Manyuan Zhang
2026
Exploring Reasoning Reward Model for Agents
Kaixuan Fan | Kaituo Feng | Manyuan Zhang | Tianshuo Peng | Zhixun Li | Yilei Jiang | Shuang Chen | Xiangyu Yue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Kaixuan Fan | Kaituo Feng | Manyuan Zhang | Tianshuo Peng | Zhixun Li | Yilei Jiang | Shuang Chen | Xiangyu Yue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has achieved notable success in enabling agents to perform complex reasoning and tool use. However, most methods still relies on sparse outcome-based reward for training. Such feedback fails to differentiate intermediate reasoning quality, leading to suboptimal training results. In this paper, we introduce Agent Reasoning Reward Model (Agent-RRM), a multi-faceted reward model that produces structured feedback for agentic trajectories, including (1) an explicit reasoning trace , (2) a focused critique that provides refinement guidance by highlighting reasoning flaws, and (3) an overall score that evaluates process performance. Leveraging these signals, we systematically investigate three integration strategies: Reagent-C (text-augmented refinement), Reagent-R (reward-augmented guidance), and Reagent-U (unified feedback integration). Extensive evaluations across 12 diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Reagent-U yields substantial performance leaps, achieving 43.7% on GAIA and 46.2% on WebWalkerQA, validating the effectiveness of our reasoning reward model and training schemes. Code, models, and datasets will be released to facilitate future research.
AdaTooler-V: Adaptive Tool-Use for Images and Videos
Chaoyang Wang | Kaituo Feng | Dongyang Chen | Zhongyu Wang | Zhixun Li | Sicheng Gao | Meng Meng | Xu Zhou | Manyuan Zhang | Yuzhang Shang | Xiangyu Yue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Chaoyang Wang | Kaituo Feng | Dongyang Chen | Zhongyu Wang | Zhixun Li | Sicheng Gao | Meng Meng | Xu Zhou | Manyuan Zhang | Yuzhang Shang | Xiangyu Yue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent advances have shown that multimodal large language models (MLLMs) benefit from multimodal interleaved chain-of-thought (CoT) with vision tool interactions. However, existing open-source models often exhibit blind tool-use reasoning patterns, invoking vision tools even when they are unnecessary, which significantly increases inference overhead and degrades model performance. To this end, we propose AdaTooler-V, an MLLM that performs adaptive tool-use by determining whether a visual problem truly requires tools. First, we introduce AT-GRPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm that adaptively adjusts reward scales based on the Tool Benefit Score of each sample, encouraging the model to invoke tools only when they provide genuine improvements. Moreover, we construct two datasets to support training: AdaTooler-V-CoT-100k for SFT cold start and AdaTooler-V-300k for RL with verifiable rewards across single-image, multi-image, and video data. Experiments across twelve benchmarks demonstrate the strong reasoning capability of AdaTooler-V, outperforming existing methods in diverse visual reasoning tasks. Notably, AdaTooler-V-7B achieves an accuracy of 89.8% on the high-resolution benchmark V*, surpassing the commercial proprietary model GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro.
2025
LM-Searcher: Cross-domain Neural Architecture Search with LLMs via Unified Numerical Encoding
Yuxuan Hu | Jihao Liu | Ke Wang | Jinliang Zheng | Weikang Shi | Manyuan Zhang | Qi Dou | Rui Liu | Aojun Zhou | Hongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuxuan Hu | Jihao Liu | Ke Wang | Jinliang Zheng | Weikang Shi | Manyuan Zhang | Qi Dou | Rui Liu | Aojun Zhou | Hongsheng Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new avenues for solving complex optimization problems, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS). However, existing LLM-driven NAS approaches rely heavily on prompt engineering and domain-specific tuning, limiting their practicality and scalability across diverse tasks. In this work, we propose LM-Searcher, a novel framework that leverages LLMs for cross-domain neural architecture optimization without the need for extensive domain-specific adaptation. Central to our approach is NCode, a universal numerical string representation for neural architectures, which enables cross-domain architecture encoding and search. We also reformulate the NAS problem as a ranking task, training LLMs to select high-performing architectures from candidate pools using instruction-tuning samples derived from a novel pruning-based subspace sampling strategy. Our curated dataset, encompassing a wide range of architecture-performance pairs, encourages robust and transferable learning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LM-Searcher achieves competitive performance in both in-domain (e.g., CNNs for image classification) and out-of-domain (e.g., LoRA configurations for segmentation and generation) tasks, establishing a new paradigm for flexible and generalizable LLM-based architecture search.