Yu Yang
Publications
Reasoning or Memorization? Direction-Aware Diversity Exploration in LLM Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning has become a key paradigm for eliciting reasoning abilities in large language models, where exploration is crucial for discovering effective solution trajectories. Existing exploration methods typically encourage diversity in semantic or gradient spaces, without distinguishing what drives this diversity. A trajectory may appear novel because it follows a new reasoning process, or because it varies memorized patterns and shortcuts. Rewarding both cases equally may steer exploration toward memorization rather than genuine reasoning improvement. In this paper, we propose DiRL, a Direction-Aware Reinforcement Learning framework that anchors exploration to an internal reasoning-memorization direction of the policy. Specifically, DiRL extracts this direction from model representations, constructs direction-weighted gradient features to characterize rollout updates, and shapes rewards to amplify reasoning-aligned exploration while suppressing memorization-aligned variations. DiRL integrates seamlessly into standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Extensive experiments on mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DiRL, showing significant improvements over various existing exploration methods.
CoBA-RL: Capability-Oriented Budget Allocation for Reinforcement Learning in LLMs
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key approach for enhancing LLM reasoning. However, standard frameworks like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) typically employ a uniform rollout budget, leading to resource inefficiency. Moreover, existing adaptive methods often rely on instance-level metrics, such as task pass rates, failing to capture the model's dynamic learning state. To address these limitations, we propose CoBA-RL, a reinforcement learning algorithm designed to adaptively allocate rollout budgets based on the model's evolving capability. Specifically, CoBA-RL utilizes a Capability-Oriented Value function to map tasks to their potential training gains and employs a heap-based greedy strategy to efficiently self-calibrate the distribution of computational resources to samples with high training value. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively orchestrates the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, delivering consistent generalization improvements across multiple challenging benchmarks. These findings underscore that quantifying sample training value and optimizing budget allocation are pivotal for advancing LLM post-training efficiency.
MemOCR: Layout-Aware Visual Memory for Efficient Long-Horizon Reasoning
Long-horizon agentic reasoning necessitates effectively compressing growing interaction histories into a limited context window. Most existing memory systems serialize history as text, where token-level cost is uniform and scales linearly with length, often spending scarce budget on low-value details. To this end, we introduce MemOCR, a multimodal memory agent that improves long-horizon reasoning under tight context budgets by allocating memory space with adaptive information density through visual layout. Concretely, MemOCR maintains a structured rich-text memory (e.g., headings, highlights) and renders it into an image that the agent consults for memory access, visually prioritizing crucial evidence while aggressively compressing auxiliary details. To ensure robustness across varying memory budgets, we train MemOCR with reinforcement learning under budget-aware objectives that expose the agent to diverse compression levels. Across long-context multi-hop and single-hop question-answering benchmarks, MemOCR outperforms strong text-based baselines and achieves more effective context utilization under extreme budgets.
MemOCR: Layout-Aware Visual Memory for Efficient Long-Horizon Reasoning
Long-horizon agentic reasoning necessitates effectively compressing growing interaction histories into a limited context window. Most existing memory systems serialize history as text, where token-level cost is uniform and scales linearly with length, often spending scarce budget on low-value details. To this end, we introduce MemOCR, a multimodal memory agent that improves long-horizon reasoning under tight context budgets by allocating memory space with adaptive information density through visual layout. Concretely, MemOCR maintains a structured rich-text memory (e.g., headings, highlights) and renders it into an image that the agent consults for memory access, visually prioritizing crucial evidence while aggressively compressing auxiliary details. To ensure robustness across varying memory budgets, we train MemOCR with reinforcement learning under budget-aware objectives that expose the agent to diverse compression levels. Across long-context multi-hop and single-hop question-answering benchmarks, MemOCR outperforms strong text-based baselines and achieves more effective context utilization under extreme budgets.