Jian Zhang
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2026
A Survey of Quantized Graph Representation Learning: Connecting Graph Structures with Large Language Models
Qika Lin | Zhen Peng | Kaize Shi | Kai He | Yiming Xu | Jian Zhang | Erik Cambria | Mengling Feng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Qika Lin | Zhen Peng | Kaize Shi | Kai He | Yiming Xu | Jian Zhang | Erik Cambria | Mengling Feng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Recent years have witnessed rapid advances in graph representation learning, with the continuous embedding approach emerging as the dominant paradigm. However, such methods encounter issues regarding parameter efficiency, interpretability, and robustness. Thus, Quantized Graph Representation (QGR) learning has recently gained increasing interest, which represents the graph structure with discrete codes instead of conventional continuous embeddings. Given its analogous representation form to natural language, QGR also possesses the capability to seamlessly integrate graph structures with large language models (LLMs). As this emerging paradigm is still in its infancy yet holds significant promise, we undertake this thorough survey to promote its rapid future prosperity. We first present the background of the general quantization methods and their merits. Moreover, we provide an in-depth demonstration of current QGR studies from the perspectives of quantized strategies, training objectives, distinctive designs, knowledge graph quantization, and applications. We further explore the strategies for code dependence learning and integration with LLMs. At last, we give discussions and conclude future directions, aiming to provide a comprehensive picture of QGR and inspire future research.
MAXS: Meta-Adaptive Exploration with LLM Agents
Jian Zhang | Zhiyuan Wang | Zhangqi Wang | Yu He | Haoran Luo | li Yuan | Lingling Zhang | Rui Mao | Qika Lin | Jun Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jian Zhang | Zhiyuan Wang | Zhangqi Wang | Yu He | Haoran Luo | li Yuan | Lingling Zhang | Rui Mao | Qika Lin | Jun Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Language Model (LLM) Agents exhibit inherent reasoning abilities through the collaboration of multiple tools.However, during agent inference, existing methods often suffer from (i) locally myopic generation, due to the absence of lookahead, and (ii) trajectory instability, where minor early errors can escalate into divergent reasoning paths. These issues make it difficult to balance global effectiveness and computational efficiency. To address these two issues, we propose meta-adaptive exploration with LLM agents (MAXS)[https://github.com/exoskeletonzj/MAXS], a meta-adaptive reasoning framework based on LLM Agents that flexibly integrates tool execution and reasoning planning. MAXS employs a lookahead strategy to extend reasoning paths a few steps ahead, estimating the advantage value of tool usage, and combines step consistency variance and inter-step trend slopes to jointly select stable, consistent, and high-value reasoning steps. Additionally, we introduce a trajectory convergence mechanism that controls computational cost by halting further rollouts once path consistency is achieved, enabling a balance between resource efficiency and global effectiveness in multi-tool reasoning. We conduct extensive empirical studies across three base models (MiMo-VL-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-32B) and five datasets, demonstrating that MAXS consistently outperforms existing methods in both performance and inference efficiency. Further analysis confirms the effectiveness of our lookahead strategy and tool usage.
TIDE: Trajectory-based Diagnostic Evaluation of Test-Time Improvement in LLM Agents
Hang Yan | Xinyu Che | Fangzhi Xu | Qiushi Sun | Zichen Ding | Kanzhi Cheng | Jian Zhang | Tao Qin | Jun Liu | Qika Lin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hang Yan | Xinyu Che | Fangzhi Xu | Qiushi Sun | Zichen Ding | Kanzhi Cheng | Jian Zhang | Tao Qin | Jun Liu | Qika Lin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recent advances in autonomous LLM agents demonstrate their ability to improve performance through iterative interaction with the environment. We define this paradigm as Test-Time Improvement (TTI). However, the mechanisms under how and why TTI succeed or fail remain poorly understood, and existing evaluation metrics fail to capture their task optimization efficiency, behavior adaptation after erroneous actions, and the specific utility of working memory. To address these gaps, we propose Test-time Improvement Diagnostic Evaluation (TIDE), a lightweight, agent-agnostic and environment-agnostic framework that decomposes TTI into three comprehensive and interconnected dimensions. The framework measures (1) the overall temporal dynamics of task completion and (2) identifies whether performance is constrained by recursive looping behaviors or (3) by burdensome accumulated memory. Through extensive experiments, TIDE highlights that improving agent performance calls for explicitly optimizing the interaction dynamics between the agent and the environment.
GeoChallenge-90K: A Multi-Answer Multiple-Choice Benchmark for Diagram-Grounded Geometric Reasoning
Yushun Zhang | Weiping Fu | Zesheng Yang | Bo Zhao | Lingling Zhang | Jian Zhang | Yumeng Fu | Jiaxing Huang | Jun Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yushun Zhang | Weiping Fu | Zesheng Yang | Bo Zhao | Lingling Zhang | Jian Zhang | Yumeng Fu | Jiaxing Huang | Jun Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Evaluating the symbolic reasoning of large language models (LLMs) calls for geometry benchmarks that require multi-step proofs grounded in both text and diagrams. However, existing benchmarks are often limited in scale and rarely provide visually grounded multiple-choice questions, limiting reliable evaluation of complex reasoning. We introduce GeoChallenge, a dataset of 90K automatically generated multiple-choice geometry proof problems, each requiring multi-step reasoning over aligned textual descriptions and diagrams. GeoChallenge provides fine-grained complexity ratings and formal language annotations to enable controlled evaluation. Experiments on multiple advanced LLMs show a clear performance gap between models and humans (the best-performing model, GPT-5-nano, achieves 75.89 exact match vs. 94.74 for humans). Further analysis also reveals three common failure patterns of LLMs: (1) exact match failures under the multiple-choice setting; (2) weak visual reliance; and (3) overextended reasoning without convergence.
Beyond the Stability-Exploration Dilemma: Environmental Regularization for LLM Policy Optimization
Xianlei Zhou | Xiangdi Meng | Yu He | Tianyu Qi | Shuyan Guan | Xianli Zhang | Jian Zhang | Xin Li | Qika Lin | Jun Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xianlei Zhou | Xiangdi Meng | Yu He | Tianyu Qi | Shuyan Guan | Xianli Zhang | Jian Zhang | Xin Li | Qika Lin | Jun Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Policy optimization (PO) for Large Language Models faces a stability–exploration trade-off, currently mediated by an action-side Policy-KL regularizer. This puts practitioners in a double bind: keeping Policy-KL constrains response behavior and consumes the action-side exploration budget, while dropping it leaves the optimization without an explicit drift control. We argue for an alternative that breaks the dilemma by moving regularization to the input side. As training progresses, the distribution over training queries induced by the current policy drifts unchecked from its pre-RL reference distribution.
Concretely, Environment-Regularized Policy Optimization (ERPO) introduces a Query-KL (QKL) term that bounds this query distribution shift, together with a dataset-static reference-derived per-query weight that biases each per-query update toward queries typical under the reference. The QKL gradient flows strictly through the query likelihood; the response score function used by policy-gradient estimators does not appear in the QKL term, so QKL exerts no direct gradient pressure on the response distribution—exploration is preserved. ERPO plugs into GRPO/PPO/REINFORCE-style pipelines without additional forward passes. On six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ERPO replaces the standard Policy-KL regularizer while achieving effective control over query distribution drift, delivering stronger accuracy and substantially more stable behavior under high-temperature decoding and long-horizon training.
Concretely, Environment-Regularized Policy Optimization (ERPO) introduces a Query-KL (QKL) term that bounds this query distribution shift, together with a dataset-static reference-derived per-query weight that biases each per-query update toward queries typical under the reference. The QKL gradient flows strictly through the query likelihood; the response score function used by policy-gradient estimators does not appear in the QKL term, so QKL exerts no direct gradient pressure on the response distribution—exploration is preserved. ERPO plugs into GRPO/PPO/REINFORCE-style pipelines without additional forward passes. On six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, ERPO replaces the standard Policy-KL regularizer while achieving effective control over query distribution drift, delivering stronger accuracy and substantially more stable behavior under high-temperature decoding and long-horizon training.
MedForge: Interpretable Medical Deepfake Detection via Forgery-aware Reasoning
Zhihui Chen | Kai He | Qingyuan Lei | Bin Pu | Jian Zhang | Yuling Xu | Mengling Feng
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhihui Chen | Kai He | Qingyuan Lei | Bin Pu | Jian Zhang | Yuling Xu | Mengling Feng
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Text-guided image editors can now manipulate authentic medical scans with high fidelity, enabling lesion implantation/removal that threatens clinical trust and safety. Existing defenses are inadequate for healthcare. Medical detectors are largely black-box, while MLLM-based explainers are typically post-hoc, lack medical expertise, and may hallucinate evidence on ambiguous cases. We present MedForge, a data-and-method solution for pre-hoc, evidence-grounded medical forgery detection. We introduce MedForge-90K, a large-scale benchmark of realistic lesion edits across 19 pathologies with expert-guided reasoning supervision via doctor inspection guidelines and gold edit locations. Building on it, MedForge-Reasoner performs localize-then-analyze reasoning, predicting suspicious regions before producing a verdict, and is further aligned with Forgery-aware GSPO to strengthen grounding and reduce hallucinations. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art detection accuracy and trustworthy, expert-aligned explanations.
MUR: Momentum Uncertainty guided Reasoning for Large Language Models
Hang Yan | Fangzhi Xu | Rongman Xu | Yifei Li | Jian Zhang | Haoran Luo | Xiaobao Wu | Anh Tuan Luu | Haiteng Zhao | Qika Lin | Jun Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Hang Yan | Fangzhi Xu | Rongman Xu | Yifei Li | Jian Zhang | Haoran Luo | Xiaobao Wu | Anh Tuan Luu | Haiteng Zhao | Qika Lin | Jun Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on reasoning-intensive tasks, yet optimizing their reasoning efficiency remains an open challenge. While Test-Time Scaling (TTS) improves reasoning quality, it often leads to overthinking—wasting tokens on redundant computations. This work investigates how to efficiently and adaptively guide LLM TTS without additional training. Inspired by the concept of momentum in physics, we propose Momentum Uncertainty-guided Reasoning (MUR), which dynamically allocates thinking budgets to critical reasoning steps by tracking and aggregating step-wise uncertainty over time. To support flexible inference-time control, we introduce -control, a simple mechanism that tunes the reasoning budget via a single hyperparameter. We provide in-depth theoretical proof to support the superiority of MUR in terms of stability and biases. MUR is comprehensively evaluated against various TTS methods across four challenging benchmarks (MATH-500, AIME24, AIME25, and GPQA-diamond) using different sizes of recent Qwen3 models (1.7B, 4B, and 8B). Results demonstrate that MUR reduces computation by over 45% on average while improving accuracy by 0.33–3.46%.
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Co-authors
- Qika Lin 5
- Jun Liu 5
- Mengling Feng 2
- Kai He 2
- Yu He 2
- Haoran Luo 2
- Fangzhi Xu 2
- Hang Yan 2
- Lingling Zhang 2
- Erik Cambria 1
- Xinyu Che 1
- Zhihui Chen 1
- Kanzhi Cheng 1
- Zichen Ding 1
- Weiping Fu 1
- Yumeng Fu 1
- Shuyan Guan 1
- Jiaxing Huang 1
- Qingyuan Lei 1
- Xin Li 1
- Yifei Li 1
- Rui Mao 1
- Xiangdi Meng 1
- Zhen Peng 1
- Bin Pu 1
- Tianyu Qi 1
- Tao Qin 1
- Kaize Shi 1
- Qiushi Sun 1
- Luu Anh Tuan 1
- Zhangqi Wang 1
- Zhiyuan Wang 1
- Xiaobao Wu 1
- Rongman Xu 1
- Yiming Xu 1
- Yuling Xu 1
- Zesheng Yang 1
- Li Yuan 1
- Xianli Zhang 1
- Yushun Zhang 1
- Bo Zhao 1
- Haiteng Zhao 1
- Xianlei Zhou 1