On-policy distillation (OPD) trains a student using teacher predictions on student-generated responses. Some methods insert teacher-written segments, or bridges, but disagree on how to train on those tokens. We compare no loss, forward KL and reverse KL on identical trajectories using Qwen3-1.7B as student and Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 as teacher. We separate gradients by which model wrote each token. Under our short training runs and BF16 inference, pre-specified tests detected no added accuracy benefit from teacher text as context or as a training target. A one-paragraph bridge after the student's first paragraph is only 2.7% of the tokens and contributes a small gradient nearly orthogonal to the student-token gradient. In this main comparison, the three loss treatments gave similar gradient directions and were statistically equivalent in accuracy within a +/-5 percentage-point margin. An exploratory pilot placing the bridge where failed responses disagreed most with the teacher suggested a benefit from teacher-token loss. A pre-specified replication did not confirm this, and fourfold weighting showed no significant accuracy benefit. Two limitations bound these findings. Among the tested amounts of training on fixed responses, gains peaked after four updates before the student increasingly failed to stop generating. None of the tested online training variants met the criteria for stable stopping and improved accuracy. Our evaluations used BF16 inference, which rounds away most of the small weight changes. When evaluated in exact FP32, the tested replication models frequently reached the response-length limit. Our accuracy findings therefore concern BF16 inference; they do not establish that teacher-token supervision is generally unnecessary.
As foundation models evolve from information generation to digital work execution, agents are increasingly capable of completing complex tasks across tools, applications, and workflows. However, existing research lacks a unified perspective on how agents reliably accomplish delegated work. To address this gap, we present a work-centric, system-level perspective that views work agents as systems combining foundation models and runtime harnesses to execute tasks in stateful workspaces and deliver verifiable outcomes. We introduce two complementary dimensions, work persistence and work openness, to characterize working conditions, and classify digital work into five forms according to task scope and organization. Building on this framework, we identify five core capability families required for reliable work execution and examine approaches to model optimization, harness optimization, and their joint optimization. We further analyze existing evaluation methods and metrics from the perspective of work outcomes. Finally, we discuss future research directions, including sustained work delegation, adaptation to open environments, and the interaction between work execution and capability improvement. This paper provides a unified framework for understanding, optimizing, and evaluating work agents, supporting the development of systems capable of delivering reliable, verifiable, and practically valuable work outcomes.
Generalist robot policies and language-model agents provide complementary capabilities, but completing a task also requires adapting their use to the consequences of physical interaction. We study execution as a locus of adaptation: feedback guides the current action and supplies evidence for revising subsequent decisions under fixed model weights. We introduce RoboDoctor, a training-free framework that connects diagnosis, grounded action, and persistent experience across three revision targets. The harness allocates control between policy and agent; intervention determines when to assist while preserving useful policy behavior; and operation refines physical methods through observed effects. Linked experience records retain the reason for a decision, the attempted method, its outcome, and conditions for reuse. On a curated archive of 54 RoboDojo-Sim task entries, RoboDoctor achieves a five-dimension mean score of 57.10, with a native success rate of 49.44%. Recorded interactions illustrate strategy changes, selective correction, and grasp revision. These findings characterize execution-time adaptation in the evaluated system; controlled trials remain necessary to isolate the contribution of cross-episode experience.
Mengzhang Li, Yuan Yao National University of Singapore
We present OpenGlass, an open-source, privacy-oriented, local-first system for low-latency multimodal visual assistance, with a primary focus on blind and low-vision users. Cloud MLLM assistants offer strong visual understanding, but often require uploading first-person visual data and can suffer multi-second network delays; wearable glasses are ideal for sensing, but cannot host large models under tight compute and power budgets. OpenGlass addresses this gap with a sensing-computing split: an ESP32-based glasses-side unit captures visual context, while a nearby consumer-grade device performs local MLLM inference and local speech output, reducing cloud reliance and keeping raw egocentric visual data on user-controlled devices by default. We evaluate response quality, query-ready-to-audio latency, safety-aware abstention, and auditable logs. Under real ESP32 Wi-Fi capture, OpenGlass reaches 993 ms median user-to-audio latency with resized payloads and 1625 ms with raw 1280\times720 payloads; 97.5% and 93.3% of trials fall below 2 s, respectively. OpenGlass is a user-initiated visual-assistance reference platform for obstacle/hazard awareness, sign/object queries, and image-quality self-checking, rather than a certified navigation aid. We release source code, hardware instructions, prompts, evaluation data, and logs.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xiangxi Zheng Nanjing Nniversity, Kuang He Shopee, Jiayi Hu East China Normal University, Ping Yu Nanjing University, Rui Yan Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Yuan Yao, Peng Hou Shopee, Anxiang Zeng Shopee 等 9 位作者
Chart-to-code generation demands strict visual precision and syntactic correctness from Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, existing approaches are fundamentally constrained by data-centric limitations: despite the availability of growing chart-to-code datasets, simply scaling homogeneous chart-code pairs conflates visual perception with program logic, preventing models from fully leveraging the richness of multimodal supervision. We present CharTide, a novel data-centric framework that systematically redesigns both training and alignment data for chart-to-code generation. First, we construct a 2M-sample dataset via a Tri-Perspective Tuning strategy, explicitly decoupling training into visual perception, pure-text code logic, and modality fusion streams, enabling a 7B model to surpass specialized baselines using only supervised data. Second, we reformulate alignment as a data verification problem rather than a heuristic scoring task. To this end, we introduce an Inquiry-Driven RL framework grounded in the principle of information invariance: a downstream model should yield consistent answers to identical visual queries across both original and generated charts. Moving beyond rigid rule matching or VLM scoring, we employ a frozen Inspector to objectively verify generated charts through atomic QA tasks, providing verifiable reward signals based on answer accuracy. Experiments on ChartMimic, Plot2Code, and ChartX show that CharTide-7B/8B significantly outperforms open-source baselines, surpasses GPT-4o, and is competitive with GPT-5.
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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
We introduce Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe), a training-and-inference framework designed to overcome a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window. PaCoRe departs from the traditional sequential paradigm by driving TTC through massive parallel exploration coordinated via a message-passing architecture in multiple rounds. Each round launches many parallel reasoning trajectories, compacts their findings into context-bounded messages, and synthesizes these messages to guide the next round and ultimately produce the final answer. Trained end-to-end with large-scale, outcome-based reinforcement learning, the model masters the synthesis abilities required by PaCoRe and scales to multi-million-token effective TTC without exceeding context limits. The approach yields strong improvements across diverse domains and notably pushes reasoning beyond frontier systems in mathematics: an 8B model reaches 94.5% on HMMT 2025, surpassing GPT-5’s 93.2% by scaling effective TTC to roughly two million tokens. We open-source model checkpoints, training data, and the full inference pipeline to accelerate follow-up work.
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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
Zhiyuan Yao Zhejiang University, Zishan Xu, Yifu Guo, Zhiguang Han, Cheng Yang Tencent Hunyuan, Shuo Zhang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Weinan Zhang Shanghai Jiaotong University, Xingshan Zeng Noah's Ark Lab, Huawei Technologies Ltd. 等 9 位作者
With the rise of the Agent Web and Model Context Protocol (MCP), the agent ecosystem is evolving into an open collaborative network, exponentially increasing accessible tools. However, current architectures face severe scalability and generality bottlenecks. To address this, we propose ACE-Router, a pipeline for training history-aware routers to empower precise navigation in large-scale ecosystems. By leveraging a dependency-rich candidate Graph to synthesize multi-turn trajectories, we effectively train routers with dynamic context understanding to create the plug-and-play Light Routing Agent. Experiments on the real-world benchmarks MCP-Universe and MCP-Mark demonstrate superior performance. Notably, ACE-Router exhibits critical properties for the future Agent Web: it not only generalizes to multi-agent collaboration with minimal adaptation but also maintains exceptional robustness against noise and scales effectively to massive candidate spaces. These findings provide a strong empirical foundation for universal orchestration in open-ended ecosystems.Our code is available at https://github.com/euyis1019/ACE-Router.
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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
Jincheng Liu, Sijun He Tencent, Jingjing Wu, Xiangsen Wang, Yang Chen, Zhaoqi Kuang, Siqi Bao, Yuan Yao
Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities. However, a critical question remains: do these models possess genuine strategic reasoning, or do they primarily excel at pattern recognition? To address this, we present ChessArena, a chess-based testbed for evaluating LLMs. Chess demands strategic reasoning, precise rule adherence, and the ability to track complex game states. ChessArena is a competitive framework where LLMs play against each other under four play modes. We evaluate 13 LLMs across over 800 games, testing basic understanding, move selection, and puzzle solving. Results reveal significant shortcomings: no model beats Maia-1100 (human amateur level), and some lose to random play. We also present a strong baseline: our fine-tuned Qwen3-8B substantially improves performance, approaching much larger state-of-the-art reasoning 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
Xiangfeng Wang University of Science and Technology of China, Hangyu Guo Stephens College, Yanlin Lai Tsinghua University, Mitt Huang Stepfun, Liang Zhao Megvii Technology Inc., Chengyuan Yao StepFun Inc, Yinmin Zhang StepFun, Qi Han 等 14 位作者
While model-based verifiers are essential for scaling Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), current outcome-centric verification paradigms primarily focus on the consistency between the final result and the ground truth, often neglecting potential errors in the derivation process. This leads to assigning positive rewards to correct answers produced from incorrect derivations. To bridge this gap, we introduce PRIME, a benchmark for evaluating verifiers on PRocess-outcome alignment verification In Mathematics and Engineering. Curated from a comprehensive collection of college-level STEM problems, PRIME comprises 2,530 high-difficulty samples through a consistency-based filtering pipeline. Through extensive evaluation, we find that current verifiers frequently fail to detect derivation flaws. Furthermore, we propose a process-aware RLVR training paradigm utilizing verifiers selected via PRIME. This approach substantially outperforms the outcome-only verification baseline, achieving absolute performance gains of 8.29%, 9.12%, and 7.31% on AIME24, AIME25, and Beyond-AIME, respectively, for the Qwen3-14B-Base model. Finally, we demonstrate a strong linear correlation (R^2 > 0.92) between verifier accuracy on PRIME and RLVR training effectiveness, validating PRIME as a reliable predictor for verifier selection.
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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
Tiejin Chen Arizona State University, Huaiyuan Yao, Jia Chen University of California, Riverside, Evangelos E. Papalexakis University of California, Riverside, Hua Wei Arizona State University
While Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) consistently outperform single-agent systems on complex tasks, their intricate interactions introduce critical reliability challenges arising from communication dynamics and role dependencies. Existing Uncertainty Quantification methods, typically designed for single-turn outputs, fail to address the unique complexities of the MAS. Specifically, these methods struggle with three distinct challenges: the cascading uncertainty in multi-step reasoning, the variability of inter-agent communication paths, and the diversity of communication topologies. To bridge this gap, we introduce MATU, a novel framework that quantifies uncertainty through tensor decomposition. MATU moves beyond analyzing final text outputs by representing entire reasoning trajectories as embedding matrices and organizing multiple execution runs into a higher-order tensor. By applying tensor decomposition, we disentangle and quantify distinct sources of uncertainty, offering a comprehensive reliability measure that is generalizable across different agent structures. We provide comprehensive experiments to show that MATU effectively estimates holistic and robust uncertainty across diverse tasks and communication topologies.
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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