NeurIPS 2026AcceptedNew
Mingda Zhang, Wenjin Liu, Tiesunlong Shen† (corresponding author), Qika Lin, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria, Xiaoying Tang, Haoran Luo
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 39 (NeurIPS 2026)
In recent years, agentic workflows have been widely applied to solve complex human tasks. However, existing workflow construction still faces key challenges, including human-dependent workflow construction, the lack of graph-level execution feedback, and the inability to repair errors in-loop during long-horizon construction. To address these challenges, we propose FlowSteer, a new paradigm of Agent Designing Agentic Workflows - a single agent itself end-to-end designs the workflow that a downstream executor runs. To support this paradigm, we introduce the Workflow Canvas, a novel executable graph-state environment that returns syntax-checked execution feedback for every atomic edit. Built on the canvas, we further propose Reinforced Progressive Canvas Editing, in which a lightweight policy agent issues one atomic edit per turn conditioned on real canvas feedback, and is trained end-to-end via reinforcement learning. Moreover, FlowSteer provides a plug-and-play framework that supports diverse operator libraries and interchangeable LLM backends. Experimental results on twelve datasets show that FlowSteer significantly outperforms baselines across various tasks.
@inproceedings{zhang2026flowsteer,
title = {{FlowSteer: Towards Agents Designing Agentic Workflows via Reinforced Progressive Canvas Editing}},
author = {Mingda Zhang and Wenjin Liu and Tiesunlong Shen and Qika Lin and Rui Mao and Erik Cambria and Xiaoying Tang and Haoran Luo},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 39 (NeurIPS 2026)},
year = {2026},
eprint = {2602.01664},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {http://flowsteer.org/},
note = {Accepted}
}ACM MM 2026AcceptedNew
Ziyi Zhou, Xiaoming Zhang† (corresponding author), Hui Pang, Yuting Zhang, Tiesunlong Shen, Bingyu Yan, Erik Cambria, Litian Zhang
Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '26) · Oral
@inproceedings{zhou2026metapath,
title = {{Reasoning through Evolution: Automatic Meta-path Discovery for LLM-based Fake News Detection}},
author = {Ziyi Zhou and Xiaoming Zhang and Hui Pang and Yuting Zhang and Tiesunlong Shen and Bingyu Yan and Erik Cambria and Litian Zhang},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '26)},
year = {2026},
eprint = {2609.18597},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
note = {Accepted}
}Information Fusion 2026New
Tiesunlong Shen, Jin Wang† (corresponding author), Liang-Chih Yu† (corresponding author), Xuejie Zhang, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria
Information Fusion, vol. 137, art. 104655
@article{shen2026cgd,
title = {{Controllable Graph Diffusion for Community Search}},
author = {Tiesunlong Shen and Jin Wang and Liang-Chih Yu and Xuejie Zhang and Rui Mao and Erik Cambria},
journal = {Information Fusion, vol. 137, art. 104655},
year = {2026},
volume = {137},
pages = {104655},
publisher = {Elsevier BV},
doi = {10.1016/j.inffus.2026.104655},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2026.104655}
}ACL Findings 2026New
Wenjin Liu, Haoran Luo† (corresponding author), Xueyuan Lin, Haoming Liu† (corresponding author), Tiesunlong Shen, Jiapu Wang, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pp. 16260-16280
Recently, advanced large language models (LLMs) have emerged at an increasingly rapid pace. However, when faced with complex problems, most users are often unable to provide accurate and effective prompts to interact with LLMs, thus limiting the performance of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose Prompt-R1, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that uses a small-scale LLM to collaborate with large-scale LLMs, replacing user interaction to solve problems better. This collaboration is cast as a multi-turn prompt interaction, where the small-scale LLM thinks and generates prompts, and the large-scale LLM performs complex reasoning. A dual-constrained reward is designed to optimize for correctness, generation quality, and reasoning accuracy. Prompt-R1 provides a plug-and-play framework that supports both inference and training with various large-scale LLMs. Experiments on multiple public datasets show that Prompt-R1 significantly outperforms baseline models across tasks.
@inproceedings{liu2026promptr1,
title = {{Prompt-R1: Collaborative Automatic Prompting Framework via End-to-end Reinforcement Learning}},
author = {Wenjin Liu and Haoran Luo and Xueyuan Lin and Haoming Liu and Tiesunlong Shen and Jiapu Wang and Rui Mao and Erik Cambria},
booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pp. 16260-16280},
year = {2026},
pages = {16260--16280},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.799},
eprint = {2511.01016},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.799.pdf}
}IEEE TCSS 2026
Erik Cambria, Rui Mao, Xulang Zhang, Luwei Xiao, Tiesunlong Shen, Avinash Anand
IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 4086-4095
Large language models (LLMs) generate fluent, context-rich text but suffer from hallucinations and limited interpretability. We introduce SenticNet 9, a neurosymbolic framework that automates commonsense reasoning while preserving transparency. It leverages conceptual primitive discovery (CPD) to learn foundational concepts and a time shift mechanism (TSM) to iteratively refine them through temporal feedback. This combination yields a scalable, cognitively inspired architecture that merges symbolic interpretability with LLM generalization. Experiments show SenticNet 9 outperforming embeddings, transformers, and state-of-the-art LLMs across tasks, delivering higher accuracy without sacrificing explainability.
@article{cambria2026senticnet9,
title = {{SenticNet 9: Generative Commonsense for Emotion AI via Conceptual Primitive Discovery and Time Shift Mechanism}},
author = {Erik Cambria and Rui Mao and Xulang Zhang and Luwei Xiao and Tiesunlong Shen and Avinash Anand},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 4086-4095},
year = {2026},
volume = {13},
pages = {4086--4095},
publisher = {Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)},
doi = {10.1109/TCSS.2026.3677113},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2026.3677113}
}AAAI 2026
Tiesunlong Shen, Rui Mao, Jin Wang† (corresponding author), Heming Sun, Jian Zhang, Xuejie Zhang, Erik Cambria
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 40, no. 39 (AAAI-26), pp. 32920-32928
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical, yet traditional fine-tuning methods are computationally expensive and inflexible. While test-time alignment offers a promising alternative, existing approaches often rely on distorted trajectory-level signals or inefficient sampling, fundamentally capping performance and failing to preserve the generative diversity of the base model. This paper introduces LLMdoctor, a novel framework for efficient test-time alignment that operates via a patient-doctor paradigm. It integrates token-level reward acquisition with token-level flow-guided preference optimization (TFPO) to steer a large, frozen patient LLM with a smaller, specialized doctor model. Unlike conventional methods that rely on trajectory-level rewards, LLMdoctor first extracts fine-grained, token-level preference signals from the patient model's behavioral variations. These signals then guide the training of the doctor model via TFPO, which establishes flow consistency across all subtrajectories, enabling precise token-by-token alignment while inherently preserving generation diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLMdoctor significantly outperforms existing test-time alignment methods and even surpasses the performance of full fine-tuning approaches like DPO.
@inproceedings{shen2026llmdoctor,
title = {{LLMdoctor: Token-Level Flow-Guided Preference Optimization for Efficient Test-Time Alignment of Large Language Models}},
author = {Tiesunlong Shen and Rui Mao and Jin Wang and Heming Sun and Jian Zhang and Xuejie Zhang and Erik Cambria},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 40, no. 39 (AAAI-26), pp. 32920-32928},
year = {2026},
volume = {40},
pages = {32920--32928},
publisher = {Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)},
doi = {10.1609/aaai.v40i39.40573},
eprint = {2601.10416},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/40573}
}Information Fusion 2026
Rui Pan, Haoran Luo, Quan Yuan, Guiyang Luo, Jinglin Li, Tiesunlong Shen, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria
Information Fusion, vol. 129, art. 104068
@article{pan2026multitask,
title = {{Multitask Reinforcement Learning with Metadata-Guided Adaptive Routing}},
author = {Rui Pan and Haoran Luo and Quan Yuan and Guiyang Luo and Jinglin Li and Tiesunlong Shen and Rui Mao and Erik Cambria},
journal = {Information Fusion, vol. 129, art. 104068},
year = {2026},
volume = {129},
pages = {104068},
publisher = {Elsevier BV},
doi = {10.1016/j.inffus.2025.104068},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.104068}
}Information Fusion 2026
Jian Zhang, Shihao Qi, Yuxuan Dong, Li Yuan, Tiesunlong Shen, Weiping Fu, Bifan Wei, Haiping Zhu, Jun Liu
Information Fusion, vol. 128, art. 103956
@article{zhang2026gkgllm,
title = {{GKG-LLM: A Unified Framework for Generalized Knowledge Graph Construction}},
author = {Jian Zhang and Shihao Qi and Yuxuan Dong and Li Yuan and Tiesunlong Shen and Weiping Fu and Bifan Wei and Haiping Zhu and Jun Liu},
journal = {Information Fusion, vol. 128, art. 103956},
year = {2026},
volume = {128},
pages = {103956},
publisher = {Elsevier BV},
doi = {10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103956},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103956}
}