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Pengjie Ren

39 accepted papers

2026

Disentangling Knowledge Representations for Large Language Model Editing

ICLR 2026poster

Knowledge Editing has emerged as a promising solution for efficiently updating embedded knowledge in large language models (LLMs). While existing approaches demonstrate effectiveness in integrating new knowledge and preserving the original capabilities of LLMs, they fail to maintain fine-grained irr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

From Traits to Roles: Consensus-Guided Composition of Orthogonal Experts for Cooperative MARL

IJCAI 2026

Parameter sharing is a central design choice in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, yet it fundamentally conflicts with the need for role specialization in heterogeneous cooperative environments. Existing role-based methods typically learn monolithic role representations, which often suf

Cited by 0Scholar
2025

Belief-Calibrated Multi-Agent Consensus Seeking for Complex NLP Tasks

NeurIPS 2025poster

A multi-agent system (MAS) enhances its capacity to solve complex natural language processing (NLP) tasks through collaboration among multiple agents, where consensus-seeking serves as a fundamental mechanism. However, existing consensus-seeking approaches typically rely on voting mechanisms to judg…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Bridging the Capability Gap: Joint Alignment Tuning for Harmonizing LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

EMNLP 2025

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the construction of multi-agent systems to solve complex tasks by dividing responsibilities among specialized agents, such as a planning agent for subgoal generation and a grounding agent for executing tool-use actions. Most existing method

2025

ExcluIR: Exclusionary Neural Information Retrieval

AAAI 2025technical

Exclusion is an important and universal linguistic skill that humans use to express what they do not want. There is little research on exclusionary retrieval, where users express what they do not want to be part of the results produced for their queries. We investigate the scenario of exclusionary r…

2025

Integrating Learning-Based Manipulation and Physics-Based Locomotion for Whole-Body Badminton Robot Control

ICRA 2025

Learning-based methods, such as imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL), can produce excel control policies over challenging agile robot tasks, such as sports robot. However, no existing work has harmonized learning-based policy with model-based methods to reduce training complexity

Cited by 6SourceScholar
2025

KELE: Residual Knowledge Erasure for Enhanced Multi-hop Reasoning in Knowledge Editing

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) face challenges with internal knowledge inaccuracies and outdated information. Knowledge editing has emerged as a pivotal approach to mitigate these issues. Although current knowledge editing techniques exhibit promising performance in single-hop reasoning tasks, they sh

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MACPO: Weak-to-Strong Alignment via Multi-Agent Contrastive Preference Optimization

ICLR 2025poster

As large language models (LLMs) are rapidly advancing and achieving near-human capabilities on specific tasks, aligning them with human values is becoming more urgent. In scenarios where LLMs outperform humans, we face a weak-to-strong alignment problem where we need to effectively align strong stud…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

Rethinking the Alignment of Psychotherapy Dialogue Generation with Motivational Interviewing Strategies

COLING 2025main

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating psychotherapeutic dialogues, particularly in the context of motivational interviewing (MI). However, the inherent lack of transparency in LLM outputs presents significant challenges given the sensitive nature of psy…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Retrieval Models Aren’t Tool-Savvy: Benchmarking Tool Retrieval for Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

Tool learning aims to augment large language models (LLMs) with diverse tools, enabling them to act as agents for solving practical tasks. Due to the limited context length of tool-using LLMs, adopting information retrieval (IR) models to select useful tools from large toolsets is a critical initial…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SLARD: A Chinese Superior Legal Article Retrieval Dataset

COLING 2025main

Retrieving superior legal articles involves identifying relevant legal articles that hold higher legal effectiveness. This process is crucial in legislative work because superior legal articles form the legal basis for drafting new laws. However, most existing legal information retrieval research fo…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Trustworthy Medical Question Answering: An Evaluation-Centric Survey

EMNLP 2025

Trustworthiness in healthcare question-answering (QA) systems is important for ensuring patient safety, clinical effectiveness, and user confidence. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into medical settings, the reliability of their responses directly influences clinical d

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

UIPE: Enhancing LLM Unlearning by Removing Knowledge Related to Forgetting Targets

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) inevitably acquire harmful information during training on massive datasets. LLM unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of such harmful information while maintaining the model’s overall performance. Existing unlearning methods, represented by gradient ascent-based app

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Uncovering Overfitting in Large Language Model Editing

ICLR 2025spotlight

Knowledge editing has been proposed as an effective method for updating and correcting the internal knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing editing methods often struggle with complex tasks, such as multi-hop reasoning. In this paper, we identify and investigate the phenomenon o…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Autonomous Workflow for Multimodal Fine-Grained Training Assistants Towards Mixed Reality

ACL 2024findings

Autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents have emerged as promising protocols for automatically understanding the language-based environment, particularly with the exponential development of large language models (LLMs). However, a fine-grained, comprehensive understanding of multimodal environ…

2024

Confucius: Iterative Tool Learning from Introspection Feedback by Easy-to-Difficult Curriculum

AAAI 2024technical

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external tools has emerged as a promising approach to extending the capability of LLMs. Although there are some works that employ open-source LLMs for the tool-learning task, most of them are trained in a controlled environment in which LLMs only learn to…

2024

Generate-then-Ground in Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-hop Question Answering

ACL 2024long

Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) task presents a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the intensive knowledge required. Current solutions, like Retrieval-Augmented Generation, typically retrieve potential documents from an external corpus to read an answer. However, the p…

2024

KnowTuning: Knowledge-aware Fine-tuning for Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Despite their success at many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, large language models still struggle to effectively leverage knowledge for knowledge-intensive tasks, manifesting limitations such as generating incomplete, non-factual, or illogical answers. These limitations stem from inadequat…

2024

Knowledge Graph Enhanced Large Language Model Editing

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) are pivotal in advancing natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their efficacy is hampered by inaccuracies and outdated knowledge. Model editing emerges as a promising solution to address these challenges. However, existing editing methods struggle to track and inc…

2024

Learning to Use Tools via Cooperative and Interactive Agents

EMNLP 2024finding

Tool learning empowers large language models (LLMs) as agents to use external tools and extend their utility. Existing methods employ one single LLM-based agent to iteratively select and execute tools, thereafter incorporating execution results into the next action prediction. Despite their progress…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2024

MEFT: Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning through Sparse Adapter

ACL 2024long

Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) facilitates the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) under limited resources. However, the fine-tuning performance with PEFT on complex, knowledge-intensive tasks is limited due to the constrained model capacity, which originates from the limited number…

2024

MELoRA: Mini-Ensemble Low-Rank Adapters for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

ACL 2024long

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is a popular method for tailoring pre-trained large language models (LLMs), especially as the models’ scale and the diversity of tasks increase. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is based on the idea that the adaptation process is intrinsically low-dimensional, i.e.,…

2024

Self-Supervised Position Debiasing for Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

Fine-tuning has been demonstrated to be an effective method to improve the domain performance of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs might fit the dataset bias and shortcuts for prediction, leading to poor generation performance. Previous works have proven that LLMs are prone to exhibit posi…

2023

Answering Ambiguous Questions via Iterative Prompting

ACL 2023long

In open-domain question answering, due to the ambiguity of questions, multiple plausible answers may exist. To provide feasible answers to an ambiguous question,one approach is to directly predict all valid answers, but this can struggle with balancing relevance and diversity. An alternative is to g…

2023

Contrastive Learning Reduces Hallucination in Conversations

AAAI 2023technical

Pre-trained language models (LMs) store knowledge in their parameters and can generate informative responses when used in conversational systems. However, LMs suffer from the problem of “hallucination:” they may generate plausible-looking statements that are irrelevant or factually incorrect. To add…

2023

Feature-Level Debiased Natural Language Understanding

AAAI 2023technical

Natural language understanding (NLU) models often rely on dataset biases rather than intended task-relevant features to achieve high performance on specific datasets. As a result, these models perform poorly on datasets outside the training distribution. Some recent studies address this issue by red…

2023

Generalizing Few-Shot Named Entity Recognizers to Unseen Domains with Type-Related Features

EMNLP 2023long findings

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) has shown remarkable progress in identifying entities in low-resource domains. However, few-shot NER methods still struggle with out-of-domain (OOD) examples due to their reliance on manual labeling for the target domain. To address this limitation, recent stu…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents

EMNLP 2023long main

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization across various language-related tasks, including search engines. However, existing work utilizes the generative ability of LLMs for Information Retrieval (IR) rather than direct passage ranking. The discrepancy betwe…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Learning to Tokenize for Generative Retrieval

NeurIPS 2023poster

As a new paradigm in information retrieval, generative retrieval directly generates a ranked list of document identifiers (docids) for a given query using generative language models (LMs). How to assign each document a unique docid (denoted as document tokenization) is a critical problem, because it…

Cited by 112SourcePDFScholar
2023

Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction via Hierarchical Reasoning

EMNLP 2023long findings

Multiple defendants in a criminal fact description generally exhibit complex interactions, and cannot be well handled by existing Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) methods which focus on predicting judgment results (e.g., law articles, charges, and terms of penalty) for single-defendant cases. To addr…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

RADE: Reference-Assisted Dialogue Evaluation for Open-Domain Dialogue

ACL 2023long

Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is challenging for reasons such as the one-to-many problem, i.e., many appropriate responses other than just the golden response. As of now, automatic evaluation methods need better consistency with humans, while reliable human evaluation can be time- and cost…

2023

Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis

EMNLP 2023long main

Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models (LLMs). However, people can hardly trust the results generated by a model without reliable analysis of legal judgement. For legal practitioners, it is common practice to utilize syllogistic reasoning to…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Towards a Unified Framework for Reference Retrieval and Related Work Generation

EMNLP 2023long findings

The task of related work generation aims to generate a comprehensive survey of related research topics automatically, saving time and effort for authors. Existing methods simplify this task by using human-annotated references in a large-scale scientific corpus as information sources, which is time-…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

UMSE: Unified Multi-scenario Summarization Evaluation

ACL 2023findings

Summarization quality evaluation is a non-trivial task in text summarization. Contemporary methods can be mainly categorized into two scenarios: (1) reference-based: evaluating with human-labeled reference summary; (2) reference-free: evaluating the summary consistency of the document. Recent studie…

2022

Improving Multi-label Malevolence Detection in Dialogues through Multi-faceted Label Correlation Enhancement

ACL 2022long

A dialogue response is malevolent if it is grounded in negative emotions, inappropriate behavior, or an unethical value basis in terms of content and dialogue acts. The detection of malevolent dialogue responses is attracting growing interest. Current research on detecting dialogue malevolence has l…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generation

AAAI 2022technical

Lack of external knowledge makes empathetic dialogue systems difficult to perceive implicit emotions and learn emotional interactions from limited dialogue history. To address the above problems, we propose to leverage external knowledge, including commonsense knowledge and emotional lexical knowled…

2021

A Human-machine Collaborative Framework for Evaluating Malevolence in Dialogues

ACL 2021long

Conversational dialogue systems (CDSs) are hard to evaluate due to the complexity of natural language. Automatic evaluation of dialogues often shows insufficient correlation with human judgements. Human evaluation is reliable but labor-intensive. We introduce a human-machine collaborative framework,…

2021

Learning to Ask Conversational Questions by Optimizing Levenshtein Distance

ACL 2021long

Conversational Question Simplification (CQS) aims to simplify self-contained questions into conversational ones by incorporating some conversational characteristics, e.g., anaphora and ellipsis. Existing maximum likelihood estimation based methods often get trapped in easily learned tokens as all to…

2020

EmpDG: Multi-resolution Interactive Empathetic Dialogue Generation

COLING 2020main

A humanized dialogue system is expected to generate empathetic replies, which should be sensitive to the users’ expressed emotion. The task of empathetic dialogue generation is proposed to address this problem. The essential challenges lie in accurately capturing the nuances of human emotion and con…