James Cheng
2026
SEMA-RAG: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Medical Reasoning
Yongfeng Huang | Ruiying Chen | James Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yongfeng Huang | Ruiying Chen | James Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely employed to mitigate risks such as hallucinations and knowledge obsolescence in medical question answering, yet its predominantly single-round, static retrieval paradigm misaligns with the multi-stage process of clinical reasoning. This compressed workflow induces two structural deficiencies: question-to-query translation often lacks clinically grounded semantic interpretation, and retrieval lacks iterative sufficiency feedback, making it difficult to form reliable evidence chains. We argue that both issues stem from a deeper cause—overloading a single reasoning chain with heterogeneous tasks of interpretation, exploration, and adjudication—and that the remedy is to reconstruct the workflow via task decoupling and dynamic multi-round exploration. To this end, we propose the Self-Evolving Multi-Agent framework **SEMA-RAG**, which assigns these roles to three specialist agents: **Interpreter Agent** for clinical schema interpretation, **Explorer Agent** for sufficiency-driven self-evolving retrieval, and **Arbiter Agent** for evidence adjudication and answer selection. Across five benchmarks and five LLM backbones, SEMA-RAG improves the strongest baseline by **+6.46** accuracy points on average, measured per backbone.
RecMem: Recurrence-based Memory Consolidation for Efficient and Effective Long-Running LLM Agents
Zijie Dai | Shiyuan Deng | Sheng Guan | Yizhou Tian | Xin Yao | Xiao Yan | James Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zijie Dai | Shiyuan Deng | Sheng Guan | Yizhou Tian | Xin Yao | Xiao Yan | James Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Memory systems often organize user-agent interactions as retrievable external memory and are crucial for long-running agents by overcoming the limited context windows of LLMs. However, existing memory systems invoke LLMs to process every incoming interaction for memory extraction, and such an eager memory consolidation scheme leads to substantial token consumption. To tackle this problem, we propose RecMem by rethinking when memory consolidation should be conducted. RecMem stores incoming interactions in a subconscious memory layer and encode them using lightweight embedding models for retrieval. LLMs are only invoked to extract episodic and semantic memory when sustained recurrence are observed for semantically similar interactions. Such recurrence-based consolidation works because these interactions correspond to a semantic cluster with rich information and thus are worth extraction and summarization. To improve accuracy, RecMem also incorporates a semantic refinement mechanism that recovers the fine-grained facts omitted by memory extraction. Experiments show that RecMem reduces the memory construction token cost of three SOTA memory systems by up to 87% while exceeding their accuracy.
2025
Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Knowledge
Haoyu Huang | Yongfeng Huang | Yang Junjie | Zhenyu Pan | Yongqiang Chen | Kaili Ma | Hongzhi Chen | James Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Haoyu Huang | Yongfeng Huang | Yang Junjie | Zhenyu Pan | Yongqiang Chen | Kaili Ma | Hongzhi Chen | James Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) in domain-specific tasks. However, existing RAG methods do not adequately utilize the naturally inherent hierarchical knowledge in human cognition, which limits the capabilities of RAG systems. In this paper, we introduce a new RAG approach, called HiRAG, which utilizes hierarchical knowledge to enhance the semantic understanding and structure capturing capabilities of RAG systems in the indexing and retrieval processes. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that HiRAG achieves significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline methods.