Kaidong Yu
Author directory2026
Beyond Binary: Turning Partial Success into Dense Verifiable Rewards for Reinforcement Learning in Code Generation
Longwen Wang | Yirui Liu | Xuaner Wu | Xiaohui Hu | Yuankai Fan | Kaidong Yu | Qizhen Weng | Wei Xi | Xuelong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Longwen Wang | Yirui Liu | Xuaner Wu | Xiaohui Hu | Yuankai Fan | Kaidong Yu | Qizhen Weng | Wei Xi | Xuelong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Effective reward design is a central challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for code generation. Mainstream test-suite-level outcome rewards enforce functional correctness but induce sparsity, while external Reward Models (RMs) provide dense supervision at the cost of misalignment and additional overhead. Since code evaluation naturally yields multiple test-case-level outcomes, partial success—passing a subset of test cases—offers an intrinsic, verifiable source of dense supervision. In this paper, we propose VeRPO (Verifiable Dense Reward Policy Optimization), an RL framework that systematically turns verifiable partial success into reliable dense rewards. We analyze partial-success rewards using a weighted sum formulation, theoretically identifying a critical cardinality bias that causes policy updates to disproportionately favor gains from easy-test successes over progress on frontier tests. Based on this, VeRPO introduces a dynamic, density-calibrated local reward that explicitly corrects this bias and provides robust dense supervision from partial success. To enhance alignment with end-to-end functional correctness, VeRPO further integrates the local dense reward with global execution outcomes. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks and settings demonstrate that VeRPO outperforms outcome-driven and RM-based baselines, achieving up to +8.83 pass@1 gain with negligible time cost (< 0.02%) and zero GPU memory overhead.
Awakening Dormant Experts:Counterfactual Routing to Mitigate MoE Hallucinations
Wentao Hu | Yanbo Zhai | Xiaohui Hu | Mingkuan Zhao | Shanhong yu | Xue Liu | Kaidong Yu | Shuangyong Song | Xuelong Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Wentao Hu | Yanbo Zhai | Xiaohui Hu | Mingkuan Zhao | Shanhong yu | Xue Liu | Kaidong Yu | Shuangyong Song | Xuelong Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have achieved remarkable scalability, yet they remain vulnerable to hallucinations, particularly when processing long-tail knowledge. We identify that this fragility stems from static Top-k routing: routers tend to favor high-frequency patterns over rare factual associations. Consequently, “specialist experts” possessing critical long-tail knowledge are often assigned low gating scores and remain “dormant”—under-prioritized for specific tokens despite their proven causal importance on other inputs. To address this, we propose Counterfactual Routing (CoR), a training-free inference framework designed to awaken these dormant experts. CoR integrates layer-wise perturbation analysis with the Counterfactual Expert Impact (CEI) metric to dynamically shift computational resources from syntax-dominant to knowledge-intensive layers while maintaining a constant total activation count, effectively retrieving causally decisive experts via virtual ablation. Extensive experiments on TruthfulQA, FACTOR, and TriviaQA demonstrate that CoR improves factual accuracy by 3.1% on average without increasing the inference budget, establishing a superior Pareto frontier compared to static scaling strategies.
2025
Improve LLM-as-a-Judge Ability as a General Ability
Jiachen Yu | Shaoning Sun | Xiaohui Hu | Jiaxu Yan | Kaidong Yu | Xuelong Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jiachen Yu | Shaoning Sun | Xiaohui Hu | Jiaxu Yan | Kaidong Yu | Xuelong Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
LLM-as-a-Judge leverages the generative and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate LLM responses across diverse scenarios, providing accurate preference signals. This approach plays a vital role in aligning LLMs with human values. Recent studies have raised many methods to train LLM as generative judges, but most of them are data consuming or lack accuracy, and only focus on LLM’s judge ability. In this work, we conceptualize judging ability as a general capability of LLMs and adapt the two-stage SFT-DPO training framework—commonly used in traditional general model training—to the development of judge models. We introduce an efficient data synthesis method, which includes the automatic generation of various judge templates, dual verification for data accuracy and consistency. A difficulty-based data stratification strategy allows us to distribute more effective data to the SFT and DPO stages respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach, utilizing only about 2% to 40% of the data required by other methods, achieves SOTA performance on RewardBench. Furthermore, our training method enhances the general capabilities of the model by constructing complicated judge task with CoT outputs. We further validate the effectiveness of our model by deploying it to provide reward signals in a real-world RLHF scenarios. We will open-source our model weights and training data to facilitate further research.