Zixuan Zhu
Author directory2026
Unified Context Evolution for LLM Agents
Zixuan Zhu | Yitong Hu | Yong Dai | Junfeng Fang | Chunyang Jiang | Senkang Hu | Yuzhi Zhao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zixuan Zhu | Yitong Hu | Yong Dai | Junfeng Fang | Chunyang Jiang | Senkang Hu | Yuzhi Zhao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
LLM-based agents can solve multi-step interactive tasks by combining reasoning with environment feedback, yet each episode starts from the same fixed context and any useful strategy discovered along the way is lost once the task ends. Existing approaches either limit learning to the current task or pool all experience into a single untyped store, without distinguishing knowledge types, tracking quality through use, or balancing what the library still lacks. We introduce Unified Context Evolution (UCE), a gradient-free framework that externalizes agent experience into an evolving library of typed Evolvable Context Units (ECUs). UCE decomposes experience into four complementary types (Memory, Strategy, Workflow, and Skill), each generated from trajectories under type-specific conditions, retrieved at decision time, scored through repeated usage outcomes, and pruned when no longer valuable. A scheduling module allocates each cycle’s generation budget toward the types where the library is weakest. Across two interactive benchmarks, UCE raises ALFWorld success from 75.4% to 96.3% and WebShop task score from 45.1% to 61.3%, and remains effective across alternative actor reasoning backbones without model retraining.
2025
CuriousLLM: Elevating Multi-Document Question Answering with LLM-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Zukang Yang | Zixuan Zhu | Jennifer Zhu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 3: Industry Track)
Zukang Yang | Zixuan Zhu | Jennifer Zhu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 3: Industry Track)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in open-domain question answering. However, they continue to face challenges such as hallucinations and knowledge cutoffs. These issues can be mitigated through in-context learning by providing LLMs with relevant context before generating answers. Recent literature proposes Knowledge Graph Prompting (KGP) which integrates knowledge graphs with an LLM-based traversal agent to substantially enhance document retrieval quality. However, KGP requires costly fine-tuning with large datasets and remains prone to hallucination. In this paper, we propose CuriousLLM, an enhancement that integrates a curiosity-driven reasoning mechanism into an LLM agent. This mechanism enables the agent to generate relevant follow-up questions, thereby guiding the information retrieval process more efficiently.Central to our approach is the development of the new Follow-upQA dataset, which includes questions and supporting evidence as input, with follow-up questions serving as ground truths. These follow-up questions either inquire about what is still missing to fully answer the user’s query or use special tokens to signify that the retrieved evidence is sufficient. Our experiments show that CuriousLLM significantly boosts LLM performance in multi-document question answering (MD-QA), circumventing the substantial computational costs and latency from the original KGP framework.