Wen Yao
2026
Model-Based Imaginative Planning for Embodied Agents
Junru Song | Hengzhe Jin | Yucong Huang | Tingsong Jiang | Weien Zhou | Feifei Wang | Yang Yang | Ying Wen | Wen Yao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Junru Song | Hengzhe Jin | Yucong Huang | Tingsong Jiang | Weien Zhou | Feifei Wang | Yang Yang | Ying Wen | Wen Yao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reasoning and planning critically rely on a predictive dynamics model. In symbolic domains such as mathematics and code, large language models (LLMs) internalize transition rules during pretraining, allowing reinforcement learning or test-time scaling to effectively elicit and generalize their reasoning ability. Embodied decision making is fundamentally different: agents must reason from sparse visual evidence under partial observability, while coping with environment-specific dynamics and affordances not captured by language priors. Here we propose IMPLEMENT, a model-based reasoning framework that enables frozen LLMs to perform imaginative planning. A lightweight world model converts raw pixels into object-centric symbolic states amenable to language-based reasoning, and predicts their evolution under hypothetical actions. To address partial observability, we perform Monte Carlo state prediction via temperature sampling, enabling decision evaluation over multiple plausible futures. To support adaptation to unseen environments, we integrate Meta In-Context Learning, conditioning the world model on interaction history to continuously refine its predictions. At inference time, the LLM and world model form a tight co-reasoning loop: the LLM proposes candidate actions, the world model simulates future trajectories, and the LLM refines its decisions, effectively inducing an online policy iteration scheme. Extensive experiments in ALFWorld demonstrate consistent advantages over finetuning-based and strong test-time scaling approaches, validating IMPLEMENT as an effective framework for grounding language agents in visual embodied environments.
DisCal: Distribution-Aware Calibration for Mathematical Reasoning Under Character-Level Noisy Inputs
Bo Zhang | Jiawei Zhang | Cong Gao | Bingxu Han | Minghao Hu | Jun Zhang | Yunbo Cao | Zhunchen Luo | Wen Yao | Guotong Geng | Zhong Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Bo Zhang | Jiawei Zhang | Cong Gao | Bingxu Han | Minghao Hu | Jun Zhang | Yunbo Cao | Zhunchen Luo | Wen Yao | Guotong Geng | Zhong Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Although large reasoning models (LRMs) exhibit exceptional mathematical reasoning capabilities on clean inputs, their reasoning accuracy drops substantially in the presence of character-level noise such as typographical errors. Critically, their confidence estimates fail to reflect the corresponding decline in reasoning accuracy. While confidence calibration offers a principled solution, existing methods predominantly target clean inputs, leaving noisy scenarios largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose DisCal (Distribution-aware Calibration), a confidence calibration framework for character-level noisy inputs. DisCal extracts uncertainty signals from both the empirical answer distribution and the model’s predictive distribution, and integrates them via a learned calibrator to produce well-calibrated confidence. Experiments across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DisCal consistently outperforms existing calibration methods under noisy inputs, reducing Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by up to 39.21% and improving Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC) by up to 31.44%.
2025
SafeConf: A Confidence-Calibrated Safety Self-Evaluation Method for Large Language Models
Bo Zhang | Cong Gao | Linkang Yang | Bingxu Han | Minghao Hu | Zhunchen Luo | Guotong Geng | Xiaoying Bai | Jun Zhang | Wen Yao | Zhong Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Bo Zhang | Cong Gao | Linkang Yang | Bingxu Han | Minghao Hu | Zhunchen Luo | Guotong Geng | Xiaoying Bai | Jun Zhang | Wen Yao | Zhong Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved groundbreaking progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Despite the numerous advantages of LLMs, they also pose significant safety risks. Self-evaluation mechanisms have gained increasing attention as a key safeguard to ensure safe and controllable content generation. However, LLMs often exhibit overconfidence, which seriously compromises the accuracy of safety self-evaluation. To address this challenge, we propose SafeConf, a method to enhance the safety self-evaluation capability of LLMs through confidence calibration. The method performs semantic mutations on the original safety evaluation questions and adopts a self-consistency strategy to quantify confidence based on answer accuracy on the mutated questions. Finally, these confidence scores are used to construct a dataset for fine-tuning. We conducte experiments on both Chinese and English datasets. The results show that SafeConf improves self-evaluation accuracy by an average of 5.86% and 7.79% over the state-of-the-art baseline methods on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Llama3-8B-Instruct models, respectively, without affecting the general capabilities of the models.
Leveraging Dual Process Theory in Language Agent Framework for Real-time Simultaneous Human-AI Collaboration
Shao Zhang | Xihuai Wang | Wenhao Zhang | Chaoran Li | Junru Song | Tingyu Li | Lin Qiu | Xuezhi Cao | Xunliang Cai | Wen Yao | Weinan Zhang | Xinbing Wang | Ying Wen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shao Zhang | Xihuai Wang | Wenhao Zhang | Chaoran Li | Junru Song | Tingyu Li | Lin Qiu | Xuezhi Cao | Xunliang Cai | Wen Yao | Weinan Zhang | Xinbing Wang | Ying Wen
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Agents built on large language models (LLMs) have excelled in turn-by-turn human-AI collaboration but struggle with simultaneous tasks requiring real-time interaction. Latency issues and the challenge of inferring variable human strategies hinder their ability to make autonomous decisions without explicit instructions. Through experiments with current independent *System 1* and *System 2* methods, we validate the necessity of using Dual Process Theory (DPT) in real-time tasks. We propose DPT-Agent, a novel language agent framework that integrates *System 1* and *System 2* for efficient real-time simultaneous human-AI collaboration. DPT-Agent’s *System 1* uses a Finite-state Machine (FSM) and code-as-policy for fast, intuitive, and controllable decision-making. DPT-Agent’s *System 2* integrates Theory of Mind (ToM) and asynchronous reflection to infer human intentions and perform reasoning-based autonomous decisions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DPT-Agent through further experiments with rule-based agents and human collaborators, showing significant improvements over mainstream LLM-based frameworks. To the best of our knowledge, DPT-Agent is the first language agent framework that achieves successful real-time simultaneous human-AI collaboration autonomously. Code of DPT-Agent can be found in https://github.com/sjtu-marl/DPT-Agent.
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Co-authors
- Cong Gao 2
- Guotong Geng 2
- Bingxu Han 2
- Zhunchen Luo 2
- Junru Song 2
- Zhong Wang 2
- Ying Wen 2
- Xiaoying Bai 1
- Xunliang Cai 1
- Xuezhi Cao 1
- Yunbo Cao 1
- Minghao Hu 1
- Minghao Hu 1
- Yucong Huang 1
- Tingsong Jiang 1
- Hengzhe Jin 1
- Chaoran Li 1
- Tingyu Li 1
- Lin Qiu 1
- Feifei Wang 1
- Xihuai Wang 1
- Xinbing Wang 1
- Linkang Yang 1
- Yang Yang 1
- Bo Zhang 1
- Jun Zhang 1
- Shao Zhang 1
- Wenhao Zhang 1
- Weinan Zhang 1
- Bo Zhang 1
- Jiawei Zhang 1
- Jun Zhang 1
- Weien Zhou 1