Qisheng Su, Shiting Huang, Zhen Fang University of Science and Technology of China, Ziyan Chen, Zehui Chen, Feng Zhao University of Science and Technology of China
In real-world Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) scenarios, a major source of inefficiency is that the toolcalls create pauses between LLM requests and cause KV-cache eviction. Also, the long, unfiltered response returned by external tools inflates the KV-cache, so each decode step spends more time loading the growing cache and thus becomes steadily slower as context length increases. However, existing efficiency metrics like token counts and toolcall counts fail to capture this real computational cost. To address this, we introduce PTE (Prefill Token Equivalents), a hardware-aware TIR-efficiency metric that unifies internal reasoning and external tool-use costs while explicitly accounting for non-reusable KV-Cache and long-tool-response scenarios, thus better reflects real-world scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments across five TIR benchmarks, quantify their PTE costs, and identify four inefficiency patterns that appear in TIR. In a simulated high-concurrency industrial setting, PTE explains wall-clock latency significantly better than token-count metric. We also discover that trajectories with higher PTE costs tend to have lower reasoning correctness, indicating that simply using more tools does not improve the quality of the answer. PTE offers a new perspective on the efficiency of Tool-Integrated Reasoning. The code is available.
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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
Zhen Fang University of Science and Technology of China, Ruiyan Han, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen University of Science and Technology of China 等 12 位作者
While Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, a significant gap persists in their ability to leverage such internal knowledge for high-quality generation. We formalize this discrepancy as Conduction Aphasia, a phenomenon where models accurately interpret multimodal inputs but struggle to translate that understanding into faithful and controllable synthesis. To address this, we propose UniCorn, a simple yet elegant self-improvement framework that eliminates the need for external data or teacher supervision. By partitioning a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge, UniCorn generates high-quality interactions via self-play and employs cognitive pattern reconstruction to distill latent understanding into explicit generative signals. To validate the restoration of multimodal coherence, we introduce UniCycle, a cycle-consistency benchmark based on a Text to Image to Text reconstruction loop. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniCorn achieves comprehensive and substantial improvements over the base model across six general image generation benchmarks. Notably, it achieves SOTA performance on TIIF(73.8), DPG(86.8), CompBench(88.5), and UniCycle while further delivering substantial gains of +5.0 on WISE and +6.5 on OneIG. These results highlight that our method significantly enhances T2I generation while maintaining robust comprehension, demonstrating the scalability of fully self-supervised refinement for unified multimodal intelligence.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Shun Zou, Yong Wang, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen University of Science and Technology of China, Chongyang Tao Beihang University, Feng Zhao University of Science and Technology of China, Xiangxiang Chu Alibaba Group
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have recently become a promising alternative to autoregressive large language models (ARMs). Semi-autoregressive (Semi-AR) decoding is widely employed in base dLLMs and advanced decoding strategies due to its superior performance. However, our observations reveal that Semi-AR decoding suffers from inherent block constraints, which cause the decoding of many cross-block stable tokens to be unnecessarily delayed. To address this challenge, we systematically investigate the identification of stable tokens and present three key findings: (1) naive lookahead decoding is unreliable, (2) token stability closely correlates with convergence trend, and (3) historical information is isolated. Building on these insights, we propose Anchor-based History-stable Decoding (AHD), a training-free, plug-and-play dynamic decoding strategy. Specifically, AHD monitors the stability trend of tokens in real time through dynamic anchors. Once a token reaches stability, it initiates early cross-block decoding to enhance efficiency and performance. Extensive experiments across language, vision-language, and audio-language domains demonstrate that AHD simultaneously improves both performance and inference efficiency. Notably, AHD effectively reverses the performance degradation typically observed in existing advanced decoding acceleration strategies. For instance, on the BBH benchmark, our approach reduces decoding steps by 80% while improving performance by 3.67%.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表