Zhiyuan Yao
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2026
SKILL0: In-Context Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Skill Internalization
Zhengxi Lu | Zhiyuan Yao | Jinyang Wu | Chengcheng Han | Xierui Song | Xunliang Cai | Weiming Lu | Jun Xiao | Yueting Zhuang | Yongliang Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zhengxi Lu | Zhiyuan Yao | Jinyang Wu | Chengcheng Han | Xierui Song | Xunliang Cai | Weiming Lu | Jun Xiao | Yueting Zhuang | Yongliang Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Agent skills, structured packages of procedural knowledge and executable resources that agents dynamically load at inference time, have become a reliable mechanism for augmenting LLM agents. Yet inference-time skill augmentation is fundamentally limited: retrieval noise introduces irrelevant guidance, injected skill content imposes substantial token overhead, and the model never truly acquires the knowledge it merely follows. We ask whether skills can instead be internalized into model parameters, enabling zero-shot autonomous behavior without any runtime skill retrieval. We introduce SKILL0, an in-context reinforcement learning framework designed for skill internalization. SKILL0 introduces a training-time curriculum that begins with full skill context and progressively withdraws it. Skills are grouped offline by category and rendered with interaction history into a compact visual context, teaching the model tool invocation and multi-turn task completion. A Dynamic Curriculum then evaluates each skill file’s on-policy helpfulness, retaining only those from which the current policy still benefits within a linearly decaying budget, until the agent operates in a fully zero-shot setting. Extensive agentic experiments demonstrate that SKILL0 achieves substantial improvements over the standard RL baseline (+9.7% for ALFWorld, +6.6% for Search-QA and +10.1% for WebShop), while maintaining a highly efficient context of fewer than 0.5k tokens per step.
RealMem: Benchmarking LLMs in Real-World Memory-Driven Interaction
Haonan Bian | Zhiyuan Yao | Sen Hu | Zishan Xu | Shaolei Zhang | Yifu Guo | Ziliang Yang | Xueran Han | Huacan Wang | Ronghao Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Haonan Bian | Zhiyuan Yao | Sen Hu | Zishan Xu | Shaolei Zhang | Yifu Guo | Ziliang Yang | Xueran Han | Huacan Wang | Ronghao Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from static dialogue interfaces to autonomous general agents, effective memory is paramount to ensuring long-term consistency. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on casual conversation or task-oriented dialogue, failing to capture “long-term project-oriented” interactions where agents must track evolving goals. To bridge this gap, we introduce RealMem, the first benchmark grounded in realistic project scenarios. RealMem comprises over 2,000 cross-session dialogues across eleven scenarios, utilizing natural user queries for evaluation. We propose a synthesis pipeline that integrates Project Foundation Construction, Multi-Agent Dialogue Generation, and Memory and Schedule Management to simulate the dynamic evolution of memory. Experiments reveal that current memory systems face significant challenges in managing the long-term project states and dynamic context dependencies inherent in real-world projects. Our code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/realmem-A1E4.
Distill Where You Fail: Recovering Learning Signals of Negative RL-Groups from Adaptive Teacher Guidance
Zhuowen Han | Jinwei Xiao | Zhengxi Lu | Renren Jin | Zhiyuan Yao | Yuxin Liu | Hongyan Hao | Yueqing Sun | Yu Yang | Xierui Song | Xunliang Cai | Deyi Xiong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhuowen Han | Jinwei Xiao | Zhengxi Lu | Renren Jin | Zhiyuan Yao | Yuxin Liu | Hongyan Hao | Yueqing Sun | Yu Yang | Xierui Song | Xunliang Cai | Deyi Xiong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs). While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, it suffers from sparse reward signals and loses gradients entirely when all responses within a group receive identical rewards. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers a natural remedy by providing dense, token-level supervision from a teacher model. However, naively combining GRPO with OPD leads to degraded performance, due to three underlying causes: not all samples benefit from distillation; fitting too quickly to the teacher undermines the exploratory capacity of RL; and OPD’s advantages are asymmetric, suppressing most tokens. To address these challenges, we propose RSTG (Recovering Learning Signals via Adaptive Teacher Guidance), which applies distillation selectively and precisely where it matters most. At the sample level, OPD is restricted to negative zero-variance prompts with each sample weighted by the teacher’s confidence score. At the token level, distillation targets only tokens with high student entropy or large teacher-student divergence. We further augment training with SFT on correct trajectories generated by the teacher model, injecting positive gradient signals where RL yields none. Experiments demonstrate that RSTG substantially outperforms naive GRPO+OPD by +4.02% on math and +3.05% on code.
ACE-Router: Generalizing History-Aware Routing from MCP Tools to the Agent Web
Zhiyuan Yao | Zishan Xu | Yifu Guo | Zhiguang Han | Cheng Yang | Shuo Zhang | Weinan Zhang | Xingshan Zeng | Weiwen Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhiyuan Yao | Zishan Xu | Yifu Guo | Zhiguang Han | Cheng Yang | Shuo Zhang | Weinan Zhang | Xingshan Zeng | Weiwen Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
With the rise of the Agent Web and Model Context Protocol (MCP), the agent ecosystem is evolving into an open collaborative network, exponentially increasing accessible tools. However, current architectures face severe scalability and generality bottlenecks. To address this, we propose ACE-Router, a pipeline for training history-aware routers to empower precise navigation in large-scale ecosystems. By leveraging a dependency-rich candidate Graph to synthesize multi-turn trajectories, we effectively train routers with dynamic context understanding to create the plug-and-play Light Routing Agent. Experiments on the real-world benchmarks MCP-Universe and MCP-Mark demonstrate superior performance. Notably, ACE-Router exhibits critical properties for the future Agent Web: it not only generalizes to multi-agent collaboration with minimal adaptation but also maintains exceptional robustness against noise and scales effectively to massive candidate spaces. These findings provide a strong empirical foundation for universal orchestration in open-ended ecosystems.Our code is available at https://github.com/euyis1019/ACE-Router.
Does Memory Need Graphs? A Unified Framework and Empirical Analysis for Long-Term Dialog Memory
Sen Hu | Yuxiang Wei | Jiaxin Ran | Xueran Han | Zhiyuan Yao | Huacan Wang | Ronghao Chen | Lei Zou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Sen Hu | Yuxiang Wei | Jiaxin Ran | Xueran Han | Zhiyuan Yao | Huacan Wang | Ronghao Chen | Lei Zou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
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Co-authors
- Xunliang Cai 2
- Ronghao Chen 2
- Qi GU 2
- Yifu Guo 2
- Xueran Han 2
- Sen Hu 2
- Zhengxi Lu 2
- Huacan Wang 2
- Zishan Xu 2
- Haonan Bian 1
- Chengcheng Han 1
- Zhiguang Han 1
- Zhuowen Han 1
- Hongyan Hao 1
- Renren Jin 1
- Weiwen Liu 1
- Yuxin Liu 1
- Weiming Lu 1
- Jiaxin Ran 1
- Yongliang Shen 1
- Yueqing Sun 1
- Yuxiang Wei 1
- Jinyang Wu 1
- Jinwei Xiao 1
- Jun Xiao 1
- Deyi Xiong (德意 熊) 1
- Cheng Yang 1
- Yu Yang 1
- Ziliang Yang 1
- Xingshan Zeng 1
- Shaolei Zhang 1
- Shuo Zhang 1
- Weinan Zhang 1
- Yueting Zhuang 1
- Lei Zou 1