Ke An, Shizhe Xiang, Yue Liu, Liang Chen, Pei Fu, Shaojie Zhang, Xiaoxing Hu, Yupei Wang
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for vision-language models (VLMs). Standard RLVR, however, assigns identical outcome-derived credit to all generated tokens regardless of their perceptual relevance. Recent perception-aware methods estimate visual reliance through image perturbation or masking. These indirect proxies require perturbation branches, while corruption sensitivity does not necessarily identify the visual evidence used for reasoning. We instead shape model perception through native attention, an intrinsic model signal. Rather than treating attention as a post-hoc explanation, we formulate it as a reward-anchored, token-aligned routing signal that encourages attention patterns supporting visually grounded reasoning. To this end, we propose NAS-PO, a Native Attention-Strategy Policy Optimization framework. NAS-PO analyzes native attention with a visual mass policy that quantifies visual allocation and a conditional visual policy that captures spatial routing over visual tokens, making the optimization well-posed. Based on this, Native Attention-Strategy Advantage Shaping (NAS-AS) draws on the visual-mass policy to redistribute signed policy-gradient credit for visually engaged rollouts. The Adaptive Attention-Coupled (AAC) loss then aligns the visual-mass policy on all response tokens and the conditional visual policy on visually active ones, consolidating the visual-routing patterns that drive successful trajectories. Experiments demonstrate that NAS-PO substantially surpasses leading RL-tuned VLMs across 7 out-of-domain reasoning and perception benchmarks, with its effectiveness consistently validated across 8B and 32B. Visual-Routing Sensitivity (VRS) analysis further indicates that the optimized attention prioritizes visually load-bearing regions.
Jihoon Jeong, Mirco Ravanelli, Zhepei Wang, Cem Subakan
Reasoning is increasingly important for large audio-language models (LALMs), yet remains relatively underexplored compared with text-only and vision-language models. We introduce Audio-R1, a reinforcement learning (RL) post-training framework that revisits audio self-supervised learning as a source of verifiable rewards for improving audio understanding and reasoning task performance. Audio-R1 uses answers automatically determined during the construction of self-supervised tasks to verify model responses and compute rewards. Experiments across multiple LALMs and diverse audio benchmarks show consistent performance gains, while ablations demonstrate the benefits of each self-supervised task and additional gains from joint training. While both supervised fine-tuning and Audio-R1 improve self-supervised task accuracy, Audio-R1 further improves performance on downstream tasks distinct from the training tasks. These results highlight the potential of RL post-training with self-supervised audio tasks to improve downstream performance and reasoning-trace quality.
Pei Wang, Yanan Wu Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xiaoshuai Song, Weixun Wang Alibaba Group, Gengru Chen Alibaba Group, Zhongwen Li, Kezhong Yan, Qi Liu 等 16 位作者
Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly deployed in e-commerce shopping. To perform thorough, user-tailored product searches, agents should interpret personal preferences, engage in multi-turn dialogues, and ultimately retrieve and discriminate among highly similar products. However, existing research has yet to provide a unified simulation environment that consistently captures all of these aspects, and always focuses solely on evaluation benchmarks without training support. In this paper, we introduce ShopSimulator, a large-scale and challenging Chinese shopping environment. Leveraging ShopSimulator, we evaluate LLMs across diverse scenarios, finding that even the best-performing models achieve less than 40% full-success rate. Error analysis reveals that agents struggle with deep search and product selection in long trajectories, fail to balance the use of personalization cues, and to effectively engage with users. Further training exploration provides practical guidance for overcoming these weaknesses, with the combination of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) yielding significant performance improvements.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表