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ZhenChun Xu, Yi Cai, Dajun Zheng, li Yuan, Mengchen Zhao, Qixiang Wang, Jiexin Wang

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), automated code generation has made remarkable progress. Recent studies explore multi-agent collaboration and adopt planning–coding–debugging workflows to enhance performance. However, these approaches are constrained by rigid, predefined workflows that fail to flexibly adjust their plans and lack effective verification of intermediate reasoning steps. In this work, we propose MavenCoder, a model-adaptive and verification–enhanced framework for competition-level code generation. MavenCoder leverages adaptive assessment aligned with the model’s capabilities to select planning strategies, while providing timely feedback and correction via multi-perspective verification. This adaptive problem-solving paradigm mitigates earlier limitations by enabling flexible planning and timely error correction. Compared with existing state-of-the-art approaches, MavenCoder achieves superior pass@1 results across multiple benchmarks, achieving 87.5% on LiveCodeBench, 93.9% on HumanEval+, 81.7% on MBPP+, and 46.1% on CodeContests, outperforming recent agent-based systems with improvement exceeding 3%–40%.

Pengna Li, Kangyi Wu, Shaoqing Xu, Fang Li, Lin Zhao, Long Chen, Zhi-Xin Yang, Nanning Zheng

Image-goal navigation steers an agent to a target location specified by an image in unseen environments. Existing methods primarily handle this task by learning an end-to-end navigation policy, which compares the similarities of target and observation images and directly predicts the actions. However, when the target is distant or lies in another room, such methods fail to extract informative visual cues, leading the agent to wander around. Motivated by the human cognitive principle that deliberate, high-level reasoning guides fast, reactive execution in complex tasks, we propose Hierarchical Reasoning Navigation (HRNav), a framework that decomposes image-goal navigation into high-level planning and low-level execution. In high-level planning, a vision-language model is trained on a self-collected dataset to generate a short-horizon plan, such as whether the agent should walk through the door or down the hallway. This downgrades the difficulty of the long-horizon task, making it more amenable to the execution part. In low-level execution, an online reinforcement learning policy is utilized to decide actions conditioned on the short-horizon plan. We also devise a novel Wandering Suppression Penalty (WSP) to further reduce the wandering problem. Together, these components form a hierarchical framew ork for Image-Goal Navigation. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Xiang Cheng, Yulan Hu, Xiangwen Zhang, Lu Xu, Lide Tan, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Yong Liu

Travel planning is a natural real-world task to test large language models’ (LLMs) planning and tool-use abilities. Although prior work has studied LLM performance on travel planning, existing settings still differ from real-world needs, mainly due to limited domain coverage, insufficient modeling of users’ implicit preferences in multi-turn conversations, and a lack of evaluation of agents’ capability boundaries. To mitigate these gaps, we propose \mbox{\textbf{TravelBench}}, a benchmark for \textit{truly real-world} travel planning. We collect user queries, user preferences, and tools from real scenarios, and construct three subtasks—\textit{Single-Turn}, \textit{Multi-Turn}, and \textit{Unsolvable}—to evaluate agents’ three core capabilities in real settings: (1) solving problems independently, (2) interacting with users to elicit implicit preferences, and (3) recognizing the capability boundaries. To enable stable tool invocation and reproducible evaluation, we cache real tool-call results and build a sandbox environment which integrates ten travel-related tools, enabling agents to combine these tools to solve most practical travel planning problems. We evaluate multiple LLMs on TravelBench and find that even advanced models exhibit imbalanced performance across different capabilities. Our further systematic verification demonstrates the stability of the proposed benchmark. TravelBench provides a practical and reproducible benchmark to advance research on LLM agents for real-world travel planning.

Kexin Ma, Haotian Wang, Shenglin Chen, Yishuai Cai, Huangyuyu, Ruochun Jin

Embodied agents have successfully leveraged large language models (LLMs) to better transform human instructions and images into executable task plans. Furthermore, memories of agents can be leveraged to achieve continual self-learning and optimization. However, vector data quality problems emerge in memories when they are projected into vector space, especially in discerning contextually similar but semantically conflicting sentences and highly similar images. This is particularly detrimental to embodied AI as it potentially distorts the robot’s actions. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict Detection Rules (CDRs) to identify and manage data quality issues in vector knowledge bases, which assist in correcting the index structure and further improving the answer quality. Experimental results show that planners with CDRs exceed the basic LLM planner by 15.25% and 14.25% in grammatical accuracy (GA) and interpretation accuracy (IA) on average, respectively. Moreover, the entire workflow has been successfully integrated into various scenarios, demonstrating its practical applicability and robustness in the real world.

Raffaele Pisano, Roberto Navigli

Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a powerful tool for providing step-level feedback when evaluating the reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs), which frequently produce chains of thought (CoTs) containing errors even when the final answer is correct. However, existing PRM datasets remain expensive to construct, prone to annotation errors, and predominantly limited to the mathematical domain.This work introduces a novel and scalable approach to PRM dataset generation based on planning logical problems expressed in the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). Using this method, we generate a corpus of approximately one million reasoning steps across various PDDL domains and use it to train PRMs. Experimental results show that augmenting widely-used PRM training datasets with PDDL-derived data yields substantial improvements in both mathematical and non-mathematical reasoning, as demonstrated across multiple benchmarks.These findings indicate that planning problems constitute a scalable and effective resource for generating robust, precise, and fine-grained training data for PRMs, going beyond the classical mathematical sources that dominate this field.

Han Zhang, Zihan Gu, Zhiyuan Wang, Tianyi Ma, Jiacheng Lu, Xinyan Zhang, Yuhao Wei, Cheng Hua

While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve high accuracy on established Classical Chinese Poetry benchmarks, it remains challenging to distinguish transferable Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning from reliance on familiar pre-training patterns. To address this issue, we introduce Neo-Classic, an evaluation benchmark that combines a constructionist Out-of-Sample (OOS) dataset with a suite of reverse understanding probes. Unlike traditional benchmarks that rely on verification or generation over historical corpora, Neo-Classic comprises strictly metrical poetry authored by contemporary experts, reducing the possibility of direct retrieval. We evaluate state-of-the-art models, including Qwen3-Max, Gemini-3-Pro, and DeepSeek-V3.2, across five behavioral probes designed to test hierarchical constraint satisfaction. Our results reveal two primary limitations. First, a performance gap of 20%–50% emerges when models transition from historical to contemporary texts. Second, models exhibit substantial difficulties in discourse-level ordering tasks, with standard accuracy remaining low (0–13%). Although expert-level guidance improves the performance of reasoning-enhanced models to 36%, a notable gap with human experts persists. These findings suggest that while current LLMs capture local formal patterns, they struggle with global hierarchical planning required for robust Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning.

Yixuan Wang, Yue Huang, Hong Qian, Yunzhao Wei, Yifei Ding, Wenkai Wang, Zhi Liu, Zhongjing Huang, Aimin Zhou, Jiajun Guo

Creativity has become a core competence in the era of LLMs and human–AI collaboration, underpinning innovation in real-world problem solving. Crucially, the systematic improvement of creativity necessitates scientifically valid assessment instruments. Psychometric research recognizes context-based assessment as an effective way to measure creative thinking. However, high-quality expert-designed contexts remain scarce. Existing LLM-based generators often struggle with insufficient assessment cues, weak narrative coherence, limited stylistic diversity, and poor support for creative thinking. To address these challenges, we propose AlphaContext, an evolutionary tree-based psychometric context generator for creativity assessment. First, the HyperTree Outline Planner formalizes expert-designed outlining as a rule-guided hypertree and performs top-down hierarchical planning. The MCTS-based Context Generator fills the outline via MCTS to balance global structure and local quality. Then, the Evolutionary Context Optimizer evolves contexts with MAP-Elites by repeatedly updating niche elites to jointly improve diversity and quality. Finally, the Assessment-Guided Evolution Refiner simulates virtual participants with diverse styles and recycles weak contexts for further evolution. Experiments show that AlphaContext yields an average improvement of 8% over competitive methods across 6 quality metrics.

Chaohui Guo, Michel C. A. Klein, Zhisheng Huang

Entity matching (EM) requires fine-grained contextual understanding and domain knowledge. Recent work shows that large language models (LLMs) can serve as strong matchers across domains, but most methods either make independent pairwise decisions or rely on manually designed composite pipelines, thus lacking flexibility in realistic multi-candidate settings. At the same time, they typically ignore inference cost at scale. We formulate LLM-based EM with candidates as a cost-aware sequential decision problem and propose CaRL-EM, a reinforcement learning controller that manages LLM operations. Given the state of an anchor record, its candidate set, and the cost, CaRL-EM adaptively chooses among different operators (Match/Compare/Select/Decide) and model capacities to maximize a quality–cost objective. The policy interacts with abstract operators, allowing the same controller to be reused with different underlying LLM backends at inference time without retraining. Experiments on 7 benchmarks show that CaRL-EM (i) learns to dynamically plan the usage of inexpensive and expensive operators based on task complexity, (ii) achieves robust zero-shot transfer across diverse datasets and domains, and (iii) consistently achieves a better quality–cost trade-off than strong LLM-based baselines and manually designed pipelines, yielding a lower inference cost at comparable or higher quality.

Yindong Zhang, Wenmian Yang, Yiquan Zhang, Weijia Jia

Developing agents capable of navigating fragmented, multi-source information remains challenging, primarily due to the scarcity of benchmarks reflecting hybrid workflows combining database querying with external APIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReCoQA, a large-scale benchmark of 29,270 real-estate instances featuring machine-verifiable supervision for intermediate steps, including structured intent labels, SQL queries, and API calls. Complementarily, we propose HIRE-Agent, a hierarchical framework instantiating an understand–plan–execute architecture as a strong baseline. By orchestrating a Front-end parser, a planning Supervisor, and execution Specialists, HIRE-Agent effectively integrates heterogeneous evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HIRE-Agent constitutes a strong baseline and substantiates the necessity of hierarchical collaboration for complex, real-world reasoning tasks.

Xinshun Feng, Xinhao Song, Lijun Li, Gongshen Liu, Jing Shao

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have demonstrated significant potential in single-turn reasoning tasks. With the paradigm shift toward self-evolving agentic learning, models are increasingly expected to learn from trajectories by synthesizing tools or accumulating explicit experiences. However, prevailing methods typically rely on large-scale LLMs or multi-agent frameworks, which hinder their deployment in resource-constrained environments. The inherent sparsity of outcome-based rewards also poses a substantial challenge, as agents typically receive feedback only upon task completion. To address these limitations, we introduce a Tool-Memory based self-evolving agentic framework SEARL. Unlike approaches that directly utilize interaction experiences, our method constructs a structured experience memory that integrates planning with execution. This provides a novel form of state abstraction that facilitates the aggregation of actions within functionally analogous contexts, such as tool reuse. Consequently, agents not only extract explicit knowledge from historical data but also leverage inter-trajectory correlations to densify reward signals. We evaluate our framework on knowledge reasoning and complex search tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving more practical and efficient agentic learning.

Pei-An Chen, Yongching Liang, Jia-Fong Yeh, Hung-Ting Su, Yi-Ting Chen, Min Sun, Winston H. Hsu

Intelligent embodied agents should not simply follow instructions, as real-world environments often involve unexpected conditions and exceptions. However, existing methods usually focus on directly executing instructions, without considering whether the target objects can actually be manipulated, meaning they fail to assess available affordances. To address this limitation, we introduce DynAfford, a benchmark that evaluates embodied agents in dynamic environments where object affordances may change over time and are not specified in the instruction. DynAfford requires agents to perceive object states, infer implicit preconditions, and adapt their actions accordingly. To enable this capability, we introduce ADAPT (Affordance-Driven Adaptive Planning and Task execution), a plug-and-play module that augments existing planners with explicit affordance reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating ADAPT significantly improves robustness and task success across both seen and unseen environments. We also show that a domain-adapted, LoRA-finetuned vision-language model used as the affordance inference backend outperforms a commercial LLM (GPT-4o), highlighting the importance of task-aligned affordance grounding.

Jinyang Wu, Shuo Yang, Yuhao Shen, Shuai Zhang, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao

Reinforcement learning has empowered large language models to act as intelligent agents, yet training them for long-horizon tasks remains challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality trajectories, especially under limited resources. Existing methods typically scale up rollout sizes and indiscriminately allocate computational resources among intermediate steps. Such attempts inherently waste substantial computation budget on trivial steps while failing to guarantee sample quality. To address this, we propose **SPARK** (**S**trategic **P**olicy-**A**ware explo**R**ation via **K**ey-state dynamic branching), a novel framework that selectively branches at critical decision states for resource-efficient exploration. Our key insight is to activate adaptive branching exploration at critical decision points to probe promising trajectories, thereby achieving precise resource allocation that prioritizes sampling quality over blind coverage. This design leverages the agent’s intrinsic decision-making signals to reduce dependence on human priors, enabling the agent to autonomously expand exploration and achieve stronger generalization. Experiments across diverse tasks (e.g., embodied planning), demonstrate that **SPARK** achieves superior success rates with significantly fewer training samples, exhibiting robust generalization even in unseen scenarios. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/jinyangwu/SPARK.

Yixin Wan, Xingrun Chen, Kai-Wei Chang

Advancements in Large language models (LLMs) have enabled a variety of downstream applications like story and interview script generation.However, recent research raised concerns about culture-related fairness issues in LLM-generated content.In this work, we identify and systematically investigate LLMs’ **insider-outsider bias**, a phenomenon where models position themselves as "insiders" of mainstream cultures during generation while externalizing less dominant cultures.We propose the ***InsideOut*** benchmark with 4,000 generation prompts and three evaluation metrics to quantify this bias through a *culturally situated interview script generation* task, in which an LLM is positioned as a reporter interviewing local people across 10 diverse cultures.Empirical evaluation on 5 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that while models adopt insider tones in over 88% US-contexted scripts on average, they disproportionately default to "outsider" stances for non-Western cultures.To mitigate these biases, we propose *2 inference-time methods*: a baseline prompt-based **Fairness Intervention Pillars (FIP)** method, and a structured **Mitigation via Fairness Agents (MFA)** framework consisting of a Single-Agent (MFA-SA), a Hierarchical-Agent (MFA-HA), and an autonomous Agentic Planning (MFA-Plan) pipeline.Empirical results demonstrate that agent-based MFA methods achieve outstanding and robust performance in mitigating the insider-outsider bias:For instance, on the Cultural Alignment Gap (CAG) metric, *MFA-SA reduces bias in Llama model by 89.70 % and MFA-HA mitigates bias in Qwen by 82.54%*.These findings showcase the effectiveness of agent-based methods as a promising direction for mitigating biases in generative LLMs.

Zezhou Wang, Ziyun Zhang, Xiaoyi Zhang, Zhuzhong Qian, Yan Lu

Vision-language models are increasingly deployed as computer-use agents (CUAs) that operate desktops and browsers. Top-performing CUAs are framework-based systems that decompose planning and execution, while end-to-end screenshot-to-action policies are easier to deploy but lag behind on benchmarks such as OSWorld-Verified. GUI datasets like OSWorld pose two bottlenecks: they expose only a few hundred interactive, verifiable tasks and environments, and expert trajectories must be gathered by interacting with these environments, making such data hard to scale. We therefore ask how reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) can best exploit a small pool of exist expert trajectories to train end-to-end policies. Na"ively mixing these off-policy traces into on-policy RLVR is brittle: even after format conversion, expert trajectories exhibit structural mismatch and distribution shift from the learner. We propose BEPA (Bi-Level Expert-to-Policy Assimilation), which turns static expert traces into policy-aligned guidance via self-rolled reachable trajectories under the base policy (LEVEL-1) and a per-task, dynamically updated cache used in RLVR (LEVEL-2). On OSWorld-Verified, BEPA improves UITARS1.5-7B success from 22.87% to 32.13% and raises a held-out split from 5.74% to 10.30%, with consistent gains on MMBench-GUI and Online-Mind2Web. Our code and data are available at an anonymous repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ACL_BEPA.

Jiaxuan Wang, Yulan Hu, Wenjin Yang, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Lan-Zhe Guo

In classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Reward Models (RMs) serve as the fundamental signal provider for model alignment. As Large Language Models evolve into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool invocation and complex reasoning, the paradigm of reward modeling faces unprecedented challenges–most notably, the lack of benchmarks specifically designed to assess RM capabilities within tool-integrated environments. To address this gap, we present Plan-RewardBench, a trajectory-level preference benchmark designed to evaluate how well judges distinguish preferred versus distractor agent trajectories in complex tool-using scenarios. Plan-RewardBench covers four representative task families—(i) Safety Refusal, (ii) Tool-Irrelevance / Unavailability, (iii) Complex Planning, and (iv) Robust Error Recovery—comprising validated positive trajectories and confusable hard negatives constructed via multi-model natural rollouts, rule-based perturbations, and minimal-edit LLM perturbations. We benchmark representative RMs (generative, discriminative, and LLM-as-Judge) under a unified pairwise protocol, reporting accuracy trends across varying trajectory lengths and task categories. Furthermore, we provide diagnostic analyses of prevalent failure modes. Our results reveal that all three evaluator families face substantial challenges, with performance degrading sharply on long-horizon trajectories, underscoring the necessity for specialized training in agentic, trajectory-level reward modeling. Ultimately, Plan-RewardBench aims to serve as both a practical evaluation suite and a reusable blueprint for constructing agentic planning preference data.

Tianwei Lan, Jiaqi Wu, Zeming Liu, Zhaoxin Fan, Haifeng Wang, Yuhang Guo

Embodied Action Sequence Planning focuses on the capability of embodied agents to implement action planning via environmental perception. This technology enables diverse intelligent assistance for real-world scenarios such as home and office environments. To address the limitations of existing embodied agents in meeting the requirement for proactivity and achieving joint understanding of visual and audio information, this study investigates the ability of embodied agents to proactively provide assistance through action sequence planning based on joint understanding of vision and audio perception without explicit human instructions. Correspondingly, we propose PEAP, the first multimodal proactive embodied action sequence planning dataset. We evaluate the performance of multiple Large Language Models on the PEAP dataset. The results demonstrate that these models still exhibit significant deficiencies on this task particularly lacking accurate environmental perception capabilities. Furthermore, ablation experiment and replacement experiment further corroborate that the joint understanding of multimodal information can significantly improve the models’ performance on proactive embodied action sequence planning task.

Wonduk Seo, Juhyeon Lee, Yanjun Shao, Qingshan Zhou, Seunghyun Lee, Yi Bu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled dynamic reasoning in automated data analytics, yet recent multi-agent systems remain limited by rigid, single-path workflows that restrict strategic exploration and often lead to suboptimal outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose SPIO (Sequential Plan Integration and Optimization), a framework that replaces rigid workflows with adaptive, multi-path planning across four core modules: data preprocessing, feature engineering, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning. In each module, specialized agents generate diverse candidate strategies, which are cascaded and refined by an optimization agent. SPIO offers two operating modes: SPIO-S for selecting a single optimal pipeline, and SPIO-E for ensembling top-k pipelines to maximize robustness. Extensive evaluations on Kaggle and OpenML benchmarks show that SPIO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average performance gain of 5.6%. By explicitly exploring and integrating multiple solution paths, SPIO delivers a more flexible, accurate, and reliable foundation for automated data science.

Hui Wu, Chao Xu, Jianghui Wang, Ziqiong Liu, Dong Li, Yiwei Dai, Emad Barsoum

Embodied agents in open-ended environments such as Minecraft increasingly adopt planner–controller architectures, with large language models acting as high-level planners. While planning has advanced rapidly, control remains underexplored. Existing systems commonly rely on a monolithic policy to execute subgoals across varying contexts, forcing incompatible behaviors into a shared parameter space and causing interference that scaling only partially mitigates. To address this, we propose MoEC, a Memory-Routed Mixture-of-Experts Controller for Adaptive Minecraft Control. MoEC routes via a subgoal-indexed, non-parametric expert memory and regulates capacity through failure-triggered expert growth and redundancy-aware consolidation. This design enables continual adaptation without full retraining, while maintaining parameter efficiency and with bounded inference cost. We evaluate MoEC on diverse and compositional Minecraft tasks, demonstrating significant gains in adaptability, robustness, and execution consistency over strong baselines, yielding a scalable and efficient alternative for open-ended control.

Hao Sun, Yu Song, Teng Shiyu, Ziwei Niu, Yen-wei Chen

VLA models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for transferring semantic knowledge from web-scale data to physical robotic control. However, current single-frame architectures suffer from intrinsic limitations: temporal myopia that discards historical dynamics, reasoning gaps between high-level instructions and low-level motor commands, and inference inefficiency due to autoregressive scalar decoding. In this work, we propose MIRTH, a unified framework designed to address these challenges. MIRTH augments a pretrained VLA backbone with three key innovations: (1) dual-scale temporal memory hubs that compress long-term scene evolution and short-term motion trends into compact embeddings; (2) latent reasoning tokens optimized via a mutual-information objective carving out a semantic plan space to align multimodal context with action trajectories; and (3) a parallel action decoding scheme that replaces autoregressive generation with vector-wise prediction to maximize control throughput. Extensive evaluations on the LIBERO simulation benchmark and a real-world LeRobot platform demonstrate that MIRTH achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibiting emergent error recovery capabilities. We will release our code and collected datasets to facilitate reproducible research in embodied AI upon publication.

Haofu Yang, Jiaji Liu, Chen Huang, Faguo Wu, Wenqiang Lei, See-Kiong Ng

Developing non-collaborative dialogue agents traditionally requires the manual, unscalable codification of expert strategies. We propose METRO, a method that leverages large language models to autonomously induce both strategy actions and planning logic directly from raw transcripts. METRO formalizes expert knowledge into a Strategy Forest, a hierarchical structure that captures both short-term responses (nodes) and long-term strategic foresight (branches). Experimental results across two benchmarks show that METRO demonstrates promising performance, outperforming existing methods by an average of 9%-10%. Our further analysis not only reveals the success behind METRO (strategic behavioral diversity and foresight), but also demonstrates its robust cross-task transferability. This offers new insights into building non-collaborative agents in a cost-effective and scalable way. Our code is available at https://github.com/Humphrey-0125/METRO.