Yingyi Zhang


2026

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have scaled the potential for reasoning and agentic search, wherein models autonomously plan, retrieve, and reason over external knowledge to answer complex queries. However, the iterative think–search loop accumulates long system memories, leading to memory dilution problem. In addition, existing memory management methods struggle to capture fine-grained semantic relations between queries and documents and often lose substantial information. Therefore, we propose MemSearch-o1, an agentic search framework built on reasoning-aligned memory growth and retracing. MemSearch-o1 dynamically grows fine-grained memory fragments from memory seed tokens from the queries, then retraces and deeply refines the memory via a contribution function, and finally reorganizes a globally connected memory path. This shifts memory management from stream-like concatenation to structured, token-level growth with path-based reasoning. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that MemSearch-o1 substantially mitigates memory dilution, and more effectively activates the reasoning potential of diverse LLMs, establishing a solid foundation for memory-aware agentic intelligence.
Large language model (LLM) agents require long-term user memory for consistent personalization, but limited context windows hinder tracking evolving preferences over long interactions. Existing memory systems mainly rely on static, hand-crafted update rules; although reinforcement learning (RL)-based agents learn memory updates, sparse outcome rewards provide weak supervision, resulting in unstable long-horizon optimization. Drawing on memory schema theory and the functional division between prefrontal regions and hippocampus regions, we introduce MemCoE, a cognition-inspired two-stage optimization framework that learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. In the first stage, we propose Memory Guideline Induction to optimize a global guideline via contrastive feedback interpreted as textual gradients; in the second stage, Guideline-Aligned Memory Policy Optimization uses the induced guideline to define structured process rewards and performs multi-turn RL to learn a guideline-following memory evolution policy. We evaluate on three personalization memory benchmarks, covering explicit and implicit preferences as well as different sizes and noise levels, and observe consistent improvements over strong baselines with favorable robustness, transferability, and efficiency[https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/ACL2026_MemCoE].
Personalized Large Language Models (PLLMs) aim to align model outputs with individual user preferences, a crucial capability for user-centric applications. However, the prevalent approach of fine-tuning a separate module for each user faces two major limitations: (1) storage costs scale linearly with the number of users, rendering the method unscalable; and (2) fine-tuning a static model from scratch often yields suboptimal performance for users with sparse data. To address these challenges, we propose MTA, a Merge-then-Adapt framework for PLLMs. MTA comprises three key stages. First, we construct a shared Meta-LoRA Bank by selecting anchor users and pre-training meta-personalization traits within meta-LoRA modules. Second, to ensure scalability and enable dynamic personalization combination beyond static models, we introduce an Adaptive LoRA Fusion stage. This stage retrieves and dynamically merges the most relevant anchor meta-LoRAs to synthesize a user-specific one, thereby eliminating the need for user-specific storage and supporting more flexible personalization. Third, we propose a LoRA Stacking for Few-Shot Personalization stage, which applies an additional ultra-low-rank, lightweight LoRA module on top of the merged LoRA. Fine-tuning this module enables effective personalization under few-shot settings. Extensive experiments on the LaMP benchmark demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing SOTA methods across multiple tasks. Our code is also available.
Geographic reasoning is a fundamental cognitive capability that requires models to infer plausible locations by synthesizing visual evidence with spatial world knowledge. Despite recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs), existing evaluation paradigms remain largely outcome-centric, relying on static datasets and predefined labels that are conceptually misaligned with open-world geographic inference. Such outcome-centric evaluations often focus exclusively on label matching, leaving the underlying linguistic reasoning chains as unexamined black boxes. In this work, we introduce GeoArena, a dynamic, human-preference-based evaluation framework for benchmarking open-world geographic reasoning. GeoArena reframes evaluation as a pairwise reasoning alignment task on in-the-wild images, where human judges compare model-generated explanations based on reasoning quality, evidence synthesis, and plausibility. We deploy GeoArena as a public platform and benchmark 17 frontier LVLMs using thousands of human judgments, which complements existing benchmarks and supports the development of geographically grounded, human-aligned AI systems. We further provide detailed analyses of model behavior, including reliability of human preferences and factors influencing judgments of geographic reasoning quality. We open-source GeoArena to foster future research.

2025

Structured information extraction from scientific literature is crucial for capturing core concepts and emerging trends in specialized fields. While existing datasets aid model development, most focus on specific publication sections due to domain complexity and the high cost of annotating scientific texts. To address this limitation, we introduce SciNLP—a specialized benchmark for full-text entity and relation extraction in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain. The dataset comprises 60 manually annotated full-text NLP publications, covering 7,072 entities and 1,826 relations. Compared to existing research, SciNLP is the first dataset providing full-text annotations of entities and their relationships in the NLP domain. To validate the effectiveness of SciNLP, we conducted comparative experiments with similar datasets and evaluated the performance of state-of-the-art supervised models on this dataset. Results reveal varying extraction capabilities of existing models across academic texts of different lengths. Cross-comparisons with existing datasets show that SciNLP achieves significant performance improvements on certain baseline models. Using models trained on SciNLP, we implemented automatic construction of a fine-grained knowledge graph for the NLP domain. Our KG has an average node degree of 3.2 per entity, indicating rich semantic topological information that enhances downstream applications. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/AKADDC/SciNLP.
Multi-modal keyphrase prediction (MMKP) aims to advance beyond text-only methods by incorporating multiple modalities of input information to produce a set of conclusive phrases. Traditional multi-modal approaches have been proven to have significant limitations in handling the challenging absence and unseen scenarios. Additionally, we identify shortcomings in existing benchmarks that overestimate model capability due to significant overlap in training tests. In this work, we propose leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) for the MMKP task. Firstly, we use two widely-used strategies, e.g., zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to assess the lower bound performance of VLMs. Next, to improve the complex reasoning capabilities of VLMs, we adopt Fine-tune-CoT, which leverages high-quality CoT reasoning data generated by a teacher model to finetune smaller models. Finally, to address the “overthinking” phenomenon, we propose a dynamic CoT strategy which adaptively injects CoT data during training, allowing the model to flexibly leverage its reasoning capabilities during the inference stage. We evaluate the proposed strategies on various datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/DynamicCoT.

2019

This paper studies automatic keyphrase extraction on social media. Previous works have achieved promising results on it, but they neglect human reading behavior during keyphrase annotating. The human attention is a crucial element of human reading behavior. It reveals the relevance of words to the main topics of the target text. Thus, this paper aims to integrate human attention into keyphrase extraction models. First, human attention is represented by the reading duration estimated from eye-tracking corpus. Then, we merge human attention with neural network models by an attention mechanism. In addition, we also integrate human attention into unsupervised models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to utilize human attention on keyphrase extraction tasks. The experimental results show that our models have significant improvements on two Twitter datasets.

2018

Existing keyphrase extraction methods suffer from data sparsity problem when they are conducted on short and informal texts, especially microblog messages. Enriching context is one way to alleviate this problem. Considering that conversations are formed by reposting and replying messages, they provide useful clues for recognizing essential content in target posts and are therefore helpful for keyphrase identification. In this paper, we present a neural keyphrase extraction framework for microblog posts that takes their conversation context into account, where four types of neural encoders, namely, averaged embedding, RNN, attention, and memory networks, are proposed to represent the conversation context. Experimental results on Twitter and Weibo datasets show that our framework with such encoders outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.