Shuaiyi Nie
2026
Sparse Growing Transformer: Training-Time Sparse Depth Allocation via Progressive Attention Looping
Yao Chen | Yilong Chen | Yinqi Yang | Junyuan Shang | Zhenyu Zhang | Zefeng Zhang | Shuaiyi Nie | Shuohuan Wang | Yu Sun | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang | Tingwen Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yao Chen | Yilong Chen | Yinqi Yang | Junyuan Shang | Zhenyu Zhang | Zefeng Zhang | Shuaiyi Nie | Shuohuan Wang | Yu Sun | Hua Wu | Haifeng Wang | Tingwen Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Existing approaches to increasing the effective depth of Transformers predominantly rely on parameter reuse, extending computation through recursive execution.Under this paradigm, the network structure remains static along the training timeline, and additional computational depth is uniformly assigned to entire blocks at the parameter level.This rigidity across training time and parameter space leads to substantial computational redundancy during training.In contrast, we argue that depth allocation during training should not be a static preset, but rather a progressively growing structural process. Our systematic analysis reveals a deep-to-shallow maturation trajectory across layers, where high-entropy attention heads play a crucial role in semantic integration. Motivated by this observation, we introduce the Sparse Growing Transformer (SGT).SGT is a training-time sparse depth allocation framework that progressively extends recurrence from deeper to shallower layers via targeted attention looping on informative heads. This mechanism induces structural sparsity by selectively increasing depth only for a small subset of parameters as training evolves.Extensive experiments across multiple parameter scales demonstrate that SGT consistently outperforms training-time static block-level looping baselines under comparable settings, while reducing the additional training FLOPs overhead from approximately 16–20% to only 1–3% relative to a standard Transformer backbone.
ExpSeek: Self-Triggered Experience Seeking for Web Agents
Wenyuan Zhang | Xinghua Zhang | Haiyang Yu | Shuaiyi Nie | Bingli Wu | Juwei Yue | Tingwen Liu | Yongbin Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Wenyuan Zhang | Xinghua Zhang | Haiyang Yu | Shuaiyi Nie | Bingli Wu | Juwei Yue | Tingwen Liu | Yongbin Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Experience intervention in web agents emerges as a promising technical paradigm, enhancing agent interaction capabilities by providing valuable insights from accumulated experiences. However, existing methods predominantly inject experience passively as global context before task execution, struggling to adapt to dynamically changing contextual observations during agent-environment interaction. We propose **ExpSeek**, which shifts experience toward step-level proactive seeking: (1) estimating step-level entropy thresholds to determine intervention timing using the model’s intrinsic signals; (2) designing step-level tailored experience content. Experiments on Qwen3-8B and 32B models across four challenging web agent benchmarks demonstrate that ExpSeek achieves absolute improvements of 9.3% and 7.5%, respectively. Our experiments validate the feasibility and advantages of entropy as a self-triggering signal, reveal that even a small-scale 4B experience model can significantly boost the performance of larger agent models. The code is released at https://github.com/WYRipple/ExpSeek.
AttnPO: Attention-Guided Process Supervision for Efficient Reasoning
Shuaiyi Nie | Dingsiyu | Wenyuan Zhang | Linhao Yu | Tianmeng Yang | Yao Chen | Weichong Yin | Yu Sun | Hua Wu | Tingwen Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shuaiyi Nie | Dingsiyu | Wenyuan Zhang | Linhao Yu | Tianmeng Yang | Yao Chen | Weichong Yin | Yu Sun | Hua Wu | Tingwen Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large reasoning models trained with reinforcement learning and verifiable rewards (RLVR) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet often overthink, generating redundant reasoning without performance gains. Existing trajectory-level length penalties often fail to effectively shorten reasoning length and degrade accuracy, as they uniformly treat all reasoning steps and lack fine-grained signals to distinguish redundancy from necessity. Meanwhile, process-supervised methods are typically resource-intensive and suffer from inaccurate credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose ATTNPO, a low-overhead process-supervised RL framework that leverages the model’s intrinsic attention signals for step-level credit assignment. We first identify a set of special attention heads that naturally focus on essential steps while suppressing redundant ones. By leveraging the attention scores of these heads, We then employ two sub-strategies to mitigate overthinking by discouraging redundant steps while preserving accuracy by reducing penalties on essential steps. Experimental results show that ATTNPO substantially reduces reasoning length while significantly improving performance across 9 benchmarks.
2025
Revealing and Mitigating the Challenge of Detecting Character Knowledge Errors in LLM Role-Playing
Wenyuan Zhang | Shuaiyi Nie | Jiawei Sheng | Zefeng Zhang | Xinghua Zhang | Yongquan He | Tingwen Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Wenyuan Zhang | Shuaiyi Nie | Jiawei Sheng | Zefeng Zhang | Xinghua Zhang | Yongquan He | Tingwen Liu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language model (LLM) role-playing has gained widespread attention. Authentic character knowledge is crucial for constructing realistic LLM role-playing agents. However, existing works usually overlook the exploration of LLMs’ ability to detect characters’ known knowledge errors (KKE) and unknown knowledge errors (UKE) while playing roles, which would lead to low-quality automatic construction of character trainable corpus. In this paper, we propose RoleKE-Bench to evaluate LLMs’ ability to detect errors in KKE and UKE. The results indicate that even the latest LLMs struggle to detect these two types of errors effectively, especially when it comes to familiar knowledge. We experimented with various reasoning strategies and propose an agent-based reasoning method, Self-Recollection and Self-Doubt (S2RD), to explore further the potential for improving error detection capabilities.