Hong Zhao
Author directory2026
Code-A1: Adversarial Evolving of Code LLM and Test LLM via Reinforcement Learning
Aozhe Wang | Yuchen Yan | Nan Zhou | Zhengxi Lu | Hong Zhao | Yao Fu | Weihao Jiang | Weiming Lu | Jun Xiao | Yueting Zhuang | Yongliang Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Aozhe Wang | Yuchen Yan | Nan Zhou | Zhengxi Lu | Hong Zhao | Yao Fu | Weihao Jiang | Weiming Lu | Jun Xiao | Yueting Zhuang | Yongliang Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Reinforcement learning for code generation relies on verifiable rewards from unit test pass rates. Yet high-quality test suites are scarce, existing datasets offer limited coverage, and static rewards fail to adapt as models improve. Recent self-play methods unify code and test generation in a single model, but face an inherent dilemma: white-box access leads to self-collusion where the model produces trivial tests for easy rewards, yet black-box restriction yields generic tests that miss implementation-specific bugs. We introduce Code-A1, an adversarial co-evolution framework that jointly optimizes a Code LLM and a Test LLM with opposing objectives. The Code LLM is rewarded for passing more tests, while the Test LLM is rewarded for exposing more defects. This architectural separation eliminates self-collusion risks and safely enables white-box test generation, where the Test LLM can inspect candidate code to craft targeted adversarial tests. We further introduce a Mistake Book mechanism for experience replay and a composite reward balancing test validity with adversarial difficulty. Experiments on Qwen2.5-Coder models demonstrate that Code-A1 achieves code generation performance matching or exceeding models trained on human-annotated tests, while significantly improving test generation capability.
2023
Faithful Question Answering with Monte-Carlo Planning
Ruixin Hong | Hongming Zhang | Hong Zhao | Dong Yu | Changshui Zhang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ruixin Hong | Hongming Zhang | Hong Zhao | Dong Yu | Changshui Zhang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Although large language models demonstrate remarkable question-answering performances, revealing the intermediate reasoning steps that the models faithfully follow remains challenging. In this paper, we propose FAME (FAithful question answering with MontE-carlo planning) to answer questions based on faithful reasoning steps. The reasoning steps are organized as a structured entailment tree, which shows how premises are used to produce intermediate conclusions that can prove the correctness of the answer. We formulate the task as a discrete decision-making problem and solve it through the interaction of a reasoning environment and a controller. The environment is modular and contains several basic task-oriented modules, while the controller proposes actions to assemble the modules. Since the search space could be large, we introduce a Monte-Carlo planning algorithm to do a look-ahead search and select actions that will eventually lead to high-quality steps. FAME achieves advanced performance on the standard benchmark. It can produce valid and faithful reasoning steps compared with large language models with a much smaller model size.