Tong Yang
Author directory2026
MCPAgentBench: A Real-world Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Agent MCP Tool Use
Zixiang Liu | Wenrui Liu | Elsie Dai | Wenhan Yu | Lei Yu | Tong Yang | Yinjun Han | Hong Gao
Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
Zixiang Liu | Wenrui Liu | Elsie Dai | Wenhan Yu | Lei Yu | Tong Yang | Yinjun Han | Hong Gao
Proceedings of the Second Workshop for REsearch on Agent Language Models (REALM 2026)
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly serving as autonomous agents, and their utilization of external tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is considered a future trend. Current MCP evaluation sets suffer from issues such as reliance on external MCP services and a lack of difficulty awareness. To address these limitations, we propose MCPAgentBench, a benchmark based on real-world MCP definitions designed to evaluate the tool-use capabilities of agents. We construct a dataset containing authentic tasks and simulated MCP tools. The evaluation employs a dynamic sandbox environment that presents agents with candidate tool lists containing distractors, thereby testing their tool selection and discrimination abilities. Furthermore, we introduce comprehensive metrics to measure both task completion rates and execution efficiency. Experiments conducted on state-of-the-art LLMs reveal significant performance differences in handling complex, multi-step tool invocations. All code is open-source at https://github.com/Brunestuder/MCPAgentBench.
HAPMoE: Heterogeneity-Aware Automatic Parallelism Planning for Mixture-of-Experts Models Training
Mengyuan Fan | Peizhuang Cong | Zixiao Huang | Si Xu | Tong Qiao | Yanghao Li | Jing Yang | Tong Yang | Quanlu Zhang | Yu Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Mengyuan Fan | Peizhuang Cong | Zixiao Huang | Si Xu | Tong Qiao | Yanghao Li | Jing Yang | Tong Yang | Quanlu Zhang | Yu Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
As model sizes continue to scale, distributed training has become inevitable. Automatic parallelization techniques can derive efficient training parallelism strategies at low cost while achieving superior performance. The difficulty of this problem is jointly determined by the complexity of the model and the underlying compute cluster. Meanwhile, mixture-of-experts (MoE) models are increasingly emerging as the dominant architecture and the rapid evolution of accelerator hardware has made cluster heterogeneity commonplace, posing substantial challenges to automatic parallelization. However, existing approaches typically target either MoE architectures or heterogeneous clusters, failing to generalize to scenarios where both challenges coexist. To this end, we present HAPMoE, a heterogeneity-aware automatic parallelism planner for MoE training. HAPMoE builds a lightweight MoE-aware cost model and efficiently searches a six-dimensional parallel space, producing parallel plans directly deployable on Megatron-LM. Experiments show that HAPMoE improves end-to-end training throughput by up to 3.2× over baselines across heterogeneous clusters. Its non-uniform pipeline partitioning yields an additional up to 78% gains, and its pruning-enhanced dynamic programming algorithm completes the search within 1 minute, demonstrating high efficiency and practical value in complex hardware environments.
PersonaForge: Realistic Multi-Turn User Simulation for Agentic Systems
Hanglong Lv | Dawei Zhu | Lei Li | Bowen Ye | Huaqiu Liu | Yifan Song | Bofei Gao | Weimin Xiong | Jinhao Dong | Chenhong He | Lingpeng Kong | Qi Liu | Tong Yang | Fuli Luo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Hanglong Lv | Dawei Zhu | Lei Li | Bowen Ye | Huaqiu Liu | Yifan Song | Bofei Gao | Weimin Xiong | Jinhao Dong | Chenhong He | Lingpeng Kong | Qi Liu | Tong Yang | Fuli Luo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language models are increasingly used as agentic workflow executors, yet existing training data and benchmarks largely assume informationally complete, single-turn queries. Our analysis of 16K real-world sessions shows that 75.9% of interactions are multi-turn, revealing a substantial gap between how users interact with agents and how such systems are trained and evaluated. We introduce PersonaForge, a user simulation framework for synthesizing realistic multi-turn user–agent interactions. PersonaForge combines a four-dimensional persona space, SOUL-driven behavioral control calibrated to real-user statistics, and Reverse Deep Construction grounded in authentic seed queries. Using PersonaForge, we construct a 6.3K-record training dataset and PersonaForge-Bench, a manually annotated 138-task benchmark spanning over 20 professional domains with four-dimensional scoring. Experiments on Qwen3.5-27B show that PersonaForge training improves the composite score by +4.1%, with gains across all four dimensions and the largest improvements in Task Completion (+6.0%) and Response Quality (+6.8%). Further analyses show that PersonaForge-trained agents use fewer turns and tool calls, suggesting improved interaction efficiency, while ablations confirm the contribution of SOUL components and adaptive simulation. Together, PersonaForge and PersonaForge-Bench establish a foundation for training and evaluating agents under realistic multi-turn user interaction.
ARC: Active and Reflection-driven Context Management for Long-Horizon Information Seeking Agents
Yilun Yao | Shan Huang | Elsie Dai | Zhewen Tan | Zhenyu Duan | Shousheng Jia | Yanbing Jiang | Tong Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yilun Yao | Shan Huang | Elsie Dai | Zhewen Tan | Zhenyu Duan | Shousheng Jia | Yanbing Jiang | Tong Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large language models are increasingly deployed as research agents for deep search and long-horizon information seeking, yet their performance often degrades as interaction histories grow. This degradation, known as context rot, reflects a failure to maintain coherent and task-relevant internal states over extended reasoning horizons. Existing approaches primarily manage context through raw accumulation or passive summarization, treating it as a static artifact and allowing early errors or misplaced emphasis to persist. Motivated by this perspective, we propose ARC, which is the first framework to systematically formulate context management as an active, reflection-driven process that treats context as a dynamic internal reasoning state during execution. ARC operationalizes this view through reflection-driven monitoring and revision, allowing agents to actively reorganize their working context when misalignment or degradation is detected. Experiments on challenging long-horizon information-seeking benchmarks show that ARC consistently outperforms passive context compression methods, achieving up to an 11% absolute improvement in accuracy on BrowseComp-ZH with Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct.
Semantic Head Specialization Guides Hybrid ViT Attention for Multimodal LLMs
Chenhong He | Lei Li | Shicheng Li | Hanglong Lv | Lingpeng Kong | Qi Liu | Tong Yang | Shuhuai Ren
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Chenhong He | Lei Li | Shicheng Li | Hanglong Lv | Lingpeng Kong | Qi Liu | Tong Yang | Shuhuai Ren
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hybrid attention dominates frontier LLMs, yet Vision Transformers (ViTs) in multimodal LLMs lack a satisfactory hybrid design, with no consensus on why certain attention patterns work better. To fill this gap, we study ViT attention heads and find they differentiate into object- and background-specialist roles, a pattern most pronounced under full attention; we call this Semantic Head Specialization (SHS). We propose SHS-Index to quantify this specialization, show that it distinguishes full-attention from chunk-window ViTs, and find that it strongly tracks downstream benchmark performance. We then identify three structural factors that shape SHS—window interaction, token serialization, and local softmax allocation—and use them as design principles for hybrid attention. Guided by these factors, we design Ariadne Attention, a hybrid that matches full attention on 22 image and video tasks at 6.5 × less attention compute. Our findings establish head specialization as a measurable property for diagnosing and designing principled hybrid ViT attention at the multimodal-LLM scale.
ScienceArena: Benchmarking LLMs on Latest Scientific Olympiad Competitions
Guangxiang Zhao | Qilong Shi | Xusen Xiao | Liuwenpu | Yaoming Li | Linfeng Hao | Shuyang Hou | Zijian Guo | Xinrui Zhang | Yuntian Zhao | Zhengyang Wang | Wenrui Liu | Yuhan Wu | Tong Yang | Lin Sun | Xiangzheng Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Guangxiang Zhao | Qilong Shi | Xusen Xiao | Liuwenpu | Yaoming Li | Linfeng Hao | Shuyang Hou | Zijian Guo | Xinrui Zhang | Yuntian Zhao | Zhengyang Wang | Wenrui Liu | Yuhan Wu | Tong Yang | Lin Sun | Xiangzheng Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Benchmark saturation and data contamination increasingly obscure genuine scientific reasoning in frontier LLMs. We introduce ScienceArena, an olympiad-style benchmark from thirteen public science competitions in physics, chemistry, and biology, including IPhO and IChO 2025–2026, IBO 2023, USAPhO 2026, and USNCO 2025. Its open-ended, multi-step problems use process-credit rubrics, making faithful scoring difficult. We build ScienceArena through an expert-audited digitization pipeline that converts official exams, figures, solutions, and rubrics into structured items verified by olympiad medalists. To scale evaluation beyond costly human grading, we calibrate LLM-as-judge against medalist ground truth on archived answers from five models across IPhO and IChO; two strong judges stay within one point of expert total scores. Medalist notes show that failures often stem from visual grounding, structure fidelity, and global problem control rather than missing terminology. Evaluating fourteen recent LLMs with interleaved solving, we find that top models obtain medal-equivalent rubric scores on several public international exams, while chemistry and long-horizon consistency remain key bottlenecks. We provide an interactive demo.
RealClawBench: Live OpenClaw Benchmarks from Real Developer-Agent Sessions
Zongwei Lv | Yaoming Li | Zhewen Tan | Yilun Yao | Yuxuan Tian | Lin Sun | Xiangzheng Zhang | Weihong Lin | Tong Yang | Guangxiang Zhao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zongwei Lv | Yaoming Li | Zhewen Tan | Yilun Yao | Yuxuan Tian | Lin Sun | Xiangzheng Zhang | Weihong Lin | Tong Yang | Guangxiang Zhao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Agent benchmarks should reflect what users actually ask deployed agents to do, yet existing benchmarks often miss the realism of real developer-agent sessions. We introduce RealClawBench, a live benchmark framework built from real OpenClaw sessions to capture the distribution, diversity, and real-world difficulty of deployed agent use. Real user requests are challenging to benchmark because they often depend on local execution environments, involve implicit or underspecified intent, and require nontrivial verification. RealClawBench addresses these challenges with two core mechanisms: reconstructed execution environments and deterministic verifiable scorers, which together convert real sessions into reproducible, automatically scored tasks. The resulting release contains 281 executable tasks sampled from a much larger real-session pool while preserving the source distribution, with maximum final-vs-source Jensen-Shannon divergence of 0.0448. Evaluating 14 contemporary models shows that the best system solves only 65.8% of tasks, revealing substantial headroom on realistic developer-agent workloads. By turning real deployed sessions into controlled evaluation instances, RealClawBench provides a practical path toward benchmarks that better measure agent capability in actual use.
LPFQA: A Long-Tail Professional Forum-based Benchmark for LLM Evaluation
Liya Zhu | Peizhuang Cong | Jingzhe Ding | Aowei Ji | Wenya Wu | Jiani Hou | Chunjie Wu | Xiang Gao | Jingkai Liu | Zhou Huan | XueLei Sun | Yang Yang | Jianpeng Jiao | Liang HU | Xinjie Chen | Jiashuo Liu | Tong Yang | Zaiyuan Wang | Ge Zhang | Wenhao Huang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Liya Zhu | Peizhuang Cong | Jingzhe Ding | Aowei Ji | Wenya Wu | Jiani Hou | Chunjie Wu | Xiang Gao | Jingkai Liu | Zhou Huan | XueLei Sun | Yang Yang | Jianpeng Jiao | Liang HU | Xinjie Chen | Jiashuo Liu | Tong Yang | Zaiyuan Wang | Ge Zhang | Wenhao Huang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on standard reasoning and question-answering benchmarks, yet such evaluations often fail to capture their ability to handle long-tail, expertise-intensive knowledge in real-world professional scenarios. We introduce LPFQA, a long-tail knowledge benchmark derived from authentic professional forum discussions, covering 7 academic and industrial domains with 430 curated tasks grounded in practical expertise. LPFQA evaluates specialized reasoning, domain-specific terminology understanding, and contextual interpretation, and adopts a hierarchical difficulty structure to ensure semantic clarity and uniquely identifiable answers. Experiments on over multiple mainstream LLMs reveal substantial performance gaps, particularly on tasks requiring deep domain reasoning, exposing limitations overlooked by existing benchmarks. Overall, LPFQA provides an authentic and discriminative evaluation framework that complements prior benchmarks and informs future LLM development. Our data is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/m-a-p/LPFQA.
TriPlay-RL: Tri-Role Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for LLM Safety Alignment
Zhewen Tan | Wenhan Yu | Jianfeng Si | Tongxin Liu | Kaiqi Guan | Huiyan Jin | Jiawen Tao | Xiaokun Yuan | Xiangzheng Zhang | Duohe Ma | Tong Yang | Lin Sun
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhewen Tan | Wenhan Yu | Jianfeng Si | Tongxin Liu | Kaiqi Guan | Huiyan Jin | Jiawen Tao | Xiaokun Yuan | Xiangzheng Zhang | Duohe Ma | Tong Yang | Lin Sun
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In recent years, safety risks associated with large language models have become increasingly prominent, highlighting the urgent need to mitigate the generation of toxic and harmful content. The mainstream paradigm for LLM safety alignment typically adopts a collaborative framework involving three roles: an attacker for adversarial prompt generation, a defender for safety defense, and an evaluator for response assessment. In this paper, we propose a closed-loop reinforcement learning framework called TriPlay-RL that enables iterative and co-improving collaboration among three roles with near-zero manual annotation. Experimental results show that the attacker preserves high output diversity while achieving a 20%–50% improvement in adversarial effectiveness. The defender attains 10%–30% gains in safety performance without degrading general reasoning capability, and the evaluator continuously refines its fine-grained judgment ability through iterations, accurately distinguishing unsafe responses, simple refusals, and useful guidance. Overall, our framework establishes an efficient and scalable paradigm for LLM safety alignment, enabling continuous co-evolution within a unified learning loop. The code is available at https://github.com/Qihoo360/TriPlay-RL.
Thinking with Reasoning Skills: Fewer Tokens, More Accuracy
Guangxiang Zhao | Qilong Shi | Xusen Xiao | Xiangzheng Zhang | Tong Yang | Lin Sun
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Guangxiang Zhao | Qilong Shi | Xusen Xiao | Xiangzheng Zhang | Tong Yang | Lin Sun
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Reasoning LLMs often spend substantial tokens on long intermediate reasoning traces (e.g., chain-of-thought) when solving new problems. We propose to summarize and store reusable reasoning skills distilled from extensive deliberation and trial-and-error exploration, and to retrieve these skills at inference time to guide future reasoning. Unlike the prevailing reasoning from scratch paradigm, our approach first recalls relevant skills for each query, helping the model avoid redundant detours and focus on effective solution paths. We evaluate our method on coding and mathematical reasoning tasks, and find that it significantly reduces reasoning tokens while improving overall performance. The resulting lower per-request cost indicates strong practical and economic potential for real-world deployment.
2025
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference
Ping Gong | Jiawei Yi | Shengnan Wang | Juncheng Zhang | Zewen Jin | Ouxiang Zhou | Ruibo Liu | Guanbin Xu | Youhui Bai | Bowen Ye | Kun Yuan | Tong Yang | Gong Zhang | Renhai Chen | Feng Wu | Cheng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Ping Gong | Jiawei Yi | Shengnan Wang | Juncheng Zhang | Zewen Jin | Ouxiang Zhou | Ruibo Liu | Guanbin Xu | Youhui Bai | Bowen Ye | Kun Yuan | Tong Yang | Gong Zhang | Renhai Chen | Feng Wu | Cheng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a pivotal research area, yet the attention module remains a critical bottleneck in LLM inference, even with techniques like KVCache to mitigate redundant computations. While various top-k attention mechanisms have been proposed to accelerate LLM inference by exploiting the inherent sparsity of attention, they often struggled to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, we introduce HATA (Hash-Aware Top-k Attention), a novel approach that systematically integrates low-overhead learning-to-hash techniques into the Top-k attention process. Different from the existing top-k attention methods which are devoted to seeking an absolute estimation of qk score, typically with a great cost, HATA maps queries and keys into binary hash codes, and acquires the relative qk score order with a quite low cost, which is sufficient for realizing top-k attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HATA achieves up to 7.2× speedup compared to vanilla full attention while maintaining model accuracy. In addition, HATA outperforms the state-of-the-art top-k attention methods in both accuracy and efficiency across multiple mainstream LLM models and diverse tasks. HATA is open source at https://github.com/gpzlx1/HATA.
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- Lin Sun 4
- Xiangzheng Zhang 4
- Zhewen Tan 3
- Guangxiang Zhao 3
- Peizhuang Cong 2
- Elsie Dai 2
- Chenhong He 2
- Lingpeng Kong 2
- Lei Li 2
- Yaoming Li 2
- Qi Liu 2
- Wenrui Liu 2
- Hanglong Lv 2
- Qilong Shi 2
- Xusen Xiao 2
- Yilun Yao 2
- Bowen Ye 2
- Wenhan Yu 2
- Youhui Bai 1
- Renhai Chen 1
- Xinjie Chen 1
- Jingzhe Ding 1
- Jinhao Dong 1
- Zhenyu Duan 1
- Mengyuan Fan 1
- Bofei Gao 1
- Hong Gao 1
- Xiang Gao 1
- Ping Gong 1
- Kaiqi Guan 1
- Zijian Guo 1
- Liang HU 1
- Yinjun Han 1
- Linfeng Hao 1
- Jiani Hou 1
- Shuyang Hou 1
- Zhou Huan 1
- Shan Huang 1
- Wenhao Huang 1
- Zixiao Huang 1
- Aowei Ji 1
- Shousheng Jia 1
- Yanbing Jiang 1
- Jianpeng Jiao 1
- Huiyan Jin 1
- Zewen Jin 1
- Cheng Li 1
- Shicheng Li 1
- Yanghao Li 1
- Weihong Lin 1
- Huaqiu Liu 1
- Jiashuo Liu 1
- Jingkai Liu 1
- Ruibo Liu 1
- Tongxin Liu 1
- Zixiang Liu 1
- Liuwenpu 1
- Fuli Luo 1
- Zongwei Lv 1
- Duohe Ma 1
- Tong Qiao 1
- Shuhuai Ren 1
- Jianfeng Si 1
- Yifan Song 1
- XueLei Sun 1
- Jiawen Tao 1
- Yuxuan Tian 1
- Shengnan Wang 1
- Yu Wang 1
- Zaiyuan Wang 1
- Zhengyang Wang 1
- Chunjie Wu 1
- Feng Wu 1
- Wenya Wu 1
- Yuhan Wu 1
- Weimin Xiong 1
- Guanbin Xu 1
- Si Xu 1
- Jing Yang 1
- Yang Yang 1
- Jiawei Yi 1
- Lei Yu 1
- Kun Yuan 1
- Xiaokun Yuan 1
- Ge Zhang 1
- Gong Zhang 1
- Juncheng Zhang 1
- Quanlu Zhang 1
- Xinrui Zhang 1
- Yuntian Zhao 1
- Ouxiang Zhou 1
- Dawei Zhu 1
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