Jinwu Hu
2026
Training-Free Test-Time Contrastive Learning for Large Language Models
Kaiwen Zheng | Kai Zhou | Jinwu Hu | Te Gu | Mingkai Peng | Fei Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Kaiwen Zheng | Kai Zhou | Jinwu Hu | Te Gu | Mingkai Peng | Fei Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities, but their performance often degrades under distribution shift. Existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods rely on gradient-based updates that require white-box access and need substantial overhead, while training-free alternatives are either static or depend on external guidance. In this paper, we propose Training-Free Test-Time Contrastive Learning (**TF-TTCL**), a training-free adaptation framework that enables a frozen LLM to improve online by distilling supervision from its own inference experiences. Specifically, TF-TTCL implements a dynamic "Explore-Reflect-Steer" loop through three core modules: 1) Semantic Query Augmentation first diversifies problem views via multi-agent role-playing to generate different reasoning trajectories; 2) Contrastive Experience Distillation then captures the semantic gap between superior and inferior trajectories, distilling them into explicit textual rules; and 3) Contextual Rule Retrieval finally activates these stored rules during inference to dynamically steer the frozen LLM toward robust reasoning patterns while avoiding observed errors. Extensive experiments on closed-ended reasoning tasks and open-ended evaluation tasks demonstrate that TF-TTCL consistently outperforms strong zero-shot baselines and representative TTA methods under online evaluation. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinSCUTer/TF-TTCL.
2025
Generating Long-form Story Using Dynamic Hierarchical Outlining with Memory-Enhancement
Qianyue Wang | Jinwu Hu | Zhengping Li | Yufeng Wang | Daiyuan Li | Yu Hu | Mingkui Tan
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Qianyue Wang | Jinwu Hu | Zhengping Li | Yufeng Wang | Daiyuan Li | Yu Hu | Mingkui Tan
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Long-form story generation task aims to produce coherent and sufficiently lengthy text, essential for applications such as novel writingand interactive storytelling. However, existing methods, including LLMs, rely on rigid outlines or lack macro-level planning, making it difficult to achieve both contextual consistency and coherent plot development in long-form story generation. To address this issues, we propose Dynamic Hierarchical Outlining with Memory-Enhancement long-form story generation method, named DOME, to generate the long-form story with coherent content and plot. Specifically, the Dynamic Hierarchical Outline(DHO) mechanism incorporates the novel writing theory into outline planning and fuses the plan and writing stages together, improving the coherence of the plot by ensuring the plot completeness and adapting to the uncertainty during story generation. A Memory-Enhancement Module (MEM) based on temporal knowledge graphs is introduced to store and access the generated content, reducing contextual conflicts and improving story coherence. Finally, we propose a Temporal Conflict Analyzer leveraging temporal knowledge graphs to automatically evaluate the contextual consistency of long-form story. Experiments demonstrate that DOME significantly improves the fluency, coherence, and overall quality of generated long stories compared to state-of-the-art methods.