Senkang Hu
Author directory2026
Skill-Conditioned Gated Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning
Jiazhen Huang | Xiao Chen | Xiao Luo | Yong Dai | Senkang Hu | Yuzhi Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Jiazhen Huang | Xiao Chen | Xiao Luo | Yong Dai | Senkang Hu | Yuzhi Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
On-policy self-distillation (SD) improves LLM reasoning by using teacher-side privileged information (PI) to turn sparse verifier outcomes into dense token-level supervision. Existing methods usually assume trusted PI, such as reference answers or successful traces. We ask whether PI can instead come from an experience-derived skill bank, where retrieved skills are compact and reusable but may also be irrelevant or misleading. We propose Skill-Conditioned Gated Self-Distillation (SGSD), which formulates skill-based SD as teacher hypothesis validation rather than unconditional imitation. SGSD retrieves skill-mistake pairs, constructs a multi-teacher pool, and lets all skill-conditioned teachers score the same plain-prompt student rollout. The verifier validates each teacher’s polarity: supporting a success or suppressing a failure gives positive supervision, while the opposite stance is reversed. A robust gated objective then distills informative teacher-student disagreements while suppressing uncertain or extreme signals. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that SGSD consistently improves over GRPO and remains competitive with answer-conditioned OPSD under a weaker PI assumption. For example, on Qwen3-1.7B, SGSD outperforms GRPO by 6.2% and OPSD by 1.7% on AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25.
Unified Context Evolution for LLM Agents
Zixuan Zhu | Yitong Hu | Yong Dai | Junfeng Fang | Chunyang Jiang | Senkang Hu | Yuzhi Zhao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zixuan Zhu | Yitong Hu | Yong Dai | Junfeng Fang | Chunyang Jiang | Senkang Hu | Yuzhi Zhao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
LLM-based agents can solve multi-step interactive tasks by combining reasoning with environment feedback, yet each episode starts from the same fixed context and any useful strategy discovered along the way is lost once the task ends. Existing approaches either limit learning to the current task or pool all experience into a single untyped store, without distinguishing knowledge types, tracking quality through use, or balancing what the library still lacks. We introduce Unified Context Evolution (UCE), a gradient-free framework that externalizes agent experience into an evolving library of typed Evolvable Context Units (ECUs). UCE decomposes experience into four complementary types (Memory, Strategy, Workflow, and Skill), each generated from trajectories under type-specific conditions, retrieved at decision time, scored through repeated usage outcomes, and pruned when no longer valuable. A scheduling module allocates each cycle’s generation budget toward the types where the library is weakest. Across two interactive benchmarks, UCE raises ALFWorld success from 75.4% to 96.3% and WebShop task score from 45.1% to 61.3%, and remains effective across alternative actor reasoning backbones without model retraining.