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Bing Yin

Publications and source records attributed to Bing Yin.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

BackPlay: Head-Only Look-Back Self-Correction for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) decode multiple tokens in parallel, but aggressive multi-token decoding amplifies cross-token dependency errors and can sharply degrade generation quality. We propose BackPlay, a frozen-backbone self-correction framework that trains only a lightweight correction head on a finetuned DLM without updating any backbone or adapter parameters. Because the head is trained on errors produced by the same frozen generator used at inference time, its training distribution aligns with the error patterns of the deployed model. We further introduce Look-back Correction, a training mechanism that injects predictions from earlier, more corrupted denoising states into later, richer contexts, enabling the head to leverage later context to detect mistakes made in earlier generation steps. During inference, BackPlay periodically revisits previously generated tokens through selective remasking and regeneration to limit error accumulation. Across mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks, BackPlay improves the speed--quality trade-off of the underlying DLM under multi-token decoding.

cs.LG↗

SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding

Session history is a common way of recording user interacting behaviors throughout a browsing activity with multiple products. For example, if an user clicks a product webpage and then leaves, it might because there are certain features that don't satisfy the user, which serve as an important indicator of on-the-spot user preferences. However, all prior works fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used. There is also a lack of data and corresponding benchmark for explicitly modeling intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions. To address these issues, we introduce the concept of an intention tree and propose a dataset curation pipeline. Together, we construct a sibling multimodal benchmark, SessionIntentBench, that evaluates L(V)LMs' capability on understanding inter-session intention shift with four subtasks. With 1,952,177 intention entries, 1,132,145 session intention trajectories, and 13,003,664 available tasks mined using 10,905 sessions, we provide a scalable way to exploit the existing session data for customer intention understanding. We conduct human annotations to collect ground-truth label for a subset of collected data to form an evaluation gold set. Extensive experiments on the annotated data further confirm that current L(V)LMs fail to capture and utilize the intention across the complex session setting. Further analysis show injecting intention enhances LLMs' performances.

cs.CL↗

Dictionary-Aligned Concept Control for Safeguarding Multimodal LLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been shown to be vulnerable to malicious queries that can elicit unsafe responses. Recent work uses prompt engineering, response classification, or finetuning to improve MLLM safety. Nevertheless, such approaches are often ineffective against evolving malicious patterns, may require rerunning the query, or demand heavy computational resources. Steering the activations of a frozen model at inference time has recently emerged as a flexible and effective solution. However, existing steering methods for MLLMs typically handle only a narrow set of safety-related concepts or struggle to adjust specific concepts without affecting others. To address these challenges, we introduce Dictionary-Aligned Concept Control (DACO), a framework that utilizes a curated concept dictionary and a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) to provide granular control over MLLM activations. First, we curate a dictionary of 15,000 multimodal concepts by retrieving over 400,000 caption-image stimuli and summarizing their activations into concept directions. We name the dataset DACO-400K. Second, we show that the curated dictionary can be used to intervene activations via sparse coding. Third, we propose a new steering approach that uses our dictionary to initialize the training of an SAE and automatically annotate the semantics of the SAE atoms for safeguarding MLLMs. Experiments on multiple MLLMs (e.g., QwenVL, LLaVA, InternVL) across safety benchmarks (e.g., MM-SafetyBench, JailBreakV) show that DACO significantly improves MLLM safety while maintaining general-purpose capabilities.

cs.LG↗

Controllable and Verifiable Tool-Use Data Synthesis for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Existing synthetic tool-use corpora are primarily designed for offline supervised fine-tuning, yet reinforcement learning (RL) requires executable environments that support reward-checkable online rollouts. We propose COVERT, a two-stage pipeline that first generates reliable base tool-use trajectories through self-evolving synthesis with multi-level validation, and then applies oracle-preserving augmentations that systematically increase environmental complexity. These augmentations introduce distractor tools, indirect or ambiguous user queries, and noisy, multi-format, or erroneous tool outputs, while strictly preserving oracle tool calls and final answers as ground truth. This design enables automatic reward computation via reference matching for standard cases and lightweight judge-assisted verification for special behaviors such as error detection, supporting RL optimization of tool-calling policies. On Qwen2.5-Instruct-14B, COVERT-RL improves overall accuracy on BFCL v3 from 56.5 to 59.9 and on ACEBench from 53.0 to 59.3, with minimal regressions on general-ability benchmarks; when stacked on SFT, it further reaches 62.1 and 61.8, confirming additive gains. These results suggest that oracle-preserving synthetic environments offer a practical RL refinement stage, complementary to SFT, for improving tool-use robustness under ambiguity and unreliable tool feedback.

cs.AI↗

Training LLMs for Multi-Step Tool Orchestration with Constrained Data Synthesis and Graduated Rewards

Multi-step tool orchestration remains challenging for LLMs, as state-of-the-art models frequently fail on full sequence execution due to parameter errors. Training for these workflows faces two obstacles: the lack of environments supporting complex real-world API dependencies, and sparse binary rewards that provide no signal for partial correctness. We propose a reinforcement learning framework addressing both challenges. First, we construct a deterministic environment backed by a large-scale cache of real API responses, enabling constrained synthesis of valid multi-step traces with controllable complexity. Second, we introduce a graduated reward that decomposes correctness into atomic validity (call-level correctness at increasing granularity) and orchestration consistency (correct sequencing with dependency respect). On ComplexFuncBench, our approach substantially improves turn accuracy, with ablations confirming both reward components are essential. Cross-benchmark evaluation on BFCL v4 shows that the learned orchestration skills transfer to entirely different API ecosystems (e.g., agentic web search and memory management), yielding consistent gains while maintaining stable single-step performance. Code is available at https://github.com/horizon-rl/ToolOrchestrationReward

cs.LG↗

TDATR: Improving End-to-End Table Recognition via Table Detail-Aware Learning and Cell-Level Visual Alignment

Tables are pervasive in diverse documents, making table recognition (TR) a fundamental task in document analysis. Existing modular TR pipelines separately model table structure and content, leading to suboptimal integration and complex workflows. End-to-end approaches rely heavily on large-scale TR data and struggle in data-constrained scenarios. To address these issues, we propose TDATR (Table Detail-Aware Table Recognition) improves end-to-end TR through table detail-aware learning and cell-level visual alignment. TDATR adopts a ``perceive-then-fuse'' strategy. The model first performs table detail-aware learning to jointly perceive table structure and content through multiple structure understanding and content recognition tasks designed under a language modeling paradigm. These tasks can naturally leverage document data from diverse scenarios to enhance model robustness. The model then integrates implicit table details to generate structured HTML outputs, enabling more efficient TR modeling when trained with limited data. Furthermore, we design a structure-guided cell localization module integrated into the end-to-end TR framework, which efficiently locates cell and strengthens vision-language alignment. It enhances the interpretability and accuracy of TR. We achieve state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance on seven benchmarks without dataset-specific fine-tuning.

cs.CV↗

Stepwise Penalization for Length-Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large reasoning models improve with more test-time computation, but often overthink, producing unnecessarily long chains-of-thought that raise cost without improving accuracy. Prior reinforcement learning approaches typically rely on a single outcome reward with trajectory-level length penalties, which cannot distinguish essential from redundant reasoning steps and therefore yield blunt compression. Although recent work incorporates step-level signals, such as offline pruning, supervised data construction, or verifier-based intermediate rewards, reasoning length is rarely treated as an explicit step-level optimization objective during RL. We propose Step-wise Adaptive Penalization (SWAP), a fine-grained framework that allocates length reduction across steps based on intrinsic contribution. We estimate step importance from the model's on-policy log-probability improvement toward the correct answer, then treat excess length as a penalty mass redistributed to penalize low-importance steps more heavily while preserving high-importance reasoning. We optimize with a unified outcome-process advantage within group-relative policy optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SWAP reduces reasoning length by 64.3% on average while improving accuracy by 5.7% relative to the base model.

cs.CL↗

REST: Diffusion-based Real-time End-to-end Streaming Talking Head Generation via ID-Context Caching and Asynchronous Streaming Distillation

Diffusion models have significantly advanced the field of talking head generation (THG). However, slow inference speeds and prevalent non-autoregressive paradigms severely constrain the application of diffusion-based THG models. In this study, we propose REST, a pioneering diffusion-based, real-time, end-to-end streaming audio-driven talking head generation framework. To support real-time end-to-end generation, a compact video latent space is first learned through a spatiotemporal variational autoencoder with a high compression ratio. Additionally, to enable semi-autoregressive streaming within the compact video latent space, we introduce an ID-Context Cache mechanism, which integrates ID-Sink and Context-Cache principles into key-value caching for maintaining identity consistency and temporal coherence during long-term streaming generation. Furthermore, an Asynchronous Streaming Distillation (ASD) strategy is proposed to mitigate error accumulation and enhance temporal consistency in streaming generation, leveraging a non-streaming teacher with an asynchronous noise schedule to supervise the streaming student. REST bridges the gap between autoregressive and diffusion-based approaches, achieving a breakthrough in efficiency for applications requiring real-time THG. Experimental results demonstrate that REST outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both generation speed and overall performance.

cs.CV↗

Rethinking Popularity Bias in Collaborative Filtering via Analytical Vector Decomposition

Popularity bias fundamentally undermines the personalization capabilities of collaborative filtering (CF) models, causing them to disproportionately recommend popular items while neglecting users' genuine preferences for niche content. While existing approaches treat this as an external confounding factor, we reveal that popularity bias is an intrinsic geometric artifact of Bayesian Pairwise Ranking (BPR) optimization in CF models. Through rigorous mathematical analysis, we prove that BPR systematically organizes item embeddings along a dominant "popularity direction" where embedding magnitudes directly correlate with interaction frequency. This geometric distortion forces user embeddings to simultaneously handle two conflicting tasks-expressing genuine preference and calibrating against global popularity-trapping them in suboptimal configurations that favor popular items regardless of individual tastes. We propose Directional Decomposition and Correction (DDC), a universally applicable framework that surgically corrects this embedding geometry through asymmetric directional updates. DDC guides positive interactions along personalized preference directions while steering negative interactions away from the global popularity direction, disentangling preference from popularity at the geometric source. Extensive experiments across multiple BPR-based architectures demonstrate that DDC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art debiasing methods, reducing training loss to less than 5% of heavily-tuned baselines while achieving superior recommendation quality and fairness. Code is available in https://github.com/LingFeng-Liu-AI/DDC.

cs.IR↗

Breaking Model Lock-in: Cost-Efficient Zero-Shot LLM Routing via a Universal Latent Space

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a fragmented and inefficient ecosystem, a state of ``model lock-in'' where seamlessly integrating novel models remains a significant bottleneck. Current routing frameworks require exhaustive, costly retraining, hindering scalability and adaptability. We introduce ZeroRouter, a new paradigm for LLM routing that breaks this lock-in. Our approach is founded on a universal latent space, a model-agnostic representation of query difficulty that fundamentally decouples the characterization of a query from the profiling of a model. This allows for zero-shot onboarding of new models without full-scale retraining. ZeroRouter features a context-aware predictor that maps queries to this universal space and a dual-mode optimizer that balances accuracy, cost, and latency. Our framework consistently outperforms all baselines, delivering higher accuracy at lower cost and latency.

cs.LG↗

DocR1: Evidence Page-Guided GRPO for Multi-Page Document Understanding

Understanding multi-page documents poses a significant challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as it requires fine-grained visual comprehension and multi-hop reasoning across pages. While prior work has explored reinforcement learning (RL) for enhancing advanced reasoning in MLLMs, its application to multi-page document understanding remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce DocR1, an MLLM trained with a novel RL framework, Evidence Page-Guided GRPO (EviGRPO). EviGRPO incorporates an evidence-aware reward mechanism that promotes a coarse-to-fine reasoning strategy, guiding the model to first retrieve relevant pages before generating answers. This training paradigm enables us to build high-quality models with limited supervision. To support this, we design a two-stage annotation pipeline and a curriculum learning strategy, based on which we construct two datasets: EviBench, a high-quality training set with 4.8k examples, and ArxivFullQA, an evaluation benchmark with 8.6k QA pairs based on scientific papers. Extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that DocR1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-page tasks, while consistently maintaining strong results on single-page benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

Binary-Gaussian: Compact and Progressive Representation for 3D Gaussian Segmentation

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has emerged as an efficient 3D representation and a promising foundation for semantic tasks like segmentation. However, existing 3D-GS-based segmentation methods typically rely on high-dimensional category features, which introduce substantial memory overhead. Moreover, fine-grained segmentation remains challenging due to label space congestion and the lack of stable multi-granularity control mechanisms. To address these limitations, we propose a coarse-to-fine binary encoding scheme for per-Gaussian category representation, which compresses each feature into a single integer via the binary-to-decimal mapping, drastically reducing memory usage. We further design a progressive training strategy that decomposes panoptic segmentation into a series of independent sub-tasks, reducing inter-class conflicts and thereby enhancing fine-grained segmentation capability. Additionally, we fine-tune opacity during segmentation training to address the incompatibility between photometric rendering and semantic segmentation, which often leads to foreground-background confusion. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance while significantly reducing memory consumption and accelerating inference.

cs.CV↗

READ: Real-time and Efficient Asynchronous Diffusion for Audio-driven Talking Head Generation

The introduction of diffusion models has brought significant advances to the field of audio-driven talking head generation. However, the extremely slow inference speed severely limits the practical implementation of diffusion-based talking head generation models. In this study, we propose READ, a real-time diffusion-transformer-based talking head generation framework. Our approach first learns a spatiotemporal highly compressed video latent space via a temporal VAE, significantly reducing the token count to accelerate generation. To achieve better audio-visual alignment within this compressed latent space, a pre-trained Speech Autoencoder (SpeechAE) is proposed to generate temporally compressed speech latent codes corresponding to the video latent space. These latent representations are then modeled by a carefully designed Audio-to-Video Diffusion Transformer (A2V-DiT) backbone for efficient talking head synthesis. Furthermore, to ensure temporal consistency and accelerated inference in extended generation, we propose a novel asynchronous noise scheduler (ANS) for both the training and inference processes of our framework. The ANS leverages asynchronous add-noise and asynchronous motion-guided generation in the latent space, ensuring consistency in generated video clips. Experimental results demonstrate that READ outperforms state-of-the-art methods by generating competitive talking head videos with significantly reduced runtime, achieving an optimal balance between quality and speed while maintaining robust metric stability in long-time generation.

cs.GR↗

Self-Rewarding PPO: Aligning Large Language Models with Demonstrations Only

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has emerged as a crucial method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human-annotated demonstrations. However, SFT, being an off-policy approach similar to behavior cloning, often struggles with overfitting and poor out-of-domain generalization, especially in limited-data scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose Self-Rewarding PPO, a novel fine-tuning method that leverages on-policy techniques to enhance generalization performance. Our approach combines the strengths of SFT and proximal policy optimization (PPO) to achieve more effective alignment from demonstration data. At its core is a reward function designed as the log policy ratio between the SFT model and the pretrained base model. This function serves as an implicit reward signal, using the pretrained policy as a baseline and the SFT policy as a target. By doing so, it enables on-policy fine-tuning without relying on human preference annotations. The integration of this self-rewarding mechanism with PPO addresses key limitations of SFT, improving generalization, data efficiency, and robustness. Our empirical evaluation across a range of natural language processing tasks demonstrates that Self-Rewarding PPO consistently outperforms traditional SFT methods. The results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in aligning LLMs using demonstration data, particularly in scenarios where high-quality annotated data is scarce.

cs.CL↗

WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning

While reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing large language models (LLMs), it has primarily focused on single-turn tasks such as solving math problems. Training effective web agents for multi-turn interactions remains challenging due to the complexity of long-horizon decision-making across dynamic web interfaces. In this work, we present WebAgent-R1, a simple yet effective end-to-end multi-turn RL framework for training web agents. It learns directly from online interactions with web environments by asynchronously generating diverse trajectories, entirely guided by binary rewards depending on task success. Experiments on the WebArena-Lite benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of WebAgent-R1, boosting the task success rate of Qwen-2.5-3B from 6.1% to 33.9% and Llama-3.1-8B from 8.5% to 44.8%, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods and strong proprietary models such as OpenAI o3. In-depth analyses reveal the effectiveness of the thinking-based prompting strategy and test-time scaling through increased interactions for web tasks. We further investigate different RL initialization policies by introducing two variants, namely WebAgent-R1-Zero and WebAgent-R1-CoT, which highlight the importance of the warm-up training stage (i.e., behavior cloning) and provide insights on incorporating long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in web agents.

cs.CL↗

Improving Sampling Efficiency in RLVR through Adaptive Rollout and Response Reuse

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive reasoning performance, with reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) emerging as a standard paradigm for post-training. A representative algorithm, group relative policy optimization (GRPO) (Shao et al., 2024), computes advantages by normalizing outcome rewards within response groups, but suffers from a vanishing advantage issue when all responses in a group receive identical rewards. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Rollout and Response Reuse Policy Optimization (AR3PO), a sampling efficient RLVR algorithm that introduces two novel techniques: adaptive rollout, which dynamically allocates more responses to difficult prompts while saving computation on easier ones, and response reuse, which leverages previously generated correct responses to provide useful training signals. We compare AR3PO with strong RLVR baselines on multiple representative benchmarks using two different families of base models. Across the 7B and 8B models, AR3PO consistently outperforms GRPO and matches or surpasses DAPO (Yu et al., 2025), reducing rollout cost by up to 4.2x. On the larger 32B model, AR3PO achieves comparable performance to DAPO at similar training steps while maintaining substantially lower rollout cost.

cs.LG↗

Improving Large Language Models Function Calling and Interpretability via Guided-Structured Templates

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning and tool-use capabilities, yet they often fail in real-world tool-interactions due to incorrect parameterization, poor tool selection, or misinterpretation of user intent. These issues often stem from an incomplete understanding of user goals and inadequate comprehension of tool documentation. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven effective for enhancing reasoning in general contexts, our analysis reveals that free-form CoT is insufficient and sometimes counterproductive for structured function-calling tasks. To address this, we introduce a curriculum-inspired framework that leverages structured reasoning templates to guide LLMs through more deliberate step-by-step instructions for generating function callings. Experimental results show that our method reduces tool-use errors, achieving 3-12% relative improvements over strong baselines across diverse model series and approaches. Moreover, our framework enhances the robustness, interpretability, and transparency of tool-using agents, advancing the development of more reliable AI assistants for real-world applications.

cs.AI↗

Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions?

Despite significant achievements in improving the instruction-following capabilities of large language models (LLMs), the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge. Real-world scenarios often require consistency across multiple instructions over time, such as secret privacy, personal preferences, and prioritization, which demand sophisticated abilities to integrate multiple turns and carefully balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict. This work presents a systematic investigation of LLMs' capabilities in handling multiple turns of instructions, covering three levels of difficulty: (1) retrieving information from instructions, (2) tracking and reasoning across turns, and (3) resolving conflicts among instructions. We construct MultiTurnInstruct~with $\sim$1.1K high-quality multi-turn conversations through the human-in-the-loop approach and result in nine capability categories, including statics and dynamics, reasoning, and multitasking. Our finding reveals an intriguing trade-off between different capabilities. While GPT models demonstrate superior memorization, they show reduced effectiveness in privacy-protection tasks requiring selective information withholding. Larger models exhibit stronger reasoning capabilities but still struggle with resolving conflicting instructions. Importantly, these performance gaps cannot be attributed solely to information loss, as models demonstrate strong BLEU scores on memorization tasks. Still, their attention mechanisms fail to integrate multiple related instructions effectively. These findings highlight critical areas for improvement in complex real-world tasks involving multi-turn instructions. Data and codes are released at https://github.com/Glaciohound/Multi-Turn-Instruct.

cs.CL↗