Huan Xiao

Yincen Qu, Huan Xiao, Feng Li et al.

Travel planning is a valuable yet complex task that poses significant challenges even for advanced large language models (LLMs). While recent benchmarks have advanced in evaluating LLMs' planning capabilities, they often fall short in evaluating feasibility, reliability, and engagement of travel plans. We introduce a comprehensive benchmark for travel planning that unifies fine-grained criteria into a single reward, enabling direct comparison of plan quality and seamless integration with reinforcement learning (RL). Our evaluator achieves moderate agreement with travel-expert annotations (60.75%) and outperforms multiple LLM-as-judge baselines. We further release a large-scale dataset of 4,870 queries including 219 real-world, free-form requests for generalization to authentic user intent. Using this benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments across diverse methods and LLMs, including test-time computation, neuro-symbolic approaches, supervised fine-tuning, and RL via GRPO. Across base models, RL generally improves itinerary feasibility over prompt-only and supervised baselines, yielding higher unified reward scores.

Yuyue Wang, Huan Xiao, Yihan Wu et al.

Text to Speech (TTS) models can generate natural and high-quality speech, but it is not expressive enough when synthesizing speech with dramatic expressiveness, such as stand-up comedies. Considering comedians have diverse personal speech styles, including personal prosody, rhythm, and fillers, it requires real-world datasets and strong speech style modeling capabilities, which brings challenges. In this paper, we construct a new dataset and develop ComedicSpeech, a TTS system tailored for the stand-up comedy synthesis in low-resource scenarios. First, we extract prosody representation by the prosody encoder and condition it to the TTS model in a flexible way. Second, we enhance the personal rhythm modeling by a conditional duration predictor. Third, we model the personal fillers by introducing comedian-related special tokens. Experiments show that ComedicSpeech achieves better expressiveness than baselines with only ten-minute training data for each comedian. The audio samples are available at https://xh621.github.io/stand-up-comedy-demo/