Yuyan Zhou
2026
LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models
Yuyan Zhou | Jiarui Yu | Hande Dong | Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Jianqing Zhang | Qiang Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yuyan Zhou | Jiarui Yu | Hande Dong | Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Jianqing Zhang | Qiang Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space.However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference, failing to discover diverse reasoning paths.To bridge the gap, we inject controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs’ exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL).Building on this, we propose **L**atent R**e**asoning **P**olicy **O**ptimization (**LEPO**), a novel framework that applies RL directly to continuous latent representations.Specifically, in rollout stage, LEPO maintains stochasticity to enable diverse trajectory sampling, while in optimization stage, LEPO constructs a unified gradient estimation for both latent representations and discrete tokens.
ReCreate: Reasoning and Creating Domain Agents Driven by Experience
Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Jian Luo | Jianqing Zhang | Yuyan Zhou | Qiang Lin | Can Wang | Hande Dong | Jiawei Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhezheng Hao | Hong Wang | Jian Luo | Jianqing Zhang | Yuyan Zhou | Qiang Lin | Can Wang | Hande Dong | Jiawei Chen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Model (LLM) agents are reshaping the industrial landscape. However, most practical agents remain human-designed because tasks differ widely, making them labor-intensive to build. This situation poses a central question: can we automatically create and adapt domain agents in the wild? While several recent approaches have sought to automate agent creation, they typically treat agent generation as a black-box procedure and rely solely on final performance metrics to guide the process. Such strategies overlook critical evidence explaining why an agent succeeds or fails, and often require high computational costs. To address these limitations, we propose ReCreate, an experience-driven framework for the automatic creation of domain agents. ReCreate systematically leverages agent interaction histories, which provide rich concrete signals on both the causes of success or failure and the avenues for improvement. Specifically, we introduce an agent-as-optimizer paradigm that effectively learns from experience via three key components: (i) an experience storage and retrieval mechanism for on-demand inspection; (ii) a reasoning–creating synergy pipeline that map execution experience into scaffold edits; and (iii) hierarchical updates that abstract instance-level details into reusable domain patterns. In experiments across diverse domains, ReCreate consistently outperforms human-designed agents and existing automated agent generation methods, even when starting from minimal seed scaffolds.
Diffusion with Truncated Blocks: Fast and High-Quality Text Generation using Truncated Block Generation
Yuyan Zhou | Weiyu Chen | James Kwok
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yuyan Zhou | Weiyu Chen | James Kwok
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Diffusion-based Large Language Models (dLLMs) are emerging as a powerful alternative to traditional autoregressive models. These models learn to generate text by iteratively denoising masked sequences. In this work, we identify a critical problem in dLLMs: the model’s attention is wastefully expended on uninformative mask tokens, diluting its focus on meaningful context. We term this phenomenon “attention dilution”. We further show that this artifact is amplified by token-level noising, whereas models employing sequence-level noise exhibit a reduced effect. To resolve this problem, we introduce Truncated Block Generation, a novel sampling algorithm that not only mitigates attention dilution but also enables faster inference and flexible-length sequence generation. Extensive experiments validate our analysis and demonstrate the marked effectiveness of our proposed method in enhancing both the performance and efficiency of dLLMs.
GAPO: Robust Advantage Estimation for Real-World Code LLMs
Jianqing Zhang | Zhezheng Hao | Wei Xia | Hande Dong | Hong Wang | Chenxing Wei | Yuyan Zhou | Yubin Qi | Qiang Lin | Jian Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Jianqing Zhang | Zhezheng Hao | Wei Xia | Hande Dong | Hong Wang | Chenxing Wei | Yuyan Zhou | Yubin Qi | Qiang Lin | Jian Cao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, where group-relative methods, such as GRPO, are popular due to their critic-free and normalized advantage estimation. However, in real-world code-editing scenarios, reward distributions are often skewed with unpredictable noise, leading to distorted advantage computation and increased rollout outliers. To address this issue, we propose Group Adaptive Policy Optimization (GAPO), which adaptively finds an interval with the highest SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) per prompt and uses the median of that interval as an adaptive Q to replace the group mean in advantage calculation to reduce noise further. This adaptive Q robustly handles rollout noise while remaining plug-and-play and efficient. We evaluate GAPO on nine instruction-tuned LLMs (3B–14B) using a collected large dataset of 51,844 real-world, history-aware code-editing tasks spanning 10 programming languages. GAPO yields up to 4.35 in-domain (ID) and 5.30 out-of-domain (OOD) exact-match improvements over GRPO and its variant DAPO, while achieving lower clipping ratios and higher GPU throughput. Code: https://github.com/TsingZ0/verl-GAPO
2024
MetaGPT: Merging Large Language Models Using Model Exclusive Task Arithmetic
Yuyan Zhou | Liang Song | Bingning Wang | Weipeng Chen
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuyan Zhou | Liang Song | Bingning Wang | Weipeng Chen
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 has catalyzed the exploration of multi-task learning (MTL), in which a single model demonstrates proficiency across diverse tasks. Task arithmetic has emerged as a cost-effective approach for MTL. It enables performance enhancement across multiple tasks by adding their corresponding task vectors to a pre-trained model. However, the current lack of a method that can simultaneously achieve optimal performance, computational efficiency, and data privacy limits their application to LLMs. In this paper, we propose Model Exclusive Task Arithmetic for merging GPT-scale models (MetaGPT) which formalizes the objective of model merging into a multi-task learning framework, aiming to minimize the average loss difference between the merged model and each individual task model. Since data privacy limits the use of multi-task training data, we leverage LLMs’ local linearity and task vectors’ orthogonality to separate the data term and scaling coefficients term and derive a model-exclusive task arithmetic method. Our proposed MetaGPT is data-agnostic and bypasses the heavy search process, making it cost-effective and easy to implement for LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaGPT leads to improvement of task arithmetic and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks.