Hongyu Lu
2026
Web Sitemap Knowledge Can Enhance Autonomous Browsing
Yuyao Zhang | Hongyu Lu | Jiajie Jin | Hongjin Qian | Shiyu Li | Zhao Yang | Yutao Zhu | Ji-Rong Wen | Zhicheng Dou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yuyao Zhang | Hongyu Lu | Jiajie Jin | Hongjin Qian | Shiyu Li | Zhao Yang | Yutao Zhu | Ji-Rong Wen | Zhicheng Dou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled web agents to perform interactive tasks on real-world websites. However, existing agents still suffer from limited robustness, efficiency, and task success, largely due to their lack of structural understanding of websites and the absence of browsing priors in pre-trained models. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Web Agent Sitemap Protocol (WASP), an agent-oriented sitemap that integrate structured website knowledge into web agents. WASP adopts a dual-granularity design, providing global site-level structure and local page-level semantic and interaction guidance. We also introduce a framework LightASM for constructing such sitemaps by identifying core pages and generating concise semantic summaries and block-level descriptions. Experiments on real-world browsing benchmarks demonstrate that WASP substantially improves the robustness, efficiency, and effectiveness of LLM-based web agents without extra training.
Beyond Fully Random Masking: Attention-Guided Denoising and Optimization for Diffusion Language Models
Jia Deng | Junyi Li | Xin Zhao | Jinpeng Wang | Hongyu Lu | Ji-Rong Wen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jia Deng | Junyi Li | Xin Zhao | Jinpeng Wang | Hongyu Lu | Ji-Rong Wen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of attention in dLLMs and show that tokens attending more strongly to revealed context exhibit greater generation stability and play a critical role in reasoning. Motivated by these findings, we propose AGDO, an attention-guided denoising and optimization framework that aligns both training and optimization with attention-derived dependencies. AGDO determines the denoising order based on attention structure and emphasizes attention-critical tokens during supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that AGDO consistently improves reasoning performance, outperforming state-of-the-art post-training methods for dLLMs.
Experience-Driven Reflective Co-Evolution of Prompts and Heuristics for Autonomous Algorithm Design
Yihong Liu | Junyi Li | Hongyu Lu | Xin Zhao | Ji-Rong Wen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yihong Liu | Junyi Li | Hongyu Lu | Xin Zhao | Ji-Rong Wen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Combinatorial optimization has long been dominated by manually engineered heuristics, a paradigm requiring substantial expert intuition and implementation overhead. The advent of Large Language Models has disrupted this landscape, enabling the autonomous synthesis and optimization of algorithms. Recent approaches typically iterate on heuristic populations using LLMs as mutators; however, these strategies often suffer from limited exploration, leading to stagnation in local optima. To overcome this, we present the Experience-Driven Reflective Co-Evolution of Prompt and Heuristics (EvoPH) for autonomous algorithm design, a novel framework that couples an island migration model with elite selection to maintain population diversity. Uniquely, EvoPH co-evolves both the guiding prompts and the heuristics themselves, using a feedback loop driven by past experience to refine the search process. We demonstrate EvoPH’s efficacy on the Traveling Salesman and Bin Packing Problems. Our results show that EvoPH achieves superior accuracy compared to baselines, marking a significant step forward in LLM-aided algorithm design.