Huan Song
Author directory2026
JudgePanel: A Compact Judge with Panel Deliberation via Adaptive Multi-Reward Reinforcement Learning
Yiyue Qian | Shinan Zhang | Huan Song | Hannah R Marlowe
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yiyue Qian | Shinan Zhang | Huan Song | Hannah R Marlowe
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
The LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm has emerged as a scalable alternative to human evaluation. However, single-model judges are limited by their inherent model biases, while multi-agent evaluation protocols that mitigate this through diverse deliberation are prohibitively expensive at inference time. To this end, we propose JudgePanel, which equips a compact Judge model with multi-agent Panel deliberation capability. Specifically, we first train on panel deliberation traces from an ensemble of strong evaluators, capturing structured patterns of discussion, disagreement, and resolution. To further improve judgment quality beyond SFT, we introduce AdaReward, an adaptive multi-reward RL algorithm that dynamically rebalances reward component weights as different objectives saturate at different rates during RL training. For practical deployment, we further design a lightweight domain specialization module for rapid adaptation to new evaluation domains with few hundred labeled samples. As a result, (i) Novel: the first framework to equip a single compact judge with multi-agent panel deliberation capability at single-model inference cost; (ii) Effective Reliable: JudgePanel with a 14B backbone outperforms judge-specialized models up to 70B across four evaluation benchmarks, demonstrates strong position consistency, and rapidly specializes to new domains with few hundred samples.
SALT: Step-level Advantage Assignment for Long-horizon Agents via Trajectory Graph
Jiazheng Li | Yawei Wang | Qiaojing Yan | Yijun Tian | Zhichao Xu | Huan Song | Panpan Xu | Lin Lee Cheong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Jiazheng Li | Yawei Wang | Qiaojing Yan | Yijun Tian | Zhichao Xu | Huan Song | Panpan Xu | Lin Lee Cheong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, enabling language agents to excel at single-turn tasks. However, their application to complex, multi-step, and long-horizon tasks remains challenging. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising avenue for addressing these challenges, mainstream approaches typically rely solely on sparse, outcome-based rewards — a limitation that becomes especially problematic for group-based RL algorithms lacking critic models, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). In such methods, uniformly rewarding or penalizing all actions within a trajectory can lead to training instability and suboptimal policies, because beneficial and detrimental actions are often entangled across multi-step interactions. To address this challenge, we propose SALT, a novel and lightweight framework that provides a finer-grained advantage assignment, derived solely from outcome rewards. We achieve this by constructing a graph from trajectories of the same prompt, which allows us to quantify the quality of each step and assign advantages accordingly. Crucially, SALT is designed as a plug-and-play module that seamlessly integrates with existing group-based RL algorithms — requiring no modifications to the rollout procedure and introducing negligible computational overhead. Extensive experiments on the WebShop, ALFWorld, and AppWorld benchmarks with various model sizes demonstrate that SALT consistently improves performance. We also conduct a thorough analysis to validate the design choices behind SALT and offer actionable insights.
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.