Yaohua Tang

Songshuo Lu, Hua Wang, Zhi Chen et al.

Large-scale alignment pipelines typically pair a policy model with a separately trained reward model whose parameters remain frozen during reinforcement learning (RL). This separation creates a complex, resource-intensive pipeline and suffers from a performance ceiling due to a static reward signal. We propose a novel framework, Unified Reward & Policy Optimization (URPO), that unifies instruction-following ("player") and reward modeling ("referee") within a single model and a single training phase. Our method recasts all alignment data-including preference pairs, verifiable reasoning, and open-ended instructions-into a unified generative format optimized by a single Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) loop. This enables the model to learn from ground-truth preferences and verifiable logic while simultaneously generating its own rewards for open-ended tasks. Experiments on the Qwen2.5-7B model demonstrate URPO's superiority. Our unified model significantly outperforms a strong baseline using a separate generative reward model, boosting the instruction-following score on AlpacaEval from 42.24 to 44.84 and the composite reasoning average from 32.66 to 35.66. Furthermore, URPO cultivates a superior internal evaluator as a byproduct of training, achieving a RewardBench score of 85.15 and surpassing the dedicated reward model it replaces (83.55). By eliminating the need for a separate reward model and fostering a co-evolutionary dynamic between generation and evaluation, URPO presents a simpler, more efficient, and more effective path towards robustly aligned language models.

Yaohua Tang, Zhicheng Hu, Kun Cheng et al.

The increasing context window size in large language models (LLMs) has improved their ability to handle complex, long-text tasks. However, as the conversation rounds continue, it is required to store a large amount of KV cache in GPU memory, which significantly affects the efficiency and even availability of the model serving systems. This paper analyzes dialogue data from real users on the granularity of round and discovers that the LLM inference manifests a watershed layer, after which the distribution of round-level attention shows notable similarity. Based on this, we propose Round Attention - a novel round-level attention mechanism that selectively processes the KV cache of top-k relevant rounds, where k is dynamically determined through the attention matrix in the watershed layer. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that our method reduces memory usage by 54\% to 82\%, while experimental results confirm that loading sparse critical-round KV cache maintains answer accuracy without performance degradation.

Yanwen Fang, Philip L. H. Yu, Yaohua Tang

It is well known that modeling and forecasting realized covariance matrices of asset returns play a crucial role in the field of finance. The availability of high frequency intraday data enables the modeling of the realized covariance matrices directly. However, most of the models available in the literature depend on strong structural assumptions and they often suffer from the curse of dimensionality. We propose an end-to-end trainable model built on the CNN and Convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) which does not require to make any distributional or structural assumption but could handle high-dimensional realized covariance matrices consistently. The proposed model focuses on local structures and spatiotemporal correlations. It learns a nonlinear mapping that connect the historical realized covariance matrices to the future one. Our empirical studies on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate its excellent forecasting ability compared with several advanced volatility models.

Yaohua Tang, Fandong Meng, Zhengdong Lu et al.

In this paper, we propose phraseNet, a neural machine translator with a phrase memory which stores phrase pairs in symbolic form, mined from corpus or specified by human experts. For any given source sentence, phraseNet scans the phrase memory to determine the candidate phrase pairs and integrates tagging information in the representation of source sentence accordingly. The decoder utilizes a mixture of word-generating component and phrase-generating component, with a specifically designed strategy to generate a sequence of multiple words all at once. The phraseNet not only approaches one step towards incorporating external knowledge into neural machine translation, but also makes an effort to extend the word-by-word generation mechanism of recurrent neural network. Our empirical study on Chinese-to-English translation shows that, with carefully-chosen phrase table in memory, phraseNet yields 3.45 BLEU improvement over the generic neural machine translator.