Anxiang Zeng
Author directory2026
Orchestrating Tokens and Sequences: Dynamic Hybrid Policy Optimization for RLVR
Zijun Min | Bingshuai Liu | Ante Wang | Long Zhang | Anxiang Zeng | Haibo Zhang | Jinsong Su
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zijun Min | Bingshuai Liu | Ante Wang | Long Zhang | Anxiang Zeng | Haibo Zhang | Jinsong Su
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) offers a promising framework for optimizing large language models in reasoning tasks. However, existing RLVR algorithms focus on different granularities, and each has complementary strengths and limitations. Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) updates the policy with token-level importance ratios, which preserves fine-grained credit assignment but often suffers from high variance and instability. In contrast, Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) applies single sequence-level importance ratios across all tokens in a response that better matches sequence-level rewards, but sacrifices token-wise credit assignment. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Hybrid Policy Optimization (DHPO) to bridge GRPO and GSPO within a single clipped surrogate objective. DHPO combines token-level and sequence-level importance ratios using weighting mechanisms. We explore two variants of the mixing mechanism, including an averaged mixing and an entropy-guided mixing. To further stabilize training, we employ a branch-specific clipping strategy that constrains token-level and sequence-level ratios within separate trust regions before mixing, preventing outliers in either branch from dominating the update. Across seven challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, experiments on both dense and MoE models from the Qwen3 series show that DHPO consistently outperforms GRPO and GSPO. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/DHPO.
SPEC-Distill: Towards Efficient Speculative Distillation for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards
Bingshuai Liu | Zijun Min | Ante Wang | Jiajun Cao | Haibo Zhang | Liang Yao | Shuman Liu | Anxiang Zeng | Jinsong Su
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Bingshuai Liu | Zijun Min | Ante Wang | Jiajun Cao | Haibo Zhang | Liang Yao | Shuman Liu | Anxiang Zeng | Jinsong Su
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves mathematical reasoning, but sparse sequence-level rewards make training heavily dependent on long, repeated rollout generation. On-policy distillation (OPD) makes these rollouts more informative by asking a larger teacher to score every student trajectory token by token, but this inserts large-teacher forward passes into every RL step and requires online resources beyond standard student-only RL. We propose SPEC-Distill, a speculative prefix distillation framework in which the teacher shapes rollout construction rather than defining an auxiliary reward. Instead of querying the teacher during training, SPEC-Distill runs it once offline to build a reusable pool of expert trajectories. During RL, the student treats these trajectories as speculative drafts, accepts a prefix under a lenience-controlled criterion, completes the response under its own policy, and is updated only by verifiable rewards with standard GRPO. Against OPD, this removes online teacher scoring; against standard autoregressive rollouts, accepted prefixes reduce the number of fresh student-generated tokens. In the primary non-think setting, SPEC-Distill improves Qwen3-4B from 66.1 to 73.2 average accuracy over GRPO, and outperforms OPD on the two scales. Compared with full-response expert reuse such as Luffy, SPEC-Distill reaches comparable accuracy on Qwen3-1.7B while reducing online rollout tokens by about 60% and rollout time from 10.90 to 7.06 hours. Analysis further shows that teacher prefixes are best used as an early scaffold, after which reusing the student’s own rollouts provides the strongest balance between expert guidance and on-policy exploration.
OmniReasoner: Thinking with Long Audio-Video via Native Tool Use
Yu Chen | Qiufeng Wang | Caorui Li | Ziyu Xiong | Yi-Dong Wang | Mingqi Gao | Shuman Liu | Biao Liu | Chunfeng Yang | Anxiang Zeng | Haibo Zhang | Chaofan Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yu Chen | Qiufeng Wang | Caorui Li | Ziyu Xiong | Yi-Dong Wang | Mingqi Gao | Shuman Liu | Biao Liu | Chunfeng Yang | Anxiang Zeng | Haibo Zhang | Chaofan Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Long audio-video reasoning is difficult for omni-modal LLMs because the decisive evidence is often sparse, cross-modal, and too expensive to preserve with uniformly high-fidelity inputs. We introduce OmniReasoner, a tool-use post-training framework for Thinking with Long Audio-Video: omni-modal LLMs learn, via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to decide whether and where to call a zoom-in tool before answering. OmniReasoner first builds a low-cost global preview of the full stream and then, when needed, calls the zoom-in tool with a requested temporal interval for higher-fidelity visual and audio inspection before answering. Because the model observes different sampling granularities before and after this call—a sparse global preview and a denser local clip—we introduce TimeAnchor, which keeps the tool’s temporal argument valid and round-trip-consistent across these granularities, rather than tied to frame indices from a particular sampling rate. To make this tool-use behavior trainable without expensive manual interval annotation, we build a Temporal Augmented Data Engine that synthesizes tool-use post-training trajectories by video editing and composition. Experiments across omni-modal and video benchmarks show that OmniReasoner improves both answer accuracy and temporal grounding while concentrating high-fidelity computation on informative regions. Code is available at https://github.com/RockyChen0205/OmniReasoner.
CharTide: Data-Centric Chart-to-Code Generation via Tri-Perspective Tuning and Inquiry-Driven Evolution
Xiangxi Zheng | Kuang He | Jiayi Hu | Ping Yu | Rui Yan | Yuan Yao | Peng Hou | Anxiang Zeng | Alex Jinpeng Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xiangxi Zheng | Kuang He | Jiayi Hu | Ping Yu | Rui Yan | Yuan Yao | Peng Hou | Anxiang Zeng | Alex Jinpeng Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
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.
2025
Optimal Transport-Based Token Weighting scheme for Enhanced Preference Optimization
Meng Li | Guangda Huzhang | Haibo Zhang | Xiting Wang | Anxiang Zeng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Meng Li | Guangda Huzhang | Haibo Zhang | Xiting Wang | Anxiang Zeng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising framework for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences by directly optimizing the log-likelihood difference between chosen and rejected responses. However, existing methods assign equal importance to all tokens in the response, while humans focus on more meaningful parts. This leads to suboptimal preference optimization, as irrelevant or noisy tokens disproportionately influence DPO loss. To address this limitation, we propose Optimal Transport-based token weighting scheme for enhancing direct Preference Optimization (OTPO). By emphasizing semantically meaningful token pairs and de-emphasizing less relevant ones, our method introduces a context-aware token weighting scheme that yields a more contrastive reward difference estimate. This adaptive weighting enhances reward stability, improves interpretability, and ensures that preference optimization focuses on meaningful differences between responses. Extensive experiments have validated OTPO’s effectiveness in improving instruction-following ability across various settings.