Jinwei Xiao
Author directory2026
Distill Where You Fail: Recovering Learning Signals of Negative RL-Groups from Adaptive Teacher Guidance
Zhuowen Han | Jinwei Xiao | Zhengxi Lu | Renren Jin | Zhiyuan Yao | Yuxin Liu | Hongyan Hao | Yueqing Sun | Yu Yang | Xierui Song | Xunliang Cai | Deyi Xiong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhuowen Han | Jinwei Xiao | Zhengxi Lu | Renren Jin | Zhiyuan Yao | Yuxin Liu | Hongyan Hao | Yueqing Sun | Yu Yang | Xierui Song | Xunliang Cai | Deyi Xiong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs). While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, it suffers from sparse reward signals and loses gradients entirely when all responses within a group receive identical rewards. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers a natural remedy by providing dense, token-level supervision from a teacher model. However, naively combining GRPO with OPD leads to degraded performance, due to three underlying causes: not all samples benefit from distillation; fitting too quickly to the teacher undermines the exploratory capacity of RL; and OPD’s advantages are asymmetric, suppressing most tokens. To address these challenges, we propose RSTG (Recovering Learning Signals via Adaptive Teacher Guidance), which applies distillation selectively and precisely where it matters most. At the sample level, OPD is restricted to negative zero-variance prompts with each sample weighted by the teacher’s confidence score. At the token level, distillation targets only tokens with high student entropy or large teacher-student divergence. We further augment training with SFT on correct trajectories generated by the teacher model, injecting positive gradient signals where RL yields none. Experiments demonstrate that RSTG substantially outperforms naive GRPO+OPD by +4.02% on math and +3.05% on code.
2025
Coarse-to-Fine Grounded Memory for LLM Agent Planning
Wei Yang | Jinwei Xiao | Hongming Zhang | Qingyang Zhang | Yanna Wang | Bo Xu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Wei Yang | Jinwei Xiao | Hongming Zhang | Qingyang Zhang | Yanna Wang | Bo Xu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven growing interest in LLM-based agents for complex planning tasks. To avoid costly agent training, many studies adopted memory mechanism that enhances LLM with offline experiences or online trajectory analysis. However, existing works focus on single-granularity memory derived from dynamic environmental interactions, which are inherently constrained by the quality of the collected experiences. This limitation, in turn, constrain the diversity of knowledge and the flexibility of planning. We propose Coarse-to-Fine Grounded Memory (CFGM), a novel framework that grounds coarse-to-fine memories with LLM, thereby fully leverage them for flexible adaptation to diverse scenarios. CFGM grounds environmental information into coarse-grained focus points to guide experience collection in training tasks, followed by grounding of actionable hybrid-grained tips from each experience. At inference, CFGM retrieves task-relevant experiences and tips to support planning. When facing environmental anomalies, the LLM grounds the current situation into fine-grained key information, enabling flexible self-QA reflection and plan correction. Extensive experiments on AlfWorld, Webshop and ScienceWorld demonstrate that CFGM significantly outperforms competitive baselines and comprehensively optimizes memory-enhanced LLM Agent system.