Dingwei Chen
2026
Act-Adaptive Margin: Dynamically Calibrating Reward Models for Subjective Ambiguity
Feiteng Fang | Dingwei Chen | Xiang Huang | Ting-En Lin | Yuchuan Wu | Xiong Liu | Jing Ye | Ziqiang Liu | Haonan Zhang | Liang Zhu | Hamid Alinejad-Rokny | Min Yang | Yongbin Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Feiteng Fang | Dingwei Chen | Xiang Huang | Ting-En Lin | Yuchuan Wu | Xiong Liu | Jing Ye | Ziqiang Liu | Haonan Zhang | Liang Zhu | Hamid Alinejad-Rokny | Min Yang | Yongbin Li
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Currently, most reinforcement learning tasks focus on domains like mathematics and programming, where verification is relatively straightforward. However, in subjective tasks such as role-playing, alignment techniques struggle to make progress, primarily because subjective reward modeling using the Bradley-Terry model faces significant challenges when dealing with ambiguous preferences. To improve reward modeling in subjective tasks, this paper proposes AAM (Act-Adaptive Margin), which enhances reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model’s internal parameter knowledge. We design two versions of AAM that efficiently generate contextually-appropriate preference gaps without additional human annotation. This approach fundamentally improves how reward models handle subjective rewards by better integrating generative understanding with preference scoring. To validate AAM’s effectiveness in subjective reward modeling, we conduct evaluations on RewardBench, JudgeBench, and challenging role-playing tasks. Results show that AAM significantly improves subjective reward modeling performance, enhancing Bradley-Terry reward models by 2.95% in general tasks and 4.85% in subjective role-playing tasks. Furthermore, reward models trained with AAM can help downstream alignment tasks achieve better results. Our test results show that applying rewards generated by AAM-Augmented RM to preference learning techniques (e.g., GRPO) achieves state-of-the-art results on CharacterEval and Charm. The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance.
AT²PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search
Zefang Zong | Dingwei Chen | Yang Li | Qi Yi | Bo Zhou | Chengming Li | BO Qian | Peng Chen | Jie Jiang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zefang Zong | Dingwei Chen | Yang Li | Qi Yi | Bo Zhou | Chengming Li | BO Qian | Peng Chen | Jie Jiang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
LLM agents have emerged as powerful systems for tackling multi-turn tasks by interleaving internal reasoning and external tool interactions. Agentic Reinforcement Learning has recently drawn significant research attention as a critical post-training paradigm to further refine these capabilities. In this paper, we present AT²PO (**A**gentic **T**urn-based **P**olicy **O**ptimization via **T**ree Search), a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. AT²PO introduces a turn-level tree structure that jointly enables Entropy-Guided Tree Expansion for strategic exploration and Turn-wise Credit Assignment for fine-grained reward propagation from sparse outcomes. Complementing this, we propose Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization, a turn-level learning objective that aligns policy updates with the natural decision granularity of agentic interactions. ATPO is orthogonal to tree search and can be readily integrated into any multi-turn RL pipeline. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 1.84 percentage points in average, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each component.
2025
Expanding before Inferring: Enhancing Factuality in Large Language Models through Premature Layers Interpolation
Dingwei Chen | Ziqiang Liu | Feiteng Fang | Chak Tou Leong | Shiwen Ni | Ahmadreza Argha | Hamid Alinejad-Rokny | Min Yang | Chengming Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Dingwei Chen | Ziqiang Liu | Feiteng Fang | Chak Tou Leong | Shiwen Ni | Ahmadreza Argha | Hamid Alinejad-Rokny | Min Yang | Chengming Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in text understanding and generation. However, their tendency to produce factually inconsistent outputs—commonly referred to as “hallucinations”—remains a critical challenge. Existing approaches, such as retrieval-based and inference-time correction methods, primarily address this issue at the input or output level, often overlooking the intrinsic information refinement process and the role of premature layers. Meanwhile, alignment- and fine-tuning-based methods are resource-intensive. In this paper, we propose **PLI** (**P**remature **L**ayers **I**nterpolation), a novel, training-free, and plug-and-play intervention designed to enhance factuality. PLI mitigates hallucinations by inserting premature layers formed through mathematical interpolation with adjacent layers. Inspired by stable diffusion and sampling steps, PLI extends the depth of information processing and transmission in LLMs, improving factual coherence. Experiments on four publicly available datasets demonstrate that PLI effectively reduces hallucinations while outperforming existing baselines in most cases. Further analysis suggests that the success of layer interpolation is closely linked to LLMs’ internal mechanisms. To promote reproducibility, we will release our code and data upon acceptance.
2024
Forgetting before Learning: Utilizing Parametric Arithmetic for Knowledge Updating in Large Language Models
Shiwen Ni | Dingwei Chen | Chengming Li | Xiping Hu | Ruifeng Xu | Min Yang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shiwen Ni | Dingwei Chen | Chengming Li | Xiping Hu | Ruifeng Xu | Min Yang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their remarkable capabilities in text understanding and generation. However, even stronger LLMs are susceptible to acquiring erroneous or obsolete information from the training corpus. Direct secondary fine-tuning with data containing new knowledge may be ineffective in updating knowledge due to the conflict between old and new knowledge. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for fine-tuning called F-Learning (Forgetting before Learning), which employs parametric arithmetic to facilitate the forgetting of old knowledge and learning of new knowledge. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed F-Learning can obviously improve the knowledge updating performance of both full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-tuning, simultaneously outperforming the existing baselines in most cases. Moreover, we have also discovered that forgetting old knowledge by subtracting the parameters of LoRA can yield a similar effect to subtracting the parameters of full fine-tuning, and occasionally even surpass it significantly.