert sets. Through layer-stratified analysis, we further show that routing patterns first converge and then diverge across model depth. Building on these findings, we propose **RISE** (routing isolation-guided subnetwork enhancement), a framework that identifies and adapts language-specific expert subnetworks. RISE uses a tripartite selection strategy: specificity scores select language-specific experts in shallow and deep layers, while overlap scores select universal experts in middle layers. By training only the selected subnetwork while freezing the rest of the model, RISE improves low-resource performance while preserving other-language capabilities. Across 10 languages, RISE achieves target-language F1 gains of up to 10.85% with minimal cross-lingual degradation.
LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Survey
Henry Peng Zou | Wei-Chieh Huang | Yaozu Wu | Jizhou Guo | Yankai Chen | Chunyu Miao | Hoang H Nguyen | Yue Zhou | Weizhi Zhang | Liancheng Fang | Hanrong Zhang | Fangxin Wang | Pengfei Zhang | Langzhou He | Yangning Li | Dongyuan Li | Renhe Jiang | Philip S. Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Henry Peng Zou | Wei-Chieh Huang | Yaozu Wu | Jizhou Guo | Yankai Chen | Chunyu Miao | Hoang H Nguyen | Yue Zhou | Weizhi Zhang | Liancheng Fang | Hanrong Zhang | Fangxin Wang | Pengfei Zhang | Langzhou He | Yangning Li | Dongyuan Li | Renhe Jiang | Philip S. Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. However, fully autonomous LLM-based agents still face significant challenges, including limited reliability due to hallucinations, difficulty in handling complex tasks, and substantial safety and ethical risks, all of which limit their feasibility and trustworthiness in real-world applications. To overcome these limitations, LLM-based human-agent systems (LLM-HAS) incorporate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety. These human-agent collaboration systems enable humans and LLM-based agents to collaborate effectively by leveraging their complementary strengths.This paper provides the first comprehensive and structured survey of LLM-HAS. It clarifies fundamental concepts, systematically presents core components shaping these systems, including environment and profiling, human feedback, interaction types, orchestration, and communication, explores emerging applications, and discusses unique challenges and opportunities arising from human-AI collaboration. By consolidating current knowledge and offering a structured overview, we aim to foster further research and innovation in this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field. Paper lists and resources are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/Awesome-Human-Agent-Collaboration-Interaction-Systems.
AdaptiveK: Complexity-Driven Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Language Model Representations
Yifei Yao | Hanrong Zhang | Mengnan Du
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yifei Yao | Hanrong Zhang | Mengnan Du
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for interpretability research. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) offer a promising solution by decomposing activations into interpretable features, but existing approaches rely on fixed sparsity constraints that fail to account for input complexity. We propose AdaptiveK SAE (Adaptive Top K Sparse Autoencoders), a novel framework that dynamically adjusts sparsity levels based on the semantic complexity of each input. Leveraging linear probes, we demonstrate that context complexity is linearly encoded in LLM representations, and we use this signal to guide feature allocation during training. Experiments across ten language models demonstrate that this complexity-driven adaptation outperforms fixed-sparsity approaches on reconstruction fidelity, explained variance, cosine similarity and interpretability metrics while eliminating the burden of extensive hyperparameter tuning. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hiyukie/adaptiveK.
OpenSkill: Open-World Self-Evolution for LLM Agents
Zhiling Yan | Dingjie Song | Hanrong Zhang | Wei Liang | Yuxuan Zhang | Yutong Dai | Lifang He | Philip S. Yu | Ran Xu | Xiang Li | Lichao Sun
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhiling Yan | Dingjie Song | Hanrong Zhang | Wei Liang | Yuxuan Zhang | Yutong Dai | Lifang He | Philip S. Yu | Ran Xu | Xiang Li | Lichao Sun
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Self-evolving agents requires adaptation after deployment, but existing approaches assume a usable learning loop, such as curated skills, successful trajectories, or verifier signals. Real open-world deployments may provide none of these, offering only a task prompt. In this work, we study *open-world self-evolution*, where an agent must build both its skills and its own verification signals from scratch, using open-world resources but no target-task supervision. We propose **OpenSkill**, a framework that bootstraps this loop: it acquires grounded knowledge and verification anchors from documentation, repositories, and the web, synthesizes them into transferable skills, and refines those skills against self-built virtual tasks grounded in the anchors rather than in target answers. The open world thus supplies both the knowledge to be learned and a supervision-independent practice environment, with target-task supervision reserved for final evaluation. Across three benchmarks and two target agents, OpenSkill attains the best automated pass rate while satisfying the no-supervision constraint. Analysis shows its skills transfer across models without model-specific adaptation, and its self-built verifier aligns with ground-truth outcomes despite never accessing them.
Dr. Claw: An AI Scientist Workspace for Vibe Research
Dingjie Song | Hanrong Zhang | Dawei Liu | Yixin Liu | Zongxia Li | Zhengqing Yuan | Siqi Zhang | Henry Peng Zou | Zhiling Yan | Yuxuan Zhang | Yanfang Ye | Philip S. Yu | Lichao Sun
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Dingjie Song | Hanrong Zhang | Dawei Liu | Yixin Liu | Zongxia Li | Zhengqing Yuan | Siqi Zhang | Henry Peng Zou | Zhiling Yan | Yuxuan Zhang | Yanfang Ye | Philip S. Yu | Lichao Sun
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Command-line coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Gemini CLI) can already read and write files and sustain long sessions, yet end-to-end research still fragments across chat tools, IDEs, terminals, and writing environments, and the decisions that make it auditable are rarely preserved. We present **Dr. Claw**, an open-source workspace that wraps existing coding-agent executors in a *controllable* and *auditable* human-in-the-loop workflow rather than introducing another autonomous agent. Persistent state objects, a reusable skill library, and multi-executor coordination link human decisions to AI execution, turning planning, execution, and writing into one traceable, recoverable loop. We demonstrate Dr. Claw through an interactive three-view scenario and a failure-recovery walkthrough, and evaluate it against a bare command-line agent sharing the same backend executor, so the comparison contrasts the whole orchestration layer (task graph, state objects, and skill library) with the agent it wraps. Holding the executor fixed, Dr. Claw scores higher on research completeness while persisting an auditable, recoverable process trail. Demo access: repository https://github.com/OpenLAIR/dr-claw, released under AGPL-3.0 with GPL-3.0 upstream components.
GAM: Hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory for LLM Agents
Zhaofen Wu | Hanrong Zhang | Fulin Lin | Wujiang Xu | Xinran Xu | Yankai Chen | Henry Peng Zou | Shaowen Chen | Weizhi Zhang | Xue Liu | Philip S. Yu | Hongwei Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhaofen Wu | Hanrong Zhang | Fulin Lin | Wujiang Xu | Xinran Xu | Yankai Chen | Henry Peng Zou | Shaowen Chen | Weizhi Zhang | Xue Liu | Philip S. Yu | Hongwei Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
To sustain coherent long-term interactions, Large Language Model (LLM) agents must navigate the tension between acquiring new information and retaining prior knowledge. Current unified stream-based memory systems facilitate context updates but remain vulnerable to interference from transient noise. Conversely, discrete structured memory architectures provide robust knowledge retention but often struggle to adapt to fluid narrative evolution. To address this, we propose GAM, a hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory framework that explicitly decouples memory encoding from consolidation to effectively resolve the conflict between rapid context perception and stable knowledge retention. By isolating ongoing dialogue in a event progression graph and integrating it into a topic associative network only upon semantic shifts, our approach minimizes interference while preserving long-term consistency. Additionally, we introduce a Graph-guided, Multi-factor Retrieval strategy to enhance context precision. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongDialQA benchmarks indicate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency.
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Co-authors
- Philip S. Yu 5
- Henry Peng Zou 4
- Yankai Chen 3
- Wei-Chieh Huang 2
- Dingjie Song 2
- Lichao Sun 2
- Zhiling Yan 2
- Weizhi Zhang 2
- Yuxuan Zhang 2
- Shaowen Chen 1
- Yutong Dai 1
- Mengnan Du 1
- Liancheng Fang 1
- Jizhou Guo 1
- Langzhou He 1
- Lifang He 1
- Xuming Hu 1
- Jiahao Huo 1
- Renhe Jiang 1
- Dongyuan Li 1
- Jungang Li 1
- Xiang Li 1
- Yangning Li 1
- Zhonghao Li 1
- Zongxia Li 1
- Wei Liang 1
- Fulin Lin 1
- Dawei Liu 1
- Qiushi Liu 1
- Xue Liu 1
- Yixin Liu 1
- Hanjun Luo 1
- Yifei. Ma 1
- Chunyu Miao 1
- Hoang H Nguyen 1
- Haihong Pang 1
- Hanan Salam 1
- Fangxin Wang 1
- Hongwei Wang 1
- Jiaheng Wen 1
- Yaozu Wu 1
- Zhaofen Wu 1
- Ran Xu 1
- Wujiang Xu 1
- Xinran Xu 1
- Yibo Yan 1
- Yifei Yao 1
- Yu Yao 1
- Yanfang Ye 1
- Zhengqing Yuan 1
- Chengxi Zhang 1
- Jingya Zhang 1
- Pengfei Zhang 1
- Siqi Zhang 1
- Kening Zheng 1
- Yue Zhou 1
- Xin Zou 1