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Jiajun Fan

Jiajun Fan contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

4 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Retrieval is Cheap, Show Me the Code: Executable Multi-Hop Reasoning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard approach for knowledge-intensive question answering, but existing systems remain brittle on multi-hop questions, where solving the task requires chaining multiple retrieval and reasoning steps. Key challenges are that current methods represent reasoning through free-form natural language, where intermediate states are implicit, retrieval queries can drift from intended entities, and errors are detected by the same model that produces them making self-reflection an unreliable, ungrounded signal. We observe that multi-hop question answering is a typical form of step-by-step computation, and that this structured process aligns closely with how code-specialized language models are trained to operate. Motivated by this, we introduce \pyrag, a framework that reformulates multi-hop RAG as program synthesis and execution. Instead of free-form reasoning trajectories, \pyrag represents the reasoning process as an executable Python program over retrieval and QA tools, exposing intermediate states as variables, producing deterministic feedback through execution, and yielding an inspectable trace of the entire reasoning process. This formulation further enables compiler-grounded self-repair and execution-driven adaptive retrieval without any additional training. Experiments on five QA benchmarks (PopQA, HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, and Bamboogle) show that \pyrag consistently outperforms strong baselines under both training-free and RL-trained settings, with especially large gains on compositional multi-hop datasets. Our code, data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/GasolSun36/PyRAG.

preprint2026arXiv

Trust or Abstain? A Self-Aware RAG Approach

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external evidence, but it also introduces knowledge conflicts when retrieved contextual knowledge (CK) and parametric knowledge (PK) disagree or are both unreliable. Existing approaches mainly coordinate which source to use, without explicitly asking whether each answer path is correct. We argue that faithful RAG requires LLM self-awareness, namely the ability to recognize the limits of its own knowledge and reasoning. To ground this problem, we construct a model-specific, ground-truth-aligned knowledge-conflict benchmark by evaluating LLM backbones on PK-only and CK-conditioned answer paths over approximately 69K query-context instances per backbone, drawn from five conflict-QA datasets. We then introduce SABER, a Self-Aware Belief Estimator for RAG that requires no LLM fine-tuning. SABER combines a self-prior with PK-side and CK-side conditional reasoning representations from multi-trace inference, then estimates reliability beliefs with two lightweight predictors to drive a 4-cell decision over trust PK, trust CK, trust either, or abstain. Across four LLM backbones, SABER improves end-to-end accuracy and conflict-specific faithfulness over ten inference-time and fine-tuning baselines, with the largest gains on conflict-heavy datasets. Under abstention, SABER's risk-coverage curve Pareto-dominates every prompt-based abstainer, providing a tunable balance between coverage and answer risk. Our code is available at https://github.com/xizhu1022/SABER.

preprint2022arXiv

GDI: Rethinking What Makes Reinforcement Learning Different From Supervised Learning

Deep Q Network (DQN) firstly kicked the door of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) via combining deep learning (DL) with reinforcement learning (RL), which has noticed that the distribution of the acquired data would change during the training process. DQN found this property might cause instability for training, so it proposed effective methods to handle the downside of the property. Instead of focusing on the unfavourable aspects, we find it critical for RL to ease the gap between the estimated data distribution and the ground truth data distribution while supervised learning (SL) fails to do so. From this new perspective, we extend the basic paradigm of RL called the Generalized Policy Iteration (GPI) into a more generalized version, which is called the Generalized Data Distribution Iteration (GDI). We see massive RL algorithms and techniques can be unified into the GDI paradigm, which can be considered as one of the special cases of GDI. We provide theoretical proof of why GDI is better than GPI and how it works. Several practical algorithms based on GDI have been proposed to verify the effectiveness and extensiveness of it. Empirical experiments prove our state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), wherein our algorithm has achieved 9620.98% mean human normalized score (HNS), 1146.39% median HNS and 22 human world record breakthroughs (HWRB) using only 200M training frames. Our work aims to lead the RL research to step into the journey of conquering the human world records and seek real superhuman agents on both performance and efficiency.

preprint2022arXiv

Generalized Data Distribution Iteration

To obtain higher sample efficiency and superior final performance simultaneously has been one of the major challenges for deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Previous work could handle one of these challenges but typically failed to address them concurrently. In this paper, we try to tackle these two challenges simultaneously. To achieve this, we firstly decouple these challenges into two classic RL problems: data richness and exploration-exploitation trade-off. Then, we cast these two problems into the training data distribution optimization problem, namely to obtain desired training data within limited interactions, and address them concurrently via i) explicit modeling and control of the capacity and diversity of behavior policy and ii) more fine-grained and adaptive control of selective/sampling distribution of the behavior policy using a monotonic data distribution optimization. Finally, we integrate this process into Generalized Policy Iteration (GPI) and obtain a more general framework called Generalized Data Distribution Iteration (GDI). We use the GDI framework to introduce operator-based versions of well-known RL methods from DQN to Agent57. Theoretical guarantee of the superiority of GDI compared with GPI is concluded. We also demonstrate our state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), wherein our algorithm has achieved 9620.33% mean human normalized score (HNS), 1146.39% median HNS and surpassed 22 human world records using only 200M training frames. Our performance is comparable to Agent57's while we consume 500 times less data. We argue that there is still a long way to go before obtaining real superhuman agents in ALE.