Qika Lin

Jian Zhang, Zhiyuan Wang, Zhangqi Wang et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents exhibit inherent reasoning abilities through the collaboration of multiple tools. However, during agent inference, existing methods often suffer from (i) locally myopic generation, due to the absence of lookahead, and (ii) trajectory instability, where minor early errors can escalate into divergent reasoning paths. These issues make it difficult to balance global effectiveness and computational efficiency. To address these two issues, we propose meta-adaptive exploration with LLM agents https://github.com/exoskeletonzj/MAXS, a meta-adaptive reasoning framework based on LLM Agents that flexibly integrates tool execution and reasoning planning. MAXS employs a lookahead strategy to extend reasoning paths a few steps ahead, estimating the advantage value of tool usage, and combines step consistency variance and inter-step trend slopes to jointly select stable, consistent, and high-value reasoning steps. Additionally, we introduce a trajectory convergence mechanism that controls computational cost by halting further rollouts once path consistency is achieved, enabling a balance between resource efficiency and global effectiveness in multi-tool reasoning. We conduct extensive empirical studies across three base models (MiMo-VL-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-32B) and five datasets, demonstrating that MAXS consistently outperforms existing methods in both performance and inference efficiency. Further analysis confirms the effectiveness of our lookahead strategy and tool usage.

Yanrui Du, Sendong Zhao, Yibo Gao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) equipped with chain-of-thought (CoT) achieve strong performance and offer a window into LLM behavior. However, recent evidence suggests that improvements in CoT capabilities often come with redundant reasoning processes, motivating a key question: Can LLMs acquire a fast-thinking mode analogous to human System 1 reasoning? To explore this, our study presents a self-sampling framework based on activation steering for efficient CoT learning. Our method can induce style-aligned and variable-length reasoning traces from target LLMs themselves without any teacher guidance, thereby alleviating a central bottleneck of SFT-based methods-the scarcity of high-quality supervision data. Using filtered data by gold answers, we perform SFT for efficient CoT learning with (i) a human-like dual-cognitive system, and (ii) a progressive compression curriculum. Furthermore, we explore a self-evolution regime in which SFT is driven solely by prediction-consistent data of variable-length variants, eliminating the need for gold answers. Extensive experiments on math benchmarks, together with cross-domain generalization tests in medicine, show that our method yields stable improvements for both general and R1-style LLMs. Our data and model checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/DYR1/S3-CoT.

Yanrui Du, Yibo Gao, Sendong Zhao et al.

R1-style LLMs have attracted growing attention for their capacity for self-reflection, yet the internal mechanisms underlying such behavior remain unclear. To bridge this gap, we anchor on the onset of reflection behavior and trace its layer-wise activation trajectory. Using the logit lens to read out token-level semantics, we uncover a structured progression: (i) Latent-control layers, where an approximate linear direction encodes the semantics of thinking budget; (ii) Semantic-pivot layers, where discourse-level cues, including turning-point and summarization cues, surface and dominate the probability mass; and (iii) Behavior-overt layers, where the likelihood of reflection-behavior tokens begins to rise until they become highly likely to be sampled. Moreover, our targeted interventions uncover a causal chain across these stages: prompt-level semantics modulate the projection of activations along latent-control directions, thereby inducing competition between turning-point and summarization cues in semantic-pivot layers, which in turn regulates the sampling likelihood of reflection-behavior tokens in behavior-overt layers. Collectively, our findings suggest a human-like meta-cognitive process-progressing from latent monitoring, to discourse-level regulation, and to finally overt self-reflection. Our analysis code can be found at https://github.com/DYR1/S3-CoT.

Hang Yan, Xinyu Che, Fangzhi Xu et al.

Recent advances in autonomous LLM agents demonstrate their ability to improve performance through iterative interaction with the environment. We define this paradigm as Test-Time Improvement (TTI). However, the mechanisms under how and why TTI succeed or fail remain poorly understood, and existing evaluation metrics fail to capture their task optimization efficiency, behavior adaptation after erroneous actions, and the specific utility of working memory for task completion. To address these gaps, we propose Test-time Improvement Diagnostic Evaluation (TIDE), an agent-agnostic and environment-agnostic framework that decomposes TTI into three comprehensive and interconnected dimensions. The framework measures (1) the overall temporal dynamics of task completion and (2) identifies whether performance is primarily constrained by recursive looping behaviors or (3) by burdensome accumulated memory. Through extensive experiments across diverse agents and environments, TIDE highlights that improving agent performance requires more than scaling internal reasoning, calling for explicitly optimizing the interaction dynamics between the agent and the environment.

Jian Zhang, Zhangqi Wang, Zhiyuan Wang et al.

Linguistic expressions of emotions such as depression, anxiety, and trauma-related states are pervasive in clinical notes, counseling dialogues, and online mental health communities, and accurate recognition of these emotions is essential for clinical triage, risk assessment, and timely intervention. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization ability in emotion analysis tasks, their diagnostic reliability in high-stakes, context-intensive medical settings remains highly sensitive to prompt design. Moreover, existing methods face two key challenges: emotional comorbidity, in which multiple intertwined emotional states complicate prediction, and inefficient exploration of clinically relevant cues. To address these challenges, we propose APOLO (Automated Prompt Optimization for Linguistic Emotion Diagnosis), a framework that systematically explores a broader and finer-grained prompt space to improve diagnostic efficiency and robustness. APOLO formulates instruction refinement as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process and adopts a multi-agent collaboration mechanism involving Planner, Teacher, Critic, Student, and Target roles. Within this closed-loop framework, the Planner defines an optimization trajectory, while the Teacher-Critic-Student agents iteratively refine prompts to enhance reasoning stability and effectiveness, and the Target agent determines whether to continue optimization based on performance evaluation. Experimental results show that APOLO consistently improves diagnostic accuracy and robustness across domain-specific and stratified benchmarks, demonstrating a scalable and generalizable paradigm for trustworthy LLM applications in mental healthcare.

Jian Zhang, Yu He, Zhiyuan Wang et al.

Scientific reasoning relies not only on logical inference but also on activating prior knowledge and experiential structures. Memory can efficiently reuse knowledge and enhance reasoning consistency and stability. However, existing benchmarks mainly evaluate final answers or step-by-step coherence, overlooking the \textit{memory-driven} mechanisms that underlie human reasoning, which involves activating anchors and attractors, then integrating them into multi-step inference. To address this gap, we propose $A^3$-Bench~ https://a3-bench.github.io, a benchmark designed to evaluate scientific reasoning through dual-scale memory-driven activation, grounded in Anchor and Attractor Activation. First, we annotate 2,198 science reasoning problems across domains using the SAPM process(subject, anchor & attractor, problem, and memory developing). Second, we introduce a dual-scale memory evaluation framework utilizing anchors and attractors, along with the AAUI(Anchor--Attractor Utilization Index) metric to measure memory activation rates. Finally, through experiments with various base models and paradigms, we validate $A^3$-Bench and analyze how memory activation impacts reasoning performance, providing insights into memory-driven scientific reasoning.

Jingying Ma, Feng Wu, Yucheng Xing et al.

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models (EFMs) have achieved strong performance under full fine-tuning but exhibit poor generalization when subject-level supervision is limited, a common constraint in real-world clinical settings. We show that this failure stems not merely from limited supervision, but from a structural mismatch between noisy, limited supervision and the highly plastic parameter space of EFMs. To address this challenge, we propose SCOPE, a Structured COnfidence-aware Prototype-guided adaptation framework for EFM fine-tuning. SCOPE follows a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we construct reliable external supervision by learning geometry-regularized task priors, constructing balanced class-level prototypes over the resulting embeddings, and producing confidence-aware pseudo-labels from their agreement to filter unreliable signals on unlabeled data. In the second stage, we introduce ProAdapter, which adapts frozen EEG foundation models via a lightweight adapter conditioned on the structured prototypes. Experiments across three EEG tasks and five foundation model backbones demonstrate that SCOPE consistently achieves strong performance and efficiency under label-limited cross-subject settings.

Mingda Zhang, Haoran Luo, Tiesunlong Shen et al.

In recent years, a variety of powerful agentic workflows have been applied to solve a wide range of human problems. However, existing workflow orchestration still faces key challenges, including high manual cost, reliance on specific operators/large language models (LLMs), and sparse reward signals. To address these challenges, we propose FlowSteer, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that takes a lightweight policy model as the agent and an executable canvas environment, automating workflow orchestration through multi-turn interaction. In this process, the policy model analyzes execution states and selects editing actions, while the canvas executes operators and returns feedback for iterative refinement. Moreover, FlowSteer provides a plug-and-play framework that supports diverse operator libraries and interchangeable LLM backends. To effectively train this interaction paradigm, we propose Canvas Workflow Relative Policy Optimization (CWRPO), which introduces diversity-constrained rewards with conditional release to stabilize learning and suppress shortcut behaviors. Experimental results on twelve datasets show that FlowSteer significantly outperforms baselines across various tasks.