Qibin Hou
Publications
Easy Samples Are All You Need: Self-Evolving LLMs via Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Previous LLMs-based RL studies typically follow either supervised learning with high annotation costs, or unsupervised paradigms using voting or entropy-based rewards. However, their performance remains far from satisfactory due to the substantial annotation cost and issues such as model collapse or reward hacking. To address these issues, we introduce a new perspective inspired by cognitive learning theory and propose a novel approach called EasyRL. The core of EasyRL is to simulate the human cognitive acquisition curve by integrating reliable knowledge transfer from easy labeled data with a progressive divide-and-conquer strategy that tackles increasingly difficult unlabeled data. Specifically, we initialize a warm-up model using supervised RL with few-shot labeled data. This is followed by a divide-and-conquer pseudo-labeling strategy on difficult unlabeled data, combining consistency-based selection for low-uncertainty cases and reflection-based resolution for medium-uncertainty cases. Finally, difficulty-progressive self-training with iterative pseudo-labeling and RL further strengthens the model's reasoning capability. EasyRL provides a unified self-evolving framework that facilitates data-efficient post-training of LLMs. Experimental results on mathematical and scientific benchmarks demonstrate that EasyRL, using only 10% of easy labeled data, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
GeoAgent: Learning to Geolocate Everywhere with Reinforced Geographic Characteristics
This paper presents GeoAgent, a model capable of reasoning closely with humans and deriving fine-grained address conclusions. Previous RL-based methods have achieved breakthroughs in performance and interpretability but still remain concerns because of their reliance on AI-generated chain-of-thought (CoT) data and training strategies, which conflict with geographic characteristics. To address these issues, we first introduce GeoSeek, a new geolocation dataset comprising CoT data annotated by geographic experts and professional players. We further thoroughly explore the inherent characteristics of geographic tasks and propose a geo-similarity reward and a consistency reward assessed by a consistency agent to assist training. This encourages the model to converge towards correct answers from a geographic perspective while ensuring the integrity and consistency of its reasoning process. Experimental results show that GeoAgent outperforms existing methods and a series of general VLLMs across multiple grains, while generating reasoning that closely aligns with humans.