Large Language Model
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data
Li, Siheng, Li, Kejiao, Xu, Zenan, Huang, Guanhua, Yang, Evander, Li, Kun, Wu, Haoyuan, Wu, Jiajia, Zheng, Zihao, Zhang, Chenchen, Shi, Kun, Deng, Kyrierl, Yi, Qi, Xiong, Ruibin, Xu, Tingqiang, Jiang, Yuhao, Yan, Jianfeng, Zeng, Yuyuan, Xu, Guanghui, Xue, Jinbao, Xu, Zhijiang, Fang, Zheng, Li, Shuai, Liu, Qibin, Li, Xiaoxue, Li, Zhuoyu, Tao, Yangyu, Gao, Fei, Jiang, Cheng, Wang, Bo Chao, Liu, Kai, Zhu, Jianchen, Lam, Wai, Wang, Wayyt, Zhou, Bo, Wang, Di
The growing disparity between the exponential scaling of computational resources and the finite growth of high-quality text data now constrains conventional scaling approaches for large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we introduce Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training data (RLPT), a new training-time scaling paradigm for optimizing LLMs. In contrast to prior approaches that scale training primarily through supervised learning, RLPT enables the policy to autonomously explore meaningful trajectories to learn from pre-training data and improve its capability through reinforcement learning (RL). While existing RL strategies such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) rely on human annotation for reward construction, RLPT eliminates this dependency by deriving reward signals directly from pre-training data. Specifically, it adopts a next-segment reasoning objective, rewarding the policy for accurately predicting subsequent text segments conditioned on the preceding context. This formulation allows RL to be scaled on pre-training data, encouraging the exploration of richer trajectories across broader contexts and thereby fostering more generalizable reasoning skills. Extensive experiments on both general-domain and mathematical reasoning benchmarks across multiple models validate the effectiveness of RLPT. For example, when applied to Qwen3-4B-Base, RLPT yields absolute improvements of $3.0$, $5.1$, $8.1$, $6.0$, $6.6$, and $5.3$ on MMLU, MMLU-Pro, GPQA-Diamond, KOR-Bench, AIME24, and AIME25, respectively. The results further demonstrate favorable scaling behavior, suggesting strong potential for continued gains with more compute. In addition, RLPT provides a solid foundation, extending the reasoning boundaries of LLMs and enhancing RLVR performance.
MAPO: Mixed Advantage Policy Optimization
Huang, Wenke, Zhang, Quan, Fang, Yiyang, Liang, Jian, Rong, Xuankun, Yao, Huanjin, Wan, Guancheng, Liang, Ke, He, Wenwen, Li, Mingjun, Rutkowski, Leszek, Ye, Mang, Du, Bo, Tao, Dacheng
Recent advances in reinforcement learning for foundation models, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), have significantly improved the performance of foundation models on reasoning tasks. Notably, the advantage function serves as a central mechanism in GRPO for ranking the trajectory importance. However, existing explorations encounter both advantage reversion and advantage mirror problems, which hinder the reasonable advantage allocation across different query samples. In this work, we propose an easy but effective GRPO strategy, Mixed Advantage Policy Optimization (MAPO). We reveal that the trajectory appears with different certainty and propose the advantage percent deviation for samples with high-certainty trajectories. Furthermore, we dynamically reweight the advantage function for samples with varying trajectory certainty, thereby adaptively configuring the advantage function to account for sample-specific characteristics. Comparison with related state-of-the-art methods, along with ablation studies on different advantage variants, validates the effectiveness of our approach.
Failure Makes the Agent Stronger: Enhancing Accuracy through Structured Reflection for Reliable Tool Interactions
Su, Junhao, Wan, Yuanliang, Yang, Junwei, Shi, Hengyu, Han, Tianyang, Luo, Junfeng, Qiu, Yurui
Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) are usually trained with supervised imitation or coarse-grained reinforcement learning that optimizes single tool calls. Current self-reflection practices rely on heuristic prompts or one-way reasoning: the model is urged to 'think more' instead of learning error diagnosis and repair. This is fragile in multi-turn interactions; after a failure the model often repeats the same mistake. We propose structured reflection, which turns the path from error to repair into an explicit, controllable, and trainable action. The agent produces a short yet precise reflection: it diagnoses the failure using evidence from the previous step and then proposes a correct, executable follow-up call. For training we combine DAPO and GSPO objectives with a reward scheme tailored to tool use, optimizing the stepwise strategy Reflect, then Call, then Final. To evaluate, we introduce Tool-Reflection-Bench, a lightweight benchmark that programmatically checks structural validity, executability, parameter correctness, and result consistency. Tasks are built as mini trajectories of erroneous call, reflection, and corrected call, with disjoint train and test splits. Experiments on BFCL v3 and Tool-Reflection-Bench show large gains in multi-turn tool-call success and error recovery, and a reduction of redundant calls. These results indicate that making reflection explicit and optimizing it directly improves the reliability of tool interaction and offers a reproducible path for agents to learn from failure.
Growing with Your Embodied Agent: A Human-in-the-Loop Lifelong Code Generation Framework for Long-Horizon Manipulation Skills
Meng, Yuan, Sun, Zhenguo, Fest, Max, Li, Xukun, Bing, Zhenshan, Knoll, Alois
Large language models (LLMs)-based code generation for robotic manipulation has recently shown promise by directly translating human instructions into executable code, but existing approaches are limited by language ambiguity, noisy outputs, and limited context windows, which makes long-horizon tasks hard to solve. While closed-loop feedback has been explored, approaches that rely solely on LLM guidance frequently fail in extremely long-horizon scenarios due to LLMs' limited reasoning capability in the robotic domain, where such issues are often simple for humans to identify. Moreover, corrected knowledge is often stored in improper formats, restricting generalization and causing catastrophic forgetting, which highlights the need for learning reusable and extendable skills. To address these issues, we propose a human-in-the-loop lifelong skill learning and code generation framework that encodes feedback into reusable skills and extends their functionality over time. An external memory with Retrieval-Augmented Generation and a hint mechanism supports dynamic reuse, enabling robust performance on long-horizon tasks. Experiments on Ravens, Franka Kitchen, and MetaWorld, as well as real-world settings, show that our framework achieves a 0.93 success rate (up to 27% higher than baselines) and a 42% efficiency improvement in feedback rounds. It can robustly solve extremely long-horizon tasks such as "build a house", which requires planning over 20 primitives. Code will be open-sourced upon acceptance. Y ou should try to preserve the previous functionality . Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have become integral to robotic manipulation due to their robust commonsense knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities. Early approaches Co-Reyes et al. (2018); Lynch et al. (2023); Liu et al. (2023) relied on language embeddings conditioned within reinforcement learning or imitation learning to align robot actions with human commands. These methods often struggled with limited data efficiency and poor generalization. With the rapid progress of LLMs such as GPT, a natural direction has been to integrate them into the pipeline for task decomposition and language grounding Zhang et al. (2023); Huang et al. (2023); Guo et al. (2024). In this setting, an LLM decomposes a complex manipulation task into sub-tasks and invokes a pre-trained language-conditioned policy to execute low-level primitives. This approach assumes that the pre-trained policy can carry out each motion precisely, yet in practice, this is rarely possible due to environmental perturbations and imperfect policy design. Another direction for advancing human-level robotic manipulation is to adopt LLM or VLM backbones for large-scale pretraining on robotic data, creating end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models Kim et al. (2024); Black et al. (2024); Bjorck et al. (2025).
CogniLoad: A Synthetic Natural Language Reasoning Benchmark With Tunable Length, Intrinsic Difficulty, and Distractor Density
Kaiser, Daniel, Frigessi, Arnoldo, Ramezani-Kebrya, Ali, Ricaud, Benjamin
Current benchmarks for long-context reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) often blur critical factors like intrinsic task complexity, distractor interference, and task length. To enable more precise failure analysis, we introduce CogniLoad, a novel synthetic benchmark grounded in Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). CogniLoad generates natural-language logic puzzles with independently tunable parameters that reflect CLT's core dimensions: intrinsic difficulty ($d$) controls intrinsic load; distractor-to-signal ratio ($ฯ$) regulates extraneous load; and task length ($N$) serves as an operational proxy for conditions demanding germane load. Evaluating 22 SotA reasoning LLMs, CogniLoad reveals distinct performance sensitivities, identifying task length as a dominant constraint and uncovering varied tolerances to intrinsic complexity and U-shaped responses to distractor ratios. By offering systematic, factorial control over these cognitive load dimensions, CogniLoad provides a reproducible, scalable, and diagnostically rich tool for dissecting LLM reasoning limitations and guiding future model development.
Baseer: A Vision-Language Model for Arabic Document-to-Markdown OCR
Hennara, Khalil, Hreden, Muhammad, Hamed, Mohamed Motasim, Bastati, Ahmad, Aldallal, Zeina, Chrouf, Sara, AlModhayan, Safwan
Arabic document OCR remains a challenging task due to the language's cursive script, diverse fonts, diacritics, and right-to-left orientation. While modern Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced document understanding for high-resource languages, their performance on Arabic remains limited. In this work, we introduce Baseer, a vision-language model fine-tuned specifically for Arabic document OCR. Leveraging a large-scale dataset combining synthetic and real-world documents, Baseer is trained using a decoder-only fine-tuning strategy to adapt a pre-trained MLLM while preserving general visual features. We also present Misraj-DocOCR, a high-quality, expert-verified benchmark designed for rigorous evaluation of Arabic OCR systems. Our experiments show that Baseer significantly outperforms existing open-source and commercial solutions, achieving a WER of 0.25 and establishing a new state-of-the-art in the domain of Arabic document OCR. Our results highlight the benefits of domain-specific adaptation of general-purpose MLLMs and establish a strong baseline for high-accuracy OCR on morphologically rich languages like Arabic.
ZERA: Zero-init Instruction Evolving Refinement Agent -- From Zero Instructions to Structured Prompts via Principle-based Optimization
Yi, Seungyoun, Khang, Minsoo, Park, Sungrae
Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) improves large language model (LLM) performance by refining prompts for specific tasks. However, prior APO methods typically focus only on user prompts, rely on unstructured feedback, and require large sample sizes and long iteration cycles-making them costly and brittle. We propose ZERA (Zero-init Instruction Evolving Refinement Agent), a novel framework that jointly optimizes both system and user prompts through principled, low-overhead refinement. ZERA scores prompts using eight generalizable criteria with automatically inferred weights, and revises prompts based on these structured critiques. This enables fast convergence to high-quality prompts using minimal examples and short iteration cycles. We evaluate ZERA across five LLMs and nine diverse datasets spanning reasoning, summarization, and code generation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines. Further ablation studies highlight the contribution of each component to more effective prompt construction. Our implementation including all prompts is publicly available at https://github.com/younatics/zera-agent.
Safe-SAIL: Towards a Fine-grained Safety Landscape of Large Language Models via Sparse Autoencoder Interpretation Framework
Weng, Jiaqi, Zheng, Han, Zhang, Hanyu, He, Qinqin, Tao, Jialing, Xue, Hui, Chu, Zhixuan, Wang, Xiting
Increasing deployment of large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications raises significant safety concerns. Most existing safety research focuses on evaluating LLM outputs or specific safety tasks, limiting their ability to address broader, undefined risks. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) facilitate interpretability research to clarify model behavior by explaining single-meaning atomic features decomposed from entangled signals. However, prior applications on SAEs do not interpret features with fine-grained safety-related concepts, thus inadequately addressing safety-critical behaviors, such as generating toxic responses and violating safety regulations. For rigorous safety analysis, we must extract a rich and diverse set of safety-relevant features that effectively capture these high-risk behaviors, yet face two challenges: identifying SAEs with the greatest potential for generating safety concept-specific neurons, and the prohibitively high cost of detailed feature explanation. In this paper, we propose Safe-SAIL, a framework for interpreting SAE features within LLMs to advance mechanistic understanding in safety domains. Our approach systematically identifies SAE with best concept-specific interpretability, explains safety-related neurons, and introduces efficient strategies to scale up the interpretation process. We will release a comprehensive toolkit including SAE checkpoints and human-readable neuron explanations, which supports empirical analysis of safety risks to promote research on LLM safety.
TactfulToM: Do LLMs Have the Theory of Mind Ability to Understand White Lies?
Liu, Yiwei, Pretty, Emma Jane, Huang, Jiahao, Sugawara, Saku
While recent studies explore Large Language Models' (LLMs) performance on Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning tasks, research on ToM abilities that require more nuanced social context is limited, such as white lies. We introduce TactfulToM, a novel English benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to understand white lies within real-life conversations and reason about prosocial motivations behind them, particularly when they are used to spare others' feelings and maintain social harmony. Our benchmark is generated through a multi-stage human-in-the-loop pipeline where LLMs expand manually designed seed stories into conversations to maintain the information asymmetry between participants necessary for authentic white lies. We show that TactfulToM is challenging for state-of-the-art models, which perform substantially below humans, revealing shortcomings in their ability to fully comprehend the ToM reasoning that enables true understanding of white lies.
FURINA: Free from Unmergeable Router via LINear Aggregation of mixed experts
Han, Jiayi, Du, Liang, Chen, Yinda, Kang, Xiao, Ding, Weiyang, Han, Donghong
The Mixture of Experts (MoE) paradigm has been successfully integrated into Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), delivering performance gains with minimal parameter overhead. However, a key limitation of existing MoE-LoRA methods is their reliance on a discrete router, which prevents the integration of the MoE components into the backbone model. To overcome this, we propose FURINA, a novel Free from Unmergeable Router framework based on the LINear Aggregation of experts. FURINA eliminates the router by introducing a Self-Routing mechanism. This is achieved through three core innovations: (1) decoupled learning of the direction and magnitude for LoRA adapters, (2) a shared learnable magnitude vector for consistent activation scaling, and (3) expert selection loss that encourages divergent expert activation. The proposed mechanism leverages the angular similarity between the input and each adapter's directional component to activate experts, which are then scaled by the shared magnitude vector. This design allows the output norm to naturally reflect the importance of each expert, thereby enabling dynamic, router-free routing. The expert selection loss further sharpens this behavior by encouraging sparsity and aligning it with standard MoE activation patterns. We also introduce a shared expert within the MoE-LoRA block that provides stable, foundational knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, FURINA is the first router-free, MoE-enhanced LoRA method that can be fully merged into the backbone model, introducing zero additional inference-time cost or complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FURINA not only significantly outperforms standard LoRA but also matches or surpasses the performance of existing MoE-LoRA methods, while eliminating the extra inference-time overhead of MoE.