Xiaoyun Zhang

Author directory

2026

Reasoning ability has become a defining capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerging as a key paradigm to enhance it. However, RLVR training often suffers from policy entropy collapse, where the policy becomes overly deterministic, hindering exploration and limiting reasoning performance. While entropy regularization is a common remedy, its effectiveness is highly sensitive to the fixed coefficient, making it unstable across tasks and models. In this work, we revisit entropy regularization in RLVR and argue that its potential has been largely underestimated. Our analysis shows that (i) tasks of varying difficulty demand distinct exploration intensities, and (ii) balanced exploration may require the policy entropy to be maintained within a moderate range below its initial level. Therefore, we propose Adaptive Entropy Regularization (AER) — a framework that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation via three components: difficulty-aware coefficient allocation, initial-anchored target entropy, and dynamic global coefficient adjustment. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that AER consistently outperforms baselines, improving both reasoning accuracy and exploration capability. Codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AER-ACL .
Text-to-SQL parsing has achieved remarkable progress under the Full Schema Assumption, where the complete database structure is pre-loaded into the model’s context. Yet this assumption overlooks a more fundamental capability question of whether an LLM agent can resolve a query without explicit access to the underlying tables and relations. Moreover, full-schema injection may exceed the effective context window, introduce irrelevant metadata into the reasoning process, and become less reliable as databases evolve. We therefore study the Unknown Schema setting, in which an agent must actively explore the database and commit to only the relevant subset of metadata. To address this, we propose TRUST-SQL (Truthful Reasoning with Unknown Schema via Tools). We formulate the task as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process in which our autonomous agent follows a structured four-phase protocol to ground reasoning in verified metadata. This protocol provides a structural boundary for our novel Phase-Aware GRPO strategy, which applies token-level masked advantages to isolate exploration rewards from execution outcomes and resolve credit assignment, yielding a 9.9% relative improvement over standard GRPO. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that TRUST-SQL is effective at multiple scales (4B/ 8B/14B). Despite operating entirely without pre-loaded metadata, our agent matches or surpasses prior baselines on most benchmarks that rely on schema prefilling.

2025

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve remarkable performance via long reasoning chains, but often incur excessive computational overhead due to redundant reasoning, especially on simple tasks. In this work, we systematically quantify the upper bounds of LRMs under both Long-Thinking and No-Thinking modes, and uncover the phenomenon of “Internal Self-Recovery Mechanism” where models implicitly supplement reasoning during answer generation. Building on this insight, we propose Adaptive Self-Recovery Reasoning (ASRR), a framework that suppresses unnecessary reasoning and enables implicit recovery. By introducing accuracy-aware length reward regulation, ASRR adaptively allocates reasoning effort according to problem difficulty, achieving high efficiency with negligible performance sacrifice. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and models show that, compared with GRPO, ASRR reduces reasoning budget by up to 32.5% (1.5B) and 25.7% (7B) with minimal accuracy loss (1.2% and 0.6% pass@1), and significantly boosts harmless rates on safety benchmarks (up to +21.7%). Our results highlight the potential of ASRR for enabling efficient, adaptive, and safer reasoning in LRMs.
Detecting abnormal events in real-world customer service dialogues is highly challenging due to the complexity of business data and the dynamic nature of customer interactions. Moreover, models must demonstrate strong out-of-domain (OOD) generalization to enable rapid adaptation across different business scenarios and maximize commercial value.In this work, we propose a novel Adaptive Perplexity-Aware Reinforcement Learning (APARL) framework that leverages the advanced reasoning capabilities of large language models for abnormal event detection. APARL introduces a dual-loop dynamic curriculum learning architecture, enabling the model to progressively focus on more challenging samples as its proficiency increases. This design effectively addresses performance bottlenecks and significantly enhances OOD transferability.Extensive evaluations on food delivery dialogue tasks show that our model achieves significantly enhanced adaptability and robustness, attaining the highest F1 score with an average improvement of 17.19%, and an average improvement of 9.59% in OOD transfer tests. This method provides a superior solution for industrial deployment of anomaly detection models, contributing to improved operational efficiency and commercial benefits.