Yutao Yang
Author directory2026
A Benchmark for Self-Evolving Agents via Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning
Yuxuan Cai | Yipeng Hao | Jie Zhou | Hang Yan | Zhikai Lei | Rui Zheng | Zhenhua Han | Yutao Yang | Junsong Li | Qianjun Pan | Tianyu Huai | Qin Chen | Xin Li | Kai Chen | Bo Zhang | Xipeng Qiu | Liang He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yuxuan Cai | Yipeng Hao | Jie Zhou | Hang Yan | Zhikai Lei | Rui Zheng | Zhenhua Han | Yutao Yang | Junsong Li | Qianjun Pan | Tianyu Huai | Qin Chen | Xin Li | Kai Chen | Bo Zhang | Xipeng Qiu | Liang He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
As AI research increasingly moves beyond systems optimized for static tasks, a central challenge is building agents that learn continuously through experience-driven lifelong learning (ELL). In this paper, we introduce StuLife, a synthetic benchmark designed to evaluate selected operational capabilities relevant to ELL. Particularly, StuLife simulates a student’s college journey, from enrollment to academic and personal development, across three core phases and ten detailed sub-scenarios. StuLife is designed around four key design principles: From Isolated Tasks to Stateful Interaction, From Passive to Proactive, From Context to Memory, and From Imitation to Learning. In this dynamic environment, agents must acquire and distill practical skills and maintain persistent memory to make decisions based on evolving state variables (e.g., resource availability and time), and are also expected to initiate actions without external prompting. To this end, StuLife provides an evaluation protocol with dedicated metrics (e.g., StuGPA) for these capabilities. Our evaluation reveals that even the highest-StuGPA model, GPT-5, scores only 17.9/100, highlighting large gaps in long-term retention and proactive task initiation. Beyond evaluating LLMs on StuLife, we also explore the role of context engineering in improving agent performance on lifelong learning tasks.
OSCR-Attack: One-Shot Character Level Attacks through Self-Optimizing Continuous Relaxation
Lingyi Kong | Zhuo Liu | Zhanghao Hu | Qilong Qiu | Yutao Yang | Jingjing Xue | Zheng Wang | Lin Gui | Feiping Nie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Lingyi Kong | Zhuo Liu | Zhanghao Hu | Qilong Qiu | Yutao Yang | Jingjing Xue | Zheng Wang | Lin Gui | Feiping Nie
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Adversarial attacks have attracted growing attention across domains, including natural language processing (NLP). Character-level adversarial attacks preserve semantics, but they have received less attention because the discrete operations they use are costly and inefficient. Challenging these beliefs, we introduce two adaptively learnable matrices that transform discrete choices into continuous representations, enabling automatic one-shot multi-position, multi-character insertion. To optimize the two learnable matrices, we propose OSCR-Attack, an end-to-end framework based on gradient-based optimization, with a conflict resolution strategy that maps the optimized continuous distributions back into discrete insertion operations. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks with three open-source large language models (LLMs) show that OSCR-Attack improves attack success rate (ASR) by up to 21.45% points and accelerates the attack by up to 3.66 times compared to recent baselines.
PsychEval: A Multi-Session and Multi-Therapy Benchmark for High-Realism AI Psychological Counselor
Qianjun Pan | Junyi Wang | Jie Zhou | Yutao Yang | Junsong Li | Kaiyin Xu | Yougen Zhou | Yihan Li | JingYuan Zhao | Qin Chen | Ningning Zhou | Kai Chen | Liang He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Qianjun Pan | Junyi Wang | Jie Zhou | Yutao Yang | Junsong Li | Kaiyin Xu | Yougen Zhou | Yihan Li | JingYuan Zhao | Qin Chen | Ningning Zhou | Kai Chen | Liang He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
To develop a reliable AI for psychological assessment, we introduce PsychEval, a multi-session, multi-therapy, and highly realistic benchmark designed to address three key challenges:1) Can we train a highly realistic AI counselor? Realistic counseling is a longitudinal task requiring sustained memory and dynamic goal tracking. We propose a multi-session benchmark (spanning 6-10 sessions across three distinct stages) that demands critical capabilities such as memory continuity, adaptive reasoning, and longitudinal planning. The dataset is annotated with extensive professional skills, comprising over 677 meta-skills and 4577 atomic skills. 2) How to train a multi-therapy AI counselor? While existing models often focus on a single therapy, complex cases frequently require flexible strategies among various therapies. We construct a diverse dataset covering five therapeutic modalities alongside an integrative therapy with a unified three-stage clinical framework across six core psychological topics. 3) How to systematically evaluate an AI counselor? We establish a holistic evaluation framework with 18 therapy-specific and therapy-shared metrics across Client-Level and Counselor-Level dimensions. To We also construct over 2,000 diverse client profiles. Extensive experimental analysis fully validates the superior quality and clinical fidelity of our dataset.Our datasets and evaluation framework are anonymously available at this repository.
Forget What’s Sensitive, Remember What Matters: Token-Level Differential Privacy in Memory Sculpting for Continual Learning
Bihao Zhan | Jie Zhou | Junsong Li | Yutao Yang | Shilian Chen | Qianjun Pan | Xin Li | Wen Wu | Xingjiao Wu | Qin Chen | Hang Yan | Liang Dou | Liang He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Bihao Zhan | Jie Zhou | Junsong Li | Yutao Yang | Shilian Chen | Qianjun Pan | Xin Li | Wen Wu | Xingjiao Wu | Qin Chen | Hang Yan | Liang Dou | Liang He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Continual Learning (CL) models, while adept at sequential knowledge acquisition, face significant and often overlooked privacy challenges due to accumulating diverse information. Traditional privacy methods, like a uniform Differential Privacy (DP) budget, indiscriminately protect all data, leading to substantial model utility degradation and hindering CL deployment in privacy-sensitive areas. To overcome this, we propose a privacy-enhanced continual learning (PeCL) framework that forgets what’s sensitive and remembers what matters. Our approach first introduces a token-level dynamic Differential Privacy strategy that adaptively allocates privacy budgets based on the semantic sensitivity of individual tokens. This ensures robust protection for private entities while minimizing noise injection for non-sensitive, general knowledge. Second, we integrate a privacy-guided memory sculpting module. This module leverages the sensitivity analysis from our dynamic DP mechanism to intelligently forget sensitive information from the model’s memory and parameters, while explicitly preserving the task-invariant historical knowledge crucial for mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments show that PeCL achieves a superior balance between privacy preserving and model utility, outperforming baseline models by maintaining high accuracy on previous tasks while ensuring robust privacy.
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Co-authors
- Qin Chen 3
- Liang He 3
- Junsong Li 3
- Qianjun Pan 3
- Jie Zhou 3
- Kai Chen 2
- Xin Li 2
- Hang Yan 2
- Yuxuan Cai 1
- Shilian Chen 1
- Liang Dou 1
- Lin Gui 1
- Zhenhua Han 1
- Yipeng Hao 1
- Zhanghao Hu 1
- Tianyu Huai 1
- Lingyi Kong 1
- Zhikai Lei 1
- Yihan Li 1
- Zhuo Liu 1
- Feiping Nie 1
- Qilong Qiu 1
- Xipeng Qiu (邱锡鹏) 1
- Junyi Wang 1
- Zheng Wang 1
- Wen Wu 1
- Xingjiao Wu 1
- Kaiyin Xu 1
- Jingjing Xue 1
- Bihao Zhan 1
- Bo Zhang 1
- JingYuan Zhao 1
- Rui Zheng 1
- Ningning Zhou 1
- Yougen Zhou 1