Learning to Reason Faithfully through Step-Level Faithfulness MaximizationRunquan Gui, Yafu Li, Xiaoye Qu et al.
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has markedly improved the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. However, most RLVR pipelines rely on sparse outcome-based rewards, providing little supervision over intermediate steps and thus encouraging over-confidence and spurious reasoning, which in turn increases hallucinations. To address this, we propose FaithRL, a general reinforcement learning framework that directly optimizes reasoning faithfulness. We formalize a faithfulness-maximization objective and theoretically show that optimizing it mitigates over-confidence. To instantiate this objective, we introduce a geometric reward design and a faithfulness-aware advantage modulation mechanism that assigns step-level credit by penalizing unsupported steps while preserving valid partial derivations. Across diverse backbones and benchmarks, FaithRL consistently reduces hallucination rates while maintaining (and often improving) answer correctness. Further analysis confirms that FaithRL increases step-wise reasoning faithfulness and generalizes robustly. Our code is available at https://github.com/aintdoin/FaithRL.
2.6CLFeb 3
HySparse: A Hybrid Sparse Attention Architecture with Oracle Token Selection and KV Cache SharingYizhao Gao, Jianyu Wei, Qihao Zhang et al.
This work introduces Hybrid Sparse Attention (HySparse), a new architecture that interleaves each full attention layer with several sparse attention layers. While conceptually simple, HySparse strategically derives each sparse layer's token selection and KV caches directly from the preceding full attention layer. This architecture resolves two fundamental limitations of prior sparse attention methods. First, conventional approaches typically rely on additional proxies to predict token importance, introducing extra complexity and potentially suboptimal performance. In contrast, HySparse uses the full attention layer as a precise oracle to identify important tokens. Second, existing sparse attention designs often reduce computation without saving KV cache. HySparse enables sparse attention layers to reuse the full attention KV cache, thereby reducing both computation and memory. We evaluate HySparse on both 7B dense and 80B MoE models. Across all settings, HySparse consistently outperforms both full attention and hybrid SWA baselines. Notably, in the 80B MoE model with 49 total layers, only 5 layers employ full attention, yet HySparse achieves substantial performance gains while reducing KV cache storage by nearly 10x.
6.0AIFeb 3
TAME: A Trustworthy Test-Time Evolution of Agent Memory with Systematic BenchmarkingYu Cheng, Jiuan Zhou, Yongkang Hu et al.
Test-time evolution of agent memory serves as a pivotal paradigm for achieving AGI by bolstering complex reasoning through experience accumulation. However, even during benign task evolution, agent safety alignment remains vulnerable-a phenomenon known as Agent Memory Misevolution. To evaluate this phenomenon, we construct the Trust-Memevo benchmark to assess multi-dimensional trustworthiness during benign task evolution, revealing an overall decline in trustworthiness across various task domains and evaluation settings. To address this issue, we propose TAME, a dual-memory evolutionary framework that separately evolves executor memory to improve task performance by distilling generalizable methodologies, and evaluator memory to refine assessments of both safety and task utility based on historical feedback. Through a closed loop of memory filtering, draft generation, trustworthy refinement, execution, and dual-track memory updating, TAME preserves trustworthiness without sacrificing utility. Experiments demonstrate that TAME mitigates misevolution, achieving a joint improvement in both trustworthiness and task performance.