Wenhui Tan
Author directory2026
Informed Masking: Structure-Aware Perturbation for Reinforcement Learning in Diffusion Large Language Models
Xiaoyi Yu | Enver Sangineto | Pei Fu | Fiorenzo Parascandolo | Wenhui Tan | Ruikang Zhang | Rita Cucchiara | Ruihua Song | Jian Luan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xiaoyi Yu | Enver Sangineto | Pei Fu | Fiorenzo Parascandolo | Wenhui Tan | Ruikang Zhang | Rita Cucchiara | Ruihua Song | Jian Luan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to autoregressive models, yet aligning them via Reinforcement Learning (RL) requires likelihood surrogates estimated from masked reconstruction subproblems under a small Monte Carlo budget per rollout. Existing methods construct these subproblems by uniform random masking, leaving open the question of which subproblems to prioritize. We identify a systematic upstream/downstream structure in dLLM rollouts. Some tokens, when revealed, trigger large confidence changes in nearby undecoded positions; we call them upstream. Others induce only small local changes and are therefore downstream. We find masking downstream tokens yields substantially better-posed subproblems than masking upstream tokens, a phenomenon we term subproblem difficulty asymmetry. Based on the observation, we propose Informed Masking (IM), which derives a per-token priority score from the denoising trajectory at zero extra inference cost and biases mask sampling toward downstream tokens. IM is plug-and-play: when plugged into three state-of-the-art dLLM RL methods on LLaDA-8B-Instruct, it delivers up to 2.01%, 8.68%, and 5.77% relative average gains on math and planning benchmarks with improved training stability.
Rethinking Depression Prediction from a Fine-Grained Subscore Modeling Perspective via Multi-Task Learning
Zhenguang Wang | Bo Li | Wenhui Tan | Peng Cao | Yang Wang | Jia Duan | Fei Wang | Osmar Zaiane
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhenguang Wang | Bo Li | Wenhui Tan | Peng Cao | Yang Wang | Jia Duan | Fei Wang | Osmar Zaiane
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Standard depression assessment relies on instruments such as the clinician-rated Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD) and the patient-reported Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-8), but manual scoring is time-consuming and subject to inter-rater variability. Prior automated approaches typically regress a single total score or coarse severity category, lacking the fine-grained subscore-level supervision needed for precise clinical diagnosis. To address this, we propose MTSP (Multi-Task Subscore Prediction), a fine-grained model for subscore prediction via multi-task learning. MTSP achieves state-of-the-art performance on the public E-DAIC dataset (MAE 3.48, RMSE 4.57) and generalizes well to the public PDCH and a large-scale private clinical dataset (CIDH), outperforming total-score regression baselines and Qwen3-14B direct scoring. We further show that multi-task learning is essential, subscore-level supervision improves assessment by better capturing symptom-cluster structure, and prior constraints plus task-level self-paced learning enhance robustness to subscore difficulty and annotation noise.