Huaiyuan Yao
Author directory2026
MASkills: Continual Skills Optimization for Multi-Agent LLM Systems
Huaiyuan Yao | Xiaoou Liu | Charles Fleming | Tianlong Chen | Hua Wei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Huaiyuan Yao | Xiaoou Liu | Charles Fleming | Tianlong Chen | Hua Wei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
LLM-based multi-agent systems have shown strong performance on complex tasks, yet continual improvement from interaction experience remains challenging. Existing self-reflection methods build experience memories, but memories are mostly hard to invoke, refine, or scale, while agent skills offer a more actionable unit: structured procedural knowledge that specifies when to act, how to act, and which resources or tools to use. We introduce MASkills, a continual learning framework that optimizes multi-agent LLM systems through agent skills. MASkills presents a new agent-optimization pipeline that integrates skill-conditioned credit assignment, hierarchical credit aggregation, and momentum-smoothed optimization, enabling agent skill libraries to evolve through refinement, induction, consolidation, and pruning. Experiments on HotpotQA, LoCoMo, and GAIA demonstrate the effectiveness of MASkills across multiple agentic tasks.
From Rubrics to Reliable Scores: Evidence-Grounded Text Evaluation with LLM Judges
Yihan Hong | Huaiyuan Yao | Bolin Shen | Wanpeng Xu | Hua Wei | Yushun Dong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yihan Hong | Huaiyuan Yao | Bolin Shen | Wanpeng Xu | Hua Wei | Yushun Dong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Rubric-based text evaluation increasingly relies on large language models (LLMs) as scalable judges, yet frozen black-box models can interpret the same criteria inconsistently, produce score attributions that are difficult to audit, and map judgments poorly onto human scoring scales. We define this challenge as criteria transfer: translating human rubric intent into a stable, auditable inference-time scoring protocol. We introduce RULERS, which locks a task-level rubric specification, executes it through structured, evidence-grounded judgments, and calibrates the resulting signals to human score boundaries. Across four rubric-governed benchmarks and multiple frozen backbone models, RULERS achieves stronger agreement with human scores in most evaluated settings, while better matching empirical score distributions and remaining more stable under semantically equivalent rubric perturbations. Calibration controls and component ablations show that these gains cannot be attributed to post-hoc alignment alone, but depend on the combination of fixed criteria, traceable evidence, and calibrated score interpretation. These findings suggest that reliable LLM judging requires faithfully operationalizing human evaluation standards rather than relying on prompt-level scoring alone. Our code is available at https://github.com/LabRAI/Rulers.git.
LangMARL: Natural Language Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Semantic Credit Assignment
Huaiyuan Yao | Longchao Da | Xiaoou Liu | Charles Fleming | Tianlong Chen | Hua Wei
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Huaiyuan Yao | Longchao Da | Xiaoou Liu | Charles Fleming | Tianlong Chen | Hua Wei
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language model (LLM) agents struggle to autonomously evolve coordination strategies in dynamic environments, largely because coarse global outcomes obscure the causal signals needed for local policy refinement. We identify this bottleneck as a multi-agent credit assignment problem, which has long been studied in classical multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) but remains underaddressed in LLM-based systems. Building on this observation, we propose LangMARL, a framework that brings credit assignment and policy gradient evolution from cooperative MARL into the language space. LangMARL introduces agent-level language credit assignment, pioneers gradient evolution in language space for policy improvement, and summarizes task-relevant causal relations from replayed trajectories to provide dense feedback and improve convergence under sparse rewards. Extensive experiments across diverse cooperative multi-agent tasks demonstrate improved sample efficiency, interpretability, and strong generalization.
Instructional Agents: Reducing Teaching Faculty Workload through Multi-Agent Instructional Design
Huaiyuan Yao | Wanpeng Xu | Justin Turnau | Nadia Kellam | Hua Wei
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Huaiyuan Yao | Wanpeng Xu | Justin Turnau | Nadia Kellam | Hua Wei
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Preparing high-quality instructional materials remains a labor-intensive process that often requires extensive coordination among teaching faculty, instructional designers, and teaching assistants. In this work, we present Instructional Agents, a multi-agent large language model (LLM) framework designed to automate end-to-end course material generation, including syllabus creation, lecture scripts, LaTeX-based slides, and assessments. Unlike existing AI-assisted educational tools that focus on isolated tasks, Instructional Agents simulates role-based collaboration among educational agents to produce cohesive and pedagogically aligned content. The system operates in four modes: Autonomous, Catalog-Guided, Feedback-Guided, and Full Co-Pilot mode, enabling flexible control over the degree of human involvement. We evaluate Instructional Agents across five university-level computer science courses and show that it produces high-quality instructional materials while significantly reducing development time and human workload. By supporting institutions with limited instructional design capacity, Instructional Agents provides a scalable and cost-effective framework to democratize access to high-quality education, particularly in underserved or resource-constrained settings.
Every Response Counts: Quantifying Uncertainty of LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems through Tensor Decomposition
Tiejin Chen | Huaiyuan Yao | Jia Chen | Evangelos E. Papalexakis | Hua Wei
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tiejin Chen | Huaiyuan Yao | Jia Chen | Evangelos E. Papalexakis | Hua Wei
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) consistently outperform single-agent systems on complex tasks, their intricate interactions introduce critical reliability challenges arising from communication dynamics and role dependencies. Existing Uncertainty Quantification methods, typically designed for single-turn outputs, fail to address the unique complexities of the MAS. Specifically, these methods struggle with three distinct challenges: the cascading uncertainty in multi-step reasoning, the variability of inter-agent communication paths, and the diversity of communication topologies. To bridge this gap, we introduce MATU, a novel framework that quantifies uncertainty through tensor decomposition. MATU moves beyond analyzing final text outputs by representing entire reasoning trajectories as embedding matrices and organizing multiple execution runs into a higher-order tensor. By applying tensor decomposition, we disentangle and quantify distinct sources of uncertainty, offering a comprehensive reliability measure that is generalizable across different agent structures. We provide comprehensive experiments to show that MATU effectively estimates holistic and robust uncertainty across diverse tasks and communication topologies.