RL for LLM reasoning often reaches an early performance plateau as the policy distribution becomes increasingly sharp. Recent work has studied policy entropy as both a diagnostic and a control signal for this behavior. In our experiments, however, increasing entropy alone does not reliably change the eventual plateau. We analyze RL through its implicit target policy and derive a sharpness factor $κ$, together with an effective counterpart $κ_{\mathrm{eff}}$, that describes how strongly reward or advantage gaps are translated into probability-ratio gaps. Motivated by this view, we introduce reward budgeting, a plug-in advantage construction that assigns a fixed total reward budget to each prompt. For binary rewards and independent on-policy rollouts, its unclipped score-function estimator follows the gradient of an exact finite-$G$ concave objective with diminishing returns, while its advantage gap decreases as more rollouts become correct. For general rewards, a shifted log-mean interpretation holds asymptotically under the stated regularity conditions. These results motivate, rather than establish exact objective equivalence for, the clipped implementations. On Qwen3-8B and Llama3.2-3B-Instruct, reward budgeting consistently improves a range of RL baselines, with gains up to +12.50 on AMC23 and +10.00 on AIME24 and AIME25. Overall, our results support an update-dynamics view of premature convergence and show that strong gains can be obtained without explicitly preserving entropy.
Xiaofeng Tan, Jun Liu, Bin-Bin Gao, Yuanting Fan, Xi Jiang, Chengjie Wang, Hongsong Wang, Feng Zheng
RLHF is widely used to align flow-matching text-to-image models with human preferences, but often leads to severe diversity collapse after fine-tuning. In RL, diversity is often assumed to correlate with policy entropy, motivating entropy regularization. However, we show this intuition breaks in flow models: policy entropy remains constant, even while perceptual diversity collapses. We explain this mismatch both theoretically and empirically: the constant entropy arises from the fixed, pre-defined noise schedule, while the diversity collapse is driven by the mode-seeking nature of policy gradients. As a result, policy entropy fails to prevent the model from converging to a narrow high-reward region in the perceptual space. To this end, we introduce perceptual entropy that captures diversity in a perceptual space and maintains the property of standard entropy. Building upon this insight, we propose two entropy-regularized strategies, Perceptual Entropy Constraint and Perceptual Constraints on Generation Space, to preserve perceptual diversity and improve the quality. Experiments across two base models, neural and rule-based rewards, and three perceptual spaces demonstrate consistent gains in the quality-diversity trade-off; PEC achieves the best overall score of 0.734 (vs. baseline's 0.366); a complementary setting of PEC further reaches a diversity average of 0.989 (vs. baseline's 0.047). Our project page (https://xiaofeng-tan.github.io/projects/PEC) is publicly available.
In an era defined by the explosive growth of data and rapid technological advancements, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) stand at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Designed to seamlessly integrate diverse data types-including text, images, videos, audio, and physiological sequences-MLLMs address the complexities of real-world applications far beyond the capabilities of single-modality systems. In this paper, we systematically sort out the applications of MLLM in multimodal tasks such as natural language, vision, and audio. We also provide a comparative analysis of the focus of different MLLMs in the tasks, and provide insights into the shortcomings of current MLLMs, and suggest potential directions for future research. Through these discussions, this paper hopes to provide valuable insights for the further development and application of MLLM.
Kaixuan Du, Xin Wan, Dai Guan, Ming Chen, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang
Streaming multimodal assistants must make response decisions while events are still unfolding. They need to recognize when the available evidence warrants a response, produce an appropriate continuation, and remain silent otherwise. Supervised fine-tuning learns from recorded assistant turns, but does not directly train on the response prefixes produced by the evolving policy itself. We introduce Live-OPSD, an on-policy self-distillation method that uses privileged hints available only during training to supervise the policy on its own outputs. The policy first generates a continuation from the streaming context alone. The same model then re-evaluates that continuation with a hint describing the relevant evidence, and the resulting distributions guide the unhinted policy. On Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B, Live-OPSD attains an average score of 59.64 on LiveProBench, 5.26 points above the strongest continued-SFT baseline, and stays competitive on OVO-Bench (65.84). These results indicate that guiding the policy on its own outputs with privileged hints improves both when and how a streaming assistant responds.
Xiaoxiao Ma, Kuofeng Gao Tsinghua University, Zeyi Lu, Wenxi Jiang, Hao Fang Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications and Tsinghua University, Hao Wu Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University, Bin Chen Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Shu-Tao Xia Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University
Key-Value (KV) caching is widely used in large language models (LLMs) to enable long-context inference efficiently, yet its security implications remain underexplored. We present the first systematic study of how KV cache compression interacts with jailbreak attacks, evaluating four model families under diverse jailbreak attacks. We identify a double-edged effect: (i) on one hand, compression can induce Accidental Robustness, where optimization-based and encoding-based attacks fail due to Malicious Semantic Eviction, where attacks’ own attention redirection reduces the malicious query’s cache importance, and Gradient Mismatch where discrete compression operations break jailbreak optimization. (ii) On the other hand, Vulnerability Paradox arises under merging-based compression for human-designed Attacks, where aggressive merging in shallow layers triggers functional head collapse, amplifying attack success rates. To address this, we propose Safe-CAM, a history-aware, per-head feedback merging strategy that prevents safety degradation while maintaining efficiency. Experiments show Safe-CAM fully restores safety (0% ASR) and improves benign task performance with minimal overhead. Our study highlights that KV cache compression is not only an efficiency mechanism but also a safety-critical design factor in LLM deployment.
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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
Zhuo Li The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Yupeng Zhang Alibaba Group, Pengyu Cheng Alibaba Group, Jiajun Song Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, Mengyu Zhou Alibaba Group, Hao Li, Shujie Hu, Yu Qin 等 11 位作者
Hallucination remains a critical bottleneck for large language models (LLMs), undermining their reliability in real-world applications, especially in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. While existing hallucination detection methods employ LLM-as-a-judge to verify LLM outputs against retrieved evidence, they suffer from inherent confirmation bias, where the verifier inadvertently reproduces the errors of the original generation. To address this, we introduce Multi-Agent Reinforced self-Check for Hallucination (MARCH), a framework that enforces rigorous factual alignment by leveraging deliberate information asymmetry. MARCH orchestrates a collaborative pipeline of three specialized agents: a Solver, a Proposer, and a Checker. The Solver generates an initial RAG response, which the Proposer decomposes into claim-level verifiable atomic propositions. Crucially, the Checker validates these propositions against retrieved evidence in isolation, deprived of the Solver’s original output. This well-crafted information asymmetry scheme breaks the cycle of self-confirmation bias. By training this pipeline with multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), we enable the agents to co-evolve and optimize factual adherence. Extensive experiments across hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that MARCH substantially reduces hallucination rates. Notably, an 8B-parameter LLM equipped with MARCH achieves performance competitive with powerful closed-source models. MARCH paves a scalable path for factual self-improvement of LLMs through co-evolution. The code is at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/MARCH.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表