Pengyu Cheng
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2026
GD2PO: Group-Dynamic Reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization for Mitigating Multi-Reward RL Conflicts
Haotian Liu | Yihao Liu | Jingwei Ni | Siyuan Huang | Xinpeng Liu | Pengyu Cheng | Jiajun Song | Ruijin Ding | Junfeng Li | Zhechao Yu | Mengyu Zhou | Hongteng Xu | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Haotian Liu | Yihao Liu | Jingwei Ni | Siyuan Huang | Xinpeng Liu | Pengyu Cheng | Jiajun Song | Ruijin Ding | Junfeng Li | Zhechao Yu | Mengyu Zhou | Hongteng Xu | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Post-training large language models often require optimizing multiple objectives simultaneously, motivating multi-reward reinforcement learning (RL) methods that model different objectives as separate reward signals. Existing methods like Group reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization (GDPO) compute group-normalized advantages separately for each reward dimension and then aggregate them for policy updates. However, this aggregation process can cause cross-reward advantage conflict: the same rollout may have positive advantages on some reward dimensions but negative advantages on others, causing positive and negative signals to cancel each other during aggregation. To address this issue, we propose GD2PO, short for Group-Dynamic Reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization, a conflict-aware multi-reward policy optimization method. Before advantage aggregation, GD2PO uses conflict-aware criteria to identify and filter rollouts with severe reward-wise disagreement, reducing the influence of unreliable update signals. It further introduces query-level reweighting to dynamically adjust the update strength of each query according to its overall reward consensus. Experiments on tool calling and helpfulness-safety alignment show that GD2PO outperforms existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/GD2PO.
Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills
Jingwei Ni | Yihao Liu | Xinpeng Liu | Yutao Sun | Mengyu Zhou | Pengyu Cheng | Dexin Wang | Erchao Zhao | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jingwei Ni | Yihao Liu | Xinpeng Liu | Yutao Sun | Mengyu Zhou | Pengyu Cheng | Dexin Wang | Erchao Zhao | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on domain-specific skills, yet manually authoring such skills does not scale, and skills generated purely from parametric knowledge often miss critical operational pitfalls. We introduce Trace2Skill, a framework that consolidates broad execution trajectories in parallel into a unified skill directory through inductive reasoning over agent experience. Trace2Skill supports both deepening existing human-written skills and creating useful skills from weak LLM-generated drafts. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Trace2Skill across diverse domains, including office workflows, math reasoning, and vision QA. Importantly, the evolved skills are not merely memorized artifacts of the trajectories used to create them: they often transfer across model scales, across model families, and to out-of-distribution settings. For example, skills evolved from Qwen3.5-35B trajectories improve a Qwen3.5-122B agent by up to 57.65 percentage points on WikiTableQuestions. Further analyses show that Trace2Skill outperforms sequential skill editing and ReasoningBank-style retrieval memories, compresses recurring failures and workarounds into standard operating procedures (SoPs), and yields portable skills that can be reused without parameter updates or test-time retrieval.
MARCH: Multi-Agent Reinforced Check for Hallucination
Zhuo Li | Yupeng Zhang | Pengyu Cheng | Jiajun Song | Mengyu Zhou | Hao Li | Shujie Hu | Yu Qin | Erchao Zhao | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhuo Li | Yupeng Zhang | Pengyu Cheng | Jiajun Song | Mengyu Zhou | Hao Li | Shujie Hu | Yu Qin | Erchao Zhao | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Hallucination remains a critical bottleneck for large language models (LLMs), undermining their reliability in real-world applications, especially in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. While existing hallucination detection methods employ LLM-as-a-judge to verify LLM outputs against retrieved evidence, they suffer from inherent confirmation bias, where the verifier inadvertently reproduces the errors of the original generation. To address this, we introduce Multi-Agent Reinforced self-Check for Hallucination (MARCH), a framework that enforces rigorous factual alignment by leveraging deliberate information asymmetry. MARCH orchestrates a collaborative pipeline of three specialized agents: a Solver, a Proposer, and a Checker. The Solver generates an initial RAG response, which the Proposer decomposes into claim-level verifiable atomic propositions. Crucially, the Checker validates these propositions against retrieved evidence in isolation, deprived of the Solver’s original output. This well-crafted information asymmetry scheme breaks the cycle of self-confirmation bias. By training this pipeline with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), we enable the agents to co-evolve and optimize factual adherence. Extensive experiments across hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that MARCH substantially reduces hallucination rates. Notably, an 8B-parameter LLM equipped with MARCH achieves performance competitive with powerful closed-source models. MARCH paves a scalable path for factual self-improvement of LLMs through co-evolution. The code is at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/MARCH.
2025
Atoxia: Red-teaming Large Language Models with Target Toxic Answers
Yuhao Du | Zhuo Li | Pengyu Cheng | Xiang Wan | Anningzhe Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Yuhao Du | Zhuo Li | Pengyu Cheng | Xiang Wan | Anningzhe Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Despite the substantial advancements in artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) remain being challenged by generation safety. With adversarial jailbreaking prompts, one can effortlessly induce LLMs to output harmful content, causing unexpected negative social impacts. This vulnerability highlights the necessity for robust LLM red-teaming strategies to identify and mitigate such risks before large-scale application. To detect specific types of risks, we propose a novel red-teaming method that Attacks LLMs with Target Toxic Answers (Atoxia). Given a particular harmful answer, Atoxia generates a corresponding user query and a misleading answer opening to examine the internal defects of a given LLM. The proposed attacker is trained within a reinforcement learning scheme with the LLM outputting probability of the target answer as the reward. We verify the effectiveness of our method on various red-teaming benchmarks, such as AdvBench and HH-Harmless. The empirical results demonstrate that Atoxia can successfully detect safety risks in not only open-source models but also state-of-the-art black-box models such as GPT-4o.
2024
On Diversified Preferences of Large Language Model Alignment
Dun Zeng | Yong Dai | Pengyu Cheng | Longyue Wang | Tianhao Hu | Wanshun Chen | Nan Du | Zenglin Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Dun Zeng | Yong Dai | Pengyu Cheng | Longyue Wang | Tianhao Hu | Wanshun Chen | Nan Du | Zenglin Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has been recognized as the key to improving LLMs’ interaction quality. However, in this pluralistic world, human preferences can be diversified due to annotators’ different tastes, which hinders the effectiveness of LLM alignment methods. This paper presents the first quantitative analysis of the experimental scaling law for reward models with varying sizes, from 1.3 billion to 7 billion parameters, trained with human feedback exhibiting diverse preferences. Our analysis reveals that the impact of diversified human preferences depends on both model size and data size. Larger models with sufficient capacity mitigate the negative effects of diverse preferences, while smaller models struggle to accommodate them. To mitigate the impact of diverse preferences, we introduce a new metric, Expected Calibration Error (ECE), to evaluate RMs and show their obvious positive correlation with the alignment performance of LLMs. Furthermore, we propose a Multi-Objective Reward learning method (MORE) to enhance the calibration performance of RMs on shared preferences. Through experiments on four models and five human preference datasets, we find the calibration error can be adopted as a key metric for evaluating RMs and MORE can obtain superior alignment performance.
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game
Pengyu Cheng | Yifan Yang | Jian Li | Yong Dai | Tianhao Hu | Peixin Cao | Nan Du | Xiaolong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Pengyu Cheng | Yifan Yang | Jian Li | Yong Dai | Tianhao Hu | Peixin Cao | Nan Du | Xiaolong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Human preference alignment is essential to improve the interaction quality of large language models (LLMs). Existing alignment methods depend on manually annotated preference data to guide the LLM optimization directions. However, continuously updating LLMs for alignment raises a distribution gap between model-generated samples and human-annotated responses, hindering training effectiveness. To mitigate this issue, previous methods require additional preference annotation on newly generated samples to adapt to the shifted distribution, which consumes a large amount of annotation resources. Targeting more efficient human preference optimization, we propose an Adversarial Preference Optimization (APO) framework, in which the LLM and the reward model update alternatively via a min-max game. Through adversarial training, the reward model can adapt to the shifted generation distribution of the LLM without any additional annotation. With comprehensive experiments, we find the proposed adversarial training framework further enhances existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness. The code is at https://github.com/Linear95/APO.
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Co-authors
- Guanjun Jiang 3
- Xiaoxi Jiang 3
- Mengyu Zhou 3
- Yong Dai 2
- Nan Du 2
- Tianhao Hu 2
- Zhuo Li 2
- Xinpeng Liu 2
- Yihao Liu 2
- Jingwei Ni 2
- Jiajun Song 2
- Erchao Zhao 2
- Peixin Cao 1
- Wanshun Chen 1
- Ruijin Ding 1
- Yuhao Du 1
- Anningzhe Gao 1
- Shujie Hu 1
- Siyuan Huang 1
- Hao Li 1
- Jian Li 1
- Junfeng. Li 1
- Xiaolong Li (李小龙) 1
- Haotian Liu 1
- Yu Qin 1
- Yutao Sun 1
- Xiang Wan 1
- Dexin Wang 1
- Longyue Wang 1
- Hongteng Xu 1
- Zenglin Xu 1
- Yifan Yang 1
- Zhechao Yu 1
- Dun Zeng 1
- Yupeng Zhang 1