Jiayi Kuang
Author directory2026
From Atomic to Agentic: Towards Interpretable Evaluation of LLMs’ Agentic Mathematical Capabilities
Jiayi Kuang | Yinghui Li | Yunze Song | Keyu Chen | Zhifeng Shen | Yangning Li | Yidong Wang | di Yin | Ruizhi Qiao | Xing Sun | Kai Jin | Ying Shen | Liang Lin | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jiayi Kuang | Yinghui Li | Yunze Song | Keyu Chen | Zhifeng Shen | Yangning Li | Yidong Wang | di Yin | Ruizhi Qiao | Xing Sun | Kai Jin | Ying Shen | Liang Lin | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving from performing end-to-end mathematical reasoning to integrating agentic intelligence. However, most existing math benchmarks evaluate only final answers. This outcome-oriented evaluation provides limited diagnostic value for identifying process-level failures or rigorous logic, failing to guide the transformation of LLMs into robust agents. To bridge this gap, we present a process-level benchmark designed to evaluate the inherent agentic mathematical reasoning abilities of LLMs. Our framework aligns problem-solving agentic behaviors with a structured taxonomy of reusable mathematical atomic capabilities. We design a comprehensive suite of planning, action, and feedback tasks across both textual and multimodal contexts, supported by an automated pipeline that synthesizes high-quality trajectories and produces fine-grained annotations via controlled LLM rewriting. Experiments reveal that models with stronger end-to-end accuracy can exhibit markedly different agentic capability profiles. This demonstrates that process-level evaluation is crucial for interpreting the true potential of LLMs and guiding the development of next-generation mathematical agents.
INSPIRE: An Internalize-Then-Improve Approach for Example-Driven Mathematical Reasoning
Shuai Wang | Jiayi Kuang | Yinghui Li | Haojing Huang | Xinnian Liang | Ying Shen | Liang Lin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shuai Wang | Jiayi Kuang | Yinghui Li | Haojing Huang | Xinnian Liang | Ying Shen | Liang Lin
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mathematical reasoning has seen rapid progress in large language models (LLMs), yet existing methods optimize predominantly for final-answer correctness, raising the question of whether models truly internalize mathematical concepts or merely memorize solution patterns. In human mathematics education, example-based reasoning, such as constructing counterexamples to test theorem boundaries, reflects deep conceptual understanding, but remains underdeveloped in current LLMs. Enhancing this capability through preference optimization presents two key challenges: (1) the model’s limited example-based reasoning ability makes constructing effective preference pairs inherently difficult; and (2) capability acquisition is progressive, as the model must first learn to adopt this strategy before learning to apply it correctly. Therefore, we propose INSPIRE, an Internalize-Then-Improve approach combining Reference-Guided Student Internalization (RGSI), which produces high-quality preference candidates under the policy model’s own distribution, with a stage-wise rubric preference training strategy that decomposes learning into method-oriented and correctness-oriented stages. Experiments across multiple model scales and families demonstrate consistent improvements, even surpassing larger open-source models, while evaluations on out-of-distribution benchmarks confirm no degradation in general mathematical reasoning ability.
2025
Express What You See: Can Multimodal LLMs Decode Visual Ciphers with Intuitive Semiosis Comprehension?
Jiayi Kuang | Yinghui Li | Chen Wang | Haohao Luo | Ying Shen | Wenhao Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Jiayi Kuang | Yinghui Li | Chen Wang | Haohao Luo | Ying Shen | Wenhao Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Bridging the gap between visual and language remains a pivotal challenge for the multimodal community. Traditional VQA benchmarks encounter a modality gap and over-reliance on language priors, whereas human cognition excels at intuitive semiosis, associating abstract visual symbols to linguistic semantics. Inspired by this neurocognitive mechanism, we focus on emojis, the visual cipher conveying abstract textual semantics. Specifically, we propose a novel task of generating abstract linguistics from emoji sequence images, where such reasoning underpins critical applications in cryptography, thus challenging MLLMs’ reasoning of decoding complex semantics of visual ciphers. We introduce eWe-bench (Express What you SeE), assessing MLLMs’ capability of intuitive semiosis like humans. Our data construction framework ensures high visual sensitivity and data quality, which can be extended to future data enhancement. Evaluation results on advanced MLLMs highlight critical deficiencies in visual intuitive symbolic reasoning. We believe our interesting insights for advancing visual semiosis in MLLMs will pave the way for cryptographic analysis and high-level intuitive cognition intelligence of MLLMs.
Browsing Like Human: A Multimodal Web Agent with Experiential Fast-and-Slow Thinking
Haohao Luo | Jiayi Kuang | Wei Liu | Ying Shen | Jian Luan | Yang Deng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Haohao Luo | Jiayi Kuang | Wei Liu | Ying Shen | Jian Luan | Yang Deng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Automating web navigation which aims to build a web agent that follows user instructions to complete tasks like booking flights by interacting with websites, has received increasing attention due to its practical value. Although existing web agents are mostly equipped with visual perception, planning, and memory abilities, their reasoning process are still deviate from human cognition. In this work, we study the human thought pattern to empower agent with more human-like abilities in web navigation. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel multimodal web agent framework called WebExperT, which is designed to emulate the human planning process of “thinking fast and slow” to effectively decompose complex user instructions. Furthermore, WebExperT leverages experiential learning by reflecting from failure for continuously refining planning and decision-making outcomes. Experimental results on the Mind2Web benchmark demonstrate the superiority of WebExperT in both supervised and unsupervised settings.