Bo Zhou
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2026
JaggedBench: Measuring Reasoning Invariance via Automated Weakness Exploration
Donghao Luo | Chenchen Zhang | Siheng Li | Zenan Xu | Qi Yi | Boyuqiu | Weikang Wang | Guanhua Huang | Tao Yang | Bo Zhou | Alex Chan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Donghao Luo | Chenchen Zhang | Siheng Li | Zenan Xu | Qi Yi | Boyuqiu | Weikang Wang | Guanhua Huang | Tao Yang | Bo Zhou | Alex Chan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Strong large language models (LLMs) often achieve high scores on many benchmarks, yet can fail on closely related, sometimes easier, problems near their apparent capability boundary, a phenomenon known as jagged intelligence that reveals reasoning weaknesses masked by aggregate scores. Existing evaluations of jagged intelligence rely on manually designed benchmark-adjacent rewrites, which are hard to scale and quickly saturate as models improve. To address this challenge, we propose Automated Weakness Exploration (AWE), a fully automated framework for constructing and maintaining jaggedness evaluations. Using AWE, we construct JaggedBench with 1,142 verified capability-adjacent variants and evaluate 24 state-of-the-art models. On the primary evaluation set AIME 2025, benchmark-adjacent rewrites induce an average OG-to-RW relative drop of approximately 25% in Avg@k across 24 models, with consistent degradation observed across math, code, science, and knowledge domains. We identify 18 recurring failure modes. Our analysis shows that increasing reasoning intensity and scaling model size improve average performance and reduce failure frequency, yet the underlying failure-mode categories largely persist. Overall, these findings indicate that standard benchmark scores can present an overly optimistic view of reliability near the capability boundary. JaggedBench provides a more faithful and scalable lens for evaluating boundary robustness, enabling systematic diagnosis of boundary failures and longitudinal tracking of persistent weaknesses as models evolve. We release the benchmark, code, and subsequent updates at https://jaggedbench.github.io/.
Rhombus: Incentivizing Coordination in Parallel Thinking through Reinforcement Learning
Ziyuan Nan | Qi Yi | Di Huang | Yutong Wu | Guanhua Huang | Xue Gong | Kejiao Li | Yuhao Jiang | Chenchen Zhang | Zenan Xu | Xing Hu | Bo Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Ziyuan Nan | Qi Yi | Di Huang | Yutong Wu | Guanhua Huang | Xue Gong | Kejiao Li | Yuhao Jiang | Chenchen Zhang | Zenan Xu | Xing Hu | Bo Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Parallel thinking offers a promising avenue for scaling test-time compute in Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling them to explore diverse solution paths simultaneously before aggregating them into a final answer. However, coordinating the exploration and aggregation stages remains challenging, as simple aggregation techniques often incur information loss, failing to preserve the subtle, decision-relevant signals generated during exploration. To overcome this, we propose Rhombus, a parallel thinking framework that explicitly incentivizes coordination between components via end-to-end reinforcement learning. Rhombus employs multiple parallel Proposers to generate compact, decision-focused reasoning cues and a central Synthesizer to integrate them into final predictions, utilizing co-training under a shared task reward to align their interaction. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, Rhombus improves accuracy by 6.0% over long chain-of-thought baselines while reducing wall-clock latency by 39.4% under matched token budgets. Our work demonstrates that explicit communication optimization is essential for realizing the accuracy and efficiency gains of parallel reasoning.
Low-probability Tokens Sustain Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward
Guanhua Huang | Tingqiang Xu | Mingze Wang | Qi Yi | Xue Gong | Siheng Li | Ruibin Xiong | Kejiao Li | Yuhao Jiang | Bo Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Guanhua Huang | Tingqiang Xu | Mingze Wang | Qi Yi | Xue Gong | Siheng Li | Ruibin Xiong | Kejiao Li | Yuhao Jiang | Bo Zhou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has propelled Large Language Models in complex reasoning, yet its scalability is often hindered by a training bottleneck where performance plateaus as policy entropy collapses, signaling a loss of exploration. While previous methods attempt to maintain high entropy, we argue that unselective entropy maximization risks amplifying irrelevant noise rather than fostering meaningful exploration. In this paper, we identify a deeper issue: the gradual elimination of valuable low-probability exploratory tokens, which we term reasoning sparks, driven by RLVR over-penalization. To address this, we introduce Low-probability Regularization (Lp-Reg). Leveraging the statistical distinction where reasoning sparks exhibit higher probabilities than noise, Lp-Reg filters out the extremely low-probability noise tokens and prevents the suppression of potentially valuable low-probability candidates. Experiments demonstrate that Lp-Reg enables stable on-policy training for over 3,000 steps (81,204 GPU-hours), sustaining exploration in regimes where baselines typically collapse. Validated across extensive evaluations totaling over 300,000 cumulative GPU-hours, Lp-Reg demonstrates highly competitive performance in off-policy settings and consistently achieves state-of-the-art results in on-policy training across diverse model families, sizes, and domains, with relative accuracy improvements ranging from 3.06% to 7.98%.
The Art of Efficient Reasoning: Data, Reward, and Optimization
Taiqiang Wu | Zenan Xu | Bo Zhou | Ngai Wong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Taiqiang Wu | Zenan Xu | Bo Zhou | Ngai Wong
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) consistently benefit from scaled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, but also suffer from heavy computational overhead. To address this issue, efficient reasoning aims to incentivize short yet accurate thinking trajectories, typically through reward shaping with Reinforcement Learning (RL). In this paper, we systematically investigate the mechanics of efficient reasoning for LLMs. For comprehensive evaluation, we advocate for more fine-grained metrics, including length distribution conditioned on correctness and performance across a wide spectrum of token budgets ranging from 2k to 32k. First, we reveal that the training process follows a two-stage paradigm: length adaptation and reasoning refinement. After that, we conduct extensive experiments (about 0.2 million GPU hours) in a unified protocol, deconstructing training prompts and rollouts, reward shaping, and optimization strategies. In particular, a key finding is to train on relatively easier prompts, ensuring the density of positive reward signals and thus avoiding the length collapse. Meanwhile, the learned length bias can be generalized across domains. We distill all findings into valuable insights and practical guidelines, and further validate them across the Qwen3 series, ranging from 0.6B to 30B, demonstrating robustness and generalization.
ArtifactsBench: Bridging the Visual-Interactive Gap in LLM Code Generation Evaluation
Chenchen Zhang | Yuhang Li | Jiaheng Liu | Can Xu | Ao Liu | Changzhi Zhou | Ken Deng | Dengpeng Wu | Guanhua Huang | Kejiao Li | Qi Yi | Ruilin Lv | Shihui Hu | Yue Zhang | Yuhao Jiang | Zenan Xu | Yuanxing Zhang | Wiggin Zhou | Bo Zhou | Fengzong Lian
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Chenchen Zhang | Yuhang Li | Jiaheng Liu | Can Xu | Ao Liu | Changzhi Zhou | Ken Deng | Dengpeng Wu | Guanhua Huang | Kejiao Li | Qi Yi | Ruilin Lv | Shihui Hu | Yue Zhang | Yuhao Jiang | Zenan Xu | Yuanxing Zhang | Wiggin Zhou | Bo Zhou | Fengzong Lian
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly generate executable visual artifacts, yet established code benchmarks largely overlook the visual fidelity and interaction behavior that shape user experience. We introduce ArtifactsBench, a benchmark and automated multimodal evaluation framework for visual code generation. The framework executes each artifact and records three staged screenshots—before, during, and after a scripted interaction—then scores the evidence and source code with a checklist-guided Multimodal LLM (MLLM) referee. ArtifactsBench contains 1,825 tasks across nine domains and evaluates more than 30 LLMs. On a 280-query, six-model expert study, three staged screenshots yield 90.95% referee–human Pair ACC. Across the models shared with WebDev Arena, ArtifactsBench reaches 94.4% normalized Footrule consistency with that public human-preference ranking. We release the benchmark, evaluation harness, and baseline results at https://artifactsbenchmark.github.io/.
Discovery and Reinforcement of Tool-Integrated Reasoning Chains via Rollout Trees
Kun Li | Zenan Xu | Junan Li | Zengrui Jin | Jinghao Deng | Zexuan Qiu | Bo Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Kun Li | Zenan Xu | Junan Li | Zengrui Jin | Jinghao Deng | Zexuan Qiu | Bo Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Tool-Integrated Reasoning has emerged as a key paradigm to augment Large Language Models (LLMs) with computational capabilities, yet integrating tool-use into long Chain-of-Thought (long CoT) remains underexplored, largely due to the scarcity of training data and the challenge of integrating tool-use without compromising the model’s intrinsic long-chain reasoning. In this paper, we introduce DART (Discovery And Reinforcement of Tool-Integrated Reasoning Chains via Rollout Trees), a reinforcement learning framework that enables spontaneous tool-use during long CoT reasoning without additional human annotation. DART operates by constructing dynamic rollout trees during training to discover valid tool-use opportunities, branching out at promising positions to explore tool-integrated trajectories. Subsequently, a tree-based process advantage estimation identifies and credits specific sub-trajectories where tool invocation positively contributes to the solution, effectively reinforcing these beneficial behaviors during training. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks like AIME and GPQA-Diamond demonstrate that DART significantly outperforms existing methods, successfully harmonizing tool execution with long CoT reasoning.
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data
Siheng Li | Kejiao Li | Zenan Xu | Guanhua Huang | Kun Li | Haoyuan Wu | Wujiajia | Zihao Zheng | Chenchen Zhang | Kun Shi | Xue Gong | Qi Yi | Ruibin Xiong | Tingqiang Xu | Yuhao Jiang | Jianfeng Yan | Yuyuan Zeng | Guanghui Xu | Jinbao Xue | Zhijiang xu | Zheng Fang | Shuai LI | Qibin Liu | Xiaoxue Li | Zhuoyu Li | Yangyu Tao | Fei Gao | Cheng Jiang | Bochao Wang | Kai Liu | Jianchen Zhu | Wai Lam | Bo Zhou | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Siheng Li | Kejiao Li | Zenan Xu | Guanhua Huang | Kun Li | Haoyuan Wu | Wujiajia | Zihao Zheng | Chenchen Zhang | Kun Shi | Xue Gong | Qi Yi | Ruibin Xiong | Tingqiang Xu | Yuhao Jiang | Jianfeng Yan | Yuyuan Zeng | Guanghui Xu | Jinbao Xue | Zhijiang xu | Zheng Fang | Shuai LI | Qibin Liu | Xiaoxue Li | Zhuoyu Li | Yangyu Tao | Fei Gao | Cheng Jiang | Bochao Wang | Kai Liu | Jianchen Zhu | Wai Lam | Bo Zhou | Di Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) is largely driven by scaling training compute through either pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training with reinforcement learning (RL). The former contributes to learning broad knowledge and skills from general data, while struggling with data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. The latter incentivizes reasoning capabilities with strong generalization, but is constrained by limited data availability due to its reliance on human annotation. To alleviate these issues, we propose Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training data (RLPT), which combines the advantages of learning from general data and RL. In particular, RLPT derives reward signals directly from general text data through a next-segment reasoning objective, rewarding the policy for correctly predicting next text segments conditioned on the prefix text. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and models demonstrate the effectiveness of . For example, RLPT yields substantial improvements in continual pre-training (+4.6%) and provides a strong foundation for post-training (+3.4%) on Qwen3-8B-Base.
ReLook: Vision-Grounded RL with a Multimodal LLM Critic for Agentic Web Coding
Yuhang Li | Chenchen Zhang | Ruilin Lv | Ao Liu | Ken Deng | Yuanxing Zhang | Jiaheng Liu | Bo Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuhang Li | Chenchen Zhang | Ruilin Lv | Ao Liu | Ken Deng | Yuanxing Zhang | Jiaheng Liu | Bo Zhou
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at algorithmic code generation, they struggle with front-end development, where correctness is judged on rendered pixels and interaction. We present ReLook, an agentic, vision-grounded reinforcement learning framework that empowers an agent to close a robust generate–diagnose–refine loop by invoking a multimodal LLM (MLLM) as a tool. During training, the agent employs an MLLM-in-the-loop to serve as a visual critic, evaluating code via screenshots and providing actionable feedback. Crucially, we enforce a strict zero-reward policy for invalid renders to guarantee renderability and mitigate reward hacking. To prevent behavioral collapse, we introduce Forced Optimization, a strict acceptance rule that admits only improving revisions, yielding monotonically better trajectories. At inference, we decouple the critic and run a lightweight, critic-free self-edit cycle, keeping latency comparable to base decoding while retaining most of the gains. Across three widely used benchmarks, ReLook consistently outperforms strong baselines in vision-grounded front-end code generation, highlighting the benefits of agentic perception, visual rewards, and training–inference decoupling.
AT²PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search
Zefang Zong | Dingwei Chen | Yang Li | Qi Yi | Bo Zhou | Chengming Li | BO Qian | Peng Chen | Jie Jiang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zefang Zong | Dingwei Chen | Yang Li | Qi Yi | Bo Zhou | Chengming Li | BO Qian | Peng Chen | Jie Jiang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
LLM agents have emerged as powerful systems for tackling multi-turn tasks by interleaving internal reasoning and external tool interactions. Agentic Reinforcement Learning has recently drawn significant research attention as a critical post-training paradigm to further refine these capabilities. In this paper, we present AT²PO (Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search), a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. AT²PO introduces a turn-level tree structure that jointly enables Entropy-Guided Tree Expansion for strategic exploration and Turn-wise Credit Assignment for fine-grained reward propagation from sparse outcomes. Complementing this, we propose Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization, a turn-level learning objective that aligns policy updates with the natural decision granularity of agentic interactions. ATPO is orthogonal to tree search and can be readily integrated into any multi-turn RL pipeline. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 1.84 percentage points in average, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each component.
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- Zenan Xu 6
- Qi Yi 6
- Guanhua Huang 5
- Chenchen Zhang 5
- Yuhao Jiang 4
- Kejiao Li 4
- Xue Gong 3
- Siheng Li 3
- Ken Deng 2
- Kun Li 2
- Yuhang Li 2
- Ao Liu 2
- Jiaheng Liu 2
- Ruilin Lv 2
- Ruibin Xiong 2
- Tingqiang Xu 2
- Yuanxing Zhang 2
- Boyuqiu 1
- Alex Chan 1
- Dingwei Chen 1
- Peng Chen 1
- Jinghao Deng 1
- Zheng Fang 1
- Fei Gao 1
- Shihui Hu 1
- Xing Hu 1
- Di Huang 1
- Cheng Jiang 1
- Jie Jiang 1
- Zengrui Jin 1
- Shuai LI 1
- Wai Lam 1
- Chengming Li 1
- Junan Li 1
- Xiaoxue Li 1
- Yang Li 1
- Zhuoyu Li 1
- Fengzong Lian 1
- Kai Liu 1
- Qibin Liu 1
- Donghao Luo 1
- Ziyuan Nan 1
- BO Qian 1
- Zexuan Qiu 1
- Kun Shi 1
- Yangyu Tao 1
- Bochao Wang 1
- Di Wang 1
- Mingze Wang 1
- Weikang Wang (王伟康) 1
- Ngai Wong 1
- Dengpeng Wu 1
- Haoyuan Wu 1
- Taiqiang Wu 1
- Yutong Wu 1
- Wujiajia 1
- Can Xu 1
- Guanghui Xu 1
- Jinbao Xue 1
- Jianfeng Yan 1
- Tao Yang 1
- Yuyuan Zeng 1
- Yue Zhang 1
- Zihao Zheng 1
- Changzhi Zhou 1
- Wiggin Zhou 1
- Jianchen Zhu 1
- Zefang Zong 1
- Zhijiang xu 1