Yan Liu, Feng Zhang Peking University, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Xu Meituan, Jiuchong Gao, Jinghua Hao, Renqing He, Han Liu Dalian University of Technology 等 9 位作者
High-quality chain-of-thought has demonstrated strong potential for unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, current paradigms typically treat the reasoning process as an indivisible sequence, lacking an intrinsic mechanism to quantify step-wise information gain. This granularity gap manifests in two limitations: inference inefficiency from redundant exploration without explicit guidance, and optimization difficulty due to sparse outcome supervision or costly external verifiers. In this work, we propose CoT-Flow, a framework that reconceptualizes discrete reasoning steps as a continuous probabilistic flow, quantifying the contribution of each step toward the ground-truth answer. Built on this formulation, CoT-Flow enables two complementary methodologies: flow-guided decoding, which employs a greedy flow-based decoding strategy to extract information-efficient reasoning paths, and flow-based reinforcement learning, which constructs a verifier-free dense reward function. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that CoT-Flow achieves a superior balance between inference efficiency and reasoning 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
Weitao Ma Harbin Institute of Technology, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Xiachong Feng University of Hong Kong, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Xu Meituan, Jiuchong Gao, Jinghua Hao 等 10 位作者
Effective memory management is essential for large language model agents to navigate long-horizon tasks. Recent research has explored using Reinforcement Learning to develop specialized memory manager agents. However, existing approaches rely on final task performance as the primary reward, which results in severe reward sparsity and ineffective credit assignment, providing insufficient guidance for individual memory operations. To this end, we propose Fine-Mem, a unified framework designed for fine-grained feedback alignment. First, we introduce a Chunk-level Step Reward to provide immediate step-level supervision via auxiliary chunk-specific question answering tasks. Second, we devise Evidence-Anchored Reward Attribution to redistribute global rewards by anchoring credit to key memory operations, based on the specific memory items utilized as evidence in reasoning. Together, these components enable stable policy optimization and align local memory operations with the long-term utility of memory. Experiments on Memalpha and MemoryAgentBench demonstrate that Fine-Mem consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving superior success rates across various sub-tasks. Further analysis reveals its adaptability and strong generalization capabilities across diverse model configurations and backbones
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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