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Rui Zheng

43 accepted papers

2026

AgentGym-RL: An Open-Source Framework to Train LLM Agents for Long-Horizon Decision Making via Multi-Turn RL

ICLR 2026oral

Training LLM agents for complex multi-turn decision-making tasks requires extensive exploration within their environment, with reinforcement learning (RL) as a natural way. However, the open-source community currently lacks a unified RL framework capable of training agents from scratch across divers…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Critique-RL: Training Critiquing Language Models Through Two-Stage RL for Improved Discrimination and Constructive Feedback

ICLR 2026poster

Training critiquing language models to assess and provide feedback on model outputs is a promising way to improve LLMs for complex reasoning tasks. However, existing approaches typically rely on stronger supervisors for annotating critique data. To address this, we propose Critique-RL, an online RL…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

MathCritique: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Critique Models with Test-Time and Training-Time Supervision

IJCAI 2026

Training critique models to provide useful feedback for actor models is an effective approach in scalable oversight, especially for complex tasks like math reasoning. However, current research lacks suitable datasets for effectively training critique models and integrating them in a principled way a

Cited by 0Scholar
2026

MetaAct-RL: Training Language Models for Reasoning Through Meta-Action-Based Reinforcement Learning

AAAI 2026technical

Outcome-based reinforcement learning has made notable advances in training language models (LMs) for reasoning. However, without explicit incentives and controls, this paradigm has limitations and instability in eliciting high-quality reasoning trajectories with diverse actions—particularly for mode

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Rethinking 3D Shape Generation: Diffusion over Superquadrics

ICML 2026poster

Diffusion models have advanced 3D shape generation, yet most methods still denoise in high-cardinality spaces (e.g., voxel/SDF grids, meshes, or point clouds), which is computationally and memory intensive and makes it difficult to scale in terms of both higher resolution and stronger controllabilit…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Stabilizing Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for LLMs via Balanced Policy Optimization with Adaptive Clipping

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the core paradigm for aligning and strengthening large language models (LLMs). Yet, applying RL in off-policy settings—where stale data from past policies are used for training—improves sample efficiency, but remains challenging: policy entropy decline…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

What Makes a Good Speech Tokenizer for LLM-Centric Speech Generation? A Systematic Study

AAAI 2026technical

Speech-language models (SLMs) offer a promising path toward unifying speech and text understanding and generation. However, challenges remain in achieving effective cross-modal alignment and high-quality speech generation. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of speech tokenizer desi

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising foundation to build generally-capable agents (LLM-based agents) that can handle multi-turn decision-making tasks across various environments. However, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for com…

2025

Alleviating Shifted Distribution in Human Preference Alignment through Meta-Learning

AAAI 2025technical

The capability of the reward model (RM) is crucial for the success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in aligning with human preferences. However, as training progresses, the output space distribution of the policy model shifts. The RM, initially trained on responses sampled from t…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Have the VLMs Lost Confidence? A Study of Sycophancy in VLMs

ICLR 2025poster

In the study of LLMs, sycophancy represents a prevalent hallucination that poses significant challenges to these models. Specifically, LLMs often fail to adhere to original correct responses, instead blindly agreeing with users' opinions, even when those opinions are incorrect or malicious. However,…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

RMB: Comprehensively benchmarking reward models in LLM alignment

ICLR 2025poster

Reward models (RMs) guide the alignment of large language models (LLMs), steering them toward behaviors preferred by humans. Evaluating RMs is the key to better aligning LLMs. However, the current evaluation of RMs may not directly correspond to their alignment performance due to the limited distrib…

2025

SPA-VL: A Comprehensive Safety Preference Alignment Dataset for Vision Language Models

CVPR 2025poster

The emergence of Vision Language Models (VLMs) has brought unprecedented advances in understanding multimodal information. The combination of textual and visual semantics in VLMs is highly complex and diverse, making the safety alignment of these models challenging. Furthermore, due to the limited s…

2025

Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Games

EMNLP 2025

Alignment of large language models (LLM) is a process that ensures the model’s responses to user prompts align with human intentions and social values. This optimization typically relies on pre-collected prompts. The collection of these prompts often either requires careful human interventions or pr

2024

DACO: Towards Application-Driven and Comprehensive Data Analysis via Code Generation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Data analysis is a crucial analytical process essential for deriving insights from real-world databases. As shown in Figure 1, the need for data analysis typically arises from specific application scenarios, and requires diverse reasoning skills including mathematical reasoning, logical reasoning, a…

2024

Enhancing Contrastive Learning with Noise-Guided Attack: Towards Continual Relation Extraction in the Wild

ACL 2024long

The principle of continual relation extraction (CRE) involves adapting to emerging novel relations while preserving old knowledge. Existing CRE approaches excel in preserving old knowledge but falter when confronted with contaminated data streams, likely due to an artificial assumption of no annotat…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning

EMNLP 2024main

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a crucial approach to aligning language models with human values and intentions. A fundamental challenge in this method lies in ensuring that the reward model accurately understands and evaluates human preferences. Current methods rely on ranking…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Improving Generalization of Alignment with Human Preferences through Group Invariant Learning

ICLR 2024spotlight

The success of AI assistants based on language models (LLMs) hinges crucially on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which enables the generation of responses more aligned with human preferences. As universal AI assistants, there's a growing expectation for them to perform consistent…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Linear Alignment: A Closed-form Solution for Aligning Human Preferences without Tuning and Feedback

ICML 2024poster

The success of AI assistants based on Language Models (LLMs) hinges on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to comprehend and align with user intentions. However, traditional alignment algorithms, such as PPO, are hampered by complex annotation and training requirements. This reliance l…

2024

LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin

ACL 2024long

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a crucial step for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to align with human instructions and enhance their capabilities in downstream tasks. Substantially increasing instruction data is a direct solution to align the model with a broader range of downstream tas…

2024

ORTicket: Let One Robust BERT Ticket Transfer across Different Tasks

COLING 2024main

Pretrained language models can be applied for various downstream tasks but are susceptible to subtle perturbations. Most adversarial defense methods often introduce adversarial training during the fine-tuning phase to enhance empirical robustness. However, the repeated execution of adversarial train…

2024

Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality

EMNLP 2024finding

In Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), the reward model plays a crucial role in aligning language model outputs with human values. The human preference data used to train the reward model consists of a prompt and a response pair, with humans annotating which response better aligns wit…

2024

StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback

ACL 2024long

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly propelled the field of code generation. Previous work integrated reinforcement learning (RL) with compiler feedback for exploring the output space of LLMs to enhance code generation quality. However, the lengthy code generated by LLMs…

2024

Subspace Defense: Discarding Adversarial Perturbations by Learning a Subspace for Clean Signals

COLING 2024main

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are notoriously vulnerable to adversarial attacks that place carefully crafted perturbations on normal examples to fool DNNs. To better understand such attacks, a characterization of the features carried by adversarial examples is needed. In this paper, we tackle this cha…

2024

Training Large Language Models for Reasoning through Reverse Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2024poster

In this paper, we propose **R**$^3$: Learning **R**easoning through **R**everse Curriculum **R**einforcement Learning (RL), a novel method that employs only outcome supervision to achieve the benefits of process supervision for large language models. The core challenge in applying RL to complex reas…

2024

Uncertainty Aware Learning for Language Model Alignment

ACL 2024long

As instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) evolve, aligning pretrained foundation models presents increasing challenges. Existing alignment strategies, which typically leverage diverse and high-quality data sources, often overlook the intrinsic uncertainty of tasks, learning all data samples…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

CASN:Class-Aware Score Network for Textual Adversarial Detection

ACL 2023long

Adversarial detection aims to detect adversarial samples that threaten the security of deep neural networks, which is an essential step toward building robust AI systems. Density-based estimation is widely considered as an effective technique by explicitly modeling the distribution of normal data an…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Characterizing the Impacts of Instances on Robustness

ACL 2023findings

Building robust deep neural networks (DNNs) against adversarial attacks is an important but challenging task. Previous defense approaches mainly focus on developing new model structures or training algorithms, but they do little to tap the potential of training instances, especially instances with r…

2023

Connectivity Patterns are Task Embeddings

ACL 2023findings

Task embeddings are task-specific vectors designed to construct a semantic space of tasks, which can be used to predict the most transferable source task for a given target task via the similarity between task embeddings. However, existing methods use optimized parameters and representations as task…

2023

Detecting Adversarial Samples through Sharpness of Loss Landscape

ACL 2023findings

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been proven to be sensitive towards perturbations on input samples, and previous works highlight that adversarial samples are even more vulnerable than normal ones. In this work, this phenomenon is illustrated frWe first show that adversarial samples locate in steep…

2023

Loose lips sink ships: Mitigating Length Bias in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

EMNLP 2023long findings

Reinforcement learning from human feedback serves as a crucial bridge, aligning large language models with human and societal values. This alignment requires a vast corpus of human feedback to learn a reward model, which is subsequently used to finetune language models. However, we have identified t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Modeling the Q-Diversity in a Min-max Play Game for Robust Optimization

ACL 2023findings

Models trained with empirical risk minimization (ERM) are revealed to easily rely on spurious correlations, resulting in poor generalization. Group distributionally robust optimization (group DRO) can alleviate this problem by minimizing the worst-case loss over pre-defined groups. While promising,…

2023

Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning

EMNLP 2023long findings

Benefiting from massive corpora and advanced hardware, large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. However, their performance degrades in scenarios where multiple tasks are encountered sequentially, also known as catastrophic forgetting. In…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms

EMNLP 2023long findings

Reports of human-like behaviors in foundation models are growing, with psychological theories providing enduring tools to investigate these behaviors. However, current research tends to directly apply these human-oriented tools without verifying the faithfulness of their outcomes. In this paper, we…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement

EMNLP 2023long findings

To enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of large language models, researchers have extensively explored prompting methods, notably the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method which explicitly elicits human-like rationales. However, they have inadvertently overlooked the potential of enhancing model r…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2022

Decorrelate Irrelevant, Purify Relevant: Overcome Textual Spurious Correlations from a Feature Perspective

COLING 2022main

Natural language understanding (NLU) models tend to rely on spurious correlations (i.e., dataset bias) to achieve high performance on in-distribution datasets but poor performance on out-of-distribution ones. Most of the existing debiasing methods often identify and weaken these samples with biased…

2022

Efficient Adversarial Training with Robust Early-Bird Tickets

EMNLP 2022main

Adversarial training is one of the most powerful methods to improve the robustness of pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, this approach is typically more expensive than traditional fine-tuning because of the necessity to generate adversarial examples via gradient descent. Delving into the o…

2022

Flooding-X: Improving BERT’s Resistance to Adversarial Attacks via Loss-Restricted Fine-Tuning

ACL 2022long

Adversarial robustness has attracted much attention recently, and the mainstream solution is adversarial training. However, the tradition of generating adversarial perturbations for each input embedding (in the settings of NLP) scales up the training computational complexity by the number of gradien…

Cited by 35SourcePDFScholar
2022

PlugAT: A Plug and Play Module to Defend against Textual Adversarial Attack

COLING 2022main

Adversarial training, which minimizes the loss of adversarially perturbed examples, has received considerable attention. However, these methods require modifying all model parameters and optimizing the model from scratch, which is parameter inefficient and unfriendly to the already deployed models.…

2022

Robust Lottery Tickets for Pre-trained Language Models

ACL 2022long

Recent works on Lottery Ticket Hypothesis have shown that pre-trained language models (PLMs) contain smaller matching subnetworks(winning tickets) which are capable of reaching accuracy comparable to the original models. However, these tickets are proved to be notrobust to adversarial examples, and…

2020

GestureDet: Real-time Student Gesture Analysis with Multi-dimensional Attention-based Detector

IJCAI 2020poster

Students’ gestures, hand-raising, stand-up, and sleeping, indicates the engagement of students in classrooms and partially reflects teaching quality. Therefore, fast and automatically recognizing these gestures are of great importance. Due to limited computational resources in primary and secondary…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar