Long-horizon reasoning remains a central challenge for large language models (LLMs) under sparse-reward regimes. We argue that this brittleness arises from two biases induced by complex reasoning spaces: an exploration bias, where models are drawn toward locally plausible but structurally unstable branches, and a compounding bias, where small local deviations accumulate across depth and suppress rare rewards. We introduce Symbolic Closure Analysis (SCA) as a theoretical lens characterizing how branching structures and sparse rewards induce these biases in long-horizon reasoning with local admissibility, and as a design principle for structural priors in less formal reasoning tasks. Motivated by this analysis, we propose SAGE (Structural Admissibility-Guided Exploration), a unified framework that injects structural guidance to alleviate exploration bias and compounding bias in long-horizon reasoning. SAGE combines two complementary structural guidance: algebraic sparsification, which projects locally admissible candidates onto operator-indexed algebraic subspaces to suppress spurious branching and mitigate exploration bias, and hyperbolic structural guidance, which embeds reasoning states into a negatively curved space to provide dense depth-wise signals and mitigate compounding bias. Across 12 benchmarks and 7 model families, SAGE outperforms competitive baselines. In particular, SAGE achieves up to an 8-fold improvement on the Andrews-Curtis problem, an open real-world long-horizon task. Code is available at: https://github.com/Susan571/SAGE-NeurIPS2026.
Yaochen Wang, Chenguang Wang, Ming Li, Haomin Zhuang, Xinyue Zeng, Han Chen, Kwesi Adu Cobbina, Dang Nguyen 等 11 位作者
AI reviewers are increasingly used to assess scientific manuscripts, yet it remains unclear whether their judgments reflect the improvements authors make through revision. We investigate this question using PaperTrajectory-2026, the 2026 release of PaperTrajectory, a dataset of 6,959 paper trajectories across five AI conferences, with automatic annotations of changes along 14 dimensions and separate judgments of overall quality. The annotations show that major improvements emphasize empirical evidence and framing, while later revisions tend toward incremental improvement. Using independent assessments of manuscript versions from eight AI reviewers, we examine whether annotated major improvements receive higher scores, which revision dimensions are associated with score changes, and whether user opinions can outweigh observed revision gains. Every reviewer leaves scores unchanged on most major improvements, and agreement on the direction of score changes is weak. Revision dimensions show some reviewer-specific associations with score increases, but provide limited predictive discrimination and no consistent guide across reviewers. Even when a revision earns a higher neutral score, a brief negative user opinion can erase or reverse that advantage, with substantial variation across reviewers. These findings show that substantive revisions are not consistently reflected in review scores and that observed scoring gains can be vulnerable to user framing, motivating assessments that connect manuscript evidence to overall judgments and remain stable when no scientific evidence changes.
Jianpeng Chen, Wangzhi Zhan Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Haohui Wang, Brian Mayer Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Dongqi Fu Meta, Dawei Zhou Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Material claims in papers, patents, etc., often involve physical feasibility (e.g., stability under conditions, property consistency), not just textual feasibility. Yet most claim verifiers operate over language, therefore producing ungrounded judgments. On the other hand, directfirst-principles verification (e.g., density functional theory, DFT) is inflexible and hard to invoke from underspecified free-form claims.Therefore, we introduce PhyVer, a physics-grounded material claim verification system that bridges this gap by translating claimsinto multi-fidelity physical evidence and interpretable verdicts. To support human-in-the-loop inspection, we present an interactive web interface that visualizes the instantiated structure, optimization trajectories, DFT summaries, and the final decision. On expert-labeled claims, PhyVer improves agreement with experts over text-only GPT-5.1, reducing MAE from 1.54 to 1.20 and Signed MAE from0.95 to 0.82, and increasing Accuracy@±1 from 50% to 70%.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表