Quantifying glomerular inflammation in kidney-transplant biopsies is traditionally performed on single whole-slide sections using the Banff "most-severe section" rule, despite the inherently three-dimensional nature of lesion distribution. This 2D based assessment might lead to instability when inflammation varies across slices. This paper reports a feasibility study examining the technical feasibility and clinical relevance of extending Banff scoring into three dimensions. To this end, we propose a 3D Banff lesion-scoring framework that aligns serial sections, reconstructs glomerular identities across depth, and integrates inflammatory-cell counts in 3D under three scoring strategies: Compatible, Volumetric, and Deduplicated Volumetric. In the experiments, glomerulitis (g-scores) was used as an example Banff metric and applied to multi-section renal allograft biopsies. Our findings indicate that 3D Banff g-scores are more consistent across sections and, under the semi-automatic setting, the Volumetric strategy correlates more strongly with clinical biomarkers than traditional 2D scores. These results show that 3D volumetric quantification offers promising added value, underscoring the potential benefit of 3D-aware Banff scoring for kidney transplant pathology.
Junfeng Wang, Jiawei Liu, Yongchao Xu, Tao Jiang, Jiangbo Ai, Jin Zhang, Chong Wang, Qixing Zhang
Complex visual question answering often requires vision-language models to think with images, i.e., actively acquire local visual evidence by zooming into informative regions of high-resolution images. Our error analysis shows that many failures in this setting originate from incorrect observation actions, where the model fails to localize key regions or obtain crops that contain sufficient evidence for answering. We further observe that bounding-box tokens exhibit substantially higher generation entropy than ordinary language tokens, indicating high uncertainty when the model decides where to look. However, existing reinforcement learning methods based on final-answer rewards provide only trajectory-level feedback, making it difficult to assign precise credit to the observation actions. We propose Observation Policy Optimization (OPO), an RL algorithm for optimizing observation actions in tool-augmented thinking with images. OPO consists of two core modules. First, Uncertainty-Guided Observation Branching (UOB) treats each image zoom-in tool call as an observation event and selectively branches at high-uncertainty, low-redundancy events during rollout, enabling efficient exploration of alternative cropping decisions and their resulting visual evidence. Second, Evidence-Localized Advantage Attribution (ELAA) compares sibling branches using local evidence-sufficiency rewards and assigns credit only to the corresponding observation-action tokens. By decoupling observation-action optimization from trajectory-level outcome supervision, OPO improves visual evidence acquisition and further enhances visual reasoning performance. Experiments show that OPO consistently improves Qwen3-VL models across scales and achieves competitive performance against larger models and tool-augmented baselines. Code is publicly available.
Jianhong Wang, Yang Li, Samuel Kaski, Jonathan Lawry
Open multi-agent systems, where only a subset of agents are controllable, are central to real-world domains such as smart grids, yet lack a principled foundation for reinforcement learning algorithm design. We study this setting through n-agent ad hoc teamwork (NAHT), a recent framework for learning in open multi-agent environments. We propose an axiomatic framework that derives value function learning from the Shapley axioms (Efficiency, Symmetry and Linearity), treating them as structural constraints rather than heuristic design choices. This formulation builds on a novel NAHT decomposition, which characterises the fundamental difference between open and fully controllable multi-agent systems, and establishes a cooperative game-theoretic foundation for learning. We further show that enforcing these axioms on learning individual value functions recovers the Shapley value for Dec-POMDPs, providing a principled bridge between reinforcement learning and classical cooperative game theory. Building on this framework, we introduce Shapley Machines and Banzhaf Machines, two generic algorithmic templates that can be instantiated with standard reinforcement learning methods. When applied to strong base algorithms such as IPPO and POAM, our methods consistently improve learning efficiency and generalisation to unseen agent types and conventions across NAHT benchmark tasks. The code of experiments is published on https://github.com/hsvgbkhgbv/axiomatic-rl-naht.
Fang Wu, Hongbin Lin, Bingchen Duan, Yuchen Wang, Li Erran Li, Yanjie Huang, Mingxuan Cao, Yijun Ma 等 27 位作者
Protein-protein interactions underpin nearly all biological processes. Yet, designing proteins with desired interactions remains challenging due to the structural complexity governing molecular recognition. This study views protein design as a search optimization problem over a combinatorial sequence space under expensive structural evaluation. Toward this goal, we introduce a novel tree-based search framework, ProteoCraft, that employs approximate structural gradients from diffusion-based structure predictors as effective proposal policies to specify where the search should explore. Complete no-gradient inference of folding models separately assigns values to the resulting sequences, determining what is good. ProteoCraft allocates this verification budget through a coarse-to-fine paradigm: multi-site edits first explore distinct sequence basins, then verified promising states undergo strict single-site refinement. Across fourteen de novo binder-design settings spanning eight target proteins, five immune-relevant TCR-facing targets, and four localized CDR redesign tasks, ProteoCraft improves design quality and high-confidence yield. These improvements persist under independent AF2-IG and Rosetta-based interface evaluation. Prospective experimental validation further yielded an 82.9% binding hit rate for PD-L1 miniproteins, with a best measured KD of 0.879 nM, and confirmed binding of designed IFNAR2 VHH. Our code is available at https://github.com/smiles724/ProteoCraft_v1.
We present FLEG, a feed-forward network that reconstructs language-embedded 3D Gaussians from multi-view images. Previous feed-forward language-embedded Gaussian reconstruction methods are restricted to a fixed number of input views and typically attach a language-aligned semantic embedding to each Gaussian, resulting in impractical input settings and semantic redundancy. In contrast, we introduce a geometry-semantic dual-branch distillation framework that supports a variable number of uncalibrated and unposed multi-view images as input. We also propose a novel-view-based distillation strategy during training that mitigates overfitting to input views. In addition, we observe that semantic representations are significantly sparser than geometric ones, and per-Gaussian language embedding is unnecessary. To exploit this sparsity, we design a decoupled language embedding strategy that represents language information with a sparse set of semantic Gaussians, rather than attaching embeddings to every Gaussian. Compared with dense pixel-aligned per-Gaussian embedding schemes, our method uses only 5% of the language embeddings while maintaining comparable semantic fidelity, effectively reducing storage costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FLEG outperforms state-of-the-art feed-forward reconstruction and language-embedded Gaussian methods in both reconstruction quality and language-aligned semantic representation.
Yunfei Bai, Chenghao Li, Sunku Prasad Jenne, Hao Wang, Sizhe Zhang, Jihong Wang
Conventional space heating systems typically rely on single or sparse fixed-point temperature measurements, overlooking non-uniform indoor temperature distributions, transient thermal dynamics, and occupant-specific comfort requirements. This study explores an occupant-centric control strategy that aims to maintain the desired temperature around the occupant location. Spatially and temporally varying temperature fields, together with occupant mobility, make real-time local temperature estimation challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a control-oriented Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) model for indoor temperature-field prediction. Conventional PINNs rely on explicit time inputs and assume consistent temporal patterns across samples, which limits adaptability under variable initial conditions and heating sequences. The proposed model infers temporal dynamics implicitly from spatial coordinates and limited sensor measurements, improving robustness to changes in initial conditions and external disturbances. The method was validated across nine horizontal sensing planes in three controlled room-scale configurations. Against a validated COMSOL Multiphysics simulation, the PINN predicted the evaluated temperature fields with a maximum relative error below 1.85% across validation cases. These predictions supported an occupant-centric space heating control scheme. Compared with COMSOL-based offline control, the PINN-based system achieved an average prediction error of around 0.67%, and its rapid inference supports real-time occupant-centric control implementation. This work represents a move away from reliance on fixed-point temperature measurements in space heating control to an occupant-centric control strategy informed by real-time environmental feedback.
Hongxuan Liu, Roman Bushuiev, Ivy Lightheart, Mrunali Manjrekar, Anton Bushuiev, Magdalena Lederbauer, Filip Jozefov, Yinkai Wang 等 15 位作者
Reliable benchmarking is critical for developing machine learning models for tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) based molecule discovery. Subtle issues in experimental design and model evaluation procedures can degrade the trustworthiness of such benchmarks and lead to erroneous conclusions. We conduct a thorough review of model evaluation issues in the recent MS/MS machine learning literature, using the standard MassSpecGym benchmark suite as a case study to illustrate the impact of these issues. We find evaluation issues in at least 17 of 26 papers reporting MassSpecGym benchmark results in the first year of its adoption. We isolate three classes of failures: (i) data leakage, (ii) shortcut learning, and (iii) implementation bugs and metric divergence. Through extensive experimentation and code replication, we quantify the impact of these issues and show how they corrupt the evaluation standards MassSpecGym was designed to enforce. We distill our findings into recommendations generalizable to MS/MS challenges, benchmarks, and custom evaluation setups. We also release MassSpecGym v1.5, an implementation of our recommendations in the MassSpecGym benchmarking suite which addresses the failure modes identified in this audit. MassSpecGym v1.5 is publicly available at https://github.com/pluskal-lab/MassSpecGym.
Yunpeng Gong, Can Yang, Qingyuan Zeng, Dejun Xu, Zhiming Luo, Zhenzhong Wang, Min Jiang
Cross-modal person re-identification (ReID) adversarial attacks face a transferability challenge: existing methods may exhibit source-pair overfitting, where learned perturbations become overly dependent on the feature statistics of the source modality pair, thereby limiting their transferability under heterogeneous domain shifts. We argue that a key challenge is reducing source-pair-specific bias while maintaining attack effectiveness. To address this, we propose Multiform Attack (MA). The framework first learns a universal perturbation via Mahalanobis-guided gradient optimization. Since this perturbation may still retain source-pair-specific bias, the second stage performs sparse refinement through attention-shift-filtered multi-objective evolutionary search, leveraging heterogeneous source distributions in transfer settings. By separating universal perturbation learning from sparse evolutionary refinement, MA aims to reduce reliance on source-pair-specific patterns and improve transferability to unseen domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong attack effectiveness on cross-modal ReID benchmarks and improved transferability in the evaluated held-out-domain settings, with additional evaluations across model architectures.
Zimeng Wu, Qijian Tian, Penghui Du, Changqian Yu, Jiaxin Chen, Yunhong Wang
Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) enable powerful multi-image synthesis but incur substantial computation from long visual contexts. While token pruning offers a direct route to accelerating inference, existing methods are primarily adapted from understanding tasks, suffering from insufficient reference image exploration, confused conditional guidance, and pooling-induced ambiguity that degrades generation quality. To address these issues, we propose CATP, the first training-free context-compression method tailored to UMM generation, which \textbf{C}alibrates the discrepancies of general \textbf{A}ttention-based \textbf{T}oken \textbf{P}runing for better quality-efficiency trade-off. Concretely, building on independent layer-wise pruning during denoising, we introduce Guidance-Consistent Pruning (GCP) to synchronize pruning decisions across conditioning branches, and a Taylor-Calibrated Attention Metric (TCAM) that derives a theoretically grounded second-order correction for pooling-induced bias. In addition, a Fast Scoring Operator (FSO) fuses the calibration into tiled online Softmax to reduce pruning cost. Extensive experiments across representative UMMs and benchmarks demonstrate that CATP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art token-reduction methods, achieving up to 2.09$\times$ attention-core speedup.
Chenxing Wei, Jiazhen Kang, Hong Wang, Jianqing Zhang, Hao Jiang, Xiaolong Xu, Ningyuan Sun, Ying He 等 11 位作者
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) successfully aligns autoregressive models in rigorous domains like mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, applying RLVR to Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) is hindered by intractable sequence-level likelihoods, forcing existing methods to rely on unstable, high-variance approximations. We propose Sequence Likelihood-Free Policy Optimization (LFPO), an efficient framework that circumvents this bottleneck by formulating policy alignment as discrete velocity alignment. Inspired by continuous flow matching, LFPO eschews trajectory-level estimation and directly optimizes denoising logits via contrastive token-level updates, providing a stable, low-variance surrogate. Furthermore, predicting terminal solutions from intermediate states implicitly straightens the generation trajectory, enabling high-quality sampling with significantly fewer denoising iterations. Extensive experiments on reasoning and coding benchmarks demonstrate that LFPO matches or exceeds the accuracy of likelihood-based baselines while substantially accelerating inference.
Chong Wang, Zixuan Fu, Hao Cheng, Siyuan Yang, Alex C. Kot, Bihan Wen
Recent advances in diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in restoring high-quality images in a zero-shot manner. Unfortunately, extending this success to video restoration is challenging due to the substantial computational resources required to pre-train video diffusion models. A rising trend seeks to address video restoration by utilizing a pre-trained image diffusion model, initiating restoration from either frame-wise independent or identical Gaussian noise. Yet, these approaches often fall short, as such simple noise initiations fail to capture and utilize the inherent temporal correlations within degraded video frames. In this work, we propose taming noise initialization for zero-shot video restoration, which preserves the intrinsic temporal correlations by generating initial noises directly using DDIM inversion on the corrupted video frames themselves. Building on this, we introduce an adaptive noise blending strategy that suppresses degradation patterns encoded during DDIM inversion while gradually steering the noise toward a Gaussian distribution. To further emphasize temporal consistency, we propose measurement-guided trajectory attention to better align features across frames. Extensive experiments on multiple video restoration tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing zero-shot approaches, consistently achieving superior results on the DAVIS, REDS4, and Set8 datasets.
Flexible image tokenizers aim to represent an image using an ordered 1D variable-length token sequence. This flexible tokenization is typically achieved through nested dropout, where a portion of trailing tokens is randomly truncated during training, and the image is reconstructed using the remaining preceding sequence. However, this tail-truncation strategy inherently concentrates the image information in the early tokens, limiting the effectiveness of downstream AutoRegressive (AR) image generation as the token length increases. To overcome these limitations, we propose \textbf{ReToK}, a flexible tokenizer with \underline{Re}dundant \underline{Tok}en Padding and Hierarchical Semantic Regularization, designed to fully exploit all tokens for enhanced latent modeling. Specifically, we introduce \textbf{Redundant Token Padding} to activate tail tokens more frequently, thereby alleviating information over-concentration in the early tokens. In addition, we apply \textbf{Hierarchical Semantic Regularization} to align the decoding features of earlier tokens with those from a pre-trained vision foundation model, while progressively reducing the regularization strength toward the tail to allow finer low-level detail reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ReTok: on ImageNet 256$\times$256, our method achieves superior generation performance compared with both flexible and fixed-length tokenizers. Code will be available at: \href{https://github.com/zfu006/ReTok}{https://github.com/zfu006/ReTok}
Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Despite these advancements, LMs can inherit and amplify societal biases related to sensitive attributes such as gender and race, limiting their adoption in real-world applications. Therefore, fairness has been extensively explored in LMs, leading to the proposal of various fairness notions. However, the lack of clear agreement on which fairness definition to apply in specific contexts and the complexity of understanding the distinctions between these definitions can create confusion and impede further progress. To this end, this paper proposes a systematic survey that clarifies the definitions of fairness as they apply to LMs. Specifically, we begin with a brief introduction to LMs and fairness in LMs, followed by a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of existing fairness notions in LMs and the introduction of a novel taxonomy that categorizes these concepts based on their transformer architecture: encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder LMs. We further illustrate each definition through experiments, showcasing their practical implications and outcomes. Finally, we discuss current research challenges and open questions, aiming to foster innovative ideas and advance the field. The repository is publicly available online at https://github.com/vanbanTruong/Fairness-in-Large-Language-Models/tree/main/definitions.
Large Language Models (LLMs) employ multi-turn interaction as a fundamental paradigm for completing complex tasks. However, their performance often degrades in extended interactions, as they are typically trained on static, single-turn data, which hinders their ability to adapt to real-time user feedback. To address this limitation, we first propose a new paradigm: Test-Time Policy Adaptation for Multi-Turn Interactions (T2PAM), which utilizes user feedback from the ongoing interaction as a reward signal to estimate a latent optimal policy aligned with user preferences, then updates a small subset of parameters to steer the model toward this policy, ultimately enabling efficient in-conversation self-correction. We then introduce Optimum-Referenced One-Step Adaptation (ROSA), a lightweight algorithm that operationalizes T2PAM. ROSA guides the model parameters toward a theoretical optimal policy in a single, efficient update step, avoiding costly iterative gradient-based optimization and minimizing computational overhead. We provide a rigorous theoretical analysis guaranteeing that the policy of ROSA converges to the preference of user as the number of interactions increases. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmark demonstrate that ROSA achieves significant improvements in both task effectiveness and efficiency.
Remote sensing object detection is a critical technology for real-world applications such as natural resource monitoring, traffic management, and UAV-based rescue. Detecting tiny objects in high-resolution aerial imagery remains challenging due to weak visual cues and insufficient global context modeling in complex scenes. Existing methods often suffer from delayed contextual interaction and limited nonlinear reasoning, which restrict their ability to effectively refine shallow representations and ultimately lead to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose FMC-DETR, a frequency-decoupled fusion framework for aerial-view object detection. First, we propose the Wavelet Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformer (WeKat) backbone, which employs cascaded wavelet transforms to enhance global low-frequency structure perception in shallow features while preserving fine-grained details, and further leverages Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for adaptive nonlinear modeling of multi-scale dependencies. Second, we introduce the Multi-Domain Feature Coordination (MDFC) module, which refines cross-scale fused representations through partial-channel spatial, spectral, and structural coordination, thereby strengthening small-object-related feature responses in cluttered scenes. Finally, we design the Compact Partial Fusion (CPF) module, which performs compact multi-branch aggregation with progressive partial refinement to improve feature diversity and multi-scale interaction while preserving stable information flow and reducing redundant perturbation. Extensive experiments across multiple remote sensing benchmarks demonstrate that FMC-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforming the baseline detector. Code is available at https://github.com/bloomingvision/FMC-DETR.
Montgomery Bohde, Hongxuan Liu, Mrunali Manjrekar, Magdalena Lederbauer, Shuiwang Ji, Runzhong Wang, Connor W. Coley
Tandem mass spectrometry is prominent in scientific discovery workflows for identifying unknown small molecules, yet high-throughput structural elucidation remains challenging. While recent autoregressive and graph diffusion models have shown promise in de novo elucidation, performance remains limited by poor scalability during both training and inference time. In this work, we present FRIGID, a framework with a novel diffusion language model that generates molecular structures conditioned on mass spectra via intermediate fingerprint representations and determined chemical formulae, training at the scale of hundreds of millions of unlabeled structures. We then demonstrate how forward fragmentation models enable inference-time scaling by identifying spectrum-inconsistent fragments and refining them through targeted remasking and denoising. While FRIGID already achieves strong performance with its diffusion base, inference-time scaling significantly improves its accuracy, surpassing 18% Top-1 accuracy on the challenging MassSpecGym benchmark and tripling the Top-1 accuracy of the leading methods on NPLIB1. Further empirical analyses show that FRIGID exhibits log-linear performance scaling with increasing inference-time compute, opening a promising new direction for continued improvements in de novo structural elucidation. FRIGID code is publicly available at https://github.com/coleygroup/FRIGID.
With the advancement of vision-language models, web automation has made significant progress. However, deploying autonomous agents in real-world settings remains challenging, primarily due to site heterogeneity, where generalist models lack domain-specific priors for diverse interfaces, and long-horizon instability, characterized by the accumulation of decision drift over extended interactions. To address these challenges, we introduce ColorBrowserAgent (Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent), a knowledge-evolving agent for robust web automation. Our approach addresses these challenges through two synergistic mechanisms: human-in-the-loop knowledge adaptation that transforms sparse human feedback into reusable domain knowledge, and knowledge-aligned progressive summarization that stabilizes long interactions through memory compression. Extensive experiments on WebArena, WebChoreArena and industrial deployment show that ColorBrowserAgent consistently outperforms strong baselines. It achieves a state-of-the-art success rate of 71.2% on WebArena and maintains 47.4% performance under zero-shot transfer setting on WebChoreArena. In commercial deployment, it improves user satisfaction by 19.3% relatively, verifying its robustness in real-world scenarios.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Haozhong Wang, Zhuo Li The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Yibo Yang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, He Zhao Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, CSIRO, Hongyuan Zha The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dandan Guo
The inherent safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is prone to erosion during fine-tuning, even when using seemingly innocuous datasets. While existing defenses attempt to mitigate this via data selection, they typically rely on heuristic, instance-level assessments that neglect the global geometry of the data distribution and fail to explicitly repel harmful patterns. To address this, we introduce Safety Optimal Transport (SOT), a novel framework that reframes safe fine-tuning from an instance-level filtering challenge to a distribution-level alignment task grounded in Optimal Transport (OT). At its core is a dual-reference “push-pull” weight-learning mechanism: SOT optimizes sample importance by actively pulling the downstream distribution towards a trusted safe anchor while simultaneously pushing it away from a general harmful reference. This establishes a robust geometric safety boundary that effectively purifies the training data. Extensive experiments across diverse model families and domains demonstrate that SOT significantly enhances model safety while maintaining competitive downstream performance, achieving a superior safety-utility trade-off compared to baselines.
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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
Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Jian Luo State University of New York at Stony Brook, Jianqing Zhang, Yuyan Zhou, Qiang Lin, Can Wang, Hande Dong 等 9 位作者
Large Language Model (LLM) agents are reshaping the industrial landscape. However, most practical agents remain human-designed because tasks differ widely, making them labor-intensive to build. This situation poses a central question: can we automatically create and adapt domain agents in the wild? While several recent approaches have sought to automate agent creation, they typically treat agent generation as a black-box procedure and rely solely on final performance metrics to guide the process. Such strategies overlook critical evidence explaining why an agent succeeds or fails, and often require high computational costs. To address these limitations, we propose ReCreate, an experience-driven framework for the automatic creation of domain agents. ReCreate systematically leverages agent interaction histories, which provide rich concrete signals on both the causes of success or failure and the avenues for improvement. Specifically, we introduce an agent-as-optimizer paradigm that effectively learns from experience via three key components: (i) an experience storage and retrieval mechanism for on-demand inspection; (ii) a reasoning–creating synergy pipeline that map execution experience into scaffold edits; and (iii) hierarchical updates that abstract instance-level details into reusable domain patterns. In experiments across diverse domains, ReCreate consistently outperforms human-designed agents and existing automated agent generation methods, even when starting from minimal seed scaffolds.
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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
Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Haoyang Liu, Jian Luo State University of New York at Stony Brook, Jiarui Yu Tencent, Hande Dong, Qiang Lin, Can Wang 等 9 位作者
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) serves as a cornerstone technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its training is often plagued by entropy collapse, a rapid decline in policy entropy that limits exploration and undermines training effectiveness. While recent works attempt to mitigate this issue via several heuristic entropy interventions, the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct comprehensive theoretical and empirical analyses of entropy dynamics in RLVR, offering two main insights: (1) We derive a tight approximation for token-level entropy change at each update step, revealing four governing factors and providing a unified theoretical framework of how existing methods influence entropy; (2) We reveal a fundamental limitation of recent approaches: they rely on heuristic adjustments to one or two of these factors, leaving other relevant factors unconsidered, thus inherently limiting their effectiveness. Motivated by these findings, we propose STEER, a principled entropy-modulation method that adaptively reweighs tokens based on theoretically-estimated entropy variations. Extensive experiments across six mathematical reasoning and three coding benchmarks demonstrate that STEER effectively mitigates entropy collapse and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
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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 Luo Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and East China Normal University, Wentao Yan, Jingyu Gong East China Normal University, Min Wang Sensetime, Zhizhong Zhang, Xuhong Wang Shanghai AI Laboratory, Yuan Xie East China Normal University, Xin Tan East China Normal University and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Recent advances in Graphical User Interface (GUI) and embodied navigation have driven progress, yet these domains have largely evolved in isolation, with disparate datasets and training paradigms. In this paper, we observe that both tasks can be formulated as Markov Decision Processes (MDP), suggesting a foundational principle for their unification. Hence, we present NaviMaster, the first unified agent capable of unifying GUI navigation and embodied navigation within a single framework. Specifically, NaviMaster (i) proposes a visual-target trajectory collection pipeline that generates trajectories for both GUI and embodied tasks using a single formulation. (ii) employs a unified reinforcement learning framework on the mix data to improve generalization. (iii) designs a novel distance-aware reward to ensure efficient learning from the trajectories. Through extensive experiments on out-of-domain benchmarks, NaviMaster is shown to outperform state-of-the-art agents in GUI navigation, spatial affordance prediction, and embodied navigation. Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of our unified training strategy, data mixing strategy, and reward design. Resources will be released to the community.
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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
Zhiwei Zhang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Fei Zhao Xiaohongshu, Rui Wang, Zezhong Wang, Bin Liang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Jiakang Wang Kuaishou- 快手科技, Yao Hu Xiaohongshu, Shaosheng Cao 等 9 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) can call tools effectively, yet they remain brittle in multi-turn execution: after a tool-call error, smaller models often fall into repetitive invalid re-invocations instead of interpreting the feedback and recovering. This failure mode persists because current training paradigms do not explicitly teach models how to recover from execution errors. In particular, standard reinforcement learning (RL) collapses rich failure experience into sparse negative rewards, while pre-collected error-correction datasets become mismatched to the policy’s evolving failure modes. To bridge this gap, we propose Fission-GRPO, a framework that converts execution errors into on-policy corrective supervision within the RL training loop. Our core mechanism fissions each failed trajectory into a new training instance by augmenting it with diagnostic feedback from a fine-tuned Error Simulator, then resampling multiple recovery rollouts on-policy. This enables the model to learn from the precise errors it makes during exploration, rather than from static, pre-collected error cases. On BFCL v4 Multi-Turn, Fission-GRPO improves the error recovery rate of Qwen3-8B by 5.7% absolute and overall accuracy by 4.0% (from 42.75% to 46.75%), outperforming both RL baselines and specialized tool-use agents. The method further generalizes to TAU-Bench and TAU2-Bench, achieving leading results across most settings with gains up to +17.4%.
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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
Zhengyi Zhao The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shubo Zhang, Zezhong Wang, Yuxi Zhang, Huimin Wang Jarvis Research Center, Tencent YouTu Lab, Yutian Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Binyang Li 等 10 位作者
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing access to external knowledge. However, current research primarily focuses on retrieval quality, often overlooking the critical ”integration bottleneck”: even when relevant documents are retrieved, LLMs frequently fail to utilize them effectively due to conflicts with their internal parametric knowledge. In this paper, we argue that implicitly resolving this conflict in a single generation pass is suboptimal. We introduce GuarantRAG, a framework that explicitly decouples reasoning from evidence integration. First, we generate an ”Inner-Answer” based solely on parametric knowledge to capture the model’s reasoning flow. Second, to guarantee faithful evidence extraction, we generate a ”Refer-Answer” using a novel Contrastive DPO objective. This objective treats the parametric Inner-Answer as a negative constraint and the retrieved documents as positive ground truth, forcing the model to suppress internal hallucinations in favor of external evidence during this phase. Finally, rather than naive concatenation or using the DPO trained model directly, we propose a joint decoding mechanism that dynamically fuses the logical coherence of the Inner-Answer with the factual precision of the Refer-Answer at the token level. Experiments on five QA benchmarks demonstrate that GuarantRAG improves accuracy by up to 12.1% and reduces hallucinations by 16.3% compared to standard and dynamic RAG baselines.
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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
Zhenyun Yin, Shujie Wang, Xuhong Wang Shanghai AI Laboratory, Xingjun Ma Fudan University, Yingchun Wang Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Large language models with search capabilities frequently exhibit miscalibrated confidence, producing incorrect answers with high certainty. We present Deliberative Searcher, a reasoning-primary framework that integrates search operations into chain-of-thought generation while maintaining explicit confidence calibration. Our method employs constrained reinforcement learning with adaptive Lagrangian multipliers to jointly optimize correctness and reliability. Experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate substantial improvements: our 7B model reduces average false-certain rates from 54% in baselines to 2%, while our 72B variant achieves competitive accuracy with closed-source models and reduces false-certain rates to 9%. The well-calibrated confidence scores also enable more efficient test-time compute: instead of standard majority voting, we use confidence-weighted aggregation and match the performance of 16-sample majority voting with only 4 samples, a 4\times reduction in inference compute. These results establish calibrated confidence as a foundation for both trustworthy outputs and adaptive test-time compute, demonstrating the value of the proposed constrained RL framework in search-augmented language models.
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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
Zheyuan Zhang, Kaiwen Shi, Zhengqing Yuan, Zehong Wang, Tianyi Ma University of Notre Dame, Keerthiram Murugesan International Business Machines, Vincent Galassi, Chuxu Zhang University of Connecticut 等 9 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) and agent-based frameworks have advanced rapidly, enabling diverse applications. Yet, with the proliferation of models and agentic strategies, practitioners face substantial uncertainty in selecting the best configuration for a downstream task. Prior studies show that different agents and backbones exhibit complementary strengths, and that larger models are not always superior, underscoring the need for adaptive routing mechanisms. Existing approaches to agent routing, however, often emphasize cost efficiency while overlooking the fine-grained contextual and relational structure inherent in QA tasks. In this paper, we propose AgentRouter, a framework that formulates multi-agent QA as a knowledge-graph–guided routing problem supervised by empirical performance signals. Specifically, we convert QA instance into a heterogeneous knowledge graph that jointly encodes queries, contextual entities, and agents, and then train a heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) to propagate information across node types and produce task-aware routing distributions over agents. By leveraging soft supervision and weighted aggregation of agent outputs, AgentRouter learns principled collaboration schemes that capture the complementary strengths of diverse agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms single-agent and ensemble baselines, while generalizing across benchmarks and LLM backbones. These results highlight the effectiveness and robustness of graph-supervised multi-agent routing for question answering. Our code repo is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgentRouter.
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cs.CL · cs.AI · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in long-form generation, yet their application is hindered by the hallucination problem. While Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is essential for assessing reliability, the complex structure makes reliable aggregation across heterogeneous themes difficult, in addition, existing methods often overlook the nuance of neutral information and suffer from the high computational cost of fine-grained decomposition. To address these challenges, we propose AGSC (Adaptive Granularity and GMM-based Semantic Clustering), a UQ framework tailored for long-form generation. AGSC first uses NLI neutral probabilities as triggers to distinguish irrelevance from uncertainty, reducing unnecessary computation. It then applies Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) soft clustering to model latent semantic themes and assign topic-aware weights for downstream aggregation. Experiments on BIO and LongFact show that AGSC achieves state-of-the-art correlation with factuality while reducing inference time by about 60% compared to full atomic decomposition.
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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
Bo Zhang Xi’an Research Institute of High Technology, Jiawei Zhang, Cong Gao, Bingxu Han, Minghao Hu, Jun Zhang National University of Defense Technology, Yunbo Cao Information Center, Academy of Military Science, Zhunchen Luo 等 11 位作者
Although large reasoning models (LRMs) exhibit exceptional mathematical reasoning capabilities on clean inputs, their reasoning accuracy drops substantially in the presence of character-level noise such as typographical errors. Critically, their confidence estimates fail to reflect the corresponding decline in reasoning accuracy. While confidence calibration offers a principled solution, existing methods predominantly target clean inputs, leaving noisy scenarios largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose DisCal (Distribution-aware Calibration), a confidence calibration framework for character-level noisy inputs. DisCal extracts uncertainty signals from both the empirical answer distribution and the model’s predictive distribution, and integrates them via a learned calibrator to produce well-calibrated confidence. Experiments across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DisCal consistently outperforms existing calibration methods under noisy inputs, reducing Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by up to 39.21% and improving Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC) by up to 31.44%.
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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
Zhenhao Zhou, Zhuochen Huang, Yike He, Chong Wang Nanyang Technological University, Jiajun Wang Fudan University, Yijian Wu Fudan University, Xin Peng Fudan University, Yiling Lou University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Linux kernel is a critical system, serving as the foundation for numerous systems. Bugs in the Linux kernel can cause serious consequences, affecting billions of users. Fault localization (FL), which aims at identifying the buggy code elements in software, plays an essential role in software quality assurance. While recent LLM agents have achieved promising accuracy in FL on recent benchmarks like SWE-bench, it remains unclear how well these methods perform in the Linux kernel, where FL is much more challenging due to the large-scale code base, limited observability, and diverse impact factors. In this paper, we introduce LinuxFLBench, a FL benchmark constructed from real-world Linux kernel bugs. We conduct an empirical study to assess the performance of state-of-the-art LLM agents on the Linux kernel. Our initial results reveal that existing agents struggle with this task, achieving a best top-1 accuracy of only 41.6% at file level. To address this challenge, we propose LinuxFL+, an enhancement framework designed to improve FL effectiveness of LLM agents for the Linux kernel. LinuxFL+ substantially improves the FL accuracy of all studied agents (e.g., 7.2% - 11.2% accuracy increase) with minimal costs.
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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
Zihao Cheng, Zeming Liu, Yingyu Shan, Xinyi Wang, Xiangrong Zhu, Yunpu Ma Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Siemens Corporate Research, Hongru Wang, Yuhang Guo 等 10 位作者
While large language model–powered agents can self-evolve by accumulating experience or by dynamically creating new assets (i.e., tools or expert agents), existing frameworks typically treat these two evolutionary processes in isolation. This separation overlooks their intrinsic interdependence: the former is inherently bounded by a manually predefined static toolset, while the latter generates new assets from scratch without experiential guidance, leading to limited capability growth and unstable evolution. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel paradigm of co-evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation. Guided by this paradigm, we propose the Mem^{\textbf{2}}Evolve, which integrates two core components: Experience Memory and Asset Memory. Specifically, Mem^{2}Evolve leverages accumulated experience to guide the dynamic creation of assets, thereby expanding the agent’s capability space while simultaneously acquiring new experience to achieve co-evolution. Extensive experiments across 6 task categories and 8 benchmarks demonstrate that Mem^{2}Evolve achieves improvement of 18.53% over standard LLMs, 11.80% over agents evolving solely through experience, and 6.46% over those evolving solely through asset creation, establishing it as a substantially more effective and stable self-evolving agent framework.
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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
Inference providers must maintain availability for many LLMs, including low-volume but essential models, making resource efficiency increasingly important as token prices fall. Analysis of production traces reveals a dynamic bursty-group pattern in which sets of models become active together and shift over time; existing space- and time-sharing approaches lack principled mechanisms to adapt to this variability, forcing trade-offs between SLO adherence and efficiency. We observe that elastic memory allocation can unify spatial and temporal sharing. Based on this insight, we have developed Prism, a memory-centric LLM co-serving framework that applies memory ballooning to reclaim memory across models and support both forms of sharing under a single scheme. Prism's balloon driver, referred to as kvcached, has been open-sourced at https://github.com/ovg-project/kvcached, and deployed in production environments across 10K+ GPUs.