arXiv:2608. 06425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Comprehensive affective analysis is challenging for two reasons: it spans heterogeneous prediction tasks with continuous, ordinal, and multi-label outputs, and affective meaning is context-dependent, requiring conflicting cues to be reconciled rather than mapped directly to labels.
arXiv:2606. 15779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal models can name the action units (AUs) behind a facial emotion, but their AU->emotion rationales are typically plausible rather than faithful: nothing forces the AUs a model invokes to be the AUs that actually drive its prediction.
The paper introduces DAN, a training‑free inference‑time framework that improves affective reasoning in multimodal large language models. It combines a Hierarchical Emotional Reasoning Chain (HERC) to better capture fine‑grained visual cues and a Contrastive Discriminative Visual Pruning (CDVP) module to isolate discriminative tokens for semantically similar emotions. Experiments show significant gains, notably a +10.47% improvement on the WebEmo25 benchmark with Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct.
AffectOmni is a reinforcement‑learning‑trained framework that enhances multimodal large language models for affective reasoning in social and art‑related scenes. It introduces People Focus and Temporal Order rewards to prioritize people‑centric cues and structured reasoning, and uses within‑group comparative scoring for more discriminative rewards. A Thinking Summarizer converts rationales into executable evidence instructions, which are grounded into pixel‑level regions via SAM3, enabling external auditability.
arXiv:2510. 00492v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The reliability of large language models (LLMs) during test-time scaling is often assessed with \emph{external verifiers} or \emph{reward models} that distinguish correct reasoning from flawed logic.
arXiv:2603. 05659v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Rubrics as Rewards (RaR) have driven strong gains in domains with clear correctness signals and even in subjective domains by synthesizing evaluation criteria from ideal reference answers.
The paper introduces Dependency‑Aware Reward Shaping (DARS), a method that assigns step‑level credit in reinforcement learning by modeling task progress as a graph of predicates with prerequisite relations. Annotators mark each step’s effect on predicates, and DARS discounts verified predicates based on distance from broken prerequisites while preserving independent ones, converting these annotations into signed per‑step rewards. Experiments on five task families with models ranging from 1.5B to 8B show that DARS improves success rates by up to 10 points over GiGPO, boosts WebShop and Search‑R1 QA scores, complements AEPO on AIME24/25, and outperforms OmniOPD in tool‑free reasoning, with ablations confirming the contribution of step‑level credit, dependency attenuation, and graph topology.
The paper introduces RECAP, a redundancy-aware credit assignment method that improves reasoning efficiency in large language models by assigning credit to each reasoning step based on its downstream role and contribution to the correct answer. RECAP uses a semantic dependency graph to measure structural responsibility and evaluates step efficacy via changes in gold-answer log-likelihood, enabling step-specific updates without requiring a separate reward model or concise trajectories. Experiments on two 7B models across four mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that RECAP enhances the accuracy-efficiency trade-off, boosting pass@1 by 2.0–3.7 percentage points while cutting reasoning tokens by 8–31% compared to GRPO.
arXiv:2606. 09078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Process Reward Models (PRMs) improve credit assignment for reasoning by providing step-level feedback.
arXiv:2605. 03862v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a common way to improve explicit reasoning in large language models, but final-answer correctness alone does not reveal whether the reasoning trace is faithful, reliable, or useful to the model that consumes it.
arXiv:2606. 04503v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has greatly advanced large reasoning models (LRMs), but it requires timely training on a huge fully-annotated dataset.
arXiv:2604. 09482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reasoning in knowledge-intensive domains remains challenging as intermediate steps are often not locally verifiable: unlike math or code, evaluating step correctness may require synthesizing clues across large external knowledge sources.
arXiv:2607. 03957v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models can reach the right normative verdict for the wrong reason.