Baochang Ren
2026
KnowRL: Exploring Knowledgeable Reinforcement Learning for Factuality
Baochang Ren | Shuofei Qiao | Ningyu Zhang | Da Zheng | Huajun Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Baochang Ren | Shuofei Qiao | Ningyu Zhang | Da Zheng | Huajun Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Slow-thinking Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities but often suffer from severe hallucinations due to an inability to recognize their knowledge boundaries. Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches typically rely on outcome-oriented rewards, which can inadvertently reinforce fabricated reasoning paths when the final answer is correct. To address this, we propose **Know**ledge-enhanced **RL**, **KnowRL**, a framework that integrates factual supervision directly into the reasoning process. By decomposing the chain of thought into atomic facts and verifying them against the corresponding ground-truth knowledge, KnowRL performs fine-grained checks to encourage models to reason faithfully. Crucially, this process-oriented supervision teaches the model to identify its knowledge boundaries, learning to say "I don’t know" instead of fabricating answers when information is missing. Experimental results demonstrate that KnowRL effectively mitigates hallucinations—reducing the Incorrect Rate on SimpleQA by 20.3% for distillation-based slow-thinking models while maintaining strong performance on complex reasoning benchmarks like GPQA and AIME 2025. Furthermore, our method shows robust transferability to out-of-distribution tasks, indicating that the model learns a generalizable verification behavior.
2025
Agentic Knowledgeable Self-awareness
Shuofei Qiao | Zhisong Qiu | Baochang Ren | Xiaobin Wang | Xiangyuan Ru | Ningyu Zhang | Xiang Chen | Yong Jiang | Pengjun Xie | Fei Huang | Huajun Chen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shuofei Qiao | Zhisong Qiu | Baochang Ren | Xiaobin Wang | Xiangyuan Ru | Ningyu Zhang | Xiang Chen | Yong Jiang | Pengjun Xie | Fei Huang | Huajun Chen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved considerable performance across various agentic planning tasks. However, traditional approaches adopt a “flood irrigation” methodology that indiscriminately injects gold trajectories, external feedback, and domain knowledge into agent models. This practice overlooks the fundamental human cognitive principle of self-awareness - the ability to dynamically assess situational demands and strategically employ resources during decision-making. We propose Agentic Knowledgeable Self-awareness to address this gap, a novel paradigm enabling LLM-based agents to autonomously regulate knowledge utilization. Specifically, we propose KnowSelf, a data-centric approach that applies agents with knowledgeable self-awareness like humans. Concretely, we devise a heuristic situation judgement criterion to mark special tokens on the agent’s self-explored trajectories for collecting training data. Through a two-stage training process, the agent model can switch between different situations by generating specific special tokens, achieving optimal planning effects with minimal costs. Our experiments demonstrate that can outperform various strong baselines on different tasks and models with minimal use of external knowledge.