Zehua Pei

CL
h-index1
3papers
10citations
Novelty58%
AI Score44

3 Papers

6.0AIFeb 4
ReThinker: Scientific Reasoning by Rethinking with Guided Reflection and Confidence Control

Zhentao Tang, Yuqi Cui, Shixiong Kai et al.

Expert-level scientific reasoning remains challenging for large language models, particularly on benchmarks such as Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), where rigid tool pipelines, brittle multi-agent coordination, and inefficient test-time scaling often limit performance. We introduce ReThinker, a confidence-aware agentic framework that orchestrates retrieval, tool use, and multi-agent reasoning through a stage-wise Solver-Critic-Selector architecture. Rather than following a fixed pipeline, ReThinker dynamically allocates computation based on model confidence, enabling adaptive tool invocation, guided multi-dimensional reflection, and robust confidence-weighted selection. To support scalable training without human annotation, we further propose a reverse data synthesis pipeline and an adaptive trajectory recycling strategy that transform successful reasoning traces into high-quality supervision. Experiments on HLE, GAIA, and XBench demonstrate that ReThinker consistently outperforms state-of-the-art foundation models with tools and existing deep research systems, achieving state-of-the-art results on expert-level reasoning tasks.

6.7CLSep 2, 2025Code
Behavioral Fingerprinting of Large Language Models

Zehua Pei, Hui-Ling Zhen, Ying Zhang et al.

Current benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily focus on performance metrics, often failing to capture the nuanced behavioral characteristics that differentiate them. This paper introduces a novel ``Behavioral Fingerprinting'' framework designed to move beyond traditional evaluation by creating a multi-faceted profile of a model's intrinsic cognitive and interactive styles. Using a curated \textit{Diagnostic Prompt Suite} and an innovative, automated evaluation pipeline where a powerful LLM acts as an impartial judge, we analyze eighteen models across capability tiers. Our results reveal a critical divergence in the LLM landscape: while core capabilities like abstract and causal reasoning are converging among top models, alignment-related behaviors such as sycophancy and semantic robustness vary dramatically. We further document a cross-model default persona clustering (ISTJ/ESTJ) that likely reflects common alignment incentives. Taken together, this suggests that a model's interactive nature is not an emergent property of its scale or reasoning power, but a direct consequence of specific, and highly variable, developer alignment strategies. Our framework provides a reproducible and scalable methodology for uncovering these deep behavioral differences. Project: https://github.com/JarvisPei/Behavioral-Fingerprinting

4.2CLFeb 19, 2024
DiLA: Enhancing LLM Tool Learning with Differential Logic Layer

Yu Zhang, Hui-Ling Zhen, Zehua Pei et al.

Considering the challenges faced by large language models (LLMs) in logical reasoning and planning, prior efforts have sought to augment LLMs with access to external solvers. While progress has been made on simple reasoning problems, solving classical constraint satisfaction problems, such as the Boolean Satisfiability Problem (SAT) and Graph Coloring Problem (GCP), remains difficult for off-the-shelf solvers due to their intricate expressions and exponential search spaces. In this paper, we propose a novel differential logic layer-aided language modeling (DiLA) approach, where logical constraints are integrated into the forward and backward passes of a network layer, to provide another option for LLM tool learning. In DiLA, LLM aims to transform the language description to logic constraints and identify initial solutions of the highest quality, while the differential logic layer focuses on iteratively refining the LLM-prompted solution. Leveraging the logic layer as a bridge, DiLA enhances the logical reasoning ability of LLMs on a range of reasoning problems encoded by Boolean variables, guaranteeing the efficiency and correctness of the solution process. We evaluate the performance of DiLA on two classic reasoning problems and empirically demonstrate its consistent outperformance against existing prompt-based and solver-aided approaches.