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Tiezheng Yu

Publications and source records attributed to Tiezheng Yu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

What Makes Interaction Trajectories Effective for Training Terminal Agents?

Stronger code agents are commonly assumed to be superior teachers for post-training, yet this assumption remains poorly disentangled from task difficulty, harness design, and student capacity. We investigate this pedagogical link using Terminal-Lego, a scalable pipeline that transforms multi-domain real-world issues into environment-verified agentic tasks. Surprisingly, standalone performance does not dictate teaching efficacy: while Claude Opus 4.6 achieves higher scores on Terminal-Bench 2.0, students fine-tuned on trajectories from DeepSeek-V3.2, a lower-scoring agent, exhibit significantly stronger generalization. We attribute this "pedagogical paradox" to Environment-Grounded Supervision (EGS): trajectories that explicitly expose inspect-act-verify behaviors through harness-visible interactions allow students to internalize robust problem-solving routines rather than fragile action sequences. Scaling analysis reveals exceptional data efficiency: with only 15.3k Terminal-Lego trajectories, for example, Qwen3-32B achieves a 24.3% score on Terminal-Bench 2.0, rivaling previous SOTA performance established with over 30x the data volume. Our results suggest that the frontier of agent post-training lies beyond mere outcome-matching, shifting the focus toward "Harness Engineering", where the systematic design of environment-grounded interaction structures serves as the primary catalyst for reproducible and generalizable agentic intelligence.

cs.AI

One Adapts to Any: Meta Reward Modeling for Personalized LLM Alignment

Alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) aims to align outputs with human preferences, and personalized alignment further adapts models to individual users. This relies on personalized reward models that capture user-specific preferences and automatically provide individualized feedback. However, developing these models faces two critical challenges: the scarcity of feedback from individual users and the need for efficient adaptation to unseen users. We argue that addressing these constraints requires a paradigm shift from fitting data to learn user preferences to learn the process of preference adaptation. To realize this, we propose Meta Reward Modeling (MRM), which reformulates personalized reward modeling as a meta-learning problem. Specifically, we represent each user's reward model as a weighted combination of base reward functions, and optimize the initialization of these weights using a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML)-style framework to support fast adaptation under limited feedback. To ensure robustness, we introduce the Robust Personalization Objective (RPO), which places greater emphasis on hard-to-learn users during meta optimization. Extensive experiments on personalized preference datasets validate that MRM enhances few-shot personalization, improves user robustness, and consistently outperforms baselines. We release code at https://github.com/ModalityDance/MRM.

cs.CL

Agent-as-a-Judge

LLM-as-a-Judge has revolutionized AI evaluation by leveraging large language models for scalable assessments. However, as evaluands become increasingly complex, specialized, and multi-step, the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge has become constrained by inherent biases, shallow single-pass reasoning, and the inability to verify assessments against real-world observations. This has catalyzed the transition to Agent-as-a-Judge, where agentic judges employ planning, tool-augmented verification, multi-agent collaboration, and persistent memory to enable more robust, verifiable, and nuanced evaluations. Despite the rapid proliferation of agentic evaluation systems, the field lacks a unified framework to navigate this shifting landscape. To bridge this gap, we present the first comprehensive survey tracing this evolution. Specifically, we identify key dimensions that characterize this paradigm shift and establish a developmental taxonomy. We organize core methodologies and survey applications across general and professional domains. Furthermore, we analyze frontier challenges and identify promising research directions, ultimately providing a clear roadmap for the next generation of agentic evaluation.

cs.CL

InSight-o3: Empowering Multimodal Foundation Models with Generalized Visual Search

The ability for AI agents to "think with images" requires a sophisticated blend of reasoning and perception. However, current open multimodal agents still largely fall short on the reasoning aspect crucial for real-world tasks like analyzing documents with dense charts/diagrams and navigating maps. To address this gap, we introduce O3-Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal reasoning with interleaved attention to visual details. O3-Bench features challenging problems that require agents to piece together subtle visual information from distinct image areas through multi-step reasoning. The problems are highly challenging even for frontier systems like OpenAI o3, which only obtains 40.8% accuracy on O3-Bench. To make progress, we propose InSight-o3, a multi-agent framework consisting of a visual reasoning agent (vReasoner) and a visual search agent (vSearcher) for which we introduce the task of generalized visual search -- locating relational, fuzzy, or conceptual regions described in free-form language, beyond just simple objects or figures in natural images. We then present a multimodal LLM purpose-trained for this task via reinforcement learning. As a plug-and-play agent, our vSearcher empowers frontier multimodal models (as vReasoners), significantly improving their performance on a wide range of benchmarks. This marks a concrete step towards powerful o3-like open systems. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/m-Just/InSight-o3 .

cs.CV

The Synergy Dilemma of Long-CoT SFT and RL: Investigating Post-Training Techniques for Reasoning VLMs

Large vision-language models (VLMs) increasingly adopt post-training techniques such as long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to elicit sophisticated reasoning. While these methods exhibit synergy in language-only models, their joint effectiveness in VLMs remains uncertain. We present a systematic investigation into the distinct roles and interplay of long-CoT SFT and RL across multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks. We find that SFT improves performance on difficult questions by in-depth, structured reasoning, but introduces verbosity and degrades performance on simpler ones. In contrast, RL promotes generalization and brevity, yielding consistent improvements across all difficulty levels, though the improvements on the hardest questions are less prominent compared to SFT. Surprisingly, combining them through two-staged, interleaved, or progressive training strategies, as well as data mixing and model merging, all fails to produce additive benefits, instead leading to trade-offs in accuracy, reasoning style, and response length. This ``synergy dilemma'' highlights the need for more seamless and adaptive approaches to unlock the full potential of combined post-training techniques for reasoning VLMs.

cs.CL

Quantization Hurts Reasoning? An Empirical Study on Quantized Reasoning Models

Recent advancements in reasoning language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex tasks, but their extended chain-of-thought reasoning process increases inference overhead. While quantization has been widely adopted to reduce the inference cost of large language models, its impact on reasoning models remains understudied. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic study on quantized reasoning models, evaluating the open-sourced DeepSeek-R1-Distilled Qwen and LLaMA families ranging from 1.5B to 70B parameters, QwQ-32B, and Qwen3-8B. Our investigation covers weight, KV cache, and activation quantization using state-of-the-art algorithms at varying bit-widths, with extensive evaluation across mathematical (AIME, MATH-500), scientific (GPQA), and programming (LiveCodeBench) reasoning benchmarks. Our findings reveal that while lossless quantization can be achieved with W8A8 or W4A16 quantization, lower bit-widths introduce significant accuracy risks. We further identify model size, model origin, and task difficulty as critical determinants of performance. Contrary to expectations, quantized models do not exhibit increased output lengths. In addition, strategically scaling the model sizes or reasoning steps can effectively enhance the performance. All quantized models and codes are open-sourced in https://github.com/ruikangliu/Quantized-Reasoning-Models.

cs.CL

Learning to Align Multi-Faceted Evaluation: A Unified and Robust Framework

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used more and more extensively for automated evaluation in various scenarios. Previous studies have attempted to fine-tune open-source LLMs to replicate the evaluation explanations and judgments of powerful proprietary models, such as GPT-4. However, these methods are largely limited to text-based analyses under predefined general criteria, resulting in reduced adaptability for unseen instructions and demonstrating instability in evaluating adherence to quantitative and structural constraints. To address these limitations, we propose a novel evaluation framework, ARJudge, that adaptively formulates evaluation criteria and synthesizes both text-based and code-driven analyses to evaluate LLM responses. ARJudge consists of two components: a fine-tuned Analyzer that generates multi-faceted evaluation analyses and a tuning-free Refiner that combines and refines all analyses to make the final judgment. We construct a Composite Analysis Corpus that integrates tasks for evaluation criteria generation alongside text-based and code-driven analysis generation to train the Analyzer. Our results demonstrate that ARJudge outperforms existing fine-tuned evaluators in effectiveness and robustness. Furthermore, it demonstrates the importance of multi-faceted evaluation and code-driven analyses in enhancing evaluation capabilities.

cs.CL

Subtle Errors in Reasoning: Preference Learning via Error-injected Self-editing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited strong mathematical reasoning prowess, tackling tasks ranging from basic arithmetic to advanced competition-level problems. However, frequently occurring subtle yet critical errors, such as miscalculations or incorrect substitutions, limit the LLMs' full potential. Existing studies to improve mathematical ability typically involve applying preference learning to step-wise solution pairs. Although these methods leverage samples of varying granularity to mitigate reasoning errors, they overlook critical subtle errors. In this work, we propose a novel preference learning framework called eRror-Injected Self-Editing (RISE), which injects predefined subtle errors into pivotal tokens in reasoning or computation steps to construct hard pairs for error mitigation. In detail, RISE uses the LLM itself to edit a small number of tokens in the solution, injecting designed subtle errors. Then, pairs composed of self-edited solutions and their corresponding correct ones, along with pairs of correct and incorrect solutions obtained through sampling, are used together for subtle error-aware DPO training. Compared with other preference learning methods, RISE further refines the training objective without requiring fine-grained sampling or preference annotation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of RISE, with preference learning on Qwen2-7B-Instruct yielding notable improvements of 3.0% on GSM8K and 7.9% on MATH with only 4.5K training samples. Moreover, the effect of error mitigation extends from mathematical reasoning to logical reasoning and code generation.

cs.CL

A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity

This paper proposes a framework for quantitatively evaluating interactive LLMs such as ChatGPT using publicly available data sets. We carry out an extensive technical evaluation of ChatGPT using 23 data sets covering 8 different common NLP application tasks. We evaluate the multitask, multilingual and multi-modal aspects of ChatGPT based on these data sets and a newly designed multimodal dataset. We find that ChatGPT outperforms LLMs with zero-shot learning on most tasks and even outperforms fine-tuned models on some tasks. We find that it is better at understanding non-Latin script languages than generating them. It is able to generate multimodal content from textual prompts, via an intermediate code generation step. Moreover, we find that ChatGPT is 63.41% accurate on average in 10 different reasoning categories under logical reasoning, non-textual reasoning, and commonsense reasoning, hence making it an unreliable reasoner. It is, for example, better at deductive than inductive reasoning. ChatGPT suffers from hallucination problems like other LLMs and it generates more extrinsic hallucinations from its parametric memory as it does not have access to an external knowledge base. Finally, the interactive feature of ChatGPT enables human collaboration with the underlying LLM to improve its performance, i.e, 8% ROUGE-1 on summarization and 2% ChrF++ on machine translation, in a multi-turn "prompt engineering" fashion. We also release codebase for evaluation set extraction.

cs.CL

InstructAlign: High-and-Low Resource Language Alignment via Continual Crosslingual Instruction Tuning

Large language models (LLMs) that are tuned with instructions have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks and languages. However, their ability to generalize to underrepresented languages is limited due to the scarcity of available data. Additionally, directly adapting new languages to instruction-tuned LLMs can result in catastrophic forgetting, which leads to the loss of multitasking ability. To address this issue, we propose InstructAlign which uses continual crosslingual instruction tuning to enable LLMs to align new unseen languages with previously learned high-resource languages. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of InstructAlign in enabling the model to understand low-resource languages with limited parallel data while preventing catastrophic forgetting. Our work contributes to the advancement of language adaptation methods, particularly for adapting instruction-tuned LLMs to underrepresented languages. Our code is released on https://github.com/HLTCHKUST/InstructAlign

cs.CL

Towards Mitigating Hallucination in Large Language Models via Self-Reflection

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for generative and knowledge-intensive tasks including question-answering (QA) tasks. However, the practical deployment still faces challenges, notably the issue of "hallucination", where models generate plausible-sounding but unfaithful or nonsensical information. This issue becomes particularly critical in the medical domain due to the uncommon professional concepts and potential social risks involved. This paper analyses the phenomenon of hallucination in medical generative QA systems using widely adopted LLMs and datasets. Our investigation centers on the identification and comprehension of common problematic answers, with a specific emphasis on hallucination. To tackle this challenge, we present an interactive self-reflection methodology that incorporates knowledge acquisition and answer generation. Through this feedback process, our approach steadily enhances the factuality, consistency, and entailment of the generated answers. Consequently, we harness the interactivity and multitasking ability of LLMs and produce progressively more precise and accurate answers. Experimental results on both automatic and human evaluation demonstrate the superiority of our approach in hallucination reduction compared to baselines.

cs.CL

Improving Query-Focused Meeting Summarization with Query-Relevant Knowledge

Query-Focused Meeting Summarization (QFMS) aims to generate a summary of a given meeting transcript conditioned upon a query. The main challenges for QFMS are the long input text length and sparse query-relevant information in the meeting transcript. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-enhanced two-stage framework called Knowledge-Aware Summarizer (KAS) to tackle the challenges. In the first stage, we introduce knowledge-aware scores to improve the query-relevant segment extraction. In the second stage, we incorporate query-relevant knowledge in the summary generation. Experimental results on the QMSum dataset show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Further analysis proves the competency of our methods in generating relevant and faithful summaries.

cs.CL

NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources

We present NusaCrowd, a collaborative initiative to collect and unify existing resources for Indonesian languages, including opening access to previously non-public resources. Through this initiative, we have brought together 137 datasets and 118 standardized data loaders. The quality of the datasets has been assessed manually and automatically, and their value is demonstrated through multiple experiments. NusaCrowd's data collection enables the creation of the first zero-shot benchmarks for natural language understanding and generation in Indonesian and the local languages of Indonesia. Furthermore, NusaCrowd brings the creation of the first multilingual automatic speech recognition benchmark in Indonesian and the local languages of Indonesia. Our work strives to advance natural language processing (NLP) research for languages that are under-represented despite being widely spoken.

cs.CL

RHO ($ρ$): Reducing Hallucination in Open-domain Dialogues with Knowledge Grounding

Dialogue systems can leverage large pre-trained language models and knowledge to generate fluent and informative responses. However, these models are still prone to produce hallucinated responses not supported by the input source, which greatly hinders their application. The heterogeneity between external knowledge and dialogue context challenges representation learning and source integration, and further contributes to unfaithfulness. To handle this challenge and generate more faithful responses, this paper presents RHO ($ρ$) utilizing the representations of linked entities and relation predicates from a knowledge graph (KG). We propose (1) local knowledge grounding to combine textual embeddings with the corresponding KG embeddings; and (2) global knowledge grounding to equip RHO with multi-hop reasoning abilities via the attention mechanism. In addition, we devise a response re-ranking technique based on walks over KG sub-graphs for better conversational reasoning. Experimental results on OpenDialKG show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both automatic and human evaluation by a large margin, especially in hallucination reduction (17.54% in FeQA).

cs.CL

Towards Answering Open-ended Ethical Quandary Questions

Considerable advancements have been made in various NLP tasks based on the impressive power of large language models (LLMs) and many NLP applications are deployed in our daily lives. In this work, we challenge the capability of LLMs with the new task of Ethical Quandary Generative Question Answering. Ethical quandary questions are more challenging to address because multiple conflicting answers may exist to a single quandary. We explore the current capability of LLMs in providing an answer with a deliberative exchange of different perspectives to an ethical quandary, in the approach of Socratic philosophy, instead of providing a closed answer like an oracle. We propose a model that searches for different ethical principles applicable to the ethical quandary and generates an answer conditioned on the chosen principles through prompt-based few-shot learning. We also discuss the remaining challenges and ethical issues involved in this task and suggest the direction toward developing responsible NLP systems by incorporating human values explicitly.

cs.CL

Casual Conversations v2: Designing a large consent-driven dataset to measure algorithmic bias and robustness

Developing robust and fair AI systems require datasets with comprehensive set of labels that can help ensure the validity and legitimacy of relevant measurements. Recent efforts, therefore, focus on collecting person-related datasets that have carefully selected labels, including sensitive characteristics, and consent forms in place to use those attributes for model testing and development. Responsible data collection involves several stages, including but not limited to determining use-case scenarios, selecting categories (annotations) such that the data are fit for the purpose of measuring algorithmic bias for subgroups and most importantly ensure that the selected categories/subcategories are robust to regional diversities and inclusive of as many subgroups as possible. Meta, in a continuation of our efforts to measure AI algorithmic bias and robustness (https://ai.facebook.com/blog/shedding-light-on-fairness-in-ai-with-a-new-data-set), is working on collecting a large consent-driven dataset with a comprehensive list of categories. This paper describes our proposed design of such categories and subcategories for Casual Conversations v2.

cs.CV

Enabling Classifiers to Make Judgements Explicitly Aligned with Human Values

Many NLP classification tasks, such as sexism/racism detection or toxicity detection, are based on human values. Yet, human values can vary under diverse cultural conditions. Therefore, we introduce a framework for value-aligned classification that performs prediction based on explicitly written human values in the command. Along with the task, we propose a practical approach that distills value-aligned knowledge from large-scale language models (LLMs) to construct value-aligned classifiers in two steps. First, we generate value-aligned training data from LLMs by prompt-based few-shot learning. Next, we fine-tune smaller classification models with the generated data for the task. Empirical results show that our VA-Models surpass multiple baselines by at least 15.56% on the F1-score, including few-shot learning with OPT-175B and existing text augmentation methods. We suggest that using classifiers with explicit human value input improves both inclusivity & explainability in AI.

cs.CL

Kaggle Competition: Cantonese Audio-Visual Speech Recognition for In-car Commands

With the rise of deep learning and intelligent vehicles, the smart assistant has become an essential in-car component to facilitate driving and provide extra functionalities. In-car smart assistants should be able to process general as well as car-related commands and perform corresponding actions, which eases driving and improves safety. However, in this research field, most datasets are in major languages, such as English and Chinese. There is a huge data scarcity issue for low-resource languages, hindering the development of research and applications for broader communities. Therefore, it is crucial to have more benchmarks to raise awareness and motivate the research in low-resource languages. To mitigate this problem, we collect a new dataset, namely Cantonese In-car Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (CI-AVSR), for in-car speech recognition in the Cantonese language with video and audio data. Together with it, we propose Cantonese Audio-Visual Speech Recognition for In-car Commands as a new challenge for the community to tackle low-resource speech recognition under in-car scenarios.

cs.CL