Shiping Yang, Jie Wu Atlassian Corporation, Wenbiao Ding Microsoft, Ning Wu, Shining Liang Microsoft, Ming Gong Atlassian Corporation, Hongzhi Li Tongji University, Hengyuan Zhang 等 10 位作者
Robustness has become a critical attribute for the deployment of RAG systems in real-world applications. Existing research focuses on robustness to explicit noise (e.g., document semantics) but overlooks implicit noise (spurious features). Moreover, previous studies on spurious features in LLMs are limited to specific types (e.g., formats) and narrow scenarios (e.g., ICL). In this work, we identify and study spurious features in the RAG paradigm, a robustness issue caused by the sensitivity of LLMs to semantic-agnostic features. We then propose a novel framework,SURE, to empirically quantify the robustness of RALMs against spurious features. Beyond providing a comprehensive taxonomy and metrics for evaluation, the framework’s data synthesis pipeline facilitates training-based strategies to improve robustness. Further analysis suggests that spurious features are a widespread and challenging problem in the field of RAG. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RAG-SpuriousFeatures-62B3.
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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
Xiao Liang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zhenghao Lin Microsoft, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Hengyuan Zhang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang University of California, Los Angeles and Amazon, Ying Nian Wu 等 10 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities through step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. Nevertheless, at the limits of model capability, CoT often proves insufficient, and its strictly sequential nature constrains test-time scalability. A potential alternative is divide-and-conquer (DAC) reasoning, which decomposes a complex problem into subproblems to facilitate more effective exploration of the solution space. Although promising, our analysis reveals a fundamental misalignment between general-purpose post-training and DAC-style inference, which limits the model’s capacity to fully leverage this potential. To bridge this gap and fully unlock LLMs’ reasoning capabilities on the most challenging tasks, we propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) framework to enhance their DAC-style reasoning capacity. At each step, the policy decomposes a problem into a group of subproblems, solves them sequentially, and addresses the original problem conditioned on the subproblem solutions, with both decomposition and solution integrated into RL training. Under comparable training settings, our DAC-style framework endows the model with a higher performance ceiling and stronger test-time scalability, surpassing CoT by 8.6% in Pass@1 and 6.3% in Pass@32 on competition-level benchmarks. The code is available at the provided link.
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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
Hengyuan Zhang, Shiping Yang, Xiao Liang, Chenming Shang, Yuxuan Jiang University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Chaofan Tao The University of Hong Kong, Jing Xiong, Hayden Kwok-Hay So University of Hong Kong 等 11 位作者
Training student models on synthetic data generated by strong teacher models is a promising approach to distilling the capabilities of teachers. However, existing studies reveal that stronger models are not always optimal teachers, suggesting a mismatch between the teacher’s output and the student’s learning ability. To address this issue, we propose PerSyn (Personalized data Synthesis), a novel and efficient approach that customizes synthetic data to align with the learning capabilities of the student model. Specifically, our PerSyn method routes each prompt to its optimal teacher via a query-level router that jointly considers the student models’ learnability and teacher models’ response quality. It successfully transfers the synthesis paradigm from the conventional “Generate then Select” to a more efficient manner, i.e., “Route then Generate”, eliminating the need for all teacher models to generate parallel responses across the entire prompt set. Extensive experiments across different model families and scales demonstrate that PerSyn consistently outperforms all baselines on six benchmarks, including instruct tuning and math reasoning settings. Further analysis verifies the effectiveness of PerSyn and offers extra insights to propel future research. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PerSyn-8D85.
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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