Analog placement requires circuit-specific trade-offs among area, matching, routability, and electrical performance. Balancing these trade-offs through predefined objectives and fixed placement flows remains difficult. In this paper, we propose an analog placement framework in which a large language model (LLM) acts as a layout engineer through composable placement components. These components support constraint management, placement and legalization, and lightweight evaluation of routability and electrical performance. Using multimodal checkpoints of the initial and evolving design, the LLM selects and combines components to construct and revise its own placement flow. It also adapts the placement hierarchy by reopening modules or partitioning and regrouping devices, allowing local layouts to respond to global design needs. An experience skill provides reusable design knowledge to guide these decisions. Evaluation on two SMIC 180 nm circuits shows that the framework reduces placement area and improves most measured post-layout performance metrics.
Zeping Li, Hongru Wang, Yiwen Zhao, Guanhua Chen Southern University of Science and Technology, Yixia Li, Keyang Chen Fudan University, Yixin Cao Fudan University, Guangnan Ye Fudan University 等 10 位作者
Tool-using agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in tasks such as mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering. However, in long trajectories, agents often trigger excessive and low-quality tool calls, increasing latency and degrading inference performance, making managing tool-use behavior challenging. In this work, we conduct entropy-based pilot experiments and observe a strong positive correlation between entropy reduction and high-quality tool calls. Building on this finding, we propose using entropy reduction as a supervisory signal and design two reward strategies to address the differing needs of optimizing tool-use behavior. Sparse outcome rewards provide coarse, trajectory-level guidance to improve efficiency, while dense process rewards offer fine-grained supervision to enhance performance. Experiments across diverse domains show that both reward designs improve tool-use behavior: the former reduces tool calls by 72.07% compared to the average of baselines, while the latter improves performance by 22.27%. These results position entropy reduction as a key mechanism for enhancing tool-use behavior, enabling agents to be more adaptive in real-world applications.
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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
Shengli Zhou, Xiangchen Wang, Guanhua Chen Southern University of Science and Technology, Feng Zheng Southern University of Science and Technology
Large language models (LLMs) have recently been applied to 3D vision-language (3D-VL) tasks, which require spatial reasoning to identify target objects relative to anchors. Scene graphs are commonly employed to represent such relations, but reasoning over complete graphs incurs high token costs and computational inefficiencies, motivating the need for pruning. Existing pruning methods primarily rely on spatial proximity and often remove task-relevant relations, thereby undermining reliable spatial reasoning. To address these limitations, we derive a key requirement for scene graph pruning: preserving spatial relations that are most pertinent to the specific 3D-VL task. Guided by this insight, we propose the Conceptual-Adjacent Scene Graph Pruner (CAPruner). CAPruner integrates fuzzy semantic relevance with spatial proximity to estimate the importance of relations, enabling the selection of critical relations in a task-specific context. Moreover, to avoid costly relation-level annotations, CAPruner is trained by supervising the aggregated scores of each node’s incident edges. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAPruner effectively preserves relations essential for spatial reasoning, leading to substantial performance improvements of LLMs on 3D-VL tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/fz-zsl/CAPruner.
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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
Tianyi Wang, Yixia Li, Long Li Infly Tech, Yibiao Chen, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Peng Li Tsinghua University, Yang Liu 等 9 位作者
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is central to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks with verifiable rewards. However, standard token-level PPO struggles in this setting due to the instability of temporal credit assignment over long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) horizons and the prohibitive memory cost of the value model. While critic-free alternatives like GRPO mitigate these issues, they incur significant computational overhead by requiring multiple samples for baseline estimation, severely limiting training throughput. In this paper, we introduce Sequence-Level PPO (SPPO), a scalable algorithm that harmonizes the sample efficiency of PPO with the stability of outcome-based updates. SPPO reformulates the reasoning process as a Sequence-Level Contextual Bandit problem, employing a decoupled scalar value function to derive low-variance advantage signals without multi-sampling. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that SPPO significantly surpasses standard PPO and matches the performance of computation-heavy group-based methods, offering a resource-efficient framework for aligning reasoning LLMs.
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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
Zhiwen Ruan, Yichao Du, Jianjie Zheng Southern University of Science and Technology, Longyue Wang Alibaba Group, Yun Chen Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Peng Li Tsinghua University, Jinsong Su Xiamen University, Yang Liu 等 9 位作者
Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong instruction-following and generalization abilities, enabled by expensive post-training pipelines. However, adapting them to specific downstream tasks remains challenging: direct fine-tuning often disrupts this delicate balance, while existing adapter-based transfer methods typically treat the instruction-tuned model as a passive target that only participates at the final merging stage. We propose GIFT (Guided Fine-Tuning and Transfer), a simple and efficient framework that incorporates instruction-level guidance into task adaptation. GIFT fine-tunes a low-rank adapter on the pretrained base model using token-level confidence signals derived from the instruction-tuned model. The learned adapter is then merged into the instruction-tuned model, yielding task-specialized models that preserve general instruction-following behavior. We evaluate GIFT on mathematical reasoning and knowledge-intensive benchmarks across multiple model families and scales. Results show that GIFT consistently outperforms direct fine-tuning and representative transfer-based baselines, while maintaining robust generalization and favorable test-time scaling behavior.
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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
Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Jiahao Qiu Princeton University, Zhenfei Yin University of Oxford and Stanford University, Dongdong Zhang Research, Microsoft, Cheng Qian University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Zeping Li, Xiaoteng Ma Mind Lab 等 10 位作者
Agentic learning increasingly hinges on interaction, yet real-world experience is expensive, limited, and often irreversible at inference time. World models promise to mitigate these limitations, but it remains unclear whether large language models can actually serve as reliable world models, and deliver concrete benefits to downstream agents. We investigate these questions in text-based environments, a controlled testbed that reframes language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. We propose a three-level framework to evaluate LLM-based world models: (i) fidelity and consistency, (ii) scalability and robustness, and (iii) agent utility. Across five representative environments, we show that sufficiently trained world models capture coherent environment dynamics, scale predictably with data and model capacity, and unlock tangible agent improvements—for example, action verification boosts GPT-4o by 5.5% on WebShop, and warm-started RL achieves a 15% gain on SciWorld. Crucially, these benefits hinge on behavioral coverage and environment complexity, sharply characterizing when world modeling meaningfully advances agent learning.
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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
Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang Research, Microsoft, Lingjie Jiang Peking University, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Guanhua Chen Southern University of Science and Technology 等 9 位作者
Multimodal large language models have advanced rapidly, yet most remain English-centric, as scaling multilingual multimodal instruction tuning is limited by the scarcity and high cost of high-quality non-English image–text supervision. Although multilingual text data is abundant, naive textual fine-tuning can disrupt vision–language alignment and induce catastrophic forgetting. We propose Vision-Free Adaptation (VFA), a framework that decouples multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment by composing complementary task vectors over a shared LLM backbone. Specifically, we fine-tune a base LLM on multilingual text data to derive a multilingual task vector, which is then merged with the vision-aligned task vector of an MLLM. Experiments on five MLLMs across six multilingual multimodal benchmarks show consistent improvements while preserving both general multimodal and text-only capabilities. Moreover, VFA attains competitive performance with a fully multimodally trained model using less than 2% of the text data, demonstrating its efficiency and effectiveness.
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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
Junyou Su, He Zhu, Xiao Luo University of Wisconsin - Madison, Liyu Zhang, Hong-Yu Zhou, Yun Chen Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Peng Li Tsinghua University, Yang Liu 等 9 位作者
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is fundamental to adapting large language models, yet training on complete datasets incurs prohibitive costs with diminishing returns. Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity: techniques optimized for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks, and vice versa. We observe that measuring contrastive entropy between base models and minimally instruction-tuned calibrated models reveals a pattern—samples with the lowest contrastive entropy consistently yield optimal performance across domains, yet this principle manifests domain-adaptively: reasoning tasks favor entropy increase (cognitive expansion), while general tasks favor entropy decrease (cognitive compression). We introduce InstructDiff, a unified framework that operationalizes contrastive entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropy-based ranking. Extensive experiments show that InstructDiff achieves 17% relative improvement over full data training on mathematical reasoning and 52% for general instruction-following, outperforming prior baselines while using only 10% of the data.
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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
Zhicong Li, Lingjie Jiang Peking University, Yulan Hu Alibaba Group, Xingchen Zeng, Yixia Li, Xiangwen Zhang, Guanhua Chen Southern University of Science and Technology, Zheng Pan Alibaba Group 等 10 位作者
Critique-guided reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training LLM agents by augmenting sparse outcome rewards with natural-language feedback. However, current methods often rely on static or offline critic models, which fail to adapt as the policy evolves. In on-policy RL, the agent’s trajectory distribution and error patterns shift over time, causing stationary critics to become stale and providing feedback of diminishing utility. To address this, we introduce ECHO (Evolving Critic for Hindsight-Guided Optimization), a framework that jointly optimizes the policy and critic through a synchronized co-evolutionary loop. ECHO utilizes a cascaded rollout mechanism where the critic generates multiple diagnoses for an initial trajectory, followed by policy refinement to enable group-structured advantage estimation. We address the challenge of learning plateaus via a saturation-aware gain shaping objective, which rewards the critic for inducing incremental improvements in high-performing trajectories. By employing synchronized dual-track GRPO updates, ECHO ensures the critic’s feedback stays synchronized with the evolving policy. Experimental results show that ECHO yields more stable training and higher long-horizon task success across open-world environments.
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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
Zeguan Xiao Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Siqing Li, Yong Wang, Xuetao Wei Southern University of Science and Technology, Jian Yang Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Yun Chen Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Guanhua Chen Southern University of Science and Technology
Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove targeted knowledge while preserving general capability. In this paper, we recast LLM unlearning as an asymmetric two-task problem: retention is the primary objective and forgetting is an auxiliary. From this perspective, we propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination. Instantiating the framework, we adapt established PCGrad to resolve gradient conflicts, and introduce SAGO, a novel retention-prioritized gradient synthesis method. Theoretically, both variants ensure non-negative cosine similarity with the retain gradient, while SAGO achieves strictly tighter alignment through constructive sign-constrained synthesis. Empirically, on WMDP Bio/Cyber and RWKU benchmarks, SAGO consistently pushes the Pareto frontier: e.g., on WMDP Bio (SimNPO+GD), recovery of target model MMLU performance progresses from 44.6% (naive) to 94.0% (+PCGrad) and further to 96.0% (+SAGO), while maintaining comparable forgetting strength. Our results show that re-shaping gradient geometry, rather than re-balancing losses, is the key to mitigating unlearning-retention trade-offs.
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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