2.4AIJan 29
TeachBench: A Syllabus-Grounded Framework for Evaluating Teaching Ability in Large Language ModelsZheng Li, Siyao Song, Jingyuan Ma et al.
Large language models (LLMs) show promise as teaching assistants, yet their teaching capability remains insufficiently evaluated. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on problem-solving or problem-level guidance, leaving knowledge-centered teaching underexplored. We propose a syllabus-grounded evaluation framework that measures LLM teaching capability via student performance improvement after multi-turn instruction. By restricting teacher agents to structured knowledge points and example problems, the framework avoids information leakage and enables reuse of existing benchmarks. We instantiate the framework on Gaokao data across multiple subjects. Experiments reveal substantial variation in teaching effectiveness across models and domains: some models perform well in mathematics, while teaching remains challenging in physics and chemistry. We also find that incorporating example problems does not necessarily improve teaching, as models often shift toward example-specific error correction. Overall, our results highlight teaching ability as a distinct and measurable dimension of LLM behavior.
11.0AIJan 29
Self-Compression of Chain-of-Thought via Multi-Agent Reinforcement LearningYiqun Chen, Jinyuan Feng, Wei Yang et al.
The inference overhead induced by redundant reasoning undermines the interactive experience and severely bottlenecks the deployment of Large Reasoning Models. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based solutions tackle this problem by coupling a length penalty with outcome-based rewards. This simplistic reward weighting struggles to reconcile brevity with accuracy, as enforcing brevity may compromise critical reasoning logic. In this work, we address this limitation by proposing a multi-agent RL framework that selectively penalizes redundant chunks, while preserving essential reasoning logic. Our framework, Self-Compression via MARL (SCMA), instantiates redundancy detection and evaluation through two specialized agents: \textbf{a Segmentation Agent} for decomposing the reasoning process into logical chunks, and \textbf{a Scoring Agent} for quantifying the significance of each chunk. The Segmentation and Scoring agents collaboratively define an importance-weighted length penalty during training, incentivizing \textbf{a Reasoning Agent} to prioritize essential logic without introducing inference overhead during deployment. Empirical evaluations across model scales demonstrate that SCMA reduces response length by 11.1\% to 39.0\% while boosting accuracy by 4.33\% to 10.02\%. Furthermore, ablation studies and qualitative analysis validate that the synergistic optimization within the MARL framework fosters emergent behaviors, yielding more powerful LRMs compared to vanilla RL paradigms.