Yuguang Yao
2026
RIMRULE: Improving Tool-Using Language Agents via MDL-Guided Rule Learning
Xiang Gao | Yuguang Yao | Qi Zhang | Kaiwen Dong | Avinash Baidya | Ruocheng Guo | Hilaf Hasson | Kamalika Das
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xiang Gao | Yuguang Yao | Qi Zhang | Kaiwen Dong | Avinash Baidya | Ruocheng Guo | Hilaf Hasson | Kamalika Das
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to use tools reliably in domain-specific settings, where APIs may be idiosyncratic, under-documented, or tailored to private workflows. This highlights the need for effective adaptation to task-specific tools. We propose RIMRULE, a neuro-symbolic approach for LLM adaptation based on dynamic rule injection. Compact, interpretable rules are distilled from failure traces and injected into the prompt during inference to improve task performance. These rules are proposed by the LLM itself and consolidated using a Minimum Description Length (MDL) objective that favors generality and conciseness. Each rule is stored in both natural language and a structured symbolic form, supporting efficient retrieval at inference time. Experiments on tool-use benchmarks show that this approach improves accuracy on both seen and unseen tools without modifying LLM weights. It outperforms prompting-based adaptation methods and complements finetuning, offering an interpretable layer of inference-time generalization. Moreover, rules learned from one LLM can be reused to improve others, including long reasoning LLMs, highlighting the portability of symbolic knowledge across architectures.
2025
R2I-Bench: Benchmarking Reasoning-Driven Text-to-Image Generation
Kaijie Chen | Zihao Lin | Zhiyang Xu | Ying Shen | Yuguang Yao | Joy Rimchala | Jiaxin Zhang | Lifu Huang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Kaijie Chen | Zihao Lin | Zhiyang Xu | Ying Shen | Yuguang Yao | Joy Rimchala | Jiaxin Zhang | Lifu Huang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reasoning is a fundamental capability often required in real-world text-to-image (T2I) generation, e.g., generating “a bitten apple that has been left in the air for more than a week” necessitates understanding temporal decay and commonsense concepts. While recent T2I models have made impressive progress in producing photorealistic images, their reasoning capability remains underdeveloped and insufficiently evaluated. To bridge this gap, we introduce R2I-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to rigorously assess reasoning-driven T2I generation. R2I-Bench comprises 3068 meticulously curated data instances, spanning 7 core reasoning categories, including commonsense, mathematical, logical, compositional, numerical, causal, and concept mixing. To facilitate fine-grained evaluation, we design R2IScore, a QA-style metric based on instance-specific, reasoning-oriented evaluation questions that assess three critical dimensions: text-image alignment, reasoning accuracy, and image quality. Extensive experiments with 16 representative T2I models, including a strong pipeline-based framework that decouples reasoning and generation using the state-of-the-art language and image generation models, demonstrate consistently limited reasoning performance, highlighting the need for more robust, reasoning-aware architectures in the next generation of T2I systems.