Haoyu Wang

3papers

3 Papers

24.3SEJul 14
Agent-Based Software Artifact Evaluation

Zhaonan Wu, Yanjie Zhao, Zhenpeng Chen et al.

Artifact Evaluation (AE) has become a standard mechanism for linking software engineering papers to their supporting artifacts, but growing submission volume makes purely manual AE increasingly difficult to sustain. Although recent advances in LLM-based agents make AE automation increasingly plausible, current descriptive badge policies define badge semantics but provide no executable verification criteria, leaving both human reviewers and agents without a detailed basis for judgment. To address this gap, we construct ArtifactGuide, a structured scoring rubric grounded in ACM policy, expert-informed calibration, and artifact-based validation, and we design ArtifactCopilot, an agent collecting review evidence following a fixed sequence under ArtifactGuide and deriving the final badge decision from accumulated evidence. We evaluate our framework on 60 real artifacts from recent software engineering conferences using human-adjudicated badges as reference. The results show that ArtifactGuide improves the AE performance of coding agents over official ACM badge-policy prompts, increasing three-run mean exact badge agreement by 10.55 to 28.34 percentage points. Across all evaluated systems and prompting protocols, ArtifactCopilot achieves the highest badge-level agreement at 70.56% and is the only system that completed all repeated runs successfully while producing a review report in every run. A controlled user study with 8 experienced researchers suggests that ArtifactCopilot reports improve reviewer confidence, help reviewers locate evidence, and understand evaluation scope more clearly. Further analysis translates insights from automated AE into practical guidance for designing higher-quality artifacts with clearer review routes, more explicit claim-to-output links, and more concrete reuse paths.

1.4LGFeb 2Code
Boosting Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning via One-Step Flow Matching

Zeqiao Li, Yijing Wang, Haoyu Wang et al.

Diffusion policies are expressive yet incur high inference latency. Flow Matching (FM) enables one-step generation, but integrating it into Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) is challenging: the optimal policy is an intractable energy-based distribution, and the efficient log-likelihood estimation required to balance exploration and exploitation suffers from severe discretization bias. We propose \textbf{F}low-based \textbf{L}og-likelihood-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{M}aximum \textbf{E}ntropy RL (\textbf{FLAME}), a principled framework that addresses these challenges. First, we derive a Q-Reweighted FM objective that bypasses partition function estimation via importance reweighting. Second, we design a decoupled entropy estimator that rigorously corrects bias, which enables efficient exploration and brings the policy closer to the optimal MaxEnt policy. Third, we integrate the MeanFlow formulation to achieve expressive and efficient one-step control. Empirical results on MuJoCo show that FLAME outperforms Gaussian baselines and matches multi-step diffusion policies with significantly lower inference cost. Code is available at https://github.com/lzqw/FLAME.

9.0CLFeb 2
Alternating Reinforcement Learning for Rubric-Based Reward Modeling in Non-Verifiable LLM Post-Training

Ran Xu, Tianci Liu, Zihan Dong et al.

Standard reward models typically predict scalar scores that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of response quality in non-verifiable domains, such as creative writing or open-ended instruction following. To address this limitation, we propose Rubric-ARM, a framework that jointly optimizes a rubric generator and a judge using reinforcement learning from preference feedback. Unlike existing methods that rely on static rubrics or disjoint training pipelines, our approach treats rubric generation as a latent action learned to maximize judgment accuracy. We introduce an alternating optimization strategy to mitigate the non-stationarity of simultaneous updates, providing theoretical analysis that demonstrates how this schedule reduces gradient variance during training. Extensive experiments show that Rubric-ARM achieves state-of-the-art performance among baselines on multiple benchmarks and significantly improves downstream policy alignment in both offline and online reinforcement learning settings.