arXiv subjects

Runchuan Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Runchuan Zhu.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

An evidence-guided reinforcement learning method to improve psychiatric reasoning in small language models

Privacy and computational constraints limit the use of large language models in psychiatry, while adapting small language models (SLMs) often requires substantial data and expert annotation. We developed ClinMPO, an evidence-guided reinforcement-learning framework guided by the psychiatrist-defined Clinical Psychiatry Thinking Strategy (CPTS). ClinMPO uses ClinRM, a reward model trained on 18,569 question--answer pairs from 4,474 psychiatry articles. We evaluated four Qwen3 sizes on 1,737 model-screened questions. ClinMPO outperformed Base, supervised fine-tuning and standard group relative policy optimization across scales. From responses by 300 senior pre-licensure medical students, we established the human baseline, a medical-student reference. The 4B model approached this baseline, whereas the 8B model surpassed it and ranked first among 31 models and post-training variants. ClinMPO improved performance across two complementary schemes covering ICD-11 diagnostic categories and psychiatric practice competencies. Blinded assessment by three clinicians showed improved rationale quality across CPTS criteria. These findings highlight how existing clinical evidence and specialist knowledge can be incorporated into the development of medical AI systems through evidence-guided learning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Benchmarking and Boosting Multilingual Capabilities of LVLMs via OCR-Centric Reinforcement Learning

Evaluating the multilingual capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remains challenging because most benchmarks rely on non-parallel corpora, making it unclear whether cross-lingual performance gaps reflect model limitations or dataset inconsistencies. To address this, we introduce PM4Bench, the first multimodal, multilingual, multi-task benchmark built on a strictly parallel 10-language corpus, enabling fair, apples-to-apples cross-lingual comparison of model performance. We further introduce a vision setting that embeds textual inputs directly into images, better approximating deployment scenarios where LVLM-driven agents interact with virtual or physical environments through unified visual observations. Experiments with 10 LVLMs reveal that OCR is a key factor behind cross-lingual disparity when textual content is rendered visually. Motivated by this, we design an OCR-centric GRPO training strategy using fully synthesized, label-free OCR data, without expensive task-specific VQA supervision. The resulting model improves general multilingual VQA capability, reduces cross-lingual disparities under the vision setting, and transfers gains beyond PM4Bench. This methodology offers an efficient, label-free pathway toward more equitable multilingual deployment of LVLM-driven agents.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

HPFA: Hypergraph-Based Paired Failure Attribution for LLM Reasoning

Reflection is a powerful mechanism for LLM reasoning, yet its effectiveness hinges on accurately attributing failures to specific reasoning steps, a capability that current models notably lack. Existing failure attribution methods either require expensive step-by-step counterfactual testing that scales poorly with trajectory length, or treat reasoning traces as flat sequences that ignore the inherent non-linear logical dependencies. We propose a hypergraph-based paired failure attribution (HPFA) framework that attributes the failure root cause by comparing the hyperedges of the targeted failure reasoning path against a reference successful path. By reducing the search space, our method efficiently localizes root causes and enables scalable synthesis of attribution data for training a lightweight attributor model via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and agentic coding tasks demonstrate that HPFA can dramatically increase attribution accuracy and efficiency, and the trained attributor consistently improves reasoning accuracy at test time, outperforming baselines that lack graph structure or paired analysis.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Can Induced Emotion Bias LLM Behaviors in Sequential Decision Making?

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in high-stakes domains, understanding contextual factors that may modulate their decision-making becomes critical. While LLMs are trained to perceive and resonate with users' emotions, it remains unclear whether induced emotion can influence their sequential decision-making. We investigate this question using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a classic psychological paradigm for studying decision-making under uncertainty, combined with an imagination-based emotion induction procedure. We first validate the feasibility of this paradigm by confirming that LLMs can sense strong, distinguishable emotions from context and that LLM agents can learn from sequential interactions in a human-like pace. With the validated setup, we find that, different from humans, induced emotion does not significantly bias the decision dynamics of LLM agents on average. However, the effects of anger are conditioned: inducing anger makes LLM agents less sensitive to penalties for bad decisions, and in early stages of the game, anger can lower exploration, locking decisions into a few choices early. These findings reveal the subtle yet distinct effects of induced emotion on LLM decision-making compared to human behavior, and provide a tool for future research on affective modulation of LLM agents.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

RetrDex: Efficient Object Retrieval in Cluttered Scenes with a Dexterous Hand

Retrieving objects buried beneath clutter is both challenging and time-consuming, as complex support relationships make manipulation particularly difficult. Existing methods either focus on support relations and rely on sequential grasping to remove occluding objects, or perform preparatory actions such as pushing to facilitate subsequent grasps. However, these approaches are often inefficient and treat physical interactions as isolated auxiliary steps. In this paper, we propose RetrDex, an efficient framework for dexterous arm-hand systems to learn object retrieval in cluttered scenes. Our approach leverages large-scale parallel reinforcement learning (RL) in diverse cluttered scenes and incorporates a spatially aware representation that encodes occlusion patterns and spatial relationships among the target, the dexterous hand, and surrounding clutter. This representation enables the policy to develop diverse manipulation skills (e.g., pushing, stirring, and poking) that actively clear occluders. We evaluate RetrDex on 16 household objects across varied clutter configurations, and obtain strong retrieval performance and efficiency on both seen and unseen targets. Furthermore, we demonstrate successful zero-shot transfer to a real-world dexterous multi-fingered robot system, validating the practical applicability of our method. Videos can be found on our project website: https://RetrDex.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

3DS: Medical Domain Adaptation of LLMs via Decomposed Difficulty-based Data Selection

Large Language Models(LLMs) excel in general tasks but struggle in specialized domains like healthcare due to limited domain-specific knowledge.Supervised Fine-Tuning(SFT) data construction for domain adaptation often relies on heuristic methods, such as GPT-4 annotation or manual data selection, with a data-centric focus on presumed diverse, high-quality datasets. However, these methods overlook the model's inherent knowledge distribution, introducing noise, redundancy, and irrelevant data, leading to a mismatch between the selected data and the model's learning task, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a two-stage model-centric data selection framework, Decomposed Difficulty Data Selection (3DS), which aligns data with the model's knowledge distribution for optimized adaptation. In Stage1, we apply Prompt-Driven Data Selection via Explicit Alignment, where the the model filters irrelevant or redundant data based on its internal knowledge. In Stage2, we perform Decomposed Difficulty Data Selection, where data selection is guided by our defined difficulty decomposition, using three metrics: Instruction Understanding, Response Confidence, and Response Correctness. Additionally, an attention-based importance weighting mechanism captures token importance for more accurate difficulty calibration. This two-stage approach ensures the selected data is not only aligned with the model's knowledge and preferences but also appropriately challenging for the model to learn, leading to more effective and targeted domain adaptation. In the case study of the medical domain, our extensive experiments on real-world healthcare datasets demonstrate the superiority of 3DS over exisiting methods in accuracy by over 5.29%. Our dataset and code has been open-sourced at https://github.com/PuppyKnightUniversity/3DS.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

AdaptFlow: Adaptive Workflow Optimization via Meta-Learning

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in agentic workflows, which are structured sequences of LLM invocations intended to solve complex tasks. However, existing approaches often rely on static templates or manually designed workflows, which limit adaptability to diverse tasks and hinder scalability. We propose AdaptFlow, a natural language-based meta-learning framework inspired by model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML). AdaptFlow learns a generalizable workflow initialization that enables rapid subtask-level adaptation. It employs a bi-level optimization scheme: the inner loop refines the workflow for a specific subtask using LLM-generated feedback, while the outer loop updates the shared initialization to perform well across tasks. This setup allows AdaptFlow to generalize effectively to unseen tasks by adapting the initialized workflow through language-guided modifications. Evaluated across question answering, code generation, and mathematical reasoning benchmarks, AdaptFlow consistently outperforms both manually crafted and automatically searched baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results with strong generalization across tasks and models. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/microsoft/DKI_LLM/tree/AdaptFlow/AdaptFlow.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Parenting: Optimizing Knowledge Selection of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Parameter Decoupling and Tailored Tuning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective solution to the issues faced by Large Language Models (LLMs) in hallucination generation and knowledge obsolescence by incorporating externally retrieved knowledge. However, existing methods lack effective control mechanisms for integrating internal and external knowledge. Inspired by human cognitive processes, we propose Parenting, a novel framework that decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. Specifically, Parenting utilizes a key parameter mining method that combines forward and backward propagation signals to localize subspaces representing different capabilities. Then, Parenting employs a type-tailored tuning strategy, applying specific and appropriate optimizations to different subspaces, aiming to achieve a balanced enhancement of both adherence and robustness. Extensive experiments on various datasets and models validate the effectiveness and generalizability of our method.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

EL4NER: Ensemble Learning for Named Entity Recognition via Multiple Small-Parameter Large Language Models

In-Context Learning (ICL) technique based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained prominence in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks for its lower computing resource consumption, less manual labeling overhead, and stronger generalizability. Nevertheless, most ICL-based NER methods depend on large-parameter LLMs: the open-source models demand substantial computational resources for deployment and inference, while the closed-source ones incur high API costs, raise data-privacy concerns, and hinder community collaboration. To address this question, we propose an Ensemble Learning Method for Named Entity Recognition (EL4NER), which aims at aggregating the ICL outputs of multiple open-source, small-parameter LLMs to enhance overall performance in NER tasks at less deployment and inference cost. Specifically, our method comprises three key components. First, we design a task decomposition-based pipeline that facilitates deep, multi-stage ensemble learning. Second, we introduce a novel span-level sentence similarity algorithm to establish an ICL demonstration retrieval mechanism better suited for NER tasks. Third, we incorporate a self-validation mechanism to mitigate the noise introduced during the ensemble process. We evaluated EL4NER on multiple widely adopted NER datasets from diverse domains. Our experimental results indicate that EL4NER surpasses most closed-source, large-parameter LLM-based methods at a lower parameter cost and even attains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among ICL-based methods on certain datasets. These results show the parameter efficiency of EL4NER and underscore the feasibility of employing open-source, small-parameter LLMs within the ICL paradigm for NER tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Evaluating Large Language Model with Knowledge Oriented Language Specific Simple Question Answering

We introduce KoLasSimpleQA, the first benchmark evaluating the multilingual factual ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Inspired by existing research, we created the question set with features such as single knowledge point coverage, absolute objectivity, unique answers, and temporal stability. These questions enable efficient evaluation using the LLM-as-judge paradigm, testing both the LLMs' factual memory and self-awareness ("know what they don't know"). KoLasSimpleQA expands existing research in two key dimensions: (1) Breadth (Multilingual Coverage): It includes 9 languages, supporting global applicability evaluation. (2) Depth (Dual Domain Design): It covers both the general domain (global facts) and the language-specific domain (such as history, culture, and regional traditions) for a comprehensive assessment of multilingual capabilities. We evaluated mainstream LLMs, including traditional LLM and emerging Large Reasoning Models. Results show significant performance differences between the two domains, particularly in performance metrics, ranking, calibration, and robustness. This highlights the need for targeted evaluation and optimization in multilingual contexts. We hope KoLasSimpleQA will help the research community better identify LLM capability boundaries in multilingual contexts and provide guidance for model optimization. We will release KoLasSimpleQA at https://github.com/opendatalab/KoLasSimpleQA .

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

GRAIT: Gradient-Driven Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning for Effective Hallucination Mitigation

Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) aims to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by improving their ability to refuse responses to questions beyond their knowledge, thereby reducing hallucinations and improving reliability. Effective RAIT must address two key challenges: firstly, effectively reject unknown questions to minimize hallucinations; secondly, avoid over-refusal to ensure questions that can be correctly answered are not rejected, thereby maintain the helpfulness of LLM outputs. In this paper, we address the two challenges by deriving insightful observations from the gradient-based perspective, and proposing the Gradient-driven Refusal Aware Instruction Tuning Framework GRAIT: (1) employs gradient-driven sample selection to effectively minimize hallucinations and (2) introduces an adaptive weighting mechanism during fine-tuning to reduce the risk of over-refusal, achieving the balance between accurate refusals and maintaining useful responses. Experimental evaluations on open-ended and multiple-choice question answering tasks demonstrate that GRAIT significantly outperforms existing RAIT methods in the overall performance. The source code and data will be available at https://github.com/opendatalab/GRAIT .

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Utilize the Flow before Stepping into the Same River Twice: Certainty Represented Knowledge Flow for Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning

Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to refuse to answer unknown questions. By modifying responses of unknown questions in the training data to refusal responses such as "I don't know", RAIT enhances the reliability of LLMs and reduces their hallucination. Generally, RAIT modifies training samples based on the correctness of the initial LLM's response. However, this crude approach can cause LLMs to excessively refuse answering questions they could have correctly answered, the problem we call over-refusal. In this paper, we explore two primary causes of over-refusal: Static conflict occurs when similar samples within the LLM's feature space receive differing supervision signals (original vs. modified "I don't know"). Dynamic conflict arises as the LLM's evolving knowledge during SFT enables it to answer previously unanswerable questions, but the now-answerable training samples still retain the original "I don't know" supervision signals from the initial LLM state, leading to inconsistencies. These conflicts cause the trained LLM to misclassify known questions as unknown, resulting in over-refusal. To address this issue, we introduce Certainty Represented Knowledge Flow for Refusal-Aware Instructions Tuning (CRaFT). CRaFT centers on two main contributions: First, we additionally incorporate response certainty to selectively filter and modify data, reducing static conflicts. Second, we implement preliminary rehearsal training to characterize changes in the LLM's knowledge state, which helps mitigate dynamic conflicts during the fine-tuning process. We conducted extensive experiments on open-ended question answering and multiple-choice question task. Experiment results show that CRaFT can improve LLM's overall performance during the RAIT process. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/opendatalab/CRaFT .

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

KnowPO: Knowledge-aware Preference Optimization for Controllable Knowledge Selection in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

By integrating external knowledge, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become an effective strategy for mitigating the hallucination problems that large language models (LLMs) encounter when dealing with knowledge-intensive tasks. However, in the process of integrating external non-parametric supporting evidence with internal parametric knowledge, inevitable knowledge conflicts may arise, leading to confusion in the model's responses. To enhance the knowledge selection of LLMs in various contexts, some research has focused on refining their behavior patterns through instruction-tuning. Nonetheless, due to the absence of explicit negative signals and comparative objectives, models fine-tuned in this manner may still exhibit undesirable behaviors such as contextual ignorance and contextual overinclusion. To this end, we propose a Knowledge-aware Preference Optimization strategy, dubbed KnowPO, aimed at achieving adaptive knowledge selection based on contextual relevance in real retrieval scenarios. Concretely, we proposed a general paradigm for constructing knowledge conflict datasets, which comprehensively cover various error types and learn how to avoid these negative signals through preference optimization methods. Simultaneously, we proposed a rewriting strategy and data ratio optimization strategy to address preference imbalances. Experimental results show that KnowPO outperforms previous methods for handling knowledge conflicts by over 37\%, while also exhibiting robust generalization across various out-of-distribution datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Few-shots Portrait Generation with Style Enhancement and Identity Preservation

Nowadays, the wide application of virtual digital human promotes the comprehensive prosperity and development of digital culture supported by digital economy. The personalized portrait automatically generated by AI technology needs both the natural artistic style and human sentiment. In this paper, we propose a novel StyleIdentityGAN model, which can ensure the identity and artistry of the generated portrait at the same time. Specifically, the style-enhanced module focuses on artistic style features decoupling and transferring to improve the artistry of generated virtual face images. Meanwhile, the identity-enhanced module preserves the significant features extracted from the input photo. Furthermore, the proposed method requires a small number of reference style data. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of StyleIdentityGAN over state-of-art methods in artistry and identity effects, with comparisons done qualitatively, quantitatively and through a perceptual user study. Code has been released on Github3.

cs.CV↗