arXiv subjects

Baohua Dong

Publications and source records attributed to Baohua Dong.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

PAC: Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning of LLMs

Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to improve the reasoning abilities of LLMs, while training data span heterogeneous tasks. However, most RL post-training pipelines rely on fixed or manually designed task mixtures, even though task usefulness changes as training progresses. Online curriculum methods often define learnability by update magnitude, ignoring whether the update translates into reward gains, which can misallocate rollout budget toward tasks with large but ineffective updates. We propose PAC, a Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for multi-task RL of LLMs that combines two task-level signals: advantage-derived learnability, which measures the magnitude of the policy update a task can induce, and recent reward gains, which show whether those updates have improved task performance. A Bayesian Thompson Sampling controller uses these signals to allocate rollouts across tasks during GRPO training. We evaluate PAC under two settings: a multi-level reasoning setting and a multi-domain reasoning setting. PAC improves sample efficiency and final performance: it reaches comparable validation scores with fewer rollout steps and achieves higher final averages than random sampling and advantage-based curriculum baselines in both settings. These results show that jointly tracking advantage signals and actual reward gains yields an effective online curriculum for LLM post-training.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

E-Commerce Bench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Long-Horizon Autonomous Business Operation

Long-horizon agentic tasks go beyond chaining short tasks over more interaction turns. Their evolving dynamic environments and long-range dependencies require Large Language Models (LLMs) to continually explore, learn from experience, and adapt their policies over thousands of steps. We introduce E-Commerce Bench, the first open-source benchmark that integrates multi-round counterpart negotiation and dynamic events into a year-long business operation. Over a 365-day year, an LLM agent concurrently runs multiple online stores, researching the market, negotiating with suppliers to source inventory, optimizing sales strategies, fulfilling orders, handling returns, and managing cash flow to maximize its end-of-year total assets. To construct a realistic merchant-side operating environment, the product and supplier data are derived from a real e-commerce platform, while a year-long calendar of promotions, natural disasters, and supply-chain shocks continually reshapes demand. For reproducibility, both sides of the market are deterministic: customer purchases and returns follow a fixed demand model, while a negotiation kernel determines supplier pricing, concessions, and decisions, with an LLM used only to verbalize them. We evaluate 18 frontier models across seven dimensions, including year-end assets, and find that no single model dominates. GPT-5.6 Sol earns the most, growing the 100,000 opening stake into 1,431,425, yet it ranks 16th of 18 on fraud avoidance and trails Fable5 in operational efficiency. Among open-weight models, Qwen3.8-Max-Preview leads with 416,252, 38% above GLM 5.2 (high), and achieves the strongest learning over the horizon, progressively bargaining down prices across repeated orders. Our code is available at https://github.com/QwenLM/E-CommerceBench.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale

Reusable skills let LLM agents package task-specific procedures, tool affordances, and execution guidance into modular building blocks. As skill ecosystems grow to tens of thousands of entries, exposing every skill at inference time becomes infeasible. This creates a skill-routing problem: given a user task, the system must identify relevant skills before downstream planning or execution. Existing agent stacks often rely on progressive disclosure, exposing only skill names and descriptions while hiding the full implementation body. We examine this design choice on a SkillsBench-derived benchmark with approximately 80K candidate skills, targeting the practically important setting of large skill registries with heavy overlap. Across representative dense and reranking baselines on this setting, hiding the skill body causes a 37-44 percentage point drop in routing accuracy. Stronger controls show that the missing signal is body-resident rather than a simple length artifact: body-distilled descriptions recover part of the gap, but remain 7-21 points below direct all-field routing, while a metadata-only encoder trained with the same data remains 14.0 points below its all-field counterpart. Motivated by this finding, we present Skillrouter, a compact 1.2B body-aware retrieve-and-rerank pipeline. Skillrouter achieves 74.0% Hit@1 on our benchmark -- the strongest average top-1 routing performance among the baselines we evaluate -- while using 13$\times$ fewer parameters and running 5.8$\times$ faster than the strongest base pipeline. The ranking gains further generalize to a supplementary benchmark independently constructed from three skill sources. In a complementary end-to-end study across four coding agents, routing gains transfer to improved task success, with larger gains for more capable agents.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

MemTrace: Tracing and Attributing Errors in Large Language Model Memory Systems

Memory is essential for enabling large language models to support long-horizon reasoning, yet existing memory systems remain unreliable and difficult to debug. Tracing memory's dynamic evolution is crucial to understand how information is synthesized, propagated, or corrupted over time. In this work, we study the new problem of error tracing and attribution in LLM memory systems. We propose a novel framework that transforms memory pipelines into executable memory evolution graphs, enabling fine-grained tracing of operational information flow. We then construct MemTraceBench, a benchmark collected from representative memory systems such as Long-Context, RAG, Mem0, and EverMemOS, to systematically study memory failure modes. We further introduce an automatic attribution method that iteratively traces operation subgraphs to pinpoint the root cause of any failed case. Our analysis reveals that memory failures are systematic, stemming from operation-level issues like information loss and retrieval misalignment. Crucially, we leverage these fine-grained attribution signals to guide downstream prompt optimization, establishing a closed-loop system that automatically corrects faults and boosts end-task performance by up to 7.62%. Code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/MemTrace.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Which Tokens Matter? Adaptive Token Selection for RLVR with the Relative Surprisal Index

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful tool for propelling Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond imitation-based training towards more robust reasoning capabilities. Among existing approaches, RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for advancing LLM reasoning. Despite its empirical success, recent studies have offered different insights. One line of inquiry advocates prioritizing high-entropy token positions during training, while another perspective cautions against allowing low-probability tokens to dominate gradient updates. Notably, although high-entropy tokens are usually correlated with low probability, both paradigms empirically yield substantial performance gains. In this work, we argue that evaluating sampled-token probability or entropy in isolation is insufficient to capture the policy optimization dynamics. To resolve this tension, we introduce the Relative Surprisal Index (RSI), a principled, information-theoretic metric that naturally couples the token's entropy with the probability of the selected token. We show that, under mild conditions, RSI is related to the local ratio between the first-order variations of the logit-gradient norm and predictive entropy under a selected-logit perturbation. Building on RSI, we propose RSI Selection (RSI-S), an entropy-adaptive token filtering method that retains tokens within a stable RSI interval. RSI-S successfully reconciles previous contradictory paradigms and filters out both redundant low-surprisal tokens and unstable high-surprisal tail tokens. Empirical evaluations show that RSI-S achieves higher avg@32 accuracy across different model scales (Qwen2.5-1.5B, 3B, and 7B) on AIME and AMC benchmarks: RSI-S improves avg@32 accuracy by 2--3 percentage points over GRPO. Overall, RSI offers a promising perspective for RLVR improvement.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Rethinking Memory as Continuously Evolving Connectivity

Existing memory-augmented LLM agents often treat memory as a static repository with pre-defined representations and fixed retrieval pipelines, which is brittle in dynamic agentic environments where feedback, task variation, and heterogeneous signals continuously reshape what should be remembered and how it should be connected. To address this, we propose FluxMem, a connectivity-evolving memory framework that models memory as a heterogeneous graph and progressively refines its topology through three stages: initial connection formation, feedback-driven refinement, and long-term consolidation. During execution, FluxMem repairs missing links, prunes interference, aligns abstraction granularity, and distills recurrent successful trajectories into reusable procedural circuits, guided by one metric for memory generalizability and evolutionary maturity. Across three fundamentally distinct benchmarks including LoCoMo, Mind2Web, and GAIA, FluxMem achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating strong adaptation and generalization in complex agentic environments. The code will be open-sourced in https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Rubrics to Tokens: Bridging Response-level Rubrics and Token-level Rewards in Instruction Following Tasks

Rubric-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with complex, open-domain instruction following tasks. However, existing methods predominantly rely on response-level rewards, introducing severe reward sparsity and reward ambiguity problems. To address these issues, we propose Rubrics to Tokens (RTT), a novel rubric-based RL framework that bridges coarse response-level scores and fine-grained token-level credit assignment. RTT introduces a Token-Level Relevance Discriminator to predict which tokens in the response are responsible for a specific constraint, and optimizes the policy model via RTT-GRPO, which integrates response-level and token-level advantages within a unified framework. Furthermore, when transitioning from one-dimensional, outcome-level reward to three-dimensional reward space in the token-level rubric-based RL, we propose a novel group normalization method, called Intra-sample Token Group Normalization, to accommodate this shift. Extensive experiments and benchmarks demonstrate that RTT consistently outperforms other baselines in both instruction- and rubric-level accuracy across different models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

SERL: Self-Examining Reinforcement Learning on Open-Domain

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, applying RL to open-domain tasks faces two key challenges: (1) the inherent subjectivity of these tasks prevents the verifiable rewards as required by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR); (2) Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on external reward mechanisms. To overcome these limitations, we propose Self-Examining Reinforcement Learning (SERL), a novel self-improving framework where the LLM serves as both Actor and Judge. SERL introduces two synergistic reward mechanisms without any external signals. On the one hand, to improve the Actor's capability, we derive rewards from Copeland-style pairwise comparison judgments across a group of generated responses. On the other hand, a self-consistency reward that encourages coherent judgments is proposed to improve the Judge's reliability. This process refines the Judge's capability, which in turn provides a more robust reward for Actor. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing self-improvement training methods. SERL improves the LC win rate of Qwen3-8B on AlpacaEval 2 from 52.37% to 59.90%. To the best of our knowledge, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among self-improving approaches. Furthermore, it achieves a performance comparable to significantly larger models like Qwen3-32B, demonstrating superior effectiveness and robustness on open-domain tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Reason from Future: Reverse Thought Chain Enhances LLM Reasoning

It has been demonstrated that carefully designed reasoning paradigms, like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Tree-of-Thought (ToT), can enhance the reasoning capabilities of small language models by detailed thinking and extensive thought searching, unbounded branching factors in the searching space create prohibitive reasoning consumption. However these methods fall into the trap of local optimum reasoning, which means the model lacks a global perspective while solving problems. We propose a novel reasoning paradigm called Reason from Future (RFF), which generates reasoning paths by bidirectional reasoning that combines top-down planning with bottom-up reasoning accumulation. The essence of RFF lies in its reverse reasoning mechanism, which prioritizes core logical relationships and imposes goal-oriented constraints on intermediate steps, thereby reducing the searching space and mitigating error accumulation inherent in sequential forward reasoning. Empirical evaluations across diverse experiments demonstrate that RFF outperforms conventional paradigms with higher accuracy and less searching space to solve complex tasks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Conifer: Improving Complex Constrained Instruction-Following Ability of Large Language Models

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions is crucial to real-world applications. Despite recent advances, several studies have highlighted that LLMs struggle when faced with challenging instructions, especially those that include complex constraints, hindering their effectiveness in various tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce Conifer, a novel instruction tuning dataset, designed to enhance LLMs to follow multi-level instructions with complex constraints. Utilizing GPT-4, we curate the dataset by a series of LLM-driven refinement processes to ensure high quality. We also propose a progressive learning scheme that emphasizes an easy-to-hard progression, and learning from process feedback. Models trained with Conifer exhibit remarkable improvements in instruction-following abilities, especially for instructions with complex constraints. On several instruction-following benchmarks, our 7B model outperforms the state-of-the-art open-source 7B models, even exceeds the performance of models 10 times larger on certain metrics. All the code and Conifer dataset are available at https://www.github.com/ConiferLM/Conifer.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

U-NEED: A Fine-grained Dataset for User Needs-Centric E-commerce Conversational Recommendation

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) aim to understand the information needs and preferences expressed in a dialogue to recommend suitable items to the user. Most of the existing conversational recommendation datasets are synthesized or simulated with crowdsourcing, which has a large gap with real-world scenarios. To bridge the gap, previous work contributes a dataset E-ConvRec, based on pre-sales dialogues between users and customer service staff in E-commerce scenarios. However, E-ConvRec only supplies coarse-grained annotations and general tasks for making recommendations in pre-sales dialogues. Different from that, we use real user needs as a clue to explore the E-commerce conversational recommendation in complex pre-sales dialogues, namely user needs-centric E-commerce conversational recommendation (UNECR). In this paper, we construct a user needs-centric E-commerce conversational recommendation dataset (U-NEED) from real-world E-commerce scenarios. U-NEED consists of 3 types of resources: (i) 7,698 fine-grained annotated pre-sales dialogues in 5 top categories (ii) 333,879 user behaviors and (iii) 332,148 product knowledge tuples. To facilitate the research of UNECR, we propose 5 critical tasks: (i) pre-sales dialogue understanding (ii) user needs elicitation (iii) user needs-based recommendation (iv) pre-sales dialogue generation and (v) pre-sales dialogue evaluation. We establish baseline methods and evaluation metrics for each task. We report experimental results of 5 tasks on U-NEED. We also report results in 3 typical categories. Experimental results indicate that the challenges of UNECR in various categories are different.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

HIE-SQL: History Information Enhanced Network for Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing

Recently, context-dependent text-to-SQL semantic parsing which translates natural language into SQL in an interaction process has attracted a lot of attention. Previous works leverage context-dependence information either from interaction history utterances or the previous predicted SQL queries but fail in taking advantage of both since of the mismatch between natural language and logic-form SQL. In this work, we propose a History Information Enhanced text-to-SQL model (HIE-SQL) to exploit context-dependence information from both history utterances and the last predicted SQL query. In view of the mismatch, we treat natural language and SQL as two modalities and propose a bimodal pre-trained model to bridge the gap between them. Besides, we design a schema-linking graph to enhance connections from utterances and the SQL query to the database schema. We show our history information enhanced methods improve the performance of HIE-SQL by a significant margin, which achieves new state-of-the-art results on the two context-dependent text-to-SQL benchmarks, the SparC and CoSQL datasets, at the writing time.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

On the solutions to weakly coupled system of $\boldsymbol{k_i}$-Hessian equations

In this paper, the existence and multiplicity of nontrivial radial convex solutions to general coupled system of $k_i$-Hessian equations in a unit ball are studied via a fixed-point theorem. In particular, we obtain the uniqueness of nontrivial radial convex solution and nonexistence of nontrivial radial $\boldsymbol{k}$-admissible solution to a power-type system coupled by $k_i$-Hessian equations in a unit ball. Moreover, using a generalized Krein-Rutman theorem, the existence of $\boldsymbol{k}$-admissible solutions to an eigenvalue problem in a general strictly $(k-1)$-convex domain is also obtained.

math.AP↗

arXiv2018

Further Aspects of the Fueter Mapping Theorem

In this paper we first show that for $n$ being even the images of the Fueter mapping, as monogenic functions, like for the odd $n$ cases proved through computation on the pointwise differential operator, are also of the axial type (the Axial Form Theorem). Due to a recent result of B. Dong, K. I. Kou, T. Qian, I. Sabadini (2016), we know that the Fueter mapping is surjective on the set of all left- and right-monogenic functions of the axial type in axial domains (the Surjectivity Theorem). The second part results of this paper address the action of the Fueter mapping on the monomials $f^{(l)}_0(z)=z^l, l=0, \pm 1, \pm 2,...,$ in one complex variable. In generalizing the Fueter and the Sce theorems to the even dimensions $n,$ Qian used the following mapping $τ$ (applicable for odd dimensions as well): $$τ(f^{(-k)}_0)=\mathcal{F}^{-1}((-2π|\cdot |)^{n-1}\mathcal{F}({\vec{f_0^{(-k)}}})), \ \ \ τ(f^{(n-2+k)}_0)=I(τ(f^{(-k)}_0)), $$ where $k$ is any positive integer, $\mathcal{F}$ is the Fourier transformation in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1},$ $I$ is the Kelvin inversion. We show that on the monomials the action of the mapping $τ$ defined through the Kelvin inversion coincides with that of the Fueter mapping defined through the Fourier transform (the Monomial Theorem). In the mentioned 1997 paper this result is proved for the case $n$ being odd integers. The Monomial Theorem further implies that the extended mapping $τ$ on Laurent series of real coefficients is identical with the Fueter mapping defined through pointwise differentiation or the Fourier multiplier.

math.CV↗