Chen Su, Xingqun Qi, Xurui Hu, Bingkun Yang, Muyi Sun, Man Zhang, Zhenan Sun
Deriving plausible and dynamic Human Object Interaction (HOI) has gained tremendous progress in Embodied AI and Immersive AR/VR. While existing HOI methods have effectively explored human interaction with individual or fixed objects, they still show limitations in complex multi-object interaction scenes. Meanwhile, previous approaches focus more on the contact information held by human-object relation, overlooking the significance of the contact situation of various entities (i.e., object-object). To address these limitations, we propose UniffordInteractor, a Reasoning-then-Interacting framework that leverages unified affordance for realistic and long-horizon human and multi-object interaction modeling. At the reasoning stage, we devise a Unified Affordance Reasoner (UAR) that employs a fine-tuned 3D Multimodal Large Language Model for unified object-centric affordance prediction. At the interacting stage, we propose Hierarchical Interaction Generator (HIG), which formulates the interaction generation as a hierarchical (e.g., root to body to hand to objects) autoregressive prediction, conditioned on the obtained unified affordance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniffordInteractor surpasses SOTA counterparts in human and multi-object interaction generation.
Writing assistants use persistent preferences to personalize responses, but these can conflict with the current request. Responses can meet every requirement yet serve the task poorly, while task failures need not involve following a conflicting preference. We introduce Profile Conflict Arbitration (PCA-Bench), a benchmark of 64 rewriting tasks and 256 task-preference pairs. We construct these pairs by varying the profile preference for each fixed text and request, covering different relations between the preference and the request. We assess whether responses meet requirements, how well they achieve the request's goals, and whether they follow preferences. Across three LLMs, we find that when preferences compete with task goals, a higher success rate in meeting both requirements and preferences does not mean better responses: it can come with a greater quality loss compared with responses without a profile. Similar rates of preference following do not imply the same ability to meet the current task's requirements when preferences conflict with them.
Outcome-based reinforcement learning provides coarse supervision for long-horizon LLM agents: failed trajectories may contain correct steps, while successful trajectories can contain errors. Trajectory-level skills can also shift teacher preferences at unrelated steps, introducing off-target distillation signals. We introduce SCOPE, a framework for Selective Critical-Step On-Policy Self-Distillation. After a supervised warm-up, the policy analyzes its own trajectories, generates step-specific hindsight skills, and distills their guidance only at selected error steps. A bounded signed teacher-student coefficient stabilizes auxiliary updates while preserving positive reinforcement and negative correction. A success-relative pairwise length reward further encourages efficient task completion. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop demonstrate consistent improvements across multiple model backbones. With Qwen2.5-3B, SCOPE achieves 97.7% success on ALFWorld and 85.2% on WebShop, outperforming SEED by 5.9 and 6.3 percentage points, respectively. On unseen ALFWorld tasks, SCOPE reaches 89.6% success, improving over GRPO by 23.2 percentage points with 46.7% fewer interactions. Scaling to Qwen3-32B, SCOPE achieves 99.2% success on seen ALFWorld tasks and 94.0% on unseen tasks.
Generative planners are often evaluated by the trajectories they can generate, although closed-loop driving ultimately depends on the single candidate committed to control. We identify this mismatch as the sample-to-execution gap and show that improving proposal quality alone can worsen the executed decision. Here, we introduce ExecDiffuser, a recurrent proposal-to-execution framework that couples candidate generation, trajectory selection, and subsequent replanning through shared execution semantics. Intent-Guided Diffusion Proposal (IGD) assigns hypothesis responsibility and shapes trajectories with execution-conditioned supervision. Execution-Grounded Selection (EGS) learns a candidate-conditioned publication utility, commits one trajectory to control, and returns it as context for the next planning cycle. Across nuPlan, InterPlan, and NAVSIM, ExecDiffuser achieves leading closed-loop performance against strong state-of-the-art baselines. Under a unified five-seed protocol, it obtains an average score of 85.62, improving over Diffusion Planner and FlowDrive by 4.02 and 1.31 points, respectively. On NAVSIM, it achieves 92.6 PDMS under the official evaluation pipeline. Matched counterfactual analysis further shows that ExecDiffuser more reliably converts strong candidates into committed decisions, while prefix interventions confirm that this advantage persists after physical execution and subsequent replanning.
Rayson Laroca, Valfride Nascimento, Donggun Kim, Sanghyeok Chung, Subin Bae, Uihwan Seo, Seungsang Oh, Chi M. Phung 等 22 位作者
Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition (LRLPR) remains a challenging problem in real-world surveillance scenarios, where long capture distances, compression artifacts, and adverse imaging conditions can severely degrade license plate legibility. To promote progress in this area, we organized the ICPR 2026 Competition on Low-Resolution License Plate Recognition, the first competition specifically dedicated to LRLPR using real low-quality data collected under operationally relevant conditions. The competition was based on the LRLPR-26 dataset, which comprises 20,000 training tracks and 3,000 test tracks; each training track contains five low-resolution and five high-resolution images of the same license plate. Notably, a total of 269 teams from 41 countries registered for the competition, and 99 teams submitted valid entries in the Blind Test Phase. The winning team achieved a Recognition Rate of 82.13%, and four teams surpassed the 80% mark, highlighting both the high level of competition at the top of the leaderboard and the continued difficulty of the task. In addition to presenting the competition design, evaluation protocol, and main results, this paper summarizes the methods adopted by the top-5 teams and discusses current trends and promising directions for future research on LRLPR. The competition webpage is available at https://icpr26lrlpr.github.io/
Zefang Zong Tencent Inc., Dingwei Chen SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Yang Li Tencent Inc., Qi Yi University of Science and Technology of China, Bo Zhou, Chengming Li Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, BO Qian Tencent Inc., Peng Chen 等 9 位作者
LLM agents have emerged as powerful systems for tackling multi-turn tasks by interleaving internal reasoning and external tool interactions. Agentic Reinforcement Learning has recently drawn significant research attention as a critical post-training paradigm to further refine these capabilities. In this paper, we present AT²PO (Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search), a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. AT²PO introduces a turn-level tree structure that jointly enables Entropy-Guided Tree Expansion for strategic exploration and Turn-wise Credit Assignment for fine-grained reward propagation from sparse outcomes. Complementing this, we propose Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization, a turn-level learning objective that aligns policy updates with the natural decision granularity of agentic interactions. ATPO is orthogonal to tree search and can be readily integrated into any multi-turn RL pipeline. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 1.84 percentage points in average, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each component.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Zhenhua Liu Soochow University, Lijun Li Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Ruizhe Chen, Yuxian Jiang, Tong Zhu Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Zhaochen Su, Wenliang Chen Soochow University, China, Jing Shao Shanghai AI Laboratory
While guided decoding, especially value-guided methods, has emerged as a cost-effective alternative for controlling language model outputs without re-training models, its effectiveness is limited by the accuracy of the value function. We identify that this inaccuracy stems from a core distributional gap: existing methods train static value functions on trajectories sampled exclusively from the base policy, which inherently confines their training to a narrow and suboptimal view of the potential output space. We propose Iterative Value Refinement, a novel framework designed to bridge this gap. It employs Value Exploration to provide a more comprehensive and robust training signal, complemented by Iterative Self-Refinement, which uses the improved value function from one iteration to guide the generation of higher-quality data for the next. Extensive experiments on text summarization, multi-turn dialogue, and instruction following demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in aligning language models. Our approach not only achieves alignment but also significantly reduces computational costs by leveraging principled value function optimization for efficient and effective control.
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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
Zhihao Zhan, Yuhao Chen SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Jiaying Zhou SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Qinhan Lyu, Hao Liu SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Keze Wang SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Liang Lin SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Guangrun Wang SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generalized robotic control; however, they remain notoriously brittle to linguistic perturbations. We identify a critical "modality collapse” phenomenon where strong visual priors overwhelm sparse linguistic signals, causing agents to overfit to specific instruction phrasings while ignoring the underlying semantic intent. To address this, we propose Residual Semantic Steering (RSS), a probabilistic framework that disentangles physical affordance from semantic execution. RSS introduces two theoretical innovations: (1) Monte Carlo Syntactic Integration, which approximates the true semantic posterior via dense, LLM-driven distributional expansion, and (2) Residual Affordance Steering, a dual-stream decoding mechanism that explicitly isolates the causal influence of language by subtracting the visual affordance prior. Theoretical analysis suggests that RSS effectively maximizes the mutual information between action and intent while suppressing visual distractors. Empirical results across diverse manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that RSS achieves state-of-the-art robustness, maintaining performance even under adversarial linguistic perturbations.
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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
Chaoyin She Northwest Polytechnical University Xi'an, Ruifang Lu, Lida Chen SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Wei Wang SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Qinghua Huang Northwest Polytechnical University Xi'an
Ultrasound is the preferred early cancer screening modality due to non-ionizing radiation, cost-effectiveness, and real-time imaging, yet conventional diagnosis relies heavily on physician expertise, causing significant subjectivity and limited efficiency. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) show promise but lack ultrasound-specific knowledge and multi-organ generalization. We propose EchoVLM, the first open-source 10-billion-parameter ultrasound-tailored VLM with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. It is infused with knowledge across seven anatomical systems, trained on 208,941 clinical cases, 1.47 million ultrasound key-frame images, and over 100 diseases or imaging findings. Supporting clinical report generation, diagnosis prediction, and Visual Question Answering (VQA), it outperforms Qwen2-VL by 7.58 BLEU-1 and 3.45 ROUGE-1 points in report generation. This work shows substantial potential for establishing a general-purpose ultrasound VLM and lays a technical foundation for clinical translation. Source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/Asunatan/EchoVLM.
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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
Jiayu Liu, Cheng Qian University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Zhaochen Su, Qing Zong, Shijue Huang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Bingxiang He, Yi R. Fung
Current evaluations of Large Language Model (LLM) agents primarily emphasize task completion, often overlooking resource efficiency and adaptability. This neglects a crucial capability: agents’ ability to devise and adjust cost-optimal plans in response to changing environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce CostBench, a scalable, cost-centric benchmark designed to evaluate agents’ economic reasoning and replanning abilities. Situated in the travel-planning domain, CostBench comprises tasks solvable via multiple sequences of atomic and composite tools with diverse, customizable costs. It also supports four types of dynamic blocking events, such as tool failures and cost changes, to simulate real-world unpredictability and necessitate agents to adapt in real time. Evaluating leading open-sourced and proprietary models on CostBench reveals a substantial gap in cost-aware planning: agents frequently fail to identify cost-optimal solutions in static settings, with even GPT-5 achieving less than 75% exact match rate on the hardest tasks, and performance further drops significantly under dynamic conditions. By diagnosing these weaknesses, CostBench lays the groundwork for developing future agents that are both economically rational and robust.
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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
Feiteng Fang, Dingwei Chen SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Xiang Huang, Ting-En Lin, Yuchuan Wu Alibaba Group, Xiong Liu Alibaba Group, Jing Ye Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ziqiang Liu 等 13 位作者
Currently, most reinforcement learning tasks focus on domains like mathematics and programming, where verification is relatively straightforward. However, in subjective tasks such as role-playing, alignment techniques struggle to make progress, primarily because subjective reward modeling using the Bradley-Terry model faces significant challenges when dealing with ambiguous preferences. To improve reward modeling in subjective tasks, this paper proposes AAM (Act-Adaptive Margin), which enhances reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model’s internal parameter knowledge. We design two versions of AAM that efficiently generate contextually-appropriate preference gaps without additional human annotation. This approach fundamentally improves how reward models handle subjective rewards by better integrating generative understanding with preference scoring. To validate AAM’s effectiveness in subjective reward modeling, we conduct evaluations on RewardBench, JudgeBench, and challenging role-playing tasks. Results show that AAM significantly improves subjective reward modeling performance, enhancing Bradley-Terry reward models by 2.95% in general tasks and 4.85% in subjective role-playing tasks. Furthermore, reward models trained with AAM can help downstream alignment tasks achieve better results. Our test results show that applying rewards generated by AAM-Augmented RM to preference learning techniques (e.g., GRPO) achieves state-of-the-art results on CharacterEval and Charm. The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance.
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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
Zechen Sun, Yuyang Sun, Zecheng Tang Soochow University, Juntao Li, Wenpeng Hu Academy of Military Science, Wenliang Chen Soochow University, China, Zhunchen Luo, Guotong Geng AMS 等 9 位作者
Generating coherent and controllable long-form content remains a persistent challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). While reasoning-enhanced models have demonstrated success in logic-intensive domains, our evaluation reveals that they suffer from a severe length collapse in open-ended writing, where performance degrades sharply as target lengths exceed 2,000 words. We attribute this failure to the limitation of static hierarchical planning, which struggles to provide dynamic guidance over extended contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Interleaved Structural Chain-of-Thought (IS-CoT) framework. Unlike external agentic workflows, IS-CoT embeds a dynamic Plan-Write-Reflect cycle into the generation process, enabling continuous strategy adaptation and global alignment without additional assistance. Based on this framework, we construct a high-quality dataset of interleaved reasoning traces via a multi-teacher pipeline and train IS-Writer-8B. Experiments demonstrate that IS-Writer-8B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging long-form benchmarks (e.g., +3.08 vs. DeepSeek-V3.2 on LongBench-Write), exhibiting robust length compliance and coherence competitive with significantly larger proprietary models.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表