Lian Zhang
Author directory2026
SciOrch: Learning to Orchestrate Expert LLMs for Solving Frontier Multimodal Scientific Reasoning Tasks
Jingru Guo | Xiangyuan Xue | Lian Zhang | Wanghan Xu | Siki Chen | Wanli Ouyang | Lei Bai | Philip Torr | Zhenfei Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Jingru Guo | Xiangyuan Xue | Lian Zhang | Wanghan Xu | Siki Chen | Wanli Ouyang | Lei Bai | Philip Torr | Zhenfei Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Frontier scientific reasoning remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), where even the strongest commercial systems fall short of expert-level performance. A closer look at model behavior reveals substantial complementarity that single-model evaluation hides: different frontier models excel on different question types, and no single model captures the full picture. We present SciOrch, a framework that trains a lightweight 8B model to orchestrate frontier LLMs for scientific reasoning. The orchestrator decomposes each question, delegates sub-problems to selected commercial models through API calls, and synthesizes a final answer. Training such an orchestrator is fundamentally harder than conventional agentic RL: each action triggers an API call that is expensive in both dollar cost and latency, making standard online rollouts infeasible. We address this with MCTS-based approach, producing diverse orchestration trajectories, extracting per-node single-turn samples, and optimizing the orchestrator with GRPO-style training. On a 240-question test set spanning SGI-Reasoning and Scientists’ First Exam, SciOrch reaches 56.66% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest single commercial model by 3.74% and the strongest multi-agent baseline by 3.33%. It also attains the best accuracy on both SGI and SFE with less than half the API cost of typical multi-agent methods.
LatticeMind: A Conflict-Aware Memory Primitive for Multi-Agent Systems
Heng Zhou | Lian Zhang | Yutao Fan | Tiancheng He | Siki Chen | Hejia Geng | Philip Torr | Zhenfei Yin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Heng Zhou | Lian Zhang | Yutao Fan | Tiancheng He | Siki Chen | Hejia Geng | Philip Torr | Zhenfei Yin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Multi-agent LLM systems often fail not for lack of candidate answers, but because they have no persistent mechanism for deciding which incompatible claim should currently be trusted. Majority vote, debate, and judge-based selection choose an output without recording which claim wins, which is contested, or why a later update supersedes it. We present LatticeMind, a conflict-aware structured memory that handles contradiction at write time. It maintains explicit item status, applies cheap symbolic conflict checks, and routes the flagged cases to an LLM reconciler. On a label-blind ConflictBank evaluation that removes source-name hints, over a uniform draw of 200 examples from the full benchmark pool, LatticeMind reaches 0.965 accuracy versus 0.525 for the strongest baseline, with every gap significant at p<10-24 by paired McNemar test. Ablations show that removing the checker or the reconciler costs 12 to 14 points. Our claims are scoped to credibility conflicts, where one claim should defeat another: the coordination branch of the design is a safety override that we do not validate empirically, and all prompt-based comparisons are conditioned on a single backbone. On three secondary planning benchmarks and one synthetic scheduling diagnostic the picture is mixed: LatticeMind beats naive merge on three of four, but does not replace deliberation methods on tasks rewarding iterative search.
2025
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion
Jianqing Zhu | Huang Huang | Zhihang Lin | Juhao Liang | Zhengyang Tang | Khalid Almubarak | Mosen Alharthi | Bang An | Juncai He | Xiangbo Wu | Fei Yu | Junying Chen | Ma Zhuoheng | Yuhao Du | He Zhang | Saied Alshahrani | Emad A. Alghamdi | Lian Zhang | Ruoyu Sun | Haizhou Li | Benyou Wang | Jinchao Xu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jianqing Zhu | Huang Huang | Zhihang Lin | Juhao Liang | Zhengyang Tang | Khalid Almubarak | Mosen Alharthi | Bang An | Juncai He | Xiangbo Wu | Fei Yu | Junying Chen | Ma Zhuoheng | Yuhao Du | He Zhang | Saied Alshahrani | Emad A. Alghamdi | Lian Zhang | Ruoyu Sun | Haizhou Li | Benyou Wang | Jinchao Xu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
This paper addresses the critical need for democratizing large language models (LLM) in the Arab world, a region that has seen slower progress in developing models comparable to state-of-the-art offerings like GPT-4 or GPT-3.5, due to a predominant focus on mainstream languages (e.g., English and Chinese). One practical objective for Arabic LLMs is to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. However, using a different vocabulary often leads to degradation of the model’s learned knowledge, since many words become out-of-vocabulary (OOV) at the beginning of training. Inspired by the vocabulary learning during Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition for humans, the released AraLLaMA employs progressive vocabulary expansion, which is implemented by a modified BPE algorithm that progressively extends the Arabic subwords in its dynamic vocabulary during training, thereby balancing the OOV ratio at every stage. The ablation study demonstrated the effectiveness of Progressive Vocabulary Expansion.Moreover, AraLLaMA achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across a variety of Arabic benchmarks. Our model weights are available at: https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/AraLLaMa.
2024
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic
Huang Huang | Fei Yu | Jianqing Zhu | Xuening Sun | Hao Cheng | Song Dingjie | Zhihong Chen | Mosen Alharthi | Bang An | Juncai He | Ziche Liu | Junying Chen | Jianquan Li | Benyou Wang | Lian Zhang | Ruoyu Sun | Xiang Wan | Haizhou Li | Jinchao Xu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Huang Huang | Fei Yu | Jianqing Zhu | Xuening Sun | Hao Cheng | Song Dingjie | Zhihong Chen | Mosen Alharthi | Bang An | Juncai He | Ziche Liu | Junying Chen | Jianquan Li | Benyou Wang | Lian Zhang | Ruoyu Sun | Xiang Wan | Haizhou Li | Jinchao Xu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
This paper is devoted to the development of a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. To address this, the paper proposes a comprehensive solution that includes further pre-training with Arabic texts, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) utilizing native Arabic instructions, and GPT-4 responses in Arabic, alongside Reinforcement Learning with AI Feedback (RLAIF) employing a reward model attuned to local culture and values. The goal is to cultivate culturally cognizant and value-aligned Arabic LLMs capable of accommodating the diverse, application-specific needs of Arabic-speaking communities. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that the resulting model, dubbed ‘AceGPT’, sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. Codes, data, and models are in https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/AceGPT.
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Co-authors
- Mosen Alharthi 2
- Bang An 2
- Junying Chen 2
- Siki Chen 2
- Juncai He 2
- Huang Huang 2
- Haizhou Li 2
- Philip Torr 2
- Benyou Wang 2
- Jinchao Xu 2
- Zhenfei Yin 2
- Fei Yu 2
- Jianqing Zhu 2
- Emad A. Alghamdi 1
- Khalid Almubarak 1
- Saied Alshahrani 1
- Lei Bai 1
- Zhihong Chen 1
- Hao Cheng 1
- Song Dingjie 1
- Yuhao Du 1
- Yutao Fan 1
- Hejia Geng 1
- Jingru Guo 1
- Tiancheng He 1
- Jianquan Li 1
- Juhao Liang 1
- Zhihang Lin 1
- Ziche Liu 1
- Wanli Ouyang 1
- Ruoyu Sun 1
- Ruoyu Sun 1
- Xuening Sun 1
- Zhengyang Tang 1
- Xiang Wan 1
- Xiangbo Wu 1
- Wanghan Xu 1
- Xiangyuan Xue 1
- He Zhang 1
- Heng Zhou 1
- Ma Zhuoheng 1