College of William and Mary

Other people with similar names: Yang Li, Yang Li, Yang Li, Yang Li, Yang Li, Yang Li, Yang Li, Yang Li, Yang Li, Yang Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Yang Li, Yang Li, Yang Li (Hong Kong Metropolitan, Guangdong), Yang Li (CMU, Iowa State)

Unverified author pages with similar names: Yang Li


2026

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have shown strong potential for general natural language tasks with in-context examples. Existing In-Context Learning (ICL) approaches largely inherit the practice of autoregressive language models (ARLMs), incorporating all examples into a fixed prompt. However, applying this rigid, static-prompt paradigm to DLMs incurs substantial computational overhead, as the model must evaluate the maximum context length at every step. We address this inefficiency with a key discovery: the block-wise KV-cache mechanism inherent to DLM inference enables the low-cost dynamic adjustment of the context. Following this intuition, our core idea is to start generation with a minimal prompt and progressively insert additional examples on the fly only when the generated tokens are of low confidence. Through rigorous empirical evaluations, we observe that average verified token confidence correlates strongly with generation accuracy, making it a reliable and computationally efficient signal of token quality. Formally, we propose Dynamic In-Context Planner (DIP), a context-optimization algorithm based on average verified confidence that dynamically ranks and inserts in-context examples during generation, rather than providing all examples up front. Experimental results on math and coding benchmarks with LLaDA-1.5 and LLaDA-8B-Instruct show that DIP achieves up to 1.59× and 1.36× speedups, respectively, while largely preserving the generation quality of the fixed-prompt baseline. Code: https://github.com/wmd3i/DIP

2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities in mathematical and scientific tasks. To enhance complex reasoning, multi-agent systems have been proposed to harness the collective intelligence of LLM agents. However, existing collaboration structures are either predefined or rely on majority voting or round-table debates, which can suppress correct but less dominant agent contributions. Recent approaches model multi-agent systems as graph networks but optimize purely for agent performance, neglecting the quality of interactions. We hypothesize that effective agent communication is crucial for multi-agent reasoning and that debating quality plays a significant role. To address this, we propose OptAgent, a multi-agent verbal reinforcement learning algorithm that dynamically constructs and refines multi-agent collaboration structures. Our method defines action spaces and a feedback mechanism that evaluates communication robustness and coherence throughout the debate. The final decision is achieved through a majority vote over all the agents. We assess OptAgent on various reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning, creative writing, scientific reasoning, and numerical sorting. Results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms single-agent prompting methods and state-of-the-art multi-agent frameworks on diverse tasks.