Writing study: Reducing Belief Deviation in Reinforcement Learning for Active Reasoning of LLM Agents

ICLR overviewCorpus atlasBy contribution typeVisual galleryRules & templateWriting patternsPaper studies

← ICLR 2026 oral writing corpus

Deyu Zou, Yongqiang Chen, Jianxiang Wang, Garry YANG, Mufei Li, Qing Da, James Cheng, Pan Li, Yu Gong · Official ICLR 2026 oral record

Observed writing choices, not acceptance rules. This study examines the inspected manuscript version. It does not establish why the paper was accepted or that its presentation choices should be copied unchanged.

Figure, table and section ledger

Editorial contribution type: Learning & optimization algorithms (primary) · Theory & formal foundations.

Layout extraction, not a required paper template. Counts are distinct caption labels; a multi-panel figure counts once. Section spans are estimated from heading positions, including floats and whitespace. Method and limitations.

Canonical PDF

35 physical pages

Before references / appendix

≈ 10.21 page-equivalents

Main figures / tables

6 / 3

Attached appendix figures / tables

9 / 5

Attached appendix span

≈ 20.48 page-equivalents

Before references / appendix: ≈ 29.17%References / intervening material: ≈ 12.31%Attached appendix: ≈ 58.51%Estimated layout envelopes, not text/artwork area. Unresolved appendix boundaries remain within the undivided post-body material.

Extraction notes: Table numbering discontinuity; see source note. Zero means no recognized caption, not independently verified absence.

Source-bound correction: T3: retain the source's Table 4 numbering gap. Main-text Table 3 is followed by appendix Table 5 on physical page 27; raw bbox and extracted text contain no Table 4 caption or reference. Page 27 visually confirms the printed Table 5 and Table 6 labels. No missing Table 4 is synthesized.

Section-by-section lengths and source pages

The title/abstract/front matter precede the first numbered heading. A span ends at the next detected top-level heading, not at the last sentence; end-page whitespace is included. References and statements are listed separately. These are not measurements of text-only or artwork area.

Top-level heading	Starts on PDF page	Estimated span	Share of entire PDF
1 INTRODUCTION	1	≈ 1.24 pp.	3.54%
2 REINFORCEMENT LEARNING FOR ACTIVE REASONING	2	≈ 2.91 pp.	8.31%
3 EXPERIMENTS	5	≈ 4.7 pp.	13.43%
4 RELATED WORK	10	≈ 0.36 pp.	1.03%
5 CONCLUSION	10	≈ 0.32 pp.	0.91%
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	11	≈ 0.1 pp.	0.29%
REFERENCES	11	≈ 4.23 pp.	12.09%
REPRODUCIBILITY STATEMENT	15	≈ 0.08 pp.	0.23%
A NOTATION SUMMARY	15	≈ 1.14 pp.	3.26%
B MORE DETAILS ON THE THEORY	16	≈ 7.45 pp.	21.29%
C EMPIRICAL VERIFICATION OF THE THEORY	24	≈ 3.07 pp.	8.77%
D COMPLEMENTARY EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS	27	≈ 1.93 pp.	5.51%
E POTENTIAL FUTURE WORK	29	≈ 0.44 pp.	1.26%
F SETUP DETAILS	29	≈ 6.46 pp.	18.46%

All detected figure and table locations

Main text

• Figure 1 · p. 2
• Figure 2 · p. 3
• Table 1 · p. 6
• Figure 3 · p. 7
• Figure 4 · p. 7
• Table 2 · p. 8
• Table 3 · p. 8
• Figure 5 · p. 9
• Figure 6 · p. 10

Attached appendix

• Figure 7 · p. 25
• Figure 8 · p. 25
• Figure 9 · p. 26
• Table 5 · p. 27
• Table 6 · p. 27
• Table 7 · p. 28
• Table 8 · p. 28
• Table 9 · p. 31
• Figure 10 · p. 32
• Figure 11 · p. 33
• Figure 12 · p. 33
• Figure 13 · p. 34
• Figure 14 · p. 35
• Figure 15 · p. 35

Argument and organization

1. Failure mechanism to operational proxy

   Introduces belief-trap dynamics, formalizes credit contamination and turns the theory into task-specific stopping rules.

2. Outcomes and mechanism diagnostics

   Separates benchmark gains, training/token curves, generalization, truncation ablations and appendix verification.

Problem, claim and contribution

A repeated-question failure becomes a named mechanism before a method is proposed, giving the reader a causal narrative rather than a collection of optimization tricks.

Sections 1–2, pp. 1–4 · Main paper

Argument and section order

The dedicated theory-to-practice subsection acknowledges unobservable beliefs and thresholds before defining observable surrogates; each task then specifies the actual rule.

Sections 2.2–3.1, pp. 4–6 · Main paper

Figures, captions and visual explanation

Figure 1 aligns a natural-language dialogue with symbolic belief/action/observation traces. Solid rollout arrows and dashed credit arrows distinguish execution from training attribution.

Figure 1, p. 2 · Main paper

Tables, comparisons and evidence

Paired baseline/method rows include absolute point changes, while separate curves report reward and response length. This helps distinguish improved scores from cheaper rollouts.

Table 1 and Figures 3–4, pp. 6–7 · Main paper

Appendix and reproducibility

A full contents page and notation table precede proofs; later appendices add false-positive truncation, ground-truth-free alternatives and complete interaction prompts.

Appendices A–F, pp. 14–35 · Main paper

Clarity and writing conventions

Some broad success language is contradicted by small declining cells, and the abstract's up-to-30-point headline differs from the 41-point movie-recommendation gain in the final table.

Abstract, Table 1 and Section 3.3.1 · Main paper

What to reuse—and what not to infer

Transferable lesson: Make the bridge from an idealized latent mechanism to the implementable observable rule explicit, and test mistaken intervention as well as successful intervention.

Boundary: Theory should be cited conditionally: expected nonnegative potential drift alone does not establish pathwise absorption, and the appendix's nonlinear-value expectation step requires additional justification. Preference-task main truncation uses ground truth; ground-truth-free variants are separate experiments. These qualifications do not erase the empirical gains.

Apply this lesson using the argument and evidence worksheet.

Inspection record and sources

Checked

2026-09-19

Reading status

Full text + selected visuals inspected

Main text

Pages 1–10, Sections 1–5, theory-to-proxy translation and all experimental analyses.

Appendix / supplement

Pages 14–35, contents and Appendices A–F including proofs, proxy diagnostics, variants, setup and every prompt template.

Visually inspected PDF pages

2, 6

• ICLR 2026 official proceedings PDF, retrieved 2026-09-19 · 35 pages