Abstract:Large language model (LLM)-based agents have shown strong capabilities in using external tools to solve complex tasks. However, existing evaluations often overlook the temporal dimension of tool use, especially the impact of tool response latency, and are usually limited to single-task settings. In real-world applications, multiple tasks often need to be executed concurrently, and overall efficiency depends on whether an agent can use idle time while waiting for tool responses. We refer to this capability as asynchronous tool calling. To evaluate it, we propose AsyncTool, a benchmark for assessing LLM-based agents in interactive multi-task tool-use environments with delayed tool feedback. AsyncTool presents multiple heterogeneous tasks simultaneously and simulates realistic tool response latency during execution. Using a hybrid data evolution strategy, we construct a diverse asynchronous multitasking dataset that covers multiple scenarios and tool-use patterns. We evaluate models at the step, sub-task, and task levels, and introduce efficiency-oriented metrics to measure task coordination and completion efficiency. Extensive experiments show that delayed tool feedback poses substantial challenges to current agents and leads to clear performance degradation. Models that better coordinate task switching, dependency tracking, and state maintenance achieve stronger performance on AsyncTool. Our analysis identifies key failure modes of current tool-using agents and provides practical insights for designing future systems with stronger temporal reasoning and coordination capabilities.
Abstract:Recent development of agents has renewed demand for long-context reasoning capacity of LLMs. However, training LLMs for this capacity requires costly long-document curation or heuristic context synthesis. We observe that agents produce massive trajectories when solving problems, invoking tools and receiving environment observations across many turns. The evidence needed to answer the original question is thus scattered throughout these turns, requiring integration of distant context segments. Nevertheless, standard agent SFT masks tool responses and only trains turn-level tool selection, creating a supervision blind spot where these scattered signals go unused. We propose Agent Context Compilation (ACC), which converts trajectories from search, software engineering, and database querying agents into long-context QA pairs that combine the original question with tool responses and environment observations gathered across multiple turns, training the model to answer directly without tool use. This makes the dependencies between the question and the evidence explicit, enabling direct supervision of long-context reasoning over distant segments without additional annotation. ACC is a simple but effective approach that can be combined with any existing long-context extension or training method, providing scalable supervised fine-tuning data. We validate ACC on long-range dependency modeling tasks through MRCR and GraphWalks, challenging benchmarks requiring cross-turn coreference resolution and graph traversal over extended contexts. Training Qwen3-30B-A3B with ACC achieves 68.3 on MRCR (+18.1) and 77.5 on GraphWalks (+7.6), results comparable to Qwen3-235B-A22B, while preserving general capabilities on GPQA, MMLU-Pro, AIME, and IFEval. Further mechanism analysis reveals that the ACC-trained model exhibits task-adaptive attention restructuring and expert specialization.
Abstract:Pairwise human preference prediction is central to evaluating code-generation systems, where quality often depends on task-specific trade-offs beyond functional correctness. While rubric-based LLM judges improve interpretability by decomposing evaluation into explicit criteria, most existing pipelines remain pointwise: they score each response independently and derive preferences by comparing aggregated scores. We show that this design is poorly matched to pairwise code preference prediction and can underperform a strong monolithic judge. We propose CriterAlign, a criterion-centric framework that adapts rubric-based judging to pairwise preference evaluation through direct criterion-level pairwise judgments, tie-driven criterion refinement, swap-consistency filtering, and final pairwise synthesis. We further introduce Human-Preference-Aligned Guidance (HPAG), synthesized offline from training examples by extracting recurring rationale gaps between human preferences and monolithic judge predictions, and injected into the criterion generator, criterion judge, and final judge. On BigCodeReward, CriterAlign improves a Qwen2.5-VL-32B monolithic judge from 60.4% to 66.3% accuracy, with ablations confirming the contributions of pairwise criterion design and HPAG.
Abstract:Large language models are increasingly expected to serve as general-purpose agents that interact with external, stateful tool environments. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) and broader agent skills offer a unified interface for connecting agents with scalable real-world services, but training robust agents remains limited by the lack of realistic environments and principled mechanisms for life-long learning. In this paper, we present \textbf{Agent-World}, a self-evolving training arena for advancing general agent intelligence through scalable environments. Agent-World has two main components: (1) Agentic Environment-Task Discovery, which autonomously explores topic-aligned databases and executable tool ecosystems from thousands of real-world environment themes and synthesizes verifiable tasks with controllable difficulty; and (2) Continuous Self-Evolving Agent Training, which combines multi-environment reinforcement learning with a self-evolving agent arena that automatically identifies capability gaps through dynamic task synthesis and drives targeted learning, enabling the co-evolution of agent policies and environments. Across 23 challenging agent benchmarks, Agent-World-8B and 14B consistently outperforms strong proprietary models and environment scaling baselines. Further analyses reveal scaling trends in relation to environment diversity and self-evolution rounds, offering insights for building general agent intelligence.
Abstract:Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have recently become a promising alternative to autoregressive large language models (ARMs). Semi-autoregressive (Semi-AR) decoding is widely employed in base dLLMs and advanced decoding strategies due to its superior performance. However, our observations reveal that Semi-AR decoding suffers from inherent block constraints, which cause the decoding of many cross-block stable tokens to be unnecessarily delayed. To address this challenge, we systematically investigate the identification of stable tokens and present three key findings: (1) naive lookahead decoding is unreliable, (2) token stability closely correlates with convergence trend, and (3) historical information is isolated. Building on these insights, we propose Anchor-based History-stable Decoding (AHD), a training-free, plug-and-play dynamic decoding strategy. Specifically, AHD monitors the stability trend of tokens in real time through dynamic anchors. Once a token reaches stability, it initiates early cross-block decoding to enhance efficiency and performance. Extensive experiments across language, vision-language, and audio-language domains demonstrate that AHD simultaneously improves both performance and inference efficiency. Notably, AHD effectively reverses the performance degradation typically observed in existing advanced decoding acceleration strategies. For instance, on the BBH benchmark, our approach reduces decoding steps by 80% while improving performance by 3.67%.
Abstract:Effectively retrieving, reasoning, and understanding multimodal information remains a critical challenge for agentic systems. Traditional Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) methods rely on linear interaction histories, which struggle to handle long-context tasks, especially those involving information-sparse yet token-heavy visual data in iterative reasoning scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce VimRAG, a framework tailored for multimodal Retrieval-augmented Reasoning across text, images, and videos. Inspired by our systematic study, we model the reasoning process as a dynamic directed acyclic graph that structures the agent states and retrieved multimodal evidence. Building upon this structured memory, we introduce a Graph-Modulated Visual Memory Encoding mechanism, with which the significance of memory nodes is evaluated via their topological position, allowing the model to dynamically allocate high-resolution tokens to pivotal evidence while compressing or discarding trivial clues. To implement this paradigm, we propose a Graph-Guided Policy Optimization strategy. This strategy disentangles step-wise validity from trajectory-level rewards by pruning memory nodes associated with redundant actions, thereby facilitating fine-grained credit assignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VimRAG consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse multimodal RAG benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/VRAG.
Abstract:Reinforcement learning has become a cornerstone technique for developing reasoning models in complex tasks, ranging from mathematical problem-solving to imaginary reasoning. The optimization of these models typically relies on policy gradient methods, whose efficacy hinges on the accurate estimation of an advantage function. However, prevailing methods typically employ static advantage estimation, a practice that leads to inefficient credit assignment by neglecting the dynamic utility of training samples over time. This limitation results in suboptimal policy updates, which in turn manifest as slower convergence rates and increased learning instability, as models fail to adapt to evolving sample utilities effectively. To address this problem, we introduce \textbf{ADORA} (\textbf{A}dvantage \textbf{D}ynamics via \textbf{O}nline \textbf{R}ollout \textbf{A}daptation), a novel framework for policy optimization. ADORA dynamically adjusts the advantage function's weighting by adaptively categorizing training data into temporarily advantageous and disadvantageous samples, based on their evolving utility during online model rollouts. This tailored data differentiation strategy allows ADORA to be seamlessly integrated into existing policy optimization algorithms without significant architectural modifications, enabling the policy to prioritize learning from more informative experiences and thereby achieve more efficient policy updates. Extensive evaluations across diverse model families and varying data scales demonstrate that ADORA is a robust and efficient framework. It significantly enhances long reasoning in both geometric and mathematical tasks, consistently achieving notable performance gains without requiring sensitive hyperparameter tuning.
Abstract:Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its efficacy, RLVR faces a meta-learning bottleneck: it lacks mechanisms for error attribution and experience internalization intrinsic to the human learning cycle beyond practice and verification, thereby limiting fine-grained credit assignment and reusable knowledge formation. We term such reusable knowledge representations derived from past errors as meta-experience. Based on this insight, we propose Meta-Experience Learning (MEL), a novel framework that incorporates self-distilled meta-experience into the model's parametric memory. Building upon standard RLVR, we introduce an additional design that leverages the LLM's self-verification capability to conduct contrastive analysis on paired correct and incorrect trajectories, identify the precise bifurcation points where reasoning errors arise, and summarize them into generalizable meta-experience. The meta-experience is further internalized into the LLM's parametric memory by minimizing the negative log-likelihood, which induces a language-modeled reward signal that bridges correct and incorrect reasoning trajectories and facilitates effective knowledge reuse. Experimental results demonstrate that MEL achieves consistent improvements on benchmarks, yielding 3.92%--4.73% Pass@1 gains across varying model sizes.
Abstract:Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced VQA and now support Vision-DeepResearch systems that use search engines for complex visual-textual fact-finding. However, evaluating these visual and textual search abilities is still difficult, and existing benchmarks have two major limitations. First, existing benchmarks are not visual search-centric: answers that should require visual search are often leaked through cross-textual cues in the text questions or can be inferred from the prior world knowledge in current MLLMs. Second, overly idealized evaluation scenario: On the image-search side, the required information can often be obtained via near-exact matching against the full image, while the text-search side is overly direct and insufficiently challenging. To address these issues, we construct the Vision-DeepResearch benchmark (VDR-Bench) comprising 2,000 VQA instances. All questions are created via a careful, multi-stage curation pipeline and rigorous expert review, designed to assess the behavior of Vision-DeepResearch systems under realistic real-world conditions. Moreover, to address the insufficient visual retrieval capabilities of current MLLMs, we propose a simple multi-round cropped-search workflow. This strategy is shown to effectively improve model performance in realistic visual retrieval scenarios. Overall, our results provide practical guidance for the design of future multimodal deep-research systems. The code will be released in https://github.com/Osilly/Vision-DeepResearch.
Abstract:Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a broad range of vision tasks. However, constrained by the capacity of their internal world knowledge, prior work has proposed augmenting MLLMs by ``reasoning-then-tool-call'' for visual and textual search engines to obtain substantial gains on tasks requiring extensive factual information. However, these approaches typically define multimodal search in a naive setting, assuming that a single full-level or entity-level image query and few text query suffices to retrieve the key evidence needed to answer the question, which is unrealistic in real-world scenarios with substantial visual noise. Moreover, they are often limited in the reasoning depth and search breadth, making it difficult to solve complex questions that require aggregating evidence from diverse visual and textual sources. Building on this, we propose Vision-DeepResearch, which proposes one new multimodal deep-research paradigm, i.e., performs multi-turn, multi-entity and multi-scale visual and textual search to robustly hit real-world search engines under heavy noise. Our Vision-DeepResearch supports dozens of reasoning steps and hundreds of engine interactions, while internalizing deep-research capabilities into the MLLM via cold-start supervision and RL training, resulting in a strong end-to-end multimodal deep-research MLLM. It substantially outperforming existing multimodal deep-research MLLMs, and workflows built on strong closed-source foundation model such as GPT-5, Gemini-2.5-pro and Claude-4-Sonnet. The code will be released in https://github.com/Osilly/Vision-DeepResearch.