Malu Zhang
2026
Agent-GWO: Collaborative Agents for Dynamic Prompt Optimization in Large Language Models
Xudong Wang | Chaoning Zhang | Chenghao Li | Shuxu Chen | Qigan Sun | Jiaquan Zhang | Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari | Tae-Ho Kim | Jiwei Wei | Malu Zhang | Guoqing Wang | Yang Yang | Heng Tao Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xudong Wang | Chaoning Zhang | Chenghao Li | Shuxu Chen | Qigan Sun | Jiaquan Zhang | Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari | Tae-Ho Kim | Jiwei Wei | Malu Zhang | Guoqing Wang | Yang Yang | Heng Tao Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, while recent prompting strategies such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have further elevated their performance in handling complex logical problems. Despite these advances, high-quality reasoning remains heavily reliant on manual static prompts and is sensitive to decoding configurations and task distributions, leading to performance fluctuations and limited transferability. Existing automatic prompt optimization methods typically adopt single-agent local search, failing to simultaneously optimize prompts and decoding hyperparameters within a unified framework to achieve stable global improvements. To address this limitation, we propose Agent-GWO, a dynamic prompt optimization framework for complex reasoning. Specifically, we unify prompt templates and decoding hyperparameters as inheritable agent configurations. By leveraging the leader-follower mechanism of the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), we automatically select three leader agents (𝛼, 𝛽, and 𝛿) to guide the collaborative updates of the remaining agents, enabling iterative convergence toward robust optimal reasoning configurations that can be seamlessly integrated for inference. Extensive experiments on multiple mathematical and hybrid reasoning benchmarks across diverse LLM backbones show that Agent-GWO consistently improves accuracy and stability over existing prompt optimization methods.
2025
A Compressive Memory-based Retrieval Approach for Event Argument Extraction
Wanlong Liu | Enqi Zhang | Shaohuan Cheng | Dingyi Zeng | Li Zhou | Chen Zhang | Malu Zhang | Wenyu Chen
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Wanlong Liu | Enqi Zhang | Shaohuan Cheng | Dingyi Zeng | Li Zhou | Chen Zhang | Malu Zhang | Wenyu Chen
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in the Event Argument Extraction (EAE) task. However, existing retrieval-based EAE methods have two main limitations: (1) input length constraints and (2) the gap between the retriever and the inference model. These issues limit the diversity and quality of the retrieved information. In this paper, we propose a Compressive Memory-based Retrieval (CMR) mechanism for EAE, which addresses the two limitations mentioned above. Our compressive memory, designed as a dynamic matrix that effectively caches retrieved information and supports continuous updates, overcomes the limitations of input length. Additionally, after pre-loading all candidate demonstrations into the compressive memory, the model further retrieves and filters relevant information from the memory based on the input query, bridging the gap between the retriever and the inference model. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets (RAMS, WikiEvents, ACE05), significantly outperforming existing retrieval-based EAE methods.
2024
Beyond Single-Event Extraction: Towards Efficient Document-Level Multi-Event Argument Extraction
Wanlong Liu | Li Zhou | DingYi Zeng | Yichen Xiao | Shaohuan Cheng | Chen Zhang | Grandee Lee | Malu Zhang | Wenyu Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Wanlong Liu | Li Zhou | DingYi Zeng | Yichen Xiao | Shaohuan Cheng | Chen Zhang | Grandee Lee | Malu Zhang | Wenyu Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Recent mainstream event argument extraction methods process each event in isolation, resulting in inefficient inference and ignoring the correlations among multiple events. To address these limitations, here we propose a multiple-event argument extraction model DEEIA (Dependency-guided Encoding and Event-specific Information Aggregation), capable of extracting arguments from all events within a document simultaneously. The proposed DEEIA model employs a multi-event prompt mechanism, comprising DE and EIA modules. The DE module is designed to improve the correlation between prompts and their corresponding event contexts, whereas the EIA module provides event-specific information to improve contextual understanding. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on four public datasets (RAMS, WikiEvents, MLEE, and ACE05), while significantly saving the inference time compared to the baselines. Further analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules.