Scaffolding GenAI Use in Ethical Essay Writing: A Three-Year Experience Report in Introductory Computing
Asma Shakil, Paul Denny, Jun Seo, Gauravkumar Hirani, Sean Longyu Ma, Claus Brabrand
AI 速览：该经验报告基于三年六次调查与成绩关联分析，探讨在一年级计算机系统课程的伦理短文作业中，如何通过支架式负责任使用流程引导学生使用生成式AI。
As society, ethics, and professional practice become increasingly integrated across the computer science curriculum, technical courses need practical ways to support ethical reasoning. Ethical essay assignments offer one approach, but little is known about how students use GenAI when writing such essays. This experience report examines GenAI use across three years of ethical essay assignments in a large first-year computer systems course. Across six post-essay surveys from 2024 to 2026, we analyzed 1,894 responses, linked survey data with essay grades in 2025 and 2026, and introduced a scaffolded responsible-use workflow in 2026. Under voluntary-use policies, AI adoption remained steady at around two-thirds of students, rising above 90% when use was scaffolded. Students reported mainly using AI for help with grammar and style, while tool use diversified beyond ChatGPT in 2026. Grade-linked analyses showed that AI use did not independently predict essay quality, while marker evaluations indicated high levels of critical engagement when use was scaffolded. Overall, GenAI's pedagogical value appears to depend on how assessment design guides students to evaluate and critically engage with AI-generated suggestions.
LLM-enabled customer-service software in financial institutions must choose a downstream service before responding. Classifiers and LLM routers can identify a relevant label or destination, but a composed application must still verify dispatch permission and entity registration. We study this integration problem as boundary-aware pre-response routing. We present RouteBR, a controller in which one model call proposes a primary service action and registered object, then deterministic code checks identifiers and versioned rules before dispatch or a specified non-dispatch outcome. Lower-ranked candidates cannot replace a blocked primary route. We construct 600 privacy-preserving scenarios from recurring confidential-request patterns at a real financial institution; three engineers jointly reviewed the scenarios and labels. On the 200-case CONFIRM MAIN split, RouteBR reaches 97.5% final-path exact match. A matched one-call baseline given the same rules reaches 95.5%, whereas a diagnostic baseline without the rule program obtains 94.0% action accuracy but only 41.0% final-path exact match. Across 166 non-dispatch MAIN and FLIP cases, RouteBR produces no false dispatch. The artifact pairs all 1,960 prediction rows with raw receipts while excluding gold and reviewer fields from model requests. These results support separating model proposals from code-owned, replayable execution. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/YgcCoder/RouteBR.
AI 速览：作者提出 LooM，在因果编码器-解码器中只循环解码器层，并让每个 token 的 KV 只在首次访问时写入，从而在缓存不随循环次数增长的前提下，把有效深度变成部署时可选的预算。
Looped Transformers increase effective depth by re-executing shared layers, but three limitations hinder their adoption: memory grows with the loop count, compute can only be adjusted in whole-block steps, and the loop count is hard to change after training. We propose LooM (Loop-invariant Memory), which addresses each in turn. In a causal encoder-decoder (CED), LooM loops only the decoder layers after the first, which read a global memory written once per token, and each of them publishes the key-value (KV) entry for a token only on its first visit, so the cache does not grow with the loop count. These layers loop independently, providing every budget from 3 to 21 layer executions per token, and one model trained on randomly sampled budgets covers all of them without a router. With enough loops, LooM outperforms a single-pass baseline trained on the same data on language modeling, zero-shot accuracy and long-context perplexity, while using the same cache size. Our analysis further shows that the training budget distribution decides what extra depth buys. These results suggest that a CED is a natural place to loop: memory is written once, and depth becomes a budget chosen at deployment.
Simulation-based fuzzing exposes autonomous driving system (ADS) failures by repeatedly mutating and executing scenarios, but converting one failure into reusable regression scenarios remains difficult. Such variants test whether the mechanism persists after software changes, for example by varying weather or actor placement while retaining a collision's actor-route conflict. We present Bug2Scenario, a root-cause-guided post-fuzzing framework. From scenario data, traces, and oracle evidence, it extracts a root-cause pattern. An LLM proposes semantic variations over actors, missions, routes, and weather. Deterministic rules construct DriveFuzz-compatible scenarios. Execution evidence and manual review assess preservation. Separating these responsibilities prevents fluency, syntax, or recurring labels from masquerading as causal evidence. Under matched seeds, six LLM backbones, candidate budget, and execution pipeline, Bug2Scenario improves strict preservation by 6.7 percentage points (p=0.104; not significant) and boundary-inclusive preservation by 10.6 points (p=0.011). Feedback helps some initially unsuccessful seeds yield a strictly preserved candidate. Seed-level stopping then avoids further API calls and simulator runs. Remaining failures reflect actor-placement constraints, simulator instability, and incomplete or conflicting causal evidence. Bug2Scenario thus produces reliable ADS regression assets. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/YgcCoder/Bug2Sce.
Haoze Ma, Yidi Li, Yu Ma, Pengyuan Zhao, Yi Shi, Bin Ren, Yanwen Guo, Dimitrios Kanoulas
Existing audio-visual segmentation methods mainly predict sound-related regions or category masks and often fail to identify the sounding instance when multiple same-class candidates coexist. Recent audio-visual instance segmentation methods address instance-level prediction but rely largely on motion and cross-frame association, which may become unreliable under sparse observations or inconspicuous motion. To this end, we introduce binaural audio, whose interaural differences encode source-direction information, to provide spatial constraints for distinguishing the sounding instance among same-class visual candidates. We propose Binaural Sounding Instance Disambiguation for Audio-Visual Segmentation (BiSID-AVS), which progressively refines category-level candidate responses into a mask of the true sounding instance. BiSID-AVS first grounds category-consistent candidate regions through audio prompting, then projects binaural cues into an image-plane spatial response map, and finally refines the true sounding instance through dual-level spatial conditioning at the feature and decoder levels. Experiments on the binaurally extended AVS-Synthetic benchmark and Habitat-AVS dataset for robotic indoor perception show that BiSID-AVS achieves the best performance on the multi-candidate subsets, improving instance-level mIoU by 35.19 and 41.21 percentage points, respectively, while substantially reducing false activation on non-sounding same-class regions.
Large language models are deployed as long-horizon agents that compose diverse tools across MCP services into executable workflows. Existing MCP environment-scaling methods are data-centric: they first synthesize a database and scenario, then derive tools and tasks from them. As a result, tool interfaces may not match real ones, tool compositions are not grounded in execution, and tasks rarely span more than one environment. We propose ToolSpace, a tool-centric framework that reverses this order. ToolSpace mines data, state, and retry dependencies from adjacent calls in execution traces of real MCP services and open agent corpora, using deterministic rules rather than LLM judgment, and clusters the resulting weighted tool-composition graph into environments. Databases are synthesized only for state-mutating environments, while query and stateless tools replay recorded returns. ToolSpace then performs state-aware random walks with rollback and decompiles each chain into a natural-language task with assertion-based checks, keeping only samples that replay successfully from the initial state. Applied to AutomationBench and tau3-Bench Banking, the pipeline produces harder Pro versions on which 7 frontier models drop by up to 38.2 points. Across seven long-horizon tool-use benchmarks, ToolSpace raises Qwen3.6-35B-A3B from 23.0 to 41.0 average score (43.2 with RL) and GLM-5.2 from 44.6 to 56.6, on par with Claude Opus 5. Ablations show that execution-witnessed edges clearly outperform LLM-judged ones, and performance keeps improving with data and environment scale.
Multimodal agents use web and image tools to answer questions beyond their internal knowledge. Some search tasks use images mainly to identify an initial entity, then rely on text retrieval. These tasks offer limited insight into how agents connect information across images, objects, and search steps. We therefore focus on visual context management. This involves organizing and using visual information and linking it to other findings during search. Visually intensive tasks require agents to combine object appearance, local details, or spatial relations with external information. We introduce VisSearch-Bench, with 204 human-written tasks across 7 main domains and 25 subdomains. It covers Set-wise Visual Search, Sequential Visual Search, Hybrid Wide-Deep Search, Competitive Visual Disambiguation, and Visual-Structure-Guided Search. Each task provides a reference answer, traceable evidence, and scoring rules. Accuracy measures complete task success, while Process Score measures the correctness and completeness of individual results and subquestion answers. Across 16 multimodal models, the best system fully solves only 26.47% of tasks, even with search tools. These results highlight the challenge of linking visual evidence with search results to produce complete answers.
Qingguo Hu, Xinyu Ma, Yujie Lin, Yaoxiang Wang, Qi Shi, Zonghao Guo, Chi Chen, Jinsong Su
Fine-grained cross-view localization aims to precisely localize a ground camera against geo-referenced aerial imagery, but current methods typically assume a narrow geographic prior, substantially limiting their applicability when upstream localization remains coarse. To bridge this gap, we study this task over much larger aerial regions. However, this seemingly simple extension fundamentally changes the localization problem: the growing disparity in spatial extent between ground and aerial views makes reliable cross-view matching difficult to establish directly, while the increasing number of look-alike locations in larger regions introduces substantial visual ambiguity. To address these challenges, we propose RingMatch, a search-and-verification framework for wide-area cross-view localization. RingMatch first leverages predictive uncertainty to uncover plausible locations and progressively zooms into their surroundings to obtain increasingly fine-grained evidence, yielding a compact set of promising candidates. We then introduce the depth ring, a novel geometric representation that reveals subtle variations in the spatial layout around a location and serves as a view-shared spatial signature for an LVLM verifier to resolve residual ambiguity. To benchmark this setting, we construct VIGOR-Pro by composing VIGOR aerial tiles into contiguous regions with spatial extents of up to 400 m. Experiments show that RingMatch maintains strong localization performance as the aerial region expands, consistently outperforming representative end-to-end and retrieval-based methods.
Hossein Askari, Wei Sun, Chenguang Zhu, Bin Zan, Sreen Tallam, Keyu Man
In mixed-vendor accelerator fleets, many training jobs can run on several hardware types, and the best choice depends on each job's throughput on each type. Routing a job needs a throughput estimate for every candidate type before the job runs. We present LEAP, a machine learning performance prediction service that predicts each training job's throughput on every candidate hardware type at submission time and ranks the candidates by predicted throughput per unit cost. It routes tens of thousands of training job attempts a day across hundreds of different model types and more than 20 hardware types in a production fleet. LEAP predicts throughput from submission-time training configuration, including each job's prior throughput. LEAP reaches an accuracy of 77% over 30 nightly retrains, higher than the lookup table it replaced and at least as high as every alternative model we tested, including fine-tuned language models. Over six months, the share of eligible training GPU-hours that received a ranking by LEAP grew from 58% to 95%, and we estimate that it saves about 3% of training computational cost. In this paper, we identify the drivers that actually move accuracy and those that do not. We offer these as lessons for teams building performance predictors at fleet scale.
Technology-mediated audience participation (TMAP) enables audiences to influence live performances, yet balancing interaction with meaningful agency remains challenging. While AI-generated music and MR enable new forms of audio and visual audience participation, little is known about how these participation modalities influence audience experiences during live musical performance. In particular, it remains unclear how they shape perceived agency, collaboration, and engagement, and how they complement one another within TMAP systems. We present CrowdForge, an AI- and MR-mediated paradigm where audiences collectively control generative music and virtual environments during a live performance featuring a guitarist and DJ. Through a mixedmethods concert study evaluating three interaction conditions (audio, visual, and combined audio-visual), we demonstrate that observability is the primary driver of audience agency. While visual interaction provided easily observable feedback, audio parameters offered macro-structural control over the music. Audiences tended to use the control enabled by AI audio generation to test musical boundaries, introducing a productive adversarial tension between the crowd and the musicians. This dynamic pushed creative limits, deepened engagement, and generated moments of musical coherence when performers successfully resolved audience-induced challenges. We argue future TMAP systems should prioritize human-centered, highly observable interactions to build agency, while combining the expressiveness of music with the clarity of visual feedback.
Rapid advances in cowork agents are shifting human-AI collaboration toward real-world automation, delivering software, designs, and other artifacts. However, such productivity work demands both high-quality delivery on complex productivity tasks and continued monitoring and decision-making over long horizons, a combination that remains an open challenge. We introduce CoworkOS, a general-purpose harness for long-horizon work that separates task strategy from execution management: the model decides actions, delegation, and acceptance, while the runtime maintains state and feedback. Its three-layer architecture enables direct execution or delegation to Subagents, synchronously or asynchronously, under stable responsibilities. Through a shared application layer, humans and agents inspect and revise the same evolving documents, presentations, CAD models, and Blender scenes, so human-in-the-loop participation can enter both through conversation and through direct modification of the work itself. To sustain continuity across agents and sessions, CoworkOS further introduces hierarchical workspaces and persistent semantic memory, so working files, key decisions, and long-running Job logs remain shareable, reusable, and resumable after interruption. Across 12 benchmarks and 6 categories of real-world applications, CoworkOS proves highly competitive with frontier agent applications such as Codex and DeepSeek Harness. As a sustained-work case study, CoworkOS uses GLM-5.3 as its backbone to conduct RSI-driven automated post-training on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. Over five rounds, the model's average score across eight benchmarks rose from 33.19 to 42.95 (+9.76). Looking ahead, we believe CoworkOS opens a meaningful path toward general cowork-agent intelligence.
While language models (LMs) excel in natural language tasks, their ability to learn impossible languages--those that violate the structural, cognitive, or logical constraints that make human languages learnable and functional--remains debatable. This controversy is further fueled by a divide between linguistic theorists and empirical researchers working with small-scale LMs. To address this controversy, we introduce semantic coherence. This concept measures how effectively semantic information is expressed in language structures and examines the learning capabilities of LMs across multiple scales. By fine-tuning billion-parameter LMs on impossible language samples, we demonstrate that larger LMs achieve similar performance on impossible and possible languages, whereas million-parameter LMs exhibit significant degradation when trained on impossible languages. This performance gap widens as semantic complexity increases. We further show that scaling up the LM size fundamentally shifts the learning focus from grammatical rules to semantic understanding, with billion-scale LMs exhibiting a threefold reduction in sensitivity to low-level linguistic perturbations while maintaining stable performance under high-level semantic perturbations.
Weizhe Ni, Jinzhou Li, Xinyu Ma, Haoyu Li, Eva Bonde, Cody Andres Alessio-Bunnell, Wenjing Pan, Xianyi Cheng
Robotic manipulation dexterity is often pursued by building increasingly complex high-DoF multifingered hands. While many robotic hands are designed to replicate the morphology of human hands, the functional role of human hands suggests a different perspective: much of their complexity may exist to enable tool use and tool making. This observation motivates Any-ttach, a tool-centric manipulation system that leverages mechanical modularity and treats autonomous end-effector swapping as a pathway towards dexterity. Any-ttach combines: 1) a low-cost standardized interface with passive self-locking and mechanically triggered release mechanism; 2) a unified object-centric manipulation framework supporting kinesthetic teaching trajectory replay, human demonstration retargeting, and policy learning; and 3) hierarchical planning and execution system for tools and skills for multi-tool long-horizon tasks. We demonstrated 15 heterogeneous end-effector modules supported by our system, spanning different robotic fingers, everyday tools (including articulated tools such as scissors), and unconventional end-effectors through the same interface. Experiments demonstrate reliable autonomous swapping, automatic integration to new tools, and broad manipulation capability across different skill sources. Two multi-tool application demonstrations, comprising seven tool--skill steps across two tasks, further illustrate the autonomous composition of end-effector exchange and heterogeneous manipulation skills. These results show that end-effector swapping can expand manipulation capability without concentrating increasing complexity entirely in a single end-effector. More details and videos are available at https://any-ttach.github.io/.
Your LR Schedule May Not Be Principled: Effective Learning Rate Scheduling in Weight-Normalized Training
Qifan Yu, Xinyu Ma, Xingyan Bin, Di He
AI 速览：论文指出权重归一化训练的收益主要来自有效学习率轨迹而非归一化本身，并提出以有效学习率为调度对象的 AIR 调度。
Weight-normalized (WN) training is emerging as a compelling alternative to conventional weight decay (WD), with recent studies reporting substantial pretraining loss gains. We show that these gains are driven primarily by the induced effective learning rate (ELR) trajectory rather than by normalization alone. Matching ELR trajectories largely collapses the training loss dynamics of WN and WD. Schedule design should therefore target ELR rather than the nominal learning rate (LR) alone. Building on this principle, we propose AIR (Affine Inverse-square-Root decay), which combines a theoretically derived $1/\sqrt{t}$ decay with an affine adjustment to satisfy prescribed peak and terminal LRs over a finite training horizon. We further identify late-stage ELR scheduling as a key source of its gains, because a shared late schedule attenuates the effect of earlier LR choices. Experiments on 128 B-token Mixture-of-Experts pretraining demonstrate that AIR outperforms cosine and other candidate schedules in training loss, downstream performance, and hyperparameter robustness, reducing terminal training loss by approximately 0.01 relative to cosine at matched cumulative LR. Applying the same ELR trajectory to WD reproduces the corresponding training dynamics, showing that the benefits extend beyond fixed-norm training and establishing ELR as the principled scheduling object.
Diverse optimizations spanning model architecture, inference runtime, and hardware acceleration have been proposed for on-device vision-language model (VLM) deployment on edge NPUs. Still, cross-layer coordination of VLM execution on edge NPUs remains largely underexplored. This paper presents an empirical measurement study across six representative VLMs, three real-world edge platforms, and ten multimodal benchmarks. Our evaluation drills down from end-to-end application-level latency and thermal traces down to low-level kernel-scale execution behaviors, challenging several widely held community assumptions. First, softmax dominates attention costs; even lookup-table-based softmax optimizations cannot eliminate pipeline bubbles that severely underutilize NPU matrix units. Second, theoretical speedups from linear attention vanish under real-NPU execution due to prohibitive tensor-rearrangement overhead. Third, no hardware backend universally dominates autoregressive decoding: attention-tensor-shaped parallelism dictates NPU efficiency and shifts the CPU-NPU performance balance. We further find task-specific Sweet Resolutions for VLMs, which deliver meaningful accuracy gains at only modest latency overhead. Complementing these findings, we provide actionable cross-layer recommendations for hardware architects, runtime developers, and model designers.
Consumers increasingly delegate product search to AI shopping agents powered either by generative large language models (LLMs) that deliberate in natural language or by non-generative decision models that output calibrated choice probabilities in a single forward pass. Because retail platforms monetize through sponsored placements that shoppers typically discount, we examine whether an AI agent's evaluation of paid listings depends on who delegates the agent across both model families. Across three studies with no instructions to favor advertisers, naming a booking platform (vs. a traveler) as the agent's principal significantly attenuates the penalty applied to sponsored listings. Study 1 establishes this sponsorship bias across generative LLMs, prompt wordings, and reasoning efforts, showing that platform delegation weakens pre-choice skepticism and that naming the consumer as the beneficiary eliminates the bias. Study 2 establishes the bias across six commercial and open-weight decision models on calibrated choice probabilities and shows that consumer-aligned fine-tuning of an open-weight decision model (Kev 9B) across non-hotel retail categories eliminates the bias zero-shot on hotel choices. Study 3 decomposes the disclosure label across both model families, showing that attributing the placement to the platform triggers the sponsorship bias, whereas stricter disclosure wording ("Sponsored" vs. "Promoted") lowers paid-listing evaluation without eliminating this bias.
On-policy self-distillation enables the same model to act as student and teacher, with dense token-level supervision obtained by the teacher being given access to privileged information. However, conditioning the teacher on a single reference can concentrate its predictions on one reasoning trajectory and limit transfer to the student. We propose Multi-Mask Selective Self-Distillation (MASS), which approximates the unavailable marginal over diverse reference realizations using multiple independently masked views of one verified solution. MASS aggregates these complementary teacher predictions, selectively transfers reliable token-level corrections, and adaptively focuses masking on influential reference spans. Across mathematical reasoning benchmarks and model families, MASS consistently outperforms strong self-distillation baselines.
Diffusion video models produce striking clips, but they cannot reliably render an exact formula, a correct chart, a rule-consistent game or narration synchronized to on-screen events. A different route is emerging: multimodal agents that write code to render every frame and synthesize every sound. We introduce VibeVideoBench, a benchmark for evaluating agents on code-driven video generation. Its 239 self-contained tasks in English and Chinese span 12 categories, from data stories and music-driven pieces to classroom lessons and paper explainers; each asks an agent, running in its native harness inside a sandbox with no image or video generation model, to deliver a finished MP4 with sound within one hour. Evaluation is hierarchical and evidence-based: program checks of the delivery spec, about 13k task-specific rubric checks traced to the requirements they enforce, and five quality dimensions anchored per task, scored by three VLM judge panels. Across nine frontier agent systems and 2,151 scored rollouts, GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 rank first and second with both the judges and human annotators, and the strongest system satisfies every core requirement on 76.3% of tasks. Delivery is a second axis: counting missing videos as zero changes the ranking, and three quarters of the lost videos are final renders that started too late, ran too slowly or never started, a failure of how agents plan their hour. Agents build their own rendering pipelines and inspect their own frames, yet how much they look does not predict quality. The judges' ranking of the systems closely matches blind human preferences.
Diffusion-based real-world image super-resolution suffers from limited reconstruction fidelity due to information loss in VAE-based latent representations. Recently, pixel-space diffusion models offer a promising high-faithfulness alternative by avoiding latent compression, but adapting them to Real-ISR remains challenging due to inherent patch boundary artifacts and degraded generative capability. To address the issues and maximize the potential of pretrained pixel-space diffusion models, we propose HiFiPix, a pixel-space Real-ISR framework capable of ultra high-fidelity reconstruction and fine-grained visual generation effects. To suppress patch boundary artifacts, we penalize unrealistic high-frequency periodic components with a Cross-Scale Wavelet Discriminator (CWSD) for image-level supervision, and Mixup Contrastive Self-Distillation (MixCSD) for intermediate representation regularization. Furthermore, we uncover a heterogeneous generation-fidelity trade-off across low-rank adapters (LoRA) and propose Selective LoRA Pruning (LoRA-SP) to adaptively prune LoRA layers, enhancing generative capability with minimal deterioration of reconstruction fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HiFiPix consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art latent space methods in terms of both restoration accuracy and perceptual quality by a large margin. Code and models will be released.
City systems are shaped by interactions among infrastructure, human activity, and environmental conditions. Existing earth observation and urban benchmarks are limited in unified modeling and in capturing their joint dynamics. We introduce AgenticCity-Bench, a longitudinal multimodal benchmark for multi-layer unified state modeling and agentic city task reasoning. The benchmark covers 16 cities in 12 countries across six continents from 2000 to 2025, and includes 18 modalities spanning urban function, activity, and environmental state. It organizes heterogeneous data sources around a common spatial reference and calendar index while preserving spatial and temporal coverage, provenance and tile-level availability. On this foundation, AgenticCity-Bench supports urban cross-modal translation together with diverse agentic city tasks involving forecasting, planning and resource analysis. This study provides a unified benchmark for studying the transition from multimodal urban and earth observation to joint understanding and agentic city decision-making. The dataset is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgenticCity-Bench.
Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) rely on role-specific prompts and execution models to solve complex tasks collaboratively. However, prompt optimization typically keeps model assignments fixed, leaving differences in role requirements and their associated inference costs outside the search. We present UniMASO, a Unified framework for heterogeneous Multi-Agent System Optimization through the joint adaptation of prompts and model assignments. UniMASO evaluates candidate updates through local, downstream, and global feedback, using cost-aware Pareto search to retain useful quality-cost trade-offs. Topology-aware co-evolution then coordinates these updates according to agent roles and dependencies. Cross-level trajectory memory further supplies historical successes and failures to guide subsequent optimization. Experiments on five benchmarks and five execution topologies show that UniMASO achieves competitive task performance at substantially lower deployment cost than the strongest homogeneous configurations. Under centralized execution, it improves the average score from 69.79 to 70.40 while reducing token-weighted deployment cost by 85.2% relative to DeepSeek-V4-Pro with MASPO. These results support joint prompt-model adaptation as an effective approach to efficient multi-agent collaboration. The code is available at https://github.com/Achilles008/UniMASO_main.
Wenhan Liu, Xinyu Ma Baidu, Weiwei Sun Carnegie Mellon University, Yutao Zhu, Yuchen Li Baidu Inc., Dawei Yin Baidu, Zhicheng Dou Renmin University of China
Large Language Model (LLM) based listwise ranking has shown superior performance in many passage ranking tasks. With the development of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), many studies have demonstrated that step-by-step reasoning during test-time helps improve listwise ranking performance. However, due to the scarcity of reasoning-intensive training data, existing rerankers perform poorly in many complex ranking scenarios, and the ranking ability of reasoning-intensive rerankers remains largely underdeveloped. In this paper, we first propose an automated reasoning-intensive training data synthesis framework, which sources training queries and passages from diverse domains and applies DeepSeek-R1 to generate high-quality training labels. To empower the listwise reranker with strong reasoning ability, we further propose a two-stage training approach, which includes a cold-start supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage and a reinforcement learning (RL) stage. During the RL stage, we design a novel multi-view ranking reward tailored to the multi-turn nature of listwise ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our trained reasoning-intensive reranker ReasonRank outperforms existing baselines significantly and also achieves much lower latency than the pointwise reranker.
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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
Shidong Yang, Ziyu Ma Hunan University, Tongwen Huang Alibaba Group, Yiming Hu, Yong Wang, Xiangxiang Chu Alibaba Group
Reinforcement learning for LLM agents is typically conducted on a static data distribution, which fails to adapt to the agent’s evolving behavior and leads to poor coverage of complex environment interactions. To address these challenges, we propose CoEvolve, an agent-data mutual evolution framework that enables LLM agents to improve through closed-loop, interaction-driven training. Specifically, CoEvolve extracts feedback signals such as forgetting and uncertainty from rollout trajectories to identify failure-prone interaction patterns, and utilizes them to guide LLM-based task synthesis. The synthesized tasks are validated through environment interaction and utilized to update the data distribution, enabling joint adaptation of the agent and its data. Extensive experiments on AppWorld and BFCL across Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-30B-A3B demonstrate consistent and significant improvements over strong base models, yielding absolute gains of 19.43%, 15.58%, and 18.14%, respectively.
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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
Rui Wang, Ce Zhang Carnegie Mellon University, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang Tencent AI Lab 等 13 位作者
The hallmark of Deep Research agents lies in compositional reasoning, the capacity to aggregate distributed, heterogeneous information into coherent logical insights. However, current agentic systems are often retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light, where success is predominantly determined by simple entity-seeking rather than the multi-step aggregation of scattered evidence. To address this, we propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator, designed to shift the agentic paradigm from retrieval-centric to compositional aggregation. Our approach first employs Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge, then Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions using over 12 composition guidelines derived from a rigorous deconstruction of the Deep Research problem setting. Fine-tuning on this corpus fundamentally transforms agent behavior, fostering deliberate composition reasoning and reduced tool redundancy. The resulting WebAggregator-32B surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. To address the lack of benchmarks that emphasize both reasoning and retrieval, we introduce the WebAggregatorQA testbed, which reveals that even with perfect retrieval, top-tier models still underperformed. These results demonstrate that compositional reasoning, not retrieval, is the true performance ceiling for next-generation research agents.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yan Liu, Feng Zhang Peking University, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Xu Meituan, Jiuchong Gao, Jinghua Hao, Renqing He, Han Liu Dalian University of Technology 等 9 位作者
High-quality chain-of-thought has demonstrated strong potential for unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, current paradigms typically treat the reasoning process as an indivisible sequence, lacking an intrinsic mechanism to quantify step-wise information gain. This granularity gap manifests in two limitations: inference inefficiency from redundant exploration without explicit guidance, and optimization difficulty due to sparse outcome supervision or costly external verifiers. In this work, we propose CoT-Flow, a framework that reconceptualizes discrete reasoning steps as a continuous probabilistic flow, quantifying the contribution of each step toward the ground-truth answer. Built on this formulation, CoT-Flow enables two complementary methodologies: flow-guided decoding, which employs a greedy flow-based decoding strategy to extract information-efficient reasoning paths, and flow-based reinforcement learning, which constructs a verifier-free dense reward function. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that CoT-Flow achieves a superior balance between inference efficiency and reasoning performance.
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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
Curriculum learning (CL), which orders training data from easy to hard, has become a popular strategy for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Yet prior work employs disparate difficulty metrics and training setups, leaving open fundamental questions: When does curriculum help? Which direction—forward or reverse—is better? And does the answer depend on what we measure? We address these questions through a unified offline evaluation framework that decomposes curriculum difficulty into five complementary dimensions: Problem Difficulty, Model Surprisal, Confidence Margin, Predictive Uncertainty, and Decision Variability. Through controlled post-training experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks with Llama3.1-8B, Mistral-7B, and Gemma3-4B, we find that: (i) no curriculum strategy dominates universally—the relative effectiveness of forward versus reverse CL depends jointly on model capability and task complexity; (ii) even within a single metric, samples at different difficulty levels produce distinct gains depending on task demands; and (iii) Task-aligned curricula focus on shaping the model’s final representations and generalization, whereas inner-state curricula modulate internal states such as confidence and uncertainty. Our findings challenge the notion of a universal curriculum strategy and offer actionable guidance across model and task regimes, with some metrics indicating that prioritizing decision-uncertain samples can further enhance learning outcomes.
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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
Yihong Dong, Zhaoyu Ma, Xue Jiang, Zhiyuan Fan Northwest Polytechnical University Xi'an, Jiaru Qian, Yongmin Li Peking University, Jianha Xiao, Zhi Jin Peking University 等 9 位作者
Diffusion language models (DLMs) are emerging as a compelling alternative to the dominant autoregressive paradigm, offering inherent advantages in parallel generation and bidirectional context modeling. However, for the tasks with strict structural constraints such as code generation, DLMs face a critical trade-off between inference speed and output quality, where accelerating generation by reducing sampling steps often leads to catastrophic performance collapse.We find that the fundamental reasons are: 1) the generation difficulty is uneven in the structured sequence decoding steps, making DLM’s static acceleration strategy suboptimal; 2) the context of tokens generated by DLM evolves continuously, causing early high-confidence predictions to turn into irreversible errors.In this paper, we introduce efficient Sampling with Adaptive acceleration and Backtracking Enhanced Remasking (i.e., Saber), a novel training-free sampling algorithm for DLMs that the first to improve both inference speed and output quality in code generation. Saber dynamically adjusts the number of tokens unmasked per step based on the model’s evolving confidence, and utilizes a backtracking mechanism to revert tokens whose confidence drops as new context emerges, with its effectiveness supported by theoretical analysis.Extensive experiments on multiple mainstream code generation benchmarks show that Saber boosts Pass@1 accuracy by an average of 1.9% over mainstream DLM sampling methods, while achieving an average 251.4% inference speedup. By leveraging the inherent advantages of DLMs, our work significantly narrows the performance gap with autoregressive models in code generation.
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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
Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren Leiden University, Jiahong Zou, Liu Yang, Zhiwei Xu Shandong University, Xuri Ge Shandong University, Zhumin Chen Shandong University, Xinyu Ma Baidu 等 12 位作者
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs). Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based extensions improve upon vanilla RLVR (e.g., GRPO) by providing tree-based reasoning rollouts that enable fine-grained and segment-level credit assignment. However, existing methods still suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning. To address the above challenges, we propose reinforced efficient reasoning via semantically diverse explorations, i.e., ROSE, for LLMs. To encourage more diverse reasoning exploration, our method incorporates a semantic-entropy-based branching strategy and an \varepsilon-exploration mechanism. The former operates on already sampled reasoning rollouts to capture semantic uncertainty and select branching points with high semantic divergence to generate new successive reasoning paths, whereas the latter stochastically initiates reasoning rollouts from the root, preventing the search process from becoming overly local. To improve efficiency, we design a length-aware segment-level advantage estimator that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains. Extensive experiments on various mathematical reasoning benchmarks with Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZiqiZhao1/ROSE-rl.
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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
Shiqi He University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Yue Cui Alibaba Group, Xinyu Ma, Yaliang Li Alibaba Group, Bolin Ding Alibaba Group, Mosharaf Chowdhury
Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Branch_and_Browse/.
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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
Weitao Ma Harbin Institute of Technology, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Xiachong Feng University of Hong Kong, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Xu Meituan, Jiuchong Gao, Jinghua Hao 等 10 位作者
Effective memory management is essential for large language model agents to navigate long-horizon tasks. Recent research has explored using Reinforcement Learning to develop specialized memory manager agents. However, existing approaches rely on final task performance as the primary reward, which results in severe reward sparsity and ineffective credit assignment, providing insufficient guidance for individual memory operations. To this end, we propose Fine-Mem, a unified framework designed for fine-grained feedback alignment. First, we introduce a Chunk-level Step Reward to provide immediate step-level supervision via auxiliary chunk-specific question answering tasks. Second, we devise Evidence-Anchored Reward Attribution to redistribute global rewards by anchoring credit to key memory operations, based on the specific memory items utilized as evidence in reasoning. Together, these components enable stable policy optimization and align local memory operations with the long-term utility of memory. Experiments on Memalpha and MemoryAgentBench demonstrate that Fine-Mem consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving superior success rates across various sub-tasks. Further analysis reveals its adaptability and strong generalization capabilities across diverse model configurations and backbones
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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