Woongyeong Yeo
Author directory2026
HINT-SD: Targeted Hindsight Self-Distillation for Long-Horizon Agents
Woongyeong Yeo | Yumin Choi | Taekyung Ki | Sung Ju Hwang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Woongyeong Yeo | Yumin Choi | Taekyung Ki | Sung Ju Hwang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Training long-horizon LLM agents with reinforcement learning is challenging because sparse outcome rewards reveal whether a task succeeds, but not which intermediate actions caused the outcome or how they should be corrected. Recent methods alleviate this issue by generating rewards or textual hints from turn-level action-output signals, or by using feedback-conditioned self-distillation. However, generating feedback at every turn is inefficient when many intermediate turns are already successful or neutral, and applying feedback at a fixed or misaligned turn often fails to supervise the actions that contributed to the failure. To bridge this gap, we propose HINT-SD, a targeted self-distillation framework that uses full-trajectory hindsight to select failure-relevant actions and applies feedback-conditioned distillation only to targeted action spans. Experiments on BFCL v3 and AppWorld show that our method outperforms the dense per-turn feedback baseline by up to 13.60 percentage points on average while achieving a 2.26× reduction in time per training step, suggesting that selecting where to distill is key to effective and efficient long-horizon agent training.
UniversalRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Corpora of Diverse Modalities and Granularities
Woongyeong Yeo | Kangsan Kim | Soyeong Jeong | Jinheon Baek | Sung Ju Hwang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Woongyeong Yeo | Kangsan Kim | Soyeong Jeong | Jinheon Baek | Sung Ju Hwang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown substantial promise in improving factual accuracy by grounding model responses with external knowledge relevant to queries. However, most existing approaches are limited to a text-only corpus, and while recent efforts have extended RAG to other modalities such as images and videos, they typically operate over a single modality-specific corpus. In contrast, real-world queries vary widely in the type of knowledge they require, which a single type of knowledge source cannot address. To address this, we introduce UniversalRAG, an any-to-any RAG framework designed to retrieve and integrate knowledge from heterogeneous sources with diverse modalities and granularities. Specifically, motivated by the observation that forcing all modalities into a unified representation space derived from a single aggregated corpus causes a modality gap, where the retrieval tends to favor items from the same modality as the query, we propose modality-aware routing, which dynamically identifies the most appropriate modality-specific corpus and performs targeted retrieval within it, and further justify its effectiveness with a theoretical analysis. Moreover, beyond modality, we organize each modality into multiple granularity levels, enabling fine-tuned retrieval tailored to the complexity and scope of the query. We validate UniversalRAG on 10 benchmarks of multiple modalities, showing its superiority over various modality-specific and unified baselines.