Xin Sun
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2026
Revisiting Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards from a Contrastive Perspective
Feng Zhang | Xinhong Ma | Ziqiang Dong | XI Leng | Jianfei Zhao | Xin Sun | Yang Yang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Feng Zhang | Xinhong Ma | Ziqiang Dong | XI Leng | Jianfei Zhao | Xin Sun | Yang Yang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is one of the most widely adopted RLVR algorithms for post-training large language models on reasoning tasks. We first show that GRPO admits an equivalent discriminative reformulation, in which policy optimization maximizes the expected score gap between verified positive and negative rollouts. This reformulation reveals two objective-level limitations: likelihood-misaligned surrogate scores, in which clipped ratio-based scores are optimized rather than the sequence likelihoods that govern generation, and score-insensitive credit assignment, in which rollout-level credit does not reflect the current score gaps between positive and negative rollouts. To address these limitations, we propose ConSPO, a Contrastive Sequence-level Policy Optimization method that uses length-normalized sequence log-probabilities as rollout scores and contrasts verified positive rollouts against negative distractors within the same group. ConSPO optimizes a group-wise InfoNCE-style objective to adaptively strengthen updates for poorly separated positives and high-scoring negatives, together with a curriculum-scheduled margin that preserves separation pressure as training progresses. Experiments across diverse settings show that ConSPO outperforms strong baselines on challenging reasoning benchmarks.
2025
Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models through Aligning Attention Distribution to Information Flow
Jianfei Zhao | Feng Zhang | Xin Sun | Chong Feng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Jianfei Zhao | Feng Zhang | Xin Sun | Chong Feng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Due to the unidirectional masking mechanism, Decoder-Only models propagate information from left to right. LVLMs (Large Vision-Language Models) follow the same architecture, with visual information gradually integrated into semantic representations during forward propagation. Through systematic analysis, we observe that over 80% of the visual information is absorbed into the semantic representations. However, the model’s attention still predominantly focuses on the visual representations. This misalignment between the attention distribution and the actual information flow undermines the model’s visual understanding ability and contributes to hallucinations.To address this issue, we enhance the model’s visual understanding by leveraging the core information embedded in semantic representations. Specifically, we identify attention heads that focus on core semantic representations based on their attention distributions. Then, through a two-stage optimization paradigm, we propagate the advantages of these attention heads across the entire model, aligning the attention distribution with the actual information flow.We evaluate our method on three image captioning benchmarks using five different LVLMs,demonstrating its effectiveness in significantly reducing hallucinations. Further experiments reveal a trade-off between reduced hallucinations and richer details. Notably, our method allows for manual adjustment of the model’s conservativeness, enabling flexible control to meet diverse real-world requirements.