Yuchen Lu
Author directory2026
Scaling Reinforcement Learning for Content Moderation with Large Language Models
Rui Liu | Yuchen Lu | Zhenyu Hou | Fangzhou Xiong | Xiaoyang Zhang | Changshu Jian | Zhicheng Zhu | Jiayuan Ma | Jacob Tao | Merve Unlu Menevse | Han Li | Chaitali Gupta | Xiaochang Peng | Suwen Lin | Chongyang Bai | Shike Mei | Hang Cui | Yang Qin | Shuo Tang | Jason Gaedtke | Arpit Mittal | Hamed Firooz
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Rui Liu | Yuchen Lu | Zhenyu Hou | Fangzhou Xiong | Xiaoyang Zhang | Changshu Jian | Zhicheng Zhu | Jiayuan Ma | Jacob Tao | Merve Unlu Menevse | Han Li | Chaitali Gupta | Xiaochang Peng | Suwen Lin | Chongyang Bai | Shike Mei | Hang Cui | Yang Qin | Shuo Tang | Jason Gaedtke | Arpit Mittal | Hamed Firooz
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Large-scale content moderation requires models that can apply complex, evolving policies under limited expert supervision. We present an empirical study of reinforcement learning (RL) for policy-grounded moderation across three production-derived tasks. Using established RL and inference primitives, we develop three integrity-specific designs: a policy-grounded full-trace reward, rationale-marginalized Monte Carlo scoring, and policy-structured reflection. Each design addresses an observed failure mode, including reasoning-length collapse and polarized confidence estimates. Across the three tasks, RL-Only systems trained on 200–836 labeled examples remain competitive with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) systems trained on thousands of examples, corresponding to up to approximately one order of magnitude greater label efficiency at the evaluated operating points. Performance generally improves with additional data and training compute before saturating, although larger rollout counts exhibit variability. The strongest SFT→RL systems attain point-estimate performance comparable to policy-trained full-time employee (FTE) reviewers across the three tasks.
2020
Supervised Seeded Iterated Learning for Interactive Language Learning
Yuchen Lu | Soumye Singhal | Florian Strub | Olivier Pietquin | Aaron Courville
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Yuchen Lu | Soumye Singhal | Florian Strub | Olivier Pietquin | Aaron Courville
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Language drift has been one of the major obstacles to train language models through interaction. When word-based conversational agents are trained towards completing a task, they tend to invent their language rather than leveraging natural language. In recent literature, two general methods partially counter this phenomenon: Supervised Selfplay (S2P) and Seeded Iterated Learning (SIL). While S2P jointly trains interactive and supervised losses to counter the drift, SIL changes the training dynamics to prevent language drift from occurring. In this paper, we first highlight their respective weaknesses, i.e., late-stage training collapses and higher negative likelihood when evaluated on human corpus. Given these observations, we introduce Supervised Seeded Iterated Learning (SSIL) to combine both methods to minimize their respective weaknesses. We then show the effectiveness of in the language-drift translation game.