Yongqiang Chen

Author directory

2026

LLM-powered agents struggle with personalization when users issue raw, underspecified queries. In this setting, agents must infer latent intent, extract preferences from noisy interaction histories, and select among competing alternatives. Existing benchmarks rarely test this capability, as they often rely on user-refined queries or simplified histories. We introduce personalized product search (PPS), a testbed for agentic personalization under raw queries and diverse histories. We construct **A**gent **Pe**rsonalized **B**enchmark (**APeB**) from action logs, pairing underspecified intents with rich histories and user-viewed candidate items. Evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs with multi-step agent workflows, we find that models handle explicit queries well but struggle with early-stage queries requiring intent and preference discovery. Rubric analysis attributes this gap mainly to ineffective history use. A simple history-aware query-refinement pipeline, VQRA, yields consistent gains, highlighting the need for dedicated history-utilization modules in personalized agents.
Diffusion language models (D-LLMs) offer parallel denoising and bidirectional context, but hallucination detection for D-LLMs remains underexplored. Prior detectors developed for auto-regressive LLMs typically rely on single-pass cues and do not directly transfer to diffusion generation, where factuality evidence is distributed across the denoising trajectory and may appear, drift, or be self-corrected over time. We introduce TDGNet, a temporal dynamic graph framework that formulates hallucination detection as learning over evolving token-level attention graphs. At each denoising step, we sparsify the attention graph and update per-token memories via message passing, then apply temporal attention to aggregate trajectory-wide evidence for final prediction. Experiments across four D-LLMs spanning dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures (7B—16B parameters) and multiple diffusion paradigms show consistent AUROC improvements over output-based, latent-based, and static-graph baselines, with single-pass inference and modest overhead. These results highlight the importance of temporal reasoning on attention graphs for robust hallucination detection in diffusion language models.
Machine unlearning has gained increasing attention in recent years, as a promising technique to selectively remove unwanted privacy or copyrighted information from Large Language Models that are trained on a massive scale of human data. However, the emergence of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), which emphasize long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to address complex questions, presents a dilemma to unlearning: existing methods either struggle to completely eliminate undesired knowledge from the CoT traces or degrade the reasoning performances due to the interference with the reasoning process. To this end, we introduce Counterfactual Unlearning through iterative Preference Optimization (CiPO), a novel framework that redefines unlearning as the targeted intervention of the CoT reasoning in LRMs. More specifically, given a desired unlearning target answer, CiPO instructs LRMs to generate a logically valid counterfactual reasoning trace for preference tuning. As the LRM adjusts to the counterfactual trace, CiPO iteratively updates the preference learning data to increase the discrepancy from the original model. This iterative loop ensures both desirable unlearning and smooth optimization, effectively mitigating the dilemma. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that CiPO excels at unlearning, completely removing knowledge from both the intermediate CoT steps and the final answer, while preserving the reasoning abilities of LRMs.

2025

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) in domain-specific tasks. However, existing RAG methods do not adequately utilize the naturally inherent hierarchical knowledge in human cognition, which limits the capabilities of RAG systems. In this paper, we introduce a new RAG approach, called HiRAG, which utilizes hierarchical knowledge to enhance the semantic understanding and structure capturing capabilities of RAG systems in the indexing and retrieval processes. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that HiRAG achieves significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline methods.