Quanen Sun
Author directory2026
SuperValid: Capability-Aligned OOD Validation for Generalizable Downstream Scaling
Quanen Sun | Changxin Tian | Ke Shi | Cai Chen | Cunyin Peng | Jia Liu | Kunlong Chen | Zhiqiang Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Quanen Sun | Changxin Tian | Ke Shi | Cai Chen | Cunyin Peng | Jia Liu | Kunlong Chen | Zhiqiang Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Scaling laws guide large language model training by relating compute to cross-entropy loss, and recent work further extends them to predict downstream benchmark performance. However, prior approaches face generalization limitations from two aspects: focusing on benchmark-level performance introduces scenario-specific artifacts, while relying on IID validation loss fails to track capability improvements when training distributions vary. In this work, we argue that downstream scaling should be studied at the capability level, which captures shared skill factors across related tasks while abstracting away benchmark-specific noise. We propose SuperValid, a framework that synthesizes OOD (out-of-distribution), capability-aligned validation data by distilling core concepts from benchmarks within a capability domain and expanding them into diverse, knowledge-rich texts. Extensive experiments spanning 16 benchmarks grouped into 6 capability domains show that SuperValid loss exhibits strong and stable correlation with downstream performance across models of different architectures, scales, and training data distributions. As a training-free metric computable during training without benchmark evaluation, SuperValid enables effective model selection, early stopping, and scaling decisions.
HardGen: Generating Hard Samples for Tool-use Agents
Bingguang Hao | Zengzhuang Xu | Yuntao Wen | Xinyi Xu | Quanen Sun | Yang Liu | Zihao Huang | Tong Zhao | Long Chen | Dong Wang | Yicheng Chen | Maolin Wang | Cunyin Peng | Xiangyu Zhao | Chenyi Zhuang | Ji Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Bingguang Hao | Zengzhuang Xu | Yuntao Wen | Xinyi Xu | Quanen Sun | Yang Liu | Zihao Huang | Tong Zhao | Long Chen | Dong Wang | Yicheng Chen | Maolin Wang | Cunyin Peng | Xiangyu Zhao | Chenyi Zhuang | Ji Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The advancement of LLM agents with tool-use capabilities requires diverse and complex training corpora. Existing data generation methods, which predominantly follow the paradigm of random sampling and shallow generation, often yield simple and homogeneous trajectories that fail to capture complex, implicit logical dependencies. To bridge this gap, we introduce **HardGen**, an automatic agentic pipeline designed to generate hard tool-use training samples. First, HardGen establishes a dynamic API Graph built upon agent failure cases, from which it samples hard tool-execution sequences. Second, these execution sequences are used to reversely build advanced tools that combine multi-step operations into one, which then help generate hard queries requiring unstated intermediate steps. Finally, advanced tools and hard queries drive the generation of Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which is iteratively refined through closed-loop verification feedback. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that a 4B parameter model trained with our curated dataset achieves superior performance compared to several leading open-source and closed-source competitors (e.g., GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Pro and Claude-Opus-4.5). Our code, models and the curated dataset with 27,000 samples will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.