Skip to content

Author

Rong-Can Pei

2 papers indexed here

We haven’t gathered this author’s papers yet. Follow them and we’ll fetch their work.

Not the right person? Other researchers publish under this name.

Preprint Aug 2026

Sci-Surf: Navigating Scientific Literature Discovery through Human Feedback and Intelligent Summarization

The rapid growth of scientific publications makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to identify relevant new studies and effectively comprehend them. Existing academic discovery platforms typically rely on static topic subscriptions or embedding-based similarity and provide only abstracts or short summaries, offering limited support for nuanced intent modeling and in-depth paper summarization. We present Sci-Surf, an intent-centric knowledge discovery system that integrates feedback-driven personalized recommendation with multi-modal blog-style paper digestion. Our approach refines user intent representations through LLM-based user profiling, while generating structured summaries that synthesize textual and visual information from full papers. The demo presents an end-to-end academic discovery pipeline and demonstrates measurable improvements in both recommendation quality and digestion quality through real-user evaluations. Specifically, the integration of verbalized profiles led to a 10.4% average improvement in predictive alignment with real-world user preferences throughout a month-long online evaluation.

Fang Guo, Qi Zhu, Rong-Can Pei et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Negative Self-Distillation: Learning to Reason by Avoiding Flaws

On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a popular paradigm for large language model (LLM) self-improvement, allowing models to act as their own teachers by leveraging privileged information such as ground-truth solutions. However, recent findings indicate that OPSD can severely degrade the performance of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks: By forcing the student to imitate an artificially confident reasoning trace conditioned on privileged information, OPSD inadvertently suppresses expressions of uncertainty and penalizes the exploratory, self-corrective behaviors required to solve challenging problems. To address this, we introduce Negative Self-Distillation (NSD), a new framework that optimizes LLMs by diverging from flawed reasoning rather than imitating privileged solutions. Instead of relying on ground-truth answers or external supervision, NSD uses the model itself to generate a question-specific negative condition (eg, acting as a ``careless reasoner'') and pushes the student's distribution away from this self-generated negative teacher. Naively applying unlearning objectives to achieve this divergence is problematic, as flawed reasoning tokens are confounded with basic linguistic tokens; indiscriminately penalizing both risks catastrophically degrading the model's foundational language capabilities. We resolve this by designing a dynamic gating mechanism that automatically identifies and isolates reasoning-critical tokens, ensuring gradient updates target only behavioral flaws while preserving the model's linguistic priors. Empirically, NSD consistently outperforms OPSD and other label-free, self-bootstrapping reinforcement learning (RL) baselines.

Rong-Can Pei, Zhepei Wei, Shu-Yao Xu et al. · 0 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.