Powei Chang
2026
What Makes an Ideal Quote? Recommending “Unexpected yet Rational” Quotations via Novelty
Powei Chang | Jin Xiao | Guanglei Yue | Qianyu He | Yanghua Xiao | Deqing Yang | Jiaqing Liang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Powei Chang | Jin Xiao | Guanglei Yue | Qianyu He | Yanghua Xiao | Deqing Yang | Jiaqing Liang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Quotation recommendation enriches writing by suggesting quotations that fit a given context, but prior systems largely focus on topical relevance and overlook what makes quotes memorable. Based on a user study, we find that preferred quotations are often unexpected yet rational, motivating the goal of selecting quotes that are contextually novel while semantically coherent. We propose NovelQR, which (1) uses a generative label agent to map quotations and contexts into multi-dimensional deep-meaning labels for label-enhanced retrieval, and (2) reranks candidates with a token-level novelty estimator that mitigates auto-regressive continuation bias. Experiments on bilingual datasets across diverse domains show that NovelQR is preferred by human judges and improves overall recommendation quality over strong baselines, while achieving competitive novelty estimation.
Instructions are all you need: Self-supervised Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following
Qingyu Ren | Qianyu He | Powei Chang | Jie Zeng | Zeye Sun | Fei Yu | Jiaqing Liang | Yanghua Xiao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Qingyu Ren | Qianyu He | Powei Chang | Jie Zeng | Zeye Sun | Fei Yu | Jiaqing Liang | Yanghua Xiao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Language models often struggle to follow multi-constraint instructions that are crucial for real-world applications. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches suffer from dependency on external supervision and sparse reward signals from multi-constraint tasks. We propose a label-free self-supervised RL framework that eliminates dependency on external supervision by deriving reward signals directly from instructions and generating pseudo-labels for reward model training. Our approach introduces constraint decomposition strategies and efficient constraint-wise binary classification to address sparse reward challenges while maintaining computational efficiency. Experiments show that our approach generalizes well, achieving strong improvements across 3 in-domain and 5 out-of-domain datasets, including challenging agentic and multi-turn instruction following. We will open-source our code and data to facilitate future research.
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents
Zhucong Li | Powei Chang | Jin Xiao | Zhijian Zhou | Qianyu He | Jiaqing Liang | Fenglei Cao | Xu Yinghui | Yuan Qi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zhucong Li | Powei Chang | Jin Xiao | Zhijian Zhou | Qianyu He | Jiaqing Liang | Fenglei Cao | Xu Yinghui | Yuan Qi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Although LLM-based agents are proven to master tool orchestration in scientific fields, particularly chemistry, their single-task performance remains limited by underlying tool constraints. To this end, we propose tool amplification, a novel paradigm that enhances the collective capabilities of specialized tools through optimized, dynamic coordination within individual tasks. Instantiating this paradigm, we introduce ChemAmp, a computationally lightweight framework that dynamically treats chemistry tools (e.g., UniMol2, Chemformer) as composable building-block agents. It constructs task-specialized super-agents that transcend atomic tool constraints with limited data (≤10 samples). Our evaluations across four core chemistry tasks molecular design, molecule captioning, reaction prediction, and property prediction demonstrate that ChemAmp outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration. Critically, this bottom-up construction strategy enables 94% inference token cost reductions versus vanilla multi-agent systems.