@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2026-reasoning,
    title = "Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling {MLE} Agents Beyond Tree Search",
    author = "Zhang, Yifei  and
      Yang, Xu  and
      Yang, Xiao  and
      Xian, Bowen  and
      Li, Qizheng  and
      Fang, Shikai  and
      Li, Jingyuan  and
      Wang, Jian  and
      Xu, Minrui  and
      Zhang, Yuge  and
      Liu, Weiqing  and
      Bian, Jiang",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.438/",
    pages = "9013--9038",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1"
}