Wen Yang
Author directory2026
How Well Does Mathematical Reasoning Transfer Across Languages in English-Centric LLMs?
Wen Yang | Junhong Wu | Chong Li | Chengqing Zong | Jiajun Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Wen Yang | Junhong Wu | Chong Li | Chengqing Zong | Jiajun Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recent advances in Reinforcement Post-Training (RPT) have substantially improved the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear how well such gains transfer across languages. In this work, we study cross-lingual mathematical reasoning transfer in English-centric LLMs under controlled multilingual evaluation. We first evaluate a range of English-centric reasoning models on multilingual mathematical reasoning benchmarks and find that transfer is highly variable across initial model choice, target language, and training paradigm. Through controlled comparative experiments, we further find that stronger English-centric initialization does not necessarily lead to stronger relative transfer efficiency, even when it yields higher multilingual reasoning accuracy. Finally, we show that the largest improvement comes from moving beyond English-only supervision: adding a single parallel language yields a substantial gain, while further gains from additional languages are smaller but consistent. Overall, our results highlight the need to evaluate multilingual mathematical reasoning directly, using both absolute performance and relative transfer-efficiency metrics.
EDGE: Experience-Distillation for Guided Exploration in Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Can Xie | Yuyi Zhou | Wen Yang | Ziyi Zhang | Siyao Song | Yingzhuo Deng | Shuo Ren | Jiajun Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Can Xie | Yuyi Zhou | Wen Yang | Ziyi Zhang | Siyao Song | Yingzhuo Deng | Shuo Ren | Jiajun Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement learning with outcome-based objectives such as GRPO enables LLM-based agents to solve complex, long-horizon tasks, yet the reusable exploration patterns embedded in interaction trajectories are largely discarded after a single policy update. Existing experience-augmented approaches retrieve historical guidance at inference time, but they apply experiences without accounting for the policy’s evolving capability and create persistent dependencies on external retrieval. We propose EDGE (Experience-Distillation for Guided Exploration), a framework that treats retrieved experiences as temporary training-time scaffolds and progressively internalizes their benefits into the parametric policy. Concretely, EDGE partitions each rollout group into experience-conditioned and experience-free trajectories to estimate and admit only positive marginal gains without extra sampling, then distills the induced behavior into the base policy via a reverse-KL objective on its own empirical support. A co-evolutionary experience bank further synthesizes guidance from emerging failure modes and prunes obsolete entries as the policy evolves. Across embodied, web, and search-based QA tasks, EDGE improves over strong RL baselines by up to 12.5 points and remains effective without inference-time scaffolds or a proprietary reflector. The code is available at https://github.com/xvolcano02/EDGE.
2025
Markov Chain of Thought for Efficient Mathematical Reasoning
Wen Yang | Minpeng Liao | Kai Fan
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Wen Yang | Minpeng Liao | Kai Fan
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Implicit Cross-Lingual Rewarding for Efficient Multilingual Preference Alignment
Wen Yang | Junhong Wu | Chen Wang | Chengqing Zong | Jiajun Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Wen Yang | Junhong Wu | Chen Wang | Chengqing Zong | Jiajun Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become a prominent method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. While DPO has enabled significant progress in aligning English LLMs, multilingual preference alignment is hampered by data scarcity. To address this, we propose a novel approach that captures learned preferences from well-aligned English models by implicit rewards and transfers them to other languages through iterative training. Specifically, we derive an implicit reward model from the logits of an English DPO-aligned model and its corresponding reference model. This reward model is then leveraged to annotate preference relations in cross-lingual instruction-following pairs, using English instructions to evaluate multilingual responses. The annotated data is subsequently used for multilingual DPO fine-tuning, facilitating preference knowledge transfer from English to other languages. Fine-tuning Llama3 for two iterations resulted in a 12.72% average improvement in Win Rate and a 5.97% increase in Length Control Win Rate across all training languages on the X-AlpacaEval leaderboard. Our findings demonstrate that leveraging existing English-aligned models can enable efficient and effective multilingual preference alignment, significantly reducing the need for extensive multilingual preference data.
OpenS2S: Advancing Fully Open-Source End-to-End Empathetic Large Speech Language Model
Chen Wang | Tianyu Peng | Wen Yang | YiNan Bai | Guangfu Wang | Jun Lin | Lanpeng Jia | Lingxiang Wu | Jinqiao Wang | Chengqing Zong | Jiajun Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Chen Wang | Tianyu Peng | Wen Yang | YiNan Bai | Guangfu Wang | Jun Lin | Lanpeng Jia | Lingxiang Wu | Jinqiao Wang | Chengqing Zong | Jiajun Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Empathetic interaction is a cornerstone of human-machine communication, due to the need for understanding speech enriched with paralinguistic cues and generating emotional and expressive responses. However, the most powerful empathetic LSLMs are increasingly closed off, leaving the crucial details about the architecture, data and development opaque to researchers. Given the critical need for transparent research into the LSLMs and empathetic behavior, we present OpenS2S, a fully open-source, transparent and end-to-end LSLM designed to enable empathetic speech interactions. Based on our empathetic speech-to-text model BLSP-Emo, OpenS2S further employs a streaming interleaved decoding architecture to achieve low-latency speech generation. To facilitate end-to-end training, OpenS2S incorporates an automated data construction pipeline that synthesizes diverse, high-quality empathetic speech dialogues at low cost. By leveraging large language models to generate empathetic content and controllable text-to-speech systems to introduce speaker and emotional variation, we construct a scalable training corpus with rich paralinguistic diversity and minimal human supervision. We release the fully open-source OpenS2S model, including the dataset, model weights, pre-training and fine-tuning codes, to empower the broader research community and accelerate innovation in empathetic speech systems.
Teaching Vision-Language Models to Ask: Resolving Ambiguity in Visual Questions
Pu Jian | Donglei Yu | Wen Yang | Shuo Ren | Jiajun Zhang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Pu Jian | Donglei Yu | Wen Yang | Shuo Ren | Jiajun Zhang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In visual question answering (VQA) context, users often pose ambiguous questions to visual language models (VLMs) due to varying expression habits. Existing research addresses such ambiguities primarily by rephrasing questions. These approaches neglect the inherently interactive nature of user interactions with VLMs, where ambiguities can be clarified through user feedback. However, research on interactive clarification faces two major challenges: (1) Benchmarks are absent to assess VLMs’ capacity for resolving ambiguities through interaction; (2) VLMs are trained to prefer answering rather than asking, preventing them from seeking clarification. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ClearVQA benchmark, which targets three common categories of ambiguity in VQA context, and encompasses various VQA scenarios. Furthermore, we propose an automated pipeline to generate ambiguity-clarification question pairs, enabling VLMs to ask reasonable clarification questions and generate more accurate and specific answers based on user feedback, as demonstrated by experimental results.
2024
X-Instruction: Aligning Language Model in Low-resource Languages with Self-curated Cross-lingual Instructions
Chong Li | Wen Yang | Jiajun Zhang | Jinliang Lu | Shaonan Wang | Chengqing Zong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Chong Li | Wen Yang | Jiajun Zhang | Jinliang Lu | Shaonan Wang | Chengqing Zong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Large language models respond well in high-resource languages like English but struggle in low-resource languages. It may arise from the lack of high-quality instruction following data in these languages. Directly translating English samples into these languages can be a solution but unreliable, leading to responses with translation errors and lacking language-specific or cultural knowledge. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to construct cross-lingual instruction following samples with instruction in English and response in low-resource languages. Specifically, the language model first learns to generate appropriate English instructions according to the natural web texts in other languages as responses. The candidate cross-lingual instruction tuning samples are further refined and diversified. We have employed this method to build a large-scale cross-lingual instruction tuning dataset on 10 languages, namely X-Instruction. The instruction data built using our method incorporate more language-specific knowledge compared with the naive translation method. Experimental results have shown that the response quality of the model tuned on X-Instruction greatly exceeds the model distilled from a powerful teacher model, reaching or even surpassing the ones of ChatGPT. In addition, we find that models tuned on cross-lingual instruction following samples can follow the instruction in the output language without further tuning.