Jinghan He

Gengsheng Li, Jinghan He, Shijie Wang et al.

Self-play bootstraps LLM reasoning through an iterative Challenger-Solver loop: the Challenger is trained to generate questions that target the Solver's capabilities, and the Solver is optimized on the generated data to expand its reasoning skills. However, existing frameworks like R-Zero often exhibit non-sustained improvement, where early gains degrade as self-play continues. We identify a key failure mode, Diversity Illusion, where the Solver's training signals appear diverse yet collapse into recurring underlying patterns. It manifests as (1) Local Diversity Illusion, where diversity is enforced only within-batch, inducing cross-iteration mode cycling; and (2) Surface Diversity Illusion, where questions vary superficially but require near-identical reasoning skills. To mitigate them, we propose R-Diverse with two aligned innovations: Memory-Augmented Penalty (MAP), which uses a persistent memory bank to discourage recycling across iterations, and Skill-Aware Measurement (SAM), which evaluates diversity by the reasoning skills exercised rather than surface variation of questions. Across 10 math and general reasoning benchmarks, R-Diverse sustains gains over more iterations and consistently outperforms prior self-play methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Gengsheng-Li/R-Diverse.

Jinghan He, Haiyun Guo, Ming Tang et al.

Instruction tuning is now a widely adopted approach to aligning large multimodal models (LMMs) to follow human intent. It unifies the data format of vision-language tasks, enabling multi-task joint training. However, vision-language tasks are constantly being created in practice. Instead of always re-training LMMs when new tasks arrive, continual learning offers flexibility for models to continually and efficiently exploit the evolving data. This work aims to explore the following two questions: 1) Do LMMs still suffer from catastrophic forgetting in continual instruction tuning? 2) Are the existing three classes of continual learning methods still applicable to the continual instruction tuning of LMMs? An extensive study is conducted to address the above questions. First, we establish the first benchmark in this setting and reveal that catastrophic forgetting is still observed when continually instruction-tuning LMMs. However, the multi-task joint instruction tuning can facilitate the model's continual learning ability and mitigate forgetting. Second, we integrate and adapt classic continual learning methods to our context, demonstrating the efficacy of data replay and model expansion strategies across diverse scenarios. In contrast, regularization-based methods only perform well on models that have been jointly instruction-tuned on multiple tasks. Third, we delve into the correlation and forgetting dynamics between vision-language task pairs and propose task-similarity-informed regularization and model expansion methods for continual instruction tuning of LMMs. Experimental results show that our approach consistently boosts the model's performance.

Feng Xiong, Zengbin Wang, Yong Wang et al.

Self-evolving agents present a promising path toward continual adaptation by distilling task interactions into reusable knowledge artifacts. In practice, this paradigm remains hindered by two coupled bottlenecks: data inefficiency, where costly rollout effort is disproportionately spent on low-value samples rather than informative ones, and knowledge interference, where heterogeneous knowledge stored in shared repositories leads to noisy retrieval and task-misaligned guidance. Together, these issues form a self-reinforcing failure loop in which uninformative rollouts yield noisy knowledge, which in turn degrades subsequent rollouts. In this work, we introduce Ace-Skill, a co-evolutionary framework that jointly optimizes rollout allocation and knowledge organization for self-evolving multimodal agents. Specifically, Ace-Skill combines aprioritized sampler with lazy-decay proficiency tracking to focus rollouts on informative and insufficiently mastered samples, and a clustered organizer that semantically clusters knowledge for cleaner retrieval and more reliable adaptation. By improving sampling and organization together, Ace-Skill turns self-evolution into a virtuous cycle in which more informative rollouts produce higher-quality knowledge that supports stronger subsequent rollouts. Across four multimodal tool-use benchmarks, Ace-Skill delivers strong gains (e.g., +35.46% relative improvement in Avg@4 accuracy), enabling an opensource 35B MoE model to match or surpass proprietary models. The acquired knowledge also transfers effectively in a zero-shot manner to smaller 9B and 4B models, allowing resource-constrained agents to inherit advanced capabilities without additional training. The code has been publicly available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/Ace-Skill.

Zhenglin Hua, Jinghan He, Zijun Yao et al.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on multimodal tasks. However, they still suffer from hallucinations, generating text inconsistent with visual input, posing significant risks in real-world applications. Existing approaches to address this issue focus on incorporating external knowledge bases, alignment training, or decoding strategies, all of which require substantial computational cost and time. Recent works try to explore more efficient alternatives by adjusting LVLMs' internal representations. Although promising, these methods may cause hallucinations to be insufficiently suppressed or lead to excessive interventions that negatively affect normal semantics. In this work, we leverage sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to identify semantic directions closely associated with faithfulness or hallucination, extracting more precise and disentangled hallucination-related representations. Our analysis demonstrates that interventions along the identified faithful direction can mitigate hallucinations, while those along the hallucinatory direction can exacerbate them. Building on these insights, we propose Steering LVLMs via SAE Latent Directions (SSL), a plug-and-play method based on SAE-derived latent directions to mitigate hallucinations in LVLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SSL significantly outperforms existing decoding approaches in mitigating hallucinations, while maintaining transferability across different model architectures with negligible additional time overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/huazhenglin2003/SSL.

Jinghan He, Kuan Zhu, Haiyun Guo et al.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have made substantial progress in integrating large language models (LLMs) with visual inputs, enabling advanced multimodal reasoning. Despite their success, a persistent challenge is hallucination-where generated text fails to accurately reflect visual content-undermining both accuracy and reliability. Existing methods focus on alignment training or decoding refinements but primarily address symptoms at the generation stage without probing the underlying causes. In this work, we investigate the internal mechanisms driving hallucination in LVLMs, with an emphasis on the multi-head attention module. Specifically, we introduce Vision-aware Head Divergence (VHD), a metric that quantifies the sensitivity of attention head outputs to visual context. Based on this, our findings reveal the presence of vision-aware attention heads that are more attuned to visual information; however, the model's overreliance on its prior language patterns is closely related to hallucinations. Building on these insights, we propose Vision-aware Head Reinforcement (VHR), a training-free approach to mitigate hallucination by enhancing the role of vision-aware attention heads. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in mitigating hallucinations, while maintaining high efficiency with negligible additional time overhead.

Jinghan He, Haiyun Guo, Kuan Zhu et al.

Continual learning (CL) is crucial for language models to dynamically adapt to the evolving real-world demands. To mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problem in CL, data replay has been proven a simple and effective strategy, and the subsequent data-replay-based distillation can further enhance the performance. However, existing methods fail to fully exploit the knowledge embedded in models from previous tasks, resulting in the need for a relatively large number of replay samples to achieve good results. In this work, we first explore and emphasize the importance of attention weights in knowledge retention, and then propose a SElective attEntion-guided Knowledge Retention method (SEEKR) for data-efficient replay-based continual learning of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, SEEKR performs attention distillation on the selected attention heads for finer-grained knowledge retention, where the proposed forgettability-based and task-sensitivity-based measures are used to identify the most valuable attention heads. Experimental results on two continual learning benchmarks for LLMs demonstrate the superiority of SEEKR over the existing methods on both performance and efficiency. Explicitly, SEEKR achieves comparable or even better performance with only 1/10 of the replayed data used by other methods, and reduces the proportion of replayed data to 1%.

Jinghan He, Junfeng Fang, Feng Xiong et al.

Self-play has enabled large language models to autonomously improve through self-generated challenges. However, existing self-play methods for vision-language models rely on passive interaction with static image collections, resulting in strong dependence on initial datasets and inefficient learning. Without the ability to actively seek visual data tailored to their evolving capabilities, agents waste computational effort on samples that are either trivial or beyond their current skill level. To address these limitations, we propose Active-Zero, a framework that shifts from passive interaction to active exploration of visual environments. Active-Zero employs three co-evolving agents: a Searcher that retrieves images from open-world repositories based on the model's capability frontier, a Questioner that synthesizes calibrated reasoning tasks, and a Solver refined through accuracy rewards. This closed loop enables self-scaffolding auto-curricula where the model autonomously constructs its learning trajectory. On Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct across 12 benchmarks, Active-Zero achieves 53.97 average accuracy on reasoning tasks (5.7% improvement) and 59.77 on general understanding (3.9% improvement), consistently outperforming existing self-play baselines. These results highlight active exploration as a key ingredient for scalable and adaptive self-evolving vision-language systems.

Haiyun Guo, ZhiYan Hou, Yu Chen et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) require continual instruction tuning during their post-training phase to adapt to the dynamic real-world demands. However, the absence of rigorous and systematic benchmarks has hindered progress in this area. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{MLLM-CTBench}, a dataset curating seven challenging tasks from six diverse domains with three contributions. First,to enable fine-grained analysis of continual learning ability, we introduce \textbf{multidimensional evaluation metrics}, which combines final answer accuracy with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning quality assessment through a carefully trained MLLM evaluator. Then, we conduct a \textbf{comprehensive evaluation of continual learning algorithms}, systematically assessing eight algorithms from four major categories to provide actionable insights for algorithm design and adoption. Finally ,we evaluate the efficacy of \textbf{Reinforcement Fine-tuning (RFT) versus Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT)} in maintaining model performance across sequential tasks during continual instruction tuning. Our experiments demonstrate that reasoning processes in MLLMs exhibit greater resilience than final outputs to forgetting during continual learning, aligning with cognitive theories of hierarchical forgetting. We further show that both model capability and task sequence significantly influence continual learning outcomes, with stronger baseline models exhibiting greater resistance to forgetting. Notably, properly regularized RFT emerges as a more robust approach than SFT for maintaining performance across tasks.One of the key contributing factors is KL-divergence regularization, without which RFT leads to even worse forgetting than SFT on old tasks though may perform better on new tasks.