Tao Feng
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2026
Beyond Policy Optimization: A Data Curation Flywheel for Sparse-Reward Long-Horizon Planning
Yutong Wang | Ryan Ji | Kaixin Li | Baolong Bi | Tao Feng | Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yutong Wang | Ryan Ji | Kaixin Li | Baolong Bi | Tao Feng | Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Reasoning Models have demonstrated remarkable success on static tasks, yet their application to multi-round agentic planning in interactive environments faces two fundamental challenges. First, the intractable credit assignment problem renders conventional reinforcement learning ineffective in sparse-reward settings. Second, the computational overhead of verbose, step-by-step reasoning histories is prohibitive. To address these challenges, we propose BPO, a three-stage framework (bootstrapping, extrapolation, and refinement) that establishes a self-improving data flywheel to develop robust reasoning models for long-horizon, sparse-reward environments. Our framework first bootstraps efficient reasoning using the proposed planning quaternions with long-short chain-of-thought fusion. It then extrapolates to out-of-distribution tasks through complexity-stratified curriculum learning. Finally, the model iteratively refines itself by learning exclusively on experiences selected via reward-gated rejection sampling. Experiments on ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art with significant token efficiency, providing a new recipe for reasoning models in agentic planning.
MathFlow: Enhancing the Perceptual Flow of MLLMs for Visual Mathematical Problems
Shuhang Chen | Hangjie Yuan | Yunqiu Xu | Pengwei Liu | Tao Feng | Jun Cen | Zeying Huang | Yi Yang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shuhang Chen | Hangjie Yuan | Yunqiu Xu | Pengwei Liu | Tao Feng | Jun Cen | Zeying Huang | Yi Yang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Despite strong results on many tasks, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still underperform on visual mathematical problem solving, especially in reliably perceiving and interpreting diagrams. Inspired by human problem-solving, we hypothesize that the ability to extract meaningful information from diagrams is pivotal, as it directly conditions subsequent inference.Hence, we introduce FlowVerse, a comprehensive benchmark that provides a fine-grained evaluation of MLLMs’ perception and reasoning capabilities. Our preliminary results on FlowVerse reveal that existing MLLMs exhibit substantial limitations when extracting essential information and reasoned properties from diagrams and performing complex reasoning based on these visual inputs. In response, we introduce MathFlow, a modular problem-solving pipeline that decouples perception and inference into distinct stages, thereby optimizing each independently. Given the perceptual limitations observed in current MLLMs, we trained MathFlow-P-7B as a dedicated perception model.Experimental results indicate that MathFlow-P-7B yields substantial performance gains when integrated with various closed-source and open-source inference models. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the MathFlow pipeline and its compatibility with diverse inference frameworks. Project page: https://github.com/MathFlow-zju/MathFlow.