Ao Liu
2026
ReLook: Vision-Grounded RL with a Multimodal LLM Critic for Agentic Web Coding
Yuhang Li | Chenchen Zhang | Ruilin Lv | Ao Liu | Ken Deng | Yuanxing Zhang | Jiaheng Liu | Bo Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuhang Li | Chenchen Zhang | Ruilin Lv | Ao Liu | Ken Deng | Yuanxing Zhang | Jiaheng Liu | Bo Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at algorithmic code generation, they struggle with front-end development, where correctness is judged on rendered pixels and interaction. We present ReLook, an agentic, vision-grounded reinforcement learning framework that empowers an agent to close a robust generate–diagnose–refine loop by invoking a multimodal LLM (MLLM) as a tool. During training, the agent employs an MLLM-in-the-loop to serve as a visual critic, evaluating code via screenshots and providing actionable feedback. Crucially, we enforce a strict zero-reward policy for invalid renders to guarantee renderability and mitigate reward hacking. To prevent behavioral collapse, we introduce Forced Optimization, a strict acceptance rule that admits only improving revisions, yielding monotonically better trajectories. At inference, we decouple the critic and run a lightweight, critic-free self-edit cycle, keeping latency comparable to base decoding while retaining most of the gains. Across three widely used benchmarks, ReLook consistently outperforms strong baselines in vision-grounded front-end code generation, highlighting the benefits of agentic perception, visual rewards, and training–inference decoupling.
2023
Generative Data Augmentation for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction
An Wang | Junfeng Jiang | Youmi Ma | Ao Liu | Naoaki Okazaki
Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023)
An Wang | Junfeng Jiang | Youmi Ma | Ao Liu | Naoaki Okazaki
Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023)
Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) analyzes the aspect terms, opinion terms, sentiment polarity, and aspect categories in a text. One challenge in this task is the scarcity of data owing to the high annotation cost. Data augmentation techniques are commonly used to address this issue. However, existing approaches simply rewrite texts in the training data, restricting the semantic diversity of the generated data and impairing the quality due to the inconsistency between text and quads. To address these limitations, we augment quads and train a quads-to-text model to generate corresponding texts. Furthermore, we designed novel strategies to filter out low-quality data and balance the sample difficulty distribution of the augmented dataset. Empirical studies on two ASQP datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms other data augmentation methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmarks. The source code will be released upon acceptance.
2022
PLOG: Table-to-Logic Pretraining for Logical Table-to-Text Generation
Ao Liu | Haoyu Dong | Naoaki Okazaki | Shi Han | Dongmei Zhang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ao Liu | Haoyu Dong | Naoaki Okazaki | Shi Han | Dongmei Zhang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Logical table-to-text generation is a task that involves generating logically faithful sentences from tables, which requires models to derive logical-level facts from table records via logical inference. It raises a new challenge on the logical-level content planning of table-to-text models. However, directly learning the logical inference knowledge from table-text pairs is very difficult for neural models because of the ambiguity of natural language and the scarcity of parallel data. Hence even large-scale pre-trained language models present low logical fidelity on logical table-to-text. In this work, we propose a Pretrained Logical Form Generator (PLOG) framework to improve generation fidelity. Specifically, PLOG is first pretrained on a table-to-logical-form generation (table-to-logic) task, then finetuned on downstream table-to-text tasks. The logical forms are formally defined with unambiguous semantics. Hence we can collect a large amount of accurate logical forms from tables without human annotation. In addition, PLOG can learn logical inference from table-logic pairs much more reliably than from table-text pairs. To evaluate our model, we further collect a controlled logical table-to-text dataset CONTLOG based on an existing dataset. On two benchmarks, LOGICNLG and CONTLOG, PLOG outperforms strong baselines by a large margin on the logical fidelity, demonstrating the effectiveness of table-to-logic pretraining.
Exploiting Unlabeled Data for Target-Oriented Opinion Words Extraction
Yidong Wang | Hao Wu | Ao Liu | Wenxin Hou | Zhen Wu | Jindong Wang | Takahiro Shinozaki | Manabu Okumura | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Yidong Wang | Hao Wu | Ao Liu | Wenxin Hou | Zhen Wu | Jindong Wang | Takahiro Shinozaki | Manabu Okumura | Yue Zhang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction (TOWE) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task that aims to extract the corresponding opinion words of a given opinion target from the sentence. Recently, deep learning approaches have made remarkable progress on this task. Nevertheless, the TOWE task still suffers from the scarcity of training data due to the expensive data annotation process. Limited labeled data increase the risk of distribution shift between test data and training data. In this paper, we propose exploiting massive unlabeled data to reduce the risk by increasing the exposure of the model to varying distribution shifts. Specifically, we propose a novel Multi-Grained Consistency Regularization (MGCR) method to make use of unlabeled data and design two filters specifically for TOWE to filter noisy data at different granularity. Extensive experimental results on four TOWE benchmark datasets indicate the superiority of MGCR compared with current state-of-the-art methods. The in-depth analysis also demonstrates the effectiveness of the different-granularity filters.
Semi-Supervised Formality Style Transfer with Consistency Training
Ao Liu | An Wang | Naoaki Okazaki
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ao Liu | An Wang | Naoaki Okazaki
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Formality style transfer (FST) is a task that involves paraphrasing an informal sentence into a formal one without altering its meaning. To address the data-scarcity problem of existing parallel datasets, previous studies tend to adopt a cycle-reconstruction scheme to utilize additional unlabeled data, where the FST model mainly benefits from target-side unlabeled sentences. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective semi-supervised framework to better utilize source-side unlabeled sentences based on consistency training. Specifically, our approach augments pseudo-parallel data obtained from a source-side informal sentence by enforcing the model to generate similar outputs for its perturbed version. Moreover, we empirically examined the effects of various data perturbation methods and propose effective data filtering strategies to improve our framework. Experimental results on the GYAFC benchmark demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art results, even with less than 40% of the parallel data.