Kai Yu

Zihan Wang, Kangrui Wang, Qineng Wang et al.

Training large language models (LLMs) as interactive agents presents unique challenges including long-horizon decision making and interacting with stochastic environment feedback. While reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled progress in static tasks, multi-turn agent RL training remains underexplored. We propose StarPO (State-Thinking-Actions-Reward Policy Optimization), a general framework for trajectory-level agent RL, and introduce RAGEN, a modular system for training and evaluating LLM agents. Our study on four stylized environments reveals three core findings. First, our agent RL training shows a recurring mode of Echo Trap where reward variance cliffs and gradient spikes; we address this with StarPO-S, a stabilized variant with trajectory filtering, critic incorporation, and gradient stabilization. Second, we find the shaping of RL rollouts would benefit from diverse initial states, medium interaction granularity and more frequent sampling. Third, we show that without fine-grained, reasoning-aware reward signals, agent reasoning hardly emerge through multi-turn RL and they may show shallow strategies or hallucinated thoughts. Code and environments are available at https://github.com/RAGEN-AI/RAGEN.

Yiming Ai, Zhiwei He, Ziyin Zhang et al.

In this study, we delve into the validity of conventional personality questionnaires in capturing the human-like personality traits of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our objective is to assess the congruence between the personality traits LLMs claim to possess and their demonstrated tendencies in real-world scenarios. By conducting an extensive examination of LLM outputs against observed human response patterns, we aim to understand the disjunction between self-knowledge and action in LLMs.

Jiaxiang Cheng, Bing Ma, Xuhua Ren et al.

Video diffusion generation suffers from critical sampling efficiency bottlenecks, particularly for large-scale models and long contexts. Existing video acceleration methods, adapted from image-based techniques, lack a single-step distillation ability for large-scale video models and task generalization for conditional downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose the Video Phased Adversarial Equilibrium (V-PAE), a distillation framework that enables high-quality, single-step video generation from large-scale video models. Our approach employs a two-phase process. (i) Stability priming is a warm-up process to align the distributions of real and generated videos. It improves the stability of single-step adversarial distillation in the following process. (ii) Unified adversarial equilibrium is a flexible self-adversarial process that reuses generator parameters for the discriminator backbone. It achieves a co-evolutionary adversarial equilibrium in the Gaussian noise space. For the conditional tasks, we primarily preserve video-image subject consistency, which is caused by semantic degradation and conditional frame collapse during the distillation training in image-to-video (I2V) generation. Comprehensive experiments on VBench-I2V demonstrate that V-PAE outperforms existing acceleration methods by an average of 5.8% in the overall quality score, including semantic alignment, temporal coherence, and frame quality. In addition, our approach reduces the diffusion latency of the large-scale video model (e.g., Wan2.1-I2V-14B) by 100 times, while preserving competitive performance.

Kefan Yu, Qingcheng Zeng, Weihao Xuan et al.

Current large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emerging capabilities in social intelligence tasks, including implicature resolution and theory-of-mind reasoning, both of which require substantial pragmatic understanding. However, how LLMs acquire this pragmatic competence throughout the training process remains poorly understood. In this work, we introduce ALTPRAG, a dataset grounded in the pragmatic concept of alternatives, to evaluate whether LLMs at different training stages can accurately infer nuanced speaker intentions. Each instance pairs two equally plausible yet pragmatically divergent continuations and requires the model to (i) infer the speaker's intended meaning and (ii) explain when and why a speaker would choose one utterance over its alternative, thus directly probing pragmatic competence through contrastive reasoning. We systematically evaluate 22 LLMs across 3 key training stages: after pre-training, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and preference optimization, to examine the development of pragmatic competence. Our results show that even base models exhibit notable sensitivity to pragmatic cues, which improves consistently with increases in model and data scale. Additionally, SFT and RLHF contribute further gains, particularly in cognitive-pragmatic scenarios. These findings highlight pragmatic competence as an emergent and compositional property of LLM training and offer new insights for aligning models with human communicative norms.