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Fang Kong

Publications and source records attributed to Fang Kong.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

S2TDR: Structured Multimodal Reconstruction for Sticker-Aware Dialogue Understanding

Stickers are widely used in social media dialogues to express affect, stance, and intent beyond literal text. Their meanings are often non-literal and context-dependent, making them difficult to handle with generic visual fusion or standalone captioning. We propose Sticker-to-Text Dialogue Reconstruction (S2TDR), a structured multimodal reconstruction framework that converts sticker turns into contextually appropriate textual utterances. S2TDR decomposes sticker interpretation into visual cue extraction, affective-intent inference, and context-aware dialogue reconstruction, using OCR text only as an auxiliary cue when available. The reconstructed dialogue can then be consumed by existing text-based dialogue models. Experiments on sentiment analysis, intent recognition, and dialogue summarization show that S2TDR generally improves multiple downstream models over direct sticker integration methods. Further analyses on component ablations, OCR-empty stickers, and reconstruction quality indicate that structured reconstruction provides an interpretable and effective way to integrate sticker semantics into dialogue understanding.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

HSPR: Recovering Software-Agent Benchmark Scores via Hierarchical Posterior Inference

Evaluating software agents on a full benchmark is expensive. A small task subset can preserve agent rankings while yielding inaccurate scores. Historical responses provide useful structure, but tasks with identical source responses can have different outcomes for a new target agent. We introduce Hierarchical Score Posterior Recovery (HSPR), which combines source-fitted response factors with uncertain group success rates. Observed target outcomes update the posteriors over the target latent state and group rates; posterior-guided acquisition selects subsequent tasks. Its score-based criterion equals the expected one-step reduction in full-score posterior variance. Observed successes and posterior-predictive counts for unqueried tasks yield a full-score posterior. The final estimate uses its median with source-selected calibration. At a 10% task budget on four task banks from the SWE-bench family, HSPR achieves the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) on three banks and the lowest maximum absolute error (MaxErr) on all four among the methods compared. Removing group uncertainty or replacing adaptive queries increases macro MAE in the respective controls. Macro MAE decreases across 5-20% budgets. Code and project resources are publicly available.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

MARS: Memory-Aware Routing for Session-Level LLM Assistants

Long-term LLM assistants must repeatedly decide what prior context to expose and which model should answer as an interaction evolves. Existing memory systems and model routers usually make these decisions separately, although memory construction changes the evidence, distractors, and difficulty of the resulting input. We introduce MARS, a memory-aware routing framework that uses session state as a shared control interface between memory construction and model selection. A Query and Topic Manager (QTM) estimates compact decision-relevant state that guides a fixed state-conditioned memory policy and an online router, enabling each turn to receive an appropriate memory view and a suitable model under a quality-memory-cost trade-off. We evaluate MARS on RealMem and MultiChallenge with 16 system configurations each, covering long-history memory-driven interaction and bounded sessions with structured context interference. On RealMem, MARS preserves 98.2% of full-context GPT-4o's QA while using only 14.5% of its generation API cost, including both generation and controller calls for MARS, and achieves the strongest measured memory-recall and retrieval scores among compared systems. On MultiChallenge, MARS trails the strongest static system overall but approaches its performance at lower recorded cost on a mechanism-focused subset. Together, these results support a favorable quality-memory-cost trade-off for long-history, memory-dependent interaction.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Provable Transformer Context Compression for In-Context Reinforcement Learning

Transformers can perform in-context reinforcement learning without parameter updates. However, existing theoretical constructions often require context sizes that grow with the number of sampled transitions, leading to increasing memory costs in large-scale problems. This raises a fundamental scalability question: how much context is intrinsically necessary to carry out such learning? We answer this question for fixed-policy TD evaluation. We show that, with a shared linear decoder, the minimum context dimension required to exactly reproduce the first $L$ TD iterates is the Krylov dimension induced by the sampled transitions. When the available context dimension $m$ falls below this threshold, exact reproduction is no longer possible. In this regime, we characterize the optimal approximation error and show that it decays as $Θ(γ^m\max\{1,1/(m(1-γ))\})$ where $γ$ is the discounting factor. Moving from representation complexity to actual memory cost, we characterize the optimal retained memory for exact continuous representations as $Θ(nk_L)$ and show experimentally that on a sampled task whose exact rank is full but whose numerical rank is small, a context accurate to $10^{-2}$ is $88.7\%$ smaller than the sparse sufficient statistics of TD. Finally, we establish the learnability of the shared executor through pretraining by proving global convergence of an auxiliary objective over effective attention parameters under suitable task diversity. Experiments across diverse TD evaluation problems validate parameter recovery and the predicted context--accuracy tradeoff.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

From Policy Evaluation to Off-Policy Control: Provable Emergence of In-Context Q-Learning

Transformers can implement reinforcement-learning algorithms in context, yet how off-policy control emerges within Transformers remains poorly understood. We study Q-learning, a foundational model-free control algorithm that combines off-policy bootstrapping with greedy policy improvement. We prove that a two-layer attention-only Transformer can implement a finite-temperature form of Q-learning, where the temperature $τ>0$ controls the approximation to greedy action selection, recovering window Q-learning as $τ\to0$. We train the structured Transformer on randomly generated MDP tasks using output-only supervision. Experiments show that the theoretically predicted parameter structure emerges during training, including the internal greedy action-selection mechanism, and that the trained Transformer achieves performance comparable to Q-learning on unseen tasks. Our theoretical analysis further shows that the equivalent realizations form a solution manifold and that, under suitable task-diversity conditions, the training iterates converge locally to this manifold at an exponential rate. For the random-task model analyzed here, the local worst-case number of gradient steps needed to reduce the distance to the manifold by a factor $ε$ is $Θ\left(τ^{-5}\log(1/\varepsilon)\right)$, quantifying the increasing optimization cost as the learned update approaches window Q-learning.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Thinking Outside the Box: Can Language Models Rely on External Guidance Selectively?

Agent harnesses often improve language models with human-designed workflows, but as models grow more capable, unreliable guidance can increasingly constrain their execution. We call the ability to benefit from useful guidance while overriding unreliable guidance thinking outside the box. We introduce Box$^2$-Bench, which holds the model and task fixed while varying workflow reliability to isolate how models regulate their reliance on guidance. On Box$^2$-Bench, frontier models often benefit from reliable guidance but remain vulnerable when it is misleading or becomes unreliable. To test whether this capability can be learned, we train two open-weight models using bad workflows, reserving good workflows for evaluation. We explore two complementary training strategies: counterfactual supervised fine-tuning improves robustness, while outcome-based reinforcement learning can shift the balance toward greater use of helpful workflows. We further find that this behavior extends beyond workflows to other forms of external information, improving peer correction and robustness to corrupted memory. Together, our results identify selective reliance on fallible external information as a dimension of agent reliability not captured by task performance alone.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Attributing Structured-Output Gains in Function Calling: Interface Alignment versus Procedural Transfer

Structured-output benchmarks reward both task decisions and interface compliance, so prompt-induced function-calling gains require attribution before they can be interpreted as transferable skill. We introduce a four-layer gain-attribution protocol for prompt-prepended skill injection, combining canonicalized rescoring, format-only controls, repaired/balanced induction, and portability checks. Applied to the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) and scoped with API-Bank, MATH-500, and MultiHop-RAG, the protocol shows that several apparent gains are better attributed to interface alignment than to procedural transfer: format-only prompts match or exceed full skills in key BFCL cells, repaired/balanced induction removes the largest sub-frontier gains, and API-Bank target-native gains are matched within 0.5 percentage points (pp) by length-matched generic procedural prompts. These findings treat format compliance as a useful engineering capability while clarifying what a structured-output score certifies. We release BFCL-CANONICAL and recommend canonicalized metrics, balanced induction, and format-only baselines for function-calling skill-gain attribution. Code and data are available at https://github.com/couragec/skill-injection-attribution.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Exploiting Intrinsic Duality for Multi-Hop Question Generation

Multi hop question generation (MQG) aims to generate questions from multiple given documents and target answers, whereas question answering (QA) focuses on deriving answers from documents given specific questions. Although MQG and QA are inherently dual tasks, most existing MQG studies largely overlook this intrinsic duality. To address this limitation, we propose QQ, a novel framework that exploits the duality between Question and answer for multi hop Question generation. Specifically, QQ employs a unified architecture functioning simultaneously as both an MQG and a QA model to fully leverage their interdependence. Our framework is driven by two key mechanisms: (i) enforcing bidirectional alignment constraints to ensure strict mutual correspondence between the questions generated by the MQG model and the answers produced by the QA model; and (ii) applying contrastive learning to pull paired question answer representations closer while pushing unpaired ones apart, thereby reinforcing this correspondence. Extensive automatic and human evaluations on the HotpotQA and MuSiQue datasets demonstrate that the QQ framework significantly improves the quality of generated multi hop questions.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

A Unified Algorithmic Framework for Hybrid Reinforcement Learning in Tabular MDPs with Shifted Transition Dynamics

This paper investigates a hybrid reinforcement learning setting in tabular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where an agent aims to learn an optimal policy by combining online interactions with a target environment and offline data from a source environment. A central challenge is that offline data may be collected from outdated environments with shifted transition dynamics, making naive integration of historical data ineffective. To address this, we propose a unified algorithmic framework featuring two algorithms: MIN-UCB-VI for regret minimization and MAX-LCB-VI for best policy identification. Both algorithms leverage fine-grained bias information to more effectively exploit offline data under general transition shifts. We provide theoretical guarantees for our framework, including both instance-dependent and independent upper bounds on regret and sub-optimality gap. Furthermore, we establish matching lower bounds to demonstrate the optimality of our approach and validate our theoretical findings through extensive experiments.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

ESC-Skills: Discovering and Self-Evolving Skills for Emotional Support Conversations

Existing emotional support conversation (ESC) systems mainly rely on end-to-end response generation or coarse strategy supervision, offering limited interpretability and little support for systematic skill improvement. We propose ESC-Skills, a skill-centric framework that discovers and self-evolves executable emotional support skills. We first model localized support interactions as Intervention Units (IUs), which capture state--action--outcome dynamics between seeker states, support interventions, and post-response emotional changes. Based on IUs extracted from both successful and failed ESC dialogues, we construct the ESC-Skills Bank, a repository of executable emotional support skills containing intervention guidance, applicability conditions, expected outcomes, and potential risks. To further improve robustness, we introduce a multi-profile self-evolutionary refinement framework in which an ESC agent interacts with diverse simulated seeker profiles under SAGE evaluation. The resulting interaction traces are analyzed to identify missing skills, unsafe interventions, and profile-specific failure patterns, which are then used to refine the Skills Bank through simulation-based verification. Experimental results demonstrate that ESC-Skills improves both response-level quality and dialogue-level emotional outcomes while providing more interpretable and controllable support behaviors. We will release the code, prompts, and ESC-Skills Bank at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Harnesses for Inference-Time Alignment over Execution Trajectories

Harness engineering has emerged as an important inference-time technique for large language model (LLM) agents, aiming to improve long-term performance through task decomposition and guided execution. However, more elaborate harnesses are not uniformly better: increasing decomposition or guidance can sometimes improve execution, but can also reduce final task success. We study harness design through the lens of inference-time trajectory alignment. This perspective separates harness into two mechanisms: task decomposition, which structures a task into sub-goals, and guided execution, which reshapes local action distributions during execution. This decomposition allows us to quantify how workflow granularity, retry budgets, and guidance-induced action reweighting shape the performance limits of harness design. It further reveals concrete failure modes, including over-decomposition, over-pruning, and hallucinated execution. We validate these predictions through controlled synthetic experiments and real terminal agent benchmarks. Inspired by the theory, we further show that effective harnesses can be partial: specifying only the initial steps and leaving the remaining execution to agent can achieve higher pass rate than fully structured workflows.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Sample-Mean Anchored Thompson Sampling for Offline-to-Online Learning with Distribution Shift

Offline-to-online learning aims to improve online decision-making by leveraging offline logged data. A central challenge in this setting is the distribution shift between offline and online environments. While some existing works attempt to leverage shifted offline data, they largely rely on UCB-type algorithms. Thompson sampling (TS) represents another canonical class of bandit algorithms, well known for its strong empirical performance and naturally suited to offline-to-online learning through its Bayesian formulation. However, unlike UCB indices, posterior samples in TS are not guaranteed to be optimistic with respect to the true arm means. This makes indices constructed from purely online and hybrid data difficult to compare and complicates their use. To address this issue, we propose sample-mean anchored TS (Anchor-TS), which introduces a novel median-based anchoring rule that defines the arm index as the median of an online posterior sample, a hybrid posterior sample, and the online sample mean. The median anchoring systematically corrects bias induced by distribution shift by mitigating over-estimation for suboptimal arms and under-estimation for optimal arms, while exploiting offline information to obtain more accurate estimates when the shift is small. We establish theoretical guarantees showing that the proposed algorithm safely leverages offline data to accelerate online learning, and quantifying how the degree of distribution shift and the size of offline data affect the resulting regret reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements of our algorithm over baselines.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Agent^2 RL-Bench: Can LLM Agents Engineer Agentic RL Post-Training?

We introduce Agent2 RL-Bench, a compact diagnostic benchmark for evaluating agentic RL post-training, which tests whether LLM agents can autonomously design, implement, debug, and execute post-training pipelines that improve foundation models. RL post-training increasingly drives model alignment and specialization, yet existing benchmarks are largely static, rewarding supervised fine-tuning or script generation without assessing an agent's ability to close an interactive RL loop. Agent2 RL-Bench provides a unified agent-facing interface: each run starts from an isolated workspace containing a base model, task data, instructions, and a grading API, and agents must iterate within a fixed budget by training models and submitting artifacts for evaluation. The benchmark spans six tasks across three levels, from static rule-based training to judge-based optimization and closed-loop online RL with trajectory collection. Two diagnostic skills, namely runtime recording and post-hoc summarization, enable structured analysis of agent behavior, facilitating smooth and effective iteration of the benchmark's evaluation framework. Across five agent systems and six driver LLMs, agents show intelligent behavior but clear limitations: one RL-oriented run improves ALFWorld from 4.85 to 93.28 via SFT warm-up and GRPO with online rollouts, yet DeepSearchQA remains difficult, most successful routes rely on supervised pipelines, and interactive outcomes show large single-run differences across agent stacks. Overall, Agent2 RL-Bench shows that current agents can sometimes engineer online RL, but stable agent-driven RL post-training remains rare under fixed budgets. It also demonstrates that our benchmark provides a strong and effective evaluation framework for future research in this direction. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RD-Agent/blob/main/rdagent/scenarios/rl/autorl_bench/README.md

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

A Regret Perspective on Online Multiple Testing

Online Multiple Testing (OMT), a fundamental pillar of sequential statistical inference, traditionally evaluates the False Discovery Rate (FDR) and statistical power in isolation, obscuring the highly asymmetric costs of false positives and false negatives in modern automated pipelines. To unify this evaluation, we introduce $\textit{Weighted Regret}$. Under this metric, we prove the $\textit{Duality of Regret Conservation}$: purely deterministic procedures ensuring strict FDR control inevitably incur an $Ω(T)$ linear regret penalty, as threshold depletion during signal-sparse cold starts forces massive false negatives. Tailored for exogenous testing streams, we propose Decoupled-OMT (DOMT) as a baseline-agnostic meta-wrapper. By incorporating a history-decoupled, strictly non-negative random perturbation, DOMT rescues purely deterministic baselines from severe threshold depletion. Crucially, it preserves exact asymptotic safety in stationary environments and rigorously bounds finite-sample error inflation during cold-starts. Guaranteeing zero additional false negatives, it yields an order-optimal $Ω(\sqrt{T})$ regret reduction in bursty environments, with a derived ``Cold-Start Tax'' characterizing the exact phase transition of algorithmic superiority. Experiments validate that DOMT consistently curtails empirical weighted regret, achieving an order-optimal sublinear mitigation of threshold depletion to navigate the non-stationary Pareto frontier.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2026

Enhancing Target-Guided Proactive Dialogue Systems via Conversational Scenario Modeling and Intent-Keyword Bridging

A target-guided proactive dialogue system aims to steer conversations proactively toward pre-defined targets, such as designated keywords or specific topics. During guided conversations, dynamically modeling conversational scenarios and intent keywords to guide system utterance generation is beneficial; however, existing work largely overlooks this aspect, resulting in a mismatch with the dynamics of real-world conversations. In this paper, we jointly model user profiles and domain knowledge as conversational scenarios to introduce a scenario bias that dynamically influences system utterances, and employ intent-keyword bridging to predict intent keywords for upcoming dialogue turns, providing higher level and more flexible guidance. Extensive automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of conversational scenario modeling and intent keyword bridging, yielding substantial improvements in proactivity, fluency, and informativeness for target-guided proactive dialogue systems, thereby narrowing the gap with real world interactions.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Best Arm Identification in Generalized Linear Bandits via Hybrid Feedback

We study fixed-confidence best arm identification in generalized linear bandits under a hybrid feedback model: at each round, the learner may query either (i) absolute reward feedback from a single arm or (ii) relative (dueling) feedback from an arm pair, both governed by generalized linear models. We introduce a likelihood-ratio--based confidence sequence that unifies heterogeneous generalized linear observations and yields an explicit ellipsoidal confidence set under a self-concordance assumption. Building on this confidence set, we propose a hybrid Track-and-Stop algorithm that adaptively allocates queries by tracking a minimax-optimal design over a joint action space of arms and pairs. We establish $δ$-correctness and provide high-probability upper bounds on the stopping time. We further extend the framework to a cost-aware setting that accounts for heterogeneous acquisition costs across feedback modalities. Empirical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithms significantly improve sample efficiency over baseline methods.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Modeling Multiple Support Strategies within a Single Turn for Emotional Support Conversations

Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to assist individuals experiencing distress by generating empathetic and supportive dialogue. While prior work typically assumes that each supporter turn corresponds to a single strategy, real-world supportive communication often involves multiple strategies within a single utterance. In this paper, we revisit the ESC task by formulating it as multi-strategy utterance generation, where each utterance may contain one or more strategy-response pairs. We propose two generation methods: All-in-One, which predicts all strategy-response pairs in a single decoding step, and One-by-One, which iteratively generates strategy-response pairs until completion. Both methods are further enhanced with cognitive reasoning guided by reinforcement learning to improve strategy selection and response composition. We evaluate our models on the ESConv dataset under both utterance-level and dialogue-level settings. Experimental results show that our methods effectively model multi-strategy utterances and lead to improved supportive quality and dialogue success. To our knowledge, this work provides the first systematic empirical evidence that allowing multiple support strategies within a single utterance is both feasible and beneficial for emotional support conversations. All code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Pseudo-Siamese Network for Planning in Target-Oriented Proactive Dialogues

A target-oriented proactive dialogue system is designed to steer conversations toward predefined targets while actively providing suggestions. The core paradigm of such a system is to plan a reasonable dialogue path and subsequently guide language models (e.g., pre-trained or large language models) to generate responses, where dialogue path planning serves as the central component-a novel yet under-explored problem. In this work, we propose a Forward-Focused Bidirectional Pseudo-Siamese Network (FF-BPSN) for dialogue path planning toward predefined dialogue targets. FF-BPSN employs two identical transformer-based decoders for forward and backward planning, together with a forward-focused module that integrates bidirectional information to construct the final forward path. This path benefits from bidirectional planning while prioritizing forward information. We then employ the planned path to guide language models in response generation. Extensive experiments on DuRecDial and DuRecDial 2.0 demonstrate that FF-BPSN achieves state-of-the-art performance in dialogue path planning and significantly enhances the effectiveness of target-oriented proactive dialogue systems.

cs.CL↗