Qifeng Wu

Jing Shao, Qifeng Wu, Hanyu Zhang et al.

Large language model (LLM)-based Socratic tutors increasingly guide students through multi-turn questioning, but they can suffer from scaffolding collapse: under sustained student pressure, a tutor gradually abandons guided inquiry and reveals solutions directly. Prior defenses primarily constrain observable responses through prompting, preference optimization, or filtering, leaving the internal representation drift that precedes trajectory-level collapse largely unaddressed. We propose Scaffold-Preserving Representation Alignment, a two-stage framework that first warms up a Socratic tutor with supervised fine-tuning, then combines trajectory-weighted direct preference optimization with a margin-preserving representation loss anchored to frozen reference states. Our method is designed to maintain separation between scaffold-preserving and collapse-inducing hidden states across dialogue turns. We evaluate our method across five STEM disciplines and five red-teaming attack strategies. On Qwen3-8B, our method lowers Collapse Rate to 32%, delays average collapse onset beyond nine turns, and keeps over-refusal low, suggesting that representation-level alignment can improve the robustness of long-horizon Socratic tutoring under our red-teaming protocol.

Yuxin Wang, Jiahao Lu, Qifeng Wu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, this approach often leads to ``over-thinking,'' where models generate unnecessarily long reasoning traces for simple queries and incur avoidable inference cost. While recent work has explored adaptive reasoning, existing methods typically make a single query-level decision about whether to reason. This overlooks the dynamic nature of multi-step tasks, where the need for explicit reasoning varies across intermediate stages. To address this limitation, we introduce AdaptR1, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based framework for adaptive interleaved thinking in multi-hop Question Answering (QA). Unlike previous approaches that require Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for cold-start initialization, AdaptR1 uses a fully RL-based strategy with a quality-gated efficiency reward to dynamically allocate reasoning budgets at each step. Under the Graph-R1 setting, AdaptR1 reduces average think tokens by 69.71\%, with a 90.35\% reduction on HotpotQA, while maintaining performance comparable to or better than standard baselines. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that overthinking in multi-hop reasoning is not uniformly distributed but occurs predominantly during the initial planning stages, highlighting the effectiveness of step-wise adaptive budget allocation.

Chunhan Li, Qifeng Wu, Jia-Hui Pan et al.

Text-to-image generation has advanced rapidly, but existing models still struggle with faithfully composing multiple objects and preserving their attributes in complex scenes. We propose coDrawAgents, an interactive multi-agent dialogue framework with four specialized agents: Interpreter, Planner, Checker, and Painter that collaborate to improve compositional generation. The Interpreter adaptively decides between a direct text-to-image pathway and a layout-aware multi-agent process. In the layout-aware mode, it parses the prompt into attribute-rich object descriptors, ranks them by semantic salience, and groups objects with the same semantic priority level for joint generation. Guided by the Interpreter, the Planner adopts a divide-and-conquer strategy, incrementally proposing layouts for objects with the same semantic priority level while grounding decisions in the evolving visual context of the canvas. The Checker introduces an explicit error-correction mechanism by validating spatial consistency and attribute alignment, and refining layouts before they are rendered. Finally, the Painter synthesizes the image step by step, incorporating newly planned objects into the canvas to provide richer context for subsequent iterations. Together, these agents address three key challenges: reducing layout complexity, grounding planning in visual context, and enabling explicit error correction. Extensive experiments on benchmarks GenEval and DPG-Bench demonstrate that coDrawAgents substantially improves text-image alignment, spatial accuracy, and attribute binding compared to existing methods.