Wenhan Yu
Publications
ESPO: Early-Stopping Proximal Policy Optimization
When a large language model under reinforcement learning commits a wrong reasoning step early in a trajectory, standard algorithms force it to keep generating until the maximum horizon, spending compute on tokens that never receive positive reward and polluting advantage estimates with post-failure noise. We propose ESPO (Early-Stopping Proximal Policy Optimization), which detects trajectory failure on-the-fly and terminates rollouts early. At each generation step, ESPO computes a surrogate regret using only the logits already computed during sampling, and terminates when the smoothed cumulative regret significantly exceeds its estimated values. Truncated trajectories are treated as absorbing failure states with a terminal reward, concentrating negative temporal-difference (TD) errors near the detected failure step without any additional reward model or human annotation. On DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B trained for mathematical reasoning, ESPO surpasses PPO on AIME~2024 (46.28% vs. 45.25%), AMC~2023 (85.83% vs. 82.94%), and MATH-500 (87.42% vs. 85.43%), while saving more than 20% rollout tokens cumulatively.
Harness-Bench: Measuring Harness Effects across Models in Realistic Agent Workflows
LLM agents are increasingly deployed as executable systems that use tools, modify workspaces, and produce concrete artifacts. In such workflows, performance depends not only on the base model, but also on the harness: the system layer that manages context, tools, state, constraints, permissions, tracing, and recovery. However, existing benchmarks typically abstract away execution, compare complete agent systems, or hold the harness fixed, making execution-layer variation difficult to study. We introduce Harness-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating configuration-level harness effects in realistic agent workflows. Harness-Bench evaluates representative harness configurations across multiple model backends under shared task environments, budgets, and evaluation protocols, while preserving each harness's native execution behavior. The benchmark contains 106 sandboxed offline tasks constructed from practical agent-use patterns and manually reviewed for realism, solvability, oracle-checkability, and integrity. Each run records final artifacts, execution traces, usage statistics, and validator outputs, enabling analysis beyond final completion. Across 5,194 execution trajectories, we observe substantial variation in completion, process quality, efficiency, and failure behavior across model-harness pairings. These results suggest that agent capability should be reported at the model-harness configuration level rather than attributed to the base model alone. Our analysis further identifies recurring execution-alignment failures, where plausible reasoning becomes decoupled from tool feedback, workspace state, evidence, or verifiable output contracts. Harness-Bench provides a reproducible foundation for diagnosing and improving reliable, efficient, and auditable agent execution stacks.
TriPlay-RL: Tri-Role Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for LLM Safety Alignment
In recent years, safety risks associated with large language models have become increasingly prominent, highlighting the urgent need to mitigate the generation of toxic and harmful content. The mainstream paradigm for LLM safety alignment typically adopts a collaborative framework involving three roles: an attacker for adversarial prompt generation, a defender for safety defense, and an evaluator for response assessment. In this paper, we propose a closed-loop reinforcement learning framework called TriPlay-RL that enables iterative and co-improving collaboration among three roles with near-zero manual annotation. Experimental results show that the attacker preserves high output diversity while achieving a 20%-50% improvement in adversarial effectiveness; the defender attains 10%-30% gains in safety performance without degrading general reasoning capability; and the evaluator continuously refines its fine-grained judgment ability through iterations, accurately distinguishing unsafe responses, simple refusals, and useful guidance. Overall, our framework establishes an efficient and scalable paradigm for LLM safety alignment, enabling continuous co-evolution within a unified learning loop.
EntroCoT: Enhancing Chain-of-Thought via Adaptive Entropy-Guided Segmentation
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly enhanced the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. We find existing fine-tuning datasets frequently suffer from the "answer right but reasoning wrong" probelm, where correct final answers are derived from hallucinated, redundant, or logically invalid intermediate steps. This paper proposes EntroCoT, a unified framework for automatically identifying and refining low-quality CoT supervision traces. EntroCoT first proposes an entropy-based mechanism to segment the reasoning trace into multiple steps at uncertain junctures, and then introduces a Monte Carlo rollout-based mechanism to evaluate the marginal contribution of each step. By accurately filtering deceptive reasoning samples, EntroCoT constructs a high-quality dataset where every intermediate step in each reasoning trace facilitates the final answer. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that fine-tuning on the subset constructed by EntroCoT consistently outperforms the baseslines of full-dataset supervision.