Xiaoyong Du

Author directory

2026

LLM agents increasingly operate in long-horizon tasks and extended dialogues, where they must retrieve useful past experiences beyond limited context windows. A central challenge is to balance efficient recall with faithful evidence recovery. Existing memory methods often rely on static access strategies: compact memories reduce context cost but may omit fine-grained evidence, whereas full histories preserve details but introduce redundant and noisy context. We propose GraP-Mem, a multi-granularity memory planning framework that adaptively schedules memory access for each question. GraP-Mem represents each historical session with two complementary views: compact semantic memories for efficient retrieval and source contexts for detailed evidence recovery. During inference, a Plan Agent generates retrieval-oriented information needs and queries, while an Integration Agent maintains a question-specific evidence state that consolidates useful evidence and identifies remaining gaps. When the evidence is incomplete, GraP-Mem selectively expands access to source contexts or performs additional retrieval. The final Answer Model is conditioned only on the integrated evidence state. Experiments on LoCoMo and NarrativeQA show that GraP-Mem consistently improves F1 and BLEU across backbone models, demonstrating the effectiveness of plan-guided memory access across multiple granularities.
The double-edged sword of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) requires an effective triadic collaboration mechanism among LLMs, teachers and students, especially for K-12 education. By developing a triadic collaboration system to support K-12 writing learning, a multidimensional evaluation framework grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics and the suggestion trajectory tracing pipeline, this paper contributes a large-scale empirical dataset involving 57,954 essays from 10,195 students across 120 schools over two years. Our findings confirm the efficacy of this system in improving writing quality through a strategic labor division: the LLM serves as a generative engine to mitigate teacher burnout, and the teacher acts as a pedagogical gatekeeper and bridge to guarantee feedback quality. While both LLM and teacher are critical for skill improvement, we uncover a ceiling effect where excessive linguistic expansion yields diminishing marginal utility. These suggest a dynamically adaptive LLM-teacher collaboration as student proficiency increases.
Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by large language models have shown promise for complex tasks but suffer from high failure rates. Current self-reflection methods for MAS require all agents to reflect upon failure, overlooking a critical reality: failures typically stem from a specific agent leading the task astray, namely the decisive error agent, while others merely fulfill their regular duties. Forcing regular-behaving agents to reflect contaminates their memory with wrong insights. Hence, we propose DoCtOR (Diagnose-then-Correct PPO-enhanced Reflection), a novel reflection framework that enhances multi-agent collaboration. DoCtOR first identifies the decisive error step and decisive error agent through automated failure attribution, then employs counterfactual reasoning to generate a corrected decisive error step, and finally engages only the decisive error agent to produce targeted reflections. Experimental results show DoCtOR achieves 22%, 26%, and 27% improvements over initial success rates on HotPotQA, ChartQAPro, and Mind2Web datasets, outperforming Reflexion, Retroformer, and COPPER. We further establish the generalizability of our diagnose-then-correct paradigm and demonstrate that in low-resource settings, focusing reflection on reasoning steps after the decisive error step achieves comparable quality to reflecting on the complete failure trajectory.

2023

Recently, the success of pre-training in text domain has been fully extended to vision, audio, and cross-modal scenarios. The proposed pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures, which brings the opportunity to implement different pre-training models within a uniform framework. In this paper, we present TencentPretrain, a toolkit supporting pre-training models of different modalities. The core feature of TencentPretrain is the modular design. The toolkit uniformly divides pre-training models into 5 components: embedding, encoder, target embedding, decoder, and target. As almost all of common modules are provided in each component, users can choose the desired modules from different components to build a complete pre-training model. The modular design enables users to efficiently reproduce existing pre-training models or build brand-new one. We test the toolkit on text, vision, and audio benchmarks and show that it can match the performance of the original implementations.

2022

Fact verification has attracted a lot of attention recently, e.g., in journalism, marketing, and policymaking, as misinformation and dis- information can sway one’s opinion and affect one’s actions. While fact-checking is a hard task in general, in many cases, false statements can be easily debunked based on analytics over tables with reliable information. Hence, table- based fact verification has recently emerged as an important and growing research area. Yet, progress has been limited due to the lack of datasets that can be used to pre-train language models (LMs) to be aware of common table operations, such as aggregating a column or comparing tuples. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces PASTA for table-based fact verification via pre-training with synthesized sentence–table cloze questions. In particular, we design six types of common sentence–table cloze tasks, including Filter, Aggregation, Superlative, Comparative, Ordinal, and Unique, based on which we synthesize a large corpus consisting of 1.2 million sentence–table pairs from WikiTables. PASTA uses a recent pre-trained LM, DeBERTaV3, and further pre- trains it on our corpus. Our experimental results show that PASTA achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on two table-based fact verification datasets TabFact and SEM-TAB- FACTS. In particular, on the complex set of TabFact, which contains multiple operations, PASTA largely outperforms previous SOTA by 4.7% (85.6% vs. 80.9%), and the gap between PASTA and human performance on the small test set is narrowed to just 1.5% (90.6% vs. 92.1%).

2019

Existing works, including ELMO and BERT, have revealed the importance of pre-training for NLP tasks. While there does not exist a single pre-training model that works best in all cases, it is of necessity to develop a framework that is able to deploy various pre-training models efficiently. For this purpose, we propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit, namely Universal Encoder Representations (UER). UER is loosely coupled, and encapsulated with rich modules. By assembling modules on demand, users can either reproduce a state-of-the-art pre-training model or develop a pre-training model that remains unexplored. With UER, we have built a model zoo, which contains pre-trained models based on different corpora, encoders, and targets (objectives). With proper pre-trained models, we could achieve new state-of-the-art results on a range of downstream datasets.

2018

Subword-level information is crucial for capturing the meaning and morphology of words, especially for out-of-vocabulary entries. We propose CNN- and RNN-based subword-level composition functions for learning word embeddings, and systematically compare them with popular word-level and subword-level models (Skip-Gram and FastText). Additionally, we propose a hybrid training scheme in which a pure subword-level model is trained jointly with a conventional word-level embedding model based on lookup-tables. This increases the fitness of all types of subword-level word embeddings; the word-level embeddings can be discarded after training, leaving only compact subword-level representation with much smaller data volume. We evaluate these embeddings on a set of intrinsic and extrinsic tasks, showing that subword-level models have advantage on tasks related to morphology and datasets with high OOV rate, and can be combined with other types of embeddings.
Analogical reasoning is effective in capturing linguistic regularities. This paper proposes an analogical reasoning task on Chinese. After delving into Chinese lexical knowledge, we sketch 68 implicit morphological relations and 28 explicit semantic relations. A big and balanced dataset CA8 is then built for this task, including 17813 questions. Furthermore, we systematically explore the influences of vector representations, context features, and corpora on analogical reasoning. With the experiments, CA8 is proved to be a reliable benchmark for evaluating Chinese word embeddings.

2017

The number of word embedding models is growing every year. Most of them are based on the co-occurrence information of words and their contexts. However, it is still an open question what is the best definition of context. We provide a systematical investigation of 4 different syntactic context types and context representations for learning word embeddings. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to evaluate their effectiveness on 6 extrinsic and intrinsic tasks. We hope that this paper, along with the published code, would be helpful for choosing the best context type and representation for a given task.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely used in NLP tasks. This paper presents a novel weight initialization method to improve the CNNs for text classification. Instead of randomly initializing the convolutional filters, we encode semantic features into them, which helps the model focus on learning useful features at the beginning of the training. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the initialization technique on seven text classification tasks, including sentiment analysis and topic classification.
The existing word representation methods mostly limit their information source to word co-occurrence statistics. In this paper, we introduce ngrams into four representation methods: SGNS, GloVe, PPMI matrix, and its SVD factorization. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on word analogy and similarity tasks. The results show that improved word representations are learned from ngram co-occurrence statistics. We also demonstrate that the trained ngram representations are useful in many aspects such as finding antonyms and collocations. Besides, a novel approach of building co-occurrence matrix is proposed to alleviate the hardware burdens brought by ngrams.

2016

NBSVM is one of the most popular methods for text classification and has been widely used as baselines for various text representation approaches. It uses Naive Bayes (NB) feature to weight sparse bag-of-n-grams representation. N-gram captures word order in short context and NB feature assigns more weights to those important words. However, NBSVM suffers from sparsity problem and is reported to be exceeded by newly proposed distributed (dense) text representations learned by neural networks. In this paper, we transfer the n-grams and NB weighting to neural models. We train n-gram embeddings and use NB weighting to guide the neural models to focus on important words. In fact, our methods can be viewed as distributed (dense) counterparts of sparse bag-of-n-grams in NBSVM. We discover that n-grams and NB weighting are also effective in distributed representations. As a result, our models achieve new strong baselines on 9 text classification datasets, e.g. on IMDB dataset, we reach performance of 93.5% accuracy, which exceeds previous state-of-the-art results obtained by deep neural models. All source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/zhezhaoa/neural_BOW_toolkit.