Bibo Cai
2026
TinyJudge: Unverifiable Constraint Alignment via Lightweight Specialist Ensembles
Yirong Zeng | Yufei Liu | Xiao Ding | Yutai Hou | Yuxian Wang | Wu Ning | Haonan Song | Dandan Tu | Qixun Zhang | Yuxiang He | Bibo Cai | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yirong Zeng | Yufei Liu | Xiao Ding | Yutai Hou | Yuxian Wang | Wu Ning | Haonan Song | Dandan Tu | Qixun Zhang | Yuxiang He | Bibo Cai | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Instruction Following (IF) is a core capability of LLMs, requiring strict adherence to diverse constraints, ranging from verifiable ones (e.g., output length) to unverifiable ones (e.g., tone). Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a paradigm for IF tasks, leveraging LLM-as-a-judge to assess unverifiable constraints. However, we empirically find that this approach remains a significant bottleneck, suffering from severe reward hacking and higher computational overhead. In this work, we first analyze the generalization capabilities of unverifiable constraints and discover that specific constraints exhibit distinct, high-generalization patterns. Motivated by this, we propose TinyJudge, a framework that employs an ensemble of specialized tiny language models (e.g., 0.6B) to provide rewards for soft constraints. By distilling expertise from frontier models into these tiny models, it achieves high-precision, lightweight evaluation. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that TinyJudge outperforms the baselines by ~10% in average performance and 12% in reward precision. Crucially, it also achieves a 3× speedup in total training time. Our work provides a scalable and robust path for aligning LLMs with unverifiable human instructions.
Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration
Yang Zhao | Yangou Ouyang | Xiao Ding | Hepeng Wang | Bibo Cai | Kai Xiong | Jinglong Gao | Zhouhao Sun | Li Du | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yang Zhao | Yangou Ouyang | Xiao Ding | Hepeng Wang | Bibo Cai | Kai Xiong | Jinglong Gao | Zhouhao Sun | Li Du | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While Hybrid Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become the standard paradigm for training LLM agents, effective mechanisms for data allocation between these stages remain largely underexplored. Current data arbitration strategies often rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. Since SFT targets pattern consolidation through imitation while RL drives structural adaptation via exploration, misaligning data with these functional roles causes severe optimization interference. We propose PRISM, a dynamics-aware framework grounded in Schema Theory that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model’s existing knowledge. By analyzing the spatial geometric structure of gradients, PRISM identifies data triggering high spatial concentration as high-conflict signals that require RL for structural restructuring. In contrast, data yielding diffuse updates is routed to SFT for efficient consolidation. Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld demonstrate that PRISM achieves a Pareto improvement, outperforming state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 ×. Our findings suggest that disentangling data based on internal optimization regimes is crucial for scalable and robust agent alignment.
MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization
Yang Zhao | Hepeng Wang | Xiao Ding | Yangou Ouyang | Bibo Cai | Kai Xiong | Jinglong Gao | Zhouhao Sun | Li Du | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yang Zhao | Hepeng Wang | Xiao Ding | Yangou Ouyang | Bibo Cai | Kai Xiong | Jinglong Gao | Zhouhao Sun | Li Du | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its efficacy is primarily confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. Extending GRPO to **open-domain settings** remains a critical challenge, as **unconstrained generation** entails multi-faceted and often conflicting objectives—such as creativity versus factuality—where rigid, static reward scalarization is inherently suboptimal. To address this, we propose **MAESTRO** (**M**eta-learning **A**daptive **E**stimation of **S**calarization **T**rade-offs for **R**eward **O**ptimization), which introduces a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as a semantic bottleneck to perceive task-specific priorities. We formulate this as a contextual bandit problem within a bi-level optimization framework, where a lightweight Conductor network co-evolves with the policy by utilizing group-relative advantages as a meta-reward signal. Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines, while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO, and in some settings even reducing redundant generation.
2025
Exploring Large Language Models for Effective Rumor Detection on Social Media
Yirong Zeng | Xiao Ding | Bibo Cai | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yirong Zeng | Xiao Ding | Bibo Cai | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
In this paper, we explore using Large Language Models (LLMs) for rumor detection on social media. It involves assessing the veracity of claims on social media based on social context (e.g., comments, propagation patterns). LLMs, despite their impressive capabilities in text-based reasoning tasks, struggle to achieve promising rumor detection performance when facing long structured social contexts. Our preliminary analysis shows that large-scale contexts hinder LLMs’ reasoning abilities, while moderate contexts perform better for LLMs, highlighting the need for refined contexts. Accordingly, we propose a semantic-propagation collaboration-base framework that integrates small language models (e.g., graph attention network) with LLMs for effective rumor detection. It models contexts by enabling text semantic and propagation patterns to collaborate through graph attention mechanisms, and reconstruct the context by aggregating attention values during inference. Also, a cluster-based unsupervised method to refine context is proposed for generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed methods in rumor detection. This work bridges the gap for LLMs in facing long, structured data and offers a novel solution for rumor detection on social media.
ExpeTrans: LLMs Are Experiential Transfer Learners
Jinglong Gao | Xiao Ding | Lingxiao Zou | Bibo Cai | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jinglong Gao | Xiao Ding | Lingxiao Zou | Bibo Cai | Bing Qin | Ting Liu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent studies provide large language models (LLMs) with textual task-solving experiences via prompts to improve their performance.However, previous methods rely on substantial human labor or time to gather such experiences for each task, which is impractical given the growing variety of task types in user queries to LLMs.To address this issue, we design an autonomous experience transfer framework to explore whether LLMs can mimic human cognitive intelligence to autonomously transfer experience from existing source tasks to newly encountered target tasks. This not only allows the acquisition of experience without extensive costs of previous methods, but also offers a novel path for the generalization of LLMs.Experimental results on 13 datasets demonstrate that our framework effectively improves the performance of LLMs. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis of each module in the framework.
2024
Towards Generalizable and Faithful Logic Reasoning over Natural Language via Resolution Refutation
Zhouhao Sun | Xiao Ding | Li Du | Bibo Cai | Jinglong Gao | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Zhouhao Sun | Xiao Ding | Li Du | Bibo Cai | Jinglong Gao | Ting Liu | Bing Qin
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance in various natural language reasoning tasks. However, they still struggle with performing first-order logic reasoning over formal logical theories expressed in natural language. This is because the previous LLMs-based reasoning systems have the theoretical incompleteness issue. As a result, it can only address a limited set of simple reasoning problems, which significantly decreases their generalization ability. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, named Generalizable and Faithful Reasoner (GFaiR), which introduces the paradigm of resolution refutation. Resolution refutation has the capability to solve all first-order logic reasoning problems by extending reasoning rules and employing the principle of proof by contradiction, so our system’s completeness can be improved by introducing resolution refutation. Experimental results demonstrate that our system outperforms previous works by achieving state-of-the-art performances in complex scenarios while maintaining performances in simple scenarios. Besides, we observe that GFaiR is faithful to its reasoning process.