Xiaopeng Ke
Author directory2026
MemoNoveltyAgent: A Historical-Memory-Augmented Multi-Agent System for Paper Novelty Assessment
JiaJun Hou | Hexuan Deng | Wenxiang Jiao | Xuebo Liu | Xiaopeng Ke | Derek F. Wong | Min Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
JiaJun Hou | Hexuan Deng | Wenxiang Jiao | Xuebo Liu | Xiaopeng Ke | Derek F. Wong | Min Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
To alleviate the heavy burden of paper screening, researchers increasingly rely on existing AI agents, such as AI reviewers or DeepResearch, for paper evaluation and novelty assessment. However, lacking specialized mechanisms for processing scholarly literature, their analyses often produce superficial results with noticeable deficiencies in quality. To bridge this gap, we introduce MemoNoveltyAgent, a multi-agent system designed to generate comprehensive and faithful novelty reports. Beyond retrieving concrete prior-paper evidence via RAG, our system incorporates a high-level abstract memory constructed from large-scale scholarly corpora. This memory organizes research into hierarchical trees to distill field-specific evolutionary trajectories, thereby providing a broader historical context. Furthermore, we decompose papers into discrete novelty points for fine-grained analysis and retrieval, while employing a self-validation mechanism to improve report faithfulness. Finally, to address the evaluation challenges of such open-ended generation tasks, we propose a RAG-augmented checklist evaluation method that enables reliable and evidence-grounded assessments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MemoNoveltyAgent outperforms GPT-5 DeepResearch by 13.69%. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/SStan1/MemoNoveltyAgent.
Can LLM Annotators Match Human Consistency? Benchmarking Human Agreement and Optimizing Multi-Agent with Contrastive Knowledge
Xiaopeng Ke | Zhixin Wang | Xuebo Liu | Xinyu Ma | Xing Zheng | Bowen Song | Weiqiang Wang | Min Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xiaopeng Ke | Zhixin Wang | Xuebo Liu | Xinyu Ma | Xing Zheng | Bowen Song | Weiqiang Wang | Min Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
LLM-based annotation has advanced rapidly, yet existing benchmarks remain misaligned with real-world practice. Actual annotation often involves lengthy, task-specific guidelines, and different annotators may produce divergent but reasonable judgments, especially on boundary cases, where single-labeled dataset fail to reflect this disagreement. This gap also limits existing single-agent and workflow-based annotation systems, which often lack adaptability to complex, evolving guidelines. To bridge this gap, we introduce ANT-A Benchmark, a real-world multi-annotator benchmark spanning 7 datasets across domains and modalities, with task-specific guidelines and 5 independent human labels per instance. ANT-A enables a distribution-aware evaluation, using Fleiss’ 𝜅 to assess how closely model annotations align with human labeling distributions. We further propose ANT-OR, a multi-agent annotation framework that refines prompts by distilling contrastive decision rules from positive and negative feedback. Experiments show that ANT-OR improves agreement@≥2 accuracy by 4.5 points over the strongest baseline and achieves the highest alignment with human annotator distributions as measured by Fleiss’ 𝜅 within 2 points. Code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/Krueske/ANT-OR.
2025
APT: Improving Specialist LLM Performance with Weakness Case Acquisition and Iterative Preference Training
Jun Rao | Zepeng Lin | Xuebo Liu | Xiaopeng Ke | Lian Lian | Dong Jin | Shengjun Cheng | Jun Yu | Min Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Jun Rao | Zepeng Lin | Xuebo Liu | Xiaopeng Ke | Lian Lian | Dong Jin | Shengjun Cheng | Jun Yu | Min Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) often require domain-specific fine-tuning to address targeted tasks, which risks degrading their general capabilities. Maintaining a balance between domain-specific enhancements and general model utility is a key challenge. This paper proposes a novel approach named APT (Weakness Case Acquisition and Iterative Preference Training) to enhance domain-specific performance with self-generated dis-preferred weakness data (bad cases and similar cases). APT uniquely focuses on training the model using only those samples where errors occur, alongside a small, similar set of samples retrieved for this purpose. This targeted training minimizes interference with the model’s existing knowledge base, effectively retaining generic capabilities. Experimental results on the LLama-2 and Mistral-V0.3 models across various benchmarks demonstrate that APT ensures no reduction in generic capacity and achieves superior performance on downstream tasks compared to various existing methods. This validates our method as an effective strategy for enhancing domain-specific capabilities without sacrificing the model’s broader applicability.
AQuilt: Weaving Logic and Self-Inspection into Low-Cost, High-Relevance Data Synthesis for Specialist LLMs
Xiaopeng Ke | Hexuan Deng | Xuebo Liu | Jun Rao | Zhenxi Song | Jun Yu | Min Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xiaopeng Ke | Hexuan Deng | Xuebo Liu | Jun Rao | Zhenxi Song | Jun Yu | Min Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Despite the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) in general domains, they often underperform in specialized domains. Existing approaches typically rely on data synthesis methods and yield promising results by using unlabeled data to capture domain-specific features. However, these methods either incur high computational costs or suffer from performance limitations, while also demonstrating insufficient generalization across different tasks. To address these challenges, we propose AQuilt, a framework for constructing instruction-tuning data for any specialized domains from corresponding unlabeled data, including Answer, Question, Unlabeled data, Inspection, Logic, and Task type. By incorporating logic and inspection, we encourage reasoning processes and self-inspection to enhance model performance. Moreover, customizable task instructions enable high-quality data generation for any task. As a result, we construct a dataset of 703K examples to train a powerful data synthesis model. Experiments show that AQuilt is comparable to DeepSeek-V3 while utilizing just 17% of the production cost. Further analysis demonstrates that our generated data exhibits higher relevance to downstream tasks. Source code, models, and scripts are available at https://github.com/Krueske/AQuilt.