Wentao Zhang
Author directoryPapers on this page may belong to the following people: Wentao Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Wentao Zhang
2026
AgenticRag-R1: Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Stack Memory for Multi-Step Reasoning, Retrieval and Memorizing
Xinke Jiang | Yue Fang | Zhibang Yang | Jiaran Gao | Zhixin Zhang | Tao Feng | Rihong Qiu | Wentao Zhang | Hongxin Ding | Ruizhe Zhang | Yongxin Xu | Yuheng Huang | Xu Chu | Junfeng Zhao | Yasha Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xinke Jiang | Yue Fang | Zhibang Yang | Jiaran Gao | Zhixin Zhang | Tao Feng | Rihong Qiu | Wentao Zhang | Hongxin Ding | Ruizhe Zhang | Yongxin Xu | Yuheng Huang | Xu Chu | Junfeng Zhao | Yasha Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) im- proves the factuality of large language models (LLMs), yet existing RAG systems often struggle with complex, multi-step reasoning that requires adaptive retrieval and continuous revision of intermediate contexts. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based agentic RAG methods partially alleviate this issue, but typically rely on coarse-grained action spaces and trajectory-level rewards, resulting in weak reward assignment and a bias toward short-horizon, stereotyped reasoning template. To address, we propose AGENTICRAG-R1, a RL framework that deeply integrates reasoning, retrieval, and memory via a memory stack and fine-grained action space, supported by hierarchical action-aware rewards and an information-aware trajectory rejection strategy to enable effective long-horizon learning. Experiments across a diverse set of multi-hop, open-domain, and agentic reasoning benchmarks, spanning multiple backbone model sizes, demonstrate that AGENTICRAG- R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines. Moreover, AGENTICRAG-R1 learns more robust, interpretable, and memory-aware reasoning behaviors, highlighting the effect of fine-grained action modeling and information- aware optimization for long-horizon reasoning. Our code is anonymous available at https: //github.com/jiangxinke/Harness-RL/ tree/AgenticRAG-R1-Whitebox.
The Data Frontier for Large Language Models: Selection, Synthesis, and Tools
Lijun Wu | Wentao Zhang | Conghui He
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Tutorial Abstracts)
Lijun Wu | Wentao Zhang | Conghui He
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Tutorial Abstracts)
As the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) matures, the focus of the research community is undergoing a critical shift from a purely model-centric to a data-centric paradigm. It is now evident that the quality, diversity, and composition of training data—not merely its scale—are the primary drivers of a model’s advanced capabilities, from complex reasoning to reliable instruction following. However, acquiring and curating such high-quality data remains a significant bottleneck. This tutorial provides a comprehensive and practical guide to the state-of-the-art in data research directions for LLMs. We structure the tutorial around the two core pillars of modern data strategy: intelligent data selection and advanced data synthesis. In the first part, we delve into methods for curating the most valuable information from vast, noisy datasets, covering techniques like LLM-as-a-judge for automated quality filtering and active learning for maximizing annotation efficiency. The second part explores the synthetic data revolution, detailing paradigms that range from generating complex reasoning traces (e.g., Chain-of-Thought) to deploying sophisticated multi-agent workflows that can autonomously create high-quality, diverse instruction data from raw seeds. Finally, we will conclude with a practical overview of open-source tools and platforms that facilitate these data-centric workflows, empowering researchers and practitioners to build better models through better data. Attendees will leave with a principled framework and actionable insights for designing and implementing the advanced data strategies required to build the next generation of powerful, specialized, and aligned LLMs.
2024
ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training
Le Zhuo | Zewen Chi | Minghao Xu | Heyan Huang | Jianan Zhao | Heqi Zheng | Conghui He | Xian-Ling Mao | Wentao Zhang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Le Zhuo | Zewen Chi | Minghao Xu | Heyan Huang | Jianan Zhao | Heqi Zheng | Conghui He | Xian-Ling Mao | Wentao Zhang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
We propose ProtLLM, a versatile cross-modal large language model (LLM) for both protein-centric and protein-language tasks. ProtLLM features a unique dynamic protein mounting mechanism, enabling it to handle complex inputs where the natural language text is interspersed with an arbitrary number of proteins. Besides, we propose the protein-as-word language modeling approach to train ProtLLM. By developing a specialized protein vocabulary, we equip the model with the capability to predict not just natural language but also proteins from a vast pool of candidates. Additionally, we construct a large-scale interleaved protein-text dataset, named InterPT, for pre-training. This dataset comprehensively encompasses both (1) structured data sources like protein annotations and (2) unstructured data sources like biological research papers, thereby endowing ProtLLM with crucial knowledge for understanding proteins. We evaluate ProtLLM on classic supervised protein-centric tasks and explore its novel protein-language applications. Experimental results demonstrate that ProtLLM not only achieves superior performance against protein-specialized baselines on protein-centric tasks but also induces zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities on protein-language tasks.
2023
Patton: Language Model Pretraining on Text-Rich Networks
Bowen Jin | Wentao Zhang | Yu Zhang | Yu Meng | Xinyang Zhang | Qi Zhu | Jiawei Han
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Bowen Jin | Wentao Zhang | Yu Zhang | Yu Meng | Xinyang Zhang | Qi Zhu | Jiawei Han
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
A real-world text corpus sometimes comprises not only text documents, but also semantic links between them (e.g., academic papers in a bibliographic network are linked by citations and co-authorships).Text documents and semantic connections form a text-rich network, which empowers a wide range of downstream tasks such as classification and retrieval. However, pretraining methods for such structures are still lacking, making it difficult to build one generic model that can be adapted to various tasks on text-rich networks. Current pretraining objectives, such as masked language modeling, purely model texts and do not take inter-document structure information into consideration. To this end, we propose our PretrAining on TexT-Rich NetwOrk framework Patton.Patton includes two pretraining strategies: network-contextualized masked language modeling and masked node prediction, to capture the inherent dependency between textual attributes and network structure. We conduct experiments on four downstream tasks in five datasets from both academic and e-commerce domains, where Patton outperforms baselines significantly and consistently.