Weipeng Zhang
2026
PaTaRM: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling
Ai Jian | Jingqing Ruan | Xing Ma | Dailin Li | Weipeng Zhang | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Ai Jian | Jingqing Ruan | Xing Ma | Dailin Li | Weipeng Zhang | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reward models (RMs) are central to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), providing the critical supervision signals that align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences.Generative reward models (GRMs) provide greater interpretability than traditional scalar RMs, but they come with a critical trade-off: pairwise methods are hindered by a training-inference mismatch, while pointwise methods require expensive absolute annotations.To bridge this gap, we propose the Preference-aware Task-adaptive Reward Model (PaTaRM).Unlike prior approaches, PaTaRM enables robust pointwise training using readily available pairwise data via a novel Preference-Aware Reward (PAR) mechanism, eliminating the need for explicit rating labels. Furthermore, it incorporates a task-adaptive rubric system that dynamically generates instance-specific criteria for precise evaluation.Extensive experiments demonstrate that PaTaRM achieves an average relative improvement of 8.7% over the corresponding base models on RewardBench and RMBench across the Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B backbones.Crucially, when used as a reward model for downstream RLHF, it yields an average relative improvement of 13.6% over the corresponding base policies on IFEval and InfoBench, validating its effectiveness for policy alignment.Our code, data, and checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/AIJian/PaTaRM
Harmonizing Dense and Sparse Signals in Multi-turn RL: Dual-Horizon Credit Assignment for Industrial Sales Agents
Haojin Yang | Ai Jian | Yiwei Wang | Xinyue Huang | Weipeng Zhang | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai | Jingqing Ruan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Haojin Yang | Ai Jian | Yiwei Wang | Xinyue Huang | Weipeng Zhang | Ke Zeng | Xunliang Cai | Jingqing Ruan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Optimizing large language models for industrial sales requires balancing long-term commercial objectives (e.g., conversion rate) with immediate linguistic constraints such as fluency and compliance. Conventional reinforcement learning often merges these heterogeneous goals into a single reward, causing high-magnitude session-level rewards to overwhelm subtler turn-level signals, which leads to unstable training or reward hacking.To address this issue, we propose **Dual-Horizon Credit Assignment (DuCA)**, a framework that disentangles optimization across time scales. Its core, **Horizon-Independent Advantage Normalization (HIAN)**, separately normalizes advantages from turn-level and session-level rewards before fusion, ensuring balanced gradient contributions from both immediate and long-term objectives to the policy update.Extensive experiments with a high-fidelity user simulator show DuCA outperforms the state-of-the-art GRPO baseline, achieving a 6.82% relative improvement in conversion rate, reducing inter-sentence repetition by 82.28%, and lowering identity detection rate by 27.35%, indicating a substantial improvement for an industrial sales scenario that effectively balances the dual demands of strategic performance and naturalistic language generation.
2021
From Paraphrasing to Semantic Parsing: Unsupervised Semantic Parsing via Synchronous Semantic Decoding
Shan Wu | Bo Chen | Chunlei Xin | Xianpei Han | Le Sun | Weipeng Zhang | Jiansong Chen | Fan Yang | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shan Wu | Bo Chen | Chunlei Xin | Xianpei Han | Le Sun | Weipeng Zhang | Jiansong Chen | Fan Yang | Xunliang Cai
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Semantic parsing is challenging due to the structure gap and the semantic gap between utterances and logical forms. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised semantic parsing method - Synchronous Semantic Decoding (SSD), which can simultaneously resolve the semantic gap and the structure gap by jointly leveraging paraphrasing and grammar-constrained decoding. Specifically, we reformulate semantic parsing as a constrained paraphrasing problem: given an utterance, our model synchronously generates its canonical utterancel and meaning representation. During synchronously decoding: the utterance paraphrasing is constrained by the structure of the logical form, therefore the canonical utterance can be paraphrased controlledly; the semantic decoding is guided by the semantics of the canonical utterance, therefore its logical form can be generated unsupervisedly. Experimental results show that SSD is a promising approach and can achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised semantic parsing performance on multiple datasets.