Kevin Zhang
Author directory2026
ETR: Outcome-Guided Elastic Trust Regions for Policy Optimization
Shijie Zhang | Kevin Zhang | Zheyuan Gu | Xiang Guo | Rujun Guo | Liushaoyu | Guanjun Jiang | Wangxiaozhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Shijie Zhang | Kevin Zhang | Zheyuan Gu | Xiang Guo | Rujun Guo | Liushaoyu | Guanjun Jiang | Wangxiaozhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an important paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in large language models, exemplified by the success of OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Currently, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) stands as the dominant algorithm in this domain due to its stable training and critic-free efficiency. However, we argue that GRPO suffers from a structural limitation: it imposes a uniform, static trust region constraint across all samples. This design implicitly assumes signal homogeneity, a premise misaligned with the heterogeneous nature of outcome-driven learning, where advantage magnitudes and variances fluctuate significantly. Consequently, static constraints fail to fully exploit high-quality signals while insufficiently suppressing noise, often precipitating rapid entropy collapse. To address this, we propose **E**lastic **T**rust **R**egions (**ETR**), a dynamic mechanism that aligns optimization constraints with signal quality. ETR constructs a signal-aware landscape through dual-level elasticity: at the micro level, it scales clipping boundaries based on advantage magnitude to accelerate learning from high-confidence paths; at the macro level, it leverages group variance to implicitly allocate larger update budgets to tasks in the optimal learning zone. Extensive experiments on AIME and MATH benchmarks demonstrate that ETR consistently outperforms GRPO, achieving superior accuracy while effectively mitigating policy entropy degradation to ensure sustained exploration.
2024
VIEWS: Entity-Aware News Video Captioning
Hammad Ayyubi | Tianqi Liu | Arsha Nagrani | Xudong Lin | Mingda Zhang | Anurag Arnab | Feng Han | Yukun Zhu | Xuande Feng | Kevin Zhang | Jialu Liu | Shih-Fu Chang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hammad Ayyubi | Tianqi Liu | Arsha Nagrani | Xudong Lin | Mingda Zhang | Anurag Arnab | Feng Han | Yukun Zhu | Xuande Feng | Kevin Zhang | Jialu Liu | Shih-Fu Chang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Existing popular video captioning benchmarks and models often produce generic captions for videos that lack specific identification of individuals, locations, or organizations (named entities). However, in the case of news videos, the setting is more demanding, requiring the inclusion of such named entities for meaningful summarization. Therefore, we introduce the task of directly summarizing news videos into captions that are entity-aware. To facilitate research in this area, we have collected a large-scale dataset named VIEWS (VIdeo NEWS). Within this task, we face challenges inherent to recognizing named entities and navigating diverse, dynamic contexts, all while relying solely on visual cues. To address these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic approach that enriches visual information extracted from videos with context sourced from external knowledge, enabling the generation of entity-aware captions. We validate the effectiveness of our approach across three video captioning models. Additionally, we conduct a critical analysis of our methodology to gain insights into the complexity of the task, the challenges it presents, and potential avenues for future research.