Yunjia Qi


2025

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Agentic Reward Modeling: Integrating Human Preferences with Verifiable Correctness Signals for Reliable Reward Systems
Hao Peng | Yunjia Qi | Xiaozhi Wang | Zijun Yao | Bin Xu | Lei Hou | Juanzi Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training and inference-time scaling up of large language models (LLMs). However, existing reward models primarily focus on human preferences, neglecting verifiable correctness signals which have shown strong potential in training LLMs. In this paper, we propose agentic reward modeling, a reward system that combines reward models with verifiable correctness signals from different aspects to provide reliable rewards. We empirically implement a reward agent, named RewardAgent, that combines human preference rewards with two verifiable signals: factuality and instruction following, to provide more reliable rewards. We conduct comprehensive experiments on existing reward model benchmarks and inference-time best-of-n searches on real-world downstream tasks. RewardAgent significantly outperforms vanilla reward models, demonstrating its effectiveness. We further construct training preference pairs using RewardAgent and train an LLM with the DPO objective, achieving superior performance on various NLP benchmarks compared to conventional reward models. Our codes are publicly released to facilitate further research.

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LoSiA: Efficient High-Rank Fine-Tuning via Subnet Localization and Optimization
Xujia Wang | Yunjia Qi | Bin Xu
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, significantly reduce the number of trainable parameters by introducing low-rank decomposition matrices. However, existing methods perform extensive matrix multiplications in domain specialization tasks, resulting in computational inefficiency and sub-optimal fine-tuning performance. Hence, we propose LoSiA (**Lo**w-Resources **S**ubnet **I**ntegration **A**daptation), an innovative method that dynamically localizes and optimizes critical parameters during the training process. Specifically, it identifies a sub-network using gradient sparsity analysis and optimizes it as the trainable target. This design enables effective high-rank adaptation by updating only the sub-network parameters, reducing the additional matrix multiplication. We also present LoSiA-Pro, a faster implementation of LoSiA, which reduces the training latency by about 27% compared to LoRA. Extensive evaluations show that our method achieves minimal performance drop compared to full fine-tuning, while requiring the least training time across domain specialization and common-sense reasoning tasks. Further analysis shows that LoSiA also reduces forgetting during continued training.

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VerIF: Verification Engineering for Reinforcement Learning in Instruction Following
Hao Peng | Yunjia Qi | Xiaozhi Wang | Bin Xu | Lei Hou | Juanzi Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs), with verification engineering playing a central role. However, best practices for RL in instruction following remain underexplored. In this work, we explore the verification challenge in RL for instruction following and propose VerIF, a verification method that combines rule-based code verification with LLM-based verification from a large reasoning model (e.g., QwQ-32B). To support this approach, we construct a high-quality instruction-following dataset, VerInstruct, containing approximately 22,000 instances with associated verification signals. We apply RL training with VerIF to two models, achieving significant improvements across several representative instruction-following benchmarks. The trained models reach state-of-the-art performance among models of comparable size and generalize well to unseen constraints. We further observe that their general capabilities remain unaffected, suggesting that RL with VerIF can be integrated into existing RL recipes to enhance overall model performance. We will release our datasets, codes, and models to facilitate future research.

2024

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ADELIE: Aligning Large Language Models on Information Extraction
Yunjia Qi | Hao Peng | Xiaozhi Wang | Bin Xu | Lei Hou | Juanzi Li
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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MAVEN-FACT: A Large-scale Event Factuality Detection Dataset
Chunyang Li | Hao Peng | Xiaozhi Wang | Yunjia Qi | Lei Hou | Bin Xu | Juanzi Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Event Factuality Detection (EFD) task determines the factuality of textual events, i.e., classifying whether an event is a fact, possibility, or impossibility, which is essential for faithfully understanding and utilizing event knowledge. However, due to the lack of high-quality large-scale data, event factuality detection is under-explored in event understanding research, which limits the development of EFD community. To address these issues and provide faithful event understanding, we introduce MAVEN-FACT, a large-scale and high-quality EFD dataset based on the MAVEN dataset. MAVEN-FACT includes factuality annotations of 112,276 events, making it the largest EFD dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVEN-FACT is challenging for both conventional fine-tuned models and large language models (LLMs). Thanks to the comprehensive annotations of event arguments and relations in MAVEN, MAVEN-FACT also supports some further analyses and we find that adopting event arguments and relations helps in event factuality detection for fine-tuned models but does not benefit LLMs. Furthermore, we preliminarily study an application case of event factuality detection and find it helps in mitigating event-related hallucination in LLMs. We will release our dataset and codes to facilitate further research on event factuality detection.