Tianyu Yang
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2026
ALDEN: Reinforcement Learning for Active Navigation and Evidence Gathering in Long Documents
Tianyu Yang | Terry Ruas | Yijun Tian | Jan Philip Wahle | Daniel Kurzawe | Bela Gipp
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tianyu Yang | Terry Ruas | Yijun Tian | Jan Philip Wahle | Daniel Kurzawe | Bela Gipp
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While Vision–language models (VLMs) interpret text-rich images effectively, they struggle with reasoning across long, multi-page documents. We present Active 𝐋ong 𝐃ocum𝐄nt 𝐍avigation (ALDEN), a multi-turn reinforcement learning framework that fine-tunes VLMs as interactive agents capable of actively navigating long, visually rich documents rather than passive readers. ALDEN features a novel fetch action that allows direct page indexing, complementing the classic search action and better exploiting document structure. To ensure training efficiency and stability, we introduce a rule-based cross-level reward for dense supervision and a visual-semantic anchoring mechanism utilizing dual-path KL-divergence constraints. We train ALDEN on a curated corpus built from open-source datasets where trivial samples are filtered, and queries are rewritten to incentivize multi-turn navigation and fetch usage. Empirically, ALDEN achieves state-of-the-art results on five long-document benchmarks, offering a more accurate and efficient path for long-document understanding.
2025
Robust Utility-Preserving Text Anonymization Based on Large Language Models
Tianyu Yang | Xiaodan Zhu | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tianyu Yang | Xiaodan Zhu | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Anonymizing text that contains sensitive information is crucial for a wide range of applications. Existing techniques face the emerging challenges of the re-identification ability of large language models (LLMs), which have shown advanced capability in memorizing detailed information and reasoning over dispersed pieces of patterns to draw conclusions. When defending against LLM-based re-identification, anonymization could jeopardize the utility of the resulting anonymized data in downstream tasks. In general, the interaction between anonymization and data utility requires a deeper understanding within the context of LLMs. In this paper, we propose a framework composed of three key LLM-based components: a privacy evaluator, a utility evaluator and an optimization component, which work collaboratively to perform anonymization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing baselines, showing robustness in reducing the risk of re-identification while preserving greater data utility in downstream tasks. We provide detailed studies on these core modules. To consider large-scale and real-time applications, we investigate the distillation of the anonymization capabilities into lightweight models. All of our code and datasets will be made publicly available at [Github URL].