Xinhao Song
2026
SEARL: Joint Optimization of Policy and Tool Graph Memory for Self-Evolving Agents
Xinshun Feng | Xinhao Song | Lijun Li | Gongshen Liu | Jing Shao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xinshun Feng | Xinhao Song | Lijun Li | Gongshen Liu | Jing Shao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have demonstrated significant potential in single-turn reasoning tasks. With the paradigm shift toward self-evolving agentic learning, models are increasingly expected to learn from trajectories by synthesizing tools or accumulating explicit experiences. However, prevailing methods typically rely on large-scale LLMs or multi-agent frameworks, which hinder their deployment in resource-constrained environments. The inherent sparsity of outcome-based rewards also poses a substantial challenge, as agents typically receive feedback only upon task completion. To address these limitations, we introduce a Tool-Memory based self-evolving agentic framework SEARL. Unlike approaches that directly utilize interaction experiences, our method constructs a structured experience memory that integrates planning with execution. This provides a novel form of state abstraction that facilitates the aggregation of actions within functionally analogous contexts, such as tool reuse. Consequently, agents not only extract explicit knowledge from historical data but also leverage inter-trajectory correlations to densify reward signals. We evaluate our framework on knowledge reasoning and complex search tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving more practical and efficient agentic learning.
2025
ALIS: Aligned LLM Instruction Security Strategy for Unsafe Input Prompt
Xinhao Song | Sufeng Duan | Gongshen Liu
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Xinhao Song | Sufeng Duan | Gongshen Liu
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
In large language models, existing instruction tuning methods may fail to balance the performance with robustness against attacks from user input like prompt injection and jailbreaking. Inspired by computer hardware and operating systems, we propose an instruction tuning paradigm named Aligned LLM Instruction Security Strategy (ALIS) to enhance model performance by decomposing user inputs into irreducible atomic instructions and organizing them into instruction streams which will guide the response generation of model. ALIS is a hierarchical structure, in which user inputs and system prompts are treated as user and kernel mode instructions respectively. Based on ALIS, the model can maintain security constraints by ignoring or rejecting the input instructions when user mode instructions attempt to conflict with kernel mode instructions. To build ALIS, we also develop an automatic instruction generation method for training ALIS, and give one instruction decomposition task and respective datasets. Notably, the ALIS framework with a small model to generate instruction streams still improve the resilience of LLM to attacks substantially without any lose on general capabilities.