Kaituo Feng
2026
Exploring Reasoning Reward Model for Agents
Kaixuan Fan | Kaituo Feng | Manyuan Zhang | Tianshuo Peng | Zhixun Li | Yilei Jiang | Shuang Chen | Xiangyu Yue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Kaixuan Fan | Kaituo Feng | Manyuan Zhang | Tianshuo Peng | Zhixun Li | Yilei Jiang | Shuang Chen | Xiangyu Yue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has achieved notable success in enabling agents to perform complex reasoning and tool use. However, most methods still relies on sparse outcome-based reward for training. Such feedback fails to differentiate intermediate reasoning quality, leading to suboptimal training results. In this paper, we introduce Agent Reasoning Reward Model (Agent-RRM), a multi-faceted reward model that produces structured feedback for agentic trajectories, including (1) an explicit reasoning trace , (2) a focused critique that provides refinement guidance by highlighting reasoning flaws, and (3) an overall score that evaluates process performance. Leveraging these signals, we systematically investigate three integration strategies: Reagent-C (text-augmented refinement), Reagent-R (reward-augmented guidance), and Reagent-U (unified feedback integration). Extensive evaluations across 12 diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Reagent-U yields substantial performance leaps, achieving 43.7% on GAIA and 46.2% on WebWalkerQA, validating the effectiveness of our reasoning reward model and training schemes. Code, models, and datasets will be released to facilitate future research.
AdaTooler-V: Adaptive Tool-Use for Images and Videos
Chaoyang Wang | Kaituo Feng | Dongyang Chen | Zhongyu Wang | Zhixun Li | Sicheng Gao | Meng Meng | Xu Zhou | Manyuan Zhang | Yuzhang Shang | Xiangyu Yue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Chaoyang Wang | Kaituo Feng | Dongyang Chen | Zhongyu Wang | Zhixun Li | Sicheng Gao | Meng Meng | Xu Zhou | Manyuan Zhang | Yuzhang Shang | Xiangyu Yue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent advances have shown that multimodal large language models (MLLMs) benefit from multimodal interleaved chain-of-thought (CoT) with vision tool interactions. However, existing open-source models often exhibit blind tool-use reasoning patterns, invoking vision tools even when they are unnecessary, which significantly increases inference overhead and degrades model performance. To this end, we propose AdaTooler-V, an MLLM that performs adaptive tool-use by determining whether a visual problem truly requires tools. First, we introduce AT-GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that adaptively adjusts reward scales based on the Tool Benefit Score of each sample, encouraging the model to invoke tools only when they provide genuine improvements. Moreover, we construct two datasets to support training: AdaTooler-V-CoT-100k for SFT cold start and AdaTooler-V-300k for RL with verifiable rewards across single-image, multi-image, and video data. Experiments across twelve benchmarks demonstrate the strong reasoning capability of AdaTooler-V, outperforming existing methods in diverse visual reasoning tasks. Notably, AdaTooler-V-7B achieves an accuracy of 89.8% on the high-resolution benchmark V*, surpassing the commercial proprietary model GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro.
Probing Audio-Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models through the Lens of Audio
Kaixiong Gong | Kaituo Feng | Bohao Li | Yibing Wang | Mofan Cheng | Shijia Yang | Jiaming Han | Benyou Wang | Yutong Bai | Zhuoran Yang | Xiangyu Yue
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Kaixiong Gong | Kaituo Feng | Bohao Li | Yibing Wang | Mofan Cheng | Shijia Yang | Jiaming Han | Benyou Wang | Yutong Bai | Zhuoran Yang | Xiangyu Yue
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5/2.5 Pro, and Reka Core, have advanced audio-visual reasoning capabilities, achieving strong performance in tasks like cross-modal understanding and generation. However, our DeafTest uncovers unanticipated failures: most of the state-of-the-art MLLMs struggle with very simple audio tasks, such as distinguishing louder sounds or sound counting. This raises a fundamental question—does a deficiency in low-level audio perception constrain higher-level audio-visual reasoning? To address this, we introduce AV-Odyssey Bench—a comprehensive benchmark of 4,555 meticulously designed problems that integrate text, audio, and visual modalities. Each task requires models to unify cross-modal reasoning, leveraging synchronized audio-visual cues to infer solutions. By structuring questions as multiple-choice, we ensure objective, reproducible evaluations without reliance on subjective human or LLM-based judgments. Through comprehensive benchmarking of closed-source and open-source models, we showcase: (i) current MLLMs lack robust audio-visual integration ability and (ii) performance on DeafTest (Pearson’s r = 0.945) strongly correlates with AV-Odyssey accuracy. These findings challenge assumptions about models’ multimodal proficiency and highlight fundamental audio perception as a reasoning bottleneck. We believe that our results provide concrete guidance for future dataset design, alignment strategies, and architectures.