Linyao Chen


2025

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Finding the Sweet Spot: Preference Data Construction for Scaling Preference Optimization
Yao Xiao | Hai Ye | Linyao Chen | Hwee Tou Ng | Lidong Bing | Xiaoli Li | Roy Ka-Wei Lee
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Iterative data generation and model retraining are widely used to align large language models (LLMs).It typically involves a policy model to generate on-policy responses and a reward model to guide training data selection. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) further enhances this process by constructing preference pairs of chosen and rejected responses. In this work, we aim to scale up the number of on-policy samples via repeated random sampling to improve alignment performance. Conventional practice selects the sample with the highest reward as chosen and the lowest as rejected for DPO. However, our experiments reveal that this strategy leads to a decline in performance as the sample size increases. To address this, we investigate preference data construction through the lens of underlying normal distribution of sample rewards. We categorize the reward space into seven representative points and systematically explore all 21 (C72) pairwise combinations. Through evaluations on four models using AlpacaEval 2, we find that selecting the rejected response at reward position 𝜇 - 2𝜎 rather than the minimum reward, is crucial for optimal performance. We finally introduce a scalable preference data construction strategy that consistently enhances model performance as the sample scale increases.

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CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents
Tianqi Xu | Linyao Chen | Dai-Jie Wu | Yanjun Chen | Zecheng Zhang | Xiang Yao | Zhiqiang Xie | Yongchao Chen | Shilong Liu | Bochen Qian | Anjie Yang | Zhaoxuan Jin | Jianbo Deng | Philip Torr | Bernard Ghanem | Guohao Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025

The development of autonomous agents increasingly relies on Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) to perform tasks described in natural language with GUI environments, such as websites, desktop computers, or mobile phones. Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and thecomplexities of constructing tasks and evaluators. To overcome these limitations, we introduce CRAB, the first cross-environment agent benchmark framework, incorporating a graph-based fine-grained evaluation method and an efficient task generation method. Our framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. Leveraging CRAB, we develope CRAB Benchmark-v0 comprising 120 tasks in computer desktop and mobile phone environments. We evaluated 6 advanced MLMs using different single and multi-agent system configurations on this benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that the single agent with GPT-4o achieves the best completion ratio of 38.01%.