Pengyu Cheng
Other people with similar names: Pengyu Cheng
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2026
MARCH: Multi-Agent Reinforced Check for Hallucination
Zhuo Li | Yupeng Zhang | Pengyu Cheng | Jiajun Song | Mengyu Zhou | Hao Li | Shujie Hu | Yu Qin | Erchao.zec | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjunjiang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhuo Li | Yupeng Zhang | Pengyu Cheng | Jiajun Song | Mengyu Zhou | Hao Li | Shujie Hu | Yu Qin | Erchao.zec | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjunjiang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Hallucination remains a critical bottleneck for large language models (LLMs), undermining their reliability in real-world applications, especially in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. While existing hallucination detection methods employ LLM-as-a-judge to verify LLM outputs against retrieved evidence, they suffer from inherent *confirmation bias*, where the verifier inadvertently reproduces the errors of the original generation. To address this, we introduce **M**ulti-**A**gent **R**einforced self-**C**heck for **H**allucination (MARCH), a framework that enforces rigorous factual alignment by leveraging deliberate *information asymmetry*. MARCH orchestrates a collaborative pipeline of three specialized agents: a Solver, a Proposer, and a Checker. The Solver generates an initial RAG response, which the Proposer decomposes into claim-level verifiable atomic propositions. Crucially, the Checker validates these propositions against retrieved evidence in isolation, deprived of the Solver’s original output. This well-crafted information asymmetry scheme breaks the cycle of self-confirmation bias. By training this pipeline with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), we enable the agents to co-evolve and optimize factual adherence. Extensive experiments across hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that MARCH substantially reduces hallucination rates. Notably, an 8B-parameter LLM equipped with MARCH achieves performance competitive with powerful closed-source models. MARCH paves a scalable path for factual self-improvement of LLMs through co-evolution. The code is at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/MARCH.
2025
Atoxia: Red-teaming Large Language Models with Target Toxic Answers
Yuhao Du | Zhuo Li | Pengyu Cheng | Xiang Wan | Anningzhe Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Yuhao Du | Zhuo Li | Pengyu Cheng | Xiang Wan | Anningzhe Gao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Despite the substantial advancements in artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) remain being challenged by generation safety. With adversarial jailbreaking prompts, one can effortlessly induce LLMs to output harmful content, causing unexpected negative social impacts. This vulnerability highlights the necessity for robust LLM red-teaming strategies to identify and mitigate such risks before large-scale application. To detect specific types of risks, we propose a novel red-teaming method that **A**ttacks LLMs with **T**arget **Toxi**c **A**nswers (**Atoxia**). Given a particular harmful answer, Atoxia generates a corresponding user query and a misleading answer opening to examine the internal defects of a given LLM. The proposed attacker is trained within a reinforcement learning scheme with the LLM outputting probability of the target answer as the reward. We verify the effectiveness of our method on various red-teaming benchmarks, such as AdvBench and HH-Harmless. The empirical results demonstrate that Atoxia can successfully detect safety risks in not only open-source models but also state-of-the-art black-box models such as GPT-4o.
2024
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game
Pengyu Cheng | Yifan Yang | Jian Li | Yong Dai | Tianhao Hu | Peixin Cao | Nan Du | Xiaolong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Pengyu Cheng | Yifan Yang | Jian Li | Yong Dai | Tianhao Hu | Peixin Cao | Nan Du | Xiaolong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Human preference alignment is essential to improve the interaction quality of large language models (LLMs). Existing alignment methods depend on manually annotated preference data to guide the LLM optimization directions. However, continuously updating LLMs for alignment raises a distribution gap between model-generated samples and human-annotated responses, hindering training effectiveness. To mitigate this issue, previous methods require additional preference annotation on newly generated samples to adapt to the shifted distribution, which consumes a large amount of annotation resources. Targeting more efficient human preference optimization, we propose an Adversarial Preference Optimization (APO) framework, in which the LLM and the reward model update alternatively via a min-max game. Through adversarial training, the reward model can adapt to the shifted generation distribution of the LLM without any additional annotation. With comprehensive experiments, we find the proposed adversarial training framework further enhances existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness. The code is at https://github.com/Linear95/APO.
On Diversified Preferences of Large Language Model Alignment
Dun Zeng | Yong Dai | Pengyu Cheng | Longyue Wang | Tianhao Hu | Wanshun Chen | Nan Du | Zenglin Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Dun Zeng | Yong Dai | Pengyu Cheng | Longyue Wang | Tianhao Hu | Wanshun Chen | Nan Du | Zenglin Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has been recognized as the key to improving LLMs’ interaction quality. However, in this pluralistic world, human preferences can be diversified due to annotators’ different tastes, which hinders the effectiveness of LLM alignment methods. This paper presents the first quantitative analysis of the experimental scaling law for reward models with varying sizes, from 1.3 billion to 7 billion parameters, trained with human feedback exhibiting diverse preferences. Our analysis reveals that the impact of diversified human preferences depends on both model size and data size. Larger models with sufficient capacity mitigate the negative effects of diverse preferences, while smaller models struggle to accommodate them. To mitigate the impact of diverse preferences, we introduce a new metric, Expected Calibration Error (ECE), to evaluate RMs and show their obvious positive correlation with the alignment performance of LLMs. Furthermore, we propose a Multi-Objective Reward learning method (MORE) to enhance the calibration performance of RMs on shared preferences. Through experiments on four models and five human preference datasets, we find the calibration error can be adopted as a key metric for evaluating RMs and MORE can obtain superior alignment performance.