arXiv subjects

Haolang Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Haolang Zhao.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

EmoDistill: Offline Emotion Skill Distillation for Language Model Agents in Adversarial Negotiation

Post-trained LLMs are often optimized to produce helpful, polite, and accommodating responses. In adversarial negotiation, however, such behavior can become a vulnerability: emotionally framed language may influence an agent's bargaining decisions in ways that conflict with its user's objectives. We therefore introduce EmoDistill, an offline framework for distilling emotional negotiation skills from LLM-LLM interactions into smaller language-model agents. Here, an emotional negotiation skill is a state-conditioned behavior that determines which explicit emotion to invoke in a bargaining state and how to realize that emotion as an effective negotiation utterance. EmoDistill learns these two components separately: an Implicit Q-Learning (IQL) selector learns which emotion to express in each bargaining state, while a LoRA-adapted 7B policy learns emotion-conditioned expression through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Judge Policy Optimization (JPO). Across four emotion-sensitive negotiation domains, the full EmoDistill policy achieves competitive utility and improves over vanilla and IQL-only baselines in most settings. Emotion-free ablations show that removing the explicit emotion channel substantially reduces overall negotiation utility, while transfer experiments reveal partial, domain-dependent transfer and robustness to unseen LLM counterparties.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Helicase: Uncertainty-Guided Supply Chain Knowledge Graph Construction with Autonomous Multi-Agent LLMs

LLM-based multi-agent systems have been widely adopted for knowledge retrieval and report generation, synthesizing known information through web search and textual reasoning. However, many critical information tasks in supply chains are not simple one-shot queries: they are structural inference problems requiring multi-hop reasoning across complex, fragmented web resources. Questions such as \textit{``Which Tesla components use lithium from Australian mines?''} have no answer in any single document; answers must be computationally synthesized through the autonomous construction and analysis of dynamic knowledge graphs assembled from fragmented, heterogeneous sources. Moreover, such discovery processes must be uncertainty-aware: decisions depend not only on answers but on calibrated confidence in their reliability, traceable to source quality and reasoning consistency. To address this capability gap, we propose \textit{Helicase}, an autonomous multi-agent LLM system for uncertainty-guided supply chain knowledge graph construction. \textit{Helicase} decomposes high-level supply-chain queries into executable investigation plans, coordinates specialized web-search, reasoning, and coding agents through iterative verification loops, and incrementally constructs query-specific supply chain knowledge graphs with per-fact uncertainty annotations. Its three-layer uncertainty framework tracks uncertainty at the action, trajectory, and memory layers, enabling both structural inference and calibrated confidence assessment. To evaluate autonomous reasoning across the full complexity spectrum, we introduce SCQA (Supply Chain Query Assessment), a benchmark of 80 supply chain queries organized into four quadrants spanning single-hop to multi-hop inference under both high and low data visibility.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

VeriTrace: Evolving Mental Models for Deep Research Agents

Deep research agents face vast, interdependent, and pervasively uncertain information. Existing systems explore what evolving intermediate representations should look like, but leave their evolution to the LLM's implicit reasoning. Without explicit regulation, the intermediate layer is easily contaminated by mixed-quality information, and errors propagate along its dependencies, so model scale often ends up substituting for absent regulation. We argue that an agent's mental model should instead evolve through explicit feedback that continuously aligns task understanding with reality, and identify three regulatory loops: interpretive update, deviation feedback, and schema revision. We realise this in VeriTrace, a cognitive-graph framework that explicitly implements the three loops. Using matched Qwen3.5-27B backbones, VeriTrace improves over the strongest matched baseline by an average of 4.82 pp on DeepResearch Bench (DRB) Insight (1.83 pp Overall) and by 5.9 pp Overall win rate on DeepConsult. With Config-DeepSeek, it achieves the strongest reproducible open-source result on DRB.

cs.AI↗