Jiayi Liu
2026
Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding
Yuhang Zhou | Mingrui Zhang | Ke Li | Mingyi Wang | Qiao Liu | Qifei Wang | Jiayi Liu | Fei Liu | Serena Li | Weiwei LI | Mingze Gao | Abhishek Kumar | Xiangjun Fan | Zhuokai Zhao | Lizhu Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuhang Zhou | Mingrui Zhang | Ke Li | Mingyi Wang | Qiao Liu | Qifei Wang | Jiayi Liu | Fei Liu | Serena Li | Weiwei LI | Mingze Gao | Abhishek Kumar | Xiangjun Fan | Zhuokai Zhao | Lizhu Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Understanding and reasoning over tables is a critical capability for many real-world applications. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on this task, but current approaches remain limited. Fine-tuning based methods strengthen language reasoning; yet they are prone to arithmetic errors and hallucination. In contrast, tool-based methods enable precise table manipulation but rely on rigid schemas and lack semantic understanding. These complementary drawbacks highlight the need for approaches that integrate robust reasoning with reliable table processing. In this work, we propose MIXTURE-OF-MINDS, a multi-agent framework that decomposes table reasoning into three specialized roles: planning, coding, and answering. This design enables each agent to focus on a specific aspect of the task while leveraging code execution for precise table manipulation. Building on this workflow, we introduce a self-improvement training framework that employs Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) rollouts to generate pseudo-gold trajectories and optimize agents with reinforcement learning (RL). Extensive experiments show that MIXTURE-OF-MINDS delivers substantial gains, reaching 62.13% on TableBench and surpassing GPT-o3-mini. These results demonstrate the promise of combining structured multi-agent workflows with RL to advance table understanding.
2022
Incorporating Causal Analysis into Diversified and Logical Response Generation
Jiayi Liu | Wei Wei | Zhixuan Chu | Xing Gao | Ji Zhang | Tan Yan | Yulin Kang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Jiayi Liu | Wei Wei | Zhixuan Chu | Xing Gao | Ji Zhang | Tan Yan | Yulin Kang
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Although the Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE) model can generate more diversified responses than the traditional Seq2Seq model, the responses often have low relevance with the input words or are illogical with the question. A causal analysis is carried out to study the reasons behind, and a methodology of searching for the mediators and mitigating the confounding bias in dialogues is provided. Specifically, we propose to predict the mediators to preserve relevant information and auto-regressively incorporate the mediators into generating process. Besides, a dynamic topic graph guided conditional variational auto-encoder (TGG-CVAE) model is utilized to complement the semantic space and reduce the confounding bias in responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model is able to generate both relevant and informative responses, and outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of automatic metrics and human evaluations.