Sulong Xu
Author directory2026
RealWorldShop: Benchmarking and Improving Conversational Shopping Agents in Real-World E-commerce
Xinwei Yang | Kelong Mao | Yudong Guo | Sulong Xu | Gu Simiu | Chen Huang | Wenqiang Lei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xinwei Yang | Kelong Mao | Yudong Guo | Sulong Xu | Gu Simiu | Chen Huang | Wenqiang Lei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models are reshaping e-commerce from static recommenders into interactive shopping assistants, yet real-world shopping requires session-level decision support: users reveal and revise constraints, coordinate multiple goals, and expect product-grounded recommendations over a full conversation. Existing benchmarks are mostly outcome-oriented or execution-oriented, leaving this evolving decision process under-evaluated. We introduce RealWorldShop, a benchmark built on 3.28M grounded products, structured shopping episodes, a profile-grounded and action-controlled user simulator, and role-play evaluation. Our analysis shows that current systems produce locally plausible responses but struggle with state tracking, constraint updating, and grounded convergence, especially under ambiguous intent, bundle, and multi-intent scenarios. We further propose RealShop_Agent, an executable session-control framework with explicit state management, shopping-flow control, catalog-grounded retrieval, and runtime guards. Experiments show that RealShop_Agent consistently outperforms strong baselines on RealWorldShop.
A Better Spur Should Start From Each Objective
Shanwen Mao | Hao Zhang | Guangtao Nie | Zhiheng Li | Huimu Wang | Sulong Xu | Gu Simiu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shanwen Mao | Hao Zhang | Guangtao Nie | Zhiheng Li | Huimu Wang | Sulong Xu | Gu Simiu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Real-world Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) often suffers from **sparse rewards**, **reward conflicts**, and late-stage **reward tug-of-war**, causing traditional linear scalarization to experience severe metric oscillations. To address optimization conflicts among multiple objectives in real-world deployment scenarios, we propose Multi-Marginal Preference Optimization (MMPO), a fine-grained framework that intervenes at the data, gradient, and constraint levels rather than relying on coarse-grained global scalarization. Specifically, MMPO performs exposure debiasing to mitigate sparse and biased rewards, applies priority-aware orthogonal projection to decouple conflicting gradients, and introduces self-prompted gradient constraints to prevent dominant objectives from overwhelming weaker ones. Experiments on real-world e-commerce datasets show that MMPO improves training stability and consistently achieves better performance across conflicting metrics. Moreover, it generalizes robustly to broader tasks such as ToolRL and code generation, demonstrating its effectiveness as a practical paradigm for multi-objective alignment.
2025
Unraveling the Mystery: Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks Via Unearthing Real Intention
Yanhao Li | Hongshen Chen | Heng Zhang | Zhiwei Ge | Tianhao Li | Sulong Xu | Guibo Luo
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Yanhao Li | Hongshen Chen | Heng Zhang | Zhiwei Ge | Tianhao Li | Sulong Xu | Guibo Luo
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more advanced, the security risks they pose also increase. Ensuring that LLM behavior aligns with human values, particularly in mitigating jailbreak attacks with elusive and implicit intentions, has become a significant challenge. To address this issue, we propose a jailbreak defense method called Real Intentions Defense (RID), which involves two phases: soft extraction and hard deletion. In the soft extraction phase, LLMs are leveraged to extract unbiased, genuine intentions, while in the hard deletion phase, a greedy gradient-based algorithm is used to remove the least important parts of a sentence, based on the insight that words with smaller gradients have less impact on its meaning. We conduct extensive experiments on Vicuna and Llama2 models using eight state-of-the-art jailbreak attacks and six benchmark datasets. Our results show a significant reduction in both Attack Success Rate (ASR) and Harmful Score of jailbreak attacks, while maintaining overall model performance. Further analysis sheds light on the underlying mechanisms of our approach.
2023
Adaptive Hyper-parameter Learning for Deep Semantic Retrieval
Mingming Li | Chunyuan Yuan | Huimu Wang | Peng Wang | Jingwei Zhuo | Binbin Wang | Lin Liu | Sulong Xu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Mingming Li | Chunyuan Yuan | Huimu Wang | Peng Wang | Jingwei Zhuo | Binbin Wang | Lin Liu | Sulong Xu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Deep semantic retrieval has achieved remarkable success in online E-commerce applications. The majority of methods aim to distinguish positive items and negative items for each query by utilizing margin loss or softmax loss. Despite their decent performance, these methods are highly sensitive to hyper-parameters, i.e., margin and temperature 𝜏, which measure the similarity of negative pairs and affect the distribution of items in metric space. How to design and choose adaptively parameters for different pairs is still an open challenge. Recently several methods have attempted to alleviate the above problem by learning each parameter through trainable/statistical methods in the recommendation. We argue that those are not suitable for retrieval scenarios, due to the agnosticism and diversity of the queries. To fully overcome this limitation, we propose a novel adaptive metric learning method that designs a simple and universal hyper-parameter-free learning method to improve the performance of retrieval. Specifically, we first propose a method that adaptive obtains the hyper-parameters by relying on the batch similarity without fixed or extra-trainable hyper-parameters. Subsequently, we adopt a symmetric metric learning method to mitigate model collapse issues. Furthermore, the proposed method is general and sheds a highlight on other fields. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method significantly outperforms previous methods on a real-world dataset, highlighting the superiority and effectiveness of our method. This method has been successfully deployed on an online E-commerce search platform and brought substantial economic benefits.
Automatic Marketing Theme and Commodity Construction System for E-commerce
Zhiping Wang | Peng Lin | Hainan Zhang | Hongshen Chen | Tianhao Li | Zhuoye Ding | Sulong Xu | Jinghe Hu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Zhiping Wang | Peng Lin | Hainan Zhang | Hongshen Chen | Tianhao Li | Zhuoye Ding | Sulong Xu | Jinghe Hu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
When consumers’ shopping needs are concentrated, they are more interested in the collection of commodities under the specific marketing theme. Therefore, mining marketing themes and their commodities collections can help customers save shopping costs and improve user clicks and purchases for recommendation system. However, the current system invites experts to write marketing themes and select the relevant commodities, which suffer from difficulty in mass production, poor timeliness and low online indicators. Therefore, we propose a automatic marketing theme and commodity construction system, which can not only generate popular marketing themes and select the relevant commodities automatically, but also improve the theme online effectiveness in the recommendation system. Specifically, we firstly utilize the pretrained language model to generate the marketing themes. And then, we utilize the theme-commodity consistency module to select the relevant commodities for the above generative theme. What’s more, we also build the indicator simulator to evaluate the effectiveness of the above generative theme. When the indicator is lower, the above selective commodities will be input into the theme-rewriter module to generate more efficient marketing themes. Finally, we utilize the human screening to control the system quality. Both the offline experiments and online A/B test demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed system compared with state-of-the-art methods.