Liangwei Chen


2026

Code retrieval is vital to modern software engineering as it boosts reuse and speeds up debugging. However, current benchmarks primarily emphasize functional relevance while neglecting code quality. To address this gap, we introduce CoQuIR, the first large-scale, multilingual benchmark specifically designed to evaluate quality-aware code retrieval across four critical dimensions: correctness, efficiency, security, and maintainability. CoQuIR includes fine-grained quality annotations over 42,725 queries and 134,907 code snippets in 11 programming languages. Evaluating 23 retrievers (both open-source and proprietary) shows that even state-of-the-art models often fail to separate buggy or insecure code from robust counterparts. We further investigate methods for explicitly training retrievers to recognize code quality, demonstrating that quality-aware metrics can be improved without loss of semantic relevance; downstream code generation benefits from these gains. CoQuIR underscores the importance of embedding quality signals into retrieval systems as a crucial component for more trustworthy developer tools.

2020

Natural language generation (NLG) is an essential component of task-oriented dialog systems. Despite the recent success of neural approaches for NLG, they are typically developed in an offline manner for particular domains. To better fit real-life applications where new data come in a stream, we study NLG in a “continual learning” setting to expand its knowledge to new domains or functionalities incrementally. The major challenge towards this goal is catastrophic forgetting, meaning that a continually trained model tends to forget the knowledge it has learned before. To this end, we propose a method called ARPER (Adaptively Regularized Prioritized Exemplar Replay) by replaying prioritized historical exemplars, together with an adaptive regularization technique based on Elastic Weight Consolidation. Extensive experiments to continually learn new domains and intents are conducted on MultiWoZ-2.0 to benchmark ARPER with a wide range of techniques. Empirical results demonstrate that ARPER significantly outperforms other methods by effectively mitigating the detrimental catastrophic forgetting issue.