Jie Gui
Author directory2026
EvoAgentBench: Benchmarking Agent Self-Evolution via Ability Transfer
Xingze Gao | Chuanrui Hu | Hongda Chen | Pengfei Yao | Zhao Wang | Yi Bai | Zhengwei Wu | Yunyun Han | Xiaofeng Cong | Jie Gui | Yafeng Deng | Teng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xingze Gao | Chuanrui Hu | Hongda Chen | Pengfei Yao | Zhao Wang | Yi Bai | Zhengwei Wu | Yunyun Han | Xiaofeng Cong | Jie Gui | Yafeng Deng | Teng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Agent self-evolution in long-horizon LLM systems is largely procedural: useful experience is not merely stored information, but reusable procedures for searching, debugging, and verification. Yet current evaluations do not isolate this form of transfer. Agent benchmarks test single-episode task solving; memory benchmarks target information retention rather than procedural reuse. We introduce EvoAgentBench, a benchmark for agent self-evolution with Ability-guided transfer evaluated separately in four agentic domains: web research, algorithmic reasoning, software engineering, and knowledge work. EvoAgentBench extracts trace-grounded Abilities from agent executions, canonicalizes them into operational units, and builds domain-specific Ability Graphs linking tasks that share procedural overlap. By design, every test task is backed by verified training-side Ability support. Across a 528/267 train/test split, two scaffolds, and three backbones, curated Ability content yields a positive aggregate effect and positive gains in every evaluated configuration, while gains from current automatic methods remain inconsistent across configurations. EvoAgentBench shifts self-evolution evaluation from aggregate accuracy comparison to fine-grained diagnosis of experience encoding, routing, exposure, and uptake.
2025
Dropping Experts, Recombining Neurons: Retraining-Free Pruning for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts LLMs
Yixiao Zhou | Ziyu Zhao | Dongzhou Cheng | Zhiliang Wu | Jie Gui | Yi Yang | Fei Wu | Yu Cheng | Hehe Fan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Yixiao Zhou | Ziyu Zhao | Dongzhou Cheng | Zhiliang Wu | Jie Gui | Yi Yang | Fei Wu | Yu Cheng | Hehe Fan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are widely used in large language models (LLMs) due to their computational efficiency. However, though only a few experts are activated for each token, SMoE still requires loading all expert parameters, leading to high memory usage and challenges in deployment. Previous work has tried to reduce the overhead by pruning and merging experts, but primarily focused on expert-level operations, leaving neuron-level structure underexplored. We propose DERN (Dropping Experts, Recombining Neurons), a task-agnostic and retraining-free framework for expert pruning and reconstruction. We observe that experts are often misaligned and contain semantic conflicts at the neuron level, which poses challenges for direct merging. To solve this, DERN works in three steps: it first prunes redundant experts using router statistics; then it decomposes them into neuron-level expert segments, assigning each segment to its most compatible retained expert; and finally, it merges segments within each retained expert to build a compact representation. Experiments on Mixtral, Qwen, and DeepSeek SMoE models show that DERN improves performance by more than 5% on commonsense reasoning and MMLU benchmarks under 50% expert sparsity, without extra training. It also greatly reduces the number of experts and memory usage, making SMoE LLMs easier to deploy in practice.