arXiv subjects

Yuchen Yan

Publications and source records attributed to Yuchen Yan.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Predict, Don't Iterate: Efficient Adaptive-Length Infilling for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to the auto-regressive paradigm. With bidirectional attention and any-order generation, DLMs naturally fit infilling tasks, which require generating a middle span conditioned on both the prefix and the suffix. However, infilling is sensitive to the length of the span, while DLMs require the length to be fixed before generation. Although prior studies extend DLMs to dynamic lengths, they still suffer from two limitations. (i) Sensitivity to initial length. These methods require a preset length to initialize the search and are highly sensitive to this initial length, often yielding suboptimal results. (ii) Inference inefficiency. They either insert length-changing operations during generation or repeatedly search for an appropriate length using multi-step denoising confidence, both of which introduce substantial extra forward passes and computational cost. Therefore, we propose PILL (Probing-based InfiLling with preset-Length-free decoding), an efficient infilling method for DLMs that requires no preset initial length and adds far fewer extra forward passes than baselines, substantially reducing inference time. Experiments show that, across five DLMs spanning different families, architectures, and training recipes on eight infilling benchmarks, PILL improves over the strongest baseline by +4.8 average pass rate on code and +6.0 BLEU-2 on text, while running 1.82x faster than that baseline. The code is available at https://github.com/Hsu1023/PILL.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

PaperGym: Rubric-Centered Evolution for Research-Plan Generation

Research planning is the decisive capability of AI scientists. Yet a research plan admits no verifiable answer, so reinforcement learning lacks the environment it requires: tasks paired with a critic. Rubrics extracted from scientific papers can supply the critic. Existing pipelines, however, draw the question and the criteria from the same content, so the reward can be earned by paraphrase. The rubric is further compressed into a single scalar per rollout. We introduce PaperGym, a unified framework that turns each research paper into a complete training environment. PaperGym exploits the structure of a paper: the question is synthesized from the research goal and background, while the criteria are derived from the method and experiments. The criteria span methodological innovation and experimental design, and criterion leakage falls to 3.7%, versus 11.90% to 34.10% in existing datasets. Training uses the rubric twice: first as privileged context for OPSD's self-teacher, then as the reward for GRPO. Across Qwen3-1.7B/4B/8B, this schedule outperforms supervised fine-tuning, either stage alone, and the reverse ordering, improving five-benchmark averages by +5.6, +5.0, and +4.8 points. With the recipe held fixed, models trained on PaperGym-20k win 58.1% of three-way comparisons, against 28.2% for RubricHub Science. The trained Qwen3-8B reaches 73.48 on ResearchQA, above the far larger Kimi K2.6. We release the pipeline, the 20,000-instance corpus PaperGym-20k, and the benchmarks PaperGym-Innov and PaperGym-Design.

cs.CL↗