Guirong Chen Renmin University of China, Shuqi Ye, Wenkai Yang Renmin University of China, Shiqi Shen Wechat, Tencent, Guangyao Shen Tencent, Yankai Lin Renmin University of China
The evolution paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) is shifting from scaling training compute to scaling inference-time compute. While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a key engine for this transition, standard approaches often fail to equip models with the autonomous improvement capabilities required for test-time scaling. Existing critique-guided methods attempt to mitigate this by leveraging external feedback or ground-truth signals; however, these dependencies are unavailable at test time, fundamentally limiting the model’s capacity for continuous self-improvement. To bridge this gap, we propose CURE (Critique-driven Unified REinforcement Learning), a framework that jointly optimizes a single policy for standard solving, critiquing, and guided re-exploration. Uniquely, CURE facilitates re-exploration by generating strategic hints while discarding initial incorrect solutions to mitigate anchoring bias.Empirical results across diverse mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks demonstrate that CURE not only maintains competitive single-turn performance but, more importantly, unlocks effective inference-time scaling, enabling the model to significantly boost accuracy through iterative self-improvement.
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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
Songhao Wu, Ang Lv, Ruobing Xie Tencent, Samm Sun, Di Wang, Rui Yan Wuhan University, Yankai Lin Renmin University of China
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on an external router to assign tokens to experts. This design inherently separates the routing decision from each expert’s internal capabilities, leading to suboptimal performance. In this work, we address this limitation with Union-of-Experts (UoE), an MoE variant that performs "expert-autonomous routing”. The core mechanism of UoE is to pre-designate a minute fraction of neurons within each expert as "routing neurons”. Experts autonomously select relevant tokens by comparing the activation intensity of these neurons, aligning routing decisions with each expert’s functional profile. To prevent the waste of activations from unselected experts’ routing neurons, we aggregate all routing neuron outputs and sum them into the final layer output. This aggregation acts as a novel virtual shared expert whose parameters are distributed across the individual experts, and improves overall parameter efficiency. We pre-train UoE models with up to 3B parameters, demonstrating that they outperform traditional MoEs with matched efficiency. Furthermore, our analysis of the routing neurons provides valuable insights into expert-autonomous selection and the broader routing mechanisms of MoE 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
Yubo Wang, Juntian Zhang, Yichen Wu, Yankai Lin Renmin University of China, Nils Lukas Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Yuhan Liu Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
While Chain-of-Thought empowers Large Vision-Language Models with multi-step reasoning, explicit textual rationales suffer from an information bandwidth bottleneck, where continuous visual details are discarded during discrete tokenization. Recent latent reasoning methods attempt to address this challenge, but often fall prey to premature semantic collapse due to rigid autoregressive objectives. In this paper, we propose Laser, a novel paradigm that reformulates visual deduction via Dynamic Windowed Alignment Learning. Instead of forcing a point-wise prediction, Laser aligns the latent state with a dynamic validity window of future semantics. This mechanism enforces a “Forest-before-Trees” cognitive hierarchy, enabling the model to maintain a probabilistic superposition of global features before narrowing down to local details. Crucially, Laser maintains interpretability via decodable trajectories while stabilizing unconstrained learning via Self-Refined Superposition. Extensive experiments on 6 benchmarks demonstrate that Laser achieves state-of-the-art performance among latent reasoning methods, surpassing the strong baseline Monet by 5.03% on average. Notably, it achieves these gains with extreme efficiency, reducing inference tokens by more than 97%, while demonstrating robust generalization to out-of-distribution domains.
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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
Fengqi Zhu Renmin University of China, Rongzhen Wang Renmin University of China, Shen Nie, Xiaolu Zhang Ant Group, Chunwei Wu Ant Group, Jun Zhou Ant Group, Yankai Lin Renmin University of China, Ji-Rong Wen Renmin University of China 等 9 位作者
Masked diffusion language models present a promising paradigm for language modeling, yet the systematic theoretical analysis and comprehensive empirical validation of their alignment on general tasks remain relatively underexplored. In this paper, we identify the primary challenge for this problem: the high variance in Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO)-based likelihood estimates required for preference optimization. To address this issue, we propose Variance-Reduced Preference Optimization (VRPO), a framework that formally analyzes the bias and variance of the preference optimization loss and gradient based on Direct Preference Optimization, showing both are governed by a score-estimator variance. Building on this foundation, we introduce multiple unbiased variance reduction strategies, including optimal budget allocation and antithetic sampling, to improve alignment performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VRPO by applying it to LLaDA, a large diffusion language model. The resulting model, LLaDA 1.5, consistently outperforms its SFT-only predecessor consistently across various general benchmarks, such as mathematics (GSM8K +4.7), coding (HumanEval +3.0, MBPP +1.8), and alignment (IFEval +4.0, Arena-Hard +4.3). Furthermore, LLaDA 1.5 demonstrates a highly competitive mathematical performance compared to other strong language MDMs and ARMs. Our model is available at https://huggingface.co/GSAI-ML/LLaDA-1.5.
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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