Qiyuan Zhang

Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Tianhe Wu et al. · microsoft-research

Recent advancements in Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have demonstrated that scaling the length of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning considerably enhances the reliability of evaluation. However, current works predominantly rely on unstructured length scaling, ignoring the divergent efficacy of different reasoning mechanisms: Breadth-CoT (B-CoT, i.e., multi-dimensional principle coverage) and Depth-CoT (D-CoT, i.e., substantive judgment soundness). To address this, we introduce Mix-GRM, a framework that reconfigures raw rationales into structured B-CoT and D-CoT through a modular synthesis pipeline, subsequently employing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to internalize and optimize these mechanisms. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Mix-GRM establishes a new state-of-the-art across five benchmarks, surpassing leading open-source RMs by an average of 8.2\%. Our results reveal a clear divergence in reasoning: B-CoT benefits subjective preference tasks, whereas D-CoT excels in objective correctness tasks. Consequently, misaligning the reasoning mechanism with the task directly degrades performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that RLVR acts as a switching amplifier, inducing an emergent polarization where the model spontaneously allocates its reasoning style to match task demands. The synthesized data and models are released at \href{https://huggingface.co/collections/DonJoey/mix-grm}{Hugging Face}, and the code is released at \href{https://github.com/Don-Joey/Mix-GRM}{Github}.

Qiyuan Zhang, Junyi Zhou, Yufei Wang et al. · microsoft-research

As Large Language Model (LLM) alignment evolves from simple completions to complex, highly sophisticated generation, Reward Models are increasingly shifting toward rubric-guided evaluation to mitigate surface-level biases. However, the community lacks a unified benchmark to assess this evaluation paradigm, as existing benchmarks lack both the discriminative complexity and the ground-truth rubric annotations required for rigorous analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce RubricBench, a curated benchmark with 1,147 pairwise comparisons specifically designed to assess the reliability of rubric-based evaluation. Our construction employs a multi-dimensional filtration pipeline to target hard samples featuring nuanced input complexity and misleading surface bias, augmenting each with expert-annotated, atomic rubrics derived strictly from instructions. Comprehensive experiments reveal a substantial capability gap between human-annotated and model-generated rubrics, indicating that even state-of-the-art models struggle to autonomously specify valid evaluation criteria, lagging considerably behind human-guided performance.

Shuai Tan, Biao Gong, Ke Ma et al.

Character image animation is gaining significant importance across various domains, driven by the demand for robust and flexible multi-subject rendering. While existing methods excel in single-person animation, they struggle to handle arbitrary subject counts, diverse character types, and spatial misalignment between the reference image and the driving poses. We attribute these limitations to an overly rigid spatial binding that forces strict pixel-wise alignment between the pose and reference, and an inability to consistently rebind motion to intended subjects. To address these challenges, we propose CoDance, a novel Unbind-Rebind framework that enables the animation of arbitrary subject counts, types, and spatial configurations conditioned on a single, potentially misaligned pose sequence. Specifically, the Unbind module employs a novel pose shift encoder to break the rigid spatial binding between the pose and the reference by introducing stochastic perturbations to both poses and their latent features, thereby compelling the model to learn a location-agnostic motion representation. To ensure precise control and subject association, we then devise a Rebind module, leveraging semantic guidance from text prompts and spatial guidance from subject masks to direct the learned motion to intended characters. Furthermore, to facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we introduce a new multi-subject CoDanceBench. Extensive experiments on CoDanceBench and existing datasets show that CoDance achieves SOTA performance, exhibiting remarkable generalization across diverse subjects and spatial layouts. The code and weights will be open-sourced.

Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Qiyuan Zhang et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) succeeds in reasoning tasks (e.g., math and code) by checking the final verifiable answer (i.e., a verifiable dot signal). However, extending this paradigm to open-ended generation is challenging because there is no unambiguous ground truth. Relying on single-dot supervision often leads to inefficiency and reward hacking. To address these issues, we propose reinforcement learning with verifiable reference-based rewards (RLVRR). Instead of checking the final answer, RLVRR extracts an ordered linguistic signal from high-quality references (i.e, reward chain). Specifically, RLVRR decomposes rewards into two dimensions: content, which preserves deterministic core concepts (e.g., keywords), and style, which evaluates adherence to stylistic properties through LLM-based verification. In this way, RLVRR combines the exploratory strength of RL with the efficiency and reliability of supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Extensive experiments on more than 10 benchmarks with Qwen and Llama models confirm the advantages of our approach. RLVRR (1) substantially outperforms SFT trained with ten times more data and advanced reward models, (2) unifies the training of structured reasoning and open-ended generation, and (3) generalizes more effectively while preserving output diversity. These results establish RLVRR as a principled and efficient path toward verifiable reinforcement learning for general-purpose LLM alignment. We release our code and data at https://github.com/YJiangcm/RLVRR.

Qiyuan Zhang, Fuyuan Lyu, Zexu Sun et al.

As enthusiasm for scaling computation (data and parameters) in the pretraining era gradually diminished, test-time scaling (TTS), also referred to as ``test-time computing'' has emerged as a prominent research focus. Recent studies demonstrate that TTS can further elicit the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling significant breakthroughs not only in specialized reasoning tasks, such as mathematics and coding, but also in general tasks like open-ended Q&A. However, despite the explosion of recent efforts in this area, there remains an urgent need for a comprehensive survey offering a systemic understanding. To fill this gap, we propose a unified, multidimensional framework structured along four core dimensions of TTS research: what to scale, how to scale, where to scale, and how well to scale. Building upon this taxonomy, we conduct an extensive review of methods, application scenarios, and assessment aspects, and present an organized decomposition that highlights the unique functional roles of individual techniques within the broader TTS landscape. From this analysis, we distill the major developmental trajectories of TTS to date and offer hands-on guidelines for practical deployment. Furthermore, we identify several open challenges and offer insights into promising future directions, including further scaling, clarifying the functional essence of techniques, generalizing to more tasks, and more attributions. Our repository is available on https://github.com/testtimescaling/testtimescaling.github.io/

Qiyuan Zhang, Fuyuan Lyu, Xue Liu et al.

Comprehensively understanding and accurately predicting the performance of large language models across diverse downstream tasks has emerged as a pivotal challenge in NLP research. The pioneering scaling law on downstream works demonstrated intrinsic similarities within model families and utilized such similarities for performance prediction. However, they tend to overlook the similarities between model families and only consider design factors listed in the original scaling law. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel framework, Collaborative Performance Prediction (CPP), which significantly enhances prediction accuracy by leveraging the historical performance of various models on downstream tasks and other design factors for both model and task. We also collect a collaborative data sourced from online platforms containing both historical performance and additional design factors. With the support of the collaborative data, CPP not only surpasses traditional scaling laws in predicting the performance of scaled LLMs but also facilitates a detailed analysis of factor importance, an area previously overlooked.

Xueqing Peng, Zhuohan Xie, Yupeng Cao et al.

As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.

Qiyuan Zhang, Biao Gong, Shuai Tan et al.

Physical principles are fundamental to realistic visual simulation, but remain a significant oversight in transformer-based video generation. This gap highlights a critical limitation in rendering rigid body motion, a core tenet of classical mechanics. While computer graphics and physics-based simulators can easily model such collisions using Newton formulas, modern pretrain-finetune paradigms discard the concept of object rigidity during pixel-level global denoising. Even perfectly correct mathematical constraints are treated as suboptimal solutions (i.e., conditions) during model optimization in post-training, fundamentally limiting the physical realism of generated videos. Motivated by these considerations, we introduce, for the first time, a physics-aware reinforcement learning paradigm for video generation models that enforces physical collision rules directly in high-dimensional spaces, ensuring the physics knowledge is strictly applied rather than treated as conditions. Subsequently, we extend this paradigm to a unified framework, termed Mimicry-Discovery Cycle (MDcycle), which allows substantial fine-tuning while fully preserving the model's ability to leverage physics-grounded feedback. To validate our approach, we construct new benchmark PhysRVGBench and perform extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to thoroughly assess its effectiveness.

Yihuai Lan, Lei Wang, Qiyuan Zhang et al.

Developing automatic Math Word Problem (MWP) solvers has been an interest of NLP researchers since the 1960s. Over the last few years, there are a growing number of datasets and deep learning-based methods proposed for effectively solving MWPs. However, most existing methods are benchmarked soly on one or two datasets, varying in different configurations, which leads to a lack of unified, standardized, fair, and comprehensive comparison between methods. This paper presents MWPToolkit, the first open-source framework for solving MWPs. In MWPToolkit, we decompose the procedure of existing MWP solvers into multiple core components and decouple their models into highly reusable modules. We also provide a hyper-parameter search function to boost the performance. In total, we implement and compare 17 MWP solvers on 4 widely-used single equation generation benchmarks and 2 multiple equations generation benchmarks. These features enable our MWPToolkit to be suitable for researchers to reproduce advanced baseline models and develop new MWP solvers quickly. Code and documents are available at https://github.com/LYH-YF/MWPToolkit.

Yiqin Yang, Xiaoteng Ma, Chenghao Li et al.

Learning from datasets without interaction with environments (Offline Learning) is an essential step to apply Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms in real-world scenarios. However, compared with the single-agent counterpart, offline multi-agent RL introduces more agents with the larger state and action space, which is more challenging but attracts little attention. We demonstrate current offline RL algorithms are ineffective in multi-agent systems due to the accumulated extrapolation error. In this paper, we propose a novel offline RL algorithm, named Implicit Constraint Q-learning (ICQ), which effectively alleviates the extrapolation error by only trusting the state-action pairs given in the dataset for value estimation. Moreover, we extend ICQ to multi-agent tasks by decomposing the joint-policy under the implicit constraint. Experimental results demonstrate that the extrapolation error is successfully controlled within a reasonable range and insensitive to the number of agents. We further show that ICQ achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the challenging multi-agent offline tasks (StarCraft II). Our code is public online at https://github.com/YiqinYang/ICQ.

Christopher D. Wallbridge, Qiyuan Zhang

This extended abstract introduces the initial steps taken to develop a system for Rapid Internal Simulation of Knowledge (RISK). RISK aims to enable more transparency in artificial intelligence systems, especially those created by deep learning networks by allowing real-time simulation of what the system knows. By looking at hypothetical situations based on these simulations a system may make more informed decisions, and produce them for non-expert observers to understand the reasoning behind a given action.

Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Yuxin Jiang et al.

LLM-as-a-Judge, which generates chain-of-thought (CoT) judgments, has become a widely adopted auto-evaluation method. However, its reliability is compromised by the CoT reasoning's inability to capture comprehensive and deeper details, often leading to incomplete outcomes. Existing methods mainly rely on majority voting or criteria expansion, which is insufficient to address the limitation in CoT. We propose Crowd-based Comparative Evaluation, which introduces additional crowd responses to compare with the candidate responses, thereby exposing deeper and more comprehensive details within the candidate responses. This process effectively guides LLM-as-a-Judge to provide a more detailed CoT judgment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances evaluation reliability, achieving an average accuracy gain of 6.7% across five benchmarks. Moreover, our method produces higher-quality CoTs that facilitate judge distillation and exhibit superior performance in rejection sampling for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), referred to as crowd rejection sampling, thereby enabling more efficient SFT. Our analysis confirms that CoTs generated by ours are more comprehensive and of higher quality, and evaluation accuracy improves as inference scales.

Wenzhang Sun, Xiang Li, Donglin Di et al.

Recently, animating portrait images using audio input is a popular task. Creating lifelike talking head videos requires flexible and natural movements, including facial and head dynamics, camera motion, realistic light and shadow effects. Existing methods struggle to offer comprehensive, multifaceted control over these aspects. In this work, we introduce UniAvatar, a designed method that provides extensive control over a wide range of motion and illumination conditions. Specifically, we use the FLAME model to render all motion information onto a single image, maintaining the integrity of 3D motion details while enabling fine-grained, pixel-level control. Beyond motion, this approach also allows for comprehensive global illumination control. We design independent modules to manage both 3D motion and illumination, permitting separate and combined control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms others in both broad-range motion control and lighting control. Additionally, to enhance the diversity of motion and environmental contexts in current datasets, we collect and plan to publicly release two datasets, DH-FaceDrasMvVid-100 and DH-FaceReliVid-200, which capture significant head movements during speech and various lighting scenarios.

Shizhan Gong, Minda Hu, Qiyuan Zhang et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks. However, concerns about their trustworthiness persist, particularly regarding tendencies to lean more on textual cues than visual evidence and the risk of producing ungrounded or fabricated responses. To address these issues, we propose Saliency-R1, a framework for improving the interpretability and faithfulness of VLMs reasoning. Specifically, we introduce a novel saliency map technique that efficiently highlights critical image regions contributing to generated tokens without additional computational overhead. This can further be extended to trace how visual information flows through the reasoning process to the final answers, revealing the alignment between the thinking process and the visual context. We use the overlap between the saliency maps and human-annotated bounding boxes as the reward function, and apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to align the salient parts and critical regions, encouraging models to focus on relevant areas when conduct reasoning. Experiments show Saliency-R1 improves reasoning faithfulness, interpretability, and overall task performance.

Qiyuan Zhang, Chenyu Wu, Wenzhang Sun et al.

Recent advancements in portrait video generation have been noteworthy. However, existing methods rely heavily on human priors and pre-trained generative models, Motion representations based on human priors may introduce unrealistic motion, while methods relying on pre-trained generative models often suffer from inefficient inference. To address these challenges, we propose Semantic Latent Motion (SeMo), a compact and expressive motion representation. Leveraging this representation, our approach achieve both high-quality visual results and efficient inference. SeMo follows an effective three-step framework: Abstraction, Reasoning, and Generation. First, in the Abstraction step, we use a carefully designed Masked Motion Encoder, which leverages a self-supervised learning paradigm to compress the subject's motion state into a compact and abstract latent motion (1D token). Second, in the Reasoning step, we efficiently generate motion sequences based on the driving audio signal. Finally, in the Generation step, the motion dynamics serve as conditional information to guide the motion decoder in synthesizing realistic transitions from reference frame to target video. Thanks to the compact and expressive nature of Semantic Latent Motion, our method achieves efficient motion representation and high-quality video generation. User studies demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art models with an 81% win rate in realism. Extensive experiments further highlight its strong compression capability, reconstruction quality, and generative potential.

Fuyuan Lyu, Chenglin Luo, Qiyuan Zhang et al.

Conventional sequential recommendation models have achieved remarkable success in mining implicit behavioral patterns. However, these architectures remain structurally blind to explicit user intent: they struggle to adapt when a user's immediate goal (e.g., expressed via a natural language prompt) deviates from their historical habits. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the semantic reasoning to interpret such intent, existing integration paradigms force a dilemma: LLM-as-a-recommender paradigm sacrifices the efficiency and collaborative precision of ID-based retrieval, while Reranking methods are inherently bottlenecked by the recall capabilities of the underlying model. In this paper, we propose Decoupled Promptable Sequential Recommendation (DPR), a model-agnostic framework that empowers conventional sequential backbones to natively support Promptable Recommendation, the ability to dynamically steer the retrieval process using natural language without abandoning collaborative signals. DPR modulates the latent user representation directly within the retrieval space. To achieve this, we introduce a Fusion module to align the collaborative and semantic signals, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that disentangles the conflicting gradients from positive and negative steering, and a three-stage training strategy that progressively aligns the semantic space of prompts with the collaborative space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DPR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in prompt-guided tasks while maintaining competitive performance in standard sequential recommendation scenarios.

Huaize Liu, Wenzhang Sun, Qiyuan Zhang et al.

Recent breakthroughs in video autoencoders (Video AEs) have advanced video generation, but existing methods fail to efficiently model spatio-temporal redundancies in dynamics, resulting in suboptimal compression factors. This shortfall leads to excessive training costs for downstream tasks. To address this, we introduce Hi-VAE, an efficient video autoencoding framework that hierarchically encode coarse-to-fine motion representations of video dynamics and formulate the decoding process as a conditional generation task. Specifically, Hi-VAE decomposes video dynamics into two latent spaces: Global Motion, capturing overarching motion patterns, and Detailed Motion, encoding high-frequency spatial details. Using separate self-supervised motion encoders, we compress video latents into compact motion representations to reduce redundancy significantly. A conditional diffusion decoder then reconstructs videos by combining hierarchical global and detailed motions, enabling high-fidelity video reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hi-VAE achieves a high compression factor of 1428$\times$, almost 30$\times$ higher than baseline methods (e.g., Cosmos-VAE at 48$\times$), validating the efficiency of our approach. Meanwhile, Hi-VAE maintains high reconstruction quality at such high compression rates and performs effectively in downstream generative tasks. Moreover, Hi-VAE exhibits interpretability and scalability, providing new perspectives for future exploration in video latent representation and generation.

Minda Hu, Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang et al.

As a crucial step to enhance LLMs alignment with human intentions, Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) has a high demand on dataset quality. However, existing IFT datasets often contain knowledge that is inconsistent with LLMs' internal knowledge learned from the pre-training phase, which can greatly affect the efficacy of IFT. To address this issue, we introduce NILE (iNternal consIstency aLignmEnt) framework, aimed at optimizing IFT datasets to unlock LLMs' capability further. NILE operates by eliciting target pre-trained LLM's internal knowledge corresponding to instruction data. The internal knowledge is leveraged to revise the answer in IFT datasets. Additionally, we propose a novel Internal Consistency Filtering (ICF) method to filter training samples, ensuring its high consistency with LLM's internal knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate that NILE-aligned IFT datasets sharply boost LLM performance across multiple LLM ability evaluation datasets, achieving up to 66.6% gain on Arena-Hard and 68.5% on Alpaca-Eval V2. Further analysis confirms that each component of the NILE}framework contributes to these substantial performance improvements, and provides compelling evidence that dataset consistency with pre-trained internal knowledge is pivotal for maximizing LLM potential.

Qiyuan Zhang, Lei Wang, Sicheng Yu et al.

While diverse question answering (QA) datasets have been proposed and contributed significantly to the development of deep learning models for QA tasks, the existing datasets fall short in two aspects. First, we lack QA datasets covering complex questions that involve answers as well as the reasoning processes to get the answers. As a result, the state-of-the-art QA research on numerical reasoning still focuses on simple calculations and does not provide the mathematical expressions or evidences justifying the answers. Second, the QA community has contributed much effort to improving the interpretability of QA models. However, these models fail to explicitly show the reasoning process, such as the evidence order for reasoning and the interactions between different pieces of evidence. To address the above shortcomings, we introduce NOAHQA, a conversational and bilingual QA dataset with questions requiring numerical reasoning with compound mathematical expressions. With NOAHQA, we develop an interpretable reasoning graph as well as the appropriate evaluation metric to measure the answer quality. We evaluate the state-of-the-art QA models trained using existing QA datasets on NOAHQA and show that the best among them can only achieve 55.5 exact match scores, while the human performance is 89.7. We also present a new QA model for generating a reasoning graph where the reasoning graph metric still has a large gap compared with that of humans, e.g., 28 scores.