Sida Li
Author directory2026
Quality, Not Just Outcome: A Structural Scoring Framework for Selecting Coding-Agent Trajectories for Supervised Fine-Tuning
Sida Li | Yuanxin Liu | Shicheng Li | Linli Yao | Xu Sun | Haoli Bai | Xiao-Hui Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Sida Li | Yuanxin Liu | Shicheng Li | Linli Yao | Xu Sun | Haoli Bai | Xiao-Hui Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Open coding agents are commonly trained through supervised fine-tuning on interaction trajectories whose final patches pass the benchmark test suite. However, this outcome-level filtering criterion ignores process quality: trajectories that eventually succeed may still contain inefficient interaction patterns such as repetitive file inspection, unstable tool usage, or delayed modification behavior, all of which become part of the imitation target. We propose (Trajectory Quality Score), a structural scoring framework for coding-agent trajectories that operates directly on trajectory structure, requires no LLM judge, and runs in linear time. characterizes trajectory quality through structural signals organized around structured convergence: information focus, intent–action alignment, and policy dynamics. Using 155,144 successful trajectories from a public open-license corpus, we rank trajectories by and fine-tune coding agents on filtered subsets. Models trained on top-ranked trajectories consistently outperform those trained on random or bottom-ranked subsets on . Our results suggest that process-level trajectory quality is an important factor in coding-agent supervision and that structural trajectory filtering provides an effective and scalable alternative to LLM-based data selection.
AdaC-GRPO: Towards Mastering Long-Horizon Visual Sudoku Puzzles via Adaptive Curriculum Learning
Sida Li | Yuanxin Liu | Linli Yao | Shicheng Li | Xu Sun | Haoli Bai | Xiao-Hui Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Sida Li | Yuanxin Liu | Linli Yao | Shicheng Li | Xu Sun | Haoli Bai | Xiao-Hui Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
While reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) enhances reasoning in large language models, its efficacy in long-horizon multimodal tasks remains underexplored. Visual Sudoku puzzles pose a representative challenge, requiring multi-step deductive reasoning over both local constraints and global dependency chains. To this end, we introduce FG-Sudoku, a fine-grained benchmark categorized by grid size and required deductive steps. Evaluations reveal that frontier MLLMs fail on complex long-range dependencies (e.g., 9×9 puzzles). During post-training, this near-zero success rate causes severe reward sparsity, halting standard RLVR. We propose Adaptive Curriculum Group Relative Policy Optimization (AdaC-GRPO) to overcome this. Unlike rigid or prior-based schedules, AdaC-GRPO dynamically constructs training batches by tracking the model’s "Zone of Proximal Development" via online rollout accuracy. Experiments demonstrate that AdaC-GRPO enables Qwen2.5-VL-7B to approach the performance of Gemini-2.5-Flash while bridging 62.2% of the overall accuracy gap to Gemini-2.5-Pro, with its generalizability further validated across InternVL-3.5 and Qwen3-VL.