Hande Dong
2026
Plug-and-Play Data Module for Code RL: Adaptive Ambiguity Replay
Jianqing Zhang | Wei Xia | Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Hande Dong | Qiang Lin | Yang Liu | Jian Cao | Qiang Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jianqing Zhang | Wei Xia | Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Hande Dong | Qiang Lin | Yang Liu | Jian Cao | Qiang Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Reinforcement learning (RL) is effective for improving code generation but suffers from data scarcity. While experience replay mitigates this, existing approaches rely on static, in-epoch metrics that overlook training dynamics, often introducing low-utility or outdated data. Analyzing RL dynamics via dataset cartography, we observe that “ambiguous” samples, which are vital for model generalization, rapidly migrate to “easy-to-learn” regions, diminishing their training value. To address this, we propose Adaptive Ambiguity Replay (A2R) for RL, a plug-and-play module that prioritizes cross-epoch ambiguous samples. To neutralize the noise from stale experiences, A2R incorporates an adaptive importance mechanism based on policy divergence to weigh replayed rollouts. Extensive experiments on nine LLMs (3B–14B) demonstrate that A2R outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on real-world code editing tasks across both unseen and learned domains. Our results highlight cross-epoch ambiguity as a key factor for effective replay in RL. Code: https://github.com/TsingZ0/verl-A2R
Rethinking Entropy Interventions in RLVR: An Entropy Change Perspective
Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Haoyang Liu | Jian Luo | Jiarui Yu | Hande Dong | Qiang Lin | Can Wang | Jiawei Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Haoyang Liu | Jian Luo | Jiarui Yu | Hande Dong | Qiang Lin | Can Wang | Jiawei Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) serves as a cornerstone technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its training is often plagued by entropy collapse, a rapid decline in policy entropy that limits exploration and undermines training effectiveness. While recent works attempt to mitigate this issue via several heuristic entropy interventions, the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct comprehensive theoretical and empirical analyses of entropy dynamics in RLVR, offering two main insights: (1) We derive a tight approximation for token-level entropy change at each update step, revealing four governing factors and providing a unified theoretical framework of how existing methods influence entropy; (2) We reveal a fundamental limitation of recent approaches: they rely on heuristic adjustments to one or two of these factors, leaving other relevant factors unconsidered, thus inherently limiting their effectiveness. Motivated by these findings, we propose STEER, a principled entropy-modulation method that adaptively reweighs tokens based on theoretically-estimated entropy variations. Extensive experiments across six mathematical reasoning and three coding benchmarks demonstrate that STEER effectively mitigates entropy collapse and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models
Yuyan Zhou | Jiarui Yu | Hande Dong | Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Jianqing Zhang | Qiang Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yuyan Zhou | Jiarui Yu | Hande Dong | Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Jianqing Zhang | Qiang Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space.However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference, failing to discover diverse reasoning paths.To bridge the gap, we inject controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs’ exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL).Building on this, we propose **L**atent R**e**asoning **P**olicy **O**ptimization (**LEPO**), a novel framework that applies RL directly to continuous latent representations.Specifically, in rollout stage, LEPO maintains stochasticity to enable diverse trajectory sampling, while in optimization stage, LEPO constructs a unified gradient estimation for both latent representations and discrete tokens.
ReCreate: Reasoning and Creating Domain Agents Driven by Experience
Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Jian Luo | Jianqing Zhang | Yuyan Zhou | Qiang Lin | Can Wang | Hande Dong | Jiawei Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Jian Luo | Jianqing Zhang | Yuyan Zhou | Qiang Lin | Can Wang | Hande Dong | Jiawei Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Model (LLM) agents are reshaping the industrial landscape. However, most practical agents remain human-designed because tasks differ widely, making them labor-intensive to build. This situation poses a central question: can we automatically create and adapt domain agents in the wild? While several recent approaches have sought to automate agent creation, they typically treat agent generation as a black-box procedure and rely solely on final performance metrics to guide the process. Such strategies overlook critical evidence explaining why an agent succeeds or fails, and often require high computational costs. To address these limitations, we propose ReCreate, an experience-driven framework for the automatic creation of domain agents. ReCreate systematically leverages agent interaction histories, which provide rich concrete signals on both the causes of success or failure and the avenues for improvement. Specifically, we introduce an agent-as-optimizer paradigm that effectively learns from experience via three key components: (i) an experience storage and retrieval mechanism for on-demand inspection; (ii) a reasoning–creating synergy pipeline that map execution experience into scaffold edits; and (iii) hierarchical updates that abstract instance-level details into reusable domain patterns. In experiments across diverse domains, ReCreate consistently outperforms human-designed agents and existing automated agent generation methods, even when starting from minimal seed scaffolds.
GAPO: Robust Advantage Estimation for Real-World Code LLMs
Jianqing Zhang | Zhezheng Hao | Wei Xia | Hande Dong | Hong Wang | Chenxing Wei | Yuyan Zhou | Yubin Qi | Qiang Lin | Jian Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jianqing Zhang | Zhezheng Hao | Wei Xia | Hande Dong | Hong Wang | Chenxing Wei | Yuyan Zhou | Yubin Qi | Qiang Lin | Jian Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, where group-relative methods, such as GRPO, are popular due to their critic-free and normalized advantage estimation. However, in real-world code-editing scenarios, reward distributions are often skewed with unpredictable noise, leading to distorted advantage computation and increased rollout outliers. To address this issue, we propose Group Adaptive Policy Optimization (GAPO), which adaptively finds an interval with the highest SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) per prompt and uses the median of that interval as an adaptive Q to replace the group mean in advantage calculation to reduce noise further. This adaptive Q robustly handles rollout noise while remaining plug-and-play and efficient. We evaluate GAPO on nine instruction-tuned LLMs (3B–14B) using a collected large dataset of 51,844 real-world, history-aware code-editing tasks spanning 10 programming languages. GAPO yields up to 4.35 in-domain (ID) and 5.30 out-of-domain (OOD) exact-match improvements over GRPO and its variant DAPO, while achieving lower clipping ratios and higher GPU throughput. Code: https://github.com/TsingZ0/verl-GAPO