Xie Xinchen
Author directory2026
DataChef: Cooking Up Optimal Data Recipes for LLM Adaptation via Reinforcement Learning
Yicheng Chen | Ma Zerun | Xie Xinchen | Yining Li | Kai Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yicheng Chen | Ma Zerun | Xie Xinchen | Yining Li | Kai Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
In the current landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs), the curation of large-scale, high-quality training data is a primary driver of model performance. A key lever is the data recipe, which comprises a data processing pipeline to transform raw sources into training corpora. Despite the growing use of LLMs to automate individual data processing steps, such as data synthesis and filtering, the overall design of data recipes remains largely manual and labor-intensive, requiring substantial human expertise and iteration. To bridge this gap, we formulate end-to-end data recipe generation for LLM adaptation. Given a target benchmark and a pool of available data sources, a model is required to output a complete data recipe that adapts a base LLM to the target task. We present DataChef-32B, which performs online reinforcement learning using a proxy reward that predicts downstream performance for candidate recipes. Across six held-out tasks, DataChef-32B produces recipes that yield performance comparable to those curated by human experts. Notably, the recipe from DataChef-32B adapts Qwen3-1.7B-Base to the math domain, achieving 66.7 on AIME’25 and surpassing the official post-training checkpoint (Qwen3-1.7B). This work sheds new light on automating LLM training and developing self-evolving AI systems.
Architecture-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Makes Sliding-Window Attention Competitive in Math Reasoning
Kai Liu | Peijie Dong | Xie Xinchen | Jianfei Gao | Qipeng Guo | Xiaowen Chu | Shaoting Zhang | Kai Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Kai Liu | Peijie Dong | Xie Xinchen | Jianfei Gao | Qipeng Guo | Xiaowen Chu | Shaoting Zhang | Kai Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The rapid progress of reasoning and agentic large language models (LLMs) has increased the demand for long-context inference, but self-attention (SA) scales quadratically with context length. To address this, we propose SWARR (Sliding-Window Attention with Reinforced Adaptation for Math Reasoning), a practical recipe for adapting SWA models to mathematical reasoning. SWARR has two stages: (1) efficient conversion from a pretrained SA model to SWA with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which avoids pretraining a new base model, and (2) architecture-aware policy adaptation with reinforcement learning (RL). We find that SWA still underperforms SA after SFT, and we hypothesize that this gap is caused in part by a data-architecture mismatch: most SFT data are prepared for SA models and may contain long-range dependencies that are difficult for SWA to model. Because RL is architecture-aware and optimizes self-generated trajectories under the SWA constraint, it can adapt training trajectories to better match the SWA architecture. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that this architecture-aware RL substantially narrows the gap between SWA and SA, recovering much of the accuracy lost during SWA conversion while preserving the efficiency benefits of linear-complexity attention.