Wang Zhenyu
2026
DKME: Rethinking Coupled Knowledge Memory for Lifelong Model Editing of Large Language Models
Guanyu Zheng | Wang Zhenyu | He Tingting | Xv Wang | Haochang Wang | Yaokai Huang | Tiejun Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Guanyu Zheng | Wang Zhenyu | He Tingting | Xv Wang | Haochang Wang | Yaokai Huang | Tiejun Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Lifelong knowledge editing aims to inject a stream of factual updates into large language models (LLMs) without retraining, yet existing memory-based editors often suffer from catastrophic forgetting as edits accumulate. We argue that a key factor is the coupled knowledge memory mechanism, where addressing (routing) and storage (writing via memory-module updates) are entangled. This entanglement makes it difficult to confine the effects of each edit to its intended scope, particularly in multi-domain and associated-fact editing streams, where updates either span diverse semantic domains or repeatedly modify related attributes of the same subject. Consequently, updating memory for one edit inadvertently alters the routing and stored representations of previously injected edits, leading to catastrophic forgetting as edits accumulate. We propose **DKME**, which decouples addressing from storage via two stages: decoupled semantic addressing learns a fact-aware manifold for scope-aware routing, and partitioned memory storage localizes edits to memory partitions identified by unsupervised clustering in the embedding space. Experiments on three benchmarks, including HalluEditBench, CKnowEdit, and WikiDatacounterfact, demonstrate that DKME consistently achieves a more favorable trade-off between editing success and locality compared to baselines, while maintaining more stable performance as the edit scale increases.
Causal-ESC: Reliable Policy Learning for Emotional Support Conversation via Causal Inference
Xv Wang | Wang Zhenyu | Guanyu Zheng | Rui Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xv Wang | Wang Zhenyu | Guanyu Zheng | Rui Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the fluency of Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems, current research predominantly focuses on engineering increasingly complex architectures—from intricate reasoning chains to multi-agent collaborations. While these advancements (e.g., CoT) offer semantic traces of reasoning, they remain mechanistically opaque, obscuring the fundamental causal mechanisms between dialogue features and effective empathic strategies, leading to poor interpretability and susceptibility to distribution shifts in offline learning. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework Causal-ESC. Departing from conventional paradigms that directly utilize raw dialogue history as input, our approach introduces Doubly Robust (DR) learning to explicitly model the causal effect of utterance features on strategy selection, effectively mitigating the biases and counterfactual unobservability inherent in offline datasets. We further integrate an LLM-based stylized rewriting mechanism to translate these rigorously learned causal strategies into natural, context-consistent responses. Comprehensive experiments, supported by statistical verification (e.g., Outcome R2) and human-like evaluation, demonstrate that our framework not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in empathy and helpfulness but also provides a theoretically grounded, interpretable solution to the mechanistic interpretability dilemma in affective computing.
AROMA: Augmented Reasoning Over a Multimodal Architecture for Virtual Cell Genetic Perturbation Modeling
Wang Zhenyu | Geyan Ye | Wei Liu | Man Tat Alexander Ng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Wang Zhenyu | Geyan Ye | Wei Liu | Man Tat Alexander Ng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Virtual cell modeling predicts molecular state changes under genetic perturbations in silico, which is essential for biological mechanism studies. However, existing approaches suffer from unconstrained reasoning, uninterpretable predictions, and retrieval signals that are weakly aligned with regulatory topology. To address these limitations, we propose AROMA, an Augmented Reasoning Over a Multimodal Architecture for virtual cell genetic perturbation modeling. AROMA integrates textual evidence, graph-topology information, and protein sequence features to model perturbation-target dependencies, and is trained with a two-stage optimization strategy to yield predictions that are both accurate and interpretable. We also construct two knowledge graphs and a perturbation reasoning dataset, PerturbReason, containing more than 498k samples, as reusable resources for the virtual cell domain. Experiments show that AROMA outperforms existing methods across multiple cell lines, and remains robust under zero-shot evaluation on an unseen cell line, as well as in knowledge-sparse, long-tail scenarios. Overall, AROMA demonstrates that combining knowledge-driven multimodal modeling with evidence retrieval provides a promising pathway toward more reliable and interpretable virtual cell perturbation prediction. Model weights are available at https://huggingface.co/blazerye/AROMA. Code is available at https://github.com/blazerye/AROMA.
2022
A Versatile Adaptive Curriculum Learning Framework for Task-oriented Dialogue Policy Learning
Yang Zhao | Hua Qin | Wang Zhenyu | Changxi Zhu | Shihan Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Yang Zhao | Hua Qin | Wang Zhenyu | Changxi Zhu | Shihan Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Training a deep reinforcement learning-based dialogue policy with brute-force random sampling is costly. A new training paradigm was proposed to improve learning performance and efficiency by combining curriculum learning. However, attempts in the field of dialogue policy are very limited due to the lack of reliable evaluation of difficulty scores of dialogue tasks and the high sensitivity to the mode of progression through dialogue tasks. In this paper, we present a novel versatile adaptive curriculum learning (VACL) framework, which presents a substantial step toward applying automatic curriculum learning on dialogue policy tasks. It supports evaluating the difficulty of dialogue tasks only using the learning experiences of dialogue policy and skip-level selection according to their learning needs to maximize the learning efficiency. Moreover, an attractive feature of VACL is the construction of a generic, elastic global curriculum while training a good dialogue policy that could guide different dialogue policy learning without extra effort on re-training. The superiority and versatility of VACL are validated on three public dialogue datasets.