CARE: Confidence-Aware Reasoning for Reliable Medical VQA

Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) has enabled medical Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to produce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for visual question answering, yet these models suffer from $\textit{confidence miscalibration}$---a systematic gap between expressed certainty and actual diagnostic accuracy that undermines clinical trust. We propose $\textbf{CARE}$, a $\textbf{C}$onfidence-$\textbf{A}$ware medical $\textbf{RE}$asoning framework that jointly optimizes accuracy and calibration through a dual-stage pipeline. First, a scalable Medical-CoT synthesis provides structured cold-start data for Supervised Fine-Tuning. Second, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a novel $\textbf{Confidence-Aware Reward (CAR)}$ mechanism ties the model's confidence to diagnostic correctness within the reward signal. Across three Medical VQA benchmarks, $\textbf{CARE}$ achieves the highest diagnostic accuracy while obtaining the lowest Expected Calibration Error and Hallucination Rate, establishing a foundation for trustworthy clinical decision support. Our code is available at https://github.com/anotherbricki/CARE.

CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs

Despite their strong reasoning capabilities and extensive world knowledge, Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently generate plans that violate task constraints, undermining their reliability in real-world applications. This deficiency arises from a lack of systematic mechanisms to incorporate constraint information during the generation process. While existing approaches attempt to mitigate this by relying on external tools or task decomposition, they fail to enhance the model's intrinsic constraint awareness. To address this, we propose Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning (CARL), a novel RL framework designed to strengthen LLMs' intrinsic focus on constraints. CARL introduces a constraint-aware reward by comparing the model's output distributions under constrained and unconstrained inputs, encouraging constraint focus and penalizing neglect. Compatible with various RL frameworks and requiring no external solvers or top models, CARL enables scalable, end-to-end constraint-aware planning. Extensive experiments on BlocksWorld, TravelPlanner, and T-Eval demonstrate that CARL significantly outperforms standard Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) baselines and state-of-the-art reasoning models, exhibiting a markedly increased focus on constraints.

STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for training Large Language Model (LLM) agents on long-horizon tasks. However, sparse and delayed rewards often lead to trajectory neglect, in which agents lose focus on the task goal and interaction history at intermediate steps. Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy-based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence and therefore provide unreliable estimates of decision reliability. To address this issue, we propose normalized entropy, which measures confidence deviations relative to an agent's average behavior under a given state, thereby strengthening the association between low-quality actions and trajectory neglect. Building on this insight, we introduce Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization (STAPO), a hierarchical group-based RL framework. STAPO leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a joint mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty, enhancing trajectory awareness while preserving training stability. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA demonstrate that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect, validating its effectiveness and robustness for agentic tasks.