AnE: Pushing the Reasoning Frontier of Multimodal LLMs via Anchor Evolution

Post-training via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for enhancing reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing paradigms often reach a performance bottleneck due to the limitations of static data. While current methods leverage self-reflection or self-evolution to push these boundaries, they still suffer from cognitive drift and hallucinated reasoning paths caused by low-quality synthetic data. To address these challenges, we propose Anchor Evolution (AnE), a new paradigm that integrates truth-anchored data curation and model evolution, achieving faithful and steady performance gains at the reasoning frontier. Specifically, we propose Truth Anchor Expansion, which pinpoints the model failing frontier via trajectory rollouts and leverages ground-truth databases to retrieve high-fidelity anchors for faithful data curation. Subsequently, we introduce the Scaffold-Stripping Mechanism to internalize reasoning capabilities. This mechanism first anchors reasoning paths via scaffold-augmented supervision to mitigate the learning complexity and distribution drift of direct SFT on raw data, then leverages RL to strip the scaffold template, thereby effectively transitioning the reasoning paths into intrinsic model capabilities. Experimental results on multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that our method substantially advances the model performance frontier, improving the base model by 10.3\% across eight multimodal benchmarks and achieving state-of-the-art results. The code will be made publicly available.

Measurement of LLM's Philosophies of Human Nature

The widespread application of artificial intelligence (AI) in various tasks, along with frequent reports of conflicts or violations involving AI, has sparked societal concerns about interactions with AI systems. Based on Wrightsman's Philosophies of Human Nature Scale (PHNS), a scale empirically validated over decades to effectively assess individuals' attitudes toward human nature, we design the standardized psychological scale specifically targeting large language models (LLM), named the Machine-based Philosophies of Human Nature Scale (M-PHNS). By evaluating LLMs' attitudes toward human nature across six dimensions, we reveal that current LLMs exhibit a systemic lack of trust in humans, and there is a significant negative correlation between the model's intelligence level and its trust in humans. Furthermore, we propose a mental loop learning framework, which enables LLM to continuously optimize its value system during virtual interactions by constructing moral scenarios, thereby improving its attitude toward human nature. Experiments demonstrate that mental loop learning significantly enhances their trust in humans compared to persona or instruction prompts. This finding highlights the potential of human-based psychological assessments for LLM, which can not only diagnose cognitive biases but also provide a potential solution for ethical learning in artificial intelligence. We release the M-PHNS evaluation code and data at https://github.com/kodenii/M-PHNS.