What Should a Skill Remember? Quality--Cost Trade-offs in Cost-Aware Skill Rewriting for Language Model Agents

Large language model agents increasingly rely on skills: reusable procedural documents encoding workflows, tool use, implementation patterns, validation checks, and domain rules. Skill rewriting is often treated as prompt compression, but shorter skills can make agents more expensive by removing sparse operational anchors that prevent exploration, debugging, and recovery. We study skill rewriting through this economic lens. Our controlled framework profiles skill structure, rewrites skills using information-preservation strategies, and evaluates the rewrites under fixed task instructions, environments, and verifiers. Experiments on SkillsBench reveal distinct quality--cost trade-offs across strategies: API/code anchoring, workflow guarding, and rule/formula anchoring benefit different task families, with no universally dominant template. In the main held-out evaluation, the learned policy reduces total cost by 7.0% and downstream agent-token cost by 6.0%; in frozen cross-model transfer, the corresponding reductions average 14.7% and 13.7%, while verifier quality is preserved. These results position skill design as cost-aware operational knowledge engineering rather than prompt compression. Resources: https://github.com/1Reminding/Skill_EE.

CRAFT: A Unified Counterfactual Reasoning Framework for Tabular Question Answering and Fact Verification

Table reasoning remains challenging for large language models (LLMs), particularly in tasks that require multi-step inference over long and structured tables. Existing approaches predominantly rely on single-direction reasoning, which limits their ability to explore alternative hypotheses across tasks. In this work, we propose CRAFT, a unified Counterfactual Reasoning Framework that reformulates Tabular question answering and fact verification into a general bidirectional verification process. Our method explicitly constructs both declarative statements and their counterfactual variants. Evidence is then extracted from reasoning along both the original and counterfactual paths, and integrated via a weighted mechanism to arrive at the final answer. Experimental results show that our approach consistently surpasses representative baselines on table reasoning datasets such as WikiTQ and TabFact, achieving especially large improvements on complex question answering. Our framework also significantly mitigates performance gaps between different backbone LLMs. This indicates that counterfactual reasoning effectively overcomes the limitations of single-direction inference, guiding LLMs toward more discerning reasoning and establishing a more principled paradigm for structured reasoning tasks. Our code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

WorldTravel: A Realistic Multimodal Travel-Planning Benchmark with Tightly Coupled Constraints

Real-world autonomous planning requires coordinating tightly coupled constraints where a single decision dictates the feasibility of all subsequent actions. However, existing benchmarks predominantly feature loosely coupled constraints solvable through local greedy decisions and rely on idealized data, failing to capture the complexity of extracting parameters from dynamic web environments. We introduce \textbf{WorldTravel}, a benchmark comprising 150 real-world travel scenarios across 5 cities that demand navigating an average of 15+ interdependent temporal and logical constraints. To evaluate agents in realistic deployments, we develop \textbf{WorldTravel-Webscape}, a multi-modal environment featuring over 2,000 rendered webpages where agents must perceive constraint parameters directly from visual layouts to inform their planning. Our evaluation of 10 frontier models reveals a significant performance collapse: even the state-of-the-art GPT-5.2 achieves only 32.67\% feasibility in text-only settings, which plummets to 19.33\% in multi-modal environments. We identify a critical Perception-Action Gap and a Planning Horizon threshold at approximately 10 constraints where model reasoning consistently fails, suggesting that perception and reasoning remain independent bottlenecks. These findings underscore the need for next-generation agents that unify high-fidelity visual perception with long-horizon reasoning to handle brittle real-world logistics.

ReasonTabQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Table Question Answering from Real World Industrial Scenarios

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly catalyzed table-based question answering (TableQA). However, existing TableQA benchmarks often overlook the intricacies of industrial scenarios, which are characterized by multi-table structures, nested headers, and massive scales. These environments demand robust table reasoning through deep structured inference, presenting a significant challenge that remains inadequately addressed by current methodologies. To bridge this gap, we present ReasonTabQA, a large-scale bilingual benchmark encompassing 1,932 tables across 30 industry domains such as energy and automotive. ReasonTabQA provides high-quality annotations for both final answers and explicit reasoning chains, supporting both thinking and no-thinking paradigms. Furthermore, we introduce TabCodeRL, a reinforcement learning method that leverages table-aware verifiable rewards to guide the generation of logical reasoning paths. Extensive experiments on ReasonTabQA and 4 TableQA datasets demonstrate that while TabCodeRL yields substantial performance gains on open-source LLMs, the persistent performance gap on ReasonTabQA underscores the inherent complexity of real-world industrial TableQA.

MR-UIE: Multi-Perspective Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning for Universal Information Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate robust capabilities across diverse research domains. However, their performance in universal information extraction (UIE) remains insufficient, especially when tackling structured output scenarios that involve complex schema descriptions and require multi-step reasoning. While existing approaches enhance the performance of LLMs through in-context learning and instruction tuning, significant limitations nonetheless persist. To enhance the model's generalization ability, we propose integrating reinforcement learning (RL) with multi-perspective reasoning for information extraction (IE) tasks. Our work transitions LLMs from passive extractors to active reasoners, enabling them to understand not only what to extract but also how to reason. Experiments conducted on multiple IE benchmarks demonstrate that MR-UIE consistently elevates extraction accuracy across domains and surpasses state-of-the-art methods on several datasets. Furthermore, incorporating multi-perspective reasoning into RL notably enhances generalization in complex IE tasks, underscoring the critical role of reasoning in challenging scenarios.

T2R-bench: A Benchmark for Generating Article-Level Reports from Real World Industrial Tables

Extensive research has been conducted to explore the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in table reasoning. However, the essential task of transforming tables information into reports remains a significant challenge for industrial applications. This task is plagued by two critical issues: 1) the complexity and diversity of tables lead to suboptimal reasoning outcomes; and 2) existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of this task. To fill this gap, we propose the table-to-report task and construct a bilingual benchmark named T2R-bench, where the key information flow from the tables to the reports for this task. The benchmark comprises 457 industrial tables, all derived from real-world scenarios and encompassing 19 industry domains as well as 4 types of industrial tables. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation criteria to fairly measure the quality of report generation. The experiments on 25 widely-used LLMs reveal that even state-of-the-art models like Deepseek-R1 only achieves performance with 62.71 overall score, indicating that LLMs still have room for improvement on T2R-bench. Source code and data will be available after acceptance.

A Survey on Latent Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, especially when guided by explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that verbalizes intermediate steps. While CoT improves both interpretability and accuracy, its dependence on natural language reasoning limits the model's expressive bandwidth. Latent reasoning tackles this bottleneck by performing multi-step inference entirely in the model's continuous hidden state, eliminating token-level supervision. To advance latent reasoning research, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of latent reasoning. We begin by examining the foundational role of neural network layers as the computational substrate for reasoning, highlighting how hierarchical representations support complex transformations. Next, we explore diverse latent reasoning methodologies, including activation-based recurrence, hidden state propagation, and fine-tuning strategies that compress or internalize explicit reasoning traces. Finally, we discuss advanced paradigms such as infinite-depth latent reasoning via masked diffusion models, which enable globally consistent and reversible reasoning processes. By unifying these perspectives, we aim to clarify the conceptual landscape of latent reasoning and chart future directions for research at the frontier of LLM cognition. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: https://github.com/multimodal-art-projection/LatentCoT-Horizon/.

Table-R1: Region-based Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding

Tables present unique challenges for language models due to their structured row-column interactions, necessitating specialized approaches for effective comprehension. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in table reasoning through prompting and techniques like chain-of-thought (CoT) and program-of-thought (PoT), optimizing their performance for table question answering remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce region-based Table-R1, a novel reinforcement learning approach that enhances LLM table understanding by integrating region evidence into reasoning steps. Our method employs Region-Enhanced Supervised Fine-Tuning (RE-SFT) to guide models in identifying relevant table regions before generating answers, incorporating textual, symbolic, and program-based reasoning. Additionally, Table-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (TARPO) introduces a mixed reward system to dynamically balance region accuracy and answer correctness, with decaying region rewards and consistency penalties to align reasoning steps. Experiments show that Table-R1 achieves an average performance improvement of 14.36 points across multiple base models on three benchmark datasets, even outperforming baseline models with ten times the parameters, while TARPO reduces response token consumption by 67.5% compared to GRPO, significantly advancing LLM capabilities in efficient tabular reasoning.

Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multilingual Code Instruction Tuning

Recent advancement in code understanding and generation demonstrates that code LLMs fine-tuned on a high-quality instruction dataset can gain powerful capabilities to address wide-ranging code-related tasks. However, most previous existing methods mainly view each programming language in isolation and ignore the knowledge transfer among different programming languages. To bridge the gap among different programming languages, we introduce a novel multi-agent collaboration framework to enhance multilingual instruction tuning for code LLMs, where multiple language-specific intelligent agent components with generation memory work together to transfer knowledge from one language to another efficiently and effectively. Specifically, we first generate the language-specific instruction data from the code snippets and then provide the generated data as the seed data for language-specific agents. Multiple language-specific agents discuss and collaborate to formulate a new instruction and its corresponding solution (A new programming language or existing programming language), To further encourage the cross-lingual transfer, each agent stores its generation history as memory and then summarizes its merits and faults. Finally, the high-quality multilingual instruction data is used to encourage knowledge transfer among different programming languages to train Qwen2.5-xCoder. Experimental results on multilingual programming benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of Qwen2.5-xCoder in sharing common knowledge, highlighting its potential to reduce the cross-lingual gap.

RB-SQL: A Retrieval-based LLM Framework for Text-to-SQL

Large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning have significantly improved the performance of text-to-SQL task. Previous works generally focus on using exclusive SQL generation prompt to improve the LLMs' reasoning ability. However, they are mostly hard to handle large databases with numerous tables and columns, and usually ignore the significance of pre-processing database and extracting valuable information for more efficient prompt engineering. Based on above analysis, we propose RB-SQL, a novel retrieval-based LLM framework for in-context prompt engineering, which consists of three modules that retrieve concise tables and columns as schema, and targeted examples for in-context learning. Experiment results demonstrate that our model achieves better performance than several competitive baselines on public datasets BIRD and Spider.