Peng Qiu
Author directory2026
Agent-G2: Gaussian Guidance for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Zixuan Wang | Yanrui Miao | Zhengxi Lu | Teng Pan | Yiwen Qiu | Hongxing Li | Peng Qiu | Ruiqing Zhang | Yongliang Shen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zixuan Wang | Yanrui Miao | Zhengxi Lu | Teng Pan | Yiwen Qiu | Hongxing Li | Peng Qiu | Ruiqing Zhang | Yongliang Shen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hint-based reinforcement learning addresses reward sparsity in long-horizon agentic tasks by retaining a prefix of an expert trajectory before each rollout, letting the policy explore from a state closer to success. Its effectiveness hinges on the guidance depth: how much of the trajectory to keep. Existing methods treat this depth as a deterministic scalar. Scheduled approaches share one value across samples and ignore per-task heterogeneity; per-sample probing estimates it separately at the cost of extra rollouts. We find that useful guidance occupies a band of depths whose informativeness profile is approximately Gaussian around the band center, rather than concentrating at a single optimal point. We propose Agent-G², a Gaussian guidance framework that draws the depth per task from a Gaussian whose center and spread are estimated online from rollouts already collected for policy optimization, requiring no probe rollouts or learned depth predictor. The center combines a global baseline with per-cluster difficulty, and the spread tracks within-cluster variance. We evaluate Agent-G² on ALFWorld and WebShop with Qwen2.5-1.5B / 7B-Instruct. Agent-G² outperforms the strongest hint-based, hint-free, and Aux-RL baselines on ALFWorld by 2.3 / 3.9 / 7.4 points at under one-third the rollout cost of per-sample probing.
2024
BASES: Large-scale Web Search User Simulation with Large Language Model based Agents
Ruiyang Ren | Peng Qiu | Yingqi Qu | Jing Liu | Wayne Xin Zhao | Hua Wu | Ji-Rong Wen | Haifeng Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Ruiyang Ren | Peng Qiu | Yingqi Qu | Jing Liu | Wayne Xin Zhao | Hua Wu | Ji-Rong Wen | Haifeng Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Due to the excellent capacities of large language models (LLMs), it becomes feasible to develop LLM-based agents for reliable user simulation. Considering the scarcity and limit (e.g., privacy issues) of real user data, in this paper, we conduct large-scale user simulations for the web search scenario to improve the analysis and modeling of user search behavior. Specially, we propose BASES, a novel user simulation framework with LLM-based agents, designed to facilitate comprehensive simulations of web search user behaviors. Our simulation framework can generate unique user profiles at scale, which subsequently leads to diverse search behaviors. To demonstrate the effectiveness of BASES, we conduct evaluation experiments based on two human benchmarks in both Chinese and English, demonstrating that BASES can effectively simulate large-scale human-like search behaviors. To further accommodate the research on web search, we develop WARRIORS, a new large-scale dataset encompassing web search user behaviors, including both Chinese and English versions, which can greatly bolster research in the field of information retrieval.