Xingjiao Wu
2026
APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation
Dongliang Chen | Xinlin Zhuang | Junjie Xu | Luojian Xie | Zehui Wang | Jiaxi Zhuang | Haolin Yang | Liang Dou | Xiao He | Xingjiao Wu | Ying Qian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Dongliang Chen | Xinlin Zhuang | Junjie Xu | Luojian Xie | Zehui Wang | Jiaxi Zhuang | Haolin Yang | Liang Dou | Xiao He | Xingjiao Wu | Ying Qian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Multi-objective alignment for text-to-image generation is commonly implemented via static linear scalarization, but fixed weights often fail under heterogeneous rewards, leading to optimization imbalance where models overfit high-variance, high-responsiveness objectives (e.g., OCR) while under-optimizing perceptual goals. We identify two mechanistic causes: variance hijacking, where reward dispersion induces implicit reweighting that dominates the normalized training signal, and gradient conflicts, where competing objectives produce opposing update directions and trigger seesaw-like oscillations. We propose APEX (Adaptive Priority-based Efficient X-objective Alignment), which stabilizes heterogeneous rewards with Dual-Stage Adaptive Normalization and dynamically schedules objectives via 𝒫3 Adaptive Priorities that combine learning potential, conflict penalty, and progress need. On Stable Diffusion 3.5, APEX achieves improved Pareto trade-offs across four heterogeneous objectives, with balanced gains of +1.31 PickScore, +0.35 DeQA, and +0.53 Aesthetics while maintaining competitive OCR accuracy, mitigating the instability of multi-objective alignment.
2025
RMoA: Optimizing Mixture-of-Agents through Diversity Maximization and Residual Compensation
Zhentao Xie | Chengcheng Han | Jinxin Shi | Wenjun Cui | Xin Zhao | Xingjiao Wu | Jiabao Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Zhentao Xie | Chengcheng Han | Jinxin Shi | Wenjun Cui | Xin Zhao | Xingjiao Wu | Jiabao Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Although multi-agent systems based on large language models show strong capabilities on multiple tasks, they are still limited by high computational overhead, information loss, and robustness. Inspired by ResNet’s residual learning, we propose Residual Mixture-of-Agents (RMoA), integrating residual connections to optimize efficiency and reliability. To maximize information utilization from model responses while minimizing computational costs, we innovatively design an embedding-based diversity selection mechanism that greedily selects responses via vector similarity. Furthermore, to mitigate iterative information degradation, we introduce a Residual Extraction Agent to preserve cross-layer incremental information by capturing inter-layer response differences, coupled with a Residual Aggregation Agent for hierarchical information integration. Additionally, we propose an adaptive termination mechanism that dynamically halts processing based on residual convergence, further improving inference efficiency. RMoA achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmarks of across alignment, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and multitasking understanding, while significantly reducing computational overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/mindhunter01/RMoA.