Z.Y. Peng
Author directoryAlso published as: Zhongyuan Peng
2026
SCALER: Synthetic Scalable Adaptive Learning Environment for Reasoning
Caijun Xu | Changyi Xiao | Zhongyuan Peng | Xinrun Wang | Yixin Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Caijun Xu | Changyi Xiao | Zhongyuan Peng | Xinrun Wang | Yixin Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled way to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet its effectiveness hinges on training signals that remain informative as models evolve. In practice, RL progress often slows when task difficulty becomes poorly aligned with model capability or when training is dominated by a narrow set of recurring problem patterns.To jointly address these issues, we propose SCALER (Synthetic sCalable Adaptive Learning Environment for Reasoning), a framework that sustains effective learning signals through adaptive environment design.SCALER introduces a scalable synthesis pipeline that converts real-world programming problems into verifiable reasoning environments with controllable difficulty and unbounded instance generation, enabling RL training beyond finite datasets while preserving strong correctness guarantees. Building on this, SCALER further employs an adaptive multi-environment RL strategy that dynamically adjusts instance difficulty and curates the active set of environments to track the model’s capability frontier and maintain distributional diversity. This co-adaptation prevents reward sparsity, mitigates overfitting to narrow task patterns, and supports sustained improvement throughout training. Extensive experiments show that SCALER consistently outperforms other RL baselines across diverse reasoning benchmarks and exhibits more stable, long-horizon training dynamics.
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization
Zhongyuan Peng | Yifan Yao | Kaijing Ma | Shuyue Guo | Yizhe Li | Yichi Zhang | Chenchen Zhang | Yifan Zhang | Zhouliang Yu | Luming Li | Minghao Liu | Yihang Xia | Jiawei Shen | Yuchen Wu | Yixin Cao | Zhaoxiang Zhang | Wenhao Huang | Jiaheng Liu | Ge Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhongyuan Peng | Yifan Yao | Kaijing Ma | Shuyue Guo | Yizhe Li | Yichi Zhang | Chenchen Zhang | Yifan Zhang | Zhouliang Yu | Luming Li | Minghao Liu | Yihang Xia | Jiawei Shen | Yuchen Wu | Yixin Cao | Zhaoxiang Zhang | Wenhao Huang | Jiaheng Liu | Ge Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Translating natural language mathematical statements into formal, executable code is a fundamental challenge in automated theorem proving. While prior work has focused on generation and compilation success, little attention has been paid to the critic phase—the evaluation of whether generated formalizations truly capture the semantic intent of the original problem. In this paper, we introduce CriticLean, a novel critic-guided reinforcement learning framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component. Specifically, first, we propose the CriticLeanGPT, trained via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to rigorously assess the semantic fidelity of Lean 4 formalizations. Then, we introduce CriticLeanBench, a benchmark designed to measure models’ ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations, and demonstrate that our trained CriticLeanGPT models can significantly outperform strong open- and closed-source baselines. Building on the CriticLean framework, we construct FineLeanCorpus, a dataset comprising over 509K problems that exhibits rich domain diversity, broad difficulty coverage, and high correctness based on human evaluation.Overall, our findings highlight that optimizing the critic phase is essential for producing reliable formalizations and we hope our CriticLean will provide valuable insights for future advances in formal mathematical reasoning.
2025
Can Large Language Models Detect Errors in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning?
Yancheng He | Shilong Li | Jiaheng Liu | Weixun Wang | Xingyuan Bu | Ge Zhang | Z.Y. Peng | Zhaoxiang Zhang | Zhicheng Zheng | Wenbo Su | Bo Zheng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yancheng He | Shilong Li | Jiaheng Liu | Weixun Wang | Xingyuan Bu | Ge Zhang | Z.Y. Peng | Zhaoxiang Zhang | Zhicheng Zheng | Wenbo Su | Bo Zheng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recently, o1-like models have drawn significant attention, where these models produce the long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning steps to improve the reasoning abilities of existing Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, to understand the qualities of these long CoTs and measure the critique abilities of existing LLMs on these long CoTs, we introduce the DeltaBench including the generated long CoTs from different o1-like models (e.g., QwQ, DeepSeek-R1) for different reasoning tasks (e.g., Math, Code, General Reasoning), to measure the ability to detect errors in long COT reasoning. Based on DeltaBench, we first perform fine-grained analysis of the generated long CoTs to discover the effectiveness and efficiency of different o1-like models. Then, we conduct extensive evaluations of existing process reward models (PRMs) and critic models to detect the errors of each annotated process, which aims to investigate the boundaries and limitations of existing PRMs and critic models. Finally, we hope that DeltaBench could guide developers to better understand the long CoT reasoning abilities of their models.
2024
RoleLLM: Benchmarking, Eliciting, and Enhancing Role-Playing Abilities of Large Language Models
Noah Wang | Z.Y. Peng | Haoran Que | Jiaheng Liu | Wangchunshu Zhou | Yuhan Wu | Hongcheng Guo | Ruitong Gan | Zehao Ni | Jian Yang | Man Zhang | Zhaoxiang Zhang | Wanli Ouyang | Ke Xu | Wenhao Huang | Jie Fu | Junran Peng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Noah Wang | Z.Y. Peng | Haoran Que | Jiaheng Liu | Wangchunshu Zhou | Yuhan Wu | Hongcheng Guo | Ruitong Gan | Zehao Ni | Jian Yang | Man Zhang | Zhaoxiang Zhang | Wanli Ouyang | Ke Xu | Wenhao Huang | Jie Fu | Junran Peng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has paved the way for complex tasks such as role-playing, which enhances user interactions by enabling models to imitate various characters. However, the closed-source nature of state-of-the-art LLMs and their general-purpose training limit role-playing optimization. In this paper, we introduce RoleLLM, a framework to benchmark, elicit, and enhance role-playing abilities in LLMs. RoleLLM comprises four stages: (1) Role Profile Construction for 100 roles; (2) Context-Based Instruction Generation (Context-Instruct) for role-specific knowledge extraction; (3) Role Prompting using GPT (RoleGPT) for speaking style imitation; and (4) Role-Conditioned Instruction Tuning (RoCIT) for fine-tuning open-source models along with role customization. By Context-Instruct and RoleGPT, we create RoleBench, the first systematic and fine-grained character-level benchmark dataset for role-playing with 168,093 samples. Moreover, RoCIT on RoleBench yields RoleLLaMA (English) and RoleGLM (Chinese), significantly enhancing role-playing abilities and even achieving comparable results with RoleGPT (using GPT-4).
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Co-authors
- Jiaheng Liu 3
- Zhaoxiang Zhang 3
- Yixin Cao 2
- Wenhao Huang 2
- Ge Zhang 2
- Xingyuan Bu 1
- Jie Fu 1
- Ruitong Gan 1
- Hongcheng Guo 1
- Shuyue Guo 1
- Yancheng He 1
- Luming Li 1
- Shilong Li 1
- Yizhe Li 1
- Minghao Liu 1
- Kaijing Ma 1
- Zehao Ni 1
- Wanli Ouyang 1
- Junran Peng 1
- Haoran Que 1
- Jiawei Shen 1
- Wenbo Su 1
- Weixun Wang 1
- Xinrun Wang 1
- Zekun Moore Wang 1
- Yuchen Wu 1
- Yuhan Wu 1
- Yihang Xia 1
- Changyi Xiao 1
- Caijun Xu 1
- Ke Xu 1
- Jian Yang 1
- Yifan Yao 1
- Zhouliang Yu 1
- Chenchen Zhang 1
- Man Zhang 1
- Yichi Zhang 1
- Yifan Zhang 1
- Bo Zheng 1
- Zhicheng Zheng 1
- Wangchunshu Zhou 1