Kang Chen
Author directoryAlso published as: Chenkang
2026
Thinking Traps in Long Chain-of-Thought: A Measurable Study and Trap-Aware Adaptive Restart
Chenkang | Fan Yu | Junjie Nian | Sihan Zhao | Zhuoka Feng | Zijun Yao | Wang Heng | Yu Minshen | Yixin Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Chenkang | Fan Yu | Junjie Nian | Sihan Zhao | Zhuoka Feng | Zijun Yao | Wang Heng | Yu Minshen | Yixin Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Scaling test-time compute via Long Chain-of-Thought (Long-CoT) significantly enhances reasoning capabilities, yet extended generation does not guarantee correctness: after an early wrong commitment, models may keep elaborating a self-consistent but incorrect prefix. Through fine-grained trajectory analysis, we identify Thinking Traps, prefix-dominant deadlocks where later reflection, alternative attempts, or verification fails to revise the root error. On a curated subset of DAPO-MATH, 89% of failures exhibit such traps. To solve this problem, we introduce TAAR (Trap-Aware Adaptive Restart), a test-time control framework that trains a diagnostic policy to predict two signals from partial trajectories: a trap index for where to truncate and an escape probability for whether and how strongly to intervene. At inference time, TAAR truncates the trajectory before the predicted trap segment and adaptively restarts decoding; for severely trapped cases, it applies stronger perturbations, including higher-temperature resampling and an optional structured reboot suffix. Experiments on challenging mathematical and scientific reasoning benchmarks (AIME24, AIME25, GPQA-Diamond, HMMT25, BRUMO25) show that TAAR improves reasoning performance without fine-tuning base model parameters.
ARM: Role-Conditioned Neuron Transplantation for Training-Free Generalist LLM Agent Merging
Zhuoka Feng | Kang Chen | Sihan Zhao | Kai Xiong | Yaoning Wang | Yu Minshen | Junjie Nian | Changyi Xiao | Yixin Cao | Yu-Gang Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhuoka Feng | Kang Chen | Sihan Zhao | Kai Xiong | Yaoning Wang | Yu Minshen | Junjie Nian | Changyi Xiao | Yixin Cao | Yu-Gang Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Interactive large language model agents are often specialized to a single environment and transfer poorly across others. We study training-free consolidation of such specialists into a single generalist checkpoint. A key difficulty in this setting is that, in multi-turn agents, small merge errors on role-critical outputs can trigger long-horizon failure cascades. We therefore propose Agent-Role Merging (ARM), a neuron-level training-free framework that selects a merged backbone with an answer-free activation-overlap signal and then repairs residual gaps through conflict-aware transplantation of a small set of role-salient neurons. Our analyses further show that role-conditioned tracing yields more benchmark-specific neuron sets, enabling more localized repair. Across Qwen3-8B and Qwen2.5-7B expert pools, ARM produces the strongest balanced merged generalist among compared training-free baselines, improving both average performance and worst-suite robustness while preserving out-of-domain generalization. These results suggest that targeted neuron-level edits offer a practical route to robust multi-turn agent merging without end-to-end retraining.
2024
IPL: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models for Intelligent Product Listing
Kang Chen | Qing Heng Zhang | Chengbao Lian | Yixin Ji | Xuwei Liu | Shuguang Han | Guoqiang Wu | Fei Huang | Jufeng Chen
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Kang Chen | Qing Heng Zhang | Chengbao Lian | Yixin Ji | Xuwei Liu | Shuguang Han | Guoqiang Wu | Fei Huang | Jufeng Chen
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Unlike professional Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce platforms (e.g., Amazon), Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) platforms (e.g., Facebook marketplace) are mainly targeting individual sellers who usually lack sufficient experience in e-commerce. Individual sellers often struggle to compose proper descriptions for selling products. With the recent advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we attempt to integrate such state-of-the-art generative AI technologies into the product listing process. To this end, we develop IPL, an Intelligent Product Listing tool tailored to generate descriptions using various product attributes such as category, brand, color, condition, etc. IPL enables users to compose product descriptions by merely uploading photos of the selling product. More importantly, it can imitate the content style of our C2C platform Xianyu. This is achieved by employing domain-specific instruction tuning on MLLMs, and by adopting the multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) process. A comprehensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that the underlying model of IPL significantly outperforms the base model in domain-specific tasks while producing less hallucination. IPL has been successfully deployed in our production system, where 72% of users have their published product listings based on the generated content, and those product listings are shown to have a quality score 5.6% higher than those without AI assistance.