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Qiaoqiao Jin, Dong She, Siming Fu, Hualiang Wang, weihao zhou, Jidong Jiang

Subject-driven generation faces a fundamental challenge: achieving high subject fidelity while maintaining semantic alignment with textual descriptions. While recent GRPO-based approaches have shown promise in aligning generative models with human preferences, they apply uniform optimization across all denoising timesteps, ignoring the temporal dynamics of how textual and visual conditions influence generation. We present Consis-GCPO, a causal reinforcement learning framework that reformulates multi-modal condition generation through discrete-time causal modeling. Our key insight is that different conditioning signals exert varying influence throughout the denoising process—text guides semantic structure in early steps while visual references anchor details in later stages. By introducing decoupled causal intervention trajectories, we quantify instantaneous causal effects at each timestep, transforming these measurements into temporally-weighted advantages for targeted optimization. This approach enables precise tracking of textual and visual contributions, ensuring accurate credit assignment for each conditioning modality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Consis-GCPO significantly advances personalized generation, achieving superior subject consistency while preserving strong text-following capabilities, particularly excelling in complex multi-subject scenarios.

Xinxu Wei, Kanhao Zhao, Yong Jiao, Lifang He, Yu Zhang

As large language models (LLMs) continue to revolutionize AI research, there is a growing interest in building large-scale brain foundation models to advance neuroscience. While most existing brain foundation models are pre-trained on time-series signals or connectome features, we propose a novel graph-based pre-training paradigm for constructing a brain graph foundation model. In this paper, we introduce the Brain Graph Foundation Model, termed BrainGFM, a unified framework that leverages graph contrastive learning and graph masked autoencoders for large-scale fMRI-based pre-training. BrainGFM is pre-trained on a diverse mixture of brain atlases with varying parcellations, significantly expanding the pre-training corpus and enhancing the model’s ability to generalize across heterogeneous fMRI-derived brain representations. To support efficient and versatile downstream transfer, we integrate both graph prompts and language prompts into the model design, enabling BrainGFM to flexibly adapt to a wide range of atlases, neurological and psychiatric disorders, and task settings. Furthermore, we employ meta-learning to optimize the graph prompts, facilitating strong generalization to previously unseen disorders under both few-shot and zero-shot learning conditions via language-guided prompting. BrainGFM is established on 27 neuroimaging datasets spanning 25 common neurological and psychiatric disorders, encompassing 2 types of brain atlases (functional and anatomical) across 8 widely used parcellations, and covering over 25,000 subjects, 60,000 fMRI scans, and a total of 400,000 graph samples aggregated across all atlases and parcellations. The code is available at https://github.com/weixinxu666/BrainGFM.

Tianyi Wu, Xiaoxi Sun, Yanhua Jiao, Yulin Li, Yixin Chen, Yun-Hao Cao, Yi-Qi Hu, Zhuotao Tian

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models, excelling in text generation tasks due to their bidirectional attention mechanisms. However, their computational complexity, scaling as $\mathcal{O}(L^3)$ with sequence length $L$, poses significant challenges for long-sequence and real-time applications, primarily due to the lack of compatibility with key-value caching and the non-autoregressive nature of denoising steps. Existing acceleration methods rely on static caching or parallel decoding strategies, which fail to account for the dynamic behavior of token properties across layers and decoding steps. We propose \textbf{Dynamic-dLLM}, a training-free framework that enhances dLLM inference efficiency through two components: Dynamic Cache Updating (DCU), which adaptively allocates cache-update budgets based on layer-wise token dynamics, and Adaptive Parallel Decoding (APD), which dynamically calibrates decoding thresholds to balance generation quality and efficiency. Extensive experiments on models like LLaDA-8B-Instruct, LLaDA-1.5, and Dream-v0-7B-Instruct across benchmarks such as MMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval demonstrate that Dynamic-dLLM significantly improves inference speed, attaining an average speedup of exceeding 3$\times$ while maintaining performance. Dynamic-dLLM outperforms state-of-the-art acceleration methods and provides a plug-and-play solution for efficient dLLM deployment without compromising performance. Code and models will be made publicly available.

Heming Du, Jiaying Ying, Sen Wang, Xue Li, Kaihao Zhang, Xin Yu

Approximately 445.2 million individuals worldwide are living with traumatic amputations, and an estimated 31.64 million children aged 0–14 have congenital limb differences, yet they remain largely underrepresented in human pose estimation (HPE) research. Accurate HPE could significantly benefit this population in applications, such as rehabilitation monitoring and health assessment. However, the existing HPE datasets and methods assume that humans possess a full complement of upper and lower extremities and fail to model missing or altered limbs. As a result, people with limb deficiencies remain largely underrepresented, and current models cannot generalize to their unique anatomies or predict absent joints. To bridge this gap, we introduce InclusiveVidPose Dataset, the first video-based large-scale HPE dataset specific for individuals with limb deficiencies. We collect 313 videos, totaling 327k frames, and covering nearly 400 individuals with amputations, congenital limb differences, and prosthetic limbs. We adopt 8 extra keypoints at each residual limb end to capture individual anatomical variations. Under the guidance of an internationally accredited para-athletics classifier, we annotate each frame with pose keypoints, segmentation masks, bounding boxes, tracking IDs, and per-limb prosthesis status. Experiments on InclusiveVidPose highlight the limitations of the existing HPE models for individuals with limb deficiencies. We introduce a new evaluation metric, Limb-specific Confidence Consistency (LiCC), which assesses the consistency of pose estimations between residual and intact limb keypoints. We also provide a rigorous benchmark for evaluating inclusive and robust pose estimation algorithms, demonstrating that our dataset poses significant challenges. We hope InclusiveVidPose spur research toward methods that fairly and accurately serve all body types. The project website is available at: [InclusiveVidPose](https://anonymous-accept.github.io/inclusivevidpose/).

Bin Chen, Weiqi Li, Shijie Zhao, Xuanyu Zhang, Junlin Li, Li zhang, Jian Zhang

While many diffusion models have achieved impressive results in real-world video super-resolution (Real-VSR) by generating rich and realistic details, their reliance on multi-step sampling leads to slow inference. One-step networks like SeedVR2, DOVE, and DLoRAL alleviate this through condensing generation into one single step, yet they remain heavy, with billions of parameters and multi-second latency. Recent adversarial diffusion compression (ADC) offers a promising path via pruning and distilling these models into a compact AdcSR network, but directly applying it to Real-VSR fails to balance spatial details and temporal consistency due to its lack of temporal awareness and the limitations of standard adversarial learning. To address these challenges, we propose an improved **ADC** method for Real-**VSR**. Our approach distills a large diffusion Transformer (DiT) teacher DOVE equipped with 3D spatio-temporal attentions, into a pruned 2D Stable Diffusion (SD)-based AdcSR backbone, augmented with lightweight 1D temporal convolutions, achieving significantly higher efficiency. In addition, we introduce a dual-head adversarial distillation scheme, in which discriminators in both pixel and feature domains explicitly disentangle the discrimination of details and consistency into two heads, enabling both objectives to be effectively optimized without sacrificing one for the other. Experiments demonstrate that the resulting compressed **AdcVSR** model reduces complexity by **95%** in parameters and achieves an **8$\times$** acceleration over its DiT teacher DOVE, while maintaining competitive video quality and efficiency.

Hualiang Wang, Xinyue Xu, Lehan Wang, Bin Pu, Xiaomeng Li

Recent generative pre-trained vision–language (GPTv) models have achieved remarkable success in multi-modal understanding, inspiring their adaptation to medical imaging tasks such as disease diagnosis and visual question answering (VQA). However, current instruction-tuned GPTv models suffer from two key challenges: (1) medical attributes (e.g., disease names, severity grades) are encoded as plain text tokens, collapsing semantically distinct concepts into nearly identical textual sequences; and (2) inadequate textual supervision weakens visual representation learning, leading to severe inter-attribute confusion and misaligned vision–language embeddings. To address these limitations, we introduce attribute tokens (AttTok), a set of pre‑defined special tokens that uniquely encode clinical attributes (e.g., imaging modality, diagnosis, severity) within a structured token space. Complemented by attribute‑centric embedding books, AttTok serves as anchor points for aligning both visual and textual modalities into a shared, discriminative representation space. Building on this foundation, we design two key components: an attribute‑centric cross attention (ACC) adapter, which breaks the vision‑to‑text information‑flow bottleneck and enriches the visual encoder with discriminative attribute knowledge, and an attribute‑centric matching (ACM) loss, which enforces robust multi‑modal alignment centered on the attribute tokens. Extensive experiments on five medical classification benchmarks and three VQA datasets demonstrate that AttTok substantially improves both discriminative accuracy and medical knowledge reasoning, establishing a new paradigm for medical GPTv models with clinically discriminative understanding.

Zeyu Yang, Tianyi Zhang, Jianwen Xie, Chuan Li, Zhaozhuo Xu, Anshumali Shrivastava

The scaling of Generative AI (GenAI) models into the hundreds of billions of parameters makes low-precision computation indispensable for efficient deployment. We argue that the fundamental solution lies in developing low-precision \emph{floating-point} formats, which inherently provide numerical stability, memory savings, and hardware efficiency without dequantization overhead. In this paper, we present a theoretical and empirical study of an \emph{exponent concentration} phenomenon in GenAI weights: exponents consistently exhibit low entropy across architectures and modalities. We show that this arises naturally from $\alpha$-stable distributions induced by stochastic gradient descent, and we prove tight bounds on the entropy of exponents. Our analysis establishes a theoretical compression limit near FP4.67, which motivates the design of a practical FP8 format. Building on these insights, we propose Exponent-Concentrated FP8 (ECF8), a lossless compression framework with entropy-aware encoding and GPU-optimized decoding. Experiments on LLMs and DiTs up to 671B parameters demonstrate up to 26.9\% memory savings and 177.1\% throughput acceleration, with perfectly lossless computations, i.e., no deviation in model outputs. Our results establish exponent concentration as a statistical law of trained models and open a principled path for lossless low-precision floating-point design in the FP8 era. Code is available at https://github.com/zeyuyang8/ecf8.

Basile Confavreux, Aaditya Singh, Jin Hwa Lee, Amaury Sabran, Andrew Saxe

Pretrained language models can acquire novel tasks either through in-context learning (ICL)---adapting behavior via activations without weight updates---or through supervised fine-tuning (SFT), where parameters are explicitly updated. Prior work has reported differences in their generalization performance and inductive biases, but the origins of these differences remain poorly understood. In this work, we treat ICL and SFT as distinct learning algorithms and directly compare the learning dynamics they induce across medium-sized models, analyzing both the evolution of their inductive biases and the underlying internal representations. We find that ICL preserves rich input representations but imposes stronger priors inherited from pretraining, whereas SFT suppresses task-irrelevant features---potentially explaining its weaker generalization in few-shot regimes. These results highlight a mechanistic distinction between context-driven and weight-driven learning.

Yuhang Zhou, Zhongyun Hua, Zhaoquan Gu, Keke Tang, Rushi Lan, Yushu Zhang, Qing Liao, Leo Zhang

The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial examples poses significant challenges to their reliable deployment. Among existing empirical defenses, adversarial training and robust distillation have proven the most effective. In this paper, we identify a property originally associated with model intellectual property, i.e., probability sparsity induced by nasty training, and demonstrate that it can also provide interpretable improvements to adversarial robustness. We begin by analyzing how nasty training induces sparse probability distributions and qualitatively explore the spatial metric preferences this sparsity introduces to the model. Building on these insights, we propose a simple yet effective adversarial training method, nasty adversarial training (NAT), which incorporates probability sparsity as a regularization mechanism to boost adversarial robustness. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results validate the effectiveness of NAT, highlighting its potential to enhance the adversarial robustness of deep neural networks in an interpretable manner.

Shenghe Zheng, Chenyu Huang, Fangchen Yu, Junchi Yao, Jingqi Ye, Tao Chen, Yun Luo, Ning Ding, LEI BAI, Ganqu Cui 等

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to scientific reasoning, the complexity of answer formats and the diversity of equivalent expressions make answer verification a critical yet challenging task. Existing verification studies in scientific domains suffer from two major limitations: (a) the absence of systematic evaluation standards and insufficient disciplinary coverage, which hinders their comprehensive assessment; and (b) heavy reliance on cumbersome rule design or prompt engineering, which reduces their effectiveness in complex reasoning scenarios or limits their cross-disciplinary generalization. To address these challenges, we propose solutions at both the data and model levels. On the data side, we construct **SCI-VerifyBench**, a cross-disciplinary benchmark covering mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and general scientific QA. The benchmark is built from real LLM responses and enhanced with domain-specific equivalence transformations that generate challenging and realistic data. Model-based and expert annotations ensure both quality and diversity, enabling rigorous evaluation of verification ability. On the model side, we emphasize the importance of reasoning for verification and introduce **SCI-Verifier**, a unified reasoning-augmented verifier for scientific domains. Through post-training, SCI-Verifier demonstrates strong logical reasoning and equivalence judgment capabilities while maintaining concise and stable outputs. Together, SCI-VerifyBench and SCI-Verifier provide a principled framework for scientific verification, offering both systematic evaluation and practical pathways to enhance the reliability and applicability of LLMs in scientific domains.

Yanhong Li, Ming Li, Karen Livescu, Jiawei Zhou

We show that a language model’s ability to predict text is tightly linked to the breadth of its embedding space: models that spread their contextual representations more widely tend to achieve lower perplexity. Concretely, we find that representation dispersion—the average pairwise cosine distance among hidden vectors—strongly and negatively correlates with perplexity across diverse model families (LLaMA, Qwen, and others) and domains (Wikipedia, news, scientific abstracts). Beyond illustrating this link, we show how dispersion can be leveraged for a range of practical tasks—without requiring labeled data. First, measuring dispersion on unlabeled text allows us to rank examples by difficulty and identify hard slices in new domains, offering a data‐efficient tool for screening and prioritizing models before full evaluation. Next, we find that identifying layers with higher dispersion pinpoints the best representations for retrieval‐based methods such as $k$NN‐LM, bypassing exhaustive layer‐by‐layer searches. Finally, we integrate a simple “push‐away” objective into training, which increases dispersion in both single‐domain and cross‐domain scenarios and directly improves perplexity in each.

Yuyan Bu, Xiaohao Liu, ZhaoXing Ren, Yaodong Yang, Juntao Dai

The widespread deployment of large language models (LLMs) across linguistic communities necessitates reliable multilingual safety alignment. However, recent efforts to extend alignment to other languages often require substantial resources, either through large-scale, high-quality supervision in the target language or through pairwise alignment with high-resource languages, which limits scalability. In this work, we propose a resource-efficient method for improving multilingual safety alignment. We introduce a plug-and-play Multi-Lingual Consistency (MLC) loss that can be integrated into existing monolingual alignment pipelines. By improving collinearity between multilingual representation vectors, our method encourages directional consistency at the multilingual semantic level in a single update. This allows simultaneous alignment across multiple languages using only multilingual prompt variants without requiring additional response-level supervision in low-resource languages. We validate the proposed method across different model architectures and alignment paradigms, and demonstrate its effectiveness in enhancing multilingual safety with limited impact on general model utility. Further evaluation across languages and tasks indicates improved cross-lingual generalization, suggesting the proposed approach as a practical solution for multilingual consistency alignment under limited supervision.

Deep Learning · Algorithms

Harry Amad, Mihaela van der Schaar

Neural networks (NNs) often have critical behavioural trade-offs that are set at design time with hyperparameters—such as reward weights in reinforcement learning or quantile targets in regression. Post-deployment, however, user preferences can evolve, making initial settings undesirable, necessitating potentially expensive retraining. To circumvent this, we introduce the task of Hyperparameter Trajectory Inference (HTI): to learn, from observed data, how a NN's conditional output distribution changes with its hyperparameters, and construct a surrogate model that approximates the NN at unobserved hyperparameter settings. HTI requires extending existing trajectory inference approaches to incorporate conditions, exacerbating the challenge of ensuring inferred paths are feasible. We propose an approach based on conditional Lagrangian optimal transport, jointly learning the Lagrangian function governing hyperparameter-induced dynamics along with the associated optimal transport maps and geodesics between observed marginals, which form the surrogate model. We incorporate inductive biases based on the manifold hypothesis and least-action principles into the learned Lagrangian, improving surrogate model feasibility. We empirically demonstrate that our approach reconstructs NN outputs across various hyperparameter spectra better than other alternatives.

Dung Viet Nguyen, Yen Pham, Hieu Vu, Lei Zhang, Tan Nguyen

Controlling the behaviors of large language models (LLMs) is fundamental to their safety alignment and reliable deployment. However, existing steering methods are primarily driven by empirical insights and lack theoretical performance guarantees. In this work, we develop a control-theoretic foundation for activation steering by showing that popular steering methods correspond to the proportional (P) controllers, with the steering vector serving as the feedback signal. Building on this finding, we propose Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) Steering, a principled framework that leverages the full PID controller for activation steering in LLMs. The proportional (P) term aligns activations with target semantic directions, the integral (I) term accumulates errors to enforce persistent corrections across layers, and the derivative (D) term mitigates overshoot by counteracting rapid activation changes. This closed-loop design yields interpretable error dynamics and connects activation steering to classical stability guarantees in control theory. Moreover, PID Steering is lightweight, modular, and readily integrates with state-of-the-art steering methods. Extensive experiments across multiple LLM families and benchmarks demonstrate that PID Steering consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving more robust and reliable behavioral control.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Xuan Zhang, Ruixiao Li, Zhijian Zhou, Long Li, Yulei Qin, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Xiaoyu Tan, Chao Qu, Yuan Qi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a compelling way to strengthen the multi step reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, prevalent RL paradigms still lean on sparse outcome-based rewards and limited exploration, which often drives LLMs toward repetitive and suboptimal reasoning patterns. In this paper, we study the central question of how to design exploration for LLM reasoning and introduce MERCI (Motivating Exploration in LLM Reasoning with Count-based Intrinsic Rewards), a novel RL algorithm that augments policy optimization with a principled intrinsic reward. Building on the idea of count-based exploration, MERCI leverages a lightweight Coin Flipping Network (CFN) to estimate the pseudo count and further epistemic uncertainty over reasoning trajectories, and converts them into an intrinsic reward that values novelty while preserving the learning signal from task rewards. We integrate MERCI into some advanced RL frameworks like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments on complex reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that MERCI encourages richer and more varied chains of thought, significantly improves performance over strong baselines, and helps the policy escape local routines to discover better solutions. It indicates that our targeted intrinsic motivation can make exploration reliable for language model reasoning.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Donghao Li, Chengshuai Shi, Weijuan Ou, Cong Shen, Jing Yang

Prompt engineering has become central to eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). At its core lies prompt selection - efficiently identifying the most effective prompts. However, most prior investigations overlook a key challenge: the inherently multi-faceted nature of prompt performance, which cannot be captured by a single metric. To fill this gap, we study the multi-objective prompt selection problem under two practical settings: Pareto prompt set recovery and best feasible prompt identification. Casting the problem into the pure-exploration bandits framework, we adapt provably efficient algorithms from multi-objective bandits and further introduce a novel design for best feasible arm identification in structured bandits, with theoretical guarantees on the identification error in the linear case. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs show that the bandit-based approaches yield significant improvements over baselines, establishing a principled and efficient framework for multi-objective prompt optimization.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Yongcheng Zeng, Zexu Sun, Bokai Ji, Erxue Min, Hengyi Cai, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Haifeng Zhang, Xu Chen, Jun Wang

Curriculum learning plays a crucial role in enhancing the training efficiency of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning tasks. However, existing methods often fail to adequately account for variations in prompt difficulty or rely on simplistic filtering mechanisms to select prompt datasets within a narrow criterion range, resulting in significant computational waste. In this work, we approach the problem from the perspective of reinforcement learning gradient optimization, offering a systematic and theoretical investigation into how to improve the training efficiency of LLMs. We identify two key factors influencing training efficiency: the selection of training prompts and the allocation of rollout quantities across different prompts. Our theoretical analysis reveals that the sampling distribution of prompts dictates the convergence rate of gradient descent, while the allocation of the rollout quantity influences the consistency and stability of overall gradient updates. Based on these insights, we propose CurES, an efficient training method that accelerates convergence and employs Bayesian posterior estimation to minimize computational overhead. Experiments demonstrate that our CurES outperforms Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) by $\textbf{+3.30}$ points and $\textbf{+4.82}$ points with 1.5B and 7B models, respectively, and exceeds the best prior sample efficient methods by $\textbf{+2.12}$ points on average across eight math reasoning benchmarks. Additionally, CurES exhibits faster convergence compared to baselines, including GRPO.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Yuzhong Zhao, Yue Liu, Junpeng Liu, Jingye Chen, xun wu, Yaru Hao, Tengchao Lv, Shaohan Huang, Lei Cui, Qixiang Ye 等

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capability of large language models by optimizing the arithmetic mean of token-level rewards. Unfortunately, GRPO is observed to suffer from unstable policy updates when facing tokens with outlier importance-weighted rewards, which manifest as extreme importance sampling ratios during training. In this study, we propose Geometric-Mean Policy Optimization (GMPO), with the aim to improve the stability of GRPO through suppressing token reward outliers. GMPO is plug-and-play—simply replacing GRPO's arithmetic mean with the geometric mean of token-level rewards, as the latter is inherently less sensitive to outliers. GMPO is theoretically plausible—analysis reveals that both GMPO and GRPO are weighted forms of the policy gradient while the former enjoys more stable weights, which consequently benefits policy optimization and performance. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that \Ours-7B improves the average Pass@1 of GRPO by up to 4.1%, outperforming many state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/callsys/GMPO and verl.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Qianli Shen, Daoyuan Chen, Yilun Huang, Zhenqing Ling, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou

Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) is a key technique for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences and enhancing reasoning, yet its effectiveness is highly sensitive to which tasks are explored during training. Uniform task sampling is inefficient, wasting computation on tasks that are either trivial or unsolvable, while existing task selection methods often suffer from high rollout costs, poor adaptivity, or incomplete evidence. We introduce \textbf{BOTS}, a unified framework for \textbf{B}ayesian \textbf{O}nline \textbf{T}ask \textbf{S}election in LLM reinforcement finetuning. Grounded in Bayesian inference, BOTS adaptively maintains posterior estimates of task difficulty as the model evolves. It jointly incorporates \emph{explicit evidence} from direct evaluations of selected tasks and \emph{implicit evidence} inferred from these evaluations for unselected tasks, with Thompson sampling ensuring a principled balance between exploration and exploitation for task selection. To make implicit evidence practical, we instantiate it with an ultra-light interpolation-based plug-in that estimates difficulties of unevaluated tasks without extra rollouts, adding negligible overhead. Empirically, across diverse domains and LLM scales, BOTS consistently improves data efficiency and performance over baselines and ablations, providing a practical and extensible solution for dynamic task selection in RFT.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Peisong Wang, Ruotian Ma, Bang Zhang, Xingyu Chen, Zhiwei He, Kang Luo, Qingsong Lv, Qingxuan Jiang, Zheng Xie, Shanyi Wang 等

Large language models (LLMs) excel at logical and algorithmic reasoning, yet their emotional intelligence (EQ) still lags far behind their cognitive prowess. While reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced in other domains, its application to dialogue—especially for emotional intelligence—remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce RLVER, the first end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that leverages verifiable emotion rewards from simulated users to cultivate higher-order empathetic abilities in LLMs. Within this framework, self-consistent affective simulated users engage in dialogue rollouts and produce deterministic emotion scores during conversations, serving as reward signals to guide the LLM's learning. Fine-tuning publicly available Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct model with PPO boosts its Sentient-Benchmark score from 13.3 to 79.2 while largely preserving mathematical and coding competence. Extensive experiments reveal that: (i) RLVER consistently improves multiple dialogue capabilities; (ii) Thinking and non-thinking models show distinct trends—thinking models excel in empathy and insight, while non-thinking models favor action; (iii) GRPO often yields stable gains, while PPO can push certain capabilities to a higher ceiling; (iv) More challenging environments are not always better—moderate ones can yield stronger outcomes. Our results show that RLVER is a practical route toward emotionally intelligent and broadly capable language agents.