Junran Ding


2026

The autonomous synthesis of deep research reports represents a critical frontier for Large Language Models (LLMs), demanding sophisticated information orchestration and non-linear narrative logic. Current approaches rely on rigid predefined linear workflows, which cause error accumulation, preclude global restructuring from subsequent insights, and ultimately limit in-depth multimodal fusion and report quality. We propose CogGen, a Cognitively inspired recursive framework for deep research report Generation. Leveraging a Hierarchical Recursive Architecture to simulate cognitive writing, CogGen enables flexible planning and global restructuring. To extend this recursivity to multimodal content, we introduce Abstract Visual Representation (AVR): a concise intent-driven language that iteratively refines visual-text layouts without pixel-level regeneration overhead. We further present CLEF, a Cognitive Load Evaluation Framework, and curate a new benchmark from Our World in Data (OWID). Extensive experiments show CogGen achieves state-of-the-art results among open-source systems, generating reports comparable to professional analysts’ outputs and surpassing Gemini Deep Research. Our code and dataset will be publicly available upon publication.

2024

Next-token prediction serves as the dominant component in current neural language models.During the training phase, the model employs teacher forcing, which predicts tokens based on all preceding ground truth tokens.However, this approach has been found to create shortcuts, utilizing the revealed prefix to spuriously fit future tokens, potentially compromising the accuracy of the next-token predictor.In this paper, we introduce Semformer, a novel method of training a Transformer language model that explicitly models the semantic planning of response.Specifically, we incorporate a sequence of planning tokens into the prefix, guiding the planning token representations to predict the latent semantic representations of the response, which are induced by an autoencoder.In a minimal planning task (i.e., graph path-finding), our model exhibits near-perfect performance and effectively mitigates shortcut learning, a feat that standard training methods and baseline models have been unable to accomplish.Furthermore, we pretrain Semformer from scratch with 125M parameters, demonstrating its efficacy through measures of perplexity, in-context learning, and fine-tuning on summarization tasks.