LLMs have been widely used in planning, either as planners to generate action sequences end-to-end, or as formalizers to represent the planning domain and problem in a formal language that can derive plans deterministically. However, both lines of work rely on standard benchmarks that include only generic and simplistic environmental specifications, leading to potential overestimation of the planning ability of LLMs and safety concerns in downstream tasks. We bridge this gap by augmenting widely used planning benchmarks with manually annotated, fine-grained, and rich natural language constraints spanning four formally defined categories. Over 4 state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs, 4 formal languages, and 4 datasets, we show that the introduction of one-sentence constraints consistently halves performance, indicating current LLMs’ lack of robustness and an avenue for future research.
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A Goal Without a Plan Is Just a Wish: Efficient and Effective Global Planner Training for Long-Horizon Agent Tasks
PDF ↗Agents based on large language models (LLMs) struggle with brainless trial-and-error and generating hallucinatory actions due to a lack of global planning in long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we introduce a plan-and-execute framework and propose EAGLET, an efficient and effective planner training method to enhance the executor agent’s planning abilities without human effort. Specifically, we train a plug-and-play global planner through a two-step process: we first synthesize high-quality plans from an advanced LLM using our proposed homologous consensus filtering strategy, and apply fine-tuning as a cold start. Moreover, we further improve the planner with a rule-based reinforcement learning stage using a novel executor capability gain reward, ensuring it can handle task instructions of varying difficulty. Experiments on three long-horizon agent tasks show that executor agents equipped with our planner outperform existing methods, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Meanwhile, EAGLET reduces training costs by 8× compared to RL-based baselines, and it does not require manual effort or extra training data, offering an efficient and effective solution.
CostBench: Evaluating Multi-Turn Cost-Optimal Planning and Adaptation in Dynamic Environments for LLM Tool-Use Agents
PDF ↗Current evaluations of Large Language Model (LLM) agents primarily emphasize task completion, often overlooking resource efficiency and adaptability. This neglects a crucial capability: agents’ ability to devise and adjust cost-optimal plans in response to changing environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce **CostBench**, a scalable, cost-centric benchmark designed to evaluate agents’ economic reasoning and replanning abilities. Situated in the travel-planning domain, CostBench comprises tasks solvable via multiple sequences of atomic and composite tools with diverse, customizable costs. It also supports four types of dynamic blocking events, such as tool failures and cost changes, to simulate real-world unpredictability and necessitate agents to adapt in real time. Evaluating leading open-sourced and proprietary models on CostBench reveals a substantial gap in cost-aware planning: agents frequently fail to identify cost-optimal solutions in static settings, with even *GPT-5* achieving less than 75% exact match rate on the hardest tasks, and performance further drops significantly under dynamic conditions. By diagnosing these weaknesses, CostBench lays the groundwork for developing future agents that are both economically rational and robust.
LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to autonomously solve complex tasks, raising urgent needs for IP protection and regulatory provenance. While content watermarking effectively attributes LLM-generated outputs, it fails to directly identify the high-level planning behaviors (e.g., tool and subgoal choices) that govern multi-step execution. Critically, watermarking at the planning-behavior layer faces unique challenges: minor distributional deviations in decision-making can compound during long-term agent operation, degrading utility, and many agents operate as black boxes that are difficult to intervene in directly. To bridge this gap, we propose AgentMark, a behavioral watermarking framework that embeds multi-bit identifiers into planning decisions while preserving utility. It operates by eliciting an explicit behavior distribution from the agent and applying distribution-preserving conditional sampling, enabling deployment under black-box APIs while remaining compatible with action-layer content watermarking. Experiments across embodied, tool-use, and social environments demonstrate practical multi-bit capacity, robust recovery from partial logs, and utility preservation. Code is available at https://github.com/Tooooa/AgentMark.
ReProbe: Efficient Test-Time Scaling of Multi-Step Reasoning by Probing Internal States of Large Language Models
PDF ↗LLMs can solve complex tasks by generating long, multi-step reasoning chains. Test-time scaling (TTS) can further improve LLM performance by sampling multiple variants of intermediate reasoning steps, verifying their correctness, and strategically choosing the best steps for continuation. However, existing verification approaches, such as Process Reward Models (PRMs), are computationally expensive, limited to specific domains, and require large-scale human or model-generated annotations. We propose a lightweight alternative for step-level reasoning verification based on probing the internal states of LLMs. We train a transformer-based probe that uses the internal states of the frozen LLM to estimate the credibility of its reasoning steps during generation. Annotation can be generated either by another larger LLM (e.g., DeepSeek-R1) or in a self-supervised manner by the original model itself. The probes are both effective and lightweight, containing fewer than 10M parameters. Across multiple domains, including mathematics, planning, and general knowledge question answering, our probes match or even exceed the performance of PRMs that are up to 810× larger. Our findings suggest that the internal states of LLMs encode their confidence in reasoning processes and can serve as reliable signals for reasoning step verification, offering a promising direction towards scalable and generalizable TTS and introspective LLMs.
Learning from the Irrecoverable: Error-Localized Policy Optimization for Tool-Integrated LLM Reasoning
PDF ↗Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) enables LLM agents to solve tasks through planning, tool use, and iterative revision, but outcome-only reinforcement learning in this setting suffers from sparse, delayed rewards and weak step-level credit assignment. In long-horizon TIR trajectories, an early irrecoverable mistake can determine success or failure, making it crucial to localize the first irrecoverable step and leverage it for fine-grained credit assignment. We propose Error-Localized Policy Optimization (ELPO), which localizes the first irrecoverable step via binary-search rollout trees under a fixed rollout budget, converts the resulting tree into stable learning signals through hierarchical advantage attribution, and applies error-localized adaptive clipping to strengthen corrective updates on the critical step and its suffix. Across TIR benchmarks in math, science QA, and code execution, ELPO consistently outperforms strong Agentic RL baselines under comparable sampling budgets, with additional gains in Pass@K and Major@K scaling, rollout ranking quality, and tool-call efficiency. Our code is publicly released for reproducibility at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ELPO-7C19.
Despite impressive progress in high-fidelity image synthesis, generative models still struggle with logic-intensive instruction following, exposing a persistent reasoning–execution gap. Meanwhile, closed-source systems (e.g., Nano Banana) have demonstrated strong reasoning-driven image generation, highlighting a substantial gap to current open-source models. We argue that closing this gap requires not merely better visual generators, but executable reasoning: decomposing high-level intents into grounded, verifiable plans that directly steer the generative process. To this end, we propose Unified Thinker, a task-agnostic reasoning architecture for general image generation, designed as a unified planning core that can plug into diverse generators and workflows. Unified Thinker decouples a dedicated Thinker from the image Generator, enabling modular upgrades of reasoning without retraining the entire generative model. We further introduce a two-stage training paradigm: we first build a structured planning interface for the Thinker, then apply reinforcement learning to ground its policy in pixel-level feedback, encouraging plans that optimize visual correctness over textual plausibility. Extensive experiments on text-to-image generation and image editing show that Unified Thinker substantially improves image reasoning and generation quality.
Recent end-to-end spoken dialogue models enable natural interaction. However, as user demands become increasingly complex, models that rely solely on conversational abilities often struggle to cope. Incorporating agentic capabilities is therefore essential: by enabling tool use, these models can extend their knowledge boundaries and better solve real-world tasks. Yet, existing research has largely concentrated on core perception and generation, with comparatively limited exploration of such tool-augmented extensions. To bridge this gap, we present VoxMind, an integrated framework designed to equip end-to-end spoken dialogue models with comprehensive agentic abilities. Leveraging our curated 470-hour AgentChat dataset, we incorporate a "Think-before-Speak" mechanism, enabling the model to internalize structured reasoning as a critical prerequisite for planning and response generation. Furthermore, to mitigate latency bottlenecks caused by large-scale tool integration, we propose a Multi-Agent Dynamic Tool Management architecture. By asynchronously delegating retrieval tasks to an auxiliary agent aligned with the main model’s reasoning trajectory, this system effectively decouples inference latency from toolset size. Experimental results confirm that VoxMind achieves significant improvements in agent performance: compared with strong baselines, the task completion rate increases from 34.88% to 74.57%, outperforming Gemini-2.5-Pro on spoken agent tasks while preserving general conversational quality. The source code and associated data are publicly available at https://github.com/MM-Speech/VoxMind.
Many SLT systems quietly assume that brief chunks of signing map directly to spoken-language words. That assumption breaks down because signers often create meaning on the fly using context, space, and movement. We revisit SLT and argue that it is mainly a cross-modal reasoning task, not just a straightforward video-to-text conversion. We thus introduce a reasoning-driven SLT framework that uses an ordered sequence of latent thoughts as an explicit middle layer between the video and the generated text. These latent thoughts gradually extract and organize meaning over time. On top of this, we use a plan-then-ground decoding method: the model first decides what it wants to say, and then looks back at the video to find the evidence. This separation improves coherence and faithfulness. We also built and released a new large-scale gloss-free SLT dataset with stronger context dependencies and more realistic meanings. Experiments across several benchmarks show consistent gains over existing gloss-free methods. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/fletcherjiang/SignThought.
Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning
PDF ↗Large language model (LLM) dialogue agents are increasingly used in psychological therapy, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. We address this gap with three contributions: (1) MindEval, a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents; (2) MindData, a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues (2,573 sessions; 63,348 turns); and (3) MindApt, a framework that integrates a therapeutic dialogue state tracking paradigm with a patient-aware strategic planning module. On MindEval, MindApt outperforms strong baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. To evaluate utility beyond role-play, we conducted a clinical study with real patients, demonstrating that MindApt-guided care achieves outcomes comparable to therapist-determined care, while the hybrid setting combining therapist judgment with MindApt’s recommendations yields the strongest overall outcomes.
CityCube: Benchmarking Cross-view Spatial Reasoning on Vision-Language Models in Urban Environments
PDF ↗Cross-view spatial reasoning is essential for embodied AI, underpinning spatial understanding, mental simulation and planning in complex environments. Existing benchmarks primarily emphasize indoor or street settings, overlooking the unique challenges of open-ended urban spaces characterized by rich semantics, complex geometries, and view variations. To address this, we introduce CityCube, a systematic benchmark designed to probe cross-view reasoning capabilities of current VLMs in urban settings. CityCube integrates four viewpoint dynamics to mimic camera movements and spans a wide spectrum of perspectives from multiple platforms, e.g., vehicles, drones and satellites. For a comprehensive assessment, it features 5,022 meticulously annotated multi-view QA pairs categorized into five cognitive dimensions and three spatial relation expressions. A comprehensive evaluation of 33 VLMs reveals a significant performance disparity with humans: even large-scale models struggle to exceed 54.1% accuracy, remaining 34.2% below human performance. By contrast, small-scale fine-tuned VLMs achieve over 60.0% accuracy, highlighting the necessity of our benchmark. Further analyses indicate the task correlations and fundamental cognitive disparity between VLMs and human-like reasoning.
KCVR: Knowledge-Centric Video Reconstruction for Structured Pedagogical Summarization via Dynamic Graph Planning
PDF ↗Existing video summarization methods mainly compress content for gist browsing, but they often break the prerequisite logic in instructional videos and induce logical inversions (e.g., conclusions before premises). We formalize this problem as Structure-Pedagogical Reconstruction (SPR). SPR raises two challenges: (1) Structure Hallucination, where retrieved knowledge is topologically valid but not evidence-grounded by the blackboard; and (2) Logical Inversion, where soft prompt-level graph injection fails to enforce prerequisite order during decoding. To address these challenges, we propose Knowledge-Centric Video Reconstruction (KCVR), a Plan-then-Generate neuro-symbolic framework that decouples epistemic planning from content generation. KCVR prunes a Dual-Layer Epistemic Graph into a minimal video-supported plan, then realizes the plan with visually anchored attention and topology-constrained decoding. We additionally release EduStruct, a 10-discipline benchmark for SPR and structure-centric evaluation. Experiments show that KCVR outperforms strong end-to-end baselines on Knowledge Progression Consistency and Learning Objective Coverage. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/mark1001-ljj/video_sum.
LearnerCoMPASS: Intelligent Tutoring System with Dynamic Cognitive Diagnosis and Multi-Model Path Planning
PDF ↗Existing adaptive learning systems struggle to simultaneously achieve deep personalization, dynamic adaptability, and content trustworthiness, particularly in logically rigorous STEM fields where Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to "hallucination". This paper introduces LearnerCoMPASS (Cognitive Multi-model Planning Adaptive System), an integrated, end-to-end framework for adaptive learning. At its core, the framework features a novel multi-model path planning algorithm that orchestrates and fuses the outputs of heterogeneous LLM experts to generate and optimize learning sequences. To enable deep personalization, we design a dynamic cognitive diagnosis module that employs an innovative encoder-decoder architecture to generate precise, multi-dimensional cognitive state vectors for learners. To ensure trustworthiness, the system leverages an adaptively constructed dynamic knowledge graph and a Graph-RAG mechanism to provide factual anchors and logical constraints for LLM reasoning, thereby mitigating hallucinations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LearnerCoMPASS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating high-quality personalized learning paths. Furthermore, ablation studies validate the critical contributions of our dynamic cognitive diagnosis and multi-model planning components.
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly revolutionized web search. The emergence of LLM-based Search Agents marks a pivotal shift towards deeper, dynamic, autonomous information seeking. These agents can comprehend user intentions and environment context and execute multi-turn retrieval with dynamic planning, extending search capabilities far beyond the web. Leading examples like OpenAI’s Deep Research highlight their potential for deep information mining and real-world applications. This survey provides the first systematic analysis of search agents. We comprehensively analyze and categorize existing works from the perspectives of architecture, optimization, application, and evaluation, ultimately identifying critical open challenges and outlining promising future research directions in this rapidly evolving field.
Boundary-Guided Policy Optimization for Memory-efficient RL of Diffusion Large Language Models
PDF ↗A key challenge in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to diffusion large language models (dLLMs) is the intractability of their likelihood functions, which are essential for the RL objective, necessitating corresponding approximation during training. While existing methods approximate the log-likelihoods by their evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) via customized Monte Carlo (MC) sampling, they incur significant memory overhead due to the need to retain all MC samples for the gradient computation of non-linear terms in the RL objective, and thus restrict feasible sample sizes, leading to imprecise likelihood approximations and distorted RL objective. To address this, we propose Boundary-Guided Policy Optimization (BGPO), a memory-efficient RL algorithm that maximizes a specially constructed lower bound of the ELBO-based objective. This lower bound is carefully designed to satisfy two key properties: (1) Linearity: it is a linear sum where each term depends only on a single MC sample, thereby enabling gradient accumulation across samples and ensuring constant memory usage; (2) Equivalence: Both the value and gradient of this lower bound are equal to those of the ELBO-based objective in on-policy training, making it also an effective approximation for the original RL objective. These properties allow BGPO to adopt a large MC sample size, improving likelihood approximations and RL objective estimation, which in turn leads to enhanced performance. Experiments show that BGPO significantly outperforms previous RL algorithms for dLLMs in math problem solving, code generation, and planning tasks.
While agent evaluation has shifted toward long-horizon tasks, most benchmarks still emphasize local, step-level reasoning rather than the global constrained optimization (e.g., time and financial budgets) that demands genuine planning ability. Meanwhile, existing LLM planning benchmarks underrepresent the active information gathering and fine-grained local constraints typical of real-world settings. To address this, we introduce DeepPlanning, a challenging benchmark for practical long-horizon agent planning. It features multi-day travel planning and multi-product shopping tasks that require proactive information acquisition, local constrained reasoning, and global constrained optimization. Evaluations on DeepPlanning show that even frontier agentic LLMs struggle with these problems, highlighting the importance of reliable explicit reasoning patterns and parallel tool use for achieving better effectiveness-efficiency trade-offs. Error analysis further points to promising directions for improving agentic LLMs over long planning horizons. We open-source the code and data to support future research.
Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with pedagogical tutoring capabilities holds significant promise for education. Existing approaches simulate tutor behaviors or preferences and use them to prompt or fine-tune LLMs for dialogue tutoring. However, such methods often fail to sustain high-quality pedagogical conversations that provide explicit stepwise scaffolding and adapt to learners’ evolving cognitive states. To address this, we propose ScaffoldLM, a planning-guided tutoring framework with an assessment-driven memory for multi-turn math dialogue tutoring. ScaffoldLM first generates a stepwise pedagogical plan from solution steps, which serves as a stable backbone for explicit scaffolding. During tutoring, the tutoring memory is updated by an assessment-driven control loop that infers the learner’s cognitive state, evaluates whether the current step target is met, and adaptively selects tutoring actions. The plan, step-level progress, inferred learner states, and dialogue history are maintained in memory to support coherent multi-turn guidance. Experiments on multi-turn math tutoring benchmarks demonstrate that ScaffoldLM substantially improves pedagogical tutoring quality over strong baselines. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/BNU-ERC-ITEA/ScaffoldLM.
Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising non-autoregressive paradigm for sequence generation. However, their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of decoding strategy. In this work, we reveal that prevalent uncertainty-based decoding strategies induce two decoding biases in MDMs: rigid boundary bias and trivial token bias. These biases limit the model’s reasoning ability and ultimately degrade generation quality. To address these challenges, we propose UNmasking Calibration for DecOding DEbiasing (UNCODE), a decoding calibration framework that regularizes uncertainty-based decoding by incorporating two complementary priors to shape global decoding trajectories and promote content informativeness. Extensive experiments on three advanced MDMs across seven reasoning- and planning-intensive benchmarks demonstrate that UNCODE consistently outperforms existing decoding strategies by more than 7%, while achieving performance comparable to autoregressive models of similar parameter scales. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/NEUIR/Uncode.
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to Autoregressive Language Models, yet their inference strategies largely rely on prefix-based prompting inherited from the autoregressive paradigm. In this paper, we propose Template Infilling (TI), a conditioning methodology tailored for DLMs. Unlike conventional prefix prompting, TI distributes structural anchors across the target response, establishing a global template before infilling masked segments. This enables structured conditioning that leverages the bidirectional generation process of DLMs. We evaluate TI on diverse benchmarks, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and trip planning, achieving consistent improvements of 9.40%p over baseline prompting strategies. Furthermore, TI naturally supports multi-token generation settings, providing practical speed advantages while maintaining generation quality and robustness. Overall, our results highlight a DLM-specific conditioning paradigm for structured generation, suggesting a promising direction for inference methods tailored to diffusion-based language models.
Strategic planning is critical for multi-step reasoning, yet compact Language Language Models (LLMs) often lack the capacity to formulate global strategies, leading to error propagation in long-horizon tasks. Our analysis reveals that LLMs possess latent reasoning capabilities that can be unlocked when conditioned on explicit plans from a teacher model; however, runtime reliance on external guidance is often impractical due to latency and availability constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose PILOT (Planning via Internalized Latent Optimization Trajectories), a non-invasive framework designed to internalize the strategic oversight of large models into intrinsic Latent Guidance. Instead of altering backbone weights, PILOT employs a lightweight Hyper-Network to synthesize a query-conditioned Latent Guidance. This vector acts as an internal steering mechanism, guiding the model’s representations toward optimal reasoning paths. Extensive experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that PILOT effectively stabilizes reasoning trajectories, consistently outperforming strong baselines (e.g., +8.9% on MATH500) with negligible inference latency. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PILOT-B266