Researcher profile

Jiajun Chai

Jiajun Chai contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

8 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

AMR-SD: Asymmetric Meta-Reflective Self-Distillation for Token-Level Credit Assignment

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning heavily relies on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, standard algorithms like GRPO apply sequence-level rewards uniformly to all tokens, creating a severe credit-assignment bottleneck. While on-policy self-distillation attempts to resolve this by conditioning a self-teacher on privileged contexts, direct exposure to raw oracle solutions often induces over-conditioned teacher distributions, implicit answer leakage, and late-stage training collapse. To overcome these limitations, we propose Asymmetric Meta-Reflective Self-Distillation (AMR-SD). Instead of conditioning directly on raw reference traces, AMR-SD inserts a reflection bottleneck: it compresses diagnostic signals -- from verifier outcomes, peer rollouts, or reference feedback -- into concise, self-generated Socratic hints and critiques. Furthermore, we introduce Causal Information Gain (CIG) with an asymmetric, ReLU-gated threshold to translate these reflections into sparse, highly precise token-level advantage modulations. Combined with temporal annealing, this mechanism preserves the base environmental reward while filtering out distributional noise. Experiments across scientific, mathematical, and tool-use benchmarks demonstrate that AMR-SD significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving robust long-horizon stability and successfully preventing late-stage collapse.

preprint2026arXiv

AWPO: Enhancing Tool-Use of Large Language Models through Adaptive Integration of Reasoning Rewards

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise in training tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) using verifiable outcome rewards, existing methods largely overlook the potential of reasoning rewards based on chain-of-thought quality for better tool utilization. Furthermore, naïvely combining reasoning and outcome rewards may yield suboptimal performance or conflict with the primary optimization objective. To address this, we propose Advantage-Weighted Policy Optimization (AWPO), a principled RL framework that adaptively integrates reasoning rewards into advantage estimation to improve tool-use performance. AWPO incorporates variance-aware gating and difficulty-aware weighting to adaptively modulate advantages from reasoning signals based on group-relative statistics, alongside a tailored clipping mechanism for stable optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AWPO achieves state-of-the-art performance across standard tool-use benchmarks, significantly outperforming strong baselines and leading closed-source models in challenging multi-turn scenarios. Notably, with exceptional parameter efficiency, our 4B model surpasses Grok-4 by $16.0\%$ in multi-turn accuracy while preserving generalization capability on the out-of-distribution MMLU-Pro benchmark.

preprint2026arXiv

Implicit Hierarchical GRPO: Decoupling Tool Invocation from Execution for Tool-Integrated Mathematical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have increasingly leveraged tool invocation to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, existing approaches typically tightly couple tool invocation with immediate execution. Such immediate tool interaction may disrupt the reasoning coherence of LLMs and constrain their expressivity, ultimately degrading reasoning performance. To this end, for the first time, we propose and formalize the problem of decoupling tool invocation from execution during reasoning, and introduce delayed execution with explicit control to enhance tool-integrated reasoning (TIR). Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical control framework and theoretically derive a surrogate loss that enables an implicitly hierarchical policy to learn behavior equivalent to that of an explicit hierarchical policy, leading to the proposed IH-GRPO algorithm. Extensive experiments on IH-GRPO achieve absolute improvements of 1.87\%, 2.16\%, and 2.53\% on Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-8B across six out-of-domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks over the strongest baseline method, while also yielding consistent performance gains in other domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lumina04/IH-GRPO-01.

preprint2026arXiv

LocalSearchBench: Benchmarking Agentic Search in Real-World Local Life Services

Recent advances in large reasoning models LRMs have enabled agentic search systems to perform complex multi-step reasoning across multiple sources. However, most studies focus on general information retrieval and rarely explores vertical domains with unique challenges. In this work, we focus on local life services and introduce LocalSearchBench, which encompass diverse and complex business scenarios. Real-world queries in this domain are often ambiguous and require multi-hop reasoning across merchants and products, remaining challenging and not fully addressed. As the first comprehensive benchmark for agentic search in local life services, LocalSearchBench comprises a database of over 1.3M merchant entries across 6 service categories and 9 major cities, and 900 multi-hop QA tasks from real user queries that require multi-step reasoning. We also developed LocalPlayground, a unified environment integrating multiple tools for LRMs interaction. Experiments show that even state-of-the-art LRMs struggle on LocalSearchBench: the best model (DeepSeek-V3.2) achieves only 35.60% correctness, and most models have issues with completeness (average 60.32%) and faithfulness (average 30.72%). This highlights the need for specialized benchmarks and domain-specific agent training in local life services. Code, Benchmark, and Leaderboard are available at https://localsearchbench.github.io/.

preprint2026arXiv

RecRM-Bench: Benchmarking Multidimensional Reward Modeling for Agentic Recommender Systems

The integration of Large Language Model (LLM) agents is transforming recommender systems from simple query-item matching towards deeply personalized and interactive recommendations. Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides an essential framework for the optimization of these agents in recommendation tasks. However, current methodologies remain limited by a reliance on single dimensional outcome-based rewards that focus exclusively on final user interactions, overlooking critical intermediate capabilities, such as instruction following and complex intent understanding. Despite the necessity for designing multi-dimensional reward, the field lacks a standardized benchmark to facilitate this development. To bridge this gap, we introduce RecRM-Bench, the largest and most comprehensive benchmark to date for agentic recommender systems. It comprises over 1 million structured entries across four core evaluation dimensions: instruction following, factual consistency, query-item relevance, and fine-grained user behavior prediction. By supporting comprehensive assessment from syntactic compliance to complex intent grounding and preference modeling, RecRM-Bench provides a foundational dataset for training sophisticated reward models. Furthermore, we propose a systematic framework for the construction of multi-dimensional reward models and the integration of a hybrid reward function, establishing a robust foundation for developing reliable and highly capable agentic recommender systems. The complete RecRM-Bench dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/wwzeng/RecRM-Bench.

preprint2026arXiv

ResRL: Boosting LLM Reasoning via Negative Sample Projection Residual Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) but usually exhibits limited generation diversity due to the over-incentivization of positive rewards. Although methods like Negative Sample Reinforcement (NSR) mitigate this issue by upweighting penalty from negative samples, they may suppress the semantic distributions shared between positive and negative responses. To boost reasoning ability without losing diversity, this paper proposes negative sample projection Residual Reinforcement Learning (ResRL) that decouples similar semantic distributions among positive and negative responses. We theoretically link Lazy Likelihood Displacement (LLD) to negative-positive head-gradient interference and derive a single-forward proxy that upper-bounds representation alignment to guide conservative advantage reweighting. ResRL then projects negative-token hidden representations onto an SVD-based low-rank positive subspace and uses projection residuals to modulate negative gradients, improving reasoning while preserving diversity and outperforming strong baselines on average across twelve benchmarks spanning Mathematics, Code, Agent Tasks, and Function Calling. Notably, ResRL surpasses NSR on mathematical reasoning by 9.4\% in Avg@16 and 7.0\% in Pass@128. Code is available at https://github.com/1229095296/ResRL.git.

preprint2022arXiv

NVIF: Neighboring Variational Information Flow for Large-Scale Cooperative Multi-Agent Scenarios

Communication-based multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) provides information exchange between agents, which promotes the cooperation. However, existing methods cannot perform well in the large-scale multi-agent system. In this paper, we adopt neighboring communication and propose a Neighboring Variational Information Flow (NVIF) to provide efficient communication for agents. It employs variational auto-encoder to compress the shared information into a latent state. This communication protocol does not rely dependently on a specific task, so that it can be pre-trained to stabilize the MARL training. Besides. we combine NVIF with Proximal Policy Optimization (NVIF-PPO) and Deep Q Network (NVIF-DQN), and present a theoretical analysis to illustrate NVIF-PPO can promote cooperation. We evaluate the NVIF-PPO and NVIF-DQN on MAgent, a widely used large-scale multi-agent environment, by two tasks with different map sizes. Experiments show that our method outperforms other compared methods, and can learn effective and scalable cooperation strategies in the large-scale multi-agent system.

preprint2022arXiv

UNMAS: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Unshaped Cooperative Scenarios

Multi-agent reinforcement learning methods such as VDN, QMIX, and QTRAN that adopt centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) framework have shown promising results in cooperation and competition. However, in some multi-agent scenarios, the number of agents and the size of action set actually vary over time. We call these unshaped scenarios, and the methods mentioned above fail in performing satisfyingly. In this paper, we propose a new method called Unshaped Networks for Multi-Agent Systems (UNMAS) that adapts to the number and size changes in multi-agent systems. We propose the self-weighting mixing network to factorize the joint action-value. Its adaption to the change in agent number is attributed to the nonlinear mapping from each-agent Q value to the joint action-value with individual weights. Besides, in order to address the change in action set, each agent constructs an individual action-value network that is composed of two streams to evaluate the constant environment-oriented subset and the varying unit-oriented subset. We evaluate UNMAS on various StarCraft II micro-management scenarios and compare the results with several state-of-the-art MARL algorithms. The superiority of UNMAS is demonstrated by its highest winning rates especially on the most difficult scenario 3s5z_vs_3s6z. The agents learn to perform effectively cooperative behaviors while other MARL algorithms fail in. Animated demonstrations and source code are provided in https://sites.google.com/view/unmas.