Bifan Wei


2026

Despite the remarkable progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) in abstract reasoning tasks, they continue to struggle with physics problem solving due to difficulties in decoding implicit constraints and maintaining physical consistency. To address these challenges, Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a promising approach to verify intermediate reasoning steps. Existing PRMs attempt to mitigate reasoning errors but typically rely on scalar scoring, which lacks the explanatory power necessary to diagnose complex physical misconceptions. In this work, we introduce PhysPRM, a Generative PRM that treats evaluation as a generative task to produce fine-grained diagnoses comprising critiques, final judgments, and specific error types. To facilitate this, we develop an automated data synthesis pipeline to construct PhysPRM30K, a comprehensive training dataset, and PhysProcessBench, a rigorously human-verified benchmark. By employing a two-stage training paradigm that integrates Supervised Fine-Tuning with Group Relative Policy Optimization, PhysPRM significantly enhances the physics reasoning capabilities of various LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhysPRM improves performance across seven benchmarks in both Best-of-N and critique refinement strategies.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning, complex optimization tasks remain challenging, requiring domain knowledge and robust implementation. However, existing benchmarks focus narrowly on Mathematical Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, hindering comprehensive evaluation. To address this, we introduce OptiVerse, a comprehensive benchmark of 1,000 curated problems spanning neglected domains, including Stochastic Optimization, Dynamic Optimization, Game Optimization, and Optimal Control, across three difficulty levels: Easy, Medium, and Hard. The experiments with 22 LLMs of different sizes reveal sharp performance degradation on hard problems, where even advanced models like GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3 struggle to exceed 27% accuracy. Through error analysis, we identify that modeling logic errors remain the primary bottleneck. Consequently, we propose a Dual-View Auditor Agent that improves the accuracy of the LLM modeling process without introducing significant time overhead. OptiVerse will serve as a foundational platform for advancing LLMs in solving complex optimization challenges.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities, they unintentionally memorize sensitive data, posing critical privacy and security risks.Machine unlearning is pivotal for mitigating these risks, yet existing paradigms face a fundamental dilemma: aggressive unlearning often induces catastrophic forgetting that degrades model utility, whereas conservative strategies risk superficial forgetting, leaving models vulnerable to adversarial recovery. To address this trade-off, we propose AGTAO (Adversarial Gating Training with Adaptive Orthogonality), a unified framework designed to reconcile robust erasure with utility preservation. Specifically, our approach introduces Adaptive Orthogonality (AO) to dynamically mitigate geometric gradient conflicts between forgetting and retention objectives, thereby minimizing unintended knowledge degradation. Concurrently, Adversarial Gating Training (AGT) formulates unlearning as a latent-space min-max game, employing a curriculum-based gating mechanism to simulate and counter internal recovery attempts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AGTAO achieves a superior trade-off between unlearning efficacy (KUR 0.01) and model utility (MMLU 58.30).[Code is available at <https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AGT-unlearning>.].
Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with structural ambiguity in optimization problems, where a single problem admits multiple related but conflicting modeling paradigms, hindering effective solution generation. To address this, we propose Dual-Cluster Memory Agent (DCM-Agent) to enhance performance by leveraging historical solutions in a training-free manner. Central to this is Dual-Cluster Memory Construction. This agent assigns historical solutions to modeling and coding clusters, then distills each cluster’s content into three structured types: Approach, Checklist, and Pitfall. This process derives generalizable guidance knowledge. Furthermore, this agent introduces Memory-augmented Inference to dynamically navigate solution paths, detect and repair errors, and adaptively switch reasoning paths with structured knowledge. The experiments across seven optimization benchmarks demonstrate that DCM-Agent achieves an average performance improvement of 11%- 21%. Notably, our analysis reveals a “knowledge inheritance” phenomenon: memory constructed by larger models can guide smaller models toward superior performance, highlighting the framework’s scalability and efficiency.

2024

Automatically generated questions often suffer from problems such as unclear expression or factual inaccuracies, requiring a reliable and comprehensive evaluation of their quality. Human evaluation is widely used in the field of question generation (QG) and serves as the gold standard for automatic metrics. However, there is a lack of unified human evaluation criteria, which hampers consistent and reliable evaluations of both QG models and automatic metrics. To address this, we propose **QGEval**, a multi-dimensional **Eval**uation benchmark for **Q**uestion **G**eneration, which evaluates both generated questions and existing automatic metrics across 7 dimensions: fluency, clarity, conciseness, relevance, consistency, answerability, and answer consistency. We demonstrate the appropriateness of these dimensions by examining their correlations and distinctions. Through consistent evaluations of QG models and automatic metrics with QGEval, we find that 1) most QG models perform unsatisfactorily in terms of answerability and answer consistency, and 2) existing metrics fail to align well with human judgments when evaluating generated questions across the 7 dimensions. We expect this work to foster the development of both QG technologies and their evaluation.

2023

Conversational question generation aims to generate questions that depend on both context and conversation history. Conventional works utilizing deep learning have shown promising results, but heavily rely on the availability of large-scale annotated conversations. In this paper, we introduce a more realistic and less explored setting, Zero-shot Conversational Question Generation (ZeroCQG), which requires no human-labeled conversations for training. To solve ZeroCQG, we propose a multi-stage knowledge transfer framework, Synthesize, Prompt, and trAnsfer with pRe-Trained lAnguage model (SPARTA) to effectively leverage knowledge from single-turn question generation instances. To validate the zero-shot performance of SPARTA, we conduct extensive experiments on three conversational datasets: CoQA, QuAC, and DoQA by transferring knowledge from three single-turn datasets: MS MARCO, NewsQA, and SQuAD. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Specifically, SPARTA has achieved 14.81 BLEU-4 (88.2% absolute improvement compared to T5) in CoQA with knowledge transferred from SQuAD.