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Hanqing Lu

Hanqing Lu contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

8 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Firefly: Illuminating Large-Scale Verified Tool-Call Data Generation from Real APIs

Training tool-calling agents requires large-scale trajectory data with verifiable labels, yet existing approaches either synthesize environments that diverge from real API behavior or generate tasks without ground-truth outcomes for verification. We present FireFly, a pipeline for generating verified tool-call data from real-world MCP servers. Our key insight is to invert the standard synthesis pipeline: rather than generating tasks and hoping they are solvable, we first let a strong LLM explore real APIs along graph-guided DAG structures, then synthesize tasks backward from observed outcomes, guaranteeing label correctness by construction. To handle the scale of real-world tool spaces (${\sim}$1,000 tools), we build a pairwise tool graph and sample sub-DAGs to focus exploration on semantically coherent workflows. To address environment drift in live APIs, we construct a retrieval-augmented simulator that caches all exploration results and replays them during training and evaluation, enabling fully offline and reproducible RL. Applying this pipeline yields 5,144 verified tasks spanning 240 servers and 993 tools. A 4B-parameter model trained with GRPO on FireFly matches Claude Sonnet 4.6 on our held-out test set and shows improvements on multiple tool-calling benchmarks including Tau2-Bench, MCPMark, and MCP-Atlas.

preprint2026arXiv

From Seeing to Thinking: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning Improves Post-Training of Vision-Language Models

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) emphasize long chain-of-thought reasoning; yet, we find that their performance on visual tasks is primarily limited by a lack of visual perception as opposed to reasoning itself. In this work, we systematically study the interplay between perception and reasoning in VLM post-training by decomposing their capabilities into three separate training stages: visual perception, visual reasoning, and textual reasoning, incorporating specialized training data. We demonstrate that visual perception (a) requires targeted optimization with specialized data; (b) serves as a fundamental scaffold that should be solidified through staged training before refining visual reasoning; and (c) is more effectively learned via RL than caption-based SFT. Our experiments across multiple VLMs demonstrate that staged training consistently improves both visual perception and reasoning performance over merged training. Notably, models trained with our approach achieve 1.5% higher reasoning accuracy with 20.8% shorter reasoning traces, suggesting that superior perception reduces the need for excessive reasoning. Furthermore, we show that this capability-based staging represents a new curriculum dimension orthogonal to traditional difficulty-based curricula, and combining both yields further additive gains. Our staged-training models achieve superior performance among open-weight VLMs, establishing advanced results on several visual math and perception (e.g., +5.2% on WeMath and +3.7% on RealWorldQA) tasks compared with the base counterpart.

preprint2022arXiv

Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion with Self-Supervised Adaptive Graph Alignment

Predicting missing facts in a knowledge graph (KG) is crucial as modern KGs are far from complete. Due to labor-intensive human labeling, this phenomenon deteriorates when handling knowledge represented in various languages. In this paper, we explore multilingual KG completion, which leverages limited seed alignment as a bridge, to embrace the collective knowledge from multiple languages. However, language alignment used in prior works is still not fully exploited: (1) alignment pairs are treated equally to maximally push parallel entities to be close, which ignores KG capacity inconsistency; (2) seed alignment is scarce and new alignment identification is usually in a noisily unsupervised manner. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel self-supervised adaptive graph alignment (SS-AGA) method. Specifically, SS-AGA fuses all KGs as a whole graph by regarding alignment as a new edge type. As such, information propagation and noise influence across KGs can be adaptively controlled via relation-aware attention weights. Meanwhile, SS-AGA features a new pair generator that dynamically captures potential alignment pairs in a self-supervised paradigm. Extensive experiments on both the public multilingual DBPedia KG and newly-created industrial multilingual E-commerce KG empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of SS-AG

preprint2021arXiv

Fast Sequence Generation with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Autoregressive sequence Generation models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in areas like machine translation and image captioning. These models are autoregressive in that they generate each word by conditioning on previously generated words, which leads to heavy latency during inference. Recently, non-autoregressive decoding has been proposed in machine translation to speed up the inference time by generating all words in parallel. Typically, these models use the word-level cross-entropy loss to optimize each word independently. However, such a learning process fails to consider the sentence-level consistency, thus resulting in inferior generation quality of these non-autoregressive models. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient model for Non-Autoregressive sequence Generation (NAG) with a novel training paradigm: Counterfactuals-critical Multi-Agent Learning (CMAL). CMAL formulates NAG as a multi-agent reinforcement learning system where element positions in the target sequence are viewed as agents that learn to cooperatively maximize a sentence-level reward. On MSCOCO image captioning benchmark, our NAG method achieves a performance comparable to state-of-the-art autoregressive models, while brings 13.9x decoding speedup. On WMT14 EN-DE machine translation dataset, our method outperforms cross-entropy trained baseline by 6.0 BLEU points while achieves the greatest decoding speedup of 17.46x.

preprint2020arXiv

Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Attention Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Dynamic skeletal data, represented as the 2D/3D coordinates of human joints, has been widely studied for human action recognition due to its high-level semantic information and environmental robustness. However, previous methods heavily rely on designing hand-crafted traversal rules or graph topologies to draw dependencies between the joints, which are limited in performance and generalizability. In this work, we present a novel decoupled spatial-temporal attention network(DSTA-Net) for skeleton-based action recognition. It involves solely the attention blocks, allowing for modeling spatial-temporal dependencies between joints without the requirement of knowing their positions or mutual connections. Specifically, to meet the specific requirements of the skeletal data, three techniques are proposed for building attention blocks, namely, spatial-temporal attention decoupling, decoupled position encoding and spatial global regularization. Besides, from the data aspect, we introduce a skeletal data decoupling technique to emphasize the specific characteristics of space/time and different motion scales, resulting in a more comprehensive understanding of the human actions.To test the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets for skeleton-based gesture and action recognition, namely, SHREC, DHG, NTU-60 and NTU-120, where DSTA-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on all of them.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning Feature Embeddings for Discriminant Model based Tracking

After observing that the features used in most online discriminatively trained trackers are not optimal, in this paper, we propose a novel and effective architecture to learn optimal feature embeddings for online discriminative tracking. Our method, called DCFST, integrates the solver of a discriminant model that is differentiable and has a closed-form solution into convolutional neural networks. Then, the resulting network can be trained in an end-to-end way, obtaining optimal feature embeddings for the discriminant model-based tracker. As an instance, we apply the popular ridge regression model in this work to demonstrate the power of DCFST. Extensive experiments on six public benchmarks, OTB2015, NFS, GOT10k, TrackingNet, VOT2018, and VOT2019, show that our approach is efficient and generalizes well to class-agnostic target objects in online tracking, thus achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, while running beyond the real-time speed. Code will be made available.

preprint2020arXiv

Non-Autoregressive Image Captioning with Counterfactuals-Critical Multi-Agent Learning

Most image captioning models are autoregressive, i.e. they generate each word by conditioning on previously generated words, which leads to heavy latency during inference. Recently, non-autoregressive decoding has been proposed in machine translation to speed up the inference time by generating all words in parallel. Typically, these models use the word-level cross-entropy loss to optimize each word independently. However, such a learning process fails to consider the sentence-level consistency, thus resulting in inferior generation quality of these non-autoregressive models. In this paper, we propose a Non-Autoregressive Image Captioning (NAIC) model with a novel training paradigm: Counterfactuals-critical Multi-Agent Learning (CMAL). CMAL formulates NAIC as a multi-agent reinforcement learning system where positions in the target sequence are viewed as agents that learn to cooperatively maximize a sentence-level reward. Besides, we propose to utilize massive unlabeled images to boost captioning performance. Extensive experiments on MSCOCO image captioning benchmark show that our NAIC model achieves a performance comparable to state-of-the-art autoregressive models, while brings 13.9x decoding speedup.

preprint2020arXiv

Normalized and Geometry-Aware Self-Attention Network for Image Captioning

Self-attention (SA) network has shown profound value in image captioning. In this paper, we improve SA from two aspects to promote the performance of image captioning. First, we propose Normalized Self-Attention (NSA), a reparameterization of SA that brings the benefits of normalization inside SA. While normalization is previously only applied outside SA, we introduce a novel normalization method and demonstrate that it is both possible and beneficial to perform it on the hidden activations inside SA. Second, to compensate for the major limit of Transformer that it fails to model the geometry structure of the input objects, we propose a class of Geometry-aware Self-Attention (GSA) that extends SA to explicitly and efficiently consider the relative geometry relations between the objects in the image. To construct our image captioning model, we combine the two modules and apply it to the vanilla self-attention network. We extensively evaluate our proposals on MS-COCO image captioning dataset and superior results are achieved when comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. Further experiments on three challenging tasks, i.e. video captioning, machine translation, and visual question answering, show the generality of our methods.