Rui Wang, Ce Zhang Carnegie Mellon University, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang Tencent AI Lab 等 13 位作者
The hallmark of Deep Research agents lies in compositional reasoning, the capacity to aggregate distributed, heterogeneous information into coherent logical insights. However, current agentic systems are often retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light, where success is predominantly determined by simple entity-seeking rather than the multi-step aggregation of scattered evidence. To address this, we propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator, designed to shift the agentic paradigm from retrieval-centric to compositional aggregation. Our approach first employs Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge, then Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions using over 12 composition guidelines derived from a rigorous deconstruction of the Deep Research problem setting. Fine-tuning on this corpus fundamentally transforms agent behavior, fostering deliberate composition reasoning and reduced tool redundancy. The resulting WebAggregator-32B surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. To address the lack of benchmarks that emphasize both reasoning and retrieval, we introduce the WebAggregatorQA testbed, which reveals that even with perfect retrieval, top-tier models still underperformed. These results demonstrate that compositional reasoning, not retrieval, is the true performance ceiling for next-generation research agents.
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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
Wei-Cheng Tseng University of Texas at Austin, Xuanru Zhou Zhejiang University, Mingyue Huo, Yiwen Shao Nuance Labs, Hao Zhang Wuhan University, Dong Yu CapitalOne
Audio-language pretraining (ALP) holds promise for learning general-purpose audio representation, yet remains underexplored. Crucially, there is no consensus on whether audio–language models can build effective general-purpose audio encoders, nor a systematic understanding of how pretraining objectives behave across diverse tasks and scales.We identify three key barriers: limited scale of audio-text corpora, limited coverage of audio attributes in existing caption corpora, and lack of systematic exploration and evaluation.To fill this gap, we present the first principled empirical study of ALP.We first introduce CaptionStew, a 10.7M caption dataset aggregating open-source audio-text corpora across multiple domains and captioning focuses.We then conduct the first comprehensive evaluation comparing contrastive and captioning objectives for learning audio representation across speech, music, and environmental sound tasks.Our results not only demonstrate that ALP yields competitive, transferable representations, but reveal critical trade-offs: contrastive learning offers superior data efficiency, while captioning exhibits better scalability.Furthermore, we find that the benefits of supervised initialization often diminish at larger scales, challenging common practices.By grounding these claims in empirical evidence, we establish a viable pathway toward general-purpose audio representation learning, guiding future research.
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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
Yi Su, Dian Yu Tencent AI Lab, Linfeng Song Google, Juntao Li, Haitao Mi Tencent AI Lab, Zhaopeng Tu Tencent, Min Zhang Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen and Harbin Institute of Technology, Dong Yu CapitalOne
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been effective on tasks with structured solutions like math and coding, but its reliance on simple, rule-based verifiers creates a fundamental bottleneck. We find their applicability is surprisingly narrow even in structured domains, a limitation that is compounded at scale: rule-based systems can paradoxically degrade in performance as multi-domain, free-form training data increases. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new RLVR framework that uses a generative verifier to provide soft, probabilistic rewards. Our key insight is that powerful LLMs show high agreement with human evaluators when judging answer correctness given a ground-truth reference, allowing us to automate reward generation without costly human annotation. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. We show that a compact 7B generative reward model can guide a 7B policy model to decisively outperform models up to 10x its size, including the 72B Qwen2.5-Instruct (by a margin of +8.6%). This effectiveness is robust, holding true across diverse training datasets with answers sourced from experts, web users, and other LLMs, and generalizes strongly to seven out-of-distribution benchmarks. Our work provides a scalable and effective framework for extending RLVR beyond the limitations of pattern-based verification to complex, noisy, real-world domains.
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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
Mukai Li, Linfeng Song Google, Zhenwen Liang Tencent AI Lab, Jiahao Xu Tencent AI Lab, Shansan Gong, Qi Liu University of Hong Kong, Haitao Mi Tencent AI Lab, Dong Yu CapitalOne
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently advanced the field of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP), attaining substantial performance gains through widely adopted test-time scaling strategies, notably reflective Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and increased sampling passes. However, they both introduce significant computational overhead for inference. Moreover, existing cost analyses typically regulate only the number of sampling passes, while neglecting the substantial disparities in sampling costs introduced by different scaling strategies. In this paper, we systematically compare the efficiency of different test-time scaling strategies for ATP models and demonstrate the inefficiency of the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source approaches. We then investigate approaches to significantly reduce token usage and sample passes while maintaining the original performance. Specifically, we propose two complementary methods that can be integrated into a unified EconRL pipeline for amplified benefits: (1) a dynamic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) switching mechanism designed to mitigate unnecessary token consumption, and (2) Diverse parallel-scaled reinforcement learning (RL) with trainable prefixes to enhance pass rates under constrained sampling passes. Experiments on miniF2F and ProofNet demonstrate that our EconProver-GD achieves comparable performance to baseline methods with only 12% of the computational cost. This work provides actionable insights for deploying lightweight ATP models without sacrificing 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
Zhenwen Liang Tencent AI Lab, Ruosen Li University of Texas at Dallas, Yujun Zhou University of Notre Dame, Linfeng Song Google, Dian Yu Tencent AI Lab, Xinya Du University of Texas at Dallas, Haitao Mi Tencent AI Lab, Dong Yu CapitalOne
Assessing the quality of Large Language Model (LLM) outputs becomes especially challenging in high-branching settings, where a single prompt yields many plausible candidates. Existing verifiers typically operate on the surface text (e.g., reward models, LLM judges, majority voting) or on confidence proxies derived from token probabilities, both of which can be brittle: the former can be influenced by stylistic artifacts, while the latter is often miscalibrated. In this paper, we study a third source of information—the model’s hidden states—for binary correctness verification in tasks with a reliable success/failure signal (e.g., deterministic checkers or reference-grounded answers). We find that correct and incorrect solutions exhibit measurable geometric differences in their hidden-state trajectories. To isolate this signal with minimal modeling assumptions, we introduce Clue (Clustering and Experience-based Verification), a training-free, non-parametric verifier. Clue summarizes each reasoning trace by an activation delta—the difference between hidden states at the start and end of the explicit reasoning span—and predicts correctness by comparing this delta to two class centroids computed from labeled experience. Across math (AIME 24/25), scientific QA (GPQA), and a multi-domain benchmark (WebInstruct-verified), Clue improves selection and reranking, with particularly strong gains on smaller or less-calibrated models. For example, on AIME 24 with a 1.5B model, Clue raises accuracy from 56.7% (majority@64) to 70.0% (top-maj@16).
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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
Wenkai Wang, Xiyun Li, Hongcan Guo ByteDance Inc., Wenhao Yu OpenAI, Tianqing Fang Tencent AI Lab, Haitao Mi Tencent AI Lab, Dong Yu CapitalOne, Shengyu Zhang Zhejiang University
Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding requires mapping natural language instructions to precise pixel coordinates. However, due to visually homogeneous elements and dense layouts, models typically grasp semantic intent yet fail to achieve precise localization. While scaling sampling attempts (Pass@k) reveals potential gains, static self-consistency strategies derived from geometric clustering often yield limited improvements, as the model’s predictions tend to be spatially dispersed. In this paper, we propose replacing static consistency strategies with a learnable selection mechanism that selects the optimal target by critiquing its own proposals rendered on the screenshot. Given the significant disparity between the model’s grounding and critiquing capabilities, we propose a co-evolving Propose-and-Critic framework. To jointly optimize these, we introduce a maturity-aware adaptive co-evolutionary reinforcement learning paradigm. This approach dynamically balances the training objectives of proposer and critic, where the diversity of the proposer’s outputs enhances critic robustness, while the critic’s maturing discrimination capability conversely unlocks the proposer’s potential for extensive spatial exploration, fostering the mutual reinforcement and co-evolution of both capabilities, thereby ensuring generalizability to adapt to diverse and complex interface layouts. Extensive experiments over 6 benchmarks show that our method significantly enhances both capabilities.
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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
Zhenwen Liang Tencent AI Lab, Yujun Zhou University of Notre Dame, Sidi Lu ByteDance Seed, Xiangliang Zhang University of Notre Dame, Haitao Mi Tencent AI Lab, Dong Yu CapitalOne
Reinforcement Learning (RL) enhances LLM reasoning, yet a paradox emerges as models scale: strong base models saturate standard benchmarks (e.g., MATH), yielding correct but homogeneous solutions. In such environments, the lack of failure cases causes the advantage signal in group-relative algorithms (e.g., GRPO) to vanish, driving policies into mode collapse. To address this, we propose Constrained Uniform Top-K Sampling (CUTS), a parameter-free decoding strategy enforcing structure-preserving exploration. Unlike standard sampling that follows model biases, CUTS flattens the local optimization landscape by sampling uniformly from constrained high-confidence candidates. We integrate this into Mixed-CUTS, a training framework synergizing exploitative and exploratory rollouts to amplify intra-group advantage variance. Experiments on Qwen3 models demonstrate that our approach prevents policy degeneration and significantly boosts out-of-domain generalization. Notably, Mixed-CUTS improves Pass@1 accuracy on the challenging AIME25 benchmark by up to 15.1% over standard GRPO, validating that maintaining diversity within the semantic manifold is critical for rigorous reasoning.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表