Lan-Zhe Guo
Author directory2026
Roles with Rails: Contract-Preserving Role Evolution in Multi-Agent Structured Reasoning
Ling-Yue Ge | Lan-Zhe Guo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Ling-Yue Ge | Lan-Zhe Guo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Role-based LLM multi-agent systems need adaptive role pools, yet adapting such systems is not merely a matter of prompt optimization: roles often carry structural obligations, including capability coverage, message compatibility, validation, final-answer aggregation, and parser-compatible output protocols. Existing systems either fix the role inventory and lose adaptivity, or allow unconstrained generation to induce role drift, removing structurally necessary roles and breaking answer contracts. We formulate this as contract-preserving role evolution, requiring every committed edit to preserve five structural contracts (capability, communication, validation, aggregation, output protocol). We instantiate this formulation in SERO, a Self-Evolving Role Orchestration framework that evolves a typed role-card pool through credit-guided retrieval, a credit-ranked communication DAG with a protected terminal aggregator and conditional validator repair, and a contextual-bandit controller whose LLM-proposed edits are committed only when they preserve the contracts and improve task score. Experiments on real-world reasoning benchmarks across three LLM backbones confirm the value of contract-preserving role evolution.
Aligning Progress and Feasibility: A Neuro-Symbolic Dual Memory Framework for Long-Horizon LLM Agents
Bin Wen | Ruoxuan Zhang | Yang Chen | Hongxia Xie | Lan-Zhe Guo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Bin Wen | Ruoxuan Zhang | Yang Chen | Hongxia Xie | Lan-Zhe Guo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential in long-horizon decision-making tasks, such as embodied manipulation and web interaction. However, agents frequently struggle with endless trial-and-error loops or deviate from the main objective in complex environments. We attribute these failures to two fundamental errors: global Progress Drift and local Feasibility Violation. Existing methods typically attempt to address both issues simultaneously using a single paradigm. However, these two challenges are fundamentally distinct: the former relies on fuzzy semantic planning, while the latter demands strict logical constraints and state validation. The inherent limitations of such a single-paradigm approach pose a fundamental challenge for existing models in handling long-horizon tasks. Motivated by this insight, we propose a Neuro-Symbolic Dual Memory Framework that explicitly decouples semantic progress guidance from logical feasibility verification. Specifically, during the inference phase, the framework invokes both memory mechanisms synchronously: on the one hand, a neural-network-based Progress Memory extracts semantic blueprints from successful trajectories to guide global task advancement; on the other hand, a symbolic-logic-based Feasibility Memory utilizes executable Python verification functions synthesized from failed transitions to perform strict logical validation. Experiments demonstrate that this method significantly outperforms existing competitive baselines on ALFWorld, WebShop, and TextCraft. Code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-NeSy/DualMemory.
FormalImG: Evaluating Structural Compositional Generalization for T2I Models
Hong-Jie You | Jie-Jing Shao | Xiao-Wen Yang | Zhi-Fan Wu | Lin-Han Jia | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Hong-Jie You | Jie-Jing Shao | Xiao-Wen Yang | Zhi-Fan Wu | Lin-Han Jia | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
As natural language becomes a key interface for controlling text-to-image generation, users specify not only which visual concepts should appear but also how entities are constrained by attributes, relations, quantifiers, and cross-entity dependencies. Reliable controllable generation therefore requires generalization over semantic structure, not merely over novel combinations of concepts. Existing benchmarks mainly evaluate conceptual compositional generalization, while leaving the internal semantic structure of instructions underexplored. We study structural compositional generalization: whether text-to-image models can generalize across increasingly coupled semantic dependencies. We introduce FormalImG, a first-order-logic-based benchmark with 4,000 instructions across three complexity levels in two scenarios, together with computable structural compositional complexity and ε-structural compositional generalizability. Experiments on advanced text-to-image models show consistent degradation as structural complexity increases; even the strongest evaluated model generalizes only up to G0.7 = 6 in Natural and G0.7 = 4 in Knolling. Further analysis suggests that the main bottleneck lies in language-to-vision instantiation and can be partially mitigated by explicit intermediate layouts. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/yhj137/FormalImG.
TabularMath: Understanding Math Reasoning over Tables with Large Language Models
Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Wei Dong | Kun-Yang Yu | Ming Yang | Zi-Jian Cheng | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Wei Dong | Kun-Yang Yu | Ming Yang | Zi-Jian Cheng | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Mathematical reasoning has long been a key benchmark for evaluating large language models. Although substantial progress has been made on math word problems, the need for reasoning over tabular data in real-world applications has been overlooked. For instance, applications such as business intelligence demand not only multi-step numerical reasoning with tables but also robustness to incomplete or inconsistent information. However, comprehensive evaluation in this area is severely limited, constrained by the reliance on manually collected tables that are difficult to scale and the lack of coverage for potential traps encountered in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose AutoT2T, a neuro-symbolic framework that controllably transforms math word problems into scalable and verified tabular reasoning tasks. Building on this pipeline, we develop TabularMath, a benchmark comprising four subsets that include both text-based and image-based tables, covering table complexity, table quality, and table representation dimensions. Our study reveals three key observations: (1) Table complexity and reasoning difficulty impact reasoning performance jointly; (2) Low-quality tables pose severe risks to reliable reasoning in current LLMs; (3) Different table modalities show similar trends, with text-based tables typically being easier for models to reason over. In-depth analyses are conducted for each observation to guide future research.
LookStep: Efficient Vision-Language Navigation with Linguistic Foresight and Event Driven Memory
Kun-Yang Yu | Yingzhe Li | Hongyu Xu | Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Yang Chen | Ming Yang | Sheng Wang | Qing Yu | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Kun-Yang Yu | Yingzhe Li | Hongyu Xu | Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Yang Chen | Ming Yang | Sheng Wang | Qing Yu | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to follow natural-language instructions in unseen environments. Recent progress has been largely driven by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Existing methods follow a next-step action prediction paradigm, supervising only the expert action, which requires a high quantity of data for training. They also rely on cognitive maps, accumulated historical frames, or external 3D tools to maintain states, leading to high computational and memory overhead. To realize resource efficiency VLN, we propose LookStep, a unified end-to-end framework that combines Language Centric Future State Modeling and Event Driven Rolling Memory that uses language labels to generate coarse-grained navigation progress and future states for each candidate action, while autonomously deciding whether to write each observation into a bounded rolling memory with a semantic role. We validate LookStep empirically. On VLN-CE tasks, LookStep outperforms existing methods under the same training settings, achieving a 49.7% success rate on R2R-CE Val-Unseen with better memory efficiency and less data usage. Code and model is available at https://github.com/kunyang-YU/LookStep.
SymboLLM-FE: LLM-Accelerated Symbolic Regression for Automated Feature Engineering on Tabular Data
Zi-Jian Cheng | Ziyi Jia | Zhi Zhou | Yu-Feng Li | Lan-Zhe Guo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zi-Jian Cheng | Ziyi Jia | Zhi Zhou | Yu-Feng Li | Lan-Zhe Guo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Tabular data, as a core data format in machine learning, often lacks the discriminative power needed for high-performance modeling due to insufficient feature informativeness. Automated Feature Engineering (AutoFE) overcomes this by automating feature generation and selection, ensuring both model performance and operational efficiency. However, traditional AutoFE often yield features with poor interpretability because they rely on blind mathematical transformations, while large language models (LLM)-based AutoFE faces challenges in requiring costly multi-round iterations to generate high-utility features to effectively enhance model performance, compounded by inherent risks of bias and hallucination. In this paper, we combine **symbo**lic regression with **LLM**s for **f**eature **e**ngineering (SymboLLM-FE) to solve these challenges. We extract mathematically expressive formulas strongly correlated with the target via symbolic regression, which can enhance model performance, then refine them by LLMs with rich prior knowledge to ensure interpretability. Empirical results on six real-world datasets and four Kaggle competitions demonstrate that SymboLLM-FE outperforms existing AutoFE. SymboLLM-FE also addresses the dual challenges of poor interpretability and numerous iterations by employing a statistical prior-grounded LLM refinement mechanism and single-digit LLM calls.
Project Page: [LAMDA-NeSy/SymboLLM-FE](https://lamda-nesy.github.io/SymboLLM-FE/index.html)
Project Page: [LAMDA-NeSy/SymboLLM-FE](https://lamda-nesy.github.io/SymboLLM-FE/index.html)
Aligning Agents via Planning: A Benchmark for Trajectory-Level Reward Modeling
Jiaxuan Wang | Yulan Hu | Wenjin Yang | Zheng Pan | Xin Li | Lan-Zhe Guo
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jiaxuan Wang | Yulan Hu | Wenjin Yang | Zheng Pan | Xin Li | Lan-Zhe Guo
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Reward Models (RMs) serve as the fundamental signal provider for model alignment. As Large Language Models evolve into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool invocation and complex reasoning, the paradigm of reward modeling faces unprecedented challenges–most notably, the lack of benchmarks specifically designed to assess RM capabilities within tool-integrated environments. To address this gap, we present Plan-RewardBench, a trajectory-level preference benchmark designed to evaluate how well judges distinguish preferred versus distractor agent trajectories in complex tool-using scenarios. Plan-RewardBench covers four representative task families—(i) Safety Refusal, (ii) Tool-Irrelevance / Unavailability, (iii) Complex Planning, and (iv) Robust Error Recovery—comprising validated positive trajectories and confusable hard negatives constructed via multi-model natural rollouts, rule-based perturbations, and minimal-edit LLM perturbations. We benchmark representative RMs (generative, discriminative, and LLM-as-Judge) under a unified pairwise protocol, reporting accuracy trends across varying trajectory lengths and task categories. Furthermore, we provide diagnostic analyses of prevalent failure modes. Our results reveal that all three evaluator families face substantial challenges, with performance degrading sharply on long-horizon trajectories, underscoring the necessity for specialized training in agentic, trajectory-level reward modeling. Ultimately, Plan-RewardBench aims to serve as both a practical evaluation suite and a reusable blueprint for constructing agentic planning preference data.
2025
VCSearch: Bridging the Gap Between Well-Defined and Ill-Defined Problems in Mathematical Reasoning
Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Kun-Yang Yu | Ming Yang | Lin-Han Jia | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Kun-Yang Yu | Ming Yang | Lin-Han Jia | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning. However, the current evaluation mostly focuses on carefully constructed benchmarks and neglects the consideration of real-world reasoning problems that present missing or contradictory conditions, known as ill-defined problems. To further study this problem, we develop a large-scale benchmark called Problems with Missing and Contradictory conditions (PMC) containing over 5,000 validated ill-defined mathematical problems. Our preliminary experiments through PMC reveal two challenges about existing methods: (1) traditional methods exhibit a trade-off between solving accuracy and rejection capabilities, and (2) formal methods struggle with modeling complex problems. To address these challenges, We develop Variable-Constraint Search (VCSearch), a training-free framework that leverages formal language to detect ill-defined problems, where a variable-constraint pair search strategy is incorporated to improve the modeling capability of formal language. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VCSearch improves the accuracy of identifying unsolvable problems by at least 12% across different LLMs, thus achieving stronger robust mathematical reasoning ability.