Jinli Suo
Author directory2026
MemPO: Self-Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agents
Ruoran Li | Xinghua Zhang | Haiyang Yu | Shitong Duan | Xiang Li | Wenxin Xiang | Chonghua Liao | Xudong Guo | Yongbin Li | Jinli Suo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Ruoran Li | Xinghua Zhang | Haiyang Yu | Shitong Duan | Xiang Li | Wenxin Xiang | Chonghua Liao | Xudong Guo | Yongbin Li | Jinli Suo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Long-horizon agents face the challenge of growing context size during interaction with environment, which degrades the performance and stability. Existing methods typically introduce the external memory module and look up the relevant information from the stored memory, which prevents the model itself from proactively managing its memory content and aligning with the agent’s overarching task objectives. To address these limitations, we propose the self-memory policy optimization algorithm (MemPO), which enables the agent (policy model) to autonomously summarize and manage their memory during interaction with environment. By improving the credit assignment mechanism based on memory effectiveness, the policy model can selectively retain crucial information, significantly reducing token consumption while preserving task performance. Extensive experiments and analyses confirm that MemPO achieves absolute F1 score gains of 25.98 over the base model and 7.1 over the previous SOTA baseline, while reducing token usage by 67.58% and 73.12%.
CARE: Contrastive Anchor-based Rubric Evolution for Large Language Model Post-Training
Siyuan Li | Xinxin Song | Chen Ruinian | Jingjing Fan | Tingxiong Xiao | Yangen Hu | Ke Zeng | Jinli Suo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Siyuan Li | Xinxin Song | Chen Ruinian | Jingjing Fan | Tingxiong Xiao | Yangen Hu | Ke Zeng | Jinli Suo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Rubric-based reinforcement learning decomposes open-ended instructions into prompt-specific, flexible rubrics, making it better suited than reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for post-training LLMs on open-ended tasks. However, static rubrics are inevitably hacked as the policy evolves, and existing dynamic approaches introduce new problems: undirected rubric extraction, unreliable hack detection, and unbounded rubric proliferation. We propose CARE (Contrastive Anchor-based Rubric Evolution), which grounds every rubric evolution step in a high-quality anchor response generated by a frontier model conditioned on the prompt and its rubrics. At each training step, CARE contrasts the highest-scoring rollout against the anchor, enabling two complementary mechanisms: an Adaptive branch that reactively repairs reward misspecification; and a Chase branch that proactively converts frontier-level quality gaps into sharper rubrics. Together, the two branches maintain discriminative accuracy in the high-reward region—the precise region where reward over-optimization mostly originates. Experiments on WildChecklist-9K with Qwen2.5-7B-Base and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct show that CARE achieves state-of-the-art performance on Arena-Hard-2.0, InfoBench, and FollowBench, and is the only method whose win rate against GPT-4.1 anchor responses shows sustained improvement throughout 300 training steps; additional results on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen3-8B further indicate that CARE generalizes across model families.
Anchoring What Matters: A Dual-Level Learning Framework for Visually-Grounded Multimodal Reasoning
Xinxin Song | Siyuan Li | Tingxiong Xiao | Jinli Suo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xinxin Song | Siyuan Li | Tingxiong Xiao | Jinli Suo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly improved the reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, standard on-policy RLVR algorithms face a critical optimization bottleneck in preserving and reinforcing visually grounded reasoning behaviors: valuable visually-grounded reasoning trajectories are discarded after a single update, while uniform token advantage allocation prevents the model from reinforcing critical perception or reasoning steps. To bridge this gap, We propose PIVOT, a dual-level learning framework that anchors policy optimization around informative visual reasoning signals. Specifically, PIVOT introduces a self-calibrated experience replay mechanism, which selectively collects and replays visually-grounded historical experiences as stable reference anchors for policy optimization. Building upon this, we further design a vision-guided advantage allocation mechanism to allocate additional vision-aware advantages to tokens based on their local visual support and impact on downstream reasoning. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that PIVOT achieves highly competitive performance in enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of LVLMs.