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Adaptive Collaboration with Humans: Metacognitive Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent LLMs with Continual Learning

arXiv:2603.07972v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While scaling individual Large Language Models (LLMs) has delivered remarkable progress, the next frontier lies in scaling collaboration through multi-agent systems (MAS). However, purely autonomous MAS remain ''closed-world'' systems, constrained by the static knowledge horizon of pre-trained models. This limitation makes them brittle on tasks requiring knowledge beyond training data, often leading to collective failure under novel challenges. To address this, we propose the Human-In-the-Loop Multi-Agent Collaboration (HILA) framework, a principled paradigm for human--agent collaboration. HILA trains agents to learn a metacognitive policy that governs when to solve problems autonomously and when to defer to a human expert. To operationalize this policy, we introduce Dual-Loop Policy Optimization, which disentangles immediate decision-making from long-term capability growth. The inner loop applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a cost-aware reward to optimize deferral decisions, while the outer loop implements continual learning, transforming expert feedback into high-quality supervised signals that strengthen the agent's reasoning ability. Experiments on challenging mathematical and problem-solving benchmarks show that HILA, equipped with Dual-Loop Policy Optimization, consistently outperforms advanced MAS, establishing a principled foundation for collaborative and continually improving agentic systems.

Debiasing Central Fixation Confounds Reveals a Peripheral "Sweet Spot" for Human-like Scanpaths in Hard-Attention Vision

arXiv:2602.14834v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human eye movements in visual recognition reflect a balance between foveal sampling and peripheral context. Task-driven hard-attention models for vision are often evaluated by how well their scanpaths match human gaze. However, common scanpath metrics can be strongly confounded by dataset-specific center bias, especially on object-centric datasets. Using Gaze-CIFAR-10, we show that a trivial center-fixation baseline achieves surprisingly strong scanpath scores, approaching many learned policies. This makes standard metrics optimistic and blurs the distinction between genuine behavioral alignment and mere central tendency. We then analyze a hard-attention classifier under constrained vision by sweeping foveal patch size and peripheral context, revealing a peripheral sweet spot: only a narrow range of sensory constraints yields scanpaths that are simultaneously (i) above the center baseline after debiasing and (ii) temporally human-like in movement statistics. To address center bias, we propose GCS (Gaze Consistency Score), a center-debiased composite metric augmented with movement similarity. GCS uncovers a robust sweet spot at medium patch size with both foveal and peripheral vision, that is not obvious from raw scanpath metrics or accuracy alone, and also highlights a "shortcut regime" when the field-of-view becomes too large. We discuss implications for evaluating active perception on object-centric datasets and for designing gaze benchmarks that better separate behavioral alignment from center bias.

Reinforcement Learning with Promising Tokens for Large Language Models

arXiv:2602.03195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this formulation includes the massive tail of contextually irrelevant tokens in the action space, which could distract the policy from focusing on decision-making among the truly reasonable tokens. In this work, we verify that valid reasoning paths could inherently concentrate within a low-rank subspace. Based on this insight, we introduce Reinforcement Learning with Promising Tokens (RLPT), a framework that mitigates the action space issue by decoupling strategic decision-making from token generation. Specifically, RLPT leverages the semantic priors of the base model to identify a dynamic set of promising tokens and constrains policy optimization exclusively to this refined subset via masking. Theoretical analysis and empirical results demonstrate that RLPT effectively reduces gradient variance, stabilizes the training process, and improves sample efficiency. Experiment results on math, coding, and telecom reasoning show that RLPT outperforms standard RL baselines and integrates effectively across various model sizes (4B and 8B) and RL algorithms (GRPO and DAPO).
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