Ruocheng Guo
2026
RIMRULE: Improving Tool-Using Language Agents via MDL-Guided Rule Learning
Xiang Gao | Yuguang Yao | Qi Zhang | Kaiwen Dong | Avinash Baidya | Ruocheng Guo | Hilaf Hasson | Kamalika Das
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xiang Gao | Yuguang Yao | Qi Zhang | Kaiwen Dong | Avinash Baidya | Ruocheng Guo | Hilaf Hasson | Kamalika Das
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to use tools reliably in domain-specific settings, where APIs may be idiosyncratic, under-documented, or tailored to private workflows. This highlights the need for effective adaptation to task-specific tools. We propose RIMRULE, a neuro-symbolic approach for LLM adaptation based on dynamic rule injection. Compact, interpretable rules are distilled from failure traces and injected into the prompt during inference to improve task performance. These rules are proposed by the LLM itself and consolidated using a Minimum Description Length (MDL) objective that favors generality and conciseness. Each rule is stored in both natural language and a structured symbolic form, supporting efficient retrieval at inference time. Experiments on tool-use benchmarks show that this approach improves accuracy on both seen and unseen tools without modifying LLM weights. It outperforms prompting-based adaptation methods and complements finetuning, offering an interpretable layer of inference-time generalization. Moreover, rules learned from one LLM can be reused to improve others, including long reasoning LLMs, highlighting the portability of symbolic knowledge across architectures.
2025
Stepwise Reasoning Disruption Attack of LLMs
Jingyu Peng | Maolin Wang | Xiangyu Zhao | Kai Zhang | Wanyu Wang | Pengyue Jia | Qidong Liu | Ruocheng Guo | Qi Liu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jingyu Peng | Maolin Wang | Xiangyu Zhao | Kai Zhang | Wanyu Wang | Pengyue Jia | Qidong Liu | Ruocheng Guo | Qi Liu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in complex reasoning tasks, but their safety and robustness in reasoning processes remain unexplored, particularly in third-party platforms that facilitate user interactions via APIs. Existing attacks on LLM reasoning are constrained by specific settings or lack of imperceptibility, limiting their feasibility and generalizability. To address these challenges, we propose the Stepwise rEasoning Error Disruption (SEED) attack, which subtly injects errors into prior reasoning steps to mislead the model into producing incorrect subsequent reasoning and final answers. Unlike previous methods, SEED is compatible with zero-shot and few-shot settings, maintains the natural reasoning flow, and ensures covert execution without modifying the instruction. Extensive experiments on four datasets across four different models demonstrate SEED’s effectiveness, revealing the vulnerabilities of LLMs to disruptions in reasoning processes. These findings underscore the need for greater attention to the robustness of LLM reasoning to ensure safety in practical applications. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/SEED-Attack
2023
Noise-Robust Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Language Models via External Guidance
Song Wang | Zhen Tan | Ruocheng Guo | Jundong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Song Wang | Zhen Tan | Ruocheng Guo | Jundong Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Adopting a two-stage paradigm of pretraining followed by fine-tuning, Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved substantial advancements in the field of natural language processing. However, in real-world scenarios, data labels are often noisy due to the complex annotation process, making it essential to develop strategies for fine-tuning PLMs with such noisy labels. To this end, we introduce an innovative approach for fine-tuning PLMs using noisy labels, which incorporates the guidance of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. This guidance assists in accurately distinguishing between clean and noisy samples and provides supplementary information beyond the noisy labels, thereby boosting the learning process during fine-tuning PLMs. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world noisy datasets further demonstrate the superior advantages of our framework over the state-of-the-art baselines.