Zhenyu Pan
Author directory2026
LLMZERO: Discovering Adaptive Training Strategies for RL Post-Training via LLM Agents
Haoyang Fang | Wei Zhu | Boran Han | Zhenyu Pan | Shuo Yang | Shuai Zhang | Jiading Gai | Peng Tang | Cuixiong Hu | Huzefa Rangwala | George Karypis | Bernie Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Haoyang Fang | Wei Zhu | Boran Han | Zhenyu Pan | Shuo Yang | Shuai Zhang | Jiading Gai | Peng Tang | Cuixiong Hu | Huzefa Rangwala | George Karypis | Bernie Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
RL post-training strategies are dataset-dependent and reveal a recurring empirical pattern: capacity parameters accumulate monotonically across stages, while regularization parameters predominantly oscillate in response to shifting training dynamics. This distinction highlights a potential flaw in fixed training schedules: by forcing all parameters along rigid paths, they fail to capture the dynamic exploration-exploitation tradeoffs that regularization must track. We uncover this through LLMZero, an agentic system that optimizes training trajectories via tree search by diagnosing pathologies at each checkpoint and proposing coordinated multi-parameter transitions. Across four diverse GRPO tasks, LLMZero discovers strategies that improve over the base model by 9% to 140% and over grid search by 6% to 15% (relative), consistently outperforming random search and a skill-based agent under a matched compute budget. The capacity–regularization asymmetry is consistent across all four tasks, offering a candidate design heuristic for multi-stage training.
2025
Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Knowledge
Haoyu Huang | Yongfeng Huang | Yang Junjie | Zhenyu Pan | Yongqiang Chen | Kaili Ma | Hongzhi Chen | James Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Haoyu Huang | Yongfeng Huang | Yang Junjie | Zhenyu Pan | Yongqiang Chen | Kaili Ma | Hongzhi Chen | James Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 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.