Xin Lou
Author directory2026
ICA: Information-Aware Credit Assignment for Visually Grounded Long-Horizon Information-Seeking Agents
Cong Pang | Yujie YI | Xuyu Feng | Jiaqi Su | Zixuan Chen | Jiawei Hong | Tiankuo Yao | Nang Yuan | Jiapeng Luo | Lewei Lu | Xin Lou
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Cong Pang | Yujie YI | Xuyu Feng | Jiaqi Su | Zixuan Chen | Jiawei Hong | Tiankuo Yao | Nang Yuan | Jiapeng Luo | Lewei Lu | Xin Lou
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Long-horizon reinforcement learning for information seeking agents remains difficult because terminal rewards reveal whether the final answer is correct, but not which acquired information enabled it. This difficulty is amplified by text-derived webpage observations, where parsing, truncation, and summarization often produce incomplete and unstable content representations across trajectories. We propose an evidence-centric framework for web agent learning that represents information acquired through tools as identifiable units for comparison across trajectories. In particular, fetched webpages are represented as rendered snapshots, preserving layout and multimodal content as stable content-level observations. Building on these units, we introduce Information-Aware Credit Assignment, a post hoc reward propagation method that estimates turn-level utility scores from rollout success rates and assigns dense rewards to intermediate steps that introduced high-utility information. Integrated with GSPO, our method consistently improves performance on BrowseComp, GAIA, Xbench-DS, and Seal-0. Code and datasets will be released at https://github.com/pc-inno/ICA_MM_deepsearch.
2021
Compressing Large-Scale Transformer-Based Models: A Case Study on BERT
Prakhar Ganesh | Yao Chen | Xin Lou | Mohammad Ali Khan | Yin Yang | Hassan Sajjad | Preslav Nakov | Deming Chen | Marianne Winslett
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9
Prakhar Ganesh | Yao Chen | Xin Lou | Mohammad Ali Khan | Yin Yang | Hassan Sajjad | Preslav Nakov | Deming Chen | Marianne Winslett
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9
Pre-trained Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models often have billions of parameters, and thus are too resource- hungry and computation-intensive to suit low- capability devices or applications with strict latency requirements. One potential remedy for this is model compression, which has attracted considerable research attention. Here, we summarize the research in compressing Transformers, focusing on the especially popular BERT model. In particular, we survey the state of the art in compression for BERT, we clarify the current best practices for compressing large-scale Transformer models, and we provide insights into the workings of various methods. Our categorization and analysis also shed light on promising future research directions for achieving lightweight, accurate, and generic NLP models.