TimeHC-RL: Temporal-aware Hierarchical Cognitive Reinforcement Learning for Enhancing LLMs' Social Intelligence

Guiyang Hou; Xing Gao; Yuchuan Wu; Xiang Huang; Wenqi Zhang; Zhe Zheng; Yongliang Shen; Jialu Du; Fei Huang; Yongbin Li; Weiming Lu

arXiv · 2505.24500

TimeHC-RL: Temporal-aware Hierarchical Cognitive Reinforcement Learning for Enhancing LLMs' Social Intelligence

Guiyang Hou·Xing Gao·Yuchuan Wu·Xiang Huang·Wenqi Zhang·Zhe Zheng·Yongliang Shen·Jialu Du·Fei Huang·Yongbin Li·Weiming Lu

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Abstract

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in IQ-related domains that require careful thinking, such as mathematics and coding. However, enhancing LLMs' cognitive development in social domains, particularly from a post-training perspective, remains underexplored. Recognizing that the social world follows a distinct timeline and requires a richer blend of cognitive modes (from intuitive reactions (System 1) and surface-level thinking to deliberate thinking (System 2)) than mathematics, which primarily relies on System 2 cognition (careful, step-by-step reasoning), we introduce Temporal-aware Hierarchical Cognitive Reinforcement Learning (TimeHC-RL) for enhancing LLMs' social intelligence. In our experiments, we systematically explore improving LLMs' social intelligence and validate the effectiveness of the TimeHC-RL method, through five other post-training paradigms and two test-time intervention paradigms on eight datasets with diverse data patterns. Experimental results reveal the superiority of our proposed TimeHC-RL method compared to the widely adopted System 2 RL method. It gives the 7B backbone model wings, enabling it to rival the performance of advanced models like DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-O3. Additionally, the systematic exploration from post-training and test-time interventions perspectives to improve LLMs' social intelligence has uncovered several valuable insights.

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BibTeX RIS

Guiyang Hou, Xing Gao, Yuchuan Wu, Xiang Huang, Wenqi Zhang, Zhe Zheng, Yongliang Shen, Jialu Du, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Weiming Lu. 2025-05-30. TimeHC-RL: Temporal-aware Hierarchical Cognitive Reinforcement Learning for Enhancing LLMs' Social Intelligence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24500

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