Yongcan Yu
Author directory2026
Do MLLMs Really Understand Space? A Mathematical Spatial Reasoning Evaluation
Shuo Lu | Jianjie Cheng | Yinuo Xu | Yongcan Yu | Lijun Sheng | Peijie Wang | Siru Jiang | Yongguan Hu | Lingxiao He | Meng Wang | Qianlong Xie | Xingxing Wang | Ran He | Jian Liang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Shuo Lu | Jianjie Cheng | Yinuo Xu | Yongcan Yu | Lijun Sheng | Peijie Wang | Siru Jiang | Yongguan Hu | Lingxiao He | Meng Wang | Qianlong Xie | Xingxing Wang | Ran He | Jian Liang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on perception-oriented tasks, yet their ability to perform mathematical spatial reasoning, defined as the capacity to parse and manipulate two- and three-dimensional relations, remains unclear. While humans easily master textbook-style spatial problems, current MLLMs exhibit substantially higher error rates, exposing a fundamental weakness in spatial comprehension. To investigate this gap, we present MathSpatial, the first large-scale and systematic dataset resource dedicated to mathematical spatial reasoning in MLLMs. MathSpatial provides two complementary subsets: MathSpatial-Bench (2,000 problems) for evaluating spatial reasoning isolated from perceptual noise, and MathSpatial-Corpus (8,000 problems) equipped with structured reasoning traces for training. Benchmarking 20+ MLLMs reveals a severe deficit: non-reasoning models largely languish below 60% accuracy, and even the strongest reasoning models fall ~16 percentage points behind human performance (96.3%). Crucially, we demonstrate that fine-tuning on MathSpatial-Corpus yields consistent performance gains across model families. MathSpatial provides a vital resource for diagnosing and advancing spatial reasoning in MLLMs. The dataset and related resources are available at https://github.com/shuolucs/MathSpatial.
Understanding and Mitigating Spurious Signal Amplification in Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Math Reasoning
Yongcan Yu | Lingxiao He | Jian Liang | Kuangpu Guo | Meng Wang | Qianlong Xie | Xingxing Wang | Ran He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yongcan Yu | Lingxiao He | Jian Liang | Kuangpu Guo | Meng Wang | Qianlong Xie | Xingxing Wang | Ran He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) always adapts models at inference time via pseudo-labeling, leaving it vulnerable to spurious optimization signals from label noise.Through an empirical study, we observe that responses with medium consistency form an ambiguity region and constitute the primary source of reward noise.Crucially, we find that such spurious signals can be even amplified through group-relative advantage estimation.Motivated by these findings, we propose a unified framework, Debiased and Denoised test-time Reinforcement Learning (DDRL), to mitigate spurious signals.Concretely, DDRL first applies a frequency-based sampling strategy to exclude ambiguous samples while maintaining a balanced set of positive and negative examples.It then adopts a debiased advantage estimation with fixed advantages, removing the bias introduced by group-relative policy optimization.Finally, DDRL incorporates a consensus-based off-policy refinement stage, which leverages the rejection-sampled dataset to enable efficient and stable model updates.Experiments on three large language models across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DDRL consistently outperforms existing TTRL baselines.The code is available at https://github.com/yuyongcan/DDRL.
DualStake: Dual-Path Confidence Calibration in Deep Research Agent
Yinuo Xu | Yuwei Liang | Jianjie Cheng | Meng Wang | Yongcan Yu | Shuo Lu | Jian Liang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yinuo Xu | Yuwei Liang | Jianjie Cheng | Meng Wang | Yongcan Yu | Shuo Lu | Jian Liang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. However, these agents suffer from severe overconfidence, making their expressed confidence unreliable for user trust and downstream abstention. To address this, we augment the Deep Research pipeline with step confidence elicitation after each retrieval, building on the commonly used post-answer verbalized confidence. Interestingly, we find that Evidence Confidence (E-Conf), elicited after the final retrieval step, provides a stronger uncertainty signal than Answer Confidence (A-Conf), elicited after answer generation, and that A-Conf is largely shaped by E-Conf. Based on these findings, we propose DualStake, a dual-path calibration method that applies margin-clipped, confidence-dependent stake rewards to jointly align E-Conf and A-Conf with answer correctness while limiting extreme confidence optimization. Experiments on Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and Qwen3-4B across 8 QA benchmarks demonstrate that DualStake consistently improves calibration without sacrificing answer accuracy.
Supervised Fine-Tuning for Reasoning Large Language Models: A Survey
Yongcan Yu | Kuangpu Guo | Jian Liang | Lingxiao He | Meng Wang | Ran He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yongcan Yu | Kuangpu Guo | Jian Liang | Lingxiao He | Meng Wang | Ran He
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large reasoning models have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks, where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on long chain-of-thought data serves as a crucial foundation for eliciting and enhancing their reasoning abilities. Despite rapid progress in both improving and analyzing reasoning-oriented SFT, the field still lacks a systematic survey that consolidates its fast-growing literature. To fill this gap, we present a comprehensive review of recent advancements in reasoning SFT, examining the literature through the dual lenses of methodological design and analytical investigation. First, we review methodological improvements across the SFT pipeline and categorize them into data-centric approaches and algorithm-centric innovations. Second, we reorganize analytical studies along three dimensions: data characteristics, optimization dynamics, and mechanistic insights. Finally, by synthesizing current research focuses and remaining bottlenecks, we outline promising future directions for reasoning SFT. We hope this survey deepens the understanding of reasoning SFT and paves the way for advanced reasoning models.