Pengfei Zhang
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2026
DemMA: Dementia Multi-Turn Dialogue Agent with Expert-Guided Reasoning and Action Simulation
Yutong Song | Jiang Wu | Kazi Shaharair Sharif | Pengfei Zhang | Wenjun Huang | Honghui Xu | Nikil Dutt | Amir M. Rahmani
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yutong Song | Jiang Wu | Kazi Shaharair Sharif | Pengfei Zhang | Wenjun Huang | Honghui Xu | Nikil Dutt | Amir M. Rahmani
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Simulating dementia patients with large language models (LLMs) is challenging due to the need to jointly model cognitive impairment, emotional dynamics, and nonverbal behaviors over long conversations. We present DemMA, an expert-guided dementia dialogue agent for high-fidelity multi-turn patient simulation. DemMA constructs clinically grounded dementia personas by integrating pathology information, personality traits, and subtype-specific memory-status personas informed by clinical experts. To move beyond text-only simulation, DemMA explicitly models nonverbal behaviors, including motion, facial expressions, and vocal cues. We further introduce a Chain-of-Thought distillation framework that trains a single LLM to jointly generate reasoning traces, patient utterances, and aligned behavioral actions within one forward pass, enabling efficient deployment without multi-agent inference.
LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Survey
Henry Peng Zou | Wei-Chieh Huang | Yaozu Wu | Jizhou Guo | Yankai Chen | Chunyu Miao | Hoang H Nguyen | Yue Zhou | Weizhi Zhang | Liancheng Fang | Hanrong Zhang | Fangxin Wang | Pengfei Zhang | Langzhou He | Yangning Li | Dongyuan Li | Renhe Jiang | Philip S. Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Henry Peng Zou | Wei-Chieh Huang | Yaozu Wu | Jizhou Guo | Yankai Chen | Chunyu Miao | Hoang H Nguyen | Yue Zhou | Weizhi Zhang | Liancheng Fang | Hanrong Zhang | Fangxin Wang | Pengfei Zhang | Langzhou He | Yangning Li | Dongyuan Li | Renhe Jiang | Philip S. Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. However, fully autonomous LLM-based agents still face significant challenges, including limited reliability due to hallucinations, difficulty in handling complex tasks, and substantial safety and ethical risks, all of which limit their feasibility and trustworthiness in real-world applications. To overcome these limitations, LLM-based human-agent systems (LLM-HAS) incorporate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety. These human-agent collaboration systems enable humans and LLM-based agents to collaborate effectively by leveraging their complementary strengths.This paper provides the first comprehensive and structured survey of LLM-HAS. It clarifies fundamental concepts, systematically presents core components shaping these systems, including environment and profiling, human feedback, interaction types, orchestration, and communication, explores emerging applications, and discusses unique challenges and opportunities arising from human-AI collaboration. By consolidating current knowledge and offering a structured overview, we aim to foster further research and innovation in this rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field. Paper lists and resources are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/Awesome-Human-Agent-Collaboration-Interaction-Systems.
AP-GRPO: Anchor-Gated Phonetic Alignment with Policy Optimization for Pathological Speech Reconstruction
Pengfei Zhang | Hoang H Nguyen | Yutong Song | Wenjun Huang | Tahmid Imtiaz Imu | Henry Peng Zou | Jiang Wu | Honghui Xu | Amir M. Rahmani
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Pengfei Zhang | Hoang H Nguyen | Yutong Song | Wenjun Huang | Tahmid Imtiaz Imu | Henry Peng Zou | Jiang Wu | Honghui Xu | Amir M. Rahmani
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Pathological speech from patients with neurodegenerative and neuromotor disorders is often acoustically distorted and linguistically fragmented, making pathological speech reconstruction necessary to recover intended textual content from distorted and incomplete speech recordings. Crucially, such recordings are rarely uniformly degraded: some words or short phrases remain reliable and can serve as audible anchors for reconstructing the corrupted surrounding content. We introduce **Anchor-gated Phonetic Group Relative Policy Optimization (AP-GRPO)**, a GRPO framework with phonetic reward that aligns speech language models (SLMs) through audible-anchor preservation and inter-anchor phonetic compatibility to the original speech signal. AP-GRPO consists of: (i) an **anchor-gated reward** that matches reliable audible anchors in clear regions; and (ii) an **inter-anchor phonetic alignment reward** that evaluates whether recovered contents are phonetically supported by the corresponding corrupted inter-anchor speech span. Across four disease conditions, AP-GRPO improves faithful speech reconstruction, and the learned anchor constraint automatically adapts to each condition and thus reveals interpretable disease-specific profiles: conditions with severe articulatory degradation require stronger anchor enforcement, whereas milder impairment or linguistically impaired conditions rely more on phonetic alignment for inter-anchor recovery.