Yunjia Qi
Author directory2026
PREFINFER: Preference Inference from User-LLM Interaction History
Yufei Chen | Hao Peng | Yunjia Qi | Lei Hou | Bin Xu | Juanzi Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yufei Chen | Hao Peng | Yunjia Qi | Lei Hou | Bin Xu | Juanzi Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Large language model (LLM) personalization aims to generate responses that align with individual user preferences, making accurate preference inference critical. In practice, user-LLM interaction histories naturally contain rich preference signals. However, extracting preferences from these histories remains underexplored and challenging: the history can be long and noisy, preferences may evolve over time, and preferences may vary across situations even within the same topic. To address these challenges, we develop PREFINFER, a model that accurately infers user preferences from the user’s interaction history with an LLM. Specifically, we introduce PREFMINE, an automated data construction method that synthesizes high-quality preference inference data, where each sample includes a synthetic interaction history, a current user request, and the user’s preference for the current request, and construct PREFMINE-15K for training PREFINFER. Experiments show that PREFINFER achieves advanced performance on preference inference, and the preferences inferred by PREFINFER effectively guide LLMs to generate responses better aligned with user preferences. We conduct thorough ablation studies on the key design choices of PREFMINE, validating their effectiveness. We have released the code, data, and models to facilitate further research(https://github.com/THU-KEG/PREFINFER).
TRAJDEBUG: Tracing Error Lifecycle to Identify Critical Failures in Long-Horizon Agent Trajectories
Yunjia Qi | Zehua Yin | Xintong Shi | Hao Peng | Songyuanyi Lu | Yixian Liu | Richeng Xuan | Lliu Yuhong | Zhichao Hu | Xiaozhi Wang | Lei Hou | Bin Xu | Juanzi Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yunjia Qi | Zehua Yin | Xintong Shi | Hao Peng | Songyuanyi Lu | Yixian Liu | Richeng Xuan | Lliu Yuhong | Zhichao Hu | Xiaozhi Wang | Lei Hou | Bin Xu | Juanzi Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
LLM-based agentic systems have shown remarkable capabilities in complex domains, while suffering from cascading errors and difficulty in debugging. Critical error detection aims to locate the earliest error step in a failed trajectory that is responsible for the final failure. However, progress faces two main challenges. First, long trajectories make it difficult to identify individual errors, since the evidence for judging a step may be scattered across distant instructions, observations, and prior context. Second, failed trajectories often contain multiple local errors with different downstream effects, only some of which remain responsible for the final failure. In this work, we propose TrajDebug, an error-lifecycle tracing framework that addresses long-trajectory error discovery with multi-granularity history compression and evidence-based error identification, and supports critical attribution by tracing each error’s resolution status and terminal impact. We further construct TrajErrBench, a benchmark of 486 manually annotated failed trajectories from and SWE-Bench Pro, covering realistic tool-use and coding scenarios. Experiments across diverse agent benchmarks show that TrajDebug achieves the best overall performance over existing baselines, and application studies further demonstrate that its diagnoses provide actionable feedback for improving downstream agent success. We will release the codes and data to facilitate further research.
Can LLM-as-a-Judge Reliably Verify Rubrics in Agentic Scenarios?
Yangda Peng | Yunjia Qi | Haotian Xia | Guanzhong He | Xintong Shi | Richeng Xuan | Songyuanyi Lu | Yixian Liu | Zhichao Hu | Lliu Yuhong | Hao Peng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yangda Peng | Yunjia Qi | Haotian Xia | Guanzhong He | Xintong Shi | Richeng Xuan | Songyuanyi Lu | Yixian Liu | Zhichao Hu | Lliu Yuhong | Hao Peng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Rubric-based scoring has become a widely used paradigm in model evaluation, typically with LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) for rubric scoring. However, the reliability of LaaJ for rubric scoring remains underexplored. This concern is especially pronounced in agentic scenarios, where long, complex outputs further challenge reliable scoring. To address this, we conduct a systematic meta-evaluation of LaaJ reliability for rubric verification. We introduce RuVerBench, the first benchmark for assessing LaaJ reliability in rubric verification for agentic scenarios. RuVerBench covers two prevalent agentic domains, deep research and agentic coding, with 2,458 instances, each containing a model-generated output, a rubric, and a human-annotated label indicating whether the output satisfies the rubric. Using RuVerBench, we evaluate numerous frontier LLMs and find that even the most advanced models achieve strong performance but still exhibit substantial noise. We further analyze the impact of key LaaJ strategies, including prompt design, batching, and majority voting, on rubric verification. We find that weaker models are more sensitive to prompt variations, batched verification presents a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, and majority voting yields effective but diminishing returns. We have released our dataset and code to facilitate future research: https://github.com/THU-KEG/RuVerBench.
WildReward: Learning Reward Models from In-the-Wild Human Interactions
Hao Peng | Yunjia Qi | Xiaozhi Wang | Zijun Yao | Lei Hou | Juanzi Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Hao Peng | Yunjia Qi | Xiaozhi Wang | Zijun Yao | Lei Hou | Juanzi Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training of large language models (LLMs), yet they typically rely on large-scale human-annotated preference pairs. With the widespread deployment of LLMs, in-the-wild interactions have emerged as a rich source of implicit reward signals. This raises the question: Can we develop reward models directly from in-the-wild interactions? In this work, we explore this possibility by adopting WildChat as an interaction source and proposing a pipeline to extract reliable human feedback, yielding 186k high-quality instances for training WildReward via ordinal regression directly on user feedback without preference pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WildReward achieves comparable or even superior performance compared to conventional reward models, with improved calibration and cross-sample consistency. We also observe that WildReward benefits directly from user diversity, where more users yield stronger reward models. Finally, we apply WildReward to online DPO training and observe significant improvements across various downstream tasks. We will release our code, data, and models to facilitate future research.
2025
LoSiA: Efficient High-Rank Fine-Tuning via Subnet Localization and Optimization
Xujia Wang | Yunjia Qi | Bin Xu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xujia Wang | Yunjia Qi | Bin Xu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, significantly reduce the number of trainable parameters by introducing low-rank decomposition matrices. However, existing methods perform extensive matrix multiplications in domain specialization tasks, resulting in computational inefficiency and sub-optimal fine-tuning performance. Hence, we propose LoSiA (Low-Resources Subnet Integration Adaptation), an innovative method that dynamically localizes and optimizes critical parameters during the training process. Specifically, it identifies a sub-network using gradient sparsity analysis and optimizes it as the trainable target. This design enables effective high-rank adaptation by updating only the sub-network parameters, reducing the additional matrix multiplication. We also present LoSiA-Pro, a faster implementation of LoSiA, which reduces the training latency by about 27% compared to LoRA. Extensive evaluations show that our method achieves minimal performance drop compared to full fine-tuning, while requiring the least training time across domain specialization and common-sense reasoning tasks. Further analysis shows that LoSiA also reduces forgetting during continued training.
VerIF: Verification Engineering for Reinforcement Learning in Instruction Following
Hao Peng | Yunjia Qi | Xiaozhi Wang | Bin Xu | Lei Hou | Juanzi Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hao Peng | Yunjia Qi | Xiaozhi Wang | Bin Xu | Lei Hou | Juanzi Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs), with verification engineering playing a central role. However, best practices for RL in instruction following remain underexplored. In this work, we explore the verification challenge in RL for instruction following and propose VerIF, a verification method that combines rule-based code verification with LLM-based verification from a large reasoning model (e.g., QwQ-32B). To support this approach, we construct a high-quality instruction-following dataset, VerInstruct, containing approximately 22,000 instances with associated verification signals. We apply RL training with VerIF to two models, achieving significant improvements across several representative instruction-following benchmarks. The trained models reach state-of-the-art performance among models of comparable size and generalize well to unseen constraints. We further observe that their general capabilities remain unaffected, suggesting that RL with VerIF can be integrated into existing RL recipes to enhance overall model performance. We will release our datasets, codes, and models to facilitate future research.
Agentic Reward Modeling: Integrating Human Preferences with Verifiable Correctness Signals for Reliable Reward Systems
Hao Peng | Yunjia Qi | Xiaozhi Wang | Zijun Yao | Bin Xu | Lei Hou | Juanzi Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Hao Peng | Yunjia Qi | Xiaozhi Wang | Zijun Yao | Bin Xu | Lei Hou | Juanzi Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training and inference-time scaling up of large language models (LLMs). However, existing reward models primarily focus on human preferences, neglecting verifiable correctness signals which have shown strong potential in training LLMs. In this paper, we propose agentic reward modeling, a reward system that combines reward models with verifiable correctness signals from different aspects to provide reliable rewards. We empirically implement a reward agent, named RewardAgent, that combines human preference rewards with two verifiable signals: factuality and instruction following, to provide more reliable rewards. We conduct comprehensive experiments on existing reward model benchmarks and inference-time best-of-n searches on real-world downstream tasks. RewardAgent significantly outperforms vanilla reward models, demonstrating its effectiveness. We further construct training preference pairs using RewardAgent and train an LLM with the DPO objective, achieving superior performance on various NLP benchmarks compared to conventional reward models. Our codes are publicly released to facilitate further research.
2024
MAVEN-FACT: A Large-scale Event Factuality Detection Dataset
Chunyang Li | Hao Peng | Xiaozhi Wang | Yunjia Qi | Lei Hou | Bin Xu | Juanzi Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Chunyang Li | Hao Peng | Xiaozhi Wang | Yunjia Qi | Lei Hou | Bin Xu | Juanzi Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Event Factuality Detection (EFD) task determines the factuality of textual events, i.e., classifying whether an event is a fact, possibility, or impossibility, which is essential for faithfully understanding and utilizing event knowledge. However, due to the lack of high-quality large-scale data, event factuality detection is under-explored in event understanding research, which limits the development of EFD community. To address these issues and provide faithful event understanding, we introduce MAVEN-FACT, a large-scale and high-quality EFD dataset based on the MAVEN dataset. MAVEN-FACT includes factuality annotations of 112,276 events, making it the largest EFD dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVEN-FACT is challenging for both conventional fine-tuned models and large language models (LLMs). Thanks to the comprehensive annotations of event arguments and relations in MAVEN, MAVEN-FACT also supports some further analyses and we find that adopting event arguments and relations helps in event factuality detection for fine-tuned models but does not benefit LLMs. Furthermore, we preliminarily study an application case of event factuality detection and find it helps in mitigating event-related hallucination in LLMs. We will release our dataset and codes to facilitate further research on event factuality detection.