Bin Cui
2026
Heterogeneous Adaptive Policy Optimization: Tailoring Optimization to Every Token’s Nature
Zheng Liu | Mengjie Liu | Siwei Wen | Mengzhang Cai | Bin Cui | Conghui He | Wentao Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zheng Liu | Mengjie Liu | Siwei Wen | Mengzhang Cai | Bin Cui | Conghui He | Wentao Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Using entropy as a measure of heterogeneity to guide optimization has emerged as a crucial research direction in Reinforcement Learning for LLMs. However, existing methods typically treat it as a discrete filter or post-hoc regulator rather than a core optimization driver. To fully leverage the potential of entropy and achieve fine-grained regulation, we introduce **H**eterogeneous **A**daptive **P**olicy **O**ptimization (HAPO), a token-aware algorithm that continuously adapts optimization dynamics based on token-level entropy throughout the entire training process. Our algorithm includes four key components: (1) **Adaptive Temperature Sampling** that adjusts sampling temperature in real time, promoting exploration at high-entropy tokens. (2) **Token-Level Group Average Advantage Estimation** that estimates advantages at token level, accounting for sequence-length effects while preserving non-biased treatment.(3) **Differential Advantage Redistribution** that leverages entropy and importance ratios to adjust advantages for tokens with clear signals. (4) **Asymmetric Adaptive Clipping** that dynamically adjusts clipping boundaries based on token-level entropy. Through systematic investigation of entropy, we embed token-level treatment into every stage. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code, and logic tasks across multiple models demonstrate HAPO’s consistent superiority over DAPO.
Data-Centric Perspectives on Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey
Jingwen Deng | Jihao Huang | Zhen Hao Wong | Hao Liang | Quanqing Xu | Bin Cui | Wentao Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jingwen Deng | Jihao Huang | Zhen Hao Wong | Hao Liang | Quanqing Xu | Bin Cui | Wentao Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at natural language understanding and generation, yet their reliance on static pre-training corpora may lead to outdated knowledge, hallucinations, and limited adaptability. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues by grounding model outputs with external retrieval, but conventional RAG remains constrained by a fixed retrieve-then-generate routine and struggles with multi-step reasoning and tool calls. **Agentic RAG** addresses these limitations by enabling LLM agents to actively decompose tasks, issue exploratory queries, and refine evidence through iterative retrieval. Despite growing interest, the development of Agentic RAG is impeded by *data scarcity*: unlike traditional RAG, it requires challenging tasks that require planning, retrieval, and multiple reasoning decisions, and corresponding rich, interactive agent trajectories. This survey presents the first data-centric overview of Agentic RAG, framing its data lifecycle—data collecting, data preprocessing and task formulation, task construction, data for evaluation, and data enhancement for training—and cataloging representative training datasets and benchmarks in different domains (e.g. question answering, web, software engineering). From data perspectives, we aim to guide the creation of scalable, high-quality datasets for the next generation of adaptive, knowledge-seeking LLM agents. The project page is at https://github.com/fatty-belly/Awesome-AgenticRAG-Data/.
Rethinking Text-to-SQL: Dynamic Multi-turn SQL Interaction for Real-world Database Exploration
Linzhuang Sun | Tianyu Guo | Hao Liang | Ruitong Liu | Yuying Li | Qifeng Cai | Jingxuan Wei | Yuchen Wu | Bihui Yu | Xiangxiang Zhang | Wentao Zhang | Bin Cui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Linzhuang Sun | Tianyu Guo | Hao Liang | Ruitong Liu | Yuying Li | Qifeng Cai | Jingxuan Wei | Yuchen Wu | Bihui Yu | Xiangxiang Zhang | Wentao Zhang | Bin Cui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Text-to-SQL parsing, achieving remarkable success in static, single-turn query generation. However, a significant disparity remains between these academic benchmarks and real-world utility. In practical applications, such as financial auditing or business analytics, user intents are rarely static; they evolve dynamically through iterative refinement, necessitating not just information retrieval (SELECT) but continuous state manipulation (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE). To bridge this gap, we introduce DySQL-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate LLMs within a dynamic interaction framework. Unlike varying manual curation efforts, DySQL-Bench employs a two-stage automated synthesis pipeline: transforming raw relational schemas into hierarchical logic trees to generate user-database interactions, followed by a rigorous verify-and-refine protocol that ensures 100% distinct correctness via human expert validation. We further propose an interactive evaluation environment simulating a triadic workflow involving an LLM-simulated user, the agent under test, and an executable database system. Spanning 13 diverse domains with 1,072 complex tasks, our experiments reveal that current powerful models struggle in this realistic setting. Notably, GPT-4o achieves only 58.34% overall accuracy and a meager 23.81% on the strict Pass^5 metric, highlighting the substantial challenges DySQL-Bench poses for the future of database agents.
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch
Zheng Liu | Honglin Lin | Xiaoyang Wang | Xin Gao | Yu Li | Mengzhang Cai | Yun Zhu | Zhanping Zhong | Qizhi Pei | Zhuoshi Pan | Xiaoran Shang | Conghui He | Bin Cui | Wentao Zhang | Lijun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zheng Liu | Honglin Lin | Xiaoyang Wang | Xin Gao | Yu Li | Mengzhang Cai | Yun Zhu | Zhanping Zhong | Qizhi Pei | Zhuoshi Pan | Xiaoran Shang | Conghui He | Bin Cui | Wentao Zhang | Lijun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Chart reasoning is a critical capability for Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, the development of open-source models is severely hindered by the lack of high-quality training data. Existing datasets suffer from a dual challenge: synthetic charts are often simplistic and repetitive, while the associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations and lack the reasoning depth required for complex tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose **ChartVerse**, a scalable framework designed to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. (1) To address the bottleneck of simple patterns, we first introduce **Rollout Posterior Entropy (RPE)**, a novel metric that quantifies chart complexity. Guided by RPE, we develop **complexity-aware chart coder** to autonomously synthesize diverse, high-complexity charts via executable programs. (2) To guarantee reasoning rigor, we develop **truth-anchored inverse QA synthesis**. Diverging from standard generation, we adopt an answer-first paradigm: we extract deterministic answers directly from the source code, generate questions conditional on these anchors, and enforce strict consistency verification. To further elevate difficulty and reasoning depth, we filter samples based on model fail-rate and distill high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. We curate ChartVerse-SFT-600K and ChartVerse-RL-40K using Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking as the teacher. Experimental results demonstrate that ChartVerse-8B achieves state-of-the-art performance, notably surpassing its teacher and rivaling the stronger Qwen3-32B-Thinking.
2025
VersaTune: An Efficient Data Composition Framework for Training Multi-Capability LLMs
Keer Lu | Keshi Zhao | Zhuoran Zhang | Zheng Liang | Bin Cui | Tengjiao Wang | Wentao Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Keer Lu | Keshi Zhao | Zhuoran Zhang | Zheng Liang | Bin Cui | Tengjiao Wang | Wentao Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
As demonstrated by the proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT and Claude series, LLMs have the potential to achieve remarkable proficiency across a wide range of domains, including law, medicine, finance, science, code, etc., all within a single model. These capabilities are further augmented during the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) phase. Despite their potential, existing work mainly focuses on domain-specific enhancements during fine-tuning, the challenge of which lies in catastrophic forgetting of knowledge across other domains. In this study, we introduce **VersaTune**, a novel data composition framework designed for enhancing LLMs’ overall multi-domain capabilities during training. We begin with detecting the distribution of domain-specific knowledge within the base model, followed by the training data composition that aligns with the model’s existing knowledge distribution. During the subsequent training process, domain weights are dynamically adjusted based on their learnable potential and forgetting degree. Experimental results indicate that VersaTune is effective in multi-domain fostering, with an improvement of 29.77% in the overall multi-ability performances compared to uniform domain weights. Furthermore, we find that Qwen-2.5-32B + VersaTune even surpasses frontier models, including GPT-4o, Claude3.5-Sonnet and DeepSeek-V3 by 0.86%, 4.76% and 4.60%. Additionally, in scenarios where flexible expansion of a specific domain is required, VersaTune reduces the performance degradation in other domains by 38.77%, while preserving the training efficacy of the target domain.
CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs
Tao Zhang | ChengLIn Zhu | Yanjun Shen | Wenjing Luo | Yan Zhang | Hao Liang | Tao Zhang | Fan Yang | Mingan Lin | Yujing Qiao | Weipeng Chen | Bin Cui | Wentao Zhang | Zenan Zhou
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tao Zhang | ChengLIn Zhu | Yanjun Shen | Wenjing Luo | Yan Zhang | Hao Liang | Tao Zhang | Fan Yang | Mingan Lin | Yujing Qiao | Weipeng Chen | Bin Cui | Wentao Zhang | Zenan Zhou
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The adeptness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in comprehending and following natural language instructions is critical for their deployment in sophisticated real-world applications. Existing evaluations mainly focus on fragmented constraints or narrow scenarios, but they overlook the comprehensiveness and authenticity of constraints from the user’s perspective. To bridge this gap, we propose CFBench, a large-scale Chinese Comprehensive Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs, featuring 1,000 curated samples that cover more than 200 real-life scenarios and over 50 NLP tasks. CFBench meticulously compiles constraints from real-world instructions and constructs an innovative systematic framework for constraint types, which includes 10 primary categories and over 25 subcategories, and ensures each constraint is seamlessly integrated within the instructions. To make certain that the evaluation of LLM outputs aligns with user perceptions, we propose an advanced methodology that integrates multi-dimensional assessment criteria with requirement prioritization, covering various perspectives of constraints, instructions, and requirement fulfillment. Evaluating current leading LLMs on CFBench reveals substantial room for improvement in constraints following, and we further investigate influencing factors and enhancement strategies. The data and code will be made available.
Improving Low-Resource Sequence Labeling with Knowledge Fusion and Contextual Label Explanations
Peichao Lai | Jiaxin Gan | Feiyang Ye | Wentao Zhang | Fangcheng Fu | Yilei Wang | Bin Cui
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Peichao Lai | Jiaxin Gan | Feiyang Ye | Wentao Zhang | Fangcheng Fu | Yilei Wang | Bin Cui
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Sequence labeling remains a significant challenge in low-resource, domain-specific scenarios, particularly for character-dense languages. Existing methods primarily focus on enhancing model comprehension and improving data diversity to boost performance. However, these approaches still struggle with inadequate model applicability and semantic distribution biases in domain-specific contexts. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework that combines an LLM-based knowledge enhancement workflow with a span-based Knowledge Fusion for Rich and Efficient Extraction (KnowFREE) model. Our workflow employs explanation prompts to generate precise contextual interpretations of target entities, effectively mitigating semantic biases and enriching the model’s contextual understanding. The KnowFREE model further integrates extension label features, enabling efficient nested entity extraction without relying on external knowledge during inference. Experiments on multiple domain-specific sequence labeling datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively addressing the challenges posed by low-resource settings.
Enhancing Unsupervised Sentence Embeddings via Knowledge-Driven Data Augmentation and Gaussian-Decayed Contrastive Learning
Peichao Lai | Zhengfeng Zhang | Wentao Zhang | Fangcheng Fu | Bin Cui
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Peichao Lai | Zhengfeng Zhang | Wentao Zhang | Fangcheng Fu | Bin Cui
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recently, using large language models (LLMs) for data augmentation has led to considerable improvements in unsupervised sentence embedding models. However, existing methods encounter two primary challenges: limited data diversity and high data noise. Current approaches often neglect fine-grained knowledge, such as entities and quantities, leading to insufficient diversity. Besides, unsupervised data frequently lacks discriminative information, and the generated synthetic samples may introduce noise. In this paper, we propose a pipeline-based data augmentation method via LLMs and introduce the Gaussian-decayed gradient-assisted Contrastive Sentence Embedding (GCSE) model to enhance unsupervised sentence embeddings. To tackle the issue of low data diversity, our pipeline utilizes knowledge graphs (KGs) to extract entities and quantities, enabling LLMs to generate more diverse samples. To address high data noise, the GCSE model uses a Gaussian-decayed function to limit the impact of false hard negative samples, enhancing the model’s discriminative capability. Experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks, using fewer data samples and smaller LLMs, demonstrating its efficiency and robustness across various models.
ADEPT-SQL: A High-performance Text-to-SQL Application for Real-World Enterprise-Level Databases
Yongnan Chen | Zhuo Chang | Shijia Gu | Yuanhang Zong | Mei Zhang | Shiyu Wang | Zixiang He | HongZhi Chen | Wei Jin | Bin Cui
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Yongnan Chen | Zhuo Chang | Shijia Gu | Yuanhang Zong | Mei Zhang | Shiyu Wang | Zixiang He | HongZhi Chen | Wei Jin | Bin Cui
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
This paper presents Adept-SQL, a domain-adapted Text2SQL system that addresses critical deployment challenges in professional fields. While modern LLM-based solutions excel on academic benchmarks, we identify three persistent limitations in industrial application: domain-specific knowledge barriers, the schemas complexity in the real world, and the prohibitive computational costs of large LLMs. Our framework introduces two key innovations: a three-stage grounding mechanism combining dynamic terminology expansion, focused schema alignment, and historical query retrieval; coupled with a hybrid prompting architecture that decomposes SQL generation into schema-aware hinting, term disambiguation, and few-shot example incorporation phases. This approach enables efficient execution using smaller open-source LLMs while maintaining semantic precision. Deployed in petroleum engineering domains, our system achieves 97% execution accuracy on real-world databases, demonstrating 49% absolute improvement over SOTA baselines. We release implementation code to advance research in professional Text2SQL systems.
FB-Bench: A Fine-Grained Multi-Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs’ Responsiveness to Human Feedback
Youquan Li | Miao Zheng | Fan Yang | Guosheng Dong | Bin Cui | Weipeng Chen | Zenan Zhou | Wentao Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Youquan Li | Miao Zheng | Fan Yang | Guosheng Dong | Bin Cui | Weipeng Chen | Zenan Zhou | Wentao Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Human feedback is crucial in the interactions between humans and Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing research primarily focuses on benchmarking LLMs in single-turn dialogues. Even in benchmarks designed for multi-turn dialogues, the user utterances are often independent, neglecting the nuanced and complex nature of human feedback within real-world usage scenarios. To fill this research gap, we introduce FB-Bench, a fine-grained, multi-task benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ responsiveness to human feedback under real-world usage scenarios in Chinese. Drawing from the two main interaction scenarios, FB-Bench comprises 591 meticulously curated samples, encompassing eight task types, five deficiency types of response, and nine feedback types. We extensively evaluate a broad array of popular LLMs, revealing significant variations in their performance across different interaction scenarios. Further analysis indicates that task, human feedback, and deficiencies of previous responses can also significantly impact LLMs’ responsiveness. Our findings underscore both the strengths and limitations of current models, providing valuable insights and directions for future research.
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- Wentao Zhang 9
- Hao Liang 3
- Mengzhang Cai 2
- Weipeng Chen 2
- Fangcheng Fu 2
- Conghui He 2
- Peichao Lai 2
- Zheng Liu 2
- Fan Yang 2
- Tao Zhang 2
- Zenan Zhou 2
- Qifeng Cai 1
- Zhuo Chang 1
- Yongnan Chen 1
- HongZhi Chen 1
- Jingwen Deng 1
- Guosheng Dong 1
- Jiaxin Gan 1
- Xin Gao 1
- Shijia Gu 1
- Tianyu Guo 1
- Zixiang He 1
- Jihao Huang 1
- Wei Jin 1
- Yuying Li 1
- Yu Li 1
- Youquan Li 1
- Zheng Liang 1
- Mingan Lin 1
- Honglin Lin 1
- Mengjie Liu 1
- Ruitong Liu 1
- Keer Lu 1
- Wenjing Luo 1
- Zhuoshi Pan 1
- Qizhi Pei 1
- Yujing Qiao 1
- Xiaoran Shang 1
- Yanjun Shen 1
- Linzhuang Sun 1
- Tengjiao Wang 1
- Yilei Wang 1
- Xiaoyang Wang 1
- Shiyu Wang 1
- Jingxuan Wei 1
- Siwei Wen 1
- Zhen Hao Wong 1
- Yuchen Wu 1
- Lijun Wu 1
- Quanqing Xu 1
- Feiyang Ye 1
- Bihui Yu 1
- Zhuoran Zhang 1
- Yan Zhang 1
- Xiangxiang Zhang 1
- Zhengfeng Zhang 1
- Mei Zhang 1
- Keshi Zhao 1
- Miao Zheng 1
- Zhanping Zhong 1
- ChengLIn Zhu 1
- Yun Zhu 1
- Yuanhang Zong 1