Zihua Rong

Haoyang He, Zihua Rong, Kun Ji et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the dominant paradigm for strengthening the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Yet the rule-based reward functions commonly used on mathematical or programming benchmarks assess only answer format and correctness, providing no signal as to whether the induced Chain-of-Thought (CoT) actually improves the answer. Furthermore, such task-specific training offers limited control over logical depth and therefore may fail to reveal a model's genuine reasoning capacity. We propose Dynamic Reasoning Efficiency Reward (DRER) -- a plug-and-play RL reward framework that reshapes both reward and advantage signals. (i) A Reasoning Quality Reward assigns fine-grained credit to those reasoning chains that demonstrably raise the likelihood of the correct answer, directly incentivising the trajectories with beneficial CoT tokens. (ii) A Dynamic Length Advantage decays the advantage of responses whose length deviates from a validation-derived threshold, stabilising training. To facilitate rigorous assessment, we also release Logictree, a dynamically constructed deductive reasoning dataset that functions both as RL training data and as a comprehensive benchmark. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of DRER: our 7B model attains GPT-o3-mini level performance on Logictree with 400 trianing steps, while the average confidence of CoT-augmented answers rises by 30%. The model further exhibits generalisation across diverse logical-reasoning datasets, and the mathematical benchmark AIME24. These results illuminate how RL shapes CoT behaviour and chart a practical path toward enhancing formal-reasoning skills in large language models. All code and data are available in repository https://github.com/Henryhe09/DRER.

Haoyang He, Zihua Rong, Liangjie Zhao et al.

Test-time Training enables model adaptation using only test questions and offers a promising paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). However, it faces two major challenges: test questions are often highly difficult, making self-generated pseudo-labels unreliable, and existing methods lack effective mechanisms to adapt to a model's specific reasoning weaknesses, leading to inefficient learning. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{TTSR}, a self-reflective test-time self-evolving training framework. TTSR employs a single pretrained language model that alternates between the roles of a \textit{Student} and a \textit{Teacher} at test time. The Student focuses on solving problems and learning from synthesized variant questions, while the Teacher analyzes the Student's failed reasoning trajectories, summarizes recurring reasoning weaknesses, and synthesizes targeted variant questions accordingly. This process guides the model to improve within a learnable regime through a continual self-evolving loop. Experimental results on multiple challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that TTSR consistently improves reasoning performance and generalizes well across different model backbones and general-domain reasoning tasks. These findings suggest that teacher-mediated self-reflection provides an effective pathway for stable and continual reasoning improvement at test time.

Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Jiacheng Liu et al.

We present FinMMR, a novel bilingual multimodal benchmark tailored to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in financial numerical reasoning tasks. Compared to existing benchmarks, our work introduces three significant advancements. (1) Multimodality: We meticulously transform existing financial reasoning benchmarks, and construct novel questions from the latest Chinese financial research reports. FinMMR comprises 4.3K questions and 8.7K images spanning 14 categories, including tables, bar charts, and ownership structure charts. (2) Comprehensiveness: FinMMR encompasses 14 financial subdomains, including corporate finance, banking, and industry analysis, significantly exceeding existing benchmarks in financial domain knowledge breadth. (3) Challenge: Models are required to perform multi-step precise numerical reasoning by integrating financial knowledge with the understanding of complex financial images and text. The best-performing MLLM achieves only 53.0% accuracy on Hard problems. We believe that FinMMR will drive advancements in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs in real-world scenarios.