Yikun Wang
2026
GeometryZero: Advancing Geometry Solving via Group Contrastive Policy Optimization
Yikun Wang | Yibin Wang | Dianyi Wang | Zimian Peng | Qipeng Guo | Dacheng Tao | Jiaqi Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yikun Wang | Yibin Wang | Dianyi Wang | Zimian Peng | Qipeng Guo | Dacheng Tao | Jiaqi Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has boosted mathematical reasoning, yet geometry remains challenging where auxiliary construction is often essential. Prior methods either underperform or depend on very large models (e.g., GPT-4o), making them costly. We argue that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (e.g., GRPO) can train smaller models to couple auxiliary construction with solid geometric reasoning. However, naively applying GRPO yields unconditional rewards, encouraging indiscriminate and sometimes harmful constructions. We propose Group Contrastive Policy Optimization (GCPO), an RL framework with two components: (1) Group Contrastive Masking, which assigns positive/negative construction rewards based on contextual utility, and (2) a Length Reward that encourages longer reasoning chains. On top of GCPO, we build GeometryZero, an affordable family of geometry reasoning models that selectively use auxiliary construction. Experiments on Geometry3K and MathVista show GeometryZero consistently outperforms RL baselines (e.g., GRPO, ToRL).
Autoregressive Semantic Visual Reconstruction Helps VLMs Understand Better
Dianyi Wang | Wei Song | Yikun Wang | Siyuan Wang | Kaicheng Yu | Zhongyu Wei | Jiaqi Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Dianyi Wang | Wei Song | Yikun Wang | Siyuan Wang | Kaicheng Yu | Zhongyu Wei | Jiaqi Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Typical large vision-language models (LVLMs) apply autoregressive supervision primarily to textual responses, without fully exploiting causal learning over rich visual inputs. As a result, these models often emphasize vision-to-language alignment while potentially overlooking fine-grained visual information. While prior work has explored autoregressive image generation, effectively leveraging autoregressive visual supervision to enhance image understanding remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce Autoregressive Semantic Visual Reconstruction (ASVR), which enables joint learning of visual and textual modalities within a unified autoregressive framework. ASVR trains models to autoregressively reconstruct the semantic content of input images, which consistently enhances multimodal comprehension. Notably, we show that even when provided with continuous image features as input, models can effectively reconstruct discrete semantic tokens, resulting in stable and consistent improvements across various multimodal understanding benchmarks. ASVR delivers significant performance gains and scalability across varying data scales, visual input, visual supervision and model architectures. In particular, ASVR generally improves baselines by 2-3% across 14 multimodal benchmarks.
VideoPro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding
Chenglin Li | Feng Han | Yikun Wang | Ruilin Li | Shuai Dong | Haowen Hou | Haitao Li | Qianglong Chen | Feng Tao | Jingqi Tong | Yin Zhang | Jiaqi Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Chenglin Li | Feng Han | Yikun Wang | Ruilin Li | Shuai Dong | Haowen Hou | Haitao Li | Qianglong Chen | Feng Tao | Jingqi Tong | Yin Zhang | Jiaqi Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Understanding long videos remains challenging due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. Prior work has explored program-based visual grounding, typically relying on executable programs generated by auxiliary large language models. However, when scaling to long videos, existing approaches face several critical limitations: (1) frame-centric vision modules are often insufficient for long video processing; (2) naively applying program-based reasoning to all queries incurs considerable computational overhead; and (3) errors arising from low-confidence predictions and imperfect program execution are difficult to recover from. To address these challenges, we propose VideoPro, a unified framework that enables VideoLLMs to adaptively reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. VideoPro first performs adaptive reasoning, dynamically determining whether a query can be resolved directly by the native VideoLLM or requires explicit multi-step program reasoning. For complex queries, the model decomposes the task into executable programs that invoke specialized vision modules for precise temporal and semantic grounding. To further improve robustness, VideoPro incorporates a self-refinement mechanism that leverages execution feedback and confidence signals to correct erroneous executions and refine low-confidence reasoning programs. By tightly integrating adaptive reasoning with self-refinement, VideoPro consistently outperforms prior methods across multiple long-video understanding benchmarks, yielding an average 6.7% improvement for Qwen3-VL-8B.
2025
VisuoThink: Empowering LVLM Reasoning with Multimodal Tree Search
Yikun Wang | Siyin Wang | Qinyuan Cheng | Zhaoye Fei | Liang Ding | Qipeng Guo | Dacheng Tao | Xipeng Qiu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yikun Wang | Siyin Wang | Qinyuan Cheng | Zhaoye Fei | Liang Ding | Qipeng Guo | Dacheng Tao | Xipeng Qiu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models have showcased remarkable capabilities. However, they often falter when confronted with complex reasoning tasks that humans typically address through visual aids and deliberate, step-by-step thinking. While existing methods have explored text-based slow thinking or rudimentary visual assistance, they fall short of capturing the intricate, interleaved nature of human visual-verbal reasoning processes. To overcome these limitations and inspired by the mechanisms of slow thinking in human cognition, we introduce VisuoThink, a novel framework that seamlessly integrates visuospatial and linguistic domains. VisuoThink facilitates multimodal slow thinking by enabling progressive visual-textual reasoning and incorporates test-time scaling through look-ahead tree search. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VisuoThink significantly enhances reasoning capabilities via inference-time scaling, even without fine-tuning, achieving state-of-the-art performance in tasks involving geometry and spatial reasoning.
2024
Uncertainty Aware Learning for Language Model Alignment
Yikun Wang | Rui Zheng | Liang Ding | Qi Zhang | Dahua Lin | Dacheng Tao
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yikun Wang | Rui Zheng | Liang Ding | Qi Zhang | Dahua Lin | Dacheng Tao
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
As instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) evolve, aligning pretrained foundation models presents increasing challenges. Existing alignment strategies, which typically leverage diverse and high-quality data sources, often overlook the intrinsic uncertainty of tasks, learning all data samples equally. This may lead to suboptimal data efficiency and model performance. In response, we propose uncertainty-aware learning (UAL) to improve the model alignment of different task scenarios, by introducing the sample uncertainty (elicited from more capable LLMs). We implement UAL by a simple fashion – adaptively setting the label smoothing value of training according to the uncertainty of individual samples. Analysis shows that our UAL indeed facilitates better token clustering in the feature space, validating our hypothesis. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our UAL significantly and consistently outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning. Notably, LLMs aligned in a mixed scenario have achieved an average improvement of 10.62% on high-entropy tasks (i.e., AlpacaEval leaderboard), and 1.81% on complex low-entropy tasks (i.e., MetaMath and GSM8K).
Rescue: Ranking LLM Responses with Partial Ordering to Improve Response Generation
Yikun Wang | Rui Zheng | Haoming Li | Qi Zhang | Tao Gui | Fei Liu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Yikun Wang | Rui Zheng | Haoming Li | Qi Zhang | Tao Gui | Fei Liu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Customizing LLMs for a specific task involves separating high-quality responses from lower-quality ones. This skill can be developed using supervised fine-tuning with extensive human preference data. However, obtaining a large volume of expert-annotated data is costly for most tasks. In this paper, we explore a novel method to optimize LLMs using ranking metrics. This method trains the model to prioritize the best responses from a pool of candidates created for a particular task. Rather than a traditional full ordering, we advocate for a partial ordering, as achieving consensus on the perfect order of candidate responses can be challenging. Our partial ordering is more robust, less sensitive to noise, and can be achieved with limited human annotations or through heuristic methods. We test our system’s improved response generation ability using benchmark datasets, including textual entailment and multi-document question answering. We conduct ablation studies to understand crucial factors, such as how to gather candidate responses for a specific task, determine their most suitable order, and balance supervised fine-tuning with ranking metrics. Our approach, named RESCUE, offers a promising avenue for enhancing the response generation and task accuracy of LLMs.
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Co-authors
- Dacheng Tao 3
- Jiaqi Wang 3
- Liang Ding 2
- Qipeng Guo 2
- Dianyi Wang 2
- Qi Zhang 2
- Rui Zheng 2
- Qianglong Chen 1
- Qinyuan Cheng 1
- Shuai Dong 1
- Zhaoye Fei 1
- Tao Gui 1
- Feng Han 1
- Haowen Hou 1
- Chenglin Li 1
- Ruilin Li 1
- Haitao Li 1
- Haoming Li 1
- Dahua Lin 1
- Fei Liu 1
- Zimian Peng 1
- Xipeng Qiu (邱锡鹏) 1
- Wei Song 1
- Feng Tao 1
- Jingqi Tong 1
- Yibin Wang 1
- Siyuan Wang (王思远) 1
- Siyin Wang 1
- Zhongyu Wei (魏忠钰) 1
- Kaicheng Yu 1
- Yin Zhang 1