Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use. However, the fundamental cognitive faculties essential for problem-solving—perception, reasoning, and memory—remain the stable core of intelligence. Unlike memorizing specific patterns, humans succeed in novel environments by applying these intrinsic faculties to adapt and optimize. Yet, whether LLMs possess this essential capacity—namely, the ability to continuously refine solutions in response to dynamic environmental feedback—remains underexplored. To address this challenge, we introduce OPT-BENCH, a benchmark for evaluating self-improvement capabilities in large-scale search spaces. By combining 20 machine learning tasks with 10 classic NP-hard problems, OPT-BENCH provides a rigorous setting to assess whether agents can adapt through intrinsic self-reflection rather than rote tool application. We further propose OPT-Agent, a framework that emulates human-like cognitive adaptation. It operates via a general perception–memory–reasoning loop, iteratively refining solutions based on environmental feedback. Through extensive experiments on 19 LLMs from 7 model families, including reasoning models, general models, and open-source models ranging from 3B to 235B parameters, we demonstrate stronger models are more effective at leveraging feedback signals for self-improvement. However, this upper-bound adaptability remains fundamentally constrained by the models’ base capacity, and even the most advanced LLMs still fall short of human expert performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning benchmarks through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), excelling at tasks such as math, coding, logic and puzzles. However, existing benchmarks evaluate only correctness, overlooking optimality—the ability to find the best solutions under constraints. We propose , the first comprehensive framework for training and evaluating LLMs on NP-hard optimization problems through quality-aware RLVR. provides three key components: a scalable training infrastructure with instance generators, quality verifiers, and optimal baselines across 10 tasks; a rigorous benchmark with 1,000 instances evaluating both feasibility (Success Rate) and quality (Quality Ratio); and quality-aware rewards enabling continuous improvement beyond binary correctness. Training on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M with 15K examples achieves 93.1% SR and 46.6% QR, significantly outperforming GPT-4o (29.6% SR, 14.6% QR). Beyond optimization, training on transfers to diverse tasks: mathematics (+2.2%), logic (+1.2%), knowledge (+4.1%), and instruction-following (+6.1%). Our analysis reveals quality-aware rewards improve solutions by 28.8% over binary rewards, and task diversity drives generalization more than data quantity—offering insights into RLVR scaling for complex reasoning.

Despite the promising performance of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) in visual understanding, they occasionally generate incorrect outputs. While reward models (RMs) with reinforcement learning or test-time scaling offer the potential for improving generation quality, a critical gap remains: publicly available multi-modal RMs for LVLMs are scarce, and the implementation details of proprietary models are often unclear. We bridge this gap with InternLM-XComposer2.5-Reward (IXC-2.5-Reward), a simple yet effective multi-modal reward model that aligns LVLMs with human preferences. To ensure the robustness and versatility of IXC-2.5-Reward, we set up a high-quality multi-modal preference corpus spanning text, image, and video inputs across diverse domains, such as instruction following, general understanding, text-rich documents, mathematical reasoning, and video understanding. IXC-2.5-Reward achieves excellent results on the latest multi-modal reward model benchmark and shows competitive performance on text-only reward model benchmarks. We further demonstrate three key applications of IXC-2.5-Reward: (1) Providing a supervisory signal for RL training. We integrate IXC-2.5-Reward with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) yields IXC-2.5-Chat, which shows consistent improvements in instruction following and multi-modal open-ended dialogue; (2) Selecting the best response from candidate responses for test-time scaling; and (3) Filtering outlier or noisy samples from existing image and video instruction tuning training data.

Recent advancements in open-source multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have primarily focused on enhancing foundational capabilities, leaving a significant gap in human preference alignment. This paper introduces OmniAlign-V, a comprehensive dataset of 200K high-quality training samples featuring diverse images, complex questions, and varied response formats to improve MLLMs’ alignment with human preferences. We also present MM-AlignBench, a human-annotated benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs’ alignment with human values. Experimental results show that finetuning MLLMs with OmniAlign-V, using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), significantly enhances human preference alignment while maintaining or enhancing performance on standard VQA benchmarks, preserving their fundamental capabilities.