Computation and Language
☆ Beyond surface form: A pipeline for semantic analysis in Alzheimer's Disease detection from spontaneous speech
Dylan Phelps, Rodrigo Wilkens, Edward Gow-Smith, Lilian Hubner, Bárbara Malcorra, César Rennó-Costa, Marco Idiart, Maria-Cruz Villa-Uriol, Aline Villavicencio
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition that adversely affects cognitive abilities. Language-related changes can be automatically identified through the analysis of outputs from linguistic assessment tasks, such as picture description. Language models show promise as a basis for screening tools for AD, but their limited interpretability poses a challenge in distinguishing true linguistic markers of cognitive decline from surface-level textual patterns. To address this issue, we examine how surface form variation affects classification performance, with the goal of assessing the ability of language models to represent underlying semantic indicators. We introduce a novel approach where texts surface forms are transformed by altering syntax and vocabulary while preserving semantic content. The transformations significantly modify the structure and lexical content, as indicated by low BLEU and chrF scores, yet retain the underlying semantics, as reflected in high semantic similarity scores, isolating the effect of semantic information, and finding models perform similarly to if they were using the original text, with only small deviations in macro-F1. We also investigate whether language from picture descriptions retains enough detail to reconstruct the original image using generative models. We found that image-based transformations add substantial noise reducing classification accuracy. Our methodology provides a novel way of looking at what features influence model predictions, and allows the removal of possible spurious correlations. We find that just using semantic information, language model based classifiers can still detect AD. This work shows that difficult to detect semantic impairment can be identified, addressing an overlooked feature of linguistic deterioration, and opening new pathways for early detection systems.
☆ Towards Effective Model Editing for LLM Personalization
Baixiang Huang, Limeng Cui, Jiapeng Liu, Haoran Wang, Jiawei Xu, Zhuiyue Tan, Yutong Chen, Chen Luo, Yi Liu, Kai Shu
Personalization is becoming indispensable for LLMs to align with individual user preferences and needs. Yet current approaches are often computationally expensive, data-intensive, susceptible to catastrophic forgetting, and prone to performance degradation in multi-turn interactions or when handling implicit queries. To address these challenges, we conceptualize personalization as a model editing task and introduce Personalization Editing, a framework that applies localized edits guided by clustered preference representations. This design enables precise preference-aligned updates while preserving overall model capabilities. In addition, existing personalization benchmarks frequently rely on persona-based dialogs between LLMs rather than user-LLM interactions, or focus primarily on stylistic imitation while neglecting information-seeking tasks that require accurate recall of user-specific preferences. We introduce User Preference Question Answering (UPQA), a short-answer QA dataset constructed from in-situ user queries with varying levels of difficulty. Unlike prior benchmarks, UPQA directly evaluates a model's ability to recall and apply specific user preferences. Across experimental settings, Personalization Editing achieves higher editing accuracy and greater computational efficiency than fine-tuning, while outperforming prompting-based baselines in multi-turn conversations and implicit preference questions settings.
comment: 15 pages (including appendix), 7 figures. Code, data, results, and additional resources are available at: https://model-editing.github.io
☆ Towards Interactive Intelligence for Digital Humans
Yiyi Cai, Xuangeng Chu, Xiwei Gao, Sitong Gong, Yifei Huang, Caixin Kang, Kunhang Li, Haiyang Liu, Ruicong Liu, Yun Liu, Dianwen Ng, Zixiong Su, Erwin Wu, Yuhan Wu, Dingkun Yan, Tianyu Yan, Chang Zeng, Bo Zheng, You Zhou
We introduce Interactive Intelligence, a novel paradigm of digital human that is capable of personality-aligned expression, adaptive interaction, and self-evolution. To realize this, we present Mio (Multimodal Interactive Omni-Avatar), an end-to-end framework composed of five specialized modules: Thinker, Talker, Face Animator, Body Animator, and Renderer. This unified architecture integrates cognitive reasoning with real-time multimodal embodiment to enable fluid, consistent interaction. Furthermore, we establish a new benchmark to rigorously evaluate the capabilities of interactive intelligence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods across all evaluated dimensions. Together, these contributions move digital humans beyond superficial imitation toward intelligent interaction.
☆ A stylometric analysis of speaker attribution from speech transcripts
Forensic scientists often need to identify an unknown speaker or writer in cases such as ransom calls, covert recordings, alleged suicide notes, or anonymous online communications, among many others. Speaker recognition in the speech domain usually examines phonetic or acoustic properties of a voice, and these methods can be accurate and robust under certain conditions. However, if a speaker disguises their voice or employs text-to-speech software, vocal properties may no longer be reliable, leaving only their linguistic content available for analysis. Authorship attribution methods traditionally use syntactic, semantic, and related linguistic information to identify writers of written text (authorship attribution). In this paper, we apply a content-based authorship approach to speech that has been transcribed into text, using what a speaker says to attribute speech to individuals (speaker attribution). We introduce a stylometric method, StyloSpeaker, which incorporates character, word, token, sentence, and style features from the stylometric literature on authorship, to assess whether two transcripts were produced by the same speaker. We evaluate this method on two types of transcript formatting: one approximating prescriptive written text with capitalization and punctuation and another normalized style that removes these conventions. The transcripts' conversation topics are also controlled to varying degrees. We find generally higher attribution performance on normalized transcripts, except under the strongest topic control condition, in which overall performance is highest. Finally, we compare this more explainable stylometric model to black-box neural approaches on the same data and investigate which stylistic features most effectively distinguish speakers.
☆ Comparative Analysis of LLM Abliteration Methods: A Cross-Architecture Evaluation
Safety alignment mechanisms in large language models prevent responses to harmful queries through learned refusal behavior, yet these same mechanisms impede legitimate research applications including cognitive modeling, adversarial testing, and security analysis. While abliteration techniques enable surgical removal of refusal representations through directional orthogonalization, the relative effectiveness of available implementations remains uncharacterized. This study evaluates four abliteration tools (Heretic, DECCP, ErisForge, FailSpy) across sixteen instruction-tuned models (7B-14B parameters), reporting tool compatibility on all 16 models and quantitative metrics on subsets dictated by tool support. Single-pass methods demonstrated superior capability preservation on the benchmarked subset (avg GSM8K change across three models: ErisForge -0.28 pp; DECCP -0.13 pp), while Bayesian-optimized abliteration produced variable distribution shift (KL divergence: 0.043-1.646) with model-dependent capability impact. These findings provide researchers with evidence-based selection criteria for abliteration tool deployment across diverse model architectures. The principal finding indicates that mathematical reasoning capabilities exhibit the highest sensitivity to abliteration interventions, with GSM8K change ranging from +1.51 pp to -18.81 pp (-26.5% relative) depending on tool selection and model architecture.
comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, 8 tables
☆ Large-Language Memorization During the Classification of United States Supreme Court Cases
Large-language models (LLMs) have been shown to respond in a variety of ways for classification tasks outside of question-answering. LLM responses are sometimes called "hallucinations" since the output is not what is ex pected. Memorization strategies in LLMs are being studied in detail, with the goal of understanding how LLMs respond. We perform a deep dive into a classification task based on United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions. The SCOTUS corpus is an ideal classification task to study for LLM memory accuracy because it presents significant challenges due to extensive sentence length, complex legal terminology, non-standard structure, and domain-specific vocabulary. Experimentation is performed with the latest LLM fine tuning and retrieval-based approaches, such as parameter-efficient fine-tuning, auto-modeling, and others, on two traditional category-based SCOTUS classification tasks: one with 15 labeled topics and another with 279. We show that prompt-based models with memories, such as DeepSeek, can be more robust than previous BERT-based models on both tasks scoring about 2 points better than previous models not based on prompting.
comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, Appendix of Prompts
☆ Temporal Tokenization Strategies for Event Sequence Modeling with Large Language Models
Representing continuous time is a critical and under-explored challenge in modeling temporal event sequences with large language models (LLMs). Various strategies like byte-level representations or calendar tokens have been proposed. However, the optimal approach remains unclear, especially given the diverse statistical distributions of real-world event data, which range from smooth log-normal to discrete, spiky patterns. This paper presents the first empirical study of temporal tokenization for event sequences, comparing distinct encoding strategies: naive numeric strings, high-precision byte-level representations, human-semantic calendar tokens, classic uniform binning, and adaptive residual scalar quantization. We evaluate these strategies by fine-tuning LLMs on real-world datasets that exemplify these diverse distributions. Our analysis reveals that no single strategy is universally superior; instead, prediction performance depends heavily on aligning the tokenizer with the data's statistical properties, with log-based strategies excelling on skewed distributions and human-centric formats proving robust for mixed modalities.
☆ Nemotron-Cascade: Scaling Cascaded Reinforcement Learning for General-Purpose Reasoning Models
Boxin Wang, Chankyu Lee, Nayeon Lee, Sheng-Chieh Lin, Wenliang Dai, Yang Chen, Yangyi Chen, Zhuolin Yang, Zihan Liu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Wei Ping
Building general-purpose reasoning models with reinforcement learning (RL) entails substantial cross-domain heterogeneity, including large variation in inference-time response lengths and verification latency. Such variability complicates the RL infrastructure, slows training, and makes training curriculum (e.g., response length extension) and hyperparameter selection challenging. In this work, we propose cascaded domain-wise reinforcement learning (Cascade RL) to develop general-purpose reasoning models, Nemotron-Cascade, capable of operating in both instruct and deep thinking modes. Departing from conventional approaches that blend heterogeneous prompts from different domains, Cascade RL orchestrates sequential, domain-wise RL, reducing engineering complexity and delivering state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of benchmarks. Notably, RLHF for alignment, when used as a pre-step, boosts the model's reasoning ability far beyond mere preference optimization, and subsequent domain-wise RLVR stages rarely degrade the benchmark performance attained in earlier domains and may even improve it (see an illustration in Figure 1). Our 14B model, after RL, outperforms its SFT teacher, DeepSeek-R1-0528, on LiveCodeBench v5/v6/Pro and achieves silver-medal performance in the 2025 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). We transparently share our training and data recipes.
comment: We publicly release the Nemotron-Cascade models and the full collection of training data at: https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/nemotron-cascade
☆ Textual Gradients are a Flawed Metaphor for Automatic Prompt Optimization
A well-engineered prompt can increase the performance of large language models; automatic prompt optimization techniques aim to increase performance without requiring human effort to tune the prompts. One leading class of prompt optimization techniques introduces the analogy of textual gradients. We investigate the behavior of these textual gradient methods through a series of experiments and case studies. While such methods often result in a performance improvement, our experiments suggest that the gradient analogy does not accurately explain their behavior. Our insights may inform the selection of prompt optimization strategies, and development of new approaches.
☆ ReFusion: A Diffusion Large Language Model with Parallel Autoregressive Decoding
Autoregressive models (ARMs) are hindered by slow sequential inference. While masked diffusion models (MDMs) offer a parallel alternative, they suffer from critical drawbacks: high computational overhead from precluding Key-Value (KV) caching, and incoherent generation arising from learning dependencies over an intractable space of token combinations. To address these limitations, we introduce ReFusion, a novel masked diffusion model that achieves superior performance and efficiency by elevating parallel decoding from the token level to a higher slot level, where each slot is a fixed-length, contiguous sub-sequence. This is achieved through an iterative ``plan-and-infill'' decoding process: a diffusion-based planning step first identifies a set of weakly dependent slots, and an autoregressive infilling step then decodes these selected slots in parallel. The slot-based design simultaneously unlocks full KV cache reuse with a unified causal framework and reduces the learning complexity from the token combination space to a manageable slot-level permutation space. Extensive experiments on seven diverse benchmarks show that ReFusion not only overwhelmingly surpasses prior MDMs with 34% performance gains and an over 18$\times$ speedup on average, but also bridges the performance gap to strong ARMs while maintaining a 2.33$\times$ average speedup.
☆ Memory in the Age of AI Agents
Yuyang Hu, Shichun Liu, Yanwei Yue, Guibin Zhang, Boyang Liu, Fangyi Zhu, Jiahang Lin, Honglin Guo, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Jiejun Tan, Yanbin Yin, Jiongnan Liu, Zeyu Zhang, Zhongxiang Sun, Yutao Zhu, Hao Sun, Boci Peng, Zhenrong Cheng, Xuanbo Fan, Jiaxin Guo, Xinlei Yu, Zhenhong Zhou, Zewen Hu, Jiahao Huo, Junhao Wang, Yuwei Niu, Yu Wang, Zhenfei Yin, Xiaobin Hu, Yue Liao, Qiankun Li, Kun Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yixin Liu, Dawei Cheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Shirui Pan, Yan Zhang, Philip Torr, Zhicheng Dou, Ji-Rong Wen, Xuanjing Huang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Shuicheng Yan
Memory has emerged, and will continue to remain, a core capability of foundation model-based agents. As research on agent memory rapidly expands and attracts unprecedented attention, the field has also become increasingly fragmented. Existing works that fall under the umbrella of agent memory often differ substantially in their motivations, implementations, and evaluation protocols, while the proliferation of loosely defined memory terminologies has further obscured conceptual clarity. Traditional taxonomies such as long/short-term memory have proven insufficient to capture the diversity of contemporary agent memory systems. This work aims to provide an up-to-date landscape of current agent memory research. We begin by clearly delineating the scope of agent memory and distinguishing it from related concepts such as LLM memory, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and context engineering. We then examine agent memory through the unified lenses of forms, functions, and dynamics. From the perspective of forms, we identify three dominant realizations of agent memory, namely token-level, parametric, and latent memory. From the perspective of functions, we propose a finer-grained taxonomy that distinguishes factual, experiential, and working memory. From the perspective of dynamics, we analyze how memory is formed, evolved, and retrieved over time. To support practical development, we compile a comprehensive summary of memory benchmarks and open-source frameworks. Beyond consolidation, we articulate a forward-looking perspective on emerging research frontiers, including memory automation, reinforcement learning integration, multimodal memory, multi-agent memory, and trustworthiness issues. We hope this survey serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a conceptual foundation for rethinking memory as a first-class primitive in the design of future agentic intelligence.
☆ Verifying Rumors via Stance-Aware Structural Modeling
Verifying rumors on social media is critical for mitigating the spread of false information. The stances of conversation replies often provide important cues to determine a rumor's veracity. However, existing models struggle to jointly capture semantic content, stance information, and conversation strructure, especially under the sequence length constraints of transformer-based encoders. In this work, we propose a stance-aware structural modeling that encodes each post in a discourse with its stance signal and aggregates reply embedddings by stance category enabling a scalable and semantically enriched representation of the entire thread. To enhance structural awareness, we introduce stance distribution and hierarchical depth as covariates, capturing stance imbalance and the influence of reply depth. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms prior methods in the ability to predict truthfulness of a rumor. We also demonstrate that our model is versatile for early detection and cross-platfrom generalization.
comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, published in The 24th IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT 2025), London, UK, 2025
☆ PrahokBART: A Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Khmer Natural Language Generation COLING 2025
This work introduces {\it PrahokBART}, a compact pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model trained from scratch for Khmer using carefully curated Khmer and English corpora. We focus on improving the pre-training corpus quality and addressing the linguistic issues of Khmer, which are ignored in existing multilingual models, by incorporating linguistic components such as word segmentation and normalization. We evaluate PrahokBART on three generative tasks: machine translation, text summarization, and headline generation, where our results demonstrate that it outperforms mBART50, a strong multilingual pre-trained model. Additionally, our analysis provides insights into the impact of each linguistic module and evaluates how effectively our model handles space during text generation, which is crucial for the naturalness of texts in Khmer.
comment: Published at COLING 2025, 14 pages
☆ Fine-tuned LLM-based Code Migration Framework
Oleg Grynets, Vasyl Lyashkevych, Dmytro Baran, Maksym Orliansky, Taras Zelenyy, Markiian Leshchyshyn
The study presents the outcomes of research and experimental validation in the domain of automated codebase migration, with a focus on addressing challenges in transitioning SQL-based systems. The proposed method for migration essentially appears as a framework that leverages the best aspects of traditional software engineering techniques and provides an iterative, scalable, precise and efficient solution for modern database transformations. The central piece of the approach is the integration of a fine-tuned Large Language Model to address critical issues in SQL code conversion, such as syntax mapping, resolving discrepancies between Oracle PL/SQL and PostgreSQL, and optimising database elements such as stored procedures, triggers, views, and overall database logic. Thus, the method involves a trade-off between fine-tuning and prompt engineering. Special attention is given to a fine-tuning approach, which enhances the adaptability and compatibility with migration requirements across the entire database. According to the achieved results, fine-tuning plays a very important role. The study employs targeted evaluation methodologies along with computational metrics to measure the success of iterative conversion cycles. Core innovations include automated SQL feature detection, semi-supervised error analysis and integration of Subject Matter Experts feedback within a systematic migration workflow. The methodology achieves significant reductions in Syntax Error Rates, enhances feature alignment throughout migration iterations, and leverages dataset sampling to ensure continual improvement. By embedding GAI into the migration process, the framework facilitates precise feature mapping, semi-automated error resolution, and data-driven optimisation loops, improving workflow efficiency.
comment: 16 pages, 27 figures, 7 references
☆ SkipCat: Rank-Maximized Low-Rank Compression of Large Language Models via Shared Projection and Block Skipping AAAI 2026
Yu-Chen Lu, Sheng-Feng Yu, Hui-Hsien Weng, Pei-Shuo Wang, Yu-Fang Hu, Liang Hung-Chun, Hung-Yueh Chiang, Kai-Chiang Wu
Large language models (LLM) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their substantial parameter sizes pose significant challenges for deployment on edge devices with limited computational and memory resources. Low-rank compression is a promising approach to address this issue, as it reduces both computational and memory costs, making LLM more suitable for resource-constrained environments. Nonetheless, naïve low-rank compression methods require a significant reduction in the retained rank to achieve meaningful memory and computation savings. For a low-rank model, the ranks need to be reduced by more than half to yield efficiency gains. Such aggressive truncation, however, typically results in substantial performance degradation. To address this trade-off, we propose SkipCat, a novel low-rank compression framework that enables the use of higher ranks while achieving the same compression rates. First, we introduce an intra-layer shared low-rank projection method, where multiple matrices that share the same input use a common projection. This reduces redundancy and improves compression efficiency. Second, we propose a block skipping technique that omits computations and memory transfers for selected sub-blocks within the low-rank decomposition. These two techniques jointly enable our compressed model to retain more effective ranks under the same compression budget. Experimental results show that, without any additional fine-tuning, our method outperforms previous low-rank compression approaches by 7% accuracy improvement on zero-shot tasks under the same compression rate. These results highlight the effectiveness of our rank-maximized compression strategy in preserving model performance under tight resource constraints.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
☆ SIGMA: An AI-Empowered Training Stack on Early-Life Hardware
Lei Qu, Lianhai Ren, Peng Cheng, Rui Gao, Ruizhe Wang, Tianyu Chen, Xiao Liu, Xingjian Zhang, Yeyun Gong, Yifan Xiong, Yucheng Ding, Yuting Jiang, Zhenghao Lin, Zhongxin Guo, Ziyue Yang
An increasing variety of AI accelerators is being considered for large-scale training. However, enabling large-scale training on early-life AI accelerators faces three core challenges: frequent system disruptions and undefined failure modes that undermine reliability; numerical errors and training instabilities that threaten correctness and convergence; and the complexity of parallelism optimization combined with unpredictable local noise that degrades efficiency. To address these challenges, SIGMA is an open-source training stack designed to improve the reliability, stability, and efficiency of large-scale distributed training on early-life AI hardware. The core of this initiative is the LUCIA TRAINING PLATFORM (LTP), the system optimized for clusters with early-life AI accelerators. Since its launch in March 2025, LTP has significantly enhanced training reliability and operational productivity. Over the past five months, it has achieved an impressive 94.45% effective cluster accelerator utilization, while also substantially reducing node recycling and job-recovery times. Building on the foundation of LTP, the LUCIA TRAINING FRAMEWORK (LTF) successfully trained SIGMA-MOE, a 200B MoE model, using 2,048 AI accelerators. This effort delivered remarkable stability and efficiency outcomes, achieving 21.08% MFU, state-of-the-art downstream accuracy, and encountering only one stability incident over a 75-day period. Together, these advances establish SIGMA, which not only tackles the critical challenges of large-scale training but also establishes a new benchmark for AI infrastructure and platform innovation, offering a robust, cost-effective alternative to prevailing established accelerator stacks and significantly advancing AI capabilities and scalability. The source code of SIGMA is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LuciaTrainingPlatform.
comment: 22 pages, 7 figures
☆ Advancing Bangla Machine Translation Through Informal Datasets
Bangla is the sixth most widely spoken language globally, with approximately 234 million native speakers. However, progress in open-source Bangla machine translation remains limited. Most online resources are in English and often remain untranslated into Bangla, excluding millions from accessing essential information. Existing research in Bangla translation primarily focuses on formal language, neglecting the more commonly used informal language. This is largely due to the lack of pairwise Bangla-English data and advanced translation models. If datasets and models can be enhanced to better handle natural, informal Bangla, millions of people will benefit from improved online information access. In this research, we explore current state-of-the-art models and propose improvements to Bangla translation by developing a dataset from informal sources like social media and conversational texts. This work aims to advance Bangla machine translation by focusing on informal language translation and improving accessibility for Bangla speakers in the digital world.
comment: 33 pages, 13 figures
☆ neuralFOMO: Can LLMs Handle Being Second Best? Measuring Envy-Like Preferences in Multi-Agent Settings
Ojas Pungalia, Rashi Upadhyay, Abhishek Mishra, Abhiram H, Tejasvi Alladi, Sujan Yenuganti, Dhruv Kumar
Envy is a common human behavior that shapes competitiveness and can alter outcomes in team settings. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly act on behalf of humans in collaborative and competitive workflows, there is a pressing need to evaluate whether and under what conditions they exhibit envy-like preferences. In this paper, we test whether LLMs show envy-like behavior toward each other. We considered two scenarios: (1) A point allocation game that tests whether a model tries to win over its peer. (2) A workplace setting observing behaviour when recognition is unfair. Our findings reveal consistent evidence of envy-like patterns in certain LLMs, with large variation across models and contexts. For instance, GPT-5-mini and Claude-3.7-Sonnet show a clear tendency to pull down the peer model to equalize outcomes, whereas Mistral-Small-3.2-24B instead focuses on maximizing its own individual gains. These results highlight the need to consider competitive dispositions as a safety and design factor in LLM-based multi-agent systems.
comment: Under Review
☆ Non-Resolution Reasoning: A Framework for Preserving Semantic Ambiguity in Language Models
Premature semantic collapse -- the forced early commitment to a single meaning -- remains a core architectural limitation of current language models. Softmax-driven competition and greedy decoding cause models to discard valid interpretations before sufficient context is available, resulting in brittle reasoning and context failures. We introduce Non-Resolution Reasoning (NRR), a general computational framework that preserves semantic ambiguity during inference and performs resolution only when explicitly required. NRR integrates three components: (1) Multi-Vector Embeddings that maintain multiple viable interpretations per token, (2) Non-Collapsing Attention that prevents winner-take-all dynamics across layers, and (3) Contextual Identity Tracking (CIT), which assigns context-specific identities to recurring entities (e.g., distinguishing "Dr. Smith the cardiologist" from "Dr. Smith the researcher"). These mechanisms are unified by an external Resolution Operator $ρ$ that makes semantic commitment explicit, controllable, and task-dependent. Unlike standard architectures, NRR separates representation from resolution, allowing a single model to shift between creative, factual, and ambiguity-preserving reasoning without retraining. A synthetic evaluation demonstrates NRR's ability to preserve ambiguity and track context: CIT-enhanced models achieve 90.9% accuracy on out-of-distribution identity-shift tasks, compared to 9.1% for transformer baselines. NRR provides a principled alternative to premature collapse, reframing ambiguity as an explicit representational state rather than a failure mode. The question is not whether AI should resolve ambiguity, but when, how, and under whose control.
comment: 19 pages
☆ Scaling Laws for Code: Every Programming Language Matters
Jian Yang, Shawn Guo, Lin Jing, Wei Zhang, Aishan Liu, Chuan Hao, Zhoujun Li, Wayne Xin Zhao, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
Code large language models (Code LLMs) are powerful but costly to train, with scaling laws predicting performance from model size, data, and compute. However, different programming languages (PLs) have varying impacts during pre-training that significantly affect base model performance, leading to inaccurate performance prediction. Besides, existing works focus on language-agnostic settings, neglecting the inherently multilingual nature of modern software development. Therefore, it is first necessary to investigate the scaling laws of different PLs, and then consider their mutual influences to arrive at the final multilingual scaling law. In this paper, we present the first systematic exploration of scaling laws for multilingual code pre-training, conducting over 1000+ experiments (Equivalent to 336,000+ H800 hours) across multiple PLs, model sizes (0.2B to 14B parameters), and dataset sizes (1T tokens). We establish comprehensive scaling laws for code LLMs across multiple PLs, revealing that interpreted languages (e.g., Python) benefit more from increased model size and data than compiled languages (e.g., Rust). The study demonstrates that multilingual pre-training provides synergistic benefits, particularly between syntactically similar PLs. Further, the pre-training strategy of the parallel pairing (concatenating code snippets with their translations) significantly enhances cross-lingual abilities with favorable scaling properties. Finally, a proportion-dependent multilingual scaling law is proposed to optimally allocate training tokens by prioritizing high-utility PLs (e.g., Python), balancing high-synergy pairs (e.g., JavaScript-TypeScript), and reducing allocation to fast-saturating languages (Rust), achieving superior average performance across all PLs compared to uniform distribution under the same compute budget.
☆ Large language models are not about language
Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational system that recursively generates hierarchical thought structures. The language system grows with minimal external input and can readily distinguish between real language and impossible languages.
☆ Differentiable Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning
The design of effective reward functions presents a central and often arduous challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly when developing autonomous agents for complex reasoning tasks. While automated reward optimization approaches exist, they typically rely on derivative-free evolutionary heuristics that treat the reward function as a black box, failing to capture the causal relationship between reward structure and task performance. To bridge this gap, we propose Differentiable Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (DERL), a bilevel framework that enables the autonomous discovery of optimal reward signals. In DERL, a Meta-Optimizer evolves a reward function (i.e., Meta-Reward) by composing structured atomic primitives, guiding the training of an inner-loop policy. Crucially, unlike previous evolution, DERL is differentiable in its metaoptimization: it treats the inner-loop validation performance as a signal to update the Meta-Optimizer via reinforcement learning. This allows DERL to approximate the "meta-gradient" of task success, progressively learning to generate denser and more actionable feedback. We validate DERL across three distinct domains: robotic agent (ALFWorld), scientific simulation (ScienceWorld), and mathematical reasoning (GSM8k, MATH). Experimental results show that DERL achieves state-of-the-art performance on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld, significantly outperforming methods relying on heuristic rewards, especially in out-of-distribution scenarios. Analysis of the evolutionary trajectory demonstrates that DERL successfully captures the intrinsic structure of tasks, enabling selfimproving agent alignment without human intervention.
comment: Work in Progress. We release our code and model at https://github.com/sitaocheng/DERL
☆ Detecting Emotion Drift in Mental Health Text Using Pre-Trained Transformers
This study investigates emotion drift: the change in emotional state across a single text, within mental health-related messages. While sentiment analysis typically classifies an entire message as positive, negative, or neutral, the nuanced shift of emotions over the course of a message is often overlooked. This study detects sentence-level emotions and measures emotion drift scores using pre-trained transformer models such as DistilBERT and RoBERTa. The results provide insights into patterns of emotional escalation or relief in mental health conversations. This methodology can be applied to better understand emotional dynamics in content.
comment: 14 pages, 12 figures
☆ On the Effectiveness of Membership Inference in Targeted Data Extraction from Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to memorizing training data, which poses serious privacy risks. Two of the most prominent concerns are training data extraction and Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs). Prior research has shown that these threats are interconnected: adversaries can extract training data from an LLM by querying the model to generate a large volume of text and subsequently applying MIAs to verify whether a particular data point was included in the training set. In this study, we integrate multiple MIA techniques into the data extraction pipeline to systematically benchmark their effectiveness. We then compare their performance in this integrated setting against results from conventional MIA benchmarks, allowing us to evaluate their practical utility in real-world extraction scenarios.
comment: Accepted to IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML) 2026
☆ FIN-bench-v2: A Unified and Robust Benchmark Suite for Evaluating Finnish Large Language Models
We introduce FIN-bench-v2, a unified benchmark suite for evaluating large language models in Finnish. FIN-bench-v2 consolidates Finnish versions of widely used benchmarks together with an updated and expanded version of the original FIN-bench into a single, consistently formatted collection, covering multiple-choice and generative tasks across reading comprehension, commonsense reasoning, sentiment analysis, world knowledge, and alignment. All datasets are converted to HuggingFace Datasets, which include both cloze and multiple-choice prompt formulations with five variants per task, and we incorporate human annotation or review for machine-translated resources such as GoldenSwag and XED. To select robust tasks, we pretrain a set of 2.15B-parameter decoder-only models and use their learning curves to compute monotonicity, signal-to-noise, non-random performance, and model ordering consistency, retaining only tasks that satisfy all criteria. We further evaluate a set of larger instruction-tuned models to characterize performance across tasks and prompt formulations. All datasets, prompts, and evaluation configurations are publicly available via our fork of the Language Model Evaluation Harness at https://github.com/LumiOpen/lm-evaluation-harness. Supplementary resources are released in a separate repository at https://github.com/TurkuNLP/FIN-bench-v2.
☆ MiniLingua: A Small Open-Source LLM for European Languages
Large language models are powerful but often limited by high computational cost, privacy concerns, and English-centric training. Recent progress demonstrates that small, efficient models with around one billion parameters can deliver strong results and enable on-device use. This paper introduces MiniLingua, a multilingual open-source LLM of one billion parameters trained from scratch for 13 European languages, designed to balance coverage and instruction-following capabilities. Based on evaluation results, the instruction-tuned version of MiniLingua outperforms EuroLLM, a model with a similar training approach but a larger training budget, on summarization, classification and both open- and closed-book question answering. Moreover, it remains competitive with more advanced state-of-the-art models on open-ended generation tasks. We release model weights, tokenizer and source code used for data processing and model training.
comment: 9+6 pages, 6 figures and 3 tables in the main text. Code at https://github.com/MiniLingua-ai/training_artifacts
☆ Integrating Causal Reasoning into Automated Fact-Checking
In fact-checking applications, a common reason to reject a claim is to detect the presence of erroneous cause-effect relationships between the events at play. However, current automated fact-checking methods lack dedicated causal-based reasoning, potentially missing a valuable opportunity for semantically rich explainability. To address this gap, we propose a methodology that combines event relation extraction, semantic similarity computation, and rule-based reasoning to detect logical inconsistencies between chains of events mentioned in a claim and in an evidence. Evaluated on two fact-checking datasets, this method establishes the first baseline for integrating fine-grained causal event relationships into fact-checking and enhance explainability of verdict prediction.
comment: Extended version of the accepted ACM SAC paper
☆ AIR: Post-training Data Selection for Reasoning via Attention Head Influence
LLMs achieve remarkable multi-step reasoning capabilities, yet effectively transferring these skills via post-training distillation remains challenging. Existing data selection methods, ranging from manual curation to heuristics based on length, entropy, or overall loss, fail to capture the causal importance of individual reasoning steps, limiting distillation efficiency. To address this, we propose Attention Influence for Reasoning (AIR), a principled, unsupervised and training-free framework that leverages mechanistic insights of the retrieval head to select high-value post-training data. AIR first identifies reasoning-critical attention heads of an off-the-shelf model, then constructs a weakened reference model with disabled head influence, and finally quantifies the resulting loss divergence as the Attention Influence Score. This score enables fine-grained assessment at both the step and sample levels, supporting step-level weighted fine-tuning and global sample selection. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that AIR consistently improves reasoning accuracy, surpassing heuristic baselines and effectively isolating the most critical steps and samples. Our work establishes a mechanism-driven, data-efficient approach for reasoning distillation in LLMs.
comment: 19 pages
☆ AutoTool: Dynamic Tool Selection and Integration for Agentic Reasoning ICCV 2025
Agentic reinforcement learning has advanced large language models (LLMs) to reason through long chain-of-thought trajectories while interleaving external tool use. Existing approaches assume a fixed inventory of tools, limiting LLM agents' adaptability to new or evolving toolsets. We present AutoTool, a framework that equips LLM agents with dynamic tool-selection capabilities throughout their reasoning trajectories. We first construct a 200k dataset with explicit tool-selection rationales across 1,000+ tools and 100+ tasks spanning mathematics, science, code generation, and multimodal reasoning. Building on this data foundation, AutoTool employs a dual-phase optimization pipeline: (i) supervised and RL-based trajectory stabilization for coherent reasoning, and (ii) KL-regularized Plackett-Luce ranking to refine consistent multi-step tool selection. Across ten diverse benchmarks, we train two base models, Qwen3-8B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with AutoTool. With fewer parameters, AutoTool consistently outperforms advanced LLM agents and tool-integration methods, yielding average gains of 6.4% in math & science reasoning, 4.5% in search-based QA, 7.7% in code generation, and 6.9% in multimodal understanding. In addition, AutoTool exhibits stronger generalization by dynamically leveraging unseen tools from evolving toolsets during inference.
comment: Best Paper Award at ICCV 2025 Workshop on Multi-Modal Reasoning for Agentic Intelligence
☆ Efficient Adaptive Rejection Sampling for Accelerating Speculative Decoding in Large Language Models
Speculative Decoding is a prominent technique for accelerating the autoregressive inference of large language models (LLMs) by employing a fast draft model to propose candidate token sequences and a large target model to verify them in parallel. However, its core component -- the rejection sampling mechanism -- relies on a fixed, context-independent random threshold. This leads to a significant "random rejection" problem in high-uncertainty generation scenarios, where plausible candidate tokens are frequently rejected due to random chance, undermining inference efficiency. This paper introduces Efficient Adaptive Rejection Sampling (EARS), a novel method that dynamically adjusts the acceptance threshold by incorporating the target model's own predictive uncertainty, measured as \(1 - \max(P_{\mathrm{target}})\). By introducing a tolerance term proportional to this uncertainty, EARS intelligently relaxes the acceptance criterion when the model is uncertain, effectively reducing random rejections while maintaining strict standards when the model is confident. Experiments on creative writing and open-domain QA tasks demonstrate that EARS significantly enhances the efficiency of speculative decoding, achieving up to an 18.12% increase in throughput with a negligible 0.84% accuracy drop on the GSM8K benchmark. The method requires no modifications to model architectures and can be seamlessly integrated into existing speculative decoding frameworks.
☆ SpeakRL: Synergizing Reasoning, Speaking, and Acting in Language Models with Reinforcement Learning
Emre Can Acikgoz, Jinoh Oh, Jie Hao, Joo Hyuk Jeon, Heng Ji, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Xiang Li, Chengyuan Ma, Xing Fan
Effective human-agent collaboration is increasingly prevalent in real-world applications. Current trends in such collaborations are predominantly unidirectional, with users providing instructions or posing questions to agents, where agents respond directly without seeking necessary clarifications or confirmations. However, the evolving capabilities of these agents require more proactive engagement, where agents should dynamically participate in conversations to clarify user intents, resolve ambiguities, and adapt to changing circumstances. Existing prior work under-utilize the conversational capabilities of language models (LMs), thereby optimizing agents as better followers rather than effective speakers. In this work, we introduce SpeakRL, a reinforcement learning (RL) method that enhances agents' conversational capabilities by rewarding proactive interactions with users, such as asking right clarification questions when necessary. To support this, we curate SpeakER, a synthetic dataset that includes diverse scenarios from task-oriented dialogues, where tasks are resolved through interactive clarification questions. We present a systematic analysis of reward design for conversational proactivity and propose a principled reward formulation for teaching agents to balance asking with acting. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves a 20.14% absolute improvement in task completion over base models without increasing conversation turns even surpassing even much larger proprietary models, demonstrating the promise of clarification-centric user-agent interactions.
☆ MAC: A Multi-Agent Framework for Interactive User Clarification in Multi-turn Conversations
Emre Can Acikgoz, Jinoh Oh, Joo Hyuk Jeon, Jie Hao, Heng Ji, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Xiang Li, Chengyuan Ma, Xing Fan
Conversational agents often encounter ambiguous user requests, requiring an effective clarification to successfully complete tasks. While recent advancements in real-world applications favor multi-agent architectures to manage complex conversational scenarios efficiently, ambiguity resolution remains a critical and underexplored challenge--particularly due to the difficulty of determining which agent should initiate a clarification and how agents should coordinate their actions when faced with uncertain or incomplete user input. The fundamental questions of when to interrupt a user and how to formulate the optimal clarification query within the most optimal multi-agent settings remain open. In this paper, we propose MAC (Multi-Agent Clarification), an interactive multi-agent framework specifically optimized to resolve user ambiguities by strategically managing clarification dialogues. We first introduce a novel taxonomy categorizing user ambiguities to systematically guide clarification strategies. Then, we present MAC that autonomously coordinates multiple agents to interact synergistically with users. Empirical evaluations on MultiWOZ 2.4 demonstrate that enabling clarification at both levels increases task success rate 7.8\% (54.5 to 62.3) and reduces the average number of dialogue turns (6.53 to 4.86) by eliciting all required user information up front and minimizing repetition. Our findings highlight the importance of active user interaction and role-aware clarification for more reliable human-agent communication.
☆ Uncovering the Role of Initial Saliency in U-Shaped Attention Bias: Scaling Initial Token Weight for Enhanced Long-Text Processing
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, they often struggle with long-text sequences due to the ``lost in the middle'' phenomenon. This issue has been shown to arise from a U-shaped attention bias, where attention is disproportionately focused on the beginning and end of a text, leaving the middle section underrepresented. While previous studies have attributed this bias to position encoding, our research first identifies an additional factor: initial saliency. It means that in the attention computation for each token, tokens with higher attention weights relative to the initial token tend to receive more attention in the prediction of the next token. We further find that utilizing this property by scaling attention weight between the initial token and others improves the model's ability to process long contexts, achieving a maximum improvement of 3.6\% in MDQA dataset. Moreover, combining this approach with existing methods to reduce position encoding bias further enhances performance, achieving a maximum improvement of 3.4\% in KV-Retrieval tasks.
☆ Heart Disease Prediction using Case Based Reasoning (CBR)
Mohaiminul Islam Bhuiyan, Chan Hue Wah, Nur Shazwani Kamarudin, Nur Hafieza Ismail, Ahmad Fakhri Ab Nasir
This study provides an overview of heart disease prediction using an intelligent system. Predicting disease accurately is crucial in the medical field, but traditional methods relying solely on a doctor's experience often lack precision. To address this limitation, intelligent systems are applied as an alternative to traditional approaches. While various intelligent system methods exist, this study focuses on three: Fuzzy Logic, Neural Networks, and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). A comparison of these techniques in terms of accuracy was conducted, and ultimately, Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) was selected for heart disease prediction. In the prediction phase, the heart disease dataset underwent data pre-processing to clean the data and data splitting to separate it into training and testing sets. The chosen intelligent system was then employed to predict heart disease outcomes based on the processed data. The experiment concluded with Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) achieving a notable accuracy rate of 97.95% in predicting heart disease. The findings also revealed that the probability of heart disease was 57.76% for males and 42.24% for females. Further analysis from related studies suggests that factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption are significant contributors to heart disease, particularly among males.
comment: Published in Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology on 31st October 2024. Vol.102. No. 20
☆ M-GRPO: Stabilizing Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models with Momentum-Anchored Policy Optimization NeurIPS 2025
Self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) without reliance on expensive human-annotated data. However, we find that existing methods suffer from a critical failure mode under long-horizon training: a "policy collapse" where performance precipitously degrades. We diagnose this instability and demonstrate that simply scaling the number of rollouts -- a common strategy to improve performance -- only delays, but does not prevent, this collapse. To counteract this instability, we first introduce M-GRPO (Momentum-Anchored Group Relative Policy Optimization), a framework that leverages a slowly evolving momentum model to provide a stable training target. In addition, we identify that this process is often accompanied by a rapid collapse in policy entropy, resulting in a prematurely confident and suboptimal policy. To specifically address this issue, we propose a second contribution: an adaptive filtering method based on the interquartile range (IQR) that dynamically prunes low-entropy trajectories, preserving essential policy diversity. Our extensive experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that M-GRPO stabilizes the training process while the IQR filter prevents premature convergence. The combination of these two innovations leads to superior training stability and state-of-the-art performance.
comment: 7 pages, 5 figures,Accepted NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Efficient Reasoning
☆ LLM Rationalis? Measuring Bargaining Capabilities of AI Negotiators
Bilateral negotiation is a complex, context-sensitive task in which human negotiators dynamically adjust anchors, pacing, and flexibility to exploit power asymmetries and informal cues. We introduce a unified mathematical framework for modeling concession dynamics based on a hyperbolic tangent curve, and propose two metrics burstiness tau and the Concession-Rigidity Index (CRI) to quantify the timing and rigidity of offer trajectories. We conduct a large-scale empirical comparison between human negotiators and four state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) across natural-language and numeric-offers settings, with and without rich market context, as well as six controlled power-asymmetry scenarios. Our results reveal that, unlike humans who smoothly adapt to situations and infer the opponents position and strategies, LLMs systematically anchor at extremes of the possible agreement zone for negotiations and optimize for fixed points irrespective of leverage or context. Qualitative analysis further shows limited strategy diversity and occasional deceptive tactics used by LLMs. Moreover the ability of LLMs to negotiate does not improve with better models. These findings highlight fundamental limitations in current LLM negotiation capabilities and point to the need for models that better internalize opponent reasoning and context-dependent strategy.
comment: Published in the First Workshop on Multi-Turn Interactions in Large Language Models at Neurips 2025
☆ An Open and Reproducible Deep Research Agent for Long-Form Question Answering NeurIPS
Ikuya Yamada, Wataru Ikeda, Ko Yoshida, Mengyu Ye, Hinata Sugimoto, Masatoshi Suzuki, Hisanori Ozaki, Jun Suzuki
We present an open deep research system for long-form question answering, selected as a winning system in the text-to-text track of the MMU-RAG competition at NeurIPS 2025. The system combines an open-source large language model (LLM) with an open web search API to perform iterative retrieval, reasoning, and synthesis in real-world open-domain settings. To enhance reasoning quality, we apply preference tuning based on LLM-as-a-judge feedback that evaluates multiple aspects, including clarity, insightfulness, and factuality. Our experimental results show that the proposed method consistently improves answer quality across all three aspects. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/efficient-deep-research/efficient-deep-research.
comment: Technical report of a winning system in the NeurIPS MMU-RAG competition
☆ Understanding Structured Financial Data with LLMs: A Case Study on Fraud Detection
Detecting fraud in financial transactions typically relies on tabular models that demand heavy feature engineering to handle high-dimensional data and offer limited interpretability, making it difficult for humans to understand predictions. Large Language Models (LLMs), in contrast, can produce human-readable explanations and facilitate feature analysis, potentially reducing the manual workload of fraud analysts and informing system refinements. However, they perform poorly when applied directly to tabular fraud detection due to the difficulty of reasoning over many features, the extreme class imbalance, and the absence of contextual information. To bridge this gap, we introduce FinFRE-RAG, a two-stage approach that applies importance-guided feature reduction to serialize a compact subset of numeric/categorical attributes into natural language and performs retrieval-augmented in-context learning over label-aware, instance-level exemplars. Across four public fraud datasets and three families of open-weight LLMs, FinFRE-RAG substantially improves F1/MCC over direct prompting and is competitive with strong tabular baselines in several settings. Although these LLMs still lag behind specialized classifiers, they narrow the performance gap and provide interpretable rationales, highlighting their value as assistive tools in fraud analysis.
☆ Scaling Bidirectional Spans and Span Violations in Attention Mechanism
The canonical $O(N^2)$ Transformer remains the empirical performance frontier in sequence modeling, and its training can be further optimized by addressing geometric inefficiency. We propose an optimization framework that leverages an asymmetric projection to decompose the backward-pass gradients into parallel spans and orthogonal violations, while keeping the canonical forward-pass $QKV$ structure intact. Through consistent experimental validation across various decomposition and projection setups, we provide strong theoretical evidence: the standard attention gradient is suboptimal. We demonstrated that selectively scaling these components, focusing primarily on $0^{th}$ order bidirectional parallel spans, yields the most effective learning signal. On the limited WikiText-2 dataset, and using a crude configuration, this method achieved a $0.56\%$ reduction in validation loss, confirming the framework's fundamental validity and suggesting significant potential gains on larger datasets and deeper training regimes
☆ Authors Should Annotate
The status quo for labeling text is third-party annotation, but there are many cases where information directly from the document's source would be preferable over a third-person proxy, especially for egocentric features like sentiment and belief. We introduce author labeling, an annotation technique where the writer of the document itself annotates the data at the moment of creation. We collaborate with a commercial chatbot with over 10,000 users to deploy an author labeling annotation system for subjective features related to product recommendation. This system identifies task-relevant queries, generates on-the-fly labeling questions, and records authors' answers in real time. We train and deploy an online-learning model architecture for product recommendation that continuously improves from author labeling and find it achieved a 534% increase in click-through rate compared to an industry advertising baseline running concurrently. We then compare the quality and practicality of author labeling to three traditional annotation approaches for sentiment analysis and find author labeling to be higher quality, faster to acquire, and cheaper. These findings reinforce existing literature that annotations, especially for egocentric and subjective beliefs, are significantly higher quality when labeled by the author rather than a third party. To facilitate broader scientific adoption, we release an author labeling service for the research community at academic.echollm.io.
☆ QwenLong-L1.5: Post-Training Recipe for Long-Context Reasoning and Memory Management
Weizhou Shen, Ziyi Yang, Chenliang Li, Zhiyuan Lu, Miao Peng, Huashan Sun, Yingcheng Shi, Shengyi Liao, Shaopeng Lai, Bo Zhang, Dayiheng Liu, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou, Ming Yan
We introduce QwenLong-L1.5, a model that achieves superior long-context reasoning capabilities through systematic post-training innovations. The key technical breakthroughs of QwenLong-L1.5 are as follows: (1) Long-Context Data Synthesis Pipeline: We develop a systematic synthesis framework that generates challenging reasoning tasks requiring multi-hop grounding over globally distributed evidence. By deconstructing documents into atomic facts and their underlying relationships, and then programmatically composing verifiable reasoning questions, our approach creates high-quality training data at scale, moving substantially beyond simple retrieval tasks to enable genuine long-range reasoning capabilities. (2) Stabilized Reinforcement Learning for Long-Context Training: To overcome the critical instability in long-context RL, we introduce task-balanced sampling with task-specific advantage estimation to mitigate reward bias, and propose Adaptive Entropy-Controlled Policy Optimization (AEPO) that dynamically regulates exploration-exploitation trade-offs. (3) Memory-Augmented Architecture for Ultra-Long Contexts: Recognizing that even extended context windows cannot accommodate arbitrarily long sequences, we develop a memory management framework with multi-stage fusion RL training that seamlessly integrates single-pass reasoning with iterative memory-based processing for tasks exceeding 4M tokens. Based on Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking, QwenLong-L1.5 achieves performance comparable to GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5-Pro on long-context reasoning benchmarks, surpassing its baseline by 9.90 points on average. On ultra-long tasks (1M~4M tokens), QwenLong-L1.5's memory-agent framework yields a 9.48-point gain over the agent baseline. Additionally, the acquired long-context reasoning ability translates to enhanced performance in general domains like scientific reasoning, memory tool using, and extended dialogue.
☆ Building from Scratch: A Multi-Agent Framework with Human-in-the-Loop for Multilingual Legal Terminology Mapping
Accurately mapping legal terminology across languages remains a significant challenge, especially for language pairs like Chinese and Japanese, which share a large number of homographs with different meanings. Existing resources and standardized tools for these languages are limited. To address this, we propose a human-AI collaborative approach for building a multilingual legal terminology database, based on a multi-agent framework. This approach integrates advanced large language models and legal domain experts throughout the entire process-from raw document preprocessing, article-level alignment, to terminology extraction, mapping, and quality assurance. Unlike a single automated pipeline, our approach places greater emphasis on how human experts participate in this multi-agent system. Humans and AI agents take on different roles: AI agents handle specific, repetitive tasks, such as OCR, text segmentation, semantic alignment, and initial terminology extraction, while human experts provide crucial oversight, review, and supervise the outputs with contextual knowledge and legal judgment. We tested the effectiveness of this framework using a trilingual parallel corpus comprising 35 key Chinese statutes, along with their English and Japanese translations. The experimental results show that this human-in-the-loop, multi-agent workflow not only improves the precision and consistency of multilingual legal terminology mapping but also offers greater scalability compared to traditional manual methods.
comment: 43 pages, 6 fingures, accepted in Artificial Intelligence and Law (2025)
☆ Meta-GPT: Decoding the Metasurface Genome with Generative Artificial Intelligence
David Dang, Stuart Love, Meena Salib, Quynh Dang, Samuel Rothfarb, Mysk Alnatour, Andrew Salij, Hou-Tong Chen, Ho Wai, Lee, Wilton J. M. Kort-Kamp
Advancing artificial intelligence for physical sciences requires representations that are both interpretable and compatible with the underlying laws of nature. We introduce METASTRINGS, a symbolic language for photonics that expresses nanostructures as textual sequences encoding materials, geometries, and lattice configurations. Analogous to molecular textual representations in chemistry, METASTRINGS provides a framework connecting human interpretability with computational design by capturing the structural hierarchy of photonic metasurfaces. Building on this representation, we develop Meta-GPT, a foundation transformer model trained on METASTRINGS and finetuned with physics-informed supervised, reinforcement, and chain-of-thought learning. Across various design tasks, the model achieves <3% mean-squared spectral error and maintains >98% syntactic validity, generating diverse metasurface prototypes whose experimentally measured optical responses match their target spectra. These results demonstrate that Meta-GPT can learn the compositional rules of light-matter interactions through METASTRINGS, laying a rigorous foundation for AI-driven photonics and representing an important step toward a metasurface genome project.
comment: Keywords: Physics-informed machine learning; Transformer models; Reinforcement learning; Chain-of-thought reasoning; Metasurfaces; Nanophotonics; Inverse design
♻ ☆ IA2: Alignment with ICL Activations Improves Supervised Fine-Tuning
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is used to specialize model behavior by training weights to produce intended target responses for queries. In contrast, In-Context Learning (ICL) adapts models during inference with instructions or demonstrations in the prompt. ICL can offer better generalizability and more calibrated responses compared to SFT in data scarce settings, at the cost of more inference compute. In this work, we ask the question: Can ICL's internal computations be used to improve the qualities of SFT? We first show that ICL and SFT produce distinct activation patterns, indicating that the two methods achieve adaptation through different functional mechanisms. Motivated by this observation and to use ICL's rich functionality, we introduce ICL Activation Alignment (IA2), a self-distillation technique which aims to replicate ICL's activation patterns in SFT models and incentivizes ICL-like internal reasoning. Performing IA2 as a priming step before SFT significantly improves the accuracy and calibration of model outputs, as shown by our extensive empirical results on 12 popular benchmarks and two model families. This finding is not only practically useful, but also offers a conceptual window into the inner mechanics of model adaptation.
♻ ☆ MixtureVitae: Open Web-Scale Pretraining Dataset With High Quality Instruction and Reasoning Data Built from Permissive-First Text Sources
Huu Nguyen, Victor May, Harsh Raj, Marianna Nezhurina, Yishan Wang, Yanqi Luo, Minh Chien Vu, Taishi Nakamura, Ken Tsui, Van Khue Nguyen, David Salinas, Aleksandra Krasnodębska, Christoph Schuhmann, Mats Leon Richter, Xuan-Son, Vu, Jenia Jitsev
We present MixtureVitae, an open-access pretraining corpus built to minimize legal risk while providing strong downstream performance. MixtureVitae follows a permissive-first, risk-mitigated sourcing strategy that combines public-domain and permissively licensed text (e.g., CC-BY/Apache) with carefully justified low-risk additions (e.g., government works and EU TDM-eligible sources). MixtureVitae adopts a simple, single-stage pretraining recipe that integrates a large proportion of permissive synthetic instruction and reasoning data-signals typically introduced during post-training and generally scarce in permissive web corpora. We categorize all sources into a three-tier scheme that reflects varying risk levels and provide shard-level provenance metadata to enable risk-aware usage. In controlled experiments using the open-sci-ref training protocol (fixed architectures and hyperparameters; 50B and 300B token budgets across 130M-1.7B parameters), models trained on MixtureVitae consistently outperform other permissive datasets across a suite of standard benchmarks, and at the 1.7B-parameters/300B-tokens setting, they surpass FineWeb-Edu and approach DCLM late in training. Performance is particularly strong on MMLU and on math and code benchmarks: a 1.7B model pretrained on 300B MixtureVitae tokens matches or exceeds a strong 1.7B instruction-tuned baseline on GSM8K, HumanEval, and MBPP, despite using over 36 times fewer tokens (300B vs. ~11T). Supported by a thorough decontamination analysis, these results show that permissive-first data with high instruction and reasoning density, tiered by licensing and provenance-related risk, can provide a practical and risk-mitigated foundation for training capable LLMs, reducing reliance on broad web scrapes without sacrificing competitiveness. Code: https://github.com/ontocord/mixturevitae
comment: Code: \url{https://github.com/ontocord/mixturevitae}
♻ ☆ Can Language Models Discover Scaling Laws?
Haowei Lin, Haotian Ye, Wenzheng Feng, Quzhe Huang, Yujun Li, Hubert Lim, Zhengrui Li, Xiangyu Wang, Jianzhu Ma, James Zou, Yitao Liang
Discovering scaling laws for predicting model performance at scale is a fundamental and open-ended challenge, mostly reliant on slow, case specific human experimentation. To investigate the potential for LLMs to automate this process, we collect over 5,000 experiments from existing literature and curate seven diverse scaling law discovery tasks. While existing agents struggle to produce accurate law formulas, this paper introduces SLDAgent, an evolution-based agent that co-optimize the scaling law model and the parameters, enabling it to autonomously explore complex relationships between variables. For the first time, we demonstrates that SLDAgent can automatically discover laws that exhibit consistently more accurate extrapolation than their established, human-derived counterparts across all tasks. Through comprehensive analysis, we elucidate why these discovered laws are superior and verify their practical utility in both pretraining and finetuning applications. This work establishes a new paradigm for agentic scientific discovery, showing that AI systems can understand their own scaling behavior, and can contribute novel and practical knowledge back to the research community.
♻ ☆ MALLM: Multi-Agent Large Language Models Framework EMNLP 2025
Multi-agent debate (MAD) has demonstrated the ability to augment collective intelligence by scaling test-time compute and leveraging expertise. Current frameworks for multi-agent debate are often designed towards tool use, lack integrated evaluation, or provide limited configurability of agent personas, response generators, discussion paradigms, and decision protocols. We introduce MALLM (Multi-Agent Large Language Models), an open-source framework that enables systematic analysis of MAD components. MALLM offers more than 144 unique configurations of MAD, including (1) agent personas (e.g., Expert, Personality), (2) response generators (e.g., Critical, Reasoning), (3) discussion paradigms (e.g., Memory, Relay), and (4) decision protocols (e.g., Voting, Consensus). MALLM uses simple configuration files to define a debate. Furthermore, MALLM can load any textual Hugging Face dataset (e.g., MMLU-Pro, WinoGrande) and provides an evaluation pipeline for easy comparison of MAD configurations. MALLM enables researchers to systematically configure, run, and evaluate debates for their problems, facilitating the understanding of the components and their interplay.
comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2025 (Demo)
♻ ☆ Beyond Next-Token Prediction: A Performance Characterization of Diffusion versus Autoregressive Language Models
Minseo Kim, Coleman Hooper, Aditya Tomar, Chenfeng Xu, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Michael W. Mahoney, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including document processing and code generation. Autoregressive Language Models (ARMs), which generate tokens sequentially conditioned on all previous tokens, have been the predominant paradigm for LLMs. While these models have achieved high accuracy across a range of downstream tasks, they exhibit low arithmetic intensity due to the inherent sequential dependency in next-token prediction. Recently, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative architecture. DLMs generate output tokens in parallel, mitigating the limitations of sequential decoding. However, the performance implications of DLMs relative to commonly deployed ARMs are not fully understood. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of the performance characteristics of ARMs and DLMs, combining theoretical analysis with empirical profiling to characterize the trade-offs between these approaches. We show that although DLMs can achieve higher arithmetic intensity than ARMs by leveraging parallelism across token positions, they fail to scale effectively with longer contexts. We then explore block-wise decoding for DLMs, which decouples arithmetic intensity from sequence length and enables better scaling to long contexts (similar to ARMs). We also examine batched inference and find that ARMs exhibit superior throughput as they benefit more from parallelism across sequences in the batch. Finally, we highlight opportunities for accelerating DLM inference, emphasizing that reducing the number of sampling steps is key for open-source DLMs to achieve lower latency relative to ARMs.
comment: 11 pages, 5 figures
♻ ☆ False Sense of Security: Why Probing-based Malicious Input Detection Fails to Generalize
Large Language Models (LLMs) can comply with harmful instructions, raising serious safety concerns despite their impressive capabilities. Recent work has leveraged probing-based approaches to study the separability of malicious and benign inputs in LLMs' internal representations, and researchers have proposed using such probing methods for safety detection. We systematically re-examine this paradigm. Motivated by poor out-of-distribution performance, we hypothesize that probes learn superficial patterns rather than semantic harmfulness. Through controlled experiments, we confirm this hypothesis and identify the specific patterns learned: instructional patterns and trigger words. Our investigation follows a systematic approach, progressing from demonstrating comparable performance of simple n-gram methods, to controlled experiments with semantically cleaned datasets, to detailed analysis of pattern dependencies. These results reveal a false sense of security around current probing-based approaches and highlight the need to redesign both models and evaluation protocols, for which we provide further discussions in the hope of suggesting responsible further research in this direction. We have open-sourced the project at https://github.com/WangCheng0116/Why-Probe-Fails.
♻ ☆ AraReasoner: Evaluating Reasoning-Based LLMs for Arabic NLP
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in reasoning abilities and general natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their performance on Arabic data, characterized by rich morphology, diverse dialects, and complex script, remains underexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmarking study of multiple reasoning-focused LLMs, with a special emphasis on the newly introduced DeepSeek models, across a suite of fifteen Arabic NLP tasks. We experiment with various strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning. This allows us to systematically evaluate performance on datasets covering a range of applications to examine their capacity for linguistic reasoning under different levels of complexity. Our experiments reveal several key findings. First, carefully selecting just three in-context examples delivers an average uplift of over 13 F1 points on classification tasks-boosting sentiment analysis from 35.3% to 87.5% and paraphrase detection from 56.1% to 87.0%. Second, reasoning-focused DeepSeek architectures outperform a strong GPT o4-mini baseline by an average of 12 F1 points on complex inference tasks in the zero-shot setting. Third, LoRA-based fine-tuning yields up to an additional 8 points in F1 and BLEU compared to equivalent increases in model scale. The code is available at https://github.com/gufranSabri/deepseek-evals
♻ ☆ OM4OV: Leveraging Ontology Matching for Ontology Versioning
Due to the dynamic nature of the Semantic Web, version control is necessary to capture time-varying information for widely used ontologies. Despite the long-standing recognition of ontology versioning (OV) as a crucial component of efficient ontology management, many views treat OV as similar to ontology matching (OM) and directly reuse OM systems for OV tasks. In this study, we systematically analyse the similarities and differences between OM and OV and formalise the OM4OV pipeline. The pipeline is implemented and evaluated in the state-of-the-art OM system Agent-OM. The experimental results indicate that OM systems can be reused for OV tasks, but without necessary modifications, the current OM4OV pipeline can produce skewed measurements, poor performance in detecting update entities, and less explainability for false mappings. To tackle these issues, we propose an optimisation method called the cross-reference (CR) mechanism, building upon the existing alignment(s) from OM to reduce the number of matching candidates and improve overall OV performance.
comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, 1 table
♻ ☆ Geschlechtsübergreifende Maskulina im Sprachgebrauch Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung zu lexemspezifischen Unterschieden
This study examines the distribution and linguistic characteristics of generic masculines (GM) in contemporary German press texts. The use of masculine personal nouns to refer to mixed-gender groups or unspecified individuals has been widely debated in academia and the public, with con-flicting perspectives on its gender-neutrality. While psycholinguistic studies suggest that GM is more readily associated with male referents, corpus-based analyses of its actual use remain scarce. We investigate GM in a large corpus of press texts, focusing on lexeme-specific differences across dif-ferent types of personal nouns. We conducted manual annotations of the whole inflectional para-digm of 21 personal nouns, resulting in 6,195 annotated tokens. Our findings reveal considerable differences between lexical items, especially between passive role nouns and prestige-related per-sonal nouns. On a grammatical level, we find that GM occurs predominantly in the plural and in indefinite noun phrases. Furthermore, our data shows that GM is not primarily used to denote entire classes of people, as has been previously claimed. By providing an empirical insight into the use of GM in authentic written language, we contribute to a more nuanced understanding of its forms and manifestations. These findings provide a solid basis for aligning linguistic stimuli in psy-cholinguistic studies more closely with real-world language use.
comment: 32 pages, in German language, 8 figures
♻ ☆ Are most sentences unique? An empirical examination of Chomskyan claims
A repeated claim in linguistics is that the majority of linguistic utterances are unique. For example, Pinker (1994: 10), summarizing an argument by Noam Chomsky, states that "virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe." With the increased availability of large corpora, this is a claim that can be empirically investigated. The current paper addresses the question by using the NLTK Python library to parse corpora of different genres, providing counts of exact string matches in each. Results show that while completely unique sentences are often the majority of corpora, this is highly constrained by genre, and that duplicate sentences are not an insignificant part of any individual corpus.
♻ ☆ How Far Are We from Genuinely Useful Deep Research Agents?
Dingling Zhang, He Zhu, Jincheng Ren, Kangqi Song, Xinran Zhou, Boyu Feng, Shudong Liu, Jiabin Luo, Weihao Xie, Zhaohui Wang, Tianrui Qin, King Zhu, Yuqing Wang, Qianben Chen, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wei Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou
Deep Research Agents (DRAs) aim to automatically produce analyst-level reports through iterative information retrieval and synthesis. However, most existing DRAs were validated on question-answering benchmarks, while research on generating comprehensive reports remains overlooked. Worse, current benchmarks for report synthesis suffer from task complexity and subjective metrics -- this fails to reflect user demands and limits the practical utility of generated reports. To address these gaps, we present Fine-grained DEepResearch bench (FINDER), an enhanced benchmark consisting of 100 human-curated research tasks with 419 structured checklist items that standardize report structure, analytical depth, and factual grounding. Based on approximately 1,000 reports produced by mainstream DRAs, we further propose Deep rEsearch Failure Taxonomy (DEFT), the first failure taxonomy for deep research agents. DEFT contains 14 fine-grained failure modes across reasoning, retrieval, and generation, and is built upon grounded theory with human-LLM co-annotating and inter-annotator reliability validation. Our experimental findings reveal that current DRAs struggle not with task comprehension but with evidence integration, verification, and reasoning-resilient planning.
comment: 34 pages
♻ ☆ From Clicks to Preference: A Multi-stage Alignment Framework for Generative Query Suggestion in Conversational System KDD
Generative query suggestion using large language models offers a powerful way to enhance conversational systems, but aligning outputs with nuanced user preferences remains a critical challenge. To address this, we introduce a multi-stage framework designed for progressive alignment between the generation policy and user intent. Our pipeline begins with prompt engineering as a cold-start strategy, followed by the Supervised Fine-Tuning stage, in which we introduce a distillation method on click logs to create a robust foundational model. To better model user preferences while capturing their inherent uncertainty, we develop a Gaussian Reward Model (GaRM) that represents user preferences as probability distributions rather than point estimates. Finally, we employ reinforcement learning to align the generation policy with these preferences, guided by a composite reward function that integrates GaRM with auxiliary heuristics to mitigate reward hacking. To maintain training stability, this process is enhanced by a novel out-of-distribution regularization method and a two-stage reward fusion technique. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms baselines on both automatic and human evaluations and yields a 34\% relative increase in user engagement as measured by click-through rate in live A/B tests.
comment: Accepted by SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 26)
♻ ☆ Decoupling Understanding from Reasoning via Problem Space Mapping for Small-Scale Model Reasoning
Despite recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), improving the reasoning ability of Small Language Models (SLMs, e.g., up to 1.5B parameters) remains challenging. A key obstacle lies in the complexity and variability of natural language: essentially equivalent problems often appear in diverse surface forms, often obscured by redundant or distracting details. This imposes a dual burden on SLMs: they must first extract the core problem from complex linguistic input, and then perform reasoning based on that understanding. The resulting vast and noisy problem space hinders optimization, particularly for models with limited capacity. To address this, we propose a new framework that decouples understanding from reasoning by mapping natural language problems into a canonical problem space-a semantically simplified yet expressive domain. This enables SLMs to focus on reasoning over standardized inputs, free from linguistic variability. Within this framework, we introduce DURIT (Decoupled Understanding from Reasoning via Iterative Training), a three-step algorithm that iteratively: (1) mapping natural language problems via reinforcement learning, (2) aligns reasoning trajectories through self-distillation, and (3) trains reasoning policies in the problem space. The mapper and reasoner are co-trained in an alternating loop throughout this process. Experiments show that DURIT substantially improves SLMs' performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain mathematical and logical reasoning tasks. Beyond improving reasoning capabilities, DURIT also improves the robustness of reasoning, validating decoupling understanding from reasoning as an effective strategy for strengthening SLMs.
♻ ☆ A survey of diversity quantification in natural language processing: The why, what, where and how
The concept of diversity has received increased consideration in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in recent years. This is due to various motivations like promoting and inclusion, approximating human linguistic behavior, and increasing systems' performance. Diversity has however often been addressed in an ad hoc manner in NLP, and with few explicit links to other domains where this notion is better theorized. We survey articles in the ACL Anthology from the past 6 years, with "diversity" or "diverse" in their title. We find a wide range of settings in which diversity is quantified, often highly specialized and using inconsistent terminology. We put forward a unified taxonomy of why, what on, where, and how diversity is measured in NLP. Diversity measures are cast upon a unified framework from ecology and economy (Stirling, 2007) with 3 dimensions of diversity: variety, balance and disparity. We discuss the trends which emerge due to this systematized approach. We believe that this study paves the way towards a better formalization of diversity in NLP, which should bring a better understanding of this notion and a better comparability between various approaches.
♻ ☆ From Pruning to Grafting: Dynamic Knowledge Redistribution via Learnable Layer Fusion
Structured pruning of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) offers a promising path to efficiency but often suffers from irreversible performance degradation due to the discarding of transformer blocks. In this paper, we introduce FuseGPT, a compression paradigm that reframes structured pruning as iterative knowledge grafting rather than simple removal. Motivated by the observation that linear block merging fails to capture non-linear feature disparities and that block importance fluctuates dynamically during pruning, FuseGPT employs a dual-strategy pipeline. First, we propose Macro Influence (MI), a dynamic fusion-aware metric that continuously re-evaluates block redundancy as the network topology evolves. Second, instead of rigid parameter averaging, we introduce a learnable low-rank fusion mechanism that adaptively grafts the knowledge of pruned blocks onto surviving layers via lightweight local distillation. Extensive experiments on LLaMA, Mistral, Qwen, and Phi families demonstrate that FuseGPT establishes a new state-of-the-art on the compression-accuracy Pareto frontier: at 25\% sparsity, FuseGPT achieves lower perplexity than prior methods at 20\% sparsity, improves zero-shot reasoning by up to 4.5 points, and delivers 1.33$\times$ inference speedup with 25\% memory reduction. Furthermore, FuseGPT is orthogonal to quantization, achieving 52.1\% total compression with negligible quality loss when combined with 4-bit GPTQ. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/JarvisPei/FuseGPT.
♻ ☆ LegalRikai: Open Benchmark -- Benchmark for Complex Japanese Corporate Legal Tasks
This paper introduces LegalRikai: Open Benchmark, a new benchmark comprising four complex tasks that emulate Japanese corporate legal practices. The benchmark was created by legal professionals under the supervision of an attorney. This benchmark has 100 samples that require long-form, structured outputs, and we evaluated them against multiple practical criteria. We conducted both human and automated evaluations using leading LLMs, including GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Claude Opus 4.1. Our human evaluation revealed that abstract instructions prompted unnecessary modifications, highlighting model weaknesses in document-level editing that were missed by conventional short-text tasks. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that automated evaluation aligns well with human judgment on criteria with clear linguistic grounding, and assessing structural consistency remains a challenge. The result demonstrates the utility of automated evaluation as a screening tool when expert availability is limited. We propose a dataset evaluation framework to promote more practice-oriented research in the legal domain.
♻ ☆ Fixing It in Post: A Comparative Study of LLM Post-Training Data Quality and Model Performance
Recent work on large language models (LLMs) has increasingly focused on post-training and alignment with datasets curated to enhance instruction following, world knowledge, and specialized skills. However, most post-training datasets used in leading open- and closed-source LLMs remain inaccessible to the public, with limited information about their construction process. This lack of transparency has motivated the recent development of open-source post-training corpora. While training on these open alternatives can yield performance comparable to that of leading models, systematic comparisons remain challenging due to the significant computational cost of conducting them rigorously at scale, and are therefore largely absent. As a result, it remains unclear how specific samples, task types, or curation strategies influence downstream performance when assessing data quality. In this work, we conduct the first comprehensive side-by-side analysis of two prominent open post-training datasets: Tulu-3-SFT-Mix and SmolTalk. Using the Magpie framework, we annotate each sample with detailed quality metrics, including turn structure (single-turn vs. multi-turn), task category, input quality, and response quality, and we derive statistics that reveal structural and qualitative similarities and differences between the two datasets. Based on these insights, we design a principled curation recipe that produces a new data mixture, TuluTalk, which contains 14% fewer samples than either source dataset while matching or exceeding their performance on key benchmarks. Our findings offer actionable insights for constructing more effective post-training datasets that improve model performance within practical resource limits. To support future research, we publicly release both the annotated source datasets and our curated TuluTalk mixture.
♻ ☆ From Imitation to Discrimination: Toward A Generalized Curriculum Advantage Mechanism Enhancing Cross-Domain Reasoning Tasks AAAI 2026
Changpeng Yang, Jinyang Wu, Yuchen Liu, Shuai Zhang, Yang Li, Qiliang Liang, Hongzhen Wang, Shuai Nie, Jiaming Xu, Runyu Shi, Ying Huang, Guoquan Zhang
Reinforcement learning has emerged as a paradigm for post-training large language models, boosting their reasoning capabilities. Such approaches compute an advantage value for each sample, reflecting better or worse performance than expected, thereby yielding both positive and negative signals for training. However, the indiscriminate mixing of the two signals in existing methods, especially from the early stages, may lead to ambiguous guidance and limited gains. To address this issue, we propose **CAPO** (**C**urriculum **A**dvantage **P**olicy **O**ptimization), an adaptive curriculum mechanism based on advantage signals. The proposed mechanism bootstraps imitation learning with positive-only advantage samples to establish robust foundations, and subsequently introduces negative signals to cultivate discriminative capabilities, thereby improving generalization across complex scenarios. Compatible with diverse optimization methods including GRPO, PPO, RLOO, and Reinforce++, our method consistently achieves stable and significant improvements in mathematical reasoning tasks, and further generalizes effectively to multimodal Graphical User Interface (GUI) reasoning scenarios, establishing itself as a versatile and robust optimization framework.
comment: Accepted by AAAI 2026
♻ ☆ A Pipeline to Assess Merging Methods via Behavior and Internals
Merging methods combine the weights of multiple language models (LMs) to leverage their capacities, such as for domain adaptation. While existing studies investigate merged models from a solely behavioral perspective, we offer the first comprehensive view by assessing and connecting their behavior and internals. We present a novel evaluation pipeline that first merges multiple parent LMs, and then evaluates the merged models in comparison to the initial ones based on their behavior on downstream tasks, like MMLU, and the internal encoded linguistic competence. We showcase this pipeline by assessing the merging of instruction fine-tuned with math- and code-adapted LMs from the Qwen2.5 family. Our results show that merging methods impacts behavior and internals differently. While the performance of merged models is typically between that of the two parent models, their encoded information about linguistic phenomena, particularly in morphology and syntax, can surpass the parent models. Moreover, we find weak ranking correlation between this behavior and internal evaluation. With our pipeline and initial results, we emphasize the need for more comprehensive evaluations of model merging methods to gain a faithful understanding of their capabilities and reliability, beyond potential superficial behavioral advances.
comment: BlackboxNLP
♻ ☆ Cost-aware LLM-based Online Dataset Annotation
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled automated dataset labeling with minimal human supervision. While majority voting across multiple LLMs can improve label reliability by mitigating individual model biases, it incurs high computational costs due to repeated querying. In this work, we propose a novel online framework, Cost-aware Majority Voting (CaMVo), for efficient and accurate LLM-based dataset annotation. CaMVo adaptively selects a subset of LLMs for each data instance based on contextual embeddings, balancing confidence and cost without requiring pre-training or ground-truth labels. Leveraging a LinUCB-based selection mechanism and a Bayesian estimator over confidence scores, CaMVo estimates a lower bound on labeling accuracy for each LLM and aggregates responses through weighted majority voting. Our empirical evaluation on the MMLU and IMDB Movie Review datasets demonstrates that CaMVo achieves comparable or superior accuracy to full majority voting while significantly reducing labeling costs. This establishes CaMVo as a practical and robust solution for cost-efficient annotation in dynamic labeling environments.
♻ ☆ SNS-Bench-VL: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models in Social Networking Services
With the increasing integration of visual and textual content in Social Networking Services (SNS), evaluating the multimodal capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for enhancing user experience, content understanding, and platform intelligence. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on text-centric tasks, lacking coverage of the multimodal contexts prevalent in modern SNS ecosystems. In this paper, we introduce SNS-Bench-VL, a comprehensive multimodal benchmark designed to assess the performance of Vision-Language LLMs in real-world social media scenarios. SNS-Bench-VL incorporates images and text across 8 multimodal tasks, including note comprehension, user engagement analysis, information retrieval, and personalized recommendation. It comprises 4,001 carefully curated multimodal question-answer pairs, covering single-choice, multiple-choice, and open-ended tasks. We evaluate over 25 state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs, analyzing their performance across tasks. Our findings highlight persistent challenges in multimodal social context comprehension. We hope SNS-Bench-VL will inspire future research towards robust, context-aware, and human-aligned multimodal intelligence for next-generation social networking services.
comment: We found problems in the code while rechecking our implementation. These issues led to noticeable numerical discrepancies, making some of the reported results and conclusions potentially unreliable. Therefore, we request to withdraw this submission
♻ ☆ Pet-Bench: Benchmarking the Abilities of Large Language Models as E-Pets in Social Network Services
Hongcheng Guo, Zheyong Xie, Shaosheng Cao, Boyang Wang, Weiting Liu, Zheyu Ye, Zhoujun Li, Zuozhu Liu, Wei Lu
As interest in using Large Language Models for interactive and emotionally rich experiences grows, virtual pet companionship emerges as a novel yet underexplored application. Existing approaches focus on basic pet role-playing interactions without systematically benchmarking LLMs for comprehensive companionship. In this paper, we introduce Pet-Bench, a dedicated benchmark that evaluates LLMs across both self-interaction and human-interaction dimensions. Unlike prior work, Pet-Bench emphasizes self-evolution and developmental behaviors alongside interactive engagement, offering a more realistic reflection of pet companionship. It features diverse tasks such as intelligent scheduling, memory-based dialogues, and psychological conversations, with over 7,500 interaction instances designed to simulate pet behaviors. Evaluation of 28 LLMs reveals significant performance variations linked to model size and inherent capabilities, underscoring the need for specialized optimization in this domain. Pet-Bench serves as a foundational resource for benchmarking pet-related LLM abilities and advancing emotionally immersive human-pet interactions.
♻ ☆ ALIGN: Word Association Learning for Cultural Alignment in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit cultural bias from overrepresented viewpoints in training data, yet cultural alignment remains a challenge due to limited cultural knowledge and a lack of exploration into effective learning approaches. We introduce a cost-efficient and cognitively grounded method: fine-tuning LLMs on native speakers' word-association norms, leveraging cognitive psychology findings that such associations capture cultural knowledge. Using word association datasets from native speakers in the US (English) and China (Mandarin), we train Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen-2.5-7B via supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization. We evaluate models' cultural alignment through a two-tier evaluation framework that spans lexical associations and cultural value alignment using the World Values Survey. Results show significant improvements in lexical alignment (16-20% English, 43-165% Mandarin on Precision@5) and high-level cultural value shifts. On a subset of 50 questions where US and Chinese respondents diverge most, fine-tuned Qwen nearly doubles its response alignment with Chinese values (13 to 25). Remarkably, our trained 7-8B models match or exceed vanilla 70B baselines, demonstrating that a few million of culture-grounded associations achieve value alignment without expensive retraining. Our work highlights both the promise and the need for future research grounded in human cognition in improving cultural alignment in AI models.
♻ ☆ CLARIFID: Improving Radiology Report Generation by Reinforcing Clinically Accurate Impressions and Enforcing Detailed Findings
Automatic generation of radiology reports has the potential to alleviate radiologists' significant workload, yet current methods struggle to deliver clinically reliable conclusions. In particular, most prior approaches focus on producing fluent text without effectively ensuring the factual correctness of the reports and often rely on single-view images, limiting diagnostic comprehensiveness. We propose CLARIFID, a novel framework that directly optimizes diagnostic correctness by mirroring the two-step workflow of experts. Specifically, CLARIFID (1) learns the logical flow from Findings to Impression through section-aware pretraining, (2) is fine-tuned with Proximal Policy Optimization in which the CheXbert F1 score of the Impression section serves as the reward, (3) employs controlled decoding that completes "Findings" before synthesizing the "Impression", and (4) fuses multiple chest X-ray views via a vision-transformer-based multi-view encoder. During inference, we apply a next-token forcing strategy followed by report-level re-ranking, ensuring that the model first produces a comprehensive "Findings" section before synthesizing the "Impression" and thereby preserving coherent clinical reasoning. Experimental results on the MIMIC-CXR dataset demonstrate that our method achieves superior clinical efficacy and outperforms existing baselines on clinical efficacy scores.
♻ ☆ Efficiently Seeking Flat Minima for Better Generalization in Fine-Tuning Large Language Models and Beyond
Little research explores the correlation between the expressive ability and generalization ability of the low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves model generalization for both Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers by encouraging convergence to locally flat minima. However, the connection between sharpness and generalization has not been fully explored for LoRA due to the lack of tools to either empirically seek flat minima or develop theoretical methods. In this work, we propose Flat Minima LoRA (FMLoRA) and its efficient version, i.e., EFMLoRA, to seek flat minima for LoRA. Concretely, we theoretically demonstrate that perturbations in the full parameter space can be transferred to the low-rank subspace. This approach eliminates the potential interference introduced by perturbations across multiple matrices in the low-rank subspace. Our extensive experiments on large language models and vision-language models demonstrate that EFMLoRA achieves optimize efficiency comparable to that of LoRA while simultaneously attaining comparable or even better performance. For example, on the GLUE dataset with RoBERTa-large, EFMLoRA outperforms LoRA and full fine-tuning by 1.0% and 0.5% on average, respectively. On vision-language models, e.g., Qwen-VL-Chat, there are performance improvements of 1.5% and 1.0% on the SQA and VizWiz datasets, respectively. These empirical results also verify that the generalization of LoRA is closely related to sharpness, which is omitted by previous methods.
♻ ☆ Leveraging Importance Sampling to Detach Alignment Modules from Large Language Models NeurIPS 2025
The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) across industries has increased the demand for high-quality and customizable outputs. However, traditional alignment methods often require retraining large pretrained models, making it difficult to quickly adapt and optimize LLMs for diverse applications. To address this limitation, we propose a novel \textit{Residual Alignment Model} (\textit{RAM}) that formalizes the alignment process as a type of importance sampling. In this framework, the unaligned upstream model serves as the proposal distribution, while the alignment process is framed as secondary sampling based on an autoregressive alignment module that acts as an estimator of the importance weights. This design enables a natural detachment of the alignment module from the target aligned model, improving flexibility and scalability. Based on this model, we derive an efficient sequence-level training strategy for the alignment module, which operates independently of the proposal module. Additionally, we develop a resampling algorithm with iterative token-level decoding to address the common first-token latency issue in comparable methods. Experimental evaluations on two leading open-source LLMs across diverse tasks, including instruction following, domain adaptation, and preference optimization, demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baseline models.
comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 2025, 28 pages
♻ ☆ DABL: Detecting Semantic Anomalies in Business Processes Using Large Language Models
Detecting anomalies in business processes is crucial for ensuring operational success. While many existing methods rely on statistical frequency to detect anomalies, it's important to note that infrequent behavior doesn't necessarily imply undesirability. To address this challenge, detecting anomalies from a semantic viewpoint proves to be a more effective approach. However, current semantic anomaly detection methods treat a trace (i.e., process instance) as multiple event pairs, disrupting long-distance dependencies. In this paper, we introduce DABL, a novel approach for detecting semantic anomalies in business processes using large language models (LLMs). We collect 143,137 real-world process models from various domains. By generating normal traces through the playout of these process models and simulating both ordering and exclusion anomalies, we fine-tune Llama 2 using the resulting log. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DABL surpasses existing state-of-the-art semantic anomaly detection methods in terms of both generalization ability and learning of given processes. Users can directly apply DABL to detect semantic anomalies in their own datasets without the need for additional training. Furthermore, DABL offers the capability to interpret the causes of anomalies in natural language, providing valuable insights into the detected anomalies.
♻ ☆ SoMi-ToM: Evaluating Multi-Perspective Theory of Mind in Embodied Social Interactions
Humans continuously infer the states, goals, and behaviors of others by perceiving their surroundings in dynamic, real-world social interactions. However, most Theory of Mind (ToM) benchmarks only evaluate static, text-based scenarios, which have a significant gap compared to real interactions. We propose the SoMi-ToM benchmark, designed to evaluate multi-perspective ToM in embodied multi-agent complex social interactions. This benchmark is based on rich multimodal interaction data generated by the interaction environment SoMi, covering diverse crafting goals and social relationships. Our framework supports multi-level evaluation: (1) first-person evaluation provides multimodal (visual, dialogue, action, etc.) input from a first-person perspective during a task for real-time state inference, (2) third-person evaluation provides complete third-person perspective video and text records after a task for goal and behavior inference. This evaluation method allows for a more comprehensive examination of a model's ToM capabilities from both the subjective immediate experience and the objective global observation. We constructed a challenging dataset containing 35 third-person perspective videos, 363 first-person perspective images, and 1225 expert-annotated multiple-choice questions (three options). On this dataset, we systematically evaluated the performance of human subjects and several state-of-the-art large vision-language models (LVLMs). The results show that LVLMs perform significantly worse than humans on SoMi-ToM: the average accuracy gap between humans and models is 40.1% in first-person evaluation and 26.4% in third-person evaluation. This indicates that future LVLMs need to further improve their ToM capabilities in embodied, complex social interactions.
comment: 24 pages, 6 figures
♻ ☆ When Reject Turns into Accept: Quantifying the Vulnerability of LLM-Based Scientific Reviewers to Indirect Prompt Injection
Devanshu Sahoo, Manish Prasad, Vasudev Majhi, Jahnvi Singh, Vinay Chamola, Yash Sinha, Murari Mandal, Dhruv Kumar
The landscape of scientific peer review is rapidly evolving with the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs). This shift is driven by two parallel trends: the widespread individual adoption of LLMs by reviewers to manage workload (the "Lazy Reviewer" hypothesis) and the formal institutional deployment of AI-powered assessment systems by conferences like AAAI and Stanford's Agents4Science. This study investigates the robustness of these "LLM-as-a-Judge" systems (both illicit and sanctioned) to adversarial PDF manipulation. Unlike general jailbreaks, we focus on a distinct incentive: flipping "Reject" decisions to "Accept," for which we develop a novel evaluation metric which we term as WAVS (Weighted Adversarial Vulnerability Score). We curated a dataset of 200 scientific papers and adapted 15 domain-specific attack strategies to this task, evaluating them across 13 Language Models, including GPT-5, Claude Haiku, and DeepSeek. Our results demonstrate that obfuscation strategies like "Maximum Mark Magyk" successfully manipulate scores, achieving alarming decision flip rates even in large-scale models. We will release our complete dataset and injection framework to facilitate more research on this topic.
♻ ☆ Do MLLMs Really Understand the Charts?
Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated increasingly impressive performance in chart understanding, most of them exhibit alarming hallucinations and significant performance degradation when handling non-annotated charts. We argue that current MLLMs rely largely on visual recognition rather than visual reasoning to interpret the charts, and visual estimation of numerical values is one of the most fundamental capabilities in chart understanding that require complex visual reasoning. To prove this, we introduce ChartVRBench, a benchmark meticulously designed to isolate and evaluate visual reasoning ability in chart understanding. Furthermore, we propose ChartVR-3B/7B trained with a novel Visual Reasoning Reinforcement Finetuning (VR-RFT) strategy to strengthen genuine chart visual reasoning abilities. Extensive experiments show that ChartVR achieves superior performance on ChartVRBench, outperforming even powerful proprietary models. Moreover, the visual reasoning skills cultivated by the proposed VR-RFT demonstrate strong generalization, leading to significant performance gains across a diverse suite of public chart understanding benchmarks. The code and dataset will be publicly available upon publication.
♻ ☆ Building Self-Evolving Agents via Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning: A Framework and Benchmark
Yuxuan Cai, Yipeng Hao, Jie Zhou, Hang Yan, Zhikai Lei, Rui Zhen, Zhenhua Han, Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Qianjun Pan, Tianyu Huai, Qin Chen, Xin Li, Kai Chen, Bo Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Liang He
As AI advances toward general intelligence, the focus is shifting from systems optimized for static tasks to creating open-ended agents that learn continuously. In this paper, we introduce Experience-driven Lifelong Learning (ELL), a framework for building self-evolving agents capable of continuous growth through real-world interaction. The framework is built on four core principles: (1) Experience Exploration: Agents learn through continuous, self-motivated interaction with dynamic environments, navigating interdependent tasks and generating rich experiential trajectories. (2) Long-term Memory: Agents preserve and structure historical knowledge, including personal experiences, domain expertise, and commonsense reasoning, into a persistent memory system. (3) Skill Learning: Agents autonomously improve by abstracting recurring patterns from experience into reusable skills, which are actively refined and validated for application in new tasks. (4) Knowledge Internalization: Agents internalize explicit and discrete experiences into implicit and intuitive capabilities as "second nature".
We also introduce StuLife, a benchmark dataset for ELL that simulates a student's holistic college journey, from enrollment to academic and personal development, across three core phases and ten detailed sub-scenarios. StuLife is designed around three key paradigm
♻ ☆ Beyond Magic Words: Sharpness-Aware Prompt Evolving for Robust Large Language Models with TARE
Guancheng Wan, Lucheng Fu, Haoxin Liu, Yiqiao Jin, Hui Yi Leong, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Hejia Geng, Jinhe Bi, Yunpu Ma, Xiangru Tang, B. Aditya Prakash, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) hinges on carefully engineered prompts. However, prevailing prompt optimization methods, ranging from heuristic edits and reinforcement learning to evolutionary search, primarily target point-wise accuracy. They seldom enforce paraphrase invariance or searching stability, and therefore cannot remedy this brittleness in practice. Automated prompt search remains brittle: small, semantically preserving paraphrases often cause large performance swings. We identify this brittleness as the textual sharpness of the prompt landscape. In this work, we provide the first formal treatment of textual sharpness in the discrete, semantic space of prompts, together with an operational robustness criterion over a semantic neighborhood; the design is black-box or API-only, requiring no gradients to update the model's parameters. Then we introduce TARE (Textual Sharpness-Aware Evolving), a derivative-free framework that alternates between an inner, sampling-based adversarial search that stresses a prompt with hard paraphrases and an outer, robust selection that prefers candidates whose neighborhoods remain strong. We further propose ATARE, which learns anisotropic weights to shape the semantic neighborhood and adapts its radius over time to balance exploration and fidelity. Diverse tasks evaluate our methods, whose design for minimizing textual sharpness gap leads to prompts that preserve accuracy under paraphrasing, outperforming accuracy-only prompt search while remaining computationally practical.
comment: We have identified a critical methodological error in Section 3 of the manuscript, which invalidates the main results; therefore, we request withdrawal for further revision
♻ ☆ Diagnose, Localize, Align: A Full-Stack Framework for Reliable LLM Multi-Agent Systems under Instruction Conflicts
Guancheng Wan, Leixin Sun, Longxu Dou, Zitong Shi, Fang Wu, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Wenke Huang, Guibin Zhang, Hejia Geng, Xiangru Tang, Zhenfei Yin, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
Large Language Model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) have rapidly advanced collaborative reasoning, tool use, and role-specialized coordination in complex tasks. However, reliability-critical deployment remains hindered by a systemic failure mode: hierarchical compliance under instruction conflicts (system-user, peer-peer), where agents misprioritize system-level rules in the presence of competing demands. Moreover, widely used macro-level metrics (e.g., pass@k) obscure these micro-level violations and offer little actionable guidance for remedy. In this work, we present a full-stack, three-stage framework: (1) Diagnose - Contextualized Role Adherence Score (CRAS), a query-wise, context-aware scoring metric that decomposes role adherence into four measurable dimensions; (2) Localize - attention drift analysis revealing that instruction conflicts are resolved by attention heads that are largely concentrated in middle layers; (3) Align - Surgical Alignment of Instruction Layers (SAIL), which installs LoRA only on the localized focal layers and optimizes a token-weighted DPO-style preference objective that credits tokens by their focal attentional contribution. Across standard benchmarks and MAS frameworks, our surgical approach improves instruction hierarchy compliance (e.g., +5.60% with AutoGen on MedQA) without full-model finetuning.
comment: Upon further review, we realized that the version submitted to arXiv was not the final draft and omits crucial results and discussion. To avoid confusion and ensure the integrity of the record, we request withdrawal and will resubmit once the complete work is ready
♻ ☆ SpurLens: Automatic Detection of Spurious Cues in Multimodal LLMs
Unimodal vision models are known to rely on spurious correlations, but it remains unclear to what extent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit similar biases despite language supervision. In this paper, we investigate spurious bias in MLLMs and introduce SpurLens, a pipeline that leverages GPT-4 and open-set object detectors to automatically identify spurious visual cues without human supervision. Our findings reveal that spurious correlations cause two major failure modes in MLLMs: (1) over-reliance on spurious cues for object recognition, where removing these cues reduces accuracy, and (2) object hallucination, where spurious cues amplify the hallucination by over 10x. We validate our findings in various MLLMs and datasets. Beyond diagnosing these failures, we explore potential mitigation strategies, such as prompt ensembling and reasoning-based prompting, and conduct ablation studies to examine the root causes of spurious bias in MLLMs. By exposing the persistence of spurious correlations, our study calls for more rigorous evaluation methods and mitigation strategies to enhance the reliability of MLLMs.
♻ ☆ Unsupervised Acquisition of Discrete Grammatical Categories
This article presents experiments performed using a computational laboratory environment for language acquisition experiments. It implements a multi-agent system consisting of two agents: an adult language model and a daughter language model that aims to learn the mother language. Crucially, the daughter agent does not have access to the internal knowledge of the mother language model but only to the language exemplars the mother agent generates. These experiments illustrate how this system can be used to acquire abstract grammatical knowledge. We demonstrate how statistical analyses of patterns in the input data corresponding to grammatical categories yield discrete grammatical rules. These rules are subsequently added to the grammatical knowledge of the daughter language model. To this end, hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis was applied to the utterances consecutively generated by the mother language model. It is argued that this procedure can be used to acquire structures resembling grammatical categories proposed by linguists for natural languages. Thus, it is established that non-trivial grammatical knowledge has been acquired. Moreover, the parameter configuration of this computational laboratory environment determined using training data generated by the mother language model is validated in a second experiment with a test set similarly resulting in the acquisition of non-trivial categories.
comment: 34 pages, 3 figures, 7 tables. Related work: Shakouri et al., arXiv:2512.02195
♻ ☆ LookAhead Tuning: Safer Language Models via Partial Answer Previews WSDM 2026
Kangwei Liu, Mengru Wang, Yujie Luo, Lin Yuan, Mengshu Sun, Lei Liang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou, Bryan Hooi, Shumin Deng
Fine-tuning enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to specific domains, but often compromises their previously established safety alignment. To mitigate the degradation of model safety during fine-tuning, we introduce LookAhead Tuning, a lightweight and effective data-driven approach that preserves safety during fine-tuning. The method introduces two simple strategies that modify training data by previewing partial answer prefixes, thereby minimizing perturbations to the model's initial token distributions and maintaining its built-in safety mechanisms. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LookAhead Tuning effectively maintains model safety without sacrificing robust performance on downstream tasks. Our findings position LookAhead Tuning as a reliable and efficient solution for the safe and effective adaptation of LLMs.
comment: WSDM 2026 short
♻ ☆ Thinking with Visual Abstract: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning via Visual Abstraction
Images usually convey richer detail than text, but often include redundant information, which potentially downgrades multimodal reasoning performance. When faced with lengthy or complex messages, humans tend to employ abstract thinking to convert them into simple and concise abstracts. Inspired by this cognitive strategy, we introduce a novel paradigm to elicit the ability to Think with Visual Abstract (VAT), by prompting Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with visual abstract instead of explicit verbal thoughts or elaborate guidance, permitting a more efficient visual reasoning mechanism via concentrated perception. VAT encourages models to focus on more essential visual elements, concepts and structural features by undermining redundant information compared with explicit thinking methods, such as Chain-of-thought (CoT) and tool-using approaches, that increase the complexity of reasoning process via inserting verbose intermediate steps and external knowledge. Experimental results show that VAT consistently empowers different MLLMs in visual perception and reasoning tasks. VAT achieves an average gain of $2.21\%$ over GPT-5 baseline, surpassing the gain of CoT, demonstrating that VAT better enhances multimodal task performance of MLLMs. Additionally, VAT spends fewer tokens while achieving higher performance. These findings highlight the effectiveness of visual abstract thinking and encourage further exploration of more diverse reasoning paradigms from the perspective of human cognition.
♻ ☆ The Gray Zone of Faithfulness: Taming Ambiguity in Unfaithfulness Detection
Ensuring that Large Language Models (LLMs) generate summaries faithful to a given source document is essential for real-world applications. While prior research has explored LLM faithfulness, existing benchmarks suffer from annotation ambiguity, primarily due to the ill-defined boundary of permissible external knowledge in generated outputs. For instance, common sense is often incorporated into responses and labeled as "faithful", yet the acceptable extent of such knowledge remains unspecified, leading to inconsistent annotations. To address this issue, we propose a novel faithfulness annotation framework, which introduces an intermediate category, Out-Dependent, to classify cases where external knowledge is required for verification. Using this framework, we construct VeriGray (Verification with the Gray Zone) -- a new unfaithfulness detection benchmark in summarization. Statistics reveal that even SOTA LLMs, such as GPT-5, exhibit hallucinations ($\sim 6\%$ of sentences) in summarization tasks. Moreover, a substantial proportion ($\sim 8\%$ on average of models) of generated sentences fall into the Out-Dependent category, underscoring the importance of resolving annotation ambiguity in unfaithfulness detection benchmarks. Experiments demonstrate that our benchmark poses significant challenges to multiple baseline methods, indicating considerable room for future improvement.
comment: Updates the evaluation results with the latest correction of our annotations and the improved parsing algorithm for LLM detectors' responses Evaluates a new method -- GPT-5 + RAG
♻ ☆ MRAG-Suite: A Diagnostic Evaluation Platform for Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual RAG) significantly advances question answering by integrating visual and textual evidence. Yet, current evaluations fail to systematically account for query difficulty and ambiguity. We propose MRAG-Suite, a diagnostic evaluation platform integrating diverse multimodal benchmarks (WebQA, Chart-RAG, Visual-RAG, MRAG-Bench). We introduce difficulty-based and ambiguity-aware filtering strategies, alongside MM-RAGChecker, a claim-level diagnostic tool. Our results demonstrate substantial accuracy reductions under difficult and ambiguous queries, highlighting prevalent hallucinations. MM-RAGChecker effectively diagnoses these issues, guiding future improvements in Visual RAG systems.
♻ ☆ Conveying Imagistic Thinking in Traditional Chinese Medicine Translation: A Prompt Engineering and LLM-Based Evaluation Framework
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) theory is built on imagistic thinking, in which medical principles and diagnostic and therapeutic logic are structured through metaphor and metonymy. However, existing English translations largely rely on literal rendering, making it difficult for target-language readers to reconstruct the underlying conceptual networks and apply them in clinical practice. This study adopted a human-in-the-loop (HITL) framework and selected four passages from the medical canon Huangdi Neijing that are fundamental in theory. Through prompt-based cognitive scaffolding, DeepSeek V3.1 was guided to identify metaphor and metonymy in the source text and convey the theory in translation. In the evaluation stage, ChatGPT 5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Pro were instructed by prompts to simulate three types of real-world readers. Human translations, baseline model translations, and prompt-adjusted translations were scored by the simulated readers across five cognitive dimensions, followed by structured interviews and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results show that the prompt-adjusted LLM translations perform best across all five dimensions, with high cross-model and cross-role consistency. The interview themes reveal differences between human and machine translation, effective strategies for metaphor and metonymy transfer, and readers' cognitive preferences. This study provides a cognitive, efficient, and replicable HITL methodological pathway for the translation of ancient, concept-dense texts such as TCM.
comment: This is a duplicate of arXiv:2511.23059
♻ ☆ Solving Inequality Proofs with Large Language Models NeurIPS 2025
Inequality proving, crucial across diverse scientific and mathematical fields, tests advanced reasoning skills such as discovering tight bounds and strategic theorem application. This makes it a distinct, demanding frontier for large language models (LLMs), offering insights beyond general mathematical problem-solving. Progress in this area is hampered by existing datasets that are often scarce, synthetic, or rigidly formal. We address this by proposing an informal yet verifiable task formulation, recasting inequality proving into two automatically checkable subtasks: bound estimation and relation prediction. Building on this, we release IneqMath, an expert-curated dataset of Olympiad-level inequalities, including a test set and training corpus enriched with step-wise solutions and theorem annotations. We also develop a novel LLM-as-judge evaluation framework, combining a final-answer judge with four step-wise judges designed to detect common reasoning flaws. A systematic evaluation of 29 leading LLMs on IneqMath reveals a surprising reality: even top models like o1 achieve less than 10% overall accuracy under step-wise scrutiny; this is a drop of up to 65.5% from their accuracy considering only final answer equivalence. This discrepancy exposes fragile deductive chains and a critical gap for current LLMs between merely finding an answer and constructing a rigorous proof. Scaling model size and increasing test-time computation yield limited gains in overall proof correctness. Instead, our findings highlight promising research directions such as theorem-guided reasoning and self-refinement. Code and data are available at https://ineqmath.github.io/.
comment: 50 pages, 24 figures, accepted as a Spotlight at NeurIPS 2025
♻ ☆ GRADE: Generating multi-hop QA and fine-gRAined Difficulty matrix for RAG Evaluation EMNLP 2025
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are widely adopted in knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, but current evaluations often overlook the structural complexity and multi-step reasoning required in real-world scenarios. These benchmarks overlook key factors such as the interaction between retrieval difficulty and reasoning depth. To address this gap, we propose GRADE, a novel evaluation framework that models task difficulty along two orthogonal dimensions: (1) reasoning depth, defined by the number of inference steps (hops), and (2) semantic distance between the query and its supporting evidence. We construct a synthetic multi-hop QA dataset from factual news articles by extracting knowledge graphs and augmenting them through semantic clustering to recover missing links, allowing us to generate diverse and difficulty-controlled queries. Central to our framework is a 2D difficulty matrix that combines generator-side and retriever-side difficulty. Experiments across multiple domains and models show that error rates strongly correlate with our difficulty measures, validating their diagnostic utility. GRADE enables fine-grained analysis of RAG performance and provides a scalable foundation for evaluating and improving multi-hop reasoning in real-world applications.
comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2025 findings