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Guojun Yin

Publications and source records attributed to Guojun Yin.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

ResT: Reshaping Token-Level Policy Gradients for Tool-Use Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) transcend passive generation and act as goal-directed agents by invoking external tools. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled framework for optimizing these emergent tool-use policies, yet the prevailing paradigm relies exclusively on sparse outcome rewards and lacks consideration of the particularity of tool-use tasks, inflating policy-gradient variance and resulting in inefficient training. To better understand and address these challenges, we first establish a theoretical link between policy entropy and training stability of tool-use tasks, which reveals that structured, low-entropy tokens are primary determinants of rewards. Motivated by this insight, we propose \textbf{Res}haped \textbf{T}oken-level policy gradients (\textbf{ResT}) for tool-use tasks. ResT reshapes the policy gradient through entropy-informed token reweighting, progressively upweighting reasoning tokens as training proceeds. This entropy-aware scheme enables a smooth shift from structural correctness to semantic reasoning and stabilizes convergence in multi-turn tool-use tasks. Evaluation on BFCL and API-Bank shows that ResT achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming prior methods by up to $8.76\%$. When fine-tuned on a 4B base LLM, ResT further surpasses GPT-4o by $4.11\%$ on single-turn tasks and $1.50\%$ on multi-turn base tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/1229095296/ResT_Tool_use_LLM.git.

cs.CL↗

Rethinking Personalization in Large Language Models at the Token Level

With large language models (LLMs) now performing strongly across diverse tasks, there is growing demand for them to personalize outputs for individual users. Personalization is typically framed as an additional layer on top of a base NLP task, requiring model responses to meet user-specific needs while still accomplishing the underlying task. From a token-level perspective, different tokens in a response contribute to personalization to varying degrees. Tokens with higher personalization relevance should therefore receive greater emphasis when developing personalized LLMs. However, accurately estimating such personalization degrees remains challenging. To address this challenge, we propose PerContrast, a self-contrast method that estimates each output token's dependence on user-specific information through causal intervention. Building on this mechanism, we develop the PerCE loss, which adaptively upweights tokens with higher estimated personalization degrees during training via a bootstrap procedure, enabling the model to alternate between estimating and optimizing these tokens. Experiments on multiple LLMs demonstrate that PerCE substantially improves personalization performance with minimal additional cost, achieving average gains of over 10% and up to 68.04% on the LongLaMP dataset, along with strong cross-task and cross-scenario transferability. These results highlight the importance of token-level personalization modeling and establish token-aware training as a simple yet effective paradigm for advancing personalized LLMs.

cs.CL↗

Your Group-Relative Advantage Is Biased

Reinforcement Learning from Verifier Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a widely used approach for post-training large language models on reasoning tasks, with group-based methods such as GRPO and its variants gaining broad adoption. These methods rely on group-relative advantage estimation to avoid learned critics, yet its theoretical properties remain poorly understood. In this work, we uncover a fundamental issue of group-based RL: the group-relative advantage estimator is inherently biased relative to the true (expected) advantage. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that it systematically underestimates advantages for hard prompts and overestimates them for easy prompts, leading to imbalanced exploration and exploitation. To address this issue, we propose History-Aware Adaptive Difficulty Weighting (HA-DW), an adaptive reweighting scheme that adjusts advantage estimates based on an evolving difficulty anchor and training dynamics. Both theoretical analysis and experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that HA-DW consistently improves performance when integrated into GRPO and its variants. Our results suggest that correcting biased advantage estimation is critical for robust and efficient RLVR training.

cs.LG↗

AWPO: Enhancing Tool-Use of Large Language Models through Adaptive Integration of Reasoning Rewards

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise in training tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) using verifiable outcome rewards, existing methods largely overlook the potential of reasoning rewards based on chain-of-thought quality for better tool utilization. Furthermore, naïvely combining reasoning and outcome rewards may yield suboptimal performance or conflict with the primary optimization objective. To address this, we propose Advantage-Weighted Policy Optimization (AWPO), a principled RL framework that adaptively integrates reasoning rewards into advantage estimation to improve tool-use performance. AWPO incorporates variance-aware gating and difficulty-aware weighting to adaptively modulate advantages from reasoning signals based on group-relative statistics, alongside a tailored clipping mechanism for stable optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AWPO achieves state-of-the-art performance across standard tool-use benchmarks, significantly outperforming strong baselines and leading closed-source models in challenging multi-turn scenarios. Notably, with exceptional parameter efficiency, our 4B model surpasses Grok-4 by $16.0\%$ in multi-turn accuracy while preserving generalization capability on the out-of-distribution MMLU-Pro benchmark.

cs.CL↗

ToolForge: A Data Synthesis Pipeline for Multi-Hop Search without Real-World APIs

Training LLMs to invoke tools and leverage retrieved information necessitates high-quality, diverse data. However, existing pipelines for synthetic data generation often rely on tens of thousands of real API calls to enhance generalization, incurring prohibitive costs while lacking multi-hop reasoning and self-reflection. To address these limitations, we introduce ToolForge, an automated synthesis framework that achieves strong real-world tool-calling performance by constructing only a small number of virtual tools, eliminating the need for real API calls. ToolForge leverages a (question, golden context, answer) triple to synthesize large-scale tool-learning data specifically designed for multi-hop search scenarios, further enriching the generated data through multi-hop reasoning and self-reflection mechanisms. To ensure data fidelity, we employ a Multi-Layer Validation Framework that integrates both rule-based and model-based assessments. Empirical results show that a model with only 8B parameters, when trained on our synthesized data, outperforms GPT-4o on multiple benchmarks. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Buycar-arb/ToolForge .

cs.AI↗

From Experience to Strategy: Empowering LLM Agents with Trainable Graph Memory

Large Language Models (LLMs) based agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in autonomous task-solving across complex, open-ended environments. A promising approach for improving the reasoning capabilities of LLM agents is to better utilize prior experiences in guiding current decisions. However, LLMs acquire experience either through implicit memory via training, which suffers from catastrophic forgetting and limited interpretability, or explicit memory via prompting, which lacks adaptability. In this paper, we introduce a novel agent-centric, trainable, multi-layered graph memory framework and evaluate how context memory enhances the ability of LLMs to utilize parametric information. The graph abstracts raw agent trajectories into structured decision paths in a state machine and further distills them into high-level, human-interpretable strategic meta-cognition. In order to make memory adaptable, we propose a reinforcement-based weight optimization procedure that estimates the empirical utility of each meta-cognition based on reward feedback from downstream tasks. These optimized strategies are then dynamically integrated into the LLM agent's training loop through meta-cognitive prompting. Empirically, the learnable graph memory delivers robust generalization, improves LLM agents' strategic reasoning performance, and provides consistent benefits during Reinforcement Learning (RL) training.

cs.CL↗

MTIR-SQL: Multi-turn Tool-Integrated Reasoning Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in Text-to-SQL tasks, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a common method for improving performance. Existing methods primarily rely on static execution feedback, which restricts real-time error correction. However, integrating multi-turn tool invocation along with dynamic feedback could significantly improve adaptability and robustness, ultimately enhancing model performance. To address these issues, we propose MTIR-SQL, an innovative Multi-turn Tool-Integrated Reasoning reinforcement learning framework for Text-to-SQL. Our approach introduces an execution-aware multi-turn reasoning paradigm that seamlessly incorporates database execution feedback at each reasoning step, enabling context-sensitive query generation and progressive refinement throughout the reasoning process. The framework extends the GRPO algorithm to accommodate complex multi-turn interaction scenarios. Considering the training instability characteristics of MTIR and the potential for significant Deviation of model distribution from the initial model, we enhance the GRPO algorithm by adding a trajectory filtering mechanism and removing KL loss constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that MTIR-SQL, with 4B parameters, achieves \textbf{64.4}\% accuracy in the BIRD Dev and 84.6% execution accuracy in the SPIDER Dev, significantly outperforming existing approaches.

cs.AI↗

ViPER: Empowering the Self-Evolution of Visual Perception Abilities in Vision-Language Model

The limited capacity for fine-grained visual perception presents a critical bottleneck for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in real-world applications. Addressing this is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality data and the limitations of existing methods: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often compromises general capabilities, while reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) prioritizes textual reasoning over visual perception. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel two-stage task that structures visual perception learning as a coarse-to-fine progressive process. Based on this task formulation, we develop ViPER, a self-bootstrapping framework specifically designed to enable iterative evolution through self-critiquing and self-prediction. By synergistically integrating image-level and instance-level reconstruction with a two-stage reinforcement learning strategy, ViPER establishes a closed-loop training paradigm, where internally synthesized data directly fuel the enhancement of perceptual ability. Applied to the Qwen2.5-VL family, ViPER produces the Qwen-Viper series. With an average gain of 1.7% on seven comprehensive benchmarks spanning various tasks and up to 6.0% on fine-grained perception, Qwen-Viper consistently demonstrates superior performance across different vision-language scenarios while maintaining generalizability. Beyond enabling self-improvement in perceptual capabilities, ViPER provides concrete evidence for the reciprocal relationship between generation and understanding, a breakthrough to developing more autonomous and capable VLMs.

cs.CV↗

Beyond Static Testbeds: An Interaction-Centric Agent Simulation Platform for Dynamic Recommender Systems

Evaluating and iterating upon recommender systems is crucial, yet traditional A/B testing is resource-intensive, and offline methods struggle with dynamic user-platform interactions. While agent-based simulation is promising, existing platforms often lack a mechanism for user actions to dynamically reshape the environment. To bridge this gap, we introduce RecInter, a novel agent-based simulation platform for recommender systems featuring a robust interaction mechanism. In RecInter platform, simulated user actions (e.g., likes, reviews, purchases) dynamically update item attributes in real-time, and introduced Merchant Agents can reply, fostering a more realistic and evolving ecosystem. High-fidelity simulation is ensured through Multidimensional User Profiling module, Advanced Agent Architecture, and LLM fine-tuned on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) enriched interaction data. Our platform achieves significantly improved simulation credibility and successfully replicates emergent phenomena like Brand Loyalty and the Matthew Effect. Experiments demonstrate that this interaction mechanism is pivotal for simulating realistic system evolution, establishing our platform as a credible testbed for recommender systems research. Our codes are available at https://github.com/jinsong8/RecInter.

cs.CL↗

RLFactory: A Plug-and-Play Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Framework for LLM Multi-Turn Tool-Use

Large language models excel at basic reasoning but struggle with tasks that require interaction with external tools. We present RLFactory, a plug-and-play reinforcement learning post-training framework for multi-round tool use. RLFactory tackles (i) tool-call stability and adaptability amid tool heterogeneity and interface issues via an asyncio-based asynchronous caller and a decoupled tool/training architecture, and (ii) diverse evaluation needs via a reward layer supporting rule-based, model-judgment, and tool-verification signals. It reconstructs the MDP by introducing observation markers from tool feedback, closing the loop among model, tools, and environment, and implements a generate-parse-invoke-update workflow for dynamic policy optimization. On Search-R1 with Qwen3-4B, RLFactory achieves a 0.486 test score on the Natural Questions (NQ) dataset, surpassing larger models trained with similar techniques (e.g., Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-GRPO at 0.473), and increases training throughput by 6.8x. RLFactory provides a low-barrier, highly adaptable framework for strengthening multi-round tool use of LLMs in real-world scenarios. Code: https://github.com/Simple-Efficient/RL-Factory.

cs.LG↗

Promoting Efficient Reasoning with Verifiable Stepwise Reward

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently achieved significant progress in complex reasoning tasks, aided by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. However, LRMs often suffer from overthinking, expending excessive computation on simple problems and reducing efficiency. Existing efficient reasoning methods typically require accurate task assessment to preset token budgets or select reasoning modes, which limits their flexibility and reliability. In this work, we revisit the essence of overthinking and identify that encouraging effective steps while penalizing ineffective ones is key to its solution. To this end, we propose a novel rule-based verifiable stepwise reward mechanism (VSRM), which assigns rewards based on the performance of intermediate states in the reasoning trajectory. This approach is intuitive and naturally fits the step-by-step nature of reasoning tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on standard mathematical reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24 and AIME25, by integrating VSRM with PPO and Reinforce++. Results show that our method achieves substantial output length reduction while maintaining original reasoning performance, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and accuracy. Further analysis of overthinking frequency and pass@k score before and after training demonstrates that our approach in deed effectively suppresses ineffective steps and encourages effective reasoning, fundamentally alleviating the overthinking problem. All code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.AI↗

SRFT: A Single-Stage Method with Supervised and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning tasks, yet the optimal integration of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Through comprehensive analysis of token distributions, learning dynamics, and integration mechanisms from entropy-based perspectives, we reveal key differences between these paradigms: SFT induces coarse-grained global changes to LLM policy distributions, while RL performs fine-grained selective optimizations, with entropy serving as a critical indicator of training effectiveness. Building on these observations, we propose Supervised Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (SRFT), a single-stage method that unifies both fine-tuning paradigms through entropy-aware weighting mechanisms. Our approach simultaneously applies SFT and RL to directly optimize the LLM using demonstrations and self-exploration rollouts rather than through two-stage sequential methods. Extensive experiments show that SRFT achieves 59.1% average accuracy, outperforming zero-RL methods by 9.0% on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks and 10.9% on three out-of-distribution benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

RLAE: Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Ensemble for LLMs

Ensembling large language models (LLMs) can effectively combine diverse strengths of different models, offering a promising approach to enhance performance across various tasks. However, existing methods typically rely on fixed weighting strategies that fail to adapt to the dynamic, context-dependent characteristics of LLM capabilities. In this work, we propose Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Ensemble for LLMs (RLAE), a novel framework that reformulates LLM ensemble through the lens of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Our approach introduces a RL agent that dynamically adjusts ensemble weights by considering both input context and intermediate generation states, with the agent being trained using rewards that directly correspond to the quality of final outputs. We implement RLAE using both single-agent and multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms ($\text{RLAE}_\text{PPO}$ and $\text{RLAE}_\text{MAPPO}$ ), demonstrating substantial improvements over conventional ensemble methods. Extensive evaluations on a diverse set of tasks show that RLAE outperforms existing approaches by up to $3.3\%$ accuracy points, offering a more effective framework for LLM ensembling. Furthermore, our method exhibits superior generalization capabilities across different tasks without the need for retraining, while simultaneously achieving lower time latency.

cs.LG↗

Semantic Convergence: Harmonizing Recommender Systems via Two-Stage Alignment and Behavioral Semantic Tokenization

Large language models (LLMs), endowed with exceptional reasoning capabilities, are adept at discerning profound user interests from historical behaviors, thereby presenting a promising avenue for the advancement of recommendation systems. However, a notable discrepancy persists between the sparse collaborative semantics typically found in recommendation systems and the dense token representations within LLMs. In our study, we propose a novel framework that harmoniously merges traditional recommendation models with the prowess of LLMs. We initiate this integration by transforming ItemIDs into sequences that align semantically with the LLMs space, through the proposed Alignment Tokenization module. Additionally, we design a series of specialized supervised learning tasks aimed at aligning collaborative signals with the subtleties of natural language semantics. To ensure practical applicability, we optimize online inference by pre-caching the top-K results for each user, reducing latency and improving effciency. Extensive experimental evidence indicates that our model markedly improves recall metrics and displays remarkable scalability of recommendation systems.

cs.IR↗

Tri$^{2}$-plane: Thinking Head Avatar via Feature Pyramid

Recent years have witnessed considerable achievements in facial avatar reconstruction with neural volume rendering. Despite notable advancements, the reconstruction of complex and dynamic head movements from monocular videos still suffers from capturing and restoring fine-grained details. In this work, we propose a novel approach, named Tri$^2$-plane, for monocular photo-realistic volumetric head avatar reconstructions. Distinct from the existing works that rely on a single tri-plane deformation field for dynamic facial modeling, the proposed Tri$^2$-plane leverages the principle of feature pyramids and three top-to-down lateral connections tri-planes for details improvement. It samples and renders facial details at multiple scales, transitioning from the entire face to specific local regions and then to even more refined sub-regions. Moreover, we incorporate a camera-based geometry-aware sliding window method as an augmentation in training, which improves the robustness beyond the canonical space, with a particular improvement in cross-identity generation capabilities. Experimental outcomes indicate that the Tri$^2$-plane not only surpasses existing methodologies but also achieves superior performance across quantitative and qualitative assessments. The project website is: \url{https://songluchuan.github.io/Tri2Plane.github.io/}.

cs.CV↗

Adaptive Super Resolution For One-Shot Talking-Head Generation

The one-shot talking-head generation learns to synthesize a talking-head video with one source portrait image under the driving of same or different identity video. Usually these methods require plane-based pixel transformations via Jacobin matrices or facial image warps for novel poses generation. The constraints of using a single image source and pixel displacements often compromise the clarity of the synthesized images. Some methods try to improve the quality of synthesized videos by introducing additional super-resolution modules, but this will undoubtedly increase computational consumption and destroy the original data distribution. In this work, we propose an adaptive high-quality talking-head video generation method, which synthesizes high-resolution video without additional pre-trained modules. Specifically, inspired by existing super-resolution methods, we down-sample the one-shot source image, and then adaptively reconstruct high-frequency details via an encoder-decoder module, resulting in enhanced video clarity. Our method consistently improves the quality of generated videos through a straightforward yet effective strategy, substantiated by quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The code and demo video are available on: \url{https://github.com/Songluchuan/AdaSR-TalkingHead/}.

cs.CV↗

Emotional Listener Portrait: Neural Listener Head Generation with Emotion

Listener head generation centers on generating non-verbal behaviors (e.g., smile) of a listener in reference to the information delivered by a speaker. A significant challenge when generating such responses is the non-deterministic nature of fine-grained facial expressions during a conversation, which varies depending on the emotions and attitudes of both the speaker and the listener. To tackle this problem, we propose the Emotional Listener Portrait (ELP), which treats each fine-grained facial motion as a composition of several discrete motion-codewords and explicitly models the probability distribution of the motions under different emotion in conversation. Benefiting from the ``explicit'' and ``discrete'' design, our ELP model can not only automatically generate natural and diverse responses toward a given speaker via sampling from the learned distribution but also generate controllable responses with a predetermined attitude. Under several quantitative metrics, our ELP exhibits significant improvements compared to previous methods.

cs.GR↗

ForgeryNet: A Versatile Benchmark for Comprehensive Forgery Analysis

The rapid progress of photorealistic synthesis techniques has reached at a critical point where the boundary between real and manipulated images starts to blur. Thus, benchmarking and advancing digital forgery analysis have become a pressing issue. However, existing face forgery datasets either have limited diversity or only support coarse-grained analysis. To counter this emerging threat, we construct the ForgeryNet dataset, an extremely large face forgery dataset with unified annotations in image- and video-level data across four tasks: 1) Image Forgery Classification, including two-way (real / fake), three-way (real / fake with identity-replaced forgery approaches / fake with identity-remained forgery approaches), and n-way (real and 15 respective forgery approaches) classification. 2) Spatial Forgery Localization, which segments the manipulated area of fake images compared to their corresponding source real images. 3) Video Forgery Classification, which re-defines the video-level forgery classification with manipulated frames in random positions. This task is important because attackers in real world are free to manipulate any target frame. and 4) Temporal Forgery Localization, to localize the temporal segments which are manipulated. ForgeryNet is by far the largest publicly available deep face forgery dataset in terms of data-scale (2.9 million images, 221,247 videos), manipulations (7 image-level approaches, 8 video-level approaches), perturbations (36 independent and more mixed perturbations) and annotations (6.3 million classification labels, 2.9 million manipulated area annotations and 221,247 temporal forgery segment labels). We perform extensive benchmarking and studies of existing face forensics methods and obtain several valuable observations.

cs.CV↗