Zichen Zhao
Author directory2026
QUACK: Questioning, Understanding, and Auditing Communicated Knowledge in Multimodal Social Deduction Agents
Ye Yuan | Rui Song | Weien Li | Zeyu Li | Haochen Liu | Xiangyu Kong | Changjiang Han | Yonghan Yang | Zichen Zhao | Zixuan Dong | Fuyuan Lyu | Bowei He | Haolun Wu | Jikun Kang | Xue Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ye Yuan | Rui Song | Weien Li | Zeyu Li | Haochen Liu | Xiangyu Kong | Changjiang Han | Yonghan Yang | Zichen Zhao | Zixuan Dong | Fuyuan Lyu | Bowei He | Haolun Wu | Jikun Kang | Xue Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Social deduction games have become a popular testbed for probing reasoning, deception, coordination, and belief modeling in Large Language Model (LLM) agents. However, most environments are scored only by game outcomes such as win rates and largely remain to text-only interaction, making it difficult to tell whether an agent’s language is actually grounded in what it perceived and did, or to identify the failure modes underlying its behavior. To address this gap, we introduce QUACK, an open-source environment and evaluation framework for auditing the grounding of agent language in multimodal social reasoning. QUACK evaluates agents at three levels: game outcomes, behavioral trajectories, and utterance-level consistency. Its core Statement Verification Pipeline reconstructs each agent’s ground-truth trajectory from engine logs and checks every discussion claim against it, automatically flagging spatial hallucination, unsupported accusation, deception collapse, and language-action inconsistency. Evaluating three frontier VLMs in both homogeneous and cross-model adversarial settings, we find that even the strongest agent hallucinates 15.1% of its verifiable spatial claims and 11.5% of accusations are strictly unsupported. We release the full engine, evaluation framework, toolkit, and logs in https://github.com/AAAAA-Academia-Attractions/QUACK.
Optimizing User Profiles via Contextual Bandits for Retrieval-Augmented LLM Personalization
Linfeng Du | Ye Yuan | Zichen Zhao | Fuyuan Lyu | Emiliano Penaloza | Xiuying Chen | Zipeng Sun | Jikun Kang | Laurent Charlin | Xue Liu | Haolun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Linfeng Du | Ye Yuan | Zichen Zhao | Fuyuan Lyu | Emiliano Penaloza | Xiuying Chen | Zipeng Sun | Jikun Kang | Laurent Charlin | Xue Liu | Haolun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) excel at general-purpose tasks, yet adapting their responses to individual users remains challenging. Retrieval augmentation provides a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning by conditioning LLMs on user history records, and existing approaches typically select these records based on semantic relevance. We argue that relevance serves as an unreliable proxy for utility: a record may be semantically similar to a query yet fail to improve generation quality or even degrade it due to redundancy or conflicting information. To bridge this gap, we propose PURPLE, a contextual bandit framework that oPtimizes UseR Profiles for LLM pErsonalization. In contrast to a greedy selection of the most relevant records, PURPLE treats profile construction as an order-sensitive generation process and utilizes a Plackett-Luce ranking model to capture complex inter-record dependencies. By training with semantically rich feedback provided by the likelihood of the reference response, our method aligns retrieval directly with generation quality. Extensive experiments on nine personalization tasks demonstrate that PURPLE consistently outperforms strong heuristic and retrieval-augmented baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, establishing a principled and scalable solution for optimizing user profiles.