Yutao Sun
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2026
Token-Disentangled Latent Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Reasoning
Hao-Xuan Ma | Yihao Liu | Yutao Sun | Yanting Miao | Mengyu Zhou | YiCheng Xiao | Long Chen | Zhenguo Li | Han-Jia Ye | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Hao-Xuan Ma | Yihao Liu | Yutao Sun | Yanting Miao | Mengyu Zhou | YiCheng Xiao | Long Chen | Zhenguo Li | Han-Jia Ye | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Latent test-time scaling improves reasoning by refining hidden states during inference, but existing methods typically apply a single scalar reward to all editable latent tokens. For multimodal large language models, this global update ignores that generated tokens play different roles: some are sensitive to visual evidence, while others correspond to uncertain reasoning decisions. We present Token-Disentangled Latent Test-Time Scaling, an inference-time framework that makes latent refinement token-role-aware. Starting from an initial generated trajectory, we optimize a short hidden-state prefix while routing perception-side visual feedback to image-sensitive tokens and reasoning feedback to high-entropy tokens. Tokens selected by neither route are constrained by an anchor regularizer. Across six multimodal reasoning benchmarks and two frozen MLLM backbones, our method consistently improves over the initial chain-of-thought rollout: macro accuracy increases from 66.38 to 68.95 on Qwen2.5-VL-7B and from 67.93 to 69.44 on InternVL3.5-8B. These results show that token-disentangled latent refinement is an effective strategy for multimodal test-time scaling and remains competitive with output-space test-time scaling baselines.
DYNAMO: Dynamic Skill-Tool Evolution for Vision-Language Agents
Yutao Sun | Yanting Miao | Hao-Xuan Ma | Mengyu Zhou | Mingshuai Chen | Tiancheng Zhao | Dexin Wang | Lei Lv | Li Xu | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yutao Sun | Yanting Miao | Hao-Xuan Ma | Mengyu Zhou | Mingshuai Chen | Tiancheng Zhao | Dexin Wang | Lei Lv | Li Xu | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Improving vision-language models (VLMs) on visual reasoning typically requires retraining or hand-designed prompts and tools. We present Dynamo, a training-free framework that adapts a frozen VLM without any weight updates. On a small labeled training subset, the agent inspects its own correct and incorrect attempts and evolves two complementary capabilities: reusable reasoning skills for cognitive bottlenecks, and executable visual tools for perceptual ones. Each generated tool is paired with a skill that specifies when to invoke it, and both capability types accumulate in a persistent library. Across four visual reasoning benchmarks and five VLM backbones, Dynamo improves direct inference on all 20 model–benchmark settings (avg. +5.6 acc). When the tool set is given in advance, the framework learns when to call each tool, and per-step tool choice improves on every tested backbone. Against task-specific RL (VTool-R1, DeepEyes), Dynamo closes 65–99% of the RL gap at a fraction of the compute, and combines additively with RL when available.
Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills
Jingwei Ni | Yihao Liu | Xinpeng Liu | Yutao Sun | Mengyu Zhou | Pengyu Cheng | Dexin Wang | Erchao Zhao | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jingwei Ni | Yihao Liu | Xinpeng Liu | Yutao Sun | Mengyu Zhou | Pengyu Cheng | Dexin Wang | Erchao Zhao | Xiaoxi Jiang | Guanjun Jiang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on domain-specific skills, yet manually authoring such skills does not scale, and skills generated purely from parametric knowledge often miss critical operational pitfalls. We introduce Trace2Skill, a framework that consolidates broad execution trajectories in parallel into a unified skill directory through inductive reasoning over agent experience. Trace2Skill supports both deepening existing human-written skills and creating useful skills from weak LLM-generated drafts. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Trace2Skill across diverse domains, including office workflows, math reasoning, and vision QA. Importantly, the evolved skills are not merely memorized artifacts of the trajectories used to create them: they often transfer across model scales, across model families, and to out-of-distribution settings. For example, skills evolved from Qwen3.5-35B trajectories improve a Qwen3.5-122B agent by up to 57.65 percentage points on WikiTableQuestions. Further analyses show that Trace2Skill outperforms sequential skill editing and ReasoningBank-style retrieval memories, compresses recurring failures and workarounds into standard operating procedures (SoPs), and yields portable skills that can be reused without parameter updates or test-time retrieval.
2025
The Self-Improvement Paradox: Can Language Models Bootstrap Reasoning Capabilities without External Scaffolding?
Yutao Sun | Mingshuai Chen | Tiancheng Zhao | Ruochen Xu | Zilun Zhang | Jianwei Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Yutao Sun | Mingshuai Chen | Tiancheng Zhao | Ruochen Xu | Zilun Zhang | Jianwei Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Self-improving large language models (LLMs) – i.e., to improve the performance of an LLM by fine-tuning it with synthetic data generated by itself – is a promising way to advance the capabilities of LLMs while avoiding extensive supervision. Existing approaches to self-improvement often rely on external supervision signals in the form of seed data and/or assistance from third-party models. This paper presents Crescent – a simple yet effective framework for generating high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. Crescent first elicits the LLM to generate raw questions via a bait prompt, then diversifies these questions leveraging a rejection sampling-based self-deduplication, and finally feeds the questions to the LLM and collects the corresponding answers by means of majority voting. We show that Crescent sheds light on the potential of true self-improvement with zero external supervision signals for math reasoning; in particular, Crescent-generated question-answer pairs suffice to (i) improve the reasoning capabilities of an LLM while preserving its general performance (especially in the 0-shot setting); and (ii) distill LLM knowledge to weaker models more effectively than existing methods based on seed-dataset augmentation.