Meicong Zhang
2026
MoRI: Learning Motivation-Grounded Reasoning for Scientific Ideation in Large Language Models
Chenyang Gu | Jiahao Cheng | Meicong Zhang | Pujun Zheng | Jinquan Zheng | Guoxiu He
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Chenyang Gu | Jiahao Cheng | Meicong Zhang | Pujun Zheng | Jinquan Zheng | Guoxiu He
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Scientific ideation aims to propose novel solutions within a given scientific context. Existing LLM-based agentic approaches emulate human research workflows, yet inadequately model scientific reasoning, resulting in surface-level conceptual recombinations that lack technical depth and scientific grounding. To address this issue, we propose MoRI (Motivation-grounded Reasoning for Scientific Ideation), a framework that enables LLMs to explicitly learn the reasoning process from research motivations to methodologies. The base LLM is initialized via supervised fine-tuning to generate a research motivation from a given context, and is subsequently trained under a composite reinforcement learning reward that approximates scientific rigor: (1) entropy-aware information gain encourages the model to uncover and elaborate high-complexity technical details grounded in ground-truth methodologies, and (2) contrastive semantic gain constrains the reasoning trajectory to remain conceptually aligned with scientifically valid solutions. Empirical results show that MoRI consistently outperforms strong commercial LLMs and complex agentic baselines across multiple dimensions, including novelty, technical rigor, and feasibility. The code is available on GitHub.
2025
Dynamic Chunking and Selection for Reading Comprehension of Ultra-Long Context in Large Language Models
Boheng Sheng | Jiacheng Yao | Meicong Zhang | Guoxiu He
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Boheng Sheng | Jiacheng Yao | Meicong Zhang | Guoxiu He
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to accurately read and comprehend extremely long texts. Current methods for improvement typically rely on splitting long contexts into fixed-length chunks. However, fixed truncation risks separating semantically relevant content, leading to ambiguity and compromising accurate understanding. To overcome this limitation, we propose a straightforward approach for dynamically separating and selecting chunks of long context, facilitating a more streamlined input for LLMs. In particular, we compute semantic similarities between adjacent sentences, using lower similarities to adaptively divide long contexts into variable-length chunks. We further train a question-aware classifier to select sensitive chunks that are critical for answering specific questions. Experimental results on both single-hop and multi-hop question-answering benchmarks show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms strong baselines. Notably, it maintains robustness across a wide range of input lengths, handling sequences of up to 256k tokens. Our datasets and code are available at the following link: https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/DCS