Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise for complex tasks, but Text-to-SQL remains mostly restricted to single-turn paradigms. A primary bottleneck is the credit assignment problem. In traditional paradigms, rewards are determined solely by the final-turn feedback, which ignores the intermediate process and leads to ambiguous credit evaluation. To address this, we propose Agentic SQL, a framework featuring a universal two-tiered reward mechanism designed to provide effective trajectory-level evaluation and dense step-level signals. First, we introduce Aggregated Trajectory Reward (ATR) to resolve multi-turn credit assignment. Using an asymmetric transition matrix, ATR aggregates process-oriented scores to incentivize continuous improvement. Leveraging Lyapunov stability theory, we prove ATR acts as an energy dissipation operator, guaranteeing a cycle-free policy and monotonic convergence. Second, Column-Set Matching Reward (CSMR) provides immediate step-level rewards to mitigate sparsity. By executing queries at each turn, CSMR converts binary (0/1) feedback into dense [0,1] signals based on partial correctness. Evaluations on BIRD show a 5% gain over binary-reward GRPO. Notably, our approach outperforms SOTA Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B on BIRD and Spider 2.0 using identical models, propelling Text-to-SQL toward a robust multi-turn agent paradigm.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to support context windows exceeding one million tokens, the linear growth of Key-Value (KV) cache imposes severe memory capacity and bandwidth bottlenecks, constraining the efficiency of long-context inference. Existing compression approaches typically prioritize tokens based on local saliency metrics to decouple prefill computation from decoding memory. However, these methods often rely on local saliency snapshots at a specific layer, thereby systematically discarding tokens that act as global information hubs across the network depth but appear temporarily dormant at the specific layer selected for pruning. To address this limitation, we propose StructKV, a structure-aware KV cache compression framework that introduces three core innovations: First, Global In-Degree Centrality aggregates attention patterns across the network depth to identify global information hubs. Second, Dynamic Pivot Detection utilizes information-theoretic metrics to adaptively locate the optimal layer for compression. Finally, Structural Propagation Decoupling separates the computational budget from the memory storage budget. Experimental results on the LongBench and RULER benchmarks demonstrate that StructKV effectively preserves long-range dependencies and retrieval robustness.

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances code generation in Large Language Models (LLMs), it introduces a critical challenge in uncertainty estimation: Confidence Saturation. Existing calibration methods, such as Self-Consistency, rely on the assumption that consensus implies correctness. This assumption fails under systematic errors, where models confidently repeat flawed logic, leading to miscalibrated high-confidence predictions. To address this, we introduce NeuroSym-Cal, a hierarchical calibration framework. We posit that reliable confidence requires interrogating the model at two complementary levels: the extrinsic consensus of its symbolic outputs and the intrinsic sensitivity of its latent reasoning. Specifically, we propose Reasoning Sensitivity Analysis to measure the local curvature of the deductive process via latent perturbation, providing a fine-grained signal that persists even when output consensus saturates. These orthogonal features are fused by a Contextual Calibration Network to predict correctness. Experiments across state-of-the-art reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek-R1) demonstrate that NeuroSym-Cal effectively de-saturates overconfident errors, achieving state-of-the-art Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and superior selective generation performance on Out-Of-Domain (OOD) benchmarks.

While LLM-based agents can interact with environments via invoking external tools, their expanded capabilities also amplify security risks. Monitoring step-level tool invocation behaviors in real time and proactively intervening before unsafe execution is critical for agent deployment, yet remains underexplored. In this work, we first construct TS-Bench, a novel benchmark for step-level tool invocation safety detection in LLM agents. We then develop a guardrail model, TS-Guard, using multi-task reinforcement learning. The model proactively detects unsafe tool invocation actions before execution by reasoning over the interaction history. It assesses request harmfulness and action–attack correlations, producing interpretable and generalizable safety judgments and feedback. Furthermore, We introduce TS-Flow, a guardrail-feedback-driven reasoning framework for LLM agents, which reduces harmful tool invocations of ReAct-style agents by 65% on average and improves benign task completion by approximately 10% under prompt injection attacks.

Recent advancements in the Generative Reward Model (GRM) have demonstrated its potential to enhance the reasoning abilities of LLMs through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. Despite these gains, existing implementations of GRM suffer from two critical limitations. First, CoT prompting is applied indiscriminately to all inputs regardless of their inherent complexity. This introduces unnecessary computational costs for tasks amenable to fast, direct inference. Second, existing approaches primarily rely on voting-based mechanisms to evaluate CoT outputs, which often lack granularity and precision in assessing reasoning quality. In this paper, we propose E-GRM, an efficient generative reward modeling framework grounded in model-internal uncertainty. E-GRM leverages the convergence behavior of parallel model generations to estimate uncertainty and selectively trigger CoT reasoning only when needed, without relying on handcrafted features or task-dependent signals. To improve reward fidelity, we introduce a lightweight discriminative scorer trained with a hybrid regression–ranking objective to provide fine-grained evaluation of reasoning paths. Experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks show that E-GRM substantially reduces inference cost while consistently improving answer accuracy, demonstrating that model-internal uncertainty is an effective and general signal for efficient reasoning-aware reward modeling.

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has been widely used for automated reasoning data exploration, but current supervision extraction methods remain inefficient. Standard approaches retain only the single highest-reward trajectory, discarding the comparative signals present in the many explored paths. Here we introduce Contrastive Reasoning Path Synthesis (CRPS), a framework that transforms supervision extraction from a filtering process into a synthesis procedure. CRPS uses a structured reflective process to analyze the differences between high- and low-quality search trajectories, extracting explicit information about strategic pivots and local failure modes. These insights guide the synthesis of reasoning chains that incorporate success patterns while avoiding identified pitfalls. We show empirically that models fine-tuned on just 60K CRPS-synthesized examples match or exceed the performance of baselines trained on 590K examples derived from standard rejection sampling, a 20× reduction in dataset size. Furthermore, CRPS improves generalization on out-of-domain benchmarks, demonstrating that learning from the contrast between success and failure produces more transferable reasoning capabilities than learning from success alone.

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of large language models often suffers from task interference and catastrophic forgetting. Recent approaches alleviate this issue by isolating task-critical parameters during training. However, these methods represent a static solution to a dynamic problem, assuming that parameter importance remains fixed once identified. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that parameter importance exhibits temporal drift over the course of training. To address this, we propose Evolving Parameter Isolation (EPI), a fine-tuning framework that adapts isolation decisions based on online estimates of parameter importance. Instead of freezing a fixed subset of parameters, EPI periodically updates isolation masks using gradient-based signals, enabling the model to protect emerging task-critical parameters while releasing outdated ones to recover plasticity. Experiments on diverse multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that EPI consistently reduces interference and forgetting compared to static isolation and standard fine-tuning, while improving overall generalization. Our analysis highlights the necessity of synchronizing isolation mechanisms with the evolving dynamics of learning diverse abilities.

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, we observe a persistent failure mode: even after convergence, models often fail to correctly reproduce a subset of their own supervised training data. We refer to this behavior as the Incomplete Learning Phenomenon (ILP). This paper presents the first systematic study of ILP in LLM fine-tuning. We formalize ILP as post-training failure to internalize supervised instances and demonstrate its prevalence across multiple model families, domains, and datasets. Through controlled analyses, we identify five recurrent sources of incomplete learning: (1) missing prerequisite knowledge in the pre-trained model, (2) conflicts between SFT supervision and pre-training knowledge, (3) internal inconsistencies within SFT data, (4) left-side forgetting during sequential fine-tuning, and (5) insufficient optimization for rare or complex patterns. We introduce a diagnostic-first framework that maps unlearned samples to these causes using observable training and inference signals, and study several targeted mitigation strategies as causal interventions. Experiments on Qwen, LLaMA, and OLMo2 show that incomplete learning is widespread and heterogeneous, and that improvements in aggregate metrics can mask persistent unlearned subsets. The findings highlight the need for fine-grained diagnosis of what supervised fine-tuning fails to learn, and why.

Reward Models (RMs) are key components for evaluating and guiding language model outputs. However, traditional scalar RMs often struggle with incorporating contextual and background information during inference, leading to incomplete evaluations. Generative RMs (GRMs) attempt to address these limitations by generating intermediate reasoning steps. Yet, their uncontrolled black-box nature and inefficiency due to sequential decoding hinder their industrial deployment. Industrial scenarios, such as search and recommendation systems, often involve single-domain tasks requiring evaluation along specific dimensions. In such contexts, diagnosing “bad cases” necessitates structured feedback to identify and optimize dimension-specific issues.In this paper, we propose the Structural Reward Model (SRM), a modular and interpretable framework integrating side-branch models as auxiliary feature generators. By introducing fine-grained dimensions, SRMs enable interpretable and efficient evaluation, facilitating targeted diagnostics and optimization. This structured approach ensures adaptability and scalability for industrial applications.Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that SRMs outperform scalar RMs and GRMs in robustness and alignment with human preferences. The modular design further supports efficient optimization for practical scenarios, allowing SRM to provide a practical reward modeling solution for industry.

Current text mining models are trained with 0-1 hard label that indicates whether an instance belongs to a class, ignoring rich information of the relevance degree. Soft label, which involved each label of varying degrees than the hard label, is considered more suitable for describing instances. The process of generating soft labels from hard labels is defined as label smoothing (LS). Classical LS methods focus on universal data mining tasks so that they ignore the valuable text features in text mining tasks. This paper presents a novel keyword-based LS method to automatically generate soft labels from hard labels via exploiting the relevance between labels and text instances. Generated soft labels are then incorporated into existing models as auxiliary targets during the training stage, capable of improving models without adding any extra parameters. Results of extensive experiments on text classification and large-scale text retrieval datasets demonstrate that soft labels generated by our method contain rich knowledge of text features, improving the performance of corresponding models under both balanced and unbalanced settings.

The embedding-based large-scale query-document retrieval problem is a hot topic in the information retrieval (IR) field. Considering that pre-trained language models like BERT have achieved great success in a wide variety of NLP tasks, we present a QuadrupletBERT model for effective and efficient retrieval in this paper. Unlike most existing BERT-style retrieval models, which only focus on the ranking phase in retrieval systems, our model makes considerable improvements to the retrieval phase and leverages the distances between simple negative and hard negative instances to obtaining better embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that our QuadrupletBERT achieves state-of-the-art results in embedding-based large-scale retrieval tasks.

Current embedding-based large-scale retrieval models are trained with 0-1 hard label that indicates whether a query is relevant to a document, ignoring rich information of the relevance degree. This paper proposes to improve embedding-based retrieval from the perspective of better characterizing the query-document relevance degree by introducing label enhancement (LE) for the first time. To generate label distribution in the retrieval scenario, we design a novel and effective supervised LE method that incorporates prior knowledge from dynamic term weighting methods into contextual embeddings. Our method significantly outperforms four competitive existing retrieval models and its counterparts equipped with two alternative LE techniques by training models with the generated label distribution as auxiliary supervision information. The superiority can be easily observed on English and Chinese large-scale retrieval tasks under both standard and cold-start settings.