Jian Liang
2026
Understanding and Mitigating Spurious Signal Amplification in Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Math Reasoning
Yongcan Yu | Lingxiao He | Jian Liang | Kuangpu Guo | Meng Wang | Qianlong Xie | Xingxing Wang | Ran He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yongcan Yu | Lingxiao He | Jian Liang | Kuangpu Guo | Meng Wang | Qianlong Xie | Xingxing Wang | Ran He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) always adapts models at inference time via pseudo-labeling, leaving it vulnerable to spurious optimization signals from label noise.Through an empirical study, we observe that responses with medium consistency form an ambiguity region and constitute the primary source of reward noise.Crucially, we find that such spurious signals can be even amplified through group-relative advantage estimation.Motivated by these findings, we propose a unified framework, Debiased and Denoised test-time Reinforcement Learning (DDRL), to mitigate spurious signals.Concretely, DDRL first applies a frequency-based sampling strategy to exclude ambiguous samples while maintaining a balanced set of positive and negative examples.It then adopts a debiased advantage estimation with fixed advantages, removing the bias introduced by group-relative policy optimization.Finally, DDRL incorporates a consensus-based off-policy refinement stage, which leverages the rejection-sampled dataset to enable efficient and stable model updates.Experiments on three large language models across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DDRL consistently outperforms existing TTRL baselines.The code is available at https://github.com/yuyongcan/DDRL.
What If Consensus Lies? Selective-Complementary Reinforcement Learning at Test Time
Dong Yan | Jian Liang | Yanbo Wang | Shuo Lu | Ran He | Tieniu Tan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Dong Yan | Jian Liang | Yanbo Wang | Shuo Lu | Ran He | Tieniu Tan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance reasoning capabilities on unlabeled test streams by deriving pseudo-rewards from majority voting consensus.However, existing TTRL methods rely exclusively on positive pseudo-labeling strategies.Such reliance becomes vulnerable under challenging scenarios where answer distributions are highly dispersed, resulting in weak consensus that inadvertently reinforces incorrect trajectories as supervision signals.In this paper, we propose SCRL (Selective-Complementary Reinforcement Learning), a robust test-time reinforcement learning framework that effectively mitigates label noise amplification.SCRL develops Selective Positive Pseudo-Labeling, which enforces strict consensus criteria to filter unreliable majorities. Complementarily, SCRL introduces Entropy-Gated Negative Pseudo-Labeling, the first negative supervision mechanism in TTRL, to reliably prune incorrect trajectories based on generation uncertainty. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SCRL achieves substantial improvements over baselines, while maintaining robust generalization and training stability under constrained rollout budgets.
2024
Subjective Topic meets LLMs: Unleashing Comprehensive, Reflective and Creative Thinking through the Negation of Negation
Fangrui Lv | Kaixiong Gong | Jian Liang | Xinyu Pang | Changshui Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Fangrui Lv | Kaixiong Gong | Jian Liang | Xinyu Pang | Changshui Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful reasoning capacity, as evidenced by prior studies focusing on objective topics that with unique standard answers such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning. However, the reasoning to definite answers emphasizes more on logical thinking, and falls short in effectively reflecting the comprehensive, reflective, and creative thinking that is also critical for the overall reasoning prowess of LLMs. In light of this, we build a dataset SJTP comprising diverse SubJective ToPics with free responses, as well as three evaluation indicators to fully explore LLM’s reasoning ability. We observe that a sole emphasis on logical thinking falls short in effectively tackling subjective challenges. Therefore, we introduce a framework grounded in the principle of the Negation of Negation (NeoN) to unleash the potential comprehensive, reflective, and creative thinking abilities of LLMs. Comprehensive experiments on SJTP demonstrate the efficacy of NeoN, and the enhanced performance on various objective reasoning tasks unequivocally underscores the benefits of stimulating LLM’s subjective thinking in augmenting overall reasoning capabilities.
2019
Selection Bias Explorations and Debias Methods for Natural Language Sentence Matching Datasets
Guanhua Zhang | Bing Bai | Jian Liang | Kun Bai | Shiyu Chang | Mo Yu | Conghui Zhu | Tiejun Zhao
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Guanhua Zhang | Bing Bai | Jian Liang | Kun Bai | Shiyu Chang | Mo Yu | Conghui Zhu | Tiejun Zhao
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Natural Language Sentence Matching (NLSM) has gained substantial attention from both academics and the industry, and rich public datasets contribute a lot to this process. However, biased datasets can also hurt the generalization performance of trained models and give untrustworthy evaluation results. For many NLSM datasets, the providers select some pairs of sentences into the datasets, and this sampling procedure can easily bring unintended pattern, i.e., selection bias. One example is the QuoraQP dataset, where some content-independent naive features are unreasonably predictive. Such features are the reflection of the selection bias and termed as the “leakage features.” In this paper, we investigate the problem of selection bias on six NLSM datasets and find that four out of them are significantly biased. We further propose a training and evaluation framework to alleviate the bias. Experimental results on QuoraQP suggest that the proposed framework can improve the generalization ability of trained models, and give more trustworthy evaluation results for real-world adoptions.