Kaiming Liu
Author directory2026
Illusion of Alignment: Detecting Hidden Disagreement in Collaborative Dialogue
Kaiming Liu | Fuwen Luo | Ziyue Wang | Jinrui Ju | Yuxuan Liu | Xuanyu Lei | Yunghwei Lai | Peng Li | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Kaiming Liu | Fuwen Luo | Ziyue Wang | Jinrui Ju | Yuxuan Liu | Xuanyu Lei | Yunghwei Lai | Peng Li | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Collaborative dialogue can end with apparent agreement while participants still differ on goals, assumptions, or execution plans, creating an **illusion of alignment (IoA)**. A real-user study across 18 meetings confirms that IoA arises routinely in human collaboration. Yet IoA poses a paradox: if participants were aware of such disagreements, they would already be explicit; if not, they cannot articulate them when asked, leaving IoA invisible to both participants and observers. In this work, we make IoA detectable by generating diagnostic multiple-choice questions whose divergent answers across participants provide direct behavioral evidence of hidden disagreement. We construct **IoA-Suite**, a dataset and evaluation protocol for detecting hidden disagreement, spanning five task types and six domains. We find that even the best model attains only 49.5% F1, with the bottleneck traced to private context that the dialogue does not surface. We then train **IoA-Prober-8B** based on IoA-Suite, reaching 51.8% F1 on IoA-Suite. Across the aforementioned 18 real meetings, it surfaces 2.89 hidden disagreements per meeting that participants confirm they had not voiced, transferring to live human dialogue. Further, in multi-agent collaboration, pairing IoA-Prober-8B with LLM agents improves downstream task performance on BigCodeBench-Hard and HiddenBench.
Writing-RL: Advancing Long-form Writing via Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning
Xuanyu Lei | Chenliang Li | Yuning Wu | Kaiming Liu | Weizhou Shen | Peng Li | Ming Yan | Fei Huang | Ya-Qin Zhang | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xuanyu Lei | Chenliang Li | Yuning Wu | Kaiming Liu | Weizhou Shen | Peng Li | Ming Yan | Fei Huang | Ya-Qin Zhang | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled strong performance in long-form writing, but current training paradigms remain limited: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) remains constrained by data saturation and performance ceilings, while Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR), though successful in verifiable domains like math and code, cannot be directly migrated to open-ended long-form writing due to a lack of ground-truths. To further advance long-form writing, we present Writing-RL: an Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework to advance long-form writing capabilities beyond SFT. The framework consists of three key components: Margin-aware Data Selection strategy that prioritizes samples with high learning potential, Pairwise Comparison Reward mechanism that provides discriminative learning signals in the absence of verifiable rewards, and Dynamic Reference Scheduling approach, which plays a critical role by adaptively adjusting task difficulty based on evolving model performance. Experiments on 7B-scale writer models show that Writing-RL effectively improves long-form writing performance over strong SFT baselines. Furthermore, we observe that models trained with long-output RL generalize surprisingly well to long-input reasoning tasks, potentially offering a promising perspective for rethinking long-context training.
Agent-Environment Alignment via Automated Interface Generation
Kaiming Liu | Xuanyu Lei | Ziyue Wang | Peng Li | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Kaiming Liu | Xuanyu Lei | Ziyue Wang | Peng Li | Yang Liu
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language model agents have shown impressive capabilities in interactive decision-making tasks. These agents interact with environment through intermediate interfaces, such as predefined action spaces and interaction rules, which mediate the perception and action. However, mismatches often happen between the internal expectations of the agent regarding the influence of its issued actions and the actual state transitions in the environment, a phenomenon referred to as **agent-environment misalignment**. While prior work has invested substantially in improving agent strategies and environment design, the critical role of the interface still remains underexplored. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that agent-environment misalignment poses a significant bottleneck to agent performance. To mitigate this issue, we propose **ALIGN**, an Auto-Aligned Interface Generation framework that alleviates the misalignment by enriching the interface. Implemented as a lightweight wrapper, ALIGN-generated interface achieves the alignment without modifying either the agent logic or the environment code. Experiments across multiple domains including embodied tasks, web navigation and tool-use, achieve consistent performance improvements, with a 45.67% success rate improvement in ALFWorld.
2025
Efficient Dynamic Clustering-Based Document Compression for Retrieval-Augmented-Generation
Weitao Li | Xiangyu Zhang | Kaiming Liu | Xuanyu Lei | Weizhi Ma | Yang Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Weitao Li | Xiangyu Zhang | Kaiming Liu | Xuanyu Lei | Weizhi Ma | Yang Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a widely adopted approach for knowledge injection during large language model (LLM) inference in recent years. However, due to their limited ability to exploit fine-grained inter-document relationships, current RAG implementations face challenges in effectively addressing the retrieved noise and redundancy content, which may cause error in the generation results. To address these limitations, we propose an Efficient Dynamic Clustering-based document Compression framework (EDC2-RAG) that utilizes latent inter-document relationships while simultaneously removing irrelevant information and redundant content. We validate our approach, built upon GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o-mini, on widely used knowledge-QA and Hallucination-Detection datasets. Experimental results show that our method achieves consistent performance improvements across various scenarios and experimental settings, demonstrating strong robustness and applicability. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/EDC-2-RAG.