Abstract:Autonomous GUI agents based on vision-language models (VLMs) often assume deterministic environment responses, generating actions without verifying whether previous operations succeeded. In real-world settings with network latency, rendering delays, and system interruptions, this assumption leads to undetected action failures, repetitive ineffective behaviors, and catastrophic error accumulation. Moreover, learning robust recovery strategies is challenging due to the high cost of online interaction and the lack of real-time feedback in offline datasets.We propose VeriGUI (Verification-driven GUI Agent), which explicitly models action outcomes and recovery under noisy environments. VeriGUI introduces a Thinking--Verification--Action--Expectation (TVAE) framework to detect failures and guide corrective reasoning, and a two-stage training pipeline that combines Robust SFT with synthetic failure trajectories and GRPO with asymmetric verification rewards. We further construct a Robustness Benchmark based on AndroidControl to evaluate failure recognition and correction. Experiments show that VeriGUI significantly reduces failure loops and improves recovery success while maintaining competitive standard task performance.
Abstract:Extending CoT through RL has been widely used to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, due to the sparsity of reward signals, it can also induce undesirable thinking patterns such as overthinking, i.e., generating redundant intermediate reasoning content. In this work, we argue that a major source of such redundancy is inefficient reflection, which often manifests in two problematic patterns: Indiscriminate Reflection, where the model performs broad, low-impact checks throughout reasoning, and Repetitive Reflection, where it repeatedly re-verifies an already established conclusion. To address this, we introduce a graph-based CoT optimization framework. Specifically, we convert each linear CoT into a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with explicit dependency edges, and design a dual pruning strategy: branch-level pruning removes weakly contributing reflection branches, while depth-level pruning eliminates late-stage re-verification. We distill this behavior via a three-stage pipeline: (1) SFT to initialize the policy on pruned concise traces, (2) DPO to prefer correct but less redundant trajectories, and (3) GRPO with length penalty to jointly optimize answer correctness and efficiency. Experiments show that our approach reduces the average reasoning tokens by 42\% while maintaining or improving accuracy.
Abstract:Large language models achieve breakthroughs in complex reasoning via long chain-of-thought sequences. However, this often leads to severe reasoning inflation, causing substantial computational redundancy. To maximize Intelligence per Token, we introduce a theoretical metric, MSL-Minimal Sufficient Length. MSL rigorously characterizes the shortest reasoning length that preserves answer correctness. We provide a recursive definition based on independently sampled sequences and prove the existence of its limit, establishing the first measurable lower bound for reasoning-chain compression. Building on an analysis of mainstream CoT compression strategies, we identify key structural factors enabling a model to approach MSL. Based on these insights, we propose TRiMS which employs the GRPO algorithm in conjunction with MSL-based estimation during training, while mitigating instabilities during the training process through dynamic batch aggregation and advantage computation using batch-level standard deviation. TRiMS achieves over 80% CoT token reduction with a minor accuracy boost across all benchmarks.
Abstract:Reinforcement learning has recently shown promise in improving retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Despite these advances, its effectiveness in multi-hop question answering (QA) remains limited by two fundamental limitations: (i) global planning absence to structure multi-step reasoning, and (ii) unfaithful execution, which hinders effective query formulation and consistent use of retrieved evidence. We propose GlobalRAG, a reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance global reasoning in multi-hop QA. GlobalRAG decomposes questions into subgoals, coordinates retrieval with reasoning, and refines evidence iteratively. To guide this process, we introduce Planning Quality Reward and SubGoal Completion Reward, which encourage coherent planning and reliable subgoal execution. In addition, a progressive weight annealing strategy balances process-oriented and outcome-based objectives. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate that GlobalRAG significantly outperforms strong baselines while using only 8k training data (42% of the training data used by strong baselines), achieving average improvements of 14.2% in both EM and F1.