Runze Wang
2026
Learning to Evolve: A Self-Improving Framework for Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Parameter Graph Optimization
Shan He | Runze Wang | Zhuoyun Du | Huiyu Bai | Zouying Cao | Yu Cheng | Bo Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Shan He | Runze Wang | Zhuoyun Du | Huiyu Bai | Zouying Cao | Yu Cheng | Bo Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Designing and optimizing multi-agent systems (MAS) is a complex, labor-intensive process of "Agent Engineering." Existing automatic optimization methods, primarily focused on flat prompt tuning, lack the structural awareness to debug the intricate web of interactions in MAS. More critically, these optimizers are static; they do not learn from experience to improve their own optimization strategies. To address these gaps, we introduce Textual Parameter Graph Optimization (TPGO), a framework that enables a multi-agent system to learn to evolve. TPGO first models the MAS as a Textual Parameter Graph (TPG), where agents, tools, and workflows are modular, optimizable nodes. To guide evolution, we derive "textual gradients," structured natural language feedback from execution traces, to pinpoint failures and suggest granular modifications. The core of our framework is Group Relative Agent Optimization (GRAO), a novel meta-learning strategy that learns from historical optimization experiences. By analyzing past successes and failures, GRAO becomes progressively better at proposing effective updates, allowing the system to learn how to optimize itself. Extensive experiments on complex benchmarks like GAIA and MCP-Universe show that TPGO significantly enhances the performance of state-of-the-art agent frameworks, achieving higher success rates through automated, self-improving optimization.
Enabling Agents to Communicate Entirely in Latent Space
Zhuoyun Du | Runze Wang | Huiyu Bai | Zouying Cao | Xiaoyong Zhu | Yu Cheng | Bo Zheng | Wei Chen | Haochao Ying
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhuoyun Du | Runze Wang | Huiyu Bai | Zouying Cao | Xiaoyong Zhu | Yu Cheng | Bo Zheng | Wei Chen | Haochao Ying
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While natural language is the de facto communication medium for LLM-based agents, it presents a fundamental constraint. The process of downsampling rich, internal latent states into discrete tokens inherently limits the depth and nuance of information that can be transmitted, thereby hindering collaborative problem-solving. Inspired by telepathy, which bypasses symbolic language in communication, we propose Interlat (Inter-agent Latent Space Communication), a paradigm that leverages the continuous last hidden states of an LLM as a representation of its thought for direct communication (termed "latent communication"). An additional learned compression process further compresses latent communication via latent space reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that Interlat outperforms both fine-tuned chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting and single-agent baselines, even across heterogeneous models, promoting more exploratory behavior and enabling genuine utilization of latent information. Further compression not only substantially accelerates inference by up to 24× but also maintains competitive performance through an efficient information-preserving mechanism. We position this work as a feasibility study of entirely latent space inter-agent communication, and our results highlight its potential, offering valuable insights for future research.
2025
PGPO: Enhancing Agent Reasoning via Pseudocode-style Planning Guided Preference Optimization
Zouying Cao | Runze Wang | Yifei Yang | Xinbei Ma | Xiaoyong Zhu | Bo Zheng | Hai Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Zouying Cao | Runze Wang | Yifei Yang | Xinbei Ma | Xiaoyong Zhu | Bo Zheng | Hai Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in handling complex interactive problems. Existing LLM agents mainly generate natural language plans to guide reasoning, which is verbose and inefficient. NL plans are also tailored to specific tasks and restrict agents’ ability to generalize across similar tasks. To this end, we explore pseudocode-style plans (P-code Plan) to capture the structural logic of reasoning. We find that P-code Plan empowers LLM agents with stronger generalization ability and more efficiency. Inspired by this finding, we propose a pseudocode-style ̲Planning ̲Guided ̲Preference ̲Optimization method called PGPO for effective agent learning. With two planning-oriented rewards, PGPO further enhances LLM agents’ ability to generate high-quality P-code Plans and subsequent reasoning. Experiments show that PGPO achieves superior performance on representative agent benchmarks and outperforms the current leading baselines. Analyses reveal the advantage of PGPO in reducing action errors and omissions during reasoning.
2022
McQueen: a Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Query Rewrite
Yifei Yuan | Chen Shi | Runze Wang | Liyi Chen | Feijun Jiang | Yuan You | Wai Lam
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yifei Yuan | Chen Shi | Runze Wang | Liyi Chen | Feijun Jiang | Yuan You | Wai Lam
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The task of query rewrite aims to convert an in-context query to its fully-specified version where ellipsis and coreference are completed and referred-back according to the history context. Although much progress has been made, less efforts have been paid to real scenario conversations that involve drawing information from more than one modalities. In this paper, we propose the task of multimodal conversational query rewrite (McQR), which performs query rewrite under the multimodal visual conversation setting. We collect a large-scale dataset named McQueen based on manual annotation, which contains 15k visual conversations and over 80k queries where each one is associated with a fully-specified rewrite version. In addition, for entities appearing in the rewrite, we provide the corresponding image box annotation. We then use the McQueen dataset to benchmark a state-of-the-art method for effectively tackling the McQR task, which is based on a multimodal pre-trained model with pointer generator. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on this task.
2020
Joint Intent Detection and Entity Linking on Spatial Domain Queries
Lei Zhang | Runze Wang | Jingbo Zhou | Jingsong Yu | Zhenhua Ling | Hui Xiong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Lei Zhang | Runze Wang | Jingbo Zhou | Jingsong Yu | Zhenhua Ling | Hui Xiong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Continuous efforts have been devoted to language understanding (LU) for conversational queries with the fast and wide-spread popularity of voice assistants. In this paper, we first study the LU problem in the spatial domain, which is a critical problem for providing location-based services by voice assistants but is without in-depth investigation in existing studies. Spatial domain queries have several unique properties making them be more challenging for language understanding than common conversational queries, including lexical-similar but diverse intents and highly ambiguous words. Thus, a special tailored LU framework for spatial domain queries is necessary. To the end, a dataset was extracted and annotated based on the real-life queries from a voice assistant service. We then proposed a new multi-task framework that jointly learns the intent detection and entity linking tasks on the with invented hierarchical intent detection method and triple-scoring mechanism for entity linking. A specially designed spatial GCN is also utilized to model spatial context information among entities. We have conducted extensive experimental evaluations with state-of-the-art entity linking and intent detection methods, which demonstrated that can outperform all baselines with a significant margin.