Junyang Ren
2026
Table-as-Search: Agentic Information Seeking is Table Completion
Tian Lan | Felix Henry | Bin Zhu | Qianghuai Jia | Junyang Ren | Qihang PU | Haijun Li | Longyue Wang | Zhao Xu | Weihua Luo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Tian Lan | Felix Henry | Bin Zhu | Qianghuai Jia | Junyang Ren | Qihang PU | Haijun Li | Longyue Wang | Zhao Xu | Weihua Luo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Current Information Seeking (InfoSeeking) agents struggle to maintain focus and coherence during long-horizon exploration, as tracking search states, including planning procedure and massive search results, within one plain-text context is inherently fragile.To address this, we introduce Table-as-Search (TaS), a structured planning framework that reformulates the InfoSeeking task as a Table Completion task.TaS maps each query into a structured table schema maintained in an external database, where rows represent search candidates and columns denote constraints or required information.This table precisely manages the search states: filled cells strictly record the history and search results, while empty cells serve as an explicit search plan.Crucially, TaS unifies three distinct InfoSeeking tasks: Deep Search, Wide Search, and the challenging DeepWide Search.Extensive experiments demonstrate that TaS significantly outperforms numerous state-of-the-art baselines across three kinds of benchmarks, including multi-agent framework and commercial systems.Furthermore, our analysis validates the TaS’s superior robustness in long-horizon InfoSeeking, alongside its efficiency, scalability and flexibility.Code and datasets are publicly released at https://github.com/AIDC-AI/Marco-Search-Agent.
2024
Timeline-based Sentence Decomposition with In Context Learning for Temporal Fact Extraction
Jianhao Chen | Haoyuan Ouyang | Junyang Ren | Wentao Ding | Wei Hu | Yuzhong Qu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jianhao Chen | Haoyuan Ouyang | Junyang Ren | Wentao Ding | Wei Hu | Yuzhong Qu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Facts extraction is pivotal for constructing knowledge graphs. Recently, the increasing demand for temporal facts in downstream tasks has led to the emergence of the task of temporal fact extraction. In this paper, we specifically address the extraction of temporal facts from natural language text. Previous studies fail to handle the challenge of establishing time-to-fact correspondences in complex sentences. To overcome this hurdle, we propose a timeline-based sentence decomposition strategy using large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning, ensuring a fine-grained understanding of the timeline associated with various facts. In addition, we evaluate the performance of LLMs for direct temporal fact extraction and get unsatisfactory results. To this end, we introduce TSDRE, a method that incorporates the decomposition capabilities of LLMs into the traditional fine-tuning of smaller pre-trained language models (PLMs). To support the evaluation, we construct ComplexTRED, a complex temporal fact extraction dataset. Our experiments show that TSDRE achieves state-of-the-art results on both HyperRED-Temporal and ComplexTRED datasets.