Jingqing Ruan
Author directory2026
Revisiting Entropy Regularization: Adaptive Coefficient Unlocks Its Potential for LLM Reinforcement Learning
Xiaoyun Zhang | Xiaojian Yuan | Di Huang | Wang You | Chen Hu | Jingqing Ruan | Kejiang Chen | Xing Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xiaoyun Zhang | Xiaojian Yuan | Di Huang | Wang You | Chen Hu | Jingqing Ruan | Kejiang Chen | Xing Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Reasoning ability has become a defining capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerging as a key paradigm to enhance it. However, RLVR training often suffers from policy entropy collapse, where the policy becomes overly deterministic, hindering exploration and limiting reasoning performance. While entropy regularization is a common remedy, its effectiveness is highly sensitive to the fixed coefficient, making it unstable across tasks and models. In this work, we revisit entropy regularization in RLVR and argue that its potential has been largely underestimated. Our analysis shows that (i) tasks of varying difficulty demand distinct exploration intensities, and (ii) balanced exploration may require the policy entropy to be maintained within a moderate range below its initial level. Therefore, we propose Adaptive Entropy Regularization (AER) — a framework that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation via three components: difficulty-aware coefficient allocation, initial-anchored target entropy, and dynamic global coefficient adjustment. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that AER consistently outperforms baselines, improving both reasoning accuracy and exploration capability. Codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AER-ACL .
TRUST-SQL: Tool-Integrated Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL over Unknown Schemas
Ai Jian | Xiaoyun Zhang | Eryu Guo | Wanrou Du | Jingqing Ruan | Haojin Yang | Jiangbo Pei | Weipeng Zhang | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ai Jian | Xiaoyun Zhang | Eryu Guo | Wanrou Du | Jingqing Ruan | Haojin Yang | Jiangbo Pei | Weipeng Zhang | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Text-to-SQL parsing has achieved remarkable progress under the Full Schema Assumption, where the complete database structure is pre-loaded into the model’s context. Yet this assumption overlooks a more fundamental capability question of whether an LLM agent can resolve a query without explicit access to the underlying tables and relations. Moreover, full-schema injection may exceed the effective context window, introduce irrelevant metadata into the reasoning process, and become less reliable as databases evolve. We therefore study the Unknown Schema setting, in which an agent must actively explore the database and commit to only the relevant subset of metadata. To address this, we propose TRUST-SQL (Truthful Reasoning with Unknown Schema via Tools). We formulate the task as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process in which our autonomous agent follows a structured four-phase protocol to ground reasoning in verified metadata. This protocol provides a structural boundary for our novel Phase-Aware GRPO strategy, which applies token-level masked advantages to isolate exploration rewards from execution outcomes and resolve credit assignment, yielding a 9.9% relative improvement over standard GRPO. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that TRUST-SQL is effective at multiple scales (4B/ 8B/14B). Despite operating entirely without pre-loaded metadata, our agent matches or surpasses prior baselines on most benchmarks that rely on schema prefilling.
SCOPE: Signal-Calibrated On-Policy Distillation Enhancement with Dual-Path Adaptive Weighting
Binbin Zheng | Xing Ma | Yiheng Liang | Jingqing Ruan | Xiaoliang Fu | Kepeng Lin | Benchang Zhu | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Binbin Zheng | Xing Ma | Yiheng Liang | Jingqing Ruan | Xiaoliang Fu | Kepeng Lin | Benchang Zhu | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
On-policy reinforcement learning has become the dominant paradigm for reasoning alignment in large language models, yet its sparse, outcome-level rewards make token-level credit assignment notoriously difficult. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) alleviates this by introducing dense, token-level KL supervision from a teacher model, but typically applies this supervision uniformly across all rollouts, ignoring fundamental differences in signal quality. We propose **S**ignal-**C**alibrated **O**n-**P**olicy Distillation **E**nhancement (**SCOPE**), a dual-path adaptive training framework that routes on-policy rollouts by correctness into two complementary supervision paths. For incorrect trajectories, SCOPE performs teacher-perplexity-weighted KL distillation to prioritize instances where the teacher demonstrates genuine corrective capability, while down-weighting unreliable guidance. For correct trajectories, it applies student-perplexity-weighted Maximum Likelihood Estimation to concentrate reinforcement on low-confidence samples at the capability boundary rather than over-reinforcing already mastered ones. Both paths employ a group-level normalization to adaptively calibrate weight distributions, accounting for the intrinsic difficulty variance across prompts. Extensive experiments on six mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that SCOPE achieves average relative improvements of 11.42% in Avg@32 and 7.30% in Pass@32 over competitive baselines, with extended experiments demonstrating its broader applicability. Code is available at [https://github.com/machine981/SCOPE](https://github.com/machine981/SCOPE).
PaTaRM: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling
Ai Jian | Jingqing Ruan | Xing Ma | Dailin Li | Weipeng Zhang | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ai Jian | Jingqing Ruan | Xing Ma | Dailin Li | Weipeng Zhang | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reward models (RMs) are central to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), providing the critical supervision signals that align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences.Generative reward models (GRMs) provide greater interpretability than traditional scalar RMs, but they come with a critical trade-off: pairwise methods are hindered by a training-inference mismatch, while pointwise methods require expensive absolute annotations.To bridge this gap, we propose the Preference-aware Task-adaptive Reward Model (PaTaRM).Unlike prior approaches, PaTaRM enables robust pointwise training using readily available pairwise data via a novel Preference-Aware Reward (PAR) mechanism, eliminating the need for explicit rating labels. Furthermore, it incorporates a task-adaptive rubric system that dynamically generates instance-specific criteria for precise evaluation.Extensive experiments demonstrate that PaTaRM achieves an average relative improvement of 8.7% over the corresponding base models on RewardBench and RMBench across the Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B backbones.Crucially, when used as a reward model for downstream RLHF, it yields an average relative improvement of 13.6% over the corresponding base policies on IFEval and InfoBench, validating its effectiveness for policy alignment.Our code, data, and checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/AIJian/PaTaRM
Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Automated Feature Generation on Tabular Data
FengXian Dong | Zhi Zheng | Xiao Han | Wei Chen | Jingqing Ruan | Tong Xu | Yong Chen | Enhong Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
FengXian Dong | Zhi Zheng | Xiao Han | Wei Chen | Jingqing Ruan | Tong Xu | Yong Chen | Enhong Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Automated feature generation extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning. Traditional methods rely on predefined operator libraries and cannot leverage task semantics, limiting their ability to produce diverse, high-value features for complex tasks. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches introduce richer semantic signals, but still suffer from a restricted feature space due to fixed generation patterns and from the absence of feedback from the learning objective. To address these challenges, we propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MALMAS) for automated feature generation. MALMAS decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities, and a Router Agent activates an appropriate subset of agents per iteration, further broadening exploration of the feature space. We further integrate a memory module comprising procedural memory, feedback memory, and conceptual memory, enabling iterative refinement that adaptively guides subsequent feature generation and improves feature quality and diversity. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets against state-of-the-art baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Harmonizing Dense and Sparse Signals in Multi-turn RL: Dual-Horizon Credit Assignment for Industrial Sales Agents
Haojin Yang | Ai Jian | Yiwei Wang | Xinyue Huang | Weipeng Zhang | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai | Jingqing Ruan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Haojin Yang | Ai Jian | Yiwei Wang | Xinyue Huang | Weipeng Zhang | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai | Jingqing Ruan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Optimizing large language models for industrial sales requires balancing long-term commercial objectives (e.g., conversion rate) with immediate linguistic constraints such as fluency and compliance. Conventional reinforcement learning often merges these heterogeneous goals into a single reward, causing high-magnitude session-level rewards to overwhelm subtler turn-level signals, which leads to unstable training or reward hacking.To address this issue, we propose Dual-Horizon Credit Assignment (DuCA), a framework that disentangles optimization across time scales. Its core, Horizon-Independent Advantage Normalization (HIAN), separately normalizes advantages from turn-level and session-level rewards before fusion, ensuring balanced gradient contributions from both immediate and long-term objectives to the policy update.Extensive experiments with a high-fidelity user simulator show DuCA outperforms the state-of-the-art GRPO baseline, achieving a 6.82% relative improvement in conversion rate, reducing inter-sentence repetition by 82.28%, and lowering identity detection rate by 27.35%, indicating a substantial improvement for an industrial sales scenario that effectively balances the dual demands of strategic performance and naturalistic language generation.
2025
When to Continue Thinking: Adaptive Thinking Mode Switching for Efficient Reasoning
Xiaoyun Zhang | Jingqing Ruan | Xing Ma | Yawen Zhu | Haodong Zhao | Hao Li | Jiansong Chen | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Xiaoyun Zhang | Jingqing Ruan | Xing Ma | Yawen Zhu | Haodong Zhao | Hao Li | Jiansong Chen | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve remarkable performance via long reasoning chains, but often incur excessive computational overhead due to redundant reasoning, especially on simple tasks. In this work, we systematically quantify the upper bounds of LRMs under both Long-Thinking and No-Thinking modes, and uncover the phenomenon of “Internal Self-Recovery Mechanism” where models implicitly supplement reasoning during answer generation. Building on this insight, we propose Adaptive Self-Recovery Reasoning (ASRR), a framework that suppresses unnecessary reasoning and enables implicit recovery. By introducing accuracy-aware length reward regulation, ASRR adaptively allocates reasoning effort according to problem difficulty, achieving high efficiency with negligible performance sacrifice. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and models show that, compared with GRPO, ASRR reduces reasoning budget by up to 32.5% (1.5B) and 25.7% (7B) with minimal accuracy loss (1.2% and 0.6% pass@1), and significantly boosts harmless rates on safety benchmarks (up to +21.7%). Our results highlight the potential of ASRR for enabling efficient, adaptive, and safer reasoning in LRMs.
AMoPO: Adaptive Multi-objective Preference Optimization without Reward Models and Reference Models
Qi Liu | Jingqing Ruan | Hao Li | Haodong Zhao | Desheng Wang | Jiansong Chen | Wan Guanglu | Xunliang Cai | Zhi Zheng | Tong Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Qi Liu | Jingqing Ruan | Hao Li | Haodong Zhao | Desheng Wang | Jiansong Chen | Wan Guanglu | Xunliang Cai | Zhi Zheng | Tong Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Existing multi-objective preference alignment methods for large language models (LLMs) face limitations: (1) the inability to effectively balance various preference dimensions, and (2) reliance on auxiliary reward/reference models introduces computational complexity. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Multi-objective Preference Optimization (AMoPO), a novel framework that achieves dynamic balance across preference dimensions. By introducing the multi-objective optimization paradigm to use the dimension-aware generation metrics as implicit rewards, AMoPO aligns LLMs with diverse preferences without additional reward models or reference models. We introduce an adaptive weight assignment mechanism that models the generation space as a Gaussian distribution, allowing dynamic prioritization of preference dimensions. Empirical results demonstrate that AMoPO outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 28.5%, and the experiments on 7B, 14B, and 32B models reveal the scaling ability of AMoPO. Moreover, additional analysis of multiple dimensions verifies its adaptability and effectiveness. These findings validate AMoPO’s capability to achieve dimension-aware preference alignment, highlighting its superiority. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Javkonline/AMoPO.
A Reasoner for Real-World Event Detection: Scaling Reinforcement Learning via Adaptive Perplexity-Aware Sampling Strategy
Xiaoyun Zhang | Jingqing Ruan | Xing Ma | Yawen Zhu | Jiansong Chen | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Xiaoyun Zhang | Jingqing Ruan | Xing Ma | Yawen Zhu | Jiansong Chen | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Detecting abnormal events in real-world customer service dialogues is highly challenging due to the complexity of business data and the dynamic nature of customer interactions. Moreover, models must demonstrate strong out-of-domain (OOD) generalization to enable rapid adaptation across different business scenarios and maximize commercial value.In this work, we propose a novel Adaptive Perplexity-Aware Reinforcement Learning (APARL) framework that leverages the advanced reasoning capabilities of large language models for abnormal event detection. APARL introduces a dual-loop dynamic curriculum learning architecture, enabling the model to progressively focus on more challenging samples as its proficiency increases. This design effectively addresses performance bottlenecks and significantly enhances OOD transferability.Extensive evaluations on food delivery dialogue tasks show that our model achieves significantly enhanced adaptability and robustness, attaining the highest F1 score with an average improvement of 17.19%, and an average improvement of 9.59% in OOD transfer tests. This method provides a superior solution for industrial deployment of anomaly detection models, contributing to improved operational efficiency and commercial benefits.
2024
TPTU-v2: Boosting Task Planning and Tool Usage of Large Language Model-based Agents in Real-world Industry Systems
Yilun Kong | Jingqing Ruan | YiHong Chen | Bin Zhang | Tianpeng Bao | Shi Shiwei | du Guo Qing | Xiaoru Hu | Hangyu Mao | Ziyue Li | Xingyu Zeng | Rui Zhao | Xueqian Wang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Yilun Kong | Jingqing Ruan | YiHong Chen | Bin Zhang | Tianpeng Bao | Shi Shiwei | du Guo Qing | Xiaoru Hu | Hangyu Mao | Ziyue Li | Xingyu Zeng | Rui Zhao | Xueqian Wang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools, such as weather and calculator APIs. However, real-world industrial systems present prevalent challenges in task planning and tool usage: numerous APIs in the real system make it intricate to invoke the appropriate one, while the inherent limitations of LLMs pose challenges in orchestrating an accurate sub-task sequence and API-calling order. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework aimed at enhancing the Task Planning and Tool Usage (TPTU) abilities of LLM-based agents in industry. Our framework comprises three key components designed to address these challenges: (1) the API Retriever selects the most pertinent APIs among the extensive API set; (2) the Demo Selector retrieves task-level demonstrations, which is further used for in-context learning to aid LLMs in accurately decomposing subtasks and effectively invoking hard-to-distinguish APIs; (3) LLM Finetuner tunes a base LLM to enhance its capability for task planning and API calling. We validate our methods using a real-world industry system and an open-sourced academic dataset, demonstrating the efficacy of each individual component as well as the integrated framework. The code is available at here.
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- Xunliang Cai 7
- Ke Zeng 6
- Xing Ma 4
- Xiaoyun Zhang 4
- Jiansong Chen 3
- Ai Jian 3
- Weipeng Zhang 3
- Hao Li 2
- Tong Xu 2
- Haojin Yang 2
- Haodong Zhao 2
- Zhi Zheng 2
- Yawen Zhu 2
- Tianpeng Bao 1
- Enhong Chen 1
- Kejiang Chen 1
- Wei Chen 1
- Yihong Chen 1
- Yong Chen 1
- FengXian Dong 1
- Wanrou Du 1
- Xiaoliang Fu 1
- Wan Guanglu 1
- Eryu Guo 1
- Xiao Han 1
- Chen Hu 1
- Xiaoru Hu 1
- Xing Hu 1
- Di Huang 1
- Xinyue Huang 1
- Yilun Kong 1
- Dailin Li 1
- Ziyue Li 1
- Yiheng Liang 1
- Kepeng Lin 1
- Qi Liu 1
- Hangyu Mao 1
- Jiangbo Pei 1
- du Guo Qing 1
- Shi Shiwei 1
- Desheng Wang 1
- Xueqian Wang 1
- Yiwei Wang 1
- Wang You 1
- Xiaojian Yuan 1
- Xingyu Zeng 1
- Bin Zhang 1
- Rui Zhao 1
- Binbin Zheng 1
- Benchang Zhu 1