Xin Chen Nanjing University, Feng Jiang Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, Yiqian Zhang, Hardy Chen, Shuo Yan University of Texas at Dallas, Wenya Xie University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Min Yang, Shujian Huang Nanjing University
Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, yet they remain fundamentally limited by a blind self-thinking paradigm: performing extensive internal reasoning even when critical information is missing or ambiguous. We propose Proactive Interactive Reasoning (PIR), a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs from passive solvers into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. Unlike existing search- or tool-based frameworks that primarily address knowledge uncertainty by querying external environments, PIR targets premise- and intent-level uncertainty through direct interaction with the user. PIR is implemented via two core components: (1) an uncertainty-aware supervised fine-tuning procedure that equips models with interactive reasoning capability, and (2) a user-simulator-based policy optimization framework driven by a composite reward that aligns model behavior with user intent. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing demonstrate that PIR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to 32.70% higher accuracy, 22.90% higher pass rate, and 41.36 BLEU improvement, while reducing nearly half of the reasoning computation and unnecessary interaction turns. Further reliability evaluations on factual knowledge, question answering, and missing-premise scenarios confirm the strong generalization and robustness of PIR.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zidi Xiong, Yuping Lin Michigan State University, Wenya Xie University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Pengfei He Michigan State University, Zirui Liu University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Jiliang Tang Michigan State University, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Zhen Xiang University of Georgia
Memory is a critical component in large language model (LLM)-based agents, enabling them to store and retrieve past executions to improve task performance over time. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on how memory management choices impact the LLM agents’ behavior, especially their long-term performance. Specifically, we focus on two fundamental memory management operations that are widely used by many agent frameworks—memory addition and deletion—to systematically study their impact on the agent behavior. Through our quantitative analysis, we find that LLM agents display an experience-following property: high similarity between a task input and the input in a retrieved memory record often results in highly similar agent outputs. Our analysis further reveals two significant challenges associated with this property: error propagation, where inaccuracies in past experiences compound and degrade future performance, and misaligned experience replay, where some seemingly correct executions can provide limited or even misleading value as experiences. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate the importance of regulating experience quality within the memory bank and show that future task evaluations can serve as free quality labels for stored memory. Our findings offer insights into the behavioral dynamics of LLM agent memory systems and provide practical guidance for designing memory components that support robust, long-term agent performance.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表