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TSPO: Breaking the Double Homogenization Dilemma in Multi-turn Search Policy Optimization

arXiv:2601.22776v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-turn tool-integrated reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks through iterative information retrieval. However, current reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks for search-augmented reasoning predominantly rely on sparse outcome-level rewards, leading to a "Double Homogenization Dilemma." This manifests as (1) Process homogenization, where the thinking, reasoning, and tooling involved in generation are ignored. (2) Intra-group homogenization, coarse-grained outcome rewards often lead to inefficiencies in intra-group advantage estimation with methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) during sampling. To address this, we propose Turn-level Stage-aware Policy Optimization (TSPO). TSPO introduces the First-Occurrence Latent Reward (FOLR) mechanism, allocating partial rewards to the step where the ground-truth answer first appears, thereby preserving process-level signals and increasing reward variance within groups without requiring external reward models or any annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TSPO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving average performance gains of 24% and 13.6% on Qwen2.5-3B and 7B models, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Flipped-May/TSPO.

Enhancing Foundation VLM Robustness to Missing Modality: Scalable Diffusion for Bi-directional Feature Restoration

arXiv:2602.03151v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision Language Model (VLM) typically assume complete modality input during inference. However, their effectiveness drops sharply when certain modalities are unavailable or incomplete. Current research on missing modality primarily faces two dilemmas: Prompt-based methods struggle to restore missing yet indispensable features and degrade the generalizability of VLM. Imputation-based approaches, lacking effective guidance, are prone to generating semantically irrelevant noise. Restoring precise semantics while sustaining VLM's generalization remains challenging. Therefore, we propose a general missing modality restoration strategy in this paper. We introduce an enhanced diffusion model as a pluggable mid-stage training module to effectively restore missing features. Our strategy introduces two key innovations: (I) Dynamic Modality Gating, which adaptively leverages conditional features to guide the generation of semantically consistent features; (II) Cross-Modal Mutual Learning mechanism, which bridges the semantic spaces of the dual models to achieve bi-directional alignment. Notably, our strategy maintains the original integrity of the pre-trained VLM, requiring no fine-tuning of the backbone models while significantly boosting resilience to information loss. Zero-shot evaluations across benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, establishing it as a robust and scalable extension that ensures VLM reliability across diverse missing rates and conditions. Our code and models will be publicly available.
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