Junchen Wan
Publications
Let the Results Speak: A Replication-First Paradigm for LLM Behavioral Benchmarking
Subjective evaluation of LLM behavior -- empathy, restraint, calibrated emotional tone -- is hard. Human inter-rater agreement on such qualities saturates near rho ~ 0.45, and an LLM-as-judge proxy alone risks circularity: a judge sharing the target's training cohort cannot independently verify it. Anchoring validity to a single human-rater consensus does not extend to capabilities where humans themselves disagree. We propose a replication-first paradigm: instead of anchoring on one rater group, we certify the instrument via four orthogonal properties -- reliability across K runs, cross-instrument replication across architecturally distinct judges, historical-footprint calibration via judges from earlier training cohorts, and pre-registered prediction. We test it on emotional accompaniment by letting the rubric self-evolve data-driven across iterations: the dimensions are not pre-stipulated and the procedure stabilizes to a 9-dimension set. Pre-registration applies to 10 falsifiable hypotheses and 11 forward predictions, committed before any test data was collected. Applied to 49 models across 8 families, the paradigm surfaces what aggregate scores hide. On advice-restraint -- whether a model refrains from giving unsolicited solutions in empathic contexts -- gpt-5 falls 1.87 points from gpt-4.1 and Opus-4.7 falls 0.629 from Opus-4.6, while aggregate scores stay flat. The regression survives three user-proxy swaps (95% of magnitude), replicates across a 5-family judge stack and a 17-month cohort gap, and persists on 74 held-out real ESConv conversations (rho in [0.749, 0.850]); the instrument reaches ordinal Krippendorff alpha = 0.91. As a by-product, the paradigm acts as a saturation-source diagnostic, separating instrumental ceilings (breakable by rubric refinement) from structural ceilings (needing scenario or roster intervention).
GDEPO: Group Dual-dynamic and Equal-right Advantage Policy Optimization with Enhanced Training Data Utilization for Sample-Constrained Reinforcement Learning
Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) represents a fundamental challenge in Artificial Intelligence (AI), requiring the construction of machine-verifiable proofs in formal languages such as Lean to evaluate AI reasoning capabilities. Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly the high-performance Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm, has emerged as a mainstream approach for this task. However, in ATP scenarios, GRPO faces two critical issues: when composite rewards are used, its relative advantage estimation may conflict with the binary feedback from the formal verifier; meanwhile, its static sampling strategy may discard entire batches of data if no valid proof is found, resulting in zero contribution to model updates and significant data waste. To address these limitations, we propose Group Dual-dynamic and Equal-right-advantage Policy Optimization (GDEPO), a method incorporating three core mechanisms: 1) dynamic additional sampling, which resamples invalid batches until a valid proof is discovered; 2) equal-right advantage, decoupling the sign of the advantage function (based on correctness) from its magnitude (modulated by auxiliary rewards) to ensure stable and correct policy updates; and 3) dynamic additional iterations, applying extra gradient steps to initially failed but eventually successful samples to accelerate learning on challenging cases. Experiments conducted on three datasets of varying difficulty (MinF2F-test, MathOlympiadBench, PutnamBench) confirm the effectiveness of GDEPO, while ablation studies validate the necessity of its synergistic components. The proposed method enhances data utilization and optimization efficiency, offering a novel training paradigm for ATP.