Jin Xiao
2026
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents
Zhucong Li | Powei Chang | Jin Xiao | Zhijian Zhou | Qianyu He | Jiaqing Liang | Fenglei Cao | Xu Yinghui | Yuan Qi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zhucong Li | Powei Chang | Jin Xiao | Zhijian Zhou | Qianyu He | Jiaqing Liang | Fenglei Cao | Xu Yinghui | Yuan Qi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Although LLM-based agents are proven to master tool orchestration in scientific fields, particularly chemistry, their single-task performance remains limited by underlying tool constraints. To this end, we propose tool amplification, a novel paradigm that enhances the collective capabilities of specialized tools through optimized, dynamic coordination within individual tasks. Instantiating this paradigm, we introduce ChemAmp, a computationally lightweight framework that dynamically treats chemistry tools (e.g., UniMol2, Chemformer) as composable building-block agents. It constructs task-specialized super-agents that transcend atomic tool constraints with limited data (≤10 samples). Our evaluations across four core chemistry tasks molecular design, molecule captioning, reaction prediction, and property prediction demonstrate that ChemAmp outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration. Critically, this bottom-up construction strategy enables 94% inference token cost reductions versus vanilla multi-agent systems.
What Makes an Ideal Quote? Recommending “Unexpected yet Rational” Quotations via Novelty
Powei Chang | Jin Xiao | Guanglei Yue | Qianyu He | Yanghua Xiao | Deqing Yang | Jiaqing Liang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Powei Chang | Jin Xiao | Guanglei Yue | Qianyu He | Yanghua Xiao | Deqing Yang | Jiaqing Liang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Quotation recommendation enriches writing by suggesting quotations that fit a given context, but prior systems largely focus on topical relevance and overlook what makes quotes memorable. Based on a user study, we find that preferred quotations are often unexpected yet rational, motivating the goal of selecting quotes that are contextually novel while semantically coherent. We propose NovelQR, which (1) uses a generative label agent to map quotations and contexts into multi-dimensional deep-meaning labels for label-enhanced retrieval, and (2) reranks candidates with a token-level novelty estimator that mitigates auto-regressive continuation bias. Experiments on bilingual datasets across diverse domains show that NovelQR is preferred by human judges and improves overall recommendation quality over strong baselines, while achieving competitive novelty estimation.