Author name cluster

Ping Nie

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5 papers

1 author row

TMLR Journal 2026 Journal Article

BrowserAgent: Building Web Agents with Human-Inspired Web Browsing Actions

Tao Yu
Zhengbo Zhang
Zhiheng Lyu
Junhao Gong
Hongzhu Yi
Xinming Wang
Yuxuan Zhou
Jiabing Yang

Efficiently solving real-world problems with LLMs increasingly hinges on their ability to interact with dynamic web environments and autonomously acquire external information. While recent research like Search-R1 and WebDancer demonstrates strong performance in solving web tasks, they heavily rely on additional tools to convert the interactive web environment into static text content. This is in contrast to human browsing behaviors, which involve diverse interactions with the browser, such as scrolling, clicking, and typing. In this paper, we propose BrowserAgent, a more interactive agent that solves complex tasks through human-inspired browser actions. BrowserAgent operates directly on raw web pages via Playwright through a set of predefined browser actions. We adopt a two-stage training (Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT)) to improve the model's generalization abilities. Despite using significantly less training data than Search-R1, BrowserAgent achieves more competitive results across different Open-QA tasks. Additionally, we introduce an explicit memory mechanism to store key conclusions across steps, further enhancing the model's reasoning capabilities for long-horizon tasks. Notably, BrowserAgent-7B can achieve around 20\% improvement over Search-R1 on multi-hop QA tasks like HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and Bamboogle. These results indicate that BrowserAgent can serve as a more advanced framework for more interactive and scalable web agents.

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TMLR Journal 2026 Journal Article

StructEval: Benchmarking LLMs' Capabilities to Generate Structural Outputs

Jialin Yang
Dongfu Jiang
Tony He
Sherman Siu
Yuxuan Zhang
Disen Liao
Zhuofeng Li
Huaye Zeng

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become integral to software development workflows, their ability to generate structured outputs has become critically important. We introduce $\textbf{StructEval}$, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in producing both non-renderable (JSON, YAML, CSV) and renderable (HTML, React, SVG) structured formats. Unlike prior benchmarks, StructEval systematically evaluates structural fidelity across diverse formats through two paradigms: $\textbf{1)}$ generation tasks, producing structured output from natural language prompts, and $\textbf{2)}$ conversion tasks, translating between structured formats. Our benchmark encompasses 18 formats and 44 types of task, with novel metrics for format adherence and structural correctness. Results reveal significant performance gaps—even state-of-the-art models like o1-mini achieve only $75.58$ average score, with open-source alternatives lagging approximately $10$ points behind. We find generation tasks more challenging than conversion tasks, and producing correct visual content more difficult than generating text-only structures.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Breaking the Batch Barrier (B3) of Contrastive Learning via Smart Batch Mining

Raghuveer Thirukovalluru
Rui Meng
Ye Liu
Karthikeyan K
Mingyi Su
Ping Nie
Semih Yavuz
Yingbo Zhou

Contrastive learning (CL) is a prevalent technique for training embedding models, which pulls semantically similar examples (positives) closer in the representation space while pushing dissimilar ones (negatives) further apart. A key source of negatives are "in-batch" examples, i. e. , positives from other examples in the batch. Effectiveness of such models is hence strongly influenced by the size and quality of training batches. In this work, we propose Breaking the Batch Barrier (B3), a novel batch construction strategy designed to curate high-quality batches for CL. Our approach begins by using a pretrained teacher embedding model to rank all examples in the dataset, from which a sparse similarity graph is constructed. A community detection algorithm is then applied to this graph to identify clusters of examples that serve as strong negatives for one another. The clusters are then used to construct batches that are rich in in-batch negatives. Empirical results on the MMEB multimodal embedding benchmark (36 tasks) demonstrate that our method sets a new state of the art, outperforming previous best methods by +1. 3 and +2. 9 points at the 7B and 2B model scales, respectively. Notably, models trained with B3 surpass existing state-of-the-art results even with a batch size as small as 64, which is 4–16× smaller than that required by other methods. Moreover, experiments show that B3 generalizes well across domains and tasks, maintaining strong performance even when trained with considerably weaker teachers.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MoE-CAP: Benchmarking Cost, Accuracy and Performance of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Systems

Yinsicheng Jiang
Yao Fu
Yeqi Huang
Ping Nie
Zhan Lu
Leyang Xue
Congjie He
Man-Kit Sit

The sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is increasingly favored for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) efficiently, but it depends on heterogeneous compute and memory resources. These factors jointly affect system Cost, Accuracy, and Performance (CAP), making trade-offs inevitable. Existing benchmarks often fail to capture these trade-offs accurately, complicating practical deployment decisions. To address this, we introduce MoE-CAP, a benchmark specifically designed for MoE systems. Our analysis reveals that achieving an optimal balance across CAP is difficult with current hardware; MoE systems typically optimize two of the three dimensions at the expense of the third—a dynamic we term the MoE-CAP trade-off. To visualize this, we propose the CAP Radar Diagram. We further introduce sparsity-aware performance metrics—Sparse Memory Bandwidth Utilization (S-MBU) and Sparse Model FLOPS Utilization (S-MFU)—to enable accurate performance benchmarking of MoE systems across diverse hardware platforms and deployment scenarios. This benchmark is available on Github: https: //github. com/sparse-generative-ai/MoE-CAP.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Glyce: Glyph-vectors for Chinese Character Representations

Yuxian Meng
Wei Wu
Fei Wang
Xiaoya Li
Ping Nie
Fan Yin
Muyu Li
Qinghong Han

It is intuitive that NLP tasks for logographic languages like Chinese should benefit from the use of the glyph information in those languages. However, due to the lack of rich pictographic evidence in glyphs and the weak generalization ability of standard computer vision models on character data, an effective way to utilize the glyph information remains to be found. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting Glyce, the glyph-vectors for Chinese character representations. We make three major innovations: (1) We use historical Chinese scripts (e. g. , bronzeware script, seal script, traditional Chinese, etc) to enrich the pictographic evidence in characters; (2) We design CNN structures (called tianzege-CNN) tailored to Chinese character image processing; and (3) We use image-classification as an auxiliary task in a multi-task learning setup to increase the model's ability to generalize. We show that glyph-based models are able to consistently outperform word/char ID-based models in a wide range of Chinese NLP tasks. When combing with BERT, we are able to set new state-of-the-art results for a variety of Chinese NLP tasks, including language modeling, tagging (NER, CWS, POS), sentence pair classification (BQ, LCQMC, XNLI, NLPCC-DBQA), single sentence classification tasks (ChnSentiCorp, the Fudan corpus, iFeng), dependency parsing, and semantic role labeling. For example, the proposed model achieves an F1 score of 81. 6 on the OntoNotes dataset of NER, +1. 5 over BERT; it achieves an almost perfect accuracy of 99. 8\% on the the Fudan corpus for text classification.

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