Yuqi Zhu


2026

Replicating AI research is a crucial yet challenging task for large language model (LLM) agents. Existing approaches often struggle to generate executable code, primarily due to insufficient background knowledge and the limitations of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods, which fail to capture latent technical details hidden in referenced papers. Furthermore, previous approaches tend to overlook valuable implementation-level code signals and lack structured knowledge representations that support multi-granular retrieval and reuse. To overcome these challenges, we propose Executable Knowledge Graphs (xKG), a pluggable, paper-centric knowledge base that automatically integrates code snippets and technical insights extracted from scientific literature. When integrated into three agent frameworks with two different LLMs, xKG shows substantial performance gains (10.9% with o3-mini) on PaperBench, demonstrating its effectiveness as a general and extensible solution for automated AI research replication.
Long-term conversational agents need memory systems that capture relationships between events, not merely isolated facts, to support temporal reasoning and multi-hop question answering. Current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: flat memory is efficient but fails to model relational structure, while graph-based memory enables structured reasoning at the cost of expensive and fragile construction. To address these issues, we propose StructMem, a structure-enriched hierarchical memory framework that preserves event-level bindings and induces cross-event connections. By temporally anchoring dual perspectives and performing periodic semantic consolidation, StructMem improves temporal reasoning and multi-hop performance on LoCoMo, while substantially reducing token usage, API calls, and runtime compared to prior memory systems.

2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in complex reasoning tasks, yet they fall short when tackling more sophisticated challenges, especially when interacting with environments through generating executable actions. This inadequacy primarily stems from the lack of built-in action knowledge in language agents, which fails to effectively guide the planning trajectories during task solving and results in planning hallucination. To address this issue, we introduce KnowAgent, a novel approach designed to enhance the planning capabilities of LLMs by incorporating explicit action knowledge. Specifically, KnowAgent employs an action knowledge base and a knowledgeable self-learning strategy to constrain the action path during planning, enabling more reasonable trajectory synthesis, and thereby enhancing the planning performance of language agents. Experimental results on HotpotQA and ALFWorld based on various backbone models demonstrate that KnowAgent can achieve comparable or superior performance to existing baselines. Further analysis indicates the effectiveness of KnowAgent in terms of planning hallucinations mitigation.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks, but their efficiency is hindered by the substantial memory and computational costs associated with generating lengthy tokens. In this paper, we propose LightThinker, a novel method that enables LLMs to dynamically compress intermediate thoughts during reasoning. Inspired by human cognitive processes, LightThinker compresses verbose thought steps into compact representations and discards the original reasoning chains, thereby significantly reducing the number of tokens stored in the context window.This is achieved by training the model on when and how to perform compression through data construction, mapping hidden states to condensed gist tokens, and creating specialized attention masks. Additionally, we introduce the Dependency (Dep) metric to quantify the degree of compression by measuring the reliance on historical tokens during generation. Extensive experiments on four datasets and two models show that LightThinker reduces peak memory usage and inference time, while maintaining competitive accuracy. Our work provides a new direction for improving the efficiency of LLMs in complex reasoning tasks without sacrificing performance.
Current advanced long-context language models offer great potential for real-world software engineering applications. However, progress in this critical domain remains hampered by a fundamental limitation: the absence of a rigorous evaluation framework for long code understanding. To gap this obstacle, we propose a long code understanding benchmark LongCodeU from four aspects (8 tasks) to evaluate LCLMs’ long code understanding ability required for practical applications, including code unit perception, intra-code unit understanding, inter-code unit relation understanding, and long code documentation understanding. We evaluate 9 popular LCLMs on LongCodeU (i.e., 6 general models and 3 code models). Our experimental results reveal key limitations in current LCLMs’ capabilities for long code understanding. Particularly, the performance of LCLMs drops dramatically when the long code length is greater than 32K, falling far short of their claimed 128K to 1M context windows. In the four aspects, inter-code unit relation understanding is the most challenging for LCLMs. Our study provides valuable insights for optimizing LCLMs and driving advancements in software engineering.

2024

How to evaluate the coding abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains an open question. We find that existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of LLMs.To address the knowledge gap, we propose a new benchmark named DevEval, which has three advances. (1) DevEval aligns with real-world repositories in multiple dimensions, e.g., code and dependency distributions. (2) DevEval is annotated by 13 developers and contains comprehensive annotations (e.g., requirements, original repositories, reference code, and reference dependencies). (3) DevEval comprises 1,825 testing samples from 115 repositories, covering 10 popular domains (e.g., Internet, Database). Based on DevEval, we propose repository-level code generation and evaluate 8 popular LLMs on DevEval (e.g., gpt-4, gpt-3.5, StarCoder 2, DeepSeek Coder, CodeLLaMa). Our experiments reveal these LLMs’ coding abilities in real-world code repositories. For example, the highest Pass@1 of gpt-4 only is 53.04% in our experiments. We also analyze LLMs’ failed cases and summarize their shortcomings. We hope DevEval can facilitate the development of LLMs in real code repositories. DevEval, prompts, and LLMs’ predictions have been released.

2023