Peiying Yu
2026
UniCreative: Unifying Long-form Logic and Short-form Sparkle via Reference-Free Reinforcement Learning
Xiaolong Wei | Zerun Zhu | Simin Niu | Xingyu Zhang | Peiying Yu | Changxuan Xiao | Yuchen Li | Jicheng Yang | Zhejun Zhao | Chong Meng | Long Xia | Daiting Shi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xiaolong Wei | Zerun Zhu | Simin Niu | Xingyu Zhang | Peiying Yu | Changxuan Xiao | Yuchen Li | Jicheng Yang | Zhejun Zhao | Chong Meng | Long Xia | Daiting Shi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
A fundamental challenge in creative writing lies in reconciling the inherent tension between maintaining global coherence in long-form narratives and preserving local expressiveness in short-form texts. While long-context generation necessitates explicit macroscopic planning, short-form creativity often demands spontaneous, constraint-free expression. Existing alignment paradigms, however, typically employ static reward signals and rely heavily on high-quality supervised data, which is costly and difficult to scale. To address this, we propose UniCreative, a unified reference-free reinforcement learning framework. We first introduce AC-GenRM, an adaptive constraint-aware reward model that dynamically synthesizes query-specific criteria to provide fine-grained preference judgments. Leveraging these signals, we propose ACPO, a policy optimization algorithm that aligns models with human preferences across both content quality and structural paradigms without supervised fine-tuning and ground-truth references. Empirical results demonstrate that AC-GenRM aligns closely with expert evaluations, while ACPO significantly enhances performance across diverse writing tasks. Crucially, our analysis reveals an emergent meta-cognitive ability: the model learns to autonomously differentiate between tasks requiring rigorous planning and those favoring direct generation, validating the effectiveness of our direct alignment approach.
2025
Table-Critic: A Multi-Agent Framework for Collaborative Criticism and Refinement in Table Reasoning
Peiying Yu | Guoxin Chen | Jingjing Wang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Peiying Yu | Guoxin Chen | Jingjing Wang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Despite the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in various reasoning tasks, they still struggle with table reasoning tasks, particularly in maintaining consistency throughout multi-step reasoning processes. While existing approaches have explored various decomposition strategies, they often lack effective mechanisms to identify and correct errors in intermediate reasoning steps, leading to cascading error propagation. To address these issues, we propose Table-Critic, a novel multi-agent framework that facilitates collaborative criticism and iterative refinement of the reasoning process until convergence to correct solutions. Our framework consists of four specialized agents: a Judge for error identification, a Critic for comprehensive critiques, a Refiner for process improvement, and a Curator for pattern distillation. To effectively deal with diverse and unpredictable error types, we introduce a self-evolving template tree that systematically accumulates critique knowledge through experience-driven learning and guides future reflections. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that Table-Critic achieves substantial improvements over existing methods, achieving superior accuracy and error correction rates while maintaining computational efficiency and lower solution degradation rate.