Large Language Model
REASONING GYM: Reasoning Environments for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards
Stojanovski, Zafir, Stanley, Oliver, Sharratt, Joe, Jones, Richard, Adefioye, Abdulhakeem, Kaddour, Jean, Köpf, Andreas
We introduce Reasoning Gym (RG), a library of reasoning environments for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. It provides over 100 data generators and verifiers spanning multiple domains including algebra, arithmetic, computation, cognition, geometry, graph theory, logic, and various common games. Its key innovation is the ability to generate virtually infinite training data with adjustable complexity, unlike most previous reasoning datasets, which are typically fixed. This procedural generation approach allows for continuous evaluation across varying difficulty levels. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of RG in both evaluating and reinforcement learning of reasoning models.
Flex-Judge: Text-Only Reasoning Unleashes Zero-Shot Multimodal Evaluators
Ko, Jongwoo, Kim, Sungnyun, Cho, Sungwoo, Yun, Se-Young
Human-generated reward signals are critical for aligning generative models with human preferences, guiding both training and inference-time evaluations. While large language models (LLMs) employed as proxy evaluators, i.e., LLM-as-a-Judge, significantly reduce the costs associated with manual annotations, they typically require extensive modality-specific training data and fail to generalize well across diverse multimodal tasks. In this paper, we propose Flex-Judge, a reasoning-guided multimodal judge model that leverages minimal textual reasoning data to robustly generalize across multiple modalities and evaluation formats. Our core intuition is that structured textual reasoning explanations inherently encode generalizable decision-making patterns, enabling an effective transfer to multimodal judgments, e.g., with images or videos. Empirical results demonstrate that Flex-Judge, despite being trained on significantly fewer text data, achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art commercial APIs and extensively trained multimodal evaluators. Notably, Flex-Judge presents broad impact in modalities like molecule, where comprehensive evaluation benchmarks are scarce, underscoring its practical value in resource-constrained domains. Our framework highlights reasoning-based text supervision as a powerful, cost-effective alternative to traditional annotation-intensive approaches, substantially advancing scalable multimodal model-as-a-judge.
Towards Evaluating Proactive Risk Awareness of Multimodal Language Models
Yuan, Youliang, Jiao, Wenxiang, Xie, Yuejin, Shen, Chihao, Tian, Menghan, Wang, Wenxuan, Huang, Jen-tse, He, Pinjia
Human safety awareness gaps often prevent the timely recognition of everyday risks. In solving this problem, a proactive safety artificial intelligence (AI) system would work better than a reactive one. Instead of just reacting to users' questions, it would actively watch people's behavior and their environment to detect potential dangers in advance. Our Proactive Safety Bench (PaSBench) evaluates this capability through 416 multimodal scenarios (128 image sequences, 288 text logs) spanning 5 safety-critical domains. Evaluation of 36 advanced models reveals fundamental limitations: Top performers like Gemini-2.5-pro achieve 71% image and 64% text accuracy, but miss 45-55% risks in repeated trials. Through failure analysis, we identify unstable proactive reasoning rather than knowledge deficits as the primary limitation. This work establishes (1) a proactive safety benchmark, (2) systematic evidence of model limitations, and (3) critical directions for developing reliable protective AI. We believe our dataset and findings can promote the development of safer AI assistants that actively prevent harm rather than merely respond to requests. Our dataset can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Youliang/PaSBench.
Visual Instruction Bottleneck Tuning
Oh, Changdae, Li, Jiatong, Im, Shawn, Li, Sharon
Despite widespread adoption, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) suffer performance degradation when encountering unfamiliar queries under distribution shifts. Existing methods to improve MLLM generalization typically require either more instruction data or larger advanced model architectures, both of which incur non-trivial human labor or computational costs. In this work, we take an alternative approach to enhance the generalization and robustness of MLLMs under distribution shifts, from a representation learning perspective. Inspired by information bottleneck (IB) principle, we derive a variational lower bound of the IB for MLLMs and devise a practical implementation, Visual Instruction Bottleneck Tuning (Vittle). We then provide a theoretical justification of Vittle by revealing its connection to an information-theoretic robustness metric of MLLM. Empirical validation of multiple MLLMs on open-ended and closed-form question answering and object hallucination detection tasks over 45 datasets, including 30 shift scenarios, demonstrates that Vittle consistently improves the MLLM's robustness under shifts by pursuing the learning of a minimal sufficient representation.
PsyMem: Fine-grained psychological alignment and Explicit Memory Control for Advanced Role-Playing LLMs
Cheng, Xilong, Qin, Yunxiao, Tan, Yuting, Li, Zhengnan, Wang, Ye, Xiao, Hongjiang, Zhang, Yuan
Existing LLM-based role-playing methods often rely on superficial textual descriptions or simplistic metrics, inadequately modeling both intrinsic and extrinsic character dimensions. Additionally, they typically simulate character memory with implicit model knowledge or basic retrieval augment generation without explicit memory alignment, compromising memory consistency. The two issues weaken reliability of role-playing LLMs in several applications, such as trustworthy social simulation. To address these limitations, we propose PsyMem, a novel framework integrating fine-grained psychological attributes and explicit memory control for role-playing. PsyMem supplements textual descriptions with 26 psychological indicators to detailed model character. Additionally, PsyMem implements memory alignment training, explicitly trains the model to align character's response with memory, thereby enabling dynamic memory-controlled responding during inference. By training Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on our specially designed dataset (including 5,414 characters and 38,962 dialogues extracted from novels), the resulting model, termed as PsyMem-Qwen, outperforms baseline models in role-playing, achieving the best performance in human-likeness and character fidelity.
Ineq-Comp: Benchmarking Human-Intuitive Compositional Reasoning in Automated Theorem Proving on Inequalities
Zhao, Haoyu, Geng, Yihan, Tang, Shange, Lin, Yong, Lyu, Bohan, Lin, Hongzhou, Jin, Chi, Arora, Sanjeev
LLM-based formal proof assistants (e.g., in Lean) hold great promise for automating mathematical discovery. But beyond syntactic correctness, do these systems truly understand mathematical structure as humans do? We investigate this question in context of mathematical inequalities -- specifically the prover's ability to recognize that the given problem simplifies by applying a known inequality such as AM/GM. Specifically, we are interested in their ability to do this in a compositional setting where multiple inequalities must be applied as part of a solution. We introduce Ineq-Comp, a benchmark built from elementary inequalities through systematic transformations, including variable duplication, algebraic rewriting, and multi-step composition. Although these problems remain easy for humans, we find that most provers -- including Goedel, STP, and Kimina-7B -- struggle significantly. DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B shows relative robustness, but still suffers a 20% performance drop (pass@32). Even for DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B model, the gap between compositional variants and seed problems exists, implying that simply scaling up the model size alone does not fully solve the compositional weakness. Strikingly, performance remains poor for all models even when formal proofs of the constituent parts are provided in context, revealing that the source of weakness is indeed in compositional reasoning. Our results expose a persisting gap between the generalization behavior of current AI provers and human mathematical intuition. All data and evaluation code can be found at https://github.com/haoyuzhao123/LeanIneqComp.
CodeVisionary: An Agent-based Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models in Code Generation
Wang, Xinchen, Gao, Pengfei, Peng, Chao, Hu, Ruida, Gao, Cuiyun
Abstract-- Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation, underscoring the critical need for rigorous and comprehensive evaluation. Existing evaluation approaches fall into three categories, including human-centered, metric-based, and LLM-based. Considering that human-centered approaches are labour-intensive and metric-based ones overly rely on reference answers, LLM-based approaches are gaining increasing attention due to their stronger contextual understanding capabilities. However, they generally evaluate the generated code based on static prompts, and tend to fail for complex code scenarios which typically involve multiple requirements and require more contextual information. In addition, these approaches lack fine-grained evaluation for complex code, resulting in limited explainability. T o mitigate the limitations, we propose CodeVisionary, the first agent-based evaluation framework for complex code generation. CodeVisionary consists of two stages: (1) Requirement-guided multi-dimensional context distillation stage, which first formulates a detailed evaluation plan by decomposing task requirements, and then stepwise collects multi-dimensional contextual information for each requirement. A comprehensive evaluation report is also generated for enhanced explainability. For validation, we construct a new benchmark consisting of 363 samples spanning 37 coding scenarios and 23 programming languages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CodeVisionary achieves the best performance among three baselines for evaluating complex code generation, outperforming the best baseline with average improvements of 0.217, 0.163, and 0.141 in Pearson, Spearman, and Kendall-T au coefficients, respectively. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), these models have demonstrated promising results in code generation [1], [2].
Can Transformer Memory Be Corrupted? Investigating Cache-Side Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models
Hossain, Elias, Saha, Swayamjit, Roy, Somshubhra, Prasad, Ravi
Even when prompts and parameters are secured, transformer language models remain vulnerable because their key-value (KV) cache during inference constitutes an overlooked attack surface. This paper introduces Malicious Token Injection (MTI), a modular framework that systematically perturbs cached key vectors at selected layers and timesteps through controlled magnitude and frequency, using additive Gaussian noise, zeroing, and orthogonal rotations. A theoretical analysis quantifies how these perturbations propagate through attention, linking logit deviations to the Frobenius norm of corruption and softmax Lipschitz dynamics. Empirical results show that MTI significantly alters next-token distributions and downstream task performance across GPT-2 and LLaMA-2/7B, as well as destabilizes retrieval-augmented and agentic reasoning pipelines. These findings identify cache integrity as a critical yet underexplored vulnerability in current LLM deployments, positioning cache corruption as a reproducible and theoretically grounded threat model for future robustness and security research.
Investigating Thinking Behaviours of Reasoning-Based Language Models for Social Bias Mitigation
Luo, Guoqing, Maab, Iffat, Mou, Lili, Yamagishi, Junichi
While reasoning-based large language models excel at complex tasks through an internal, structured thinking process, a concerning phenomenon has emerged that such a thinking process can aggregate social stereotypes, leading to biased outcomes. However, the underlying behaviours of these language models in social bias scenarios remain underexplored. In this work, we systematically investigate mechanisms within the thinking process behind this phenomenon and uncover two failure patterns that drive social bias aggregation: 1) stereotype repetition, where the model relies on social stereotypes as its primary justification, and 2) irrelevant information injection, where it fabricates or introduces new details to support a biased narrative. Building on these insights, we introduce a lightweight prompt-based mitigation approach that queries the model to review its own initial reasoning against these specific failure patterns. Experiments on question answering (BBQ and StereoSet) and open-ended (BOLD) benchmarks show that our approach effectively reduces bias while maintaining or improving accuracy.
The Ends Justify the Thoughts: RL-Induced Motivated Reasoning in LLMs
Howe, Nikolaus, Carroll, Micah
The use of reinforcement learning (RL) with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a promising approach for developing more capable language models. In turn, this has led to investigation of CoT monitoring as a compelling method for detecting harmful behaviors such as reward hacking, under the assumption that models' reasoning processes reflect their internal decision-making. In practice, LLM training often produces unintended behaviors due to imperfect reward signals, leading models to develop misaligned tendencies. A common corrective approach is to apply post-hoc instructions to avoid problematic behaviors like sycophancy, but what happens to the model's reasoning process when these instructions conflict with learned behaviors? We investigate this question in simple settings and find that models engage in systematic motivated reasoning--generating plausible-sounding justifications for violating their instructions while downplaying potential harms. Beyond being an interesting property of training, we find that while motivated reasoning can be detected by most frontier reasoning models, smaller LLM judges can fail to identify a portion of it, and in rare cases can themselves be persuaded that the reasoning is correct, despite it contradicting clear instructions. This capability gap raises concerns that as models become more sophisticated, their motivated reasoning may become increasingly difficult for monitors to detect. Our results underscore the need to account for motivated reasoning when relying on chain-of-thought processes for model evaluation and oversight. Figure 1: We perform RL finetuning on Llama 3 8B Instruct on behaviors of different kinds. When asked to act against their trained behaviors in evaluations throughout training, models transition from performing mostly genuine reasoning to highly motivated reasoning, twisting the constitutional principles provided to them in the prompt to support the behaviors incentivized via training. The integration of reinforcement learning (RL) and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a promising approach for developing more capable language models (Jaech et al., 2024; Guo et al., 2025). Recent work has shown that encouraging models to output "thinking tokens" before committing to a final answer leads to impressive performance, especially on tasks with verifiable answers where rewards can be automatically generated, such as mathematics and programming problems (Shao et al., 2024; Zhu et al., 2024).