Qizhou Chen
2026
Taming "Zombie" Agents: A Markov State-Aware Framework for Resilient Multi-Agent Evolution
Taolin Zhang | Pukun Zhao | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Chen Chen | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Taolin Zhang | Pukun Zhao | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Chen Chen | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advancements in LLM-based multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable collaborative capabilities across complex tasks. To enhance the overall efficiency, existing methods often rely on aggressive graph topology evolution for agents (e.g., node or edge pruning), which risks prematurely discarding valuable agents due to transient issues such as hallucinations or temporary knowledge gaps. However, such hard pruning overlooks the potential for "zombie" agents to recover and contribute in subsequent discussion rounds. In this paper, we propose AgentRevive, a Markov state-aware framework for resilient multi-agent evolution. Our approach dynamically manages agent collaboration through soft state transitions, implemented via two key components: (1) State-Aware Policy Learning: Agent states are divided into "Active", "Standby", and "Terminated", selectively propagating messages based on agent memory. The policy employs a risk estimator to optimize agent state transitions by assessing hallucination risk, minimizing the influence of unreliable nodes while safeguarding valuable ones. (2) State-Aware Edge Optimization: Subgraph edges are pruned according to states learned from the policy, permanently removing "Terminated" nodes and retaining "Standby" nodes for subsequent rounds to observe potential future contributions. Extensive experiments on general reasoning, domain-specific, and hallucination challenge tasks show that our method consistently outperforms strong baselines and significantly reduces token consumption through state-aware agent scheduling.
AMATA: Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment for Knowledge-Intensive Question Answering
Taolin Zhang | Dongyang Li | Chen Chen | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Taolin Zhang | Dongyang Li | Chen Chen | Qizhou Chen | Jiuheng Wan | Xiaofeng He | Chengyu Wang | Richang Hong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Despite substantial advances in large language models (LLMs), producing factually consistent responses for knowledge-intensive question answering remains challenging. These difficulties are primarily due to hallucination and the limitations of LLMs in bridging long-tail knowledge gaps. To address this, we propose AMATA, an Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment framework that dynamically integrates external knowledge to improve response interpretability and factual grounding. Our architecture leverages six specialized agents that collaboratively perform structured actions for complex question reasoning. We formalize multi-agent collaboration with external tools as a trajectory preference alignment problem, incorporating question-aware agent customization and inter-agent preference harmonization. AMATA introduces two principal innovations: (1) Intra-Trajectory Preference Learning, which learns objective-oriented preferences to prioritize critical agents, and (2) Inter-Agent Dependency Learning, which captures cross-agent tool dependencies through a novel dependency-aware direct preference optimization technique. Empirical results show that AMATA consistently outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLM-based trajectory systems on five established knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. Further analysis demonstrates the efficiency of our method in reducing token consumption.
2025
BELLE: A Bi-Level Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Multi-Hop Question Answering
Taolin Zhang | Dongyang Li | Qizhou Chen | Chengyu Wang | Xiaofeng He
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Taolin Zhang | Dongyang Li | Qizhou Chen | Chengyu Wang | Xiaofeng He
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Multi-hop question answering (QA) involves finding multiple relevant passages and performing step-by-step reasoning to answer complex questions. Previous works on multi-hop QA employ specific methods from different modeling perspectives based on large language models (LLMs), regardless of the question types. In this paper, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of public multi-hop QA benchmarks, dividing the questions into four types and evaluating five types of cutting-edge methods for multi-hop QA: Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Single-step, Iterative-step, Sub-step, and Adaptive-step. We find that different types of multi-hop questions have varying degrees of sensitivity to different types of methods. Thus, we propose a Bi-levEL muLti-agEnt reasoning (BELLE) framework to address multi-hop QA by specifically focusing on the correspondence between question types and methods, where each type of method is regarded as an ”operator” by prompting LLMs differently. The first level of BELLE includes multiple agents that debate to obtain an executive plan of combined ”operators” to address the multi-hop QA task comprehensively. During the debate, in addition to the basic roles of affirmative debater, negative debater, and judge, at the second level, we further leverage fast and slow debaters to monitor whether changes in viewpoints are reasonable. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BELLE significantly outperforms strong baselines in various datasets. Additionally, the model consumption of BELLE is higher cost-effectiveness than that of single models in more complex multi-hop QA scenarios.
2024
DAFNet: Dynamic Auxiliary Fusion for Sequential Model Editing in Large Language Models
Taolin Zhang | Qizhou Chen | Dongyang Li | Chengyu Wang | Xiaofeng He | Longtao Huang | Hui Xue’ | Jun Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Taolin Zhang | Qizhou Chen | Dongyang Li | Chengyu Wang | Xiaofeng He | Longtao Huang | Hui Xue’ | Jun Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Recently, while large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive results, they still suffer from hallucination, i.e., the generation of false information. Model editing is the task of fixing factual mistakes in LLMs; yet, most previous works treat it as a one-time task, paying little attention to ever-emerging mistakes generated by LLMs. We address the task of sequential model editing (SME) that aims to rectify mistakes continuously. A Dynamic Auxiliary Fusion Network (DAFNet) is designed to enhance the semantic interaction among the factual knowledge within the entire sequence, preventing catastrophic forgetting during the editing process of multiple knowledge triples.Specifically, (1) for semantic fusion within a relation triple, we aggregate the intra-editing attention flow into auto-regressive self-attention with token-level granularity in LLMs. We further leverage multi-layer diagonal inter-editing attention flow to update the weighted representations of the entire sequence-level granularity. (2) Considering that auxiliary parameters are required to store the knowledge for sequential editing, we construct a new dataset named DAFSet, fulfilling recent, popular, long-tail and robust properties to enhance the generality of sequential editing. Experiments show DAFNet significantly outperforms strong baselines in single-turn and sequential editing. The usage of DAFSet also consistently improves the performance of other auxiliary network-based methods in various scenarios.
Lifelong Knowledge Editing for LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Continuous Prompt Learning
Qizhou Chen | Taolin Zhang | Xiaofeng He | Dongyang Li | Chengyu Wang | Longtao Huang | Hui Xue’
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Qizhou Chen | Taolin Zhang | Xiaofeng He | Dongyang Li | Chengyu Wang | Longtao Huang | Hui Xue’
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Model editing aims to correct outdated or erroneous knowledge in large language models (LLMs) without the need for costly retraining. Lifelong model editing is the most challenging task that caters to the continuous editing requirements of LLMs. Prior works primarily focus on single or batch editing; nevertheless, these methods fall short in lifelong editing scenarios due to catastrophic knowledge forgetting and the degradation of model performance. Although retrieval-based methods alleviate these issues, they are impeded by slow and cumbersome processes of integrating the retrieved knowledge into the model. In this work, we introduce RECIPE, a RetriEval-augmented ContInuous Prompt lEarning method, to boost editing efficacy and inference efficiency in lifelong learning. RECIPE first converts knowledge statements into short and informative continuous prompts, prefixed to the LLM’s input query embedding, to efficiently refine the response grounded on the knowledge. It further integrates the Knowledge Sentinel (KS) that acts as an intermediary to calculate a dynamic threshold, determining whether the retrieval repository contains relevant knowledge. Our retriever and prompt encoder are jointly trained to achieve editing properties, i.e., reliability, generality, and locality. In our experiments, RECIPE is assessed extensively across multiple LLMs and editing datasets, where it achieves superior editing performance. RECIPE also demonstrates its capability to maintain the overall performance of LLMs alongside showcasing fast editing and inference speed.