STAGE: Controlled Objective Admission for Multi-Preference LLM Alignment

Multi-preference alignment is often framed as scalarization: combine reward dimensions, then optimize. This leaves a temporal decision underspecified: when should each preference dimension enter policy optimization? We propose \methodname, a stability-guided active-set controller for controlled objective admission. \methodname starts from a small active set, retains admitted objectives, and expands when reward-deviation gates indicate low recent deviation or a patience budget is exhausted. A probing phase estimates a hard-to-easy order, and adaptive weighting emphasizes underperforming active dimensions. Automatic evaluations with 15 training preferences and 16 held-out benchmark columns show that \methodname obtains higher averages than simultaneous scalarization and shared-budget adapted baselines. Component ablations and expansion dynamics further support cumulative retention, gated admission, and probing-derived ordering as useful design choices in this setting. These results position objective-entry timing as a concrete control variable in reward-vector RLHF.

Ask, Condition or Abstain: Reinforcement Learning for Missing-Premise Reasoning

Answer-only reinforcement learning (RL) trains reasoning models to solve fully specified problems, but many realistic queries omit a premise needed for a unique answer. In this setting, the useful response is not always refusal: the model should ask for the missing premise, condition its answer on the unknown quantity, or abstain when no informative conditional response is available. We present \emph{Ask-Condition-Abstain Reinforcement Learning} (ACA-RL), a data-augmented RL framework for this setting. Its reasoning-graph-guided pipeline converts well-posed problems into missing-premise training instances with localized gap annotations; ACA-RL then trains on these instances with a structured reward over five observable response behaviors. We also introduce the \emph{Missing-Premise Benchmark} (MPB), a 274-instance human-verified benchmark spanning mathematical, logical, and real-world word problems. Across Qwen3 and Llama models, ACA-RL consistently improves on MPB while preserving competitive performance on well-posed reasoning tasks. Together with the released code, MPB, and training data, this work supports a new mission for NLP evaluation: measuring whether models can recognize when a task is underdetermined and handle uncertainty, not only whether they can answer fully specified questions.

ARC: Fair Relative Advantage Comparison in Open-Ended Real-World Interaction

Open-ended real-world interaction admits multiple valid behaviors: an agent may answer directly, ask for clarification, provide progress updates, or confirm before acting. This flexibility breaks a core assumption behind group-based RL: rollouts compared within a group are no longer guaranteed to be behaviorally comparable. As a result, reward-model preferences over interaction style can distort relative advantages and steer optimization toward reward-preferred behaviors rather than context-appropriate ones. We formalize this as a \textit{reward fairness problem} and propose \textbf{ARC} (Advantage Regularization via Conditioning), a training recipe that restores fairer relative comparison through strategy-conditioned rollout grouping, together with hybrid rewards and entropy regularization. We study ARC in our proposed \inter, a novel paradigm for responsive, steerable, and execution-aware user-agent interaction that decouples user-visible communication from latent reasoning and tool use. \inter\ also provides the annotation and distillation pipeline for constructing \inter-86K, our strategy-annotated training corpus for supervised and RL training. Empirically, ARC substantially strengthens the core $τ/τ^2$ tool-use benchmarks, while \inter\ reduces time-to-first-token from 4.91s to 1.27s relative to a think-style baseline. Together, these results suggest that a central bottleneck in open-ended interactive learning is not only how agents are rewarded, but whether their behaviors are compared fairly in the first place. The ARC implementation and \inter-86K training data will be released.