Pengcheng Xu
Author directory2026
Validity Is Not Visibility: A Lifecycle FSM for Agent Memory
Shuo Zhou | Pengcheng Xu | Shaotong qi | Li Que | Ming Sun | Han Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shuo Zhou | Pengcheng Xu | Shaotong qi | Li Que | Ming Sun | Han Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Long-term memory for LLM agents must answer two questions for every stored fact: whether the fact is still true and whether it should be surfaced for a given query. We refer to these two dimensions as validity and visibility, respectively. Existing memory systems often collapse these two decisions into a single scalar score. However, current and historical queries may require opposite retrieval decisions for the same fact: a superseded fact should be hidden for a current-intent query but surfaced for a historical-intent one. This creates a structural failure mode: superseded and expired facts are collapsed onto the same validity axis. To address this problem, we propose MemFSM, a training-free retrieval-side layer that separates validity from visibility through a memory-lifecycle finite-state machine. Along the validity axis, a four-state FSM tracks whether each fact has been superseded and expired. Along the visibility axis, an intent-aware router decides whether to surface or hide a fact based on its state and the query intent. By decoupling visibility from validity, MemFSM improves performance across heterogeneous memory benchmarks and diverse LLM backbones. To evaluate memory systems under fact conflicts and diverse query intents, we further introduce ValidMem, a benchmark that annotates each fact with both supersedure and expiry labels and pairs each memory store with both current-intent and historical-intent queries.
2025
Team XSZ at BioLaySumm2025: Section-Wise Summarization, Retrieval-Augmented LLM, and Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning for Lay Summaries
Pengcheng Xu | Sicheng Shen | Jieli Zhou | Hongyi Xin
Proceedings of the 24th Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing (Shared Tasks)
Pengcheng Xu | Sicheng Shen | Jieli Zhou | Hongyi Xin
Proceedings of the 24th Workshop on Biomedical Language Processing (Shared Tasks)
2024
Team YXZ at BioLaySumm: Adapting Large Language Models for Biomedical Lay Summarization
Jieli Zhou | Cheng Ye | Pengcheng Xu | Hongyi Xin
Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing
Jieli Zhou | Cheng Ye | Pengcheng Xu | Hongyi Xin
Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing
Biomedical literature are crucial for disseminating new scientific findings. However, the complexity of these research articles often leads to misinterpretations by the public. To address this urgent issue, we participated in the BioLaySumm task at the 2024 ACL BioNLP workshop, which focuses on automatically simplifying technical biomedical articles for non-technical audiences. We conduct a systematic evaluation of the SOTA large language models (LLMs) in 2024 and found that LLMs can generally achieve better readability scores than smaller models like Bart. Then we iteratively developed techniques of title infusing, K-shot prompting , LLM rewriting and instruction finetuning to further boost readability while balancing factuality and relevance. Notably, our submission achieved the first place in readability at the workshop, and among the top-3 teams with the highest readability scores, we have the best overall rank. Here, we present our experiments and findings on how to effectively adapt LLMs for automatic lay summarization. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhoujieli/biolaysumm.