Ma Zerun
Author directory2026
DataChef: Cooking Up Optimal Data Recipes for LLM Adaptation via Reinforcement Learning
Yicheng Chen | Ma Zerun | Xie Xinchen | Yining Li | Kai Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yicheng Chen | Ma Zerun | Xie Xinchen | Yining Li | Kai Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
In the current landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs), the curation of large-scale, high-quality training data is a primary driver of model performance. A key lever is the data recipe, which comprises a data processing pipeline to transform raw sources into training corpora. Despite the growing use of LLMs to automate individual data processing steps, such as data synthesis and filtering, the overall design of data recipes remains largely manual and labor-intensive, requiring substantial human expertise and iteration. To bridge this gap, we formulate end-to-end data recipe generation for LLM adaptation. Given a target benchmark and a pool of available data sources, a model is required to output a complete data recipe that adapts a base LLM to the target task. We present DataChef-32B, which performs online reinforcement learning using a proxy reward that predicts downstream performance for candidate recipes. Across six held-out tasks, DataChef-32B produces recipes that yield performance comparable to those curated by human experts. Notably, the recipe from DataChef-32B adapts Qwen3-1.7B-Base to the math domain, achieving 66.7 on AIME’25 and surpassing the official post-training checkpoint (Qwen3-1.7B). This work sheds new light on automating LLM training and developing self-evolving AI systems.
AgentCompass: A Unified Evaluation Infrastructure for Agent Capabilities
Dongsheng Zhu | Shufan Jiang | Wenhui Tian | Zixin Shang | Peiheng Zhou | Tianhao Liang | Mo Li | Qingqiu Li | Shudong Liu | Zonglin Li | Liwei Wu | Zichen Ding | Bowen Yang | Zehao Li | Zhenyu Wu | Jun XU | Zun Wang | Songyang Zhang | Dingbo Yuan | Ma Zerun | Kai Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Dongsheng Zhu | Shufan Jiang | Wenhui Tian | Zixin Shang | Peiheng Zhou | Tianhao Liang | Mo Li | Qingqiu Li | Shudong Liu | Zonglin Li | Liwei Wu | Zichen Ding | Bowen Yang | Zehao Li | Zhenyu Wu | Jun XU | Zun Wang | Songyang Zhang | Dingbo Yuan | Ma Zerun | Kai Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, the need for unified evaluation platform becomes critical. However, current evaluation pipelines remain highly fragmented and tightly coupled, hindering reproducibility and causing redundant engineering. To address this, we introduce AgentCompass, an open-source, lightweight, and extensible platform for evaluating LLM-based agents. AgentCompass organizes the evaluation process around three independent components, namely Benchmark, Harness, and Environment, thereby enabling flexible configurations without requiring the reimplementation of complex execution logic. Furthermore, it features a fault-tolerant asynchronous runtime and comprehensive trajectory analysis tools to transparently diagnose nuanced failure modes like reward-hacking. Natively supporting over 20 benchmarks across five capability dimensions, AgentCompass provides the community with a scalable and reproducible infrastructure for advancing agent research.
2025
MIG: Automatic Data Selection for Instruction Tuning by Maximizing Information Gain in Semantic Space
Yicheng Chen | Yining Li | Kai Hu | Ma Zerun | Haochen Ye | Kai Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Yicheng Chen | Yining Li | Kai Hu | Ma Zerun | Haochen Ye | Kai Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Data quality and diversity are key to the construction of effective instruction-tuning datasets. With the increasing availability of open-source instruction-tuning datasets, it is advantageous to automatically select high-quality and diverse subsets from a vast amount of data. Existing methods typically prioritize instance quality and use heuristic rules to maintain diversity. However, this absence of a comprehensive view of the entire collection often leads to suboptimal results. Moreover, heuristic rules generally focus on distance or clustering within the embedding space, which fails to accurately capture the intent of complex instructions in the semantic space. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified method for quantifying the information content of datasets. This method models the semantic space by constructing a label graph and quantifies diversity based on the distribution of information within the graph. Based on such a measurement, we further introduce an efficient sampling method that selects data samples iteratively to Maximize the Information Gain (MIG) in semantic space. Experiments on various datasets and base models demonstrate that MIG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Notably, the model fine-tuned with 5% Tulu3 data sampled by MIG achieves comparable performance to the official SFT model trained on the full dataset, with improvements of +5.73% on AlpacaEval and +6.89% on Wildbench.