Jihao Huang
Publications
CompanionBench: A Theory-Anchored, Real-World-Grounded Benchmark for AI Emotional Companionship
LLM companions are deployed at scale in personally consequential settings, yet poorly evaluated. Existing benchmarks use hand-authored scenarios and prompted simulators, aggregate empathy into one score, and overlook judge biases such as same-family favoritism and scale drift. We introduce CompanionBench, an interactive bilingual benchmark. To our knowledge, it is the first companion benchmark to ground both its scenarios and a trained user simulator in de-identified real-world data. A hidden disclosure gate branches each persona's trajectory on the agent's own behavior, controlling the interaction state space without scripting dialogue. We operationalize ten capabilities derived from 25 theories across psychology and counseling, four of them not graded explicitly by prior work: holding ambiguity, selfobject responsiveness, positive resonance and calibrated challenge. Agents are assessed on two complementary axes: a subjective ten-capability rubric and a deterministic measure of whether deeper disclosure was earned. A cross-family panel dilutes same-family favoritism; an Item Response Theory model separates agent quality from judge severity. Theory fixes what to measure and how personas are structured; real data supply events, history, and profiles -- coverage from theory, authenticity from data. Rankings are reproducible in both languages (rho = 0.996 ZH / 0.953 EN). Evaluating 28 agents reveals capability-level differences obscured by aggregate scores. Emotion regulation and calibrated challenge remain common weaknesses; holding ambiguity discriminates most. Role-play agents rank near the bottom: immersion does not imply relational competence. Across agents, the dominant failure mode is substituting surface warmth for substantive relational support. We will release 500 Chinese-English parallel pairs and the evaluation code.
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.