Despite strong results on many tasks, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still underperform on visual mathematical problem solving, especially in reliably perceiving and interpreting diagrams. Inspired by human problem-solving, we hypothesize that the ability to extract meaningful information from diagrams is pivotal, as it directly conditions subsequent inference.Hence, we introduce FlowVerse, a comprehensive benchmark that provides a fine-grained evaluation of MLLMs’ perception and reasoning capabilities. Our preliminary results on FlowVerse reveal that existing MLLMs exhibit substantial limitations when extracting essential information and reasoned properties from diagrams and performing complex reasoning based on these visual inputs. In response, we introduce MathFlow, a modular problem-solving pipeline that decouples perception and inference into distinct stages, thereby optimizing each independently. Given the perceptual limitations observed in current MLLMs, we trained MathFlow-P-7B as a dedicated perception model.Experimental results indicate that MathFlow-P-7B yields substantial performance gains when integrated with various closed-source and open-source inference models. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the MathFlow pipeline and its compatibility with diverse inference frameworks. Project page: https://github.com/MathFlow-zju/MathFlow.

In this work, we study reinforcement learning (RL) in solving text-based games. We address the challenge of combinatorial action space, by proposing a confidence-based self-imitation model to generate action candidates for the RL agent. Firstly, we leverage the self-imitation learning to rank and exploit past valuable trajectories to adapt a pre-trained language model (LM) towards a target game. Then, we devise a confidence-based strategy to measure the LM’s confidence with respect to a state, thus adaptively pruning the generated actions to yield a more compact set of action candidates. In multiple challenging games, our model demonstrates promising performance in comparison to the baselines.

Text-based games (TGs) are exciting testbeds for developing deep reinforcement learning techniques due to their partially observed environments and large action spaces. In these games, the agent learns to explore the environment via natural language interactions with the game simulator. A fundamental challenge in TGs is the efficient exploration of the large action space when the agent has not yet acquired enough knowledge about the environment. We propose CommExpl, an exploration technique that injects external commonsense knowledge, via a pretrained language model (LM), into the agent during training when the agent is the most uncertain about its next action. Our method exhibits improvement on the collected game scores during the training in four out of nine games from Jericho. Additionally, the produced trajectory of actions exhibit lower perplexity, when tested with a pretrained LM, indicating better closeness to human language.

Text-based games provide an interactive way to study natural language processing. While deep reinforcement learning has shown effectiveness in developing the game playing agent, the low sample efficiency and the large action space remain to be the two major challenges that hinder the DRL from being applied in the real world. In this paper, we address the challenges by introducing world-perceiving modules, which automatically decompose tasks and prune actions by answering questions about the environment. We then propose a two-phase training framework to decouple language learning from reinforcement learning, which further improves the sample efficiency. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the performance and sample efficiency. Besides, it shows robustness against compound error and limited pre-training data.

Deep reinforcement learning provides a promising approach for text-based games in studying natural language communication between humans and artificial agents. However, the generalization still remains a big challenge as the agents depend critically on the complexity and variety of training tasks. In this paper, we address this problem by introducing a hierarchical framework built upon the knowledge graph-based RL agent. In the high level, a meta-policy is executed to decompose the whole game into a set of subtasks specified by textual goals, and select one of them based on the KG. Then a sub-policy in the low level is executed to conduct goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. We carry out experiments on games with various difficulty levels and show that the proposed method enjoys favorable generalizability.