Few-Step

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24 papers

Latest in Few-Step

Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

Latent-Kernel Discrete Flow Maps for Few-Step Generation

Discrete diffusion and flow-matching models denoise a sequence over many steps, but to keep each step cheap, they factorize the transition across positions and decide every token independently. This makes few-step generation challenging for text when the target couples two positions, such as a subject and a verb that must agree. An independent update commits to them separately, and many function evaluations are spent repairing the mismatch. Existing few-step methods buy back the lost correlation by distilling or rectifying a slow teacher, and so inherit the teacher's quality ceiling. We ask instead whether a model can express correlated steps natively, and answer with Latent-Kernel Discrete Flow Maps (LKF), a from-scratch flow-map kernel that is a mixture of M factorized components tied by a single shared latent. Conditioned on the latent, each component is cheap, and the mixture is summed over the latent in closed form for small M. We show that a single step places mass on correlated completions with the same sampling time complexity as a factorized model, since one latent is drawn per sequence and reused across the entire denoising trajectory. We also show that the Masked Diffusion Language Model (MDLM) is a special case of our LKF model at M=1. The experiments for unconditional text generation on the One-Billion-Word (LM1B) and WikiText-103 benchmarks show that our LKF model learns strongly heterogeneous components and improves generative perplexity by 2.1x to 3.3x over the likelihood baselines without losing diversity. The gain grows with M, and at M=8, it surpasses distilled and rectified few-step samplers. The source code is available at: https://github.com/mansoor181/lkf.git
Mansoor Ahmed, Yue-Tsz Fan, Hemanth Venkateswara +1
Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

SE(3)-MeanFlow: Few-Step Protein Backbone Generation on Lie Groups

Generative modeling of protein backbones promises the de novo design of proteins with prescribed structural and functional properties. Existing diffusion and flow-matching models produce high-quality backbones on SE(3)^N, but inference requires numerically integrating an ODE over hundreds of network evaluations, each involving a Lie group exponential map - a bottleneck for high-throughput design campaigns. We introduce SE(3)-MeanFlow, a few-step generative framework that extends MeanFlow from Euclidean space to the Lie group geometry of protein frames. Working natively in the Lie algebra so(3) and in R^3, we derive closed-form average-velocity identities for rotations and translations, giving simulation-free training targets. We further introduce an SE(3) alpha-Flow objective that removes the Jacobian-vector product from the rotation branch and serves as a warm-up stage, after which training switches to a small-t stabilized MeanFlow loss that is used for the remainder of pretraining and for rectification-based post-training. In protein backbone generation, SE(3)-MeanFlow matches or exceeds flow-matching baselines that use several times more sampling steps, and its advantage widens in the few-step regime, where rectification lets it lead at every matched budget - at a modest cost in diversity.
Yikun Bai, Binghang Lu, Yikai Liu +7
Jun 11, 2026cs.CL

HyperTool: Beyond Step-Wise Tool Calls for Tool-Augmented Agents

Tool-augmented LLM agents commonly rely on step-wise atomic tool calls, where each invocation, observation, and value transfer is exposed in the main reasoning trace. This creates an \emph{execution-granularity mismatch}: locally deterministic tool workflows are unfolded into repeated model-visible decisions, consuming context and forcing the model to manage low-level dataflow in the trace. We introduce \textbf{HyperTool}, a unified executable MCP-style tool interface that changes the model-visible unit of tool execution. A model invokes HyperTool with a code block that can call existing tools through their original schemas, manipulate returned values, and pass intermediate results locally, folding deterministic tool subroutines into a single outer call. To train models to use this interface, we synthesize HyperTool-format trajectories from cross-tool compositional tasks and verify them in real MCP environments. On MCP-Universe, HyperTool improves average accuracy from 15.69% to 35.29% on Qwen3-32B and from 9.93% to 33.33% on Qwen3-8B, and surpass GPT-OSS and Kimi-k2.5 on average accuracy, showing that our HyperTool can substantially improve multi-step tool use.
Yaxin Du, Yifan Zhou, Yujie Ge +7
Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

GUITrans2Act: Understanding User Operational Behaviors from Mobile GUI Interactions with Vision-Language Models

Understanding the digital world on mobile devices is shifting from static UI perception to dynamic action comprehension. This capability enables models to convert visual state transitions into operational knowledge, defined as short natural-language sentences that describe action types, target UI elements, textual arguments, and execution orders. However, due to the highly diverse and heterogeneous UI designs across applications, existing vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to accurately infer these underlying operations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Teach VLM, a core model designed to translate mobile screen trajectories into step-wise operational knowledge by extracting and analyzing operation-related keyframes from demonstration videos. To address the scarcity of aligned training data, we develop a systematic data flywheel for scalable data acquisition. We further introduce a novel Chinese Mobile Screen Teach Benchmark for fine-grained evaluation. Building upon Teach VLM, we propose the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm, where the generated operational knowledge serves as an interpretable procedural reference to guide downstream screen-based execution agents. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Teach VLM significantly outperforms strong VLM baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance in operation semantics prediction. Furthermore, experiments in Android World show that our paradigm yields consistent Task Success Rate improvements for downstream agents. Together, Teach VLM and the Teach-and-Repeat paradigm offer a practical pathway from raw demonstrations to reusable task automation.
Yudong Zhang, Lei Hu, Daoyang Liu +4
Jun 8, 2026cs.CV

Streaming Interventions: Can Video Large Language Models Correct Mistakes as They Occur?

Learning everyday skills, like cooking a dish, relies increasingly on instructional media such as online videos. This opens the door to the use of video (and multimodal) large language models (LLMs) as task guidance assistants. A crucial capability for the real-world success of a prospective task guidance assistant is it's ability to intervene proactively as soon as a mistake is apparent in order to guide the user. To evaluate this crucial capability, we introduce Ego-MC-Bench (Mistake Corrections), a benchmark for evaluating reactive, step-by-step task guidance in realistic cooking scenarios. Extensive experiments show that Ego-MC-Bench is highly challenging for state-of-the-art video LLMs. We argue that a key reason is the limited availability of training data for fine-tuning models on this task. Although there exists a wide range of cooking video datasets, existing datasets lack examples of mistakes along with appropriately timed interventions. To help address this data limitation, we also introduce Ego-CoMist, a counterfactual synthetic dataset created by transforming non -interactive cooking videos into supervised training examples showing proactive interventions. We show that fine-tuning on Ego-CoMist yields performance gains especially for smaller and more efficient video LLMs that are well suited for delivering assistance on edge devices.
Apratim Bhattacharyya, Shweta Mahajan, Sanjay Haresh +5
Jun 5, 2026cs.LG

Interpreting Learning Under Competing Models: Joint and Stepwise Approaches for Dynamic Cognitive Diagnosis

Digital learning environments record learners' responses to individual items, making it possible to study the development of specific skills rather than overall scores. Drawing conclusions about learning from these data requires a model that links responses to latent skills and tracks how mastery changes over time. When the skills measured by each item are unknown, the analyst must decide whether to estimate this structure, the Q-matrix, jointly with the learning process, or to establish it first and study learning afterwards. We show that this decision can change substantive conclusions about how learners develop. Using dynamic cognitive diagnostic models, we analyse data from two reading games measuring vocabulary and comprehension from Grade 2 to Grade 3, with item-text embeddings providing prior information for the unknown Q-matrix. A joint analysis and a bias-corrected stepwise analysis agree that most learners move toward mastering both skills, but disagree about how many remain only partially proficient at Grade 3, changing how reading progress would be reported. A simulation study identifies when the two analyses diverge and shows that joint analysis is more reliable when the item-skill structure is uncertain and the item pool changes between grades. We provide R code for both analyses.
Yawen Ma, Sahoko Ishida, Kate Cain +1
Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

StepPRM-RTL: Stepwise Process-Reward Guided LLM Fine-Tuning for Enhanced RTL Synthesis

Automatic generation of RTL code for digital hardware designs remains challenging due to long-horizon reasoning, multi-step dependencies, and strict correctness constraints in Verilog and VHDL. We present StepPRM-RTL, a novel framework that combines stepwise trajectory modeling, process-reward modeling (PRM), and retrieval-augmented fine-tuning (RAFT) to enhance both the functional correctness and reasoning fidelity of LLM-based RTL code generation. StepPRM-RTL constructs stepwise reasoning trajectories from canonical solutions, where each step contains a rationale and incremental code modification. A Process Reward Model (PRM) evaluates intermediate steps, providing dense feedback that guides reinforcement-style updates during RAFT fine-tuning. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) explores alternative reasoning paths, enriching the training dataset with high-quality trajectories. This integration of stepwise and outcome-aware rewards allows the model to learn both how and why to construct correct RTL, improving long-horizon reasoning beyond standard supervised or outcome-based training. Experimental evaluation on benchmark Verilog and VHDL datasets demonstrates that StepPRM-RTL outperforms the best prior methods by over 10% in functional correctness and reasoning fidelity metrics. Ablation studies confirm that the combination of PRM-guided rewards and stepwise trajectory exploration is key to its performance. StepPRM-RTL generalizes across RTL languages and provides a scalable framework for high-fidelity, interpretable code generation, establishing a new standard for LLM-assisted hardware design automation.
Prashanth Vijayaraghavan, Apoorva Nitsure, Luyao Shi +2
May 28, 2026cs.CL

Rethinking Stepwise Model Routing: A Cost-Efficient Table Reasoning Perspective

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on table reasoning tasks but incur substantial inference cost due to long reasoning traces. Stepwise model routing mitigates this issue by dynamically assigning reasoning steps to smaller or larger models. However, stepwise model routing for table reasoning remains underexplored. Through empirical analysis, we find that reasoning steps involving tables contain two types of tokens with distinct uncertainty distributions: table tokens grounded in table structure, such as cell values and headers, and text tokens representing surrounding natural-language reasoning. The uncertainty of both token types is correlated with the risk that the model makes an error in the next reasoning step. However, existing methods fail to model them separately, leading to suboptimal routing decisions. To address this, we propose EcoTab, a table-aware stepwise routing framework for efficient table reasoning. At each reasoning step, EcoTab separately estimates the uncertainties of table tokens and text tokens, maps them to next-step failure risks for the small model, and combines the two risks for routing. Experiments on multiple table reasoning benchmarks show that EcoTab consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves a better balance between accuracy and efficiency.
Shenghao Ye, Yuxiang Wang, Yu Guo +3
May 28, 2026cs.AI

Rubric-Guided Process Reward for Stepwise Model Routing

Stepwise model routing improves the efficiency of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) by assigning each reasoning step to a suitable model. Recent methods formulate routing as a sequential decision process and train the router with reinforcement learning. However, although they model routing as a process, they still supervise the router with outcome rewards. Such rewards only reflect final answer correctness and fail to evaluate intermediate routing decisions, which can weaken performance and generalization. To address this gap, we propose RoRo, a rubric-guided process reward framework for stepwise model routing. RoRo first collects diverse routing trajectories and constructs preference pairs based on outcome, cost, and process quality. It then trains a Rubricor to generate a query-specific evaluation rubric and a Judge to score routing trajectories under this rubric through alternating optimization. The resulting process rewards are combined with outcome rewards to optimize the routing policy via GRPO. Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks under both same-family and cross-family settings show that RoRo consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves better accuracy and cost trade-offs.
Shenghao Ye, Yu Guo, Zhengheng Li +2
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Aligning Few-Step Generative Models by Amortizing Sample-based Variational Inference

Aligning a few-step generative model is challenging, since existing alignment frameworks typically rely on restrictive assumptions: a tractable likelihood, a specific ODE/SDE solver, or a particular model family. We introduce FAV, Few-step Generative Models Alignment via Sample-based Variational Inference, a general alignment framework that requires only sample access to the generator and the reference distribution. We cast alignment as sampling from a reward-tilted distribution anchored to a reference distribution. We leverage Stein Variational Gradient Descent as a sample-based variational inference scheme and amortize its particle updates into the generator parameters via fixed-point regression. We evaluate FAV on two domains: robotics manipulation and image generator alignment. On generative policy alignment for robotic manipulation, FAV outperforms prevailing policy extraction baselines across 56 offline and 30 offline-to-online RL tasks. For image generator alignment, FAV fine-tunes diverse few-step backbones, including GAN, drifting model, consistency models, and flow maps, scaling from ImageNet-256256 to 10242^2 text-to-image synthesis. Code is available at https://github.com/Jaewoopudding/FAV.
Jaewoo Lee, Hyeongyu Kang, Dohyun Kim +9
May 25, 2026cs.CV

DRM: Diffusion-based Reward Model With Step-wise Guidance

Current mainstream methods of aligning diffusion models with human preferences typically employ VLM-based reward models. However, these reward models, pre-trained for semantic alignment, struggle to capture the essential perceptual qualities-such as aesthetics, composition, and visual harmony. In this work, we argue that a model capable of high-fidelity generation must possess a profound understanding of these visual attributes. Based on this insight, we introduce the Diffusion-based Reward Model (DRM), a novel paradigm that use the pre-trained diffusion model as a powerful evaluative backbone. A key advantage of the DRM is its unique ability to assess not only the final image but also the noisy intermediate latents at any stage of the generative process. We leverage this step-wise evaluative capacity in two ways. First, we propose Step-wise GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that provides dense, per-step rewards to resolve the imprecise credit assignment problem in GRPO algorithm, leading to more stable and effective alignment. Second, we introduce Step-wise Sampling, a novel inference strategy that employs the DRM as a dynamic guide to evaluate multiple generation paths at each step, steering the process towards higher-quality outcomes. Extensive experiments confirm that our approach significantly enhances the final quality of generated images. Code: https://github.com/jjaxonx/DRM.
Jaxon Zhang, Binxin Yang, Hubery Yin +2
May 23, 2026cs.CL

Decompose-and-Refine: Structured Legal Question Answering with Parametric Retrieval

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in the legal domain, demonstrating notable potential in Legal Question Answering (LQA). However, unlike general QA, LQA requires answers that are not only accurate but also rigorously grounded in explicit legal authority. In statutory LQA, many questions require multi-hop reasoning across multiple legal issues, substantially increasing the risk of hallucination, thereby making accurate retrieval of supporting statutory provisions a critical prerequisite. Despite recent progress in multi-hop QA, existing approaches often rely on reasoning in natural language or retrieval without explicit query reformulation, leaving the vocabulary gap between user questions and statutory text largely unaddressed. To address this challenge, we propose Decompose-and-Refine (DaR), a statute-grounded LQA framework that tightly integrates step-wise question decomposition with parametric knowledge-based query refinement. DaR progressively decomposes a complex legal question into atomic sub-questions and generates statute-aligned parametric queries for each sub-question, enabling the selection of a single most central statutory provision corresponding to each legal issue. We evaluate DaR on KoBLEX, a Korean multi-hop LQA benchmark grounded in statutory law, using Qwen3-32B and Gemma3-27B. Experimental results demonstrate that DaR consistently improves both retrieval accuracy and final answer quality over existing approaches. Moreover, by explicitly separating sub-questions and their corresponding statutory provisions, DaR facilitates transparent, issue-level verification of complex legal reasoning processes.
Jihyung lee, Hyounghun Kim, Gary Lee
May 20, 2026cs.LG

The Hidden Signal of Verifier Strictness: Controlling and Improving Step-Wise Verification via Selective Latent Steering

Generative verifiers have emerged as a promising paradigm for step-wise verification, but their verification behavior is often poorly calibrated: they may be under-critical and miss erroneous steps, or over-critical and reject correct reasoning. We refer to this tendency to be overly lenient or overly critical as verifier strictness. In this work, we study whether verifier strictness can be controlled through hidden-state intervention. We uncover a verification-specific hidden-state signal: in step-wise verification, a verifier's tendency to accept or reject a solution step is encoded near the boundary of the corresponding verification paragraph. Exploiting this signal, we show that hidden-state steering can directly modulate verifier strictness without fine-tuning. However, uniform steering induces a trade-off between error detection and correctness certification. To address this, we propose VerifySteer, which exploits latent correctness signals for sample-level routing and selectively intervenes on paragraph boundaries. Experiments on ProcessBench and Hard2Verify show that VerifySteer outperforms prompt optimization and activation steering baselines, and is competitive with self-consistency while requiring 4-7x less inference compute. VerifySteer is also complementary to verification fine-tuning, providing further gains on top of fine-tuned verifiers. The code is available at https://github.com/YefanZhou/VerifySteer.
Yefan Zhou, Yilun Zhou, Austin Xu +3
May 20, 2026cs.LG

REFLECTOR: Internalizing Step-wise Reflection against Indirect Jailbreak

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they remain susceptible to sophisticated, multi-step jailbreak attacks that circumvent conventional surface-level safety alignment by exploiting the internal generation process. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose Reflector, a principled two-stage framework that internalizes self-reflection within the generation trajectory. Reflector first leverages teacher-guided generation to produce high-quality reflection data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), establishing structured reflection patterns. It subsequently uses Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-driven and reward-validity supervision to instill robust, autonomous self-reflection capabilities. Empirical results show that Reflector achieves Defense Success Rates (DSR) exceeding 90% against complex indirect attacks while generalizing robustly across diverse threat scenarios. Notably, the framework enhances both task-specific and general utility, yielding a 5.85% gain on GSM8K alongside improved performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks. By internalizing trajectory-level safety, Reflector overcomes the fundamental limitations of surface alignment without significant computational overhead, offering an efficient and scalable solution for the development of safe and capable LLMs.
Jiachen Ma, Jiawen Zhang, Xiangtian Li +3
May 17, 2026cs.LG

Step-wise Rubric Rewards for LLM Reasoning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is widely used to improve reasoning in large language models, but rewards only final-answer correctness with no supervision over intermediate steps. Rubric-based methods such as Rubrics as Rewards (RaR) introduce finer-grained supervision by scoring rollouts against structured criteria, yet the rubric scores are still aggregated into a single scalar applied to the entire response, causing three weaknesses: loss of multi-criterion structure, uniform supervision of correct and incorrect steps, and reward hacking through unbounded self-correction. On 1,000 problems, we find 18.2% of steps in correct-answer responses are wrong yet positively rewarded, while 49.9% of steps in incorrect-answer responses are correct yet penalized. We introduce Step-wise Rubrics as Rewards (SRaR), an RLVR framework that (i) uses an LLM judge to attribute each rubric item to a specific reasoning step, (ii) normalizes per-step rubric scores across rollouts so only steps whose quality varies produce a learning signal, and (iii) combines the per-step reward with the outcome reward through a decoupled advantage estimator that keeps the outcome baseline stable. We further build a 16K-problem rubric dataset by contrastively distilling rubric items from correct and flawed reasoning paths sampled from a strong model. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, SRaR improves average accuracy over RaR by 3.57 points on Qwen3-8B and 2.75 points on Qwen3-32B, raises the Faithful Reasoning Rate on AIME 2025 from 34.5% to 46.7%, and reduces self-correction looping from 48.1% to 26.5%.
Weichu Xie, Haozhe Zhao, Wenpu Liu +15
May 12, 2026cs.SE

StepCodeReasoner: Aligning Code Reasoning with Stepwise Execution Traces via Reinforcement Learning

Existing code reasoning methods primarily supervise final code outputs, ignoring intermediate states, often leading to reward hacking where correct answers are obtained through inconsistent reasoning. We propose StepCodeReasoner, a framework that introduces explicit intermediate execution-state supervision. By automatically inserting structured print-based execution-trace anchors into code, the model is trained to predict runtime states at each step, transforming code reasoning into a verifiable, stepwise execution modeling problem. Building on this execution-aware method, we introduce Bi-Level GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm for structured credit assignment at two levels: inter-trajectory, comparing alternative execution paths, and intra-trajectory, rewarding intermediate accuracy based on its impact on downstream correctness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StepCodeReasoner achieves SOTA performance in code reasoning. In particular, our 7B model achieves 91.1% on CRUXEval and 86.5% on LiveCodeBench, outperforming the CodeReasoner-7B baseline (86.0% and 77.7%) and GPT-4o (85.6% and 75.1%). Furthermore, on the execution-trace benchmark REval, our model scores 82.9%, outperforming baseline CodeReasoner-7B (72.3%), its 14B counterpart (81.1%), and GPT-4o (77.3%). Additionally, our approach also improves code generation performance, demonstrating that explicit execution modeling enhances both code reasoning and code generation.
Hao Wang, Rui Li, Lei Sha +1
May 6, 2026cs.CL

Every Step Counts: Step-Level Credit Assignment for Tool-Integrated Text-to-SQL

Tool-integrated Text-to-SQL parsing has emerged as a promising paradigm, framing SQL generation as a sequential decision-making process interleaved with tool execution. However, existing reinforcement learning approaches mainly rely on coarse-grained outcome supervision, resulting in a fundamental credit assignment problem: models receive the same reward for any trajectory that yields the correct answer, even when intermediate steps are redundant, inefficient, or erroneous. Consequently, models are encouraged to explore suboptimal reasoning spaces, limiting both efficiency and generalization. To address this problem, we propose FineStep, a novel framework for step-level credit assignment in tool-augmented Text-to-SQL. First, we introduce a reward design with independent process rewards to alleviate the signal sparsity of outcome supervision. Next, we present a step-level credit assignment mechanism to precisely quantify the value of each reasoning step. Finally, we develop a policy optimization method based on step-level advantages for efficient updates. Extensive experiments on BIRD benchmarks show that FineStep achieves state-of-the-art performance and reduces redundant tool interactions, with a 3.25% average EX gain over GRPO at the 4B scale.
Yaxun Dai, Baolin Sun, Junying Wang +6
May 5, 2026cs.CV

UnAC: Adaptive Visual Prompting with Abstraction and Stepwise Checking for Complex Multimodal Reasoning

Although recent LMMs have become much stronger at visual perception, they remain unreliable on problems that require multi-step reasoning over visual evidence. In this paper, we present UnAC (Understanding, Abstracting, and Checking), a multimodal prompting method that strengthens reasoning for complex multimodal tasks in LMMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5, and GPT-4V). To improve image understanding and capture fine details, we propose an adaptive visual prompting strategy that enables LMMs to focus on salient regions. We further design an image-abstraction prompt to effectively extract key information from images. In addition, we introduce a gradual self-checking scheme that improves reasoning by verifying each decomposed subquestion and its answer. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks-MathVista, MM-Vet, and MMMU.
Yifan Wang, Yun Fu
May 5, 2026cs.LG

A Few-Step Generative Model on Cumulative Flow Maps

We propose a unified, few-step generative modeling framework based on \emph{cumulative flow maps} for long-range transport in probability space, inspired by flow-map techniques for physical transport and dynamics. At its core is a cumulative-flow abstraction that connects local, instantaneous updates with finite-time transport, enabling generative models to reason about global state transitions. This perspective yields a unified few-step framework built on cumulative transport and \revise{cumulative} parameterization that applies broadly to existing diffusion- and flow-based models without being tied to a specific prediction \revise{instantiation}. Our formulation supports few-step and even one-step generation while preserving synthesis quality, requiring only minimal changes to time embeddings and training objectives, and no increase in model capacity. We demonstrate its effectiveness across diverse tasks, including image generation, geometric distribution modeling, joint prediction, and SDF generation, with reduced inference cost.
Zhiqi Li, Duowen Chen, Yuchen Sun +1
Apr 28, 2026cs.AI

Training Transformers as a Universal Computer

We demonstrate that a small transformer can learn to execute programs in MicroPy, a simplified yet computationally universal programming language. Given procedure definitions together with an expression to evaluate, the transformer predicts small-step execution using PENCIL scaffolding for space-efficient execution within a bounded context window. After training on randomly generated, meaningless MicroPy programs, the learned transformer generalizes to various human-written programs including bit copying and flipping, binary addition and multiplication, and SAT verification and solving. We note that the trained model can achieve out-of-distribution generalization; i.e., evaluate novel programs from distribution on programs. Since MicroPy can express any computation, our results provide empirical evidence that a standard transformer can be trained to act as a universal computer.
Ruize Xu, Chenxiao Yang, Yanhong Li +1
Apr 25, 2026cs.CL

S2\mathcal{S}^2IT: Stepwise Syntax Integration Tuning for Large Language Models in Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction

Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP) has seen significant advancements, largely driven by the powerful semantic understanding and generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, while syntactic structure information has been proven effective in previous extractive paradigms, it remains underutilized in the generative paradigm of LLMs due to their limited reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we propose S^2IT, a novel Stepwise Syntax Integration Tuning framework that progressively integrates syntactic structure knowledge into LLMs through a multi-step tuning process. The training process is divided into three steps. S^2IT decomposes the quadruple generation task into two stages: 1) Global Syntax-guided Extraction and 2) Local Syntax-guided Classification, integrating both global and local syntactic structure information. Finally, Fine-grained Structural Tuning enhances the model's understanding of syntactic structures through the prediction of element links and node classification. Experiments demonstrate that S^2IT significantly improves state-of-the-art performance across multiple datasets. Our implementation will be open-sourced at https://github.com/DMIRLAB-Group/S2IT.
Bingfeng Chen, Chenjie Qiu, Yifeng Xie +3
Apr 16, 2026cs.AI

RadAgent: A tool-using AI agent for stepwise interpretation of chest computed tomography

Vision-language models (VLM) have markedly advanced AI-driven interpretation and reporting of complex medical imaging, such as computed tomography (CT). Yet, existing methods largely relegate clinicians to passive observers of final outputs, offering no interpretable reasoning trace for them to inspect, validate, or refine. To address this, we introduce RadAgent, a tool-using AI agent that generates CT reports through a stepwise and interpretable process. Each resulting report is accompanied by a fully inspectable trace of intermediate decisions and tool interactions, allowing clinicians to examine how the reported findings are derived. In our experiments, we observe that RadAgent improves chest CT report generation over its 3D VLM counterpart, CT-Chat, across three dimensions. Clinical accuracy improves by 5.8 points (35.4% relative) in macro-F1 and 5.1 points (18.6% relative) in micro-F1. Robustness under adversarial conditions improves by 24.7 points (41.9% relative). Furthermore, RadAgent achieves 37.0% in faithfulness, a new capability entirely absent in its 3D VLM counterpart. By structuring the interpretation of chest CT as an explicit, tool-augmented and iterative reasoning trace, RadAgent brings us closer toward transparent and reliable AI for radiology.
Mélanie Roschewitz, Kenneth Styppa, Yitian Tao +10
Feb 12, 2026cs.CL

Few-Step Diffusion Language Models via Trajectory Self-Distillation

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have emerged as powerful generative models with the promise of fast text generation through parallel decoding. However, realizing this potential in practice remains challenging: reducing the number of decoding steps, typically causes a substantial degradation in output quality due to token factorization error. To alleviate this, we propose a self-distillation framework that trains a few-step student to match the generative trajectory of a full-step teacher. We theoretically and empirically show that trajectory-level supervision mitigates this factorization error, thereby enabling effective few-step decoding. We further incorporate Direct Discriminative Optimization (DDO), a reverse-KL objective that encourages mode-seeking toward the teacher's modes, yielding stronger performance on challenging reasoning tasks. Across reasoning and code-generation benchmarks, our method substantially narrows the gap between few-step and full-step decoding. The source code is available at https://github.com/Tyrion58/T3D.
Tunyu Zhang, Xinxi Zhang, Ligong Han +10
Feb 6, 2026cs.CV

Alleviating Sparse Rewards by Modeling Step-Wise and Long-Term Sampling Effects in Flow-Based GRPO

Deploying GRPO on Flow Matching models has proven effective for text-to-image generation. However, existing paradigms typically propagate an outcome-based reward to all preceding denoising steps without distinguishing the local effect of each step. Moreover, current group-wise ranking mainly compares trajectories at matched timesteps and ignores within-trajectory dependencies, where certain early denoising actions can affect later states via delayed, implicit interactions. We propose TurningPoint-GRPO (TP-GRPO), a GRPO framework that alleviates step-wise reward sparsity and explicitly models long-term effects within the denoising trajectory. TP-GRPO makes two key innovations: (i) it replaces outcome-based rewards with step-level incremental rewards, providing a dense, step-aware learning signal that better isolates each denoising action's "pure" effect, and (ii) it identifies turning points-steps that flip the local reward trend and make subsequent reward evolution consistent with the overall trajectory trend-and assigns these actions an aggregated long-term reward to capture their delayed impact. Turning points are detected solely via sign changes in incremental rewards, making TP-GRPO efficient and hyperparameter-free. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that TP-GRPO exploits reward signals more effectively and consistently improves generation. Demo code is available at https://github.com/YunzeTong/TurningPoint-GRPO.
Yunze Tong, Mushui Liu, Canyu Zhao +7