Zhijun Chen

Exploration is not an optional behavior in natural intelligence; it is an evolutionary principle underlying the emergence and adaptation of intelligence. Curiosity, play, and deliberate probing emerge as evolved responses to uncertainty, enabling organisms to construct internal models, expand competence, and preserve adaptability in changing environments. We argue that this evolutionary logic is equally indispensable for artificial general intelligence (AGI): exploration is not a heuristic appended to learning, but the mechanism through which generality becomes possible. We develop a unified view of Epistemic Exploration for agentic systems: the capacity of an agent to actively acquire information that reduces uncertainty about the world, seek experiences at the boundary of its current capabilities and convert them into durable capability improvement, and preserve epistemic reachability as the readiness and ability to adapt when the world changes. This view yields three criteria: Information Gain, Value Improvement, and Epistemic Reachability. We then introduce an exploration-centered five-level trajectory toward AGI, in which each level is characterised by a distinct exploration capacity and exploration serves as the transition mechanism among levels: • Responder: minimal or no explicit epistemic exploration; the system mainly relies on learned input-output mappings and local token-level variation. • Reasoner: reasoning-space exploration enables hypothesis search, deliberate reasoning trajectories, branching, backtracking, and self-verification beyond reactive response generation. • Agent: interaction-space exploration extends internal deliberation into embodied perception, tool use, memory, and closed-loop action under partial observability. • Prospector: imagination-space exploration uses learned world models to simulate counterfactual futures, reduce the cost and risk of real interaction, and support long-horizon policy improvement. • Ecosystem: coordination-space exploration enables collectives of heterogeneous agents to co-evolve roles, shared representations, communications, and collaborative strategies beyond the limits of any single agent. Finally, we conclude with evaluation principles and open challenges for building exploration-centric agents that continually reduce uncertainty, improve their own capabilities, and maintain readiness to adapt beyond predefined tasks.

LLM Ensemble – which involves the comprehensive use of multiple large language models (LLMs), each aimed at handling user queries during downstream inference, to benefit from their individual strengths – has gained substantial attention recently. The widespread availability of LLMs, coupled with their varying strengths and out-of-the-box usability, has profoundly advanced the field of LLM Ensemble. This paper presents the first systematic review of recent developments in LLM Ensemble. First, we introduce our taxonomy of LLM Ensemble and discuss several related research problems. Then, we provide a more in-depth classification of the methods under the broad categories of "ensemble-before-inference, ensemble-during-inference, ensemble-after-inference”, and review all relevant methods. Finally, we introduce related benchmarks and applications, summarize existing studies, and suggest several future research directions. A curated list of papers on LLM Ensemble is available at https://github.com/junchenzhi/Awesome-LLM-Ensemble.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, existing RLVR methods utilize rollouts in an indiscriminate and short-horizon manner: responses of heterogeneous quality within each prompt are treated uniformly, and historical rollouts are discarded after a single use. This leads to noisy supervision, poor sample efficiency, and suboptimal policy updates. We address these issues by formulating rollout scheduling in RLVR as a contextual bandit problem and proposing a unified neural scheduling framework that adaptively selects high-value rollouts throughout training. Each rollout is treated as an arm whose reward is defined by the induced performance gain between consecutive optimization steps. The resulting scheduler supports both noise-aware intra-group selection and adaptive global reuse of historical rollouts within a single principled framework. We provide theoretical justification by deriving sublinear regret bounds and showing that enlarging the rollout buffer improves the achievable performance upper bound. Experiments on six mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains in performance and training efficiency across multiple RLVR optimization methods.

We propose LLM-PeerReview, an unsupervised LLM Ensemble method that selects the most ideal response from multiple LLM-generated candidates for each query, harnessing the collective wisdom of multiple models with diverse strengths. LLM-PeerReview is built on a novel, peer-review-inspired framework that offers a clear and interpretable mechanism, while remaining fully unsupervised for flexible adaptability and generalization. Specifically, it operates in three stages: For scoring, we use the emerging LLM-as-a-Judge technique to evaluate each response by reusing multiple LLMs at hand; For reasoning, we can apply a principled graphical model-based truth inference algorithm or a straightforward averaging strategy to aggregate multiple scores to produce a final score for each response; Finally, the highest-scoring response is selected as the best ensemble output. LLM-PeerReview is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. The two variants of the proposed approach obtain strong results across four datasets, including outperforming the recent advanced model Smoothie-Global by 6.9% and 7.3% points, respectively.

Ensemble learning of LLMs has emerged as a promising alternative to enhance performance, but existing approaches typically treat models as black boxes, combining the inputs or final outputs while overlooking the rich internal representations and interactions across this http URL this work, we introduce LLMBoost, a novel ensemble fine-tuning framework that breaks this barrier by explicitly leveraging intermediate states of LLMs. Inspired by the boosting paradigm, LLMBoost incorporates three key innovations. First, a cross-model attention mechanism enables successor models to access and fuse hidden states from predecessors, facilitating hierarchical error correction and knowledge transfer. Second, a chain training paradigm progressively fine-tunes connected models with an error-suppression objective, ensuring that each model rectifies the mispredictions of its predecessor with minimal additional computation. Third, a near-parallel inference paradigm design pipelines hidden states across models layer by layer, achieving inference efficiency approaching single-model decoding. We further establish the theoretical foundations of LLMBoost, proving that sequential integration guarantees monotonic improvements under bounded correction assumptions. Extensive experiments on commonsense reasoning and arithmetic reasoning tasks demonstrate that LLMBoost consistently boosts accuracy while reducing inference latency.

Word order difference between source and target languages is a major obstacle to cross-lingual transfer, especially in the dependency parsing task. Current works are mostly based on order-agnostic models or word reordering to mitigate this problem. However, such methods either do not leverage grammatical information naturally contained in word order or are computationally expensive as the permutation space grows exponentially with the sentence length. Moreover, the reordered source sentence with an unnatural word order may be a form of noising that harms the model learning. To this end, we propose an Implicit Word Reordering framework with Knowledge Distillation (IWR-KD). This framework is inspired by that deep networks are good at learning feature linearization corresponding to meaningful data transformation, e.g. word reordering. To realize this idea, we introduce a knowledge distillation framework composed of a word-reordering teacher model and a dependency parsing student model. We verify our proposed method on Universal Dependency Treebanks across 31 different languages and show it outperforms a series of competitors, together with experimental analysis to illustrate how our method works towards training a robust parser.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a promising solution for enhancing the accuracy and credibility of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in Question & Answer tasks. This is achieved by incorporating proprietary and private data from integrated databases. However, private RAG systems face significant challenges due to the scarcity of private domain data and critical data privacy issues. These obstacles impede the deployment of private RAG systems, as developing privacy-preserving RAG systems requires a delicate balance between data security and data availability. To address these challenges, we regard federated learning (FL) as a highly promising technology for privacy-preserving RAG services. We propose a novel framework called Federated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (FedE4RAG). This framework facilitates collaborative training of client-side RAG retrieval models. The parameters of these models are aggregated and distributed on a central-server, ensuring data privacy without direct sharing of raw data. In FedE4RAG, knowledge distillation is employed for communication between the server and client models. This technique improves the generalization of local RAG retrievers during the federated learning process. Additionally, we apply homomorphic encryption within federated learning to safeguard model parameters and mitigate concerns related to data leakage. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world dataset have validated the effectiveness of FedE4RAG. The results demonstrate that our proposed framework can markedly enhance the performance of private RAG systems while maintaining robust data privacy protection.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) synergizes the retrieval of pertinent data with the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring that the generated output is not only contextually relevant but also accurate and current. We introduce XRAG, an open-source, modular codebase that facilitates exhaustive evaluation of the performance of foundational components of advanced RAG modules. These components are systematically categorized into four core phases: pre-retrieval, retrieval, post-retrieval, and generation. We systematically analyse them across reconfigured datasets, providing a comprehensive benchmark for their effectiveness. As the complexity of RAG systems continues to escalate, we underscore the critical need to identify potential failure points in RAG systems. We formulate a suite of experimental methodologies and diagnostic testing protocols to dissect the failure points inherent in RAG engineering. Subsequently, we proffer bespoke solutions aimed at bolstering the overall performance of these modules. Our work thoroughly evaluates the performance of advanced core components in RAG systems, providing insights into optimizations for prevalent failure points.

Code-switching is a data augmentation scheme mixing words from multiple languages into source lingual text. It has achieved considerable generalization performance of cross-lingual transfer tasks by aligning cross-lingual contextual word representations. However, uncontrolled and over-replaced code-switching would augment dirty samples to model training. In other words, the excessive code-switching text samples will negatively hurt the models’ cross-lingual transferability. To this end, we propose a Progressive Code-Switching (PCS) method to gradually generate moderately difficult code-switching examples for the model to discriminate from easy to hard. The idea is to incorporate progressively the preceding learned multilingual knowledge using easier code-switching data to guide model optimization on succeeding harder code-switching data. Specifically, we first design a difficulty measurer to measure the impact of replacing each word in a sentence based on the word relevance score. Then a code-switcher generates the code-switching data of increasing difficulty via a controllable temperature variable. In addition, a training scheduler decides when to sample harder code-switching data for model training. Experiments show our model achieves state-of-the-art results on three different zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks across ten languages.

We propose a neuralized undirected graphical model called Neural-Hidden-CRF to solve the weakly-supervised sequence labeling problem. Under the umbrella of probabilistic undirected graph theory, the proposed Neural-Hidden-CRF embedded with a hidden CRF layer models the variables of word sequence, latent ground truth sequence, and weak label sequence with the global perspective that undirected graphical models particularly enjoy. In Neural-Hidden-CRF, we can capitalize on the powerful language model BERT or other deep models to provide rich contextual semantic knowledge to the latent ground truth sequence, and use the hidden CRF layer to capture the internal label dependencies. Neural-Hidden-CRF is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on one crowdsourcing benchmark and three weak-supervision benchmarks, including outperforming the recent advanced model CHMM by 2.80 F1 points and 2.23 F1 points in average generalization and inference performance, respectively.

This paper explores the integration of symbolic logic knowledge into deep neural networks for learning from noisy crowd labels. We introduce Logic-guided Learning from Noisy Crowd Labels (Logic-LNCL), an EM-alike iterative logic knowledge distillation framework that learns from both noisy labeled data and logic rules of interest. Unlike traditional EM methods, our framework contains a “pseudo-E-step” that distills from the logic rules a new type of learning target, which is then used in the “pseudo-M-step” for training the classifier. Extensive evaluations on two real-world datasets for text sentiment classification and named entity recognition demonstrate that the proposed framework improves the state-of-the-art and provides a new solution to learning from noisy crowd labels.

Understanding the vulnerability of label aggregation against data poisoning attacks is key to ensuring data quality in crowdsourced label collection. State-of-the-art attack mechanisms generally assume full knowledge of the aggregation models while failing to consider the flexibility of malicious workers in selecting which instances to label. Such a setup limits the applicability of the attack mechanisms and impedes further improvement of their success rate. This paper introduces a blackbox data poisoning attack framework that finds the optimal strategies for instance selection and labeling to attack unknown label aggregation models in crowdsourcing. We formulate the attack problem on top of a generic formalization of label aggregation models and then introduce a substitution approach that attacks a substitute aggregation model in replacement of the unknown model. Through extensive validation on multiple real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of both instance selection and model substitution in improving the success rate of attacks.

Learning from Crowds (LFC) seeks to induce a high-quality classifier from training instances, which are linked to a range of possible noisy annotations from crowdsourcing workers under their various levels of skills and their own preconditions. Recent studies on LFC focus on designing new methods to improve the performance of the classifier trained from crowdsourced labeled data. To this day, however, there remain under-explored security aspects of LFC systems. In this work, we seek to bridge this gap. We first show that LFC models are vulnerable to adversarial examples—small changes to input data can cause classifiers to make prediction mistakes. Second, we propose an approach, A-LFC for training a robust classifier from crowdsourced labeled data. Our empirical results on three real-world datasets show that the proposed approach can substantially improve the performance of the trained classifier even with the existence of adversarial examples. On average, A-LFC has 10.05% and 11.34% higher test robustness than the state-of-the-art in the white-box and black-box attack settings, respectively.

End-to-end learning from crowds has recently been introduced as an EM-free approach to training deep neural networks directly from noisy crowdsourced annotations. It models the relationship between true labels and annotations with a specific type of neural layer, termed as the crowd layer, which can be trained using pure backpropagation. Parameters of the crowd layer, however, can hardly be interpreted as annotator reliability, as compared with the more principled probabilistic approach. The lack of probabilistic interpretation further prevents extensions of the approach to account for important factors of annotation processes, eg, instance difficulty. This paper presents SpeeLFC, a structured probabilistic model that incorporates the constraints of probability axioms for parameters of the crowd layer, which allows to explicitly model annotator reliability while benefiting from the end-toend training of neural networks. Moreover, we propose SpeeLFC-D, which further takes into account instance difficulty. Extensive validation on realworld datasets shows that our methods improve the state-of-the-art.