Xiyuan Zhang


2026

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to ground large language models (LLMs) in external knowledge and improve factual accuracy. Prior work has explored iterative and self-reflective mechanisms to refine reasoning, but these approaches rely on internal model judgment and lack formally grounded, verifiable feedback. As a result, RAG systems may still produce logically inconsistent or contradictory answers in multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we propose LCR-RAG, a framework that integrates neuro-symbolic verification with reinforcement learning to explicitly optimize logical consistency. The core of our approach is a Logic-Consistency-driven Reward (LCR), which converts discrete logical signals—such as contradictions or incomplete inference chains—into a structured reward signal. This reward guides a PPO-based agent to iteratively rewrite queries and correct reasoning errors. Experiments on HotpotQA, ASQA, and TriviaQA show that LCR-RAG consistently outperforms strong RAG baselines, with ablation results indicating that the LCR mechanism is the primary source of improvement, even under noisy or conflicting retrieval conditions.

2019

Though great progress has been made for human-machine conversation, current dialogue system is still in its infancy: it usually converses passively and utters words more as a matter of response, rather than on its own initiatives. In this paper, we take a radical step towards building a human-like conversational agent: endowing it with the ability of proactively leading the conversation (introducing a new topic or maintaining the current topic). To facilitate the development of such conversation systems, we create a new dataset named Konv where one acts as a conversation leader and the other acts as the follower. The leader is provided with a knowledge graph and asked to sequentially change the discussion topics, following the given conversation goal, and meanwhile keep the dialogue as natural and engaging as possible. Konv enables a very challenging task as the model needs to both understand dialogue and plan over the given knowledge graph. We establish baseline results on this dataset (about 270K utterances and 30k dialogues) using several state-of-the-art models. Experimental results show that dialogue models that plan over the knowledge graph can make full use of related knowledge to generate more diverse multi-turn conversations. The baseline systems along with the dataset are publicly available.
In this paper, we introduce a simple system Baidu submitted for MRQA (Machine Reading for Question Answering) 2019 Shared Task that focused on generalization of machine reading comprehension (MRC) models. Our system is built on a framework of pretraining and fine-tuning, namely D-NET. The techniques of pre-trained language models and multi-task learning are explored to improve the generalization of MRC models and we conduct experiments to examine the effectiveness of these strategies. Our system is ranked at top 1 of all the participants in terms of averaged F1 score. Our codes and models will be released at PaddleNLP.