Ya-Qin Zhang


2026

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled strong performance in long-form writing, but current training paradigms remain limited: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) remains constrained by data saturation and performance ceilings, while Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR), though successful in verifiable domains like math and code, cannot be directly migrated to open-ended long-form writing due to a lack of ground-truths. To further advance long-form writing, we present Writing-RL: an Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework to advance long-form writing capabilities beyond SFT. The framework consists of three key components: Margin-aware Data Selection strategy that prioritizes samples with high learning potential, Pairwise Comparison Reward mechanism that provides discriminative learning signals in the absence of verifiable rewards, and Dynamic Reference Scheduling approach, which plays a critical role by adaptively adjusting task difficulty based on evolving model performance. Experiments on 7B-scale writer models show that Writing-RL effectively improves long-form writing performance over strong SFT baselines. Furthermore, we observe that models trained with long-output RL generalize surprisingly well to long-input reasoning tasks, potentially offering a promising perspective for rethinking long-context training.

2024

Data-generation based zero-shot learning, although effective in training Small Task-specific Models (STMs) via synthetic datasets generated by Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), is often limited by the low quality of such synthetic datasets. Previous solutions have primarily focused on single PLM settings, where synthetic datasets are typically restricted to specific sub-spaces and often deviate from real-world distributions, leading to severe distribution bias. To mitigate such bias, we propose FuseGen, a novel data-generation based zero-shot learning framework that introduces a new criteria for subset selection from synthetic datasets via utilizing multiple PLMs and trained STMs. The chosen subset provides in-context feedback to each PLM, enhancing dataset quality through iterative data generation. Trained STMs are then used for sample re-weighting as well, further improving data quality. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that FuseGen substantially outperforms existing methods, highly effective in boosting STM performance in a PLM-agnostic way. The code is available at https://github.com/LindaLydia/FuseGen.