Computation and Language 88
☆ Be My Eyes: Extending Large Language Models to New Modalities Through Multi-Agent Collaboration
James Y. Huang, Sheng Zhang, Qianchu Liu, Guanghui Qin, Tinghui Zhu, Tristan Naumann, Muhao Chen, Hoifung Poon
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in challenging, knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks. However, extending LLMs to perceive and reason over a new modality (e.g., vision), often requires costly development of large-scale vision language models (VLMs) with LLMs as backbones. Smaller VLMs are more efficient and adaptable but often lack the broad knowledge and reasoning capabilities of frontier LLMs. In this work, we propose BeMyEyes, a modular, multi-agent framework for extending LLMs to multimodal reasoning by orchestrating collaboration between efficient, adaptable VLMs as perceivers and powerful LLMs as reasoners through conversations. We then introduce a data synthesis and supervised fine-tuning pipeline to train the perceiver agent to effectively collaborate with the reasoner agent. By combining the complementary strengths of perception and reasoning agents, BeMyEyes avoids the need for training large-scale multimodal models, preserves the generalization and reasoning capabilities of LLMs, and allows flexible extension to new domains and modalities. Experiments show that our framework unlocks the multimodal reasoning capabilities for LLMs, enabling a lightweight and fully open-source solution, i.e. equipping text-only DeepSeek-R1 with Qwen2.5-VL-7B perceiver, to outperform large-scale proprietary VLMs such as GPT-4o on a wide range of knowledge-intensive multimodal tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness, modularity, and scalability of our multi-agent approach for building future multimodal reasoning systems.
☆ DR Tulu: Reinforcement Learning with Evolving Rubrics for Deep Research
Rulin Shao, Akari Asai, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Hamish Ivison, Varsha Kishore, Jingming Zhuo, Xinran Zhao, Molly Park, Samuel G. Finlayson, David Sontag, Tyler Murray, Sewon Min, Pradeep Dasigi, Luca Soldaini, Faeze Brahman, Wen-tau Yih, Tongshuang Wu, Luke Zettlemoyer, Yoon Kim, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Pang Wei Koh
Deep research models perform multi-step research to produce long-form, well-attributed answers. However, most open deep research models are trained on easily verifiable short-form QA tasks via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which does not extend to realistic long-form tasks. We address this with Reinforcement Learning with Evolving Rubrics (RLER), in which we construct and maintain rubrics that co-evolve with the policy model during training; this allows the rubrics to incorporate information that the model has newly explored and to provide discriminative, on-policy feedback. Using RLER, we develop Deep Research Tulu (DR Tulu-8B), the first open model that is directly trained for open-ended, long-form deep research. Across four long-form deep research benchmarks in science, healthcare and general domains, DR Tulu substantially outperforms existing open deep research models, and matches or exceeds proprietary deep research systems, while being significantly smaller and cheaper per query. To facilitate future research, we release all data, models, and code, including our new MCP-based agent infrastructure for deep research systems.
☆ Scalable Parameter-Light Spectral Method for Clustering Short Text Embeddings with a Cohesion-Based Evaluation Metric
Clustering short text embeddings is a foundational task in natural language processing, yet remains challenging due to the need to specify the number of clusters in advance. We introduce a scalable spectral method that estimates the number of clusters directly from the structure of the Laplacian eigenspectrum, constructed using cosine similarities and guided by an adaptive sampling strategy. This sampling approach enables our estimator to efficiently scale to large datasets without sacrificing reliability. To support intrinsic evaluation of cluster quality without ground-truth labels, we propose the Cohesion Ratio, a simple and interpretable evaluation metric that quantifies how much intra-cluster similarity exceeds the global similarity background. It has an information-theoretic motivation inspired by mutual information, and in our experiments it correlates closely with extrinsic measures such as normalized mutual information and homogeneity. Extensive experiments on six short-text datasets and four modern embedding models show that standard algorithms like K-Means and HAC, when guided by our estimator, significantly outperform popular parameter-light methods such as HDBSCAN, OPTICS, and Leiden. These results demonstrate the practical value of our spectral estimator and Cohesion Ratio for unsupervised organization and evaluation of short text data. Implementation of our estimator of k and Cohesion Ratio, along with code for reproducing the experiments, is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/towards_clustering-0C2E.
☆ Learning to Reason: Training LLMs with GPT-OSS or DeepSeek R1 Reasoning Traces
Test-time scaling, which leverages additional computation during inference to improve model accuracy, has enabled a new class of Large Language Models (LLMs) that are able to reason through complex problems by understanding the goal, turning this goal into a plan, working through intermediate steps, and checking their own work before answering . Frontier large language models with reasoning capabilities, such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI's gpt-oss, follow the same procedure when solving complex problems by generating intermediate reasoning traces before giving the final answer. Today, these models are being increasingly used to generate reasoning traces that serve as high-quality supervised data for post-training of small and medium-sized language models to teach reasoning capabilities without requiring expensive human curation. In this work, we compare the performance of medium-sized LLMs on Math problems after post-training on two kinds of reasoning traces. We compare the impact of reasoning traces generated by DeepSeek-R1 and gpt-oss LLMs in terms of accuracy and inference efficiency.
☆ Generative Query Expansion with Multilingual LLMs for Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval
Query expansion is the reformulation of a user query by adding semantically related information, and is an essential component of monolingual and cross-lingual information retrieval used to ensure that relevant documents are not missed. Recently, multilingual large language models (mLLMs) have shifted query expansion from semantic augmentation with synonyms and related words to pseudo-document generation. Pseudo-documents both introduce additional relevant terms and bridge the gap between short queries and long documents, which is particularly beneficial in dense retrieval. This study evaluates recent mLLMs and fine-tuned variants across several generative expansion strategies to identify factors that drive cross-lingual retrieval performance. Results show that query length largely determines which prompting technique is effective, and that more elaborate prompts often do not yield further gains. Substantial linguistic disparities persist: cross-lingual query expansion can produce the largest improvements for languages with the weakest baselines, yet retrieval is especially poor between languages written in different scripts. Fine-tuning is found to lead to performance gains only when the training and test data are of similar format. These outcomes underline the need for more balanced multilingual and cross-lingual training and evaluation resources.
☆ What Drives Cross-lingual Ranking? Retrieval Approaches with Multilingual Language Models
Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) enables access to multilingual knowledge but remains challenging due to disparities in resources, scripts, and weak cross-lingual semantic alignment in embedding models. Existing pipelines often rely on translation and monolingual retrieval heuristics, which add computational overhead and noise, degrading performance. This work systematically evaluates four intervention types, namely document translation, multilingual dense retrieval with pretrained encoders, contrastive learning at word, phrase, and query-document levels, and cross-encoder re-ranking, across three benchmark datasets. We find that dense retrieval models trained specifically for CLIR consistently outperform lexical matching methods and derive little benefit from document translation. Contrastive learning mitigates language biases and yields substantial improvements for encoders with weak initial alignment, and re-ranking can be effective, but depends on the quality of the cross-encoder training data. Although high-resource languages still dominate overall performance, gains over lexical and document-translated baselines are most pronounced for low-resource and cross-script pairs. These findings indicate that cross-lingual search systems should prioritise semantic multilingual embeddings and targeted learning-based alignment over translation-based pipelines, particularly for cross-script and under-resourced languages.
☆ MultiBanAbs: A Comprehensive Multi-Domain Bangla Abstractive Text Summarization Dataset
This study developed a new Bangla abstractive summarization dataset to generate concise summaries of Bangla articles from diverse sources. Most existing studies in this field have concentrated on news articles, where journalists usually follow a fixed writing style. While such approaches are effective in limited contexts, they often fail to adapt to the varied nature of real-world Bangla texts. In today's digital era, a massive amount of Bangla content is continuously produced across blogs, newspapers, and social media. This creates a pressing need for summarization systems that can reduce information overload and help readers understand content more quickly. To address this challenge, we developed a dataset of over 54,000 Bangla articles and summaries collected from multiple sources, including blogs such as Cinegolpo and newspapers such as Samakal and The Business Standard. Unlike single-domain resources, our dataset spans multiple domains and writing styles. It offers greater adaptability and practical relevance. To establish strong baselines, we trained and evaluated this dataset using several deep learning and transfer learning models, including LSTM, BanglaT5-small, and MTS-small. The results highlight its potential as a benchmark for future research in Bangla natural language processing. This dataset provides a solid foundation for building robust summarization systems and helps expand NLP resources for low-resource languages.
☆ PRInTS: Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Information Seeking
Information-seeking is a core capability for AI agents, requiring them to gather and reason over tool-generated information across long trajectories. However, such multi-step information-seeking tasks remain challenging for agents backed by language models. While process reward models (PRMs) can guide agents by ranking candidate steps at test-time, existing PRMs, designed for short reasoning with binary judgment, cannot capture richer dimensions of information-seeking steps, such as tool interactions and reasoning over tool outputs, nor handle the rapidly growing context in long-horizon tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce PRInTS, a generative PRM trained with dual capabilities: (1) dense scoring based on the PRM's reasoning across multiple step quality dimensions (e.g., interpretation of tool outputs, tool call informativeness) and (2) trajectory summarization that compresses the growing context while preserving essential information for step evaluation. Extensive evaluations across FRAMES, GAIA (levels 1-3), and WebWalkerQA (easy-hard) benchmarks on multiple models, along with ablations, reveal that best-of-n sampling with PRInTS enhances information-seeking abilities of open-source models as well as specialized agents, matching or surpassing the performance of frontier models with a much smaller backbone agent and outperforming other strong reward modeling baselines.
comment: 18 pages, code: https://github.com/G-JWLee/PRInTS
☆ AutoEnv: Automated Environments for Measuring Cross-Environment Agent Learning
Jiayi Zhang, Yiran Peng, Fanqi Kong, Yang Cheng, Yifan Wu, Zhaoyang Yu, Jinyu Xiang, Jianhao Ruan, Jinlin Wang, Maojia Song, HongZhang Liu, Xiangru Tang, Bang Liu, Chenglin Wu, Yuyu Luo
Humans naturally adapt to diverse environments by learning underlying rules across worlds with different dynamics, observations, and reward structures. In contrast, existing agents typically demonstrate improvements via self-evolving within a single domain, implicitly assuming a fixed environment distribution. Cross-environment learning has remained largely unmeasured: there is no standard collection of controllable, heterogeneous environments, nor a unified way to represent how agents learn. We address these gaps in two steps. First, we propose AutoEnv, an automated framework that treats environments as factorizable distributions over transitions, observations, and rewards, enabling low-cost (4.12 USD on average) generation of heterogeneous worlds. Using AutoEnv, we construct AutoEnv-36, a dataset of 36 environments with 358 validated levels, on which seven language models achieve 12-49% normalized reward, demonstrating the challenge of AutoEnv-36. Second, we formalize agent learning as a component-centric process driven by three stages of Selection, Optimization, and Evaluation applied to an improvable agent component. Using this formulation, we design eight learning methods and evaluate them on AutoEnv-36. Empirically, the gain of any single learning method quickly decrease as the number of environments increases, revealing that fixed learning methods do not scale across heterogeneous environments. Environment-adaptive selection of learning methods substantially improves performance but exhibits diminishing returns as the method space expands. These results highlight both the necessity and the current limitations of agent learning for scalable cross-environment generalization, and position AutoEnv and AutoEnv-36 as a testbed for studying cross-environment agent learning. The code is avaiable at https://github.com/FoundationAgents/AutoEnv.
☆ MapFormer: Self-Supervised Learning of Cognitive Maps with Input-Dependent Positional Embeddings
A cognitive map is an internal model which encodes the abstract relationships among entities in the world, giving humans and animals the flexibility to adapt to new situations, with a strong out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization that current AI systems still do not possess. To bridge this gap, we introduce MapFormers, new architectures based on Transformer models, which can learn cognitive maps from observational data and perform path integration in parallel, in a self-supervised manner. Cognitive maps are learned in the model by disentangling structural relationships in the inputs from their specific content, a property that can be achieved naturally by updating the positional encoding in Transformers with input-dependent matrices. We developed two variants of MapFormers that unify absolute and relative positional encoding to model episodic (EM) and working memory (WM), respectively. We tested MapFormers on several tasks, including a classic 2D navigation task, showing that our models can learn a cognitive map of the underlying space and generalize OOD (e.g., to longer sequences) with near-perfect performance, unlike current architectures. Together, these results demonstrate the superiority of models designed to learn a cognitive map, and the importance of introducing a structural bias for structure-content disentanglement, which can be achieved in Transformers with input-dependent positional encoding. MapFormers have broad applications in both neuroscience and AI, by explaining the neural mechanisms giving rise to cognitive maps, while allowing these relation models to be learned at scale.
comment: 19 pages (29 with appendix), 8 figures
☆ CDLM: Consistency Diffusion Language Models For Faster Sampling
Minseo Kim, Chenfeng Xu, Coleman Hooper, Harman Singh, Ben Athiwaratkun, Ce Zhang, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising parallel generation paradigm but suffer from slow inference due to numerous refinement steps and the inability to use standard KV caching. We introduce CDLM (Consistency Diffusion Language Models), a training-based acceleration method that simultaneously tackles both bottlenecks. CDLM integrates consistency modeling to drastically reduce the number of required sampling steps by enabling multi-token finalization. Furthermore, we enforce a block-wise causal attention mask during fine-tuning, making the model fully compatible with KV caching. Experiments show CDLM achieves 3.6x-14.5x lower latency while maintaining competitive accuracy on math and coding tasks. The full training and evaluation code is available at https://github.com/SqueezeAILab/CDLM.
comment: 18 pages, 6 figures
☆ A Nutrition Multimodal Photoplethysmography Language Model
Hunger and satiety dynamics shape dietary behaviors and metabolic health, yet remain difficult to capture in everyday settings. We present a Nutrition Photoplethysmography Language Model (NPLM), integrating continuous photoplethysmography (PPG) from wearables with meal descriptions. NPLM projects PPG into embeddings interpretable by language models, enabling joint reasoning over physiology and meal context. Trained on 19,340 participants and 1.1 million meal-PPG pairs, the model improved daily caloric intake prediction by 11% over text-only baselines, with accuracy maintained when 80% of meal text was removed. In an independent validation study (n=140) with controlled dining and detailed meal information, the model replicated these findings. These results demonstrate the value of integrating physiological measurements from consumer wearables with meal information for noninvasive dietary monitoring at scale.
comment: 21 pages, 2 figures
☆ In Machina N400: Pinpointing Where a Causal Language Model Detects Semantic Violations
How and where does a transformer notice that a sentence has gone semantically off the rails? To explore this question, we evaluated the causal language model (phi-2) using a carefully curated corpus, with sentences that concluded plausibly or implausibly. Our analysis focused on the hidden states sampled at each model layer. To investigate how violations are encoded, we utilized two complementary probes. First, we conducted a per-layer detection using a linear probe. Our findings revealed that a simple linear decoder struggled to distinguish between plausible and implausible endings in the lowest third of the model's layers. However, its accuracy sharply increased in the middle blocks, reaching a peak just before the top layers. Second, we examined the effective dimensionality of the encoded violation. Initially, the violation widens the representational subspace, followed by a collapse after a mid-stack bottleneck. This might indicate an exploratory phase that transitions into rapid consolidation. Taken together, these results contemplate the idea of alignment with classical psycholinguistic findings in human reading, where semantic anomalies are detected only after syntactic resolution, occurring later in the online processing sequence.
comment: Accepted at AICS2025
☆ RAVEN++: Pinpointing Fine-Grained Violations in Advertisement Videos with Active Reinforcement Reasoning EMNLP 2025
Deyi Ji, Yuekui Yang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Haiyang Wu, Shaogang Tang, Xudong Chen, Shaoping Ma, Tianrun Chen, Lanyun Zhu
Advertising (Ad) is a cornerstone of the digital economy, yet the moderation of video advertisements remains a significant challenge due to their complexity and the need for precise violation localization. While recent advancements, such as the RAVEN model, have improved coarse-grained violation detection, critical gaps persist in fine-grained understanding, explainability, and generalization. To address these limitations, we propose RAVEN++, a novel framework that introduces three key innovations: 1) Active Reinforcement Learning (RL), which dynamically adapts training to samples of varying difficulty; 2) Fine-Grained Violation Understanding, achieved through hierarchical reward functions and reasoning distillation; and 3) Progressive Multi-Stage Training, which systematically combines knowledge injection, curriculum-based passive RL, and active RL. Extensive experiments on both public and proprietary datasets, on both offline scenarios and online deployed A/B Testing, demonstrate that RAVEN++ outperforms general-purpose LLMs and specialized models like RAVEN in terms of fine-grained violation understanding, reasoning capabilities, and generalization ability.
comment: EMNLP 2025 (Oral, Industry Track)
☆ Representational Stability of Truth in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for factual tasks such as "What treats asthma?" or "What is the capital of Latvia?". However, it remains unclear how stably LLMs encode distinctions between true, false, and neither-true-nor-false content in their internal probabilistic representations. We introduce representational stability as the robustness of an LLM's veracity representations to perturbations in the operational definition of truth. We assess representational stability by (i) training a linear probe on an LLM's activations to separate true from not-true statements and (ii) measuring how its learned decision boundary shifts under controlled label changes. Using activations from sixteen open-source models and three factual domains, we compare two types of neither statements. The first are fact-like assertions about entities we believe to be absent from any training data. We call these unfamiliar neither statements. The second are nonfactual claims drawn from well-known fictional contexts. We call these familiar neither statements. The unfamiliar statements induce the largest boundary shifts, producing up to $40\%$ flipped truth judgements in fragile domains (such as word definitions), while familiar fictional statements remain more coherently clustered and yield smaller changes ($\leq 8.2\%$). These results suggest that representational stability stems more from epistemic familiarity than from linguistic form. More broadly, our approach provides a diagnostic for auditing and training LLMs to preserve coherent truth assignments under semantic uncertainty, rather than optimizing for output accuracy alone.
comment: 25 pages, 24 figures
☆ From Pixels to Posts: Retrieval-Augmented Fashion Captioning and Hashtag Generation
This paper introduces the retrieval-augmented framework for automatic fashion caption and hashtag generation, combining multi-garment detection, attribute reasoning, and Large Language Model (LLM) prompting. The system aims to produce visually grounded, descriptive, and stylistically interesting text for fashion imagery, overcoming the limitations of end-to-end captioners that have problems with attribute fidelity and domain generalization. The pipeline combines a YOLO-based detector for multi-garment localization, k-means clustering for dominant color extraction, and a CLIP-FAISS retrieval module for fabric and gender attribute inference based on a structured product index. These attributes, together with retrieved style examples, create a factual evidence pack that is used to guide an LLM to generate human-like captions and contextually rich hashtags. A fine-tuned BLIP model is used as a supervised baseline model for comparison. Experimental results show that the YOLO detector is able to obtain a mean Average Precision (mAP@0.5) of 0.71 for nine categories of garments. The RAG-LLM pipeline generates expressive attribute-aligned captions and achieves mean attribute coverage of 0.80 with full coverage at the 50% threshold in hashtag generation, whereas BLIP gives higher lexical overlap and lower generalization. The retrieval-augmented approach exhibits better factual grounding, less hallucination, and great potential for scalable deployment in various clothing domains. These results demonstrate the use of retrieval-augmented generation as an effective and interpretable paradigm for automated and visually grounded fashion content generation.
comment: Submitted to Expert Systems with Applications
☆ Eliciting Chain-of-Thought in Base LLMs via Gradient-Based Representation Optimization AAAI2026
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is a critical capability for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to tackle com- plex multi-step tasks. While base LLMs, pre-trained on general text corpora, often struggle with reasoning due to a lack of specialized training, recent studies reveal their latent reason- ing potential tied to hidden states. However, existing hidden state manipulation methods, such as linear activation steering, suffer from limitations due to their rigid and unconstrained nature, often leading to distribution shifts and degraded text quality. In this work, we propose a novel approach for elic- iting CoT reasoning from base LLMs through hidden state manipulation grounded in probabilistic conditional generation. By reformulating the challenge as an optimization problem with a balanced likelihood and prior regularization framework, our method guides hidden states toward reasoning-oriented trajectories while preserving linguistic coherence. Extensive evaluations across mathematical, commonsense, and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach con- sistently outperforms existing steering methods, offering a theoretically principled and effective solution for enhancing reasoning capabilities in base LLMs.
comment: AAAI2026
☆ Emotion-Enhanced Multi-Task Learning with LLMs for Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis
Aspect category sentiment analysis (ACSA) has achieved remarkable progress with large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches primarily emphasize sentiment polarity while overlooking the underlying emotional dimensions that shape sentiment expressions. This limitation hinders the model's ability to capture fine-grained affective signals toward specific aspect categories. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel emotion-enhanced multi-task ACSA framework that jointly learns sentiment polarity and category-specific emotions grounded in Ekman's six basic emotions. Leveraging the generative capabilities of LLMs, our approach enables the model to produce emotional descriptions for each aspect category, thereby enriching sentiment representations with affective expressions. Furthermore, to ensure the accuracy and consistency of the generated emotions, we introduce an emotion refinement mechanism based on the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) dimensional framework. Specifically, emotions predicted by the LLM are projected onto a VAD space, and those inconsistent with their corresponding VAD coordinates are re-annotated using a structured LLM-based refinement strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines on all benchmark datasets. This underlines the effectiveness of integrating affective dimensions into ACSA.
comment: 8 pages, 4 figures
☆ On the Optimality of Discrete Object Naming: a Kinship Case Study
The structure of naming systems in natural languages hinges on a trade-off between high informativeness and low complexity. Prior work capitalizes on information theory to formalize these notions; however, these studies generally rely on two simplifications: (i) optimal listeners, and (ii) universal communicative need across languages. Here, we address these limitations by introducing an information-theoretic framework for discrete object naming systems, and we use it to prove that an optimal trade-off is achievable if and only if the listener's decoder is equivalent to the Bayesian decoder of the speaker. Adopting a referential game setup from emergent communication, and focusing on the semantic domain of kinship, we show that our notion of optimality is not only theoretically achievable but also emerges empirically in learned communication systems.
☆ A symbolic Perl algorithm for the unification of Nahuatl word spellings
Juan-José Guzmán-Landa, Jesús Vázquez-Osorio, Juan-Manuel Torres-Moreno, Ligia Quintana Torres, Miguel Figueroa-Saavedra, Martha-Lorena Avendaño-Garrido, Graham Ranger, Patricia Velázquez-Morales, Gerardo Eugenio Sierra Martínez
In this paper, we describe a symbolic model for the automatic orthographic unification of Nawatl text documents. Our model is based on algorithms that we have previously used to analyze sentences in Nawatl, and on the corpus called $π$-yalli, consisting of texts in several Nawatl orthographies. Our automatic unification algorithm implements linguistic rules in symbolic regular expressions. We also present a manual evaluation protocol that we have proposed and implemented to assess the quality of the unified sentences generated by our algorithm, by testing in a sentence semantic task. We have obtained encouraging results from the evaluators for most of the desired features of our artificially unified sentences
comment: MICAI 2025, LNAI 16221, pp. 141-154, 2026. 10 pages, 4 Figures, 8 Tables
☆ A Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Multi-Domain Low-Resource In-Context NER via Knowledge Retrieval, Disambiguation and Reflective Analysis AAAI 2026
In-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising paradigm for named entity recognition (NER) in low-resource scenarios. However, existing ICL-based NER methods suffer from three key limitations: (1) reliance on dynamic retrieval of annotated examples, which is problematic when annotated data is scarce; (2) limited generalization to unseen domains due to the LLM's insufficient internal domain knowledge; and (3) failure to incorporate external knowledge or resolve entity ambiguities. To address these challenges, we propose KDR-Agent, a novel multi-agent framework for multi-domain low-resource in-context NER that integrates Knowledge retrieval, Disambiguation, and Reflective analysis. KDR-Agent leverages natural-language type definitions and a static set of entity-level contrastive demonstrations to reduce dependency on large annotated corpora. A central planner coordinates specialized agents to (i) retrieve factual knowledge from Wikipedia for domain-specific mentions, (ii) resolve ambiguous entities via contextualized reasoning, and (iii) reflect on and correct model predictions through structured self-assessment. Experiments across ten datasets from five domains demonstrate that KDR-Agent significantly outperforms existing zero-shot and few-shot ICL baselines across multiple LLM backbones. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/MWXGOD/KDR-Agent.
comment: This paper has been accepted by AAAI 2026 (Main Technical Track)
☆ GraphMind: Theorem Selection and Conclusion Generation Framework with Dynamic GNN for LLM Reasoning
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, including multi-step reasoning such as mathematical proving. However, existing approaches often lack an explicit and dynamic mechanism to structurally represent and evolve intermediate reasoning states, which limits their ability to perform context-aware theorem selection and iterative conclusion generation. To address these challenges, we propose GraphMind, a novel dynamic graph-based framework that integrates the graph neural network (GNN) with LLMs to iteratively select theorems and generate intermediate conclusions for multi-step reasoning. Our method models the reasoning process as a heterogeneous evolving graph, where nodes represent conditions, theorems, and conclusions, while edges capture logical dependencies between nodes. By encoding the current reasoning state with GNN and leveraging semantic matching for theorem selection, our framework enables context-aware, interpretable, and structured reasoning in a closed-loop manner. Experiments on various question-answering (QA) datasets demonstrate that our proposed GraphMind method achieves consistent performance improvements and significantly outperforms existing baselines in multi-step reasoning, validating the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach.
☆ Logic of Montage
In expressing emotions, as an expression form separate from natural language, we propose an alternative form that complements natural language, acting as a proxy or window for emotional states. First, we set up an expression form "Effect of Contradictory Structure." "Effect of Contradictory Structure" is not static but dynamic. Effect in "Effect of Contradictory Structure" is unpleasant or pleasant, and the orientation to avoid that unpleasantness is considered pseudo-expression of will. Second, "Effect of Contradictory Structure" can be overlapped with each other. This overlapping operation is called "montage." A broader "Structure" that includes related "Effect of Contradictory Structure" and "Effect of Structure" are set up. Montage produces "Effect of Structure". In montage, it is necessary to set something like "strength," so we adopted Deleuze and Deleuze/Guattari's word "intensity" and set it as an element of our model. We set up a general theoretical framework - Word Import Between Systems (Models) and justified the import of "intensity" through Austin's use of the word "force." "Effect of Structure" process is demonstrated using the example of proceeding to the next level of education.
☆ Understanding and Mitigating Over-refusal for Large Language Models via Safety Representation
Large language models demonstrate powerful capabilities across various natural language processing tasks, yet they also harbor safety vulnerabilities. To enhance LLM safety, various jailbreak defense methods have been proposed to guard against harmful outputs. However, improvements in model safety often come at the cost of severe over-refusal, failing to strike a good balance between safety and usability. In this paper, we first analyze the causes of over-refusal from a representation perspective, revealing that over-refusal samples reside at the boundary between benign and malicious samples. Based on this, we propose MOSR, designed to mitigate over-refusal by intervening the safety representation of LLMs. MOSR incorporates two novel components: (1) Overlap-Aware Loss Weighting, which determines the erasure weight for malicious samples by quantifying their similarity to pseudo-malicious samples in the representation space, and (2) Context-Aware Augmentation, which supplements the necessary context for rejection decisions by adding harmful prefixes before rejection responses. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in mitigating over-refusal while largely maintaining safety. Overall, we advocate that future defense methods should strike a better balance between safety and over-refusal.
☆ Classification EM-PCA for clustering and embedding
The mixture model is undoubtedly one of the greatest contributions to clustering. For continuous data, Gaussian models are often used and the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is particularly suitable for estimating parameters from which clustering is inferred. If these models are particularly popular in various domains including image clustering, they however suffer from the dimensionality and also from the slowness of convergence of the EM algorithm. However, the Classification EM (CEM) algorithm, a classifying version, offers a fast convergence solution while dimensionality reduction still remains a challenge. Thus we propose in this paper an algorithm combining simultaneously and non-sequentially the two tasks --Data embedding and Clustering-- relying on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and CEM. We demonstrate the interest of such approach in terms of clustering and data embedding. We also establish different connections with other clustering approaches.
comment: Accepted at the IEEE conference on Big Data (Special Session on Machine Learning)
☆ Knowledge-based Graphical Method for Safety Signal Detection in Clinical Trials
Francois Vandenhende, Anna Georgiou, Michalis Georgiou, Theodoros Psaras, Ellie Karekla, Elena Hadjicosta
We present a graphical, knowledge-based method for reviewing treatment-emergent adverse events (AEs) in clinical trials. The approach enhances MedDRA by adding a hidden medical knowledge layer (Safeterm) that captures semantic relationships between terms in a 2-D map. Using this layer, AE Preferred Terms can be regrouped automatically into similarity clusters, and their association to the trial disease may be quantified. The Safeterm map is available online and connected to aggregated AE incidence tables from ClinicalTrials.gov. For signal detection, we compute treatment-specific disproportionality metrics using shrinkage incidence ratios. Cluster-level EBGM values are then derived through precision-weighted aggregation. Two visual outputs support interpretation: a semantic map showing AE incidence and an expectedness-versus-disproportionality plot for rapid signal detection. Applied to three legacy trials, the automated method clearly recovers all expected safety signals. Overall, augmenting MedDRA with a medical knowledge layer improves clarity, efficiency, and accuracy in AE interpretation for clinical trials.
comment: 13 pages, 3 tables, 5 figures
☆ SWAN: Sparse Winnowed Attention for Reduced Inference Memory via Decompression-Free KV-Cache Compression
Large Language Models (LLMs) face a significant bottleneck during autoregressive inference due to the massive memory footprint of the Key-Value (KV) cache. Existing compression techniques like token eviction, quantization, or other low-rank methods often risk information loss, have fixed limits, or introduce significant computational overhead from explicit decompression steps. In this work, we introduce SWAN, a novel, fine-tuning-free framework that eliminates this overhead. Our method uses an offline orthogonal matrix to rotate and prune the KV-cache, which is then used directly in the attention computation without any reconstruction. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that SWAN, augmented with a small dense buffer, offers a robust trade-off, maintaining performance close to the uncompressed baseline even at aggressive 50-60% memory savings per-token on KV-cache. A key advantage is its runtime-tunable compression level, allowing operators to dynamically adjust the memory footprint, a flexibility absent in methods requiring fixed offline configurations. This combination of a decompression-free design, high performance under compression, and adaptability makes SWAN a practical and efficient solution for serving LLMs with long contexts.
☆ Skeletons Matter: Dynamic Data Augmentation for Text-to-Query EMNLP 2025
The task of translating natural language questions into query languages has long been a central focus in semantic parsing. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly accelerated progress in this field. However, existing studies typically focus on a single query language, resulting in methods with limited generalizability across different languages. In this paper, we formally define the Text-to-Query task paradigm, unifying semantic parsing tasks across various query languages. We identify query skeletons as a shared optimization target of Text-to-Query tasks, and propose a general dynamic data augmentation framework that explicitly diagnoses model-specific weaknesses in handling these skeletons to synthesize targeted training data. Experiments on four Text-to-Query benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance using only a small amount of synthesized data, highlighting the efficiency and generality of our approach and laying a solid foundation for unified research on Text-to-Query tasks. We release our code at https://github.com/jjjycaptain/Skeletron.
comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2025
☆ Look It Up: Analysing Internal Web Search Capabilities of Modern LLMs
Modern large language models integrate web search to provide real-time answers, yet it remains unclear whether they are efficiently calibrated to use search when it is actually needed. We introduce a benchmark evaluating both the necessity and effectiveness of web access across commercial models with no access to internal states or parameters. The dataset includes a static split of 783 temporally anchored questions answerable from pre-cutoff knowledge, aimed at testing whether models invoke search based on low internal confidence, and a dynamic split of 288 post-cutoff queries designed to test whether models recognise when search is required and retrieve updated information. Web access substantially improves static accuracy for GPT-5-mini and Claude Haiku 4.5, though confidence calibration worsens. On dynamic queries, both models frequently invoke search yet remain below 70 percent accuracy due to weak query formulation. Costs per accuracy-improving call remain low, but returns diminish once initial retrieval fails. Selective invocation helps, but models become overconfident and inconsistent after search. Overall, built-in web search meaningfully improves factual accuracy and can be invoked selectively, yet models remain overconfident, skip retrieval when it is essential, and falter once initial search queries underperform. Taken together, internal web search works better as a good low-latency verification layer than a reliable analytical tool, with clear room for improvement.
comment: 10 pages, 8 figures
☆ How Learning Rate Decay Wastes Your Best Data in Curriculum-Based LLM Pretraining
Kairong Luo, Zhenbo Sun, Haodong Wen, Xinyu Shi, Jiarui Cui, Chenyi Dang, Kaifeng Lyu, Wenguang Chen
Due to the scarcity of high-quality data, large language models (LLMs) are often trained on mixtures of data with varying quality levels, even after sophisticated data curation. A natural approach to better leverage high-quality data is curriculum-based pretraining, where the model is trained on data sorted in ascending order of quality as determined by a quality metric. However, prior studies have reported limited improvements from such curriculum-based pretraining strategies. This work identifies a critical factor constraining these methods: the incompatibility between the ascending data quality order and the decaying learning rate (LR) schedule. We find that while curriculum-based training substantially outperforms random shuffling when using a constant LR, its advantage diminishes under standard LR decay schedules. Our experiments show this incompatibility can be mitigated by two simple strategies: (1) employing a more moderate LR decay schedule, where the final LR is only moderately smaller than the peak LR, and (2) replacing LR decay with model averaging, i.e., computing a weighted average of the final few checkpoints. By combining these strategies, we improve the average score on a suite of standard benchmarks by 1.64% over random shuffling, without additional data refinement. Validated on 1.5B-parameter models trained over 30B tokens with various data-quality metrics, our findings call for a re-evaluation of curriculum-based LLM pretraining and underscore the potential of co-designing data curricula with optimization methods.
☆ Reproducibility Study of Large Language Model Bayesian Optimization ICLR 2024
In this reproducibility study, we revisit the LLAMBO framework of Daxberger et al. (2024), a prompting-based Bayesian optimization (BO) method that uses large language models as discriminative surrogates and acquisition optimizers via text-only interactions. We replicate the core Bayesmark and HPOBench experiments under the original evaluation protocol, but replace GPT-3.5 with the open-weight Llama 3.1 70B model used for all text encoding components.
Our results broadly confirm the main claims of LLAMBO. Contextual warm starting via textual problem and hyperparameter descriptions substantially improves early regret behaviour and reduces variance across runs. LLAMBO's discriminative surrogate is weaker than GP or SMAC as a pure single task regressor, yet benefits from cross task semantic priors induced by the language model. Ablations that remove textual context markedly degrade predictive accuracy and calibration, while the LLAMBO candidate sampler consistently generates higher quality and more diverse proposals than TPE or random sampling. Experiments with smaller backbones (Gemma 27B, Llama 3.1 8B) yield unstable or invalid predictions, suggesting insufficient capacity for reliable surrogate behaviour.
Overall, our study shows that the LLAMBO architecture is robust to changing the language model backbone and remains effective when instantiated with Llama 3.1 70B.
comment: 7 pages, 8 figures. Reproducibility study of the LLAMBO framework (ICLR 2024). Code: https://github.com/spagnoloG/llambo-reproducibility
☆ CoreEval: Automatically Building Contamination-Resilient Datasets with Real-World Knowledge toward Reliable LLM Evaluation ACL'25
Data contamination poses a significant challenge to the fairness of LLM evaluations in natural language processing tasks by inadvertently exposing models to test data during training. Current studies attempt to mitigate this issue by modifying existing datasets or generating new ones from freshly collected information. However, these methods fall short of ensuring contamination-resilient evaluation, as they fail to fully eliminate pre-existing knowledge from models or preserve the semantic complexity of the original datasets. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{CoreEval}, a \textbf{Co}ntamination-\textbf{re}silient \textbf{Eval}uation strategy for automatically updating data with real-world knowledge. This approach begins by extracting entity relationships from the original data and leveraging the GDELT database to retrieve relevant, up-to-date knowledge. The retrieved knowledge is then recontextualized and integrated with the original data, which is refined and restructured to ensure semantic coherence and enhanced task relevance. Ultimately, a robust data reflection mechanism is employed to iteratively verify and refine labels, ensuring consistency between the updated and original datasets. Extensive experiments on updated datasets validate the robustness of CoreEval, demonstrating its effectiveness in mitigating performance overestimation caused by data contamination.
comment: ACL'25
☆ Think Before You Prune: Selective Self-Generated Calibration for Pruning Large Reasoning Models
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex reasoning benchmarks. However, their long chain-of-thought reasoning processes incur significant inference overhead. Pruning has emerged as a promising approach to reducing computational costs. However, existing efforts have primarily focused on large language models (LLMs), while pruning LRMs remains unexplored. In this work, we conduct the first empirical study on pruning LRMs and show that directly applying existing pruning techniques fails to yield satisfactory results. Our findings indicate that using self-generated reasoning data for calibration can substantially improve pruning performance. We further investigate how the difficulty and length of reasoning data affect pruning outcomes. Our analysis reveals that challenging and moderately long self-generated reasoning data serve as ideal calibration data. Based on these insights, we propose a Selective Self-Generated Reasoning (SSGR) data construction strategy to provide effective calibration data for pruning LRMs. Experimental results on the DeepSeek-R1-Distill model series validate that our strategy improves the reasoning ability of pruned LRMs by 10%-13% compared to general pruning methods.
comment: Under Review
☆ Generating Reading Comprehension Exercises with Large Language Models for Educational Applications
With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), the applications of LLMs have grown substantially. In the education domain, LLMs demonstrate significant potential, particularly in automatic text generation, which enables the creation of intelligent and adaptive learning content. This paper proposes a new LLMs framework, which is named as Reading Comprehension Exercise Generation (RCEG). It can generate high-quality and personalized English reading comprehension exercises automatically. Firstly, RCEG uses fine-tuned LLMs to generate content candidates. Then, it uses a discriminator to select the best candidate. Finally, the quality of the generated content has been improved greatly. To evaluate the performance of RCEG, a dedicated dataset for English reading comprehension is constructed to perform the experiments, and comprehensive evaluation metrics are used to analyze the experimental results. These metrics include content diversity, factual accuracy, linguistic toxicity, and pedagogical alignment. Experimental results show that RCEG significantly improves the relevance and cognitive appropriateness of the generated exercises.
☆ FanarGuard: A Culturally-Aware Moderation Filter for Arabic Language Models
Content moderation filters are a critical safeguard against alignment failures in language models. Yet most existing filters focus narrowly on general safety and overlook cultural context. In this work, we introduce FanarGuard, a bilingual moderation filter that evaluates both safety and cultural alignment in Arabic and English. We construct a dataset of over 468K prompt and response pairs, drawn from synthetic and public datasets, scored by a panel of LLM judges on harmlessness and cultural awareness, and use it to train two filter variants. To rigorously evaluate cultural alignment, we further develop the first benchmark targeting Arabic cultural contexts, comprising over 1k norm-sensitive prompts with LLM-generated responses annotated by human raters. Results show that FanarGuard achieves stronger agreement with human annotations than inter-annotator reliability, while matching the performance of state-of-the-art filters on safety benchmarks. These findings highlight the importance of integrating cultural awareness into moderation and establish FanarGuard as a practical step toward more context-sensitive safeguards.
☆ Cognitive Alpha Mining via LLM-Driven Code-Based Evolution
Discovering effective predictive signals, or ``alphas,'' from financial data with high dimensionality and extremely low signal-to-noise ratio remains a difficult open problem. Despite progress in deep learning, genetic programming, and, more recently, large language model (LLM)--based factor generation, existing approaches still explore only a narrow region of the vast alpha search space. Neural models tend to produce opaque and fragile patterns, while symbolic or formula-based methods often yield redundant or economically ungrounded expressions that generalize poorly. Although different in form, these paradigms share a key limitation: none can conduct broad, structured, and human-like exploration that balances logical consistency with creative leaps. To address this gap, we introduce the Cognitive Alpha Mining Framework (CogAlpha), which combines code-level alpha representation with LLM-driven reasoning and evolutionary search. Treating LLMs as adaptive cognitive agents, our framework iteratively refines, mutates, and recombines alpha candidates through multi-stage prompts and financial feedback. This synergistic design enables deeper thinking, richer structural diversity, and economically interpretable alpha discovery, while greatly expanding the effective search space. Experiments on A-share equities demonstrate that CogAlpha consistently discovers alphas with superior predictive accuracy, robustness, and generalization over existing methods. Our results highlight the promise of aligning evolutionary optimization with LLM-based reasoning for automated and explainable alpha discovery. All source code will be released.
☆ Large Language Models for the Summarization of Czech Documents: From History to the Present
Text summarization is the task of automatically condensing longer texts into shorter, coherent summaries while preserving the original meaning and key information. Although this task has been extensively studied in English and other high-resource languages, Czech summarization, particularly in the context of historical documents, remains underexplored. This is largely due to the inherent linguistic complexity of Czech and the lack of high-quality annotated datasets.
In this work, we address this gap by leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Mistral and mT5, which have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks and multilingual settings. In addition, we also propose a translation-based approach that first translates Czech texts into English, summarizes them using an English-language model, and then translates the summaries back into Czech. Our study makes the following main contributions: We demonstrate that LLMs achieve new state-of-the-art results on the SumeCzech dataset, a benchmark for modern Czech text summarization, showing the effectiveness of multilingual LLMs even for morphologically rich, medium-resource languages like Czech. We introduce a new dataset, Posel od Čerchova, designed for the summarization of historical Czech texts. This dataset is derived from digitized 19th-century publications and annotated for abstractive summarization. We provide initial baselines using modern LLMs to facilitate further research in this underrepresented area.
By combining cutting-edge models with both modern and historical Czech datasets, our work lays the foundation for further progress in Czech summarization and contributes valuable resources for future research in Czech historical document processing and low-resource summarization more broadly.
☆ A Reproducible Framework for Neural Topic Modeling in Focus Group Analysis
Focus group discussions generate rich qualitative data but their analysis traditionally relies on labor-intensive manual coding that limits scalability and reproducibility. We present a rigorous, reproducible computational framework for applying neural topic modeling to focus group transcripts, addressing fundamental methodological challenges: hyperparameter sensitivity, model stability, and validation of interpretability. Using BERTopic applied to ten focus groups exploring HPV vaccine perceptions in Tunisia (1,076 utterances), we conducted systematic evaluation across 27 hyperparameter configurations, assessed stability through bootstrap resampling with 30 replicates per configuration, and validated interpretability through formal human evaluation by three domain experts. Our analysis demonstrates substantial sensitivity to hyperparameter choices and reveals that metric selection for stability assessment must align with analytical goals. A hierarchical merging strategy (extracting fine-grained topics for stability then consolidating for interpretability) effectively navigates the stability-coherence tradeoff, achieving coherence of 0.558 compared to 0.539 for direct extraction. Human validation confirmed topic quality with very good inter-rater reliability (ICC = 0.79, weighted Cohen's kappa = 0.578). Our framework provides practical guidelines that researchers can adapt to their own qualitative research contexts. All code, data processing scripts, and evaluation protocols are publicly available to support reproduction and extension of this work.
☆ Concept than Document: Context Compression via AMR-based Conceptual Entropy
Large Language Models (LLMs) face information overload when handling long contexts, particularly in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) where extensive supporting documents often introduce redundant content. This issue not only weakens reasoning accuracy but also increases computational overhead. We propose an unsupervised context compression framework that exploits Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graphs to preserve semantically essential information while filtering out irrelevant text. By quantifying node-level entropy within AMR graphs, our method estimates the conceptual importance of each node, enabling the retention of core semantics. Specifically, we construct AMR graphs from raw contexts, compute the conceptual entropy of each node, and screen significant informative nodes to form a condensed and semantically focused context than raw documents. Experiments on the PopQA and EntityQuestions datasets show that our method outperforms vanilla and other baselines, achieving higher accuracy while substantially reducing context length. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work introducing AMR-based conceptual entropy for context compression, demonstrating the potential of stable linguistic features in context engineering.
☆ Assessing the alignment between infants' visual and linguistic experience using multimodal language models
Alvin Wei Ming Tan, Jane Yang, Tarun Sepuri, Khai Loong Aw, Robert Z. Sparks, Zi Yin, Virginia A. Marchman, Michael C. Frank, Bria Long
Figuring out which objects or concepts words refer to is a central language learning challenge for young children. Most models of this process posit that children learn early object labels from co-occurrences of words and their referents that occur when someone around them talks about an object in the immediate physical environment. But how aligned in time are children's visual and linguistic experiences during everyday learning? To date, answers to this question have been limited by the need for labor-intensive manual annotations of vision-language co-occurrences. Here, we evaluate the use of contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) models to automatically characterize vision-language alignment in egocentric videos taken from the infant perspective in home environments. After validating CLIP alignment scores using human alignment judgments, we apply this metric to a large corpus of infant-perspective videos. We show that idealized aligned moments for learning (e.g., "look at the ball" with a ball present in the child's view) are relatively rare in children's everyday experiences compared to modern machine learning datasets, and highlight variability in alignment both within and across children. These findings suggest that infrequent alignment is a constraint for models describing early word learning and offer a new method for investigating children's multimodal environment.
☆ HyperbolicRAG: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hyperbolic Representations
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to access external knowledge, helping mitigate hallucinations and enhance domain-specific expertise. Graph-based RAG enhances structural reasoning by introducing explicit relational organization that enables information propagation across semantically connected text units. However, these methods typically rely on Euclidean embeddings that capture semantic similarity but lack a geometric notion of hierarchical depth, limiting their ability to represent abstraction relationships inherent in complex knowledge graphs. To capture both fine-grained semantics and global hierarchy, we propose HyperbolicRAG, a retrieval framework that integrates hyperbolic geometry into graph-based RAG. HyperbolicRAG introduces three key designs: (1) a depth-aware representation learner that embeds nodes within a shared Poincare manifold to align semantic similarity with hierarchical containment, (2) an unsupervised contrastive regularization that enforces geometric consistency across abstraction levels, and (3) a mutual-ranking fusion mechanism that jointly exploits retrieval signals from Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces, emphasizing cross-space agreement during inference. Extensive experiments across multiple QA benchmarks demonstrate that HyperbolicRAG outperforms competitive baselines, including both standard RAG and graph-augmented baselines.
comment: 12 pages
☆ Context-Aware Whisper for Arabic ASR Under Linguistic Varieties
Low-resource ASR remains a challenging problem, especially for languages like Arabic that exhibit wide dialectal variation and limited labeled data. We propose context-aware prompting strategies to adapt OpenAI's Whisper for Arabic speech recognition without retraining. Our methods include decoder prompting with first-pass transcriptions or retrieved utterances, and encoder prefixing using speech synthesized in the target speaker's voice. We introduce techniques such as prompt reordering, speaker-aware prefix synthesis, and modality-specific retrieval (lexical, semantic, acoustic) to improve transcription in real-world, zero-shot settings. Evaluated on nine Arabic linguistic conditions, our approach reduces WER by up to 22.3% on Modern Standard Arabic and 9.2% on dialectal speech, significantly mitigating hallucinations and speaker mismatch.
☆ Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Distribution-Based Feature Recovery and Fusion ACM MM 2024
As posts on social media increase rapidly, analyzing the sentiments embedded in image-text pairs has become a popular research topic in recent years. Although existing works achieve impressive accomplishments in simultaneously harnessing image and text information, they lack the considerations of possible low-quality and missing modalities. In real-world applications, these issues might frequently occur, leading to urgent needs for models capable of predicting sentiment robustly. Therefore, we propose a Distribution-based feature Recovery and Fusion (DRF) method for robust multimodal sentiment analysis of image-text pairs. Specifically, we maintain a feature queue for each modality to approximate their feature distributions, through which we can simultaneously handle low-quality and missing modalities in a unified framework. For low-quality modalities, we reduce their contributions to the fusion by quantitatively estimating modality qualities based on the distributions. For missing modalities, we build inter-modal mapping relationships supervised by samples and distributions, thereby recovering the missing modalities from available ones. In experiments, two disruption strategies that corrupt and discard some modalities in samples are adopted to mimic the low-quality and missing modalities in various real-world scenarios. Through comprehensive experiments on three publicly available image-text datasets, we demonstrate the universal improvements of DRF compared to SOTA methods under both two strategies, validating its effectiveness in robust multimodal sentiment analysis.
comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2024
☆ Large Language Models Require Curated Context for Reliable Political Fact-Checking -- Even with Reasoning and Web Search
Large language models (LLMs) have raised hopes for automated end-to-end fact-checking, but prior studies report mixed results. As mainstream chatbots increasingly ship with reasoning capabilities and web search tools -- and millions of users already rely on them for verification -- rigorous evaluation is urgent. We evaluate 15 recent LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and DeepSeek on more than 6,000 claims fact-checked by PolitiFact, comparing standard models with reasoning- and web-search variants. Standard models perform poorly, reasoning offers minimal benefits, and web search provides only moderate gains, despite fact-checks being available on the web. In contrast, a curated RAG system using PolitiFact summaries improved macro F1 by 233% on average across model variants. These findings suggest that giving models access to curated high-quality context is a promising path for automated fact-checking.
☆ RhinoInsight: Improving Deep Research through Control Mechanisms for Model Behavior and Context
Large language models are evolving from single-turn responders into tool-using agents capable of sustained reasoning and decision-making for deep research. Prevailing systems adopt a linear pipeline of plan to search to write to a report, which suffers from error accumulation and context rot due to the lack of explicit control over both model behavior and context. We introduce RhinoInsight, a deep research framework that adds two control mechanisms to enhance robustness, traceability, and overall quality without parameter updates. First, a Verifiable Checklist module transforms user requirements into traceable and verifiable sub-goals, incorporates human or LLM critics for refinement, and compiles a hierarchical outline to anchor subsequent actions and prevent non-executable planning. Second, an Evidence Audit module structures search content, iteratively updates the outline, and prunes noisy context, while a critic ranks and binds high-quality evidence to drafted content to ensure verifiability and reduce hallucinations. Our experiments demonstrate that RhinoInsight achieves state-of-the-art performance on deep research tasks while remaining competitive on deep search tasks.
☆ Empathetic Cascading Networks: A Multi-Stage Prompting Technique for Reducing Social Biases in Large Language Models
This report presents the Empathetic Cascading Networks (ECN) framework, a multi-stage prompting method designed to enhance the empathetic and inclusive capabilities of large language models. ECN employs four stages: Perspective Adoption, Emotional Resonance, Reflective Understanding, and Integrative Synthesis, to guide models toward generating emotionally resonant and contextually aware responses. Experimental results demonstrate that ECN achieves the highest Empathy Quotient (EQ) scores across GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4, while maintaining competitive Regard and Perplexity metrics. These findings emphasize ECN's potential for applications requiring empathy and inclusivity in conversational AI.
☆ CLaRa: Bridging Retrieval and Generation with Continuous Latent Reasoning
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge but still suffers from long contexts and disjoint retrieval-generation optimization. In this work, we propose CLaRa (Continuous Latent Reasoning), a unified framework that performs embedding-based compression and joint optimization in a shared continuous space. To obtain semantically rich and retrievable compressed vectors, we introduce SCP, a key-preserving data synthesis framework using QA and paraphrase supervision. CLaRa then trains the reranker and generator end-to-end via a single language modeling loss, with gradients flowing through both modules using a differentiable top-k estimator. Theoretically, this unified optimization aligns retrieval relevance with answer quality. Experiments across multiple QA benchmarks show that CLaRa achieves state-of-the-art compression and reranking performance, often surpassing text-based fine-tuned baselines.
♻ ☆ MiniF2F in Rocq: Automatic Translation Between Proof Assistants -- A Case Study
In this work, we conduct an experiment using state-of-the-art LLMs to translate MiniF2F into Rocq. The translation task focuses on generating a Rocq theorem based on three sources: a natural language description, the Lean formalization, and the Isabelle formalization. We conducted our experiment in 3 stages of increasing complexity, from basic one-shot prompting to multi-turn conversations that incorporate feedback from unsuccessful attempts. At each stage, we perform multiple rounds of translation using increasingly advanced models: GPT-4o mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, o1 mini, and o1. We successfully translated 478 out of 488 theorems. The dataset is opensource: https://github.com/LLM4Rocq/miniF2F-rocq.
♻ ☆ Information Extraction From Fiscal Documents Using LLMs
Vikram Aggarwal, Jay Kulkarni, Aditi Mascarenhas, Aakriti Narang, Siddarth Raman, Ajay Shah, Susan Thomas
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in text comprehension, but their ability to process complex, hierarchical tabular data remains underexplored. We present a novel approach to extracting structured data from multi-page government fiscal documents using LLM-based techniques. Applied to annual fiscal documents from the State of Karnataka in India (200+ pages), our method achieves high accuracy through a multi-stage pipeline that leverages domain knowledge, sequential context, and algorithmic validation. A large challenge with traditional OCR methods is the inability to verify the accurate extraction of numbers. When applied to fiscal data, the inherent structure of fiscal tables, with totals at each level of the hierarchy, allows for robust internal validation of the extracted data. We use these hierarchical relationships to create multi-level validation checks. We demonstrate that LLMs can read tables and also process document-specific structural hierarchies, offering a scalable process for converting PDF-based fiscal disclosures into research-ready databases. Our implementation shows promise for broader applications across developing country contexts.
comment: 6 pages. Presented at the AI for Financial Inclusion, Risk Modeling and Resilience in Emerging Markets workshop at ACM ICAIF 2025 Singapore
♻ ☆ PEANuT: Parameter-Efficient Adaptation with Weight-aware Neural Tweakers
Yibo Zhong, Haoxiang Jiang, Lincan Li, Ryumei Nakada, Tianci Liu, Linjun Zhang, Huaxiu Yao, Haoyu Wang
Fine-tuning large pre-trained foundation models often yields excellent downstream performance but is prohibitively expensive when updating all parameters. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods such as LoRA alleviate this by introducing lightweight update modules, yet they commonly rely on weight-agnostic linear approximations, limiting their expressiveness. In this work, we propose PEANuT, a novel PEFT framework that introduces weight-aware neural tweakers, compact neural modules that generate task-adaptive updates conditioned on frozen pre-trained weights. PEANuT provides a flexible yet efficient way to capture complex update patterns without full model tuning. We theoretically show that PEANuT achieves equivalent or greater expressivity than existing linear PEFT methods with comparable or fewer parameters. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks with over twenty datasets demonstrate that PEANuT consistently outperforms strong baselines in both NLP and vision tasks, while maintaining low computational overhead.
♻ ☆ Sentence Smith: Controllable Edits for Evaluating Text Embeddings EMNLP 2025
Controllable and transparent text generation has been a long-standing goal in NLP. Almost as long-standing is a general idea for addressing this challenge: Parsing text to a symbolic representation, and generating from it. However, earlier approaches were hindered by parsing and generation insufficiencies. Using modern parsers and a safety supervision mechanism, we show how close current methods come to this goal. Concretely, we propose the Sentence Smith framework for English, which has three steps: 1. Parsing a sentence into a semantic graph. 2. Applying human-designed semantic manipulation rules. 3. Generating text from the manipulated graph. A final entailment check (4.) verifies the validity of the applied transformation. To demonstrate our framework's utility, we use it to induce hard negative text pairs that challenge text embedding models. Since the controllable generation makes it possible to clearly isolate different types of semantic shifts, we can evaluate text embedding models in a fine-grained way, also addressing an issue in current benchmarking where linguistic phenomena remain opaque. Human validation confirms that our transparent generation process produces texts of good quality. Notably, our way of generation is very resource-efficient, since it relies only on smaller neural networks.
comment: EMNLP 2025 (main), this version fixes a subscript typo in Eq 1
♻ ☆ Enhancing Domain-Specific Encoder Models with LLM-Generated Data: How to Leverage Ontologies, and How to Do Without Them EMNLP 2025
We investigate the use of LLM-generated data for continual pretraining of encoder models in specialized domains with limited training data, using the scientific domain of invasion biology as a case study. To this end, we leverage domain-specific ontologies by enriching them with LLM-generated data and pretraining the encoder model as an ontology-informed embedding model for concept definitions. To evaluate the effectiveness of this method, we compile a benchmark specifically designed for assessing model performance in invasion biology. After demonstrating substantial improvements over standard LLM pretraining, we investigate the feasibility of applying the proposed approach to domains without comprehensive ontologies by substituting ontological concepts with concepts automatically extracted from a small corpus of scientific abstracts and establishing relationships between concepts through distributional statistics. Our results demonstrate that this automated approach achieves comparable performance using only a small set of scientific abstracts, resulting in a fully automated pipeline for enhancing domain-specific understanding of small encoder models that is especially suited for application in low-resource settings and achieves performance comparable to masked language modeling pretraining on much larger datasets.
comment: Published in the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
♻ ☆ How does Alignment Enhance LLMs' Multilingual Capabilities? A Language Neurons Perspective AAAI 2026
Shimao Zhang, Zhejian Lai, Xiang Liu, Shuaijie She, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Shujian Huang, Jiajun Chen
Multilingual Alignment is an effective and representative paradigm to enhance LLMs' multilingual capabilities, which transfers the capabilities from the high-resource languages to the low-resource languages. Meanwhile, some research on language-specific neurons provides a new perspective to analyze and understand LLMs' mechanisms. However, we find that there are many neurons that are shared by multiple but not all languages and cannot be correctly classified. In this work, we propose a ternary classification methodology that categorizes neurons into three types, including language-specific neurons, language-related neurons, and general neurons. And we propose a corresponding identification algorithm to distinguish these different types of neurons. Furthermore, based on the distributional characteristics of different types of neurons, we divide the LLMs' internal process for multilingual inference into four parts: (1) multilingual understanding, (2) shared semantic space reasoning, (3) multilingual output space transformation, and (4) vocabulary space outputting. Additionally, we systematically analyze the models before and after alignment with a focus on different types of neurons. We also analyze the phenomenon of ''Spontaneous Multilingual Alignment''. Overall, our work conducts a comprehensive investigation based on different types of neurons, providing empirical results and valuable insights to better understand multilingual alignment and multilingual capabilities of LLMs.
comment: AAAI 2026 (Oral)
♻ ☆ ContrastScore: Towards Higher Quality, Less Biased, More Efficient Evaluation Metrics with Contrastive Evaluation AACL 2025
Evaluating the quality of generated text automatically remains a significant challenge. Conventional reference-based metrics have been shown to exhibit relatively weak correlation with human evaluations. Recent research advocates the use of large language models (LLMs) as source-based metrics for natural language generation (NLG) assessment. While promising, LLM-based metrics, particularly those using smaller models, still fall short in aligning with human judgments. In this work, we introduce ContrastScore, a contrastive evaluation metric designed to enable higher-quality, less biased, and more efficient assessment of generated text. We evaluate ContrastScore on two NLG tasks: machine translation and summarization. Experimental results show that ContrastScore consistently achieves stronger correlation with human judgments than both single-model and ensemble-based baselines. Notably, ContrastScore based on Qwen 3B and 0.5B even outperforms Qwen 7B, despite having only half as many parameters, demonstrating its efficiency. Furthermore, it effectively mitigates common evaluation biases such as length and likelihood preferences, resulting in more robust automatic evaluation.
comment: Accepted at AACL 2025 (Main Conference Paper)
♻ ☆ Strategic Innovation Management in the Age of Large Language Models Market Intelligence, Adaptive R&D, and Ethical Governance
This study analyzes the multiple functions of Large Language Models (LLMs) in transforming research and development (R&D) processes. By automating knowledge discovery, boosting hypothesis creation, integrating transdisciplinary insights, and enabling cooperation within innovation ecosystems, LLMs dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of research processes. Through extensive analysis of scientific literature, patent databases, and experimental data, these models enable more flexible and informed R&D workflows, ultimately accelerating innovation cycles and lowering time-to-market for breakthrough ideas.
♻ ☆ Word-level Annotation of GDPR Transparency Compliance in Privacy Policies using Large Language Models
Ensuring transparency of data practices related to personal information is a core requirement of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, large-scale compliance assessment remains challenging due to the complexity and diversity of privacy policy language. Manual audits are labour-intensive and inconsistent, while current automated methods often lack the granularity required to capture nuanced transparency disclosures.
In this paper, we present a modular large language model (LLM)-based pipeline for fine-grained word-level annotation of privacy policies with respect to GDPR transparency requirements. Our approach integrates LLM-driven annotation with passage-level classification, retrieval-augmented generation, and a self-correction mechanism to deliver scalable, context-aware annotations across 21 GDPR-derived transparency requirements. To support empirical evaluation, we compile a corpus of 703,791 English-language privacy policies and generate a ground-truth sample of 200 manually annotated policies based on a comprehensive, GDPR-aligned annotation scheme.
We propose a two-tiered evaluation methodology capturing both passage-level classification and span-level annotation quality and conduct a comparative analysis of seven state-of-the-art LLMs on two annotation schemes, including the widely used OPP-115 dataset. The results of our evaluation show that decomposing the annotation task and integrating targeted retrieval and classification components significantly improve annotation accuracy, particularly for well-structured requirements. Our work provides new empirical resources and methodological foundations for advancing automated transparency compliance assessment at scale.
comment: Accepted to Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs) 1 (2026)
♻ ☆ A Survey of Generative Categories and Techniques in Multimodal Generative Models
Multimodal Generative Models (MGMs) have rapidly evolved beyond text generation, now spanning diverse output modalities including images, music, video, human motion, and 3D objects, by integrating language with other sensory modalities under unified architectures. This survey categorises six primary generative modalities and examines how foundational techniques, namely Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), Mixture of Experts (MoE), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, enable cross-modal capabilities. We analyze key models, architectural trends, and emergent cross-modal synergies, while highlighting transferable techniques and unresolved challenges. Building on a common taxonomy of models and training recipes, we propose a unified evaluation framework centred on faithfulness, compositionality, and robustness, and synthesise evidence from benchmarks and human studies across modalities. We further analyse trustworthiness, safety, and ethical risks, including multimodal bias, privacy leakage, and the misuse of high-fidelity media generation for deepfakes, disinformation, and copyright infringement in music and 3D assets, together with emerging mitigation strategies. Finally, we discuss how architectural trends, evaluation protocols, and governance mechanisms can be co-designed to close current capability and safety gaps, outlining critical paths toward more general-purpose, controllable, and accountable multimodal generative systems.
♻ ☆ Live-SWE-agent: Can Software Engineering Agents Self-Evolve on the Fly?
Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping almost all industries, including software engineering. In recent years, a number of LLM agents have been proposed to solve real-world software problems. Such software agents are typically equipped with a suite of coding tools and can autonomously decide the next actions to form complete trajectories to solve end-to-end software tasks. While promising, they typically require dedicated design and may still be suboptimal, since it can be extremely challenging and costly to exhaust the entire agent scaffold design space. Recognizing that software agents are inherently software themselves that can be further refined/modified, researchers have proposed a number of self-improving software agents recently, including the Darwin-Gödel Machine (DGM). Meanwhile, such self-improving agents require costly offline training on specific benchmarks and may not generalize well across different LLMs or benchmarks. In this paper, we propose Live-SWE-agent, the first live software agent that can autonomously and continuously evolve itself on-the-fly during runtime when solving real-world software problems. More specifically, Live-SWE-agent starts with the most basic agent scaffold with only access to bash tools (e.g., mini-SWE-agent), and autonomously evolves its own scaffold implementation while solving real-world software problems. Our evaluation on the widely studied SWE-bench Verified benchmark shows that LIVE-SWE-AGENT can achieve an impressive solve rate of 77.4% without test-time scaling, outperforming all existing software agents, including the best proprietary solution. Moreover, Live-SWE-agent outperforms state-of-the-art manually crafted software agents on the recent SWE-Bench Pro benchmark, achieving the best-known solve rate of 45.8%.
♻ ☆ Lost in translation: using global fact-checks to measure multilingual misinformation prevalence, spread, and evolution
Misinformation and disinformation are growing threats in the digital age, affecting people across languages and borders. However, no research has investigated the prevalence of multilingual misinformation and quantified the extent to which misinformation diffuses across languages. This paper investigates the prevalence and dynamics of multilingual misinformation through an analysis of 264,487 fact-checks spanning 95 languages. To study the evolution of claims over time and mutations across languages, we represent fact-checks with multilingual sentence embeddings and build a graph where semantically similar claims are linked. We provide quantitative evidence of repeated fact-checking efforts and establish that claims diffuse across languages. Specifically, we find that while the majority of misinformation claims are only fact-checked once, 10.26%, corresponding to more than 27,000 claims, are checked multiple times. Using fact-checks as a proxy for the spread of misinformation, we find 32.26% of repeated claims cross linguistic boundaries, suggesting that some misinformation permeates language barriers. However, spreading patterns exhibit strong assortativity, with misinformation more likely to spread within the same language or language family. Next we show that fact-checkers take more time to fact-check claims that have crossed language barriers and model the temporal and cross-lingual evolution of claims. We analyze connected components and shortest paths connecting different versions of a claim finding that claims gradually drift over time and undergo greater alteration when traversing languages. Misinformation changes over time, reducing the effectiveness of static claim matching algorithms. The findings advocate for expanded information sharing between fact-checkers globally while underscoring the importance of localized verification.
♻ ☆ In-Situ Tweedie Discrete Diffusion Models
While diffusion models excel at generating continuous data such as images, adapting them to discrete tasks has relied on indirect approaches that either operate in continuous embedding spaces or use token masking mechanisms, both of which deviate from modeling the true discrete data distribution that can be theoretically guaranteed by Tweedie's formula. We propose in-situ Tweedie Discrete Diffusion (TDD), a framework that performs diffusion guaranteed by Tweedie's formula directly within the discrete one-hot space, hence "in-situ." Unlike prior methods that diffuse continuous embeddings or mask tokens, TDD directly corrupts one-hot vectors with Gaussian noise and performs iterative denoising through a timestep-conditioned cross-entropy objective rather than mean-squared-error reconstruction. At each denoising step, the model predicts class probabilities, applies argmax to obtain discrete predictions, converts them to one-hot vectors, and feeds them into the next iteration with progressively reduced noise. This process naturally unifies discriminative classification and generative modeling under a single framework. Experiments demonstrate that TDD achieves strong performance on both image classification and text generation tasks, with extensive ablation studies confirming the effectiveness of each design component. Our work establishes a principled approach to discrete diffusion that preserves the core characteristics of diffusion models while operating natively in discrete space.
♻ ☆ AbstRaL: Augmenting LLMs' Reasoning by Reinforcing Abstract Thinking
Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs), especially smaller ones, often lack robustness in grade school math (GSM) reasoning. In particular, they tend to experience performance drops when faced with distribution shifts, such as changes to numerical or nominal variables, or insertions of distracting clauses. A possible strategy to address this involves generating synthetic data to further "instantiate" reasoning problems on potential variations. In this work, we instead focuses on the strategy of "abstracting" reasoning problems. This not only helps counteract distribution shifts but also facilitates the connection to symbolic tools for deriving solutions. Focusing on GSM, we find that this abstraction process is better acquired through reinforcement learning (RL) than just supervised fine-tuning, which often fails to produce faithful abstractions. Our method, AbstRaL -- which promotes abstract reasoning in LLMs using RL on granular abstraction data -- significantly mitigates performance degradation on recent GSM perturbation benchmarks. Besides, improving GSM robustness via AbstRaL is shown to also implicitly benefit LLMs' capabilities on OOD mathematical and general reasoning tasks, indicating that abstract thinking broadly enables better generalizability.
comment: Under review
♻ ☆ URLs Help, Topics Guide: Understanding Metadata Utility in LLM Training NeurIPS 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly pretrained on vast corpora of text without utilizing contextual metadata such as source, quality, or topic, leading to a context-free learning paradigm. While recent studies suggest that adding metadata like URL information as context (i.e., auxiliary inputs not used in the loss calculation) can improve training efficiency and downstream performance, they offer limited understanding of which types of metadata are truly effective and under what conditions. In this work, we conduct a systematic evaluation and find that not all metadata types contribute equally. Only URL context speeds up training, whereas quality scores and topic/format domain information offer no clear benefit. Furthermore, the improved downstream performances of URL conditioning emerge only when longer prompts are used at inference time. In addition, we demonstrate that context-aware pretraining enables more controllable generation than context-free pretraining, in a classifier-free guidance fashion. Although topic and format metadata do not accelerate training, they are effective for steering outputs, offering human-interpretable control over generation.
comment: NeurIPS 2025, Camera Ready
♻ ☆ ModernBERT is More Efficient than Conventional BERT for Chest CT Findings Classification in Japanese Radiology Reports
Japanese language models for medical text classification face challenges with complex vocabulary and linguistic structures in radiology reports. This study compared three Japanese models--BERT Base, JMedRoBERTa, and ModernBERT--for multi-label classification of 18 chest CT findings. Using the CT-RATE-JPN dataset, all models were fine-tuned under identical conditions. ModernBERT showed clear efficiency advantages, producing substantially fewer tokens and achieving faster training and inference than the other models while maintaining comparable performance on the internal test dataset (exact match accuracy: 74.7% vs. 72.7% for BERT Base). To assess generalizability, we additionally constructed RR-Findings, an external dataset of 243 naturally written Japanese radiology reports annotated using the same schema. Under this domain-shifted setting, performance differences became pronounced: BERT Base outperformed both JMedRoBERTa and ModernBERT, whereas ModernBERT showed the largest decline in exact match accuracy. Average precision differences were smaller, indicating that ModernBERT retained reasonable ranking ability despite reduced calibration. Overall, ModernBERT offers substantial computational efficiency and strong in-domain performance but remains sensitive to real-world linguistic variability. These results highlight the need for more diverse natural-language training data and domain-specific calibration strategies to improve robustness when deploying modern transformer models in heterogeneous clinical environments.
comment: 31 pages
♻ ☆ Entropy-Guided Reasoning Compression
Large reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet the excessive length of their chain-of-thought outputs remains a major practical bottleneck due to high computation cost and poor deployability. Existing compression methods have achieved partial success but overlook a crucial phenomenon in the training process -- the entropy conflict. During compression training, entropy decreases, leading to shorter reasoning but limited exploration, while accuracy-oriented objectives increase entropy, lengthening reasoning chains. This can cause the model to get stuck in a local dilemma. Our analysis further reveals the origin of the entropy conflict: many high-entropy tokens are logical connectors that receive larger gradients and are encouraged under the performance objective, while the compression objective simultaneously penalizes these potentially redundant connectors. This opposing pressure creates a direct source of entropy conflict. To address these issues, we adopt an entropy-guided training framework. As entropy descends, the model is guided toward efficient reasoning by encouraging concise thought steps; as entropy rises, exploration is reinforced under the compact reasoning mode to improve robustness. Experiments on six mathematical benchmarks show that our method compresses reasoning length to 20% of the original while maintaining or even surpassing baseline accuracy. Code and models will be released publicly.
comment: 10pages, 4 figures
♻ ☆ Agent-OM: Leveraging LLM Agents for Ontology Matching
Ontology matching (OM) enables semantic interoperability between different ontologies and resolves their conceptual heterogeneity by aligning related entities. OM systems currently have two prevailing design paradigms: conventional knowledge-based expert systems and newer machine learning-based predictive systems. While large language models (LLMs) and LLM agents have revolutionised data engineering and have been applied creatively in many domains, their potential for OM remains underexplored. This study introduces a novel agent-powered LLM-based design paradigm for OM systems. With consideration of several specific challenges in leveraging LLM agents for OM, we propose a generic framework, namely Agent-OM (Agent for Ontology Matching), consisting of two Siamese agents for retrieval and matching, with a set of OM tools. Our framework is implemented in a proof-of-concept system. Evaluations of three Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) tracks over state-of-the-art OM systems show that our system can achieve results very close to the long-standing best performance on simple OM tasks and can significantly improve the performance on complex and few-shot OM tasks.
comment: 31 pages
♻ ☆ TRIM: Token Reduction and Inference Modeling for Cost-Effective Language Generation
The high inference cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) poses challenges, especially for tasks requiring lengthy outputs. However, natural language often contains redundancy, which presents an opportunity for optimization. We have observed that LLMs can generate distilled language (i.e., concise outputs that retain essential meaning) when prompted appropriately. We propose TRIM, a pipeline for saving computational cost in which the LLM omits a predefined set of semantically irrelevant and easily inferable words based on the context during inference. Then, a specifically trained smaller language model with lower inference cost reconstructs the distilled answer into the ideal answer. Our experiments show promising results, particularly on the proposed NaLDA evaluation dataset focused on the reconstruction task, with 19.4% saved tokens on average for GPT-4o and only a tiny decrease in evaluation metrics. This suggests that the approach can effectively balance efficiency and accuracy in language processing tasks.
comment: 16 pages, 9 tables, 5 figures
♻ ☆ Safeguarding Privacy of Retrieval Data against Membership Inference Attacks: Is This Query Too Close to Home? EMNLP
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates the hallucination problem in large language models (LLMs) and has proven effective for personalized usages. However, delivering private retrieved documents directly to LLMs introduces vulnerability to membership inference attacks (MIAs), which try to determine whether the target data point exists in the private external database or not. Based on the insight that MIA queries typically exhibit high similarity to only one target document, we introduce a novel similarity-based MIA detection framework designed for the RAG system. With the proposed method, we show that a simple detect-and-hide strategy can successfully obfuscate attackers, maintain data utility, and remain system-agnostic against MIA. We experimentally prove its detection and defense against various state-of-the-art MIA methods and its adaptability to existing RAG systems.
comment: Accepted for EMNLP findings 2025
♻ ☆ Evaluation of OpenAI o1: Opportunities and Challenges of AGI
Tianyang Zhong, Zhengliang Liu, Yi Pan, Yutong Zhang, Zeyu Zhang, Yifan Zhou, Shizhe Liang, Zihao Wu, Yanjun Lyu, Peng Shu, Xiaowei Yu, Chao Cao, Hanqi Jiang, Hanxu Chen, Yiwei Li, Junhao Chen, Huawen Hu, Yiheng Liu, Huaqin Zhao, Shaochen Xu, Haixing Dai, Lin Zhao, Ruidong Zhang, Wei Zhao, Zhenyuan Yang, Jingyuan Chen, Peilong Wang, Wei Ruan, Hui Wang, Huan Zhao, Jing Zhang, Yiming Ren, Shihuan Qin, Tong Chen, Jiaxi Li, Arif Hassan Zidan, Afrar Jahin, Minheng Chen, Sichen Xia, Jason Holmes, Yan Zhuang, Jiaqi Wang, Bochen Xu, Weiran Xia, Jichao Yu, Kaibo Tang, Yaxuan Yang, Bolun Sun, Tao Yang, Guoyu Lu, Xianqiao Wang, Lilong Chai, He Li, Jin Lu, Xin Zhang, Bao Ge, Xintao Hu, Lian Zhang, Hua Zhou, Lu Zhang, Shu Zhang, Zhen Xiang, Yudan Ren, Jun Liu, Xi Jiang, Yu Bao, Wei Zhang, Xiang Li, Gang Li, Wei Liu, Dinggang Shen, Andrea Sikora, Xiaoming Zhai, Dajiang Zhu, Tuo Zhang, Tianming Liu
This comprehensive study evaluates the performance of OpenAI's o1-preview large language model across a diverse array of complex reasoning tasks, spanning multiple domains, including computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, medicine, linguistics, and social sciences. Through rigorous testing, o1-preview demonstrated remarkable capabilities, often achieving human-level or superior performance in areas ranging from coding challenges to scientific reasoning and from language processing to creative problem-solving. Key findings include:
-83.3% success rate in solving complex competitive programming problems, surpassing many human experts.
-Superior ability in generating coherent and accurate radiology reports, outperforming other evaluated models.
-100% accuracy in high school-level mathematical reasoning tasks, providing detailed step-by-step solutions.
-Advanced natural language inference capabilities across general and specialized domains like medicine.
-Impressive performance in chip design tasks, outperforming specialized models in areas such as EDA script generation and bug analysis.
-Remarkable proficiency in anthropology and geology, demonstrating deep understanding and reasoning in these specialized fields.
-Strong capabilities in quantitative investing. O1 has comprehensive financial knowledge and statistical modeling skills.
-Effective performance in social media analysis, including sentiment analysis and emotion recognition.
The model excelled particularly in tasks requiring intricate reasoning and knowledge integration across various fields. While some limitations were observed, including occasional errors on simpler problems and challenges with certain highly specialized concepts, the overall results indicate significant progress towards artificial general intelligence.
♻ ☆ Beyond SELECT: A Comprehensive Taxonomy-Guided Benchmark for Real-World Text-to-SQL Translation
Text-to-SQL datasets are essential for training and evaluating text-to-SQL models, but existing datasets often suffer from limited coverage and fail to capture the diversity of real-world applications. To address this, we propose a novel taxonomy for text-to-SQL classification based on dimensions including core intents, statement types, syntax structures, and key actions. Using this taxonomy, we evaluate widely used public text-to-SQL datasets (e.g., Spider and Bird) and reveal limitations in their coverage and diversity. We then introduce a taxonomy-guided dataset synthesis pipeline, yielding a new dataset named SQL-Synth. This approach combines the taxonomy with Large Language Models (LLMs) to ensure the dataset reflects the breadth and complexity of real-world text-to-SQL applications. Extensive analysis and experimental results validate the effectiveness of our taxonomy, as SQL-Synth exhibits greater diversity and coverage compared to existing benchmarks. Moreover, we uncover that existing LLMs typically fall short in adequately capturing the full range of scenarios, resulting in limited performance on SQL-Synth. However, fine-tuning can substantially improve their performance in these scenarios. The proposed taxonomy has significant potential impact, as it not only enables comprehensive analysis of datasets and the performance of different LLMs, but also guides the construction of training data for LLMs.
♻ ☆ SGM: A Framework for Building Specification-Guided Moderation Filters
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with deployment-specific requirements is critical but inherently imperfect. Despite extensive training, models remain susceptible to misalignment and adversarial inputs such as jailbreaks. Content moderation filters are commonly used as external safeguards, though they typically focus narrowly on safety. We introduce SGM (Specification-Guided Moderation), a flexible framework for training moderation filters grounded in user-defined specifications that go beyond standard safety concerns. SGM automates training data generation without relying on human-written examples, enabling scalable support for diverse, application-specific alignment goals. SGM-trained filters perform on par with state-of-the-art safety filters built on curated datasets, while supporting fine-grained and user-defined alignment control.
♻ ☆ DataSage: Multi-agent Collaboration for Insight Discovery with External Knowledge Retrieval, Multi-role Debating, and Multi-path Reasoning
In today's data-driven era, fully automated end-to-end data analytics, particularly insight discovery, is critical for discovering actionable insights that assist organizations in making effective decisions. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), LLM-driven agents have emerged as a promising paradigm for automating data analysis and insight discovery. However, existing data insight agents remain limited in several key aspects, often failing to deliver satisfactory results due to: (1) insufficient utilization of domain knowledge, (2) shallow analytical depth, and (3) error-prone code generation during insight generation. To address these issues, we propose DataSage, a novel multi-agent framework that incorporates three innovative features including external knowledge retrieval to enrich the analytical context, a multi-role debating mechanism to simulate diverse analytical perspectives and deepen analytical depth, and multi-path reasoning to improve the accuracy of the generated code and insights. Extensive experiments on InsightBench demonstrate that DataSage consistently outperforms existing data insight agents across all difficulty levels, offering an effective solution for automated data insight discovery.
♻ ☆ Don't Take the Premise for Granted: Evaluating the Premise Critique Ability of Large Language Models EMNLP 2025
Large language models (LLMs) have witnessed rapid advancements, demonstrating remarkable capabilities. However, a notable vulnerability persists: LLMs often uncritically accept flawed or contradictory premises, leading to inefficient reasoning and unreliable outputs. This emphasizes the significance of possessing the \textbf{Premise Critique Ability} for LLMs, defined as the capacity to proactively identify and articulate errors in input premises. Most existing studies assess LLMs' reasoning ability in ideal settings, largely ignoring their vulnerabilities when faced with flawed premises. Thus, we introduce the \textbf{Premise Critique Bench (PCBench)}, designed by incorporating four error types across three difficulty levels, paired with multi-faceted evaluation metrics. We conducted systematic evaluations of 15 representative LLMs. Our findings reveal: (1) Most models rely heavily on explicit prompts to detect errors, with limited autonomous critique; (2) Premise critique ability depends on question difficulty and error type, with direct contradictions being easier to detect than complex or procedural errors; (3) Reasoning ability does not consistently correlate with the premise critique ability; (4) Flawed premises trigger overthinking in reasoning models, markedly lengthening responses due to repeated attempts at resolving conflicts. These insights underscore the urgent need to enhance LLMs' proactive evaluation of input validity, positioning premise critique as a foundational capability for developing reliable, human-centric systems. The code is available at https://github.com/MLGroupJLU/Premise_Critique.
comment: EMNLP 2025 Findings camera-ready version
♻ ☆ Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL
Generating accurate SQL from users' natural language questions (text-to-SQL) remains a long-standing challenge due to the complexities involved in user question understanding, database schema comprehension, and SQL generation. Traditional text-to-SQL systems, which combine human engineering and deep neural networks, have made significant progress. Subsequently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been developed for text-to-SQL tasks, achieving promising results. However, as modern databases and user questions grow more complex, PLMs with a limited parameter size often produce incorrect SQL. This necessitates more sophisticated and tailored optimization methods, which restricts the application of PLM-based systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown significant capabilities in natural language understanding as model scale increases. Thus, integrating LLM-based solutions can bring unique opportunities, improvements, and solutions to text-to-SQL research. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of existing LLM-based text-to-SQL studies. Specifically, we offer a brief overview of the technical challenges and evolutionary process of text-to-SQL. Next, we introduce the datasets and metrics designed to evaluate text-to-SQL systems. Subsequently, we present a systematic analysis of recent advances in LLM-based text-to-SQL. Finally, we make a summarization and discuss the remaining challenges in this field and suggest expectations for future research directions. All the related resources of LLM-based, including research papers, benchmarks, and open-source projects, are collected for the community in our repository: https://github.com/DEEP-PolyU/Awesome-LLM-based-Text2SQL.
comment: Accepted to IEEE TKDE2025
♻ ☆ Systematic Reward Gap Optimization for Mitigating VLM Hallucinations NeurIPS 2025
The success of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) in mitigating hallucinations in Vision Language Models (VLMs) critically hinges on the true reward gaps within preference pairs. However, current methods, typically relying on ranking or rewriting strategies, often struggle to optimize these reward gaps in a systematic way during data curation. A core difficulty lies in precisely characterizing and strategically manipulating the overall reward gap configuration, that is, the deliberate design of how to shape these reward gaps within each preference pair across the data. To address this, we introduce Topic-level Preference Rewriting(TPR), a novel framework designed for the systematic optimization of reward gap configuration. Through selectively replacing semantic topics within VLM responses with model's own resampled candidates for targeted rewriting, TPR can provide topic-level control over fine-grained semantic details. This precise control enables advanced data curation strategies, such as progressively adjusting the difficulty of rejected responses, thereby sculpting an effective reward gap configuration that guides the model to overcome challenging hallucinations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate TPR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple hallucination benchmarks, outperforming previous methods by an average of 20%. Notably, it significantly reduces hallucinations by up to 93% on ObjectHal-Bench, and also exhibits superior data efficiency towards robust and cost-effective VLM alignment. Code and datasets are available at https://tpr-dpo.github.io .
comment: 34 pages, 12 figures, Accepted by NeurIPS 2025
♻ ☆ IAG: Input-aware Backdoor Attack on VLM-based Visual Grounding
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have significantly enhanced the visual grounding task, which involves locating objects in an image based on natural language queries. Despite these advancements, the security of VLM-based grounding systems has not been thoroughly investigated. This paper reveals a novel and realistic vulnerability: the first multi-target backdoor attack on VLM-based visual grounding. Unlike prior attacks that rely on static triggers or fixed targets, we propose IAG, a method that dynamically generates input-aware, text-guided triggers conditioned on any specified target object description to execute the attack. This is achieved through a text-conditioned UNet that embeds imperceptible target semantic cues into visual inputs while preserving normal grounding performance on benign samples. We further develop a joint training objective that balances language capability with perceptual reconstruction to ensure imperceptibility, effectiveness, and stealth. Extensive experiments on multiple VLMs (e.g., LLaVA, InternVL, Ferret) and benchmarks (RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, Flickr30k Entities, and ShowUI) demonstrate that IAG achieves the best ASRs compared with other baselines on almost all settings without compromising clean accuracy, maintaining robustness against existing defenses, and exhibiting transferability across datasets and models. These findings underscore critical security risks in grounding-capable VLMs and highlight the need for further research on trustworthy multimodal understanding.
comment: 20 pages, 13 Figures
♻ ☆ BiasJailbreak:Analyzing Ethical Biases and Jailbreak Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models AAAI 2026
Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive proficiency in various tasks, they present potential safety risks, such as `jailbreaks', where malicious inputs can coerce LLMs into generating harmful content bypassing safety alignments. In this paper, we delve into the ethical biases in LLMs and examine how those biases could be exploited for jailbreaks. Notably, these biases result in a jailbreaking success rate in GPT-4o models that differs by 20\% between non-binary and cisgender keywords and by 16\% between white and black keywords, even when the other parts of the prompts are identical. We introduce the concept of BiasJailbreak, highlighting the inherent risks posed by these safety-induced biases. BiasJailbreak generates biased keywords automatically by asking the target LLM itself, and utilizes the keywords to generate harmful output. Additionally, we propose an efficient defense method BiasDefense, which prevents jailbreak attempts by injecting defense prompts prior to generation. BiasDefense stands as an appealing alternative to Guard Models, such as Llama-Guard, that require additional inference cost after text generation. Our findings emphasize that ethical biases in LLMs can actually lead to generating unsafe output, and suggest a method to make the LLMs more secure and unbiased. To enable further research and improvements, we open-source our code and artifacts of BiasJailbreak, providing the community with tools to better understand and mitigate safety-induced biases in LLMs.
comment: Accepted as a workshop paper at AAAI 2026
♻ ☆ Can Code-Switched Texts Activate a Knowledge Switch in LLMs? A Case Study on English-Korean Code-Switching EMNLP 2025
Recent large language models (LLMs) demonstrate multilingual abilities, yet they are English-centric due to dominance of English in training corpora. The limited resource for low-resource languages remains a crucial challenge. Code-switching (CS), a phenomenon where multilingual speakers alternate between languages in a discourse, can convey subtle cultural and linguistic nuances that can be otherwise lost in translation and elicits language-specific knowledge in human communications. In light of this, we investigate whether code-switching can activate, or identify and leverage knowledge for reasoning when LLMs solve low-resource language tasks. To facilitate the research, we first present EnKoQA, a synthetic English-Korean CS question-answering dataset. We provide comprehensive analysis on a variety of multilingual LLMs by subdividing activation process into knowledge identification and knowledge leveraging. Our results demonstrate that compared to English text, CS can faithfully activate knowledge inside LLMs especially on language-specific domains, suggesting the potential of code-switching on low-resource language tasks.
comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2025 Findings
♻ ☆ SlimInfer: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Dynamic Token Pruning
Long-context inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) is heavily limited by high computational demands. While several existing methods optimize attention computation, they still process the full set of hidden states at each layer, limiting overall efficiency. In this work, we propose SlimInfer, an innovative framework that aims to accelerate inference by directly pruning less critical prompt tokens during the forward pass. Our key insight is an information diffusion phenomenon: As information from critical tokens propagates through layers, it becomes distributed across the entire sequence. This diffusion process suggests that LLMs can maintain their semantic integrity when excessive tokens, even including these critical ones, are pruned in hidden states. Motivated by this, SlimInfer introduces a dynamic fine-grained pruning mechanism that accurately removes redundant tokens of hidden state at intermediate layers. This layer-wise pruning naturally enables an asynchronous KV cache manager that prefetches required token blocks without complex predictors, reducing both memory usage and I/O costs. Extensive experiments show that SlimInfer can achieve up to $\mathbf{2.53\times}$ time-to-first-token (TTFT) speedup and $\mathbf{1.88\times}$ end-to-end latency reduction for LLaMA3.1-8B-Instruct on a single RTX 4090, without sacrificing performance on LongBench. Our code is available at https://github.com/Longxmas/SlimInfer.
♻ ☆ REAL-Prover: Retrieval Augmented Lean Prover for Mathematical Reasoning
Ziju Shen, Naohao Huang, Fanyi Yang, Yutong Wang, Guoxiong Gao, Tianyi Xu, Jiedong Jiang, Wanyi He, Pu Yang, Mengzhou Sun, Haocheng Ju, Peihao Wu, Bryan Dai, Bin Dong
Nowadays, formal theorem provers have made monumental progress on high-school and competition-level mathematics, but few of them generalize to more advanced mathematics. In this paper, we present REAL-Prover, a new open-source stepwise theorem prover for Lean 4 to push this boundary. This prover, based on our fine-tuned large language model (REAL-Prover-v1) and integrated with a retrieval system (Leansearch-PS), notably boosts performance on solving college-level mathematics problems. To train REAL-Prover-v1, we developed HERALD-AF, a data extraction pipeline that converts natural language math problems into formal statements, and a new open-source Lean 4 interactive environment (Jixia-interactive) to facilitate synthesis data collection. In our experiments, our prover using only supervised fine-tune achieves competitive results with a 23.7% success rate (Pass@64) on the ProofNet dataset-comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. To further evaluate our approach, we introduce FATE-M, a new benchmark focused on algebraic problems, where our prover achieves a SOTA success rate of 56.7% (Pass@64).
♻ ☆ Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated notable success in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly on mathematics and programming tasks. Similar to how traditional RL helps agents explore and learn new strategies, RLVR is believed to enable LLMs to continuously self-improve, thus acquiring novel reasoning abilities beyond those of the corresponding base models. In this study we critically examine the current state of RLVR by systematically probing the reasoning capability boundaries of RLVR-trained LLMs across various model families, RL algorithms, and math, coding, and visual reasoning benchmarks, using pass@k at large k values as the evaluation metric. Surprisingly, we find that the current training setup does not elicit fundamentally new reasoning patterns. While RLVR-trained models outperform their base models at small k (e.g., k = 1), the base models achieve a higher pass@k score when k is large. Coverage and perplexity analyses show that the observed reasoning abilities originate from and are bounded by the base model. Treating the base model as an upper bound, our quantitative analysis shows that six popular RLVR algorithms perform similarly and remain far from optimal in leveraging the potential of the base model. By contrast, we find that distillation can introduce new reasoning patterns from the teacher and genuinely expand the model's reasoning capabilities. Overall, our findings suggest that current RLVR methods have not yet realized the potential of RL to elicit truly novel reasoning abilities in LLMs. This highlights the need for improved RL paradigms, such as continual scaling and multi-turn agent-environment interaction, to unlock this potential.
comment: 31 pages, 27 figures
♻ ☆ SproutBench: A Benchmark for Safe and Ethical Large Language Models for Youth AAAI 2026
The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) in applications targeting children and adolescents necessitates a fundamental reassessment of prevailing AI safety frameworks, which are largely tailored to adult users and neglect the distinct developmental vulnerabilities of minors. This paper highlights key deficiencies in existing LLM safety benchmarks, including their inadequate coverage of age-specific cognitive, emotional, and social risks spanning early childhood (ages 0--6), middle childhood (7--12), and adolescence (13--18). To bridge these gaps, we introduce SproutBench, an innovative evaluation suite comprising 1,283 developmentally grounded adversarial prompts designed to probe risks such as emotional dependency, privacy violations, and imitation of hazardous behaviors. Through rigorous empirical evaluation of 47 diverse LLMs, we uncover substantial safety vulnerabilities, corroborated by robust inter-dimensional correlations (e.g., between Safety and Risk Prevention) and a notable inverse relationship between Interactivity and Age Appropriateness. These insights yield practical guidelines for advancing child-centric AI design and deployment.
comment: Accepted in AAAI 2026 Workshop on AI for Education
♻ ☆ SATA: A Paradigm for LLM Jailbreak via Simple Assistive Task Linkage ACL
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements across various tasks, but their safety alignment remain a major concern. Exploring jailbreak prompts can expose LLMs' vulnerabilities and guide efforts to secure them. Existing methods primarily design sophisticated instructions for the LLM to follow, or rely on multiple iterations, which could hinder the performance and efficiency of jailbreaks. In this work, we propose a novel jailbreak paradigm, Simple Assistive Task Linkage (SATA), which can effectively circumvent LLM safeguards and elicit harmful responses. Specifically, SATA first masks harmful keywords within a malicious query to generate a relatively benign query containing one or multiple [MASK] special tokens. It then employs a simple assistive task such as a masked language model task or an element lookup by position task to encode the semantics of the masked keywords. Finally, SATA links the assistive task with the masked query to jointly perform the jailbreak. Extensive experiments show that SATA achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms baselines by a large margin. Specifically, on AdvBench dataset, with mask language model (MLM) assistive task, SATA achieves an overall attack success rate (ASR) of 85% and harmful score (HS) of 4.57, and with element lookup by position (ELP) assistive task, SATA attains an overall ASR of 76% and HS of 4.43.
comment: ACL Findings 2025. Welcome to employ SATA as a baseline
♻ ☆ Can Large Language Models Detect Misinformation in Scientific News Reporting?
Yupeng Cao, Aishwarya Muralidharan Nair, Nastaran Jamalipour Soofi, Elyon Eyimife, K. P. Subbalakshmi
Scientific facts are often spun in the popular press with the intent to influence public opinion and action, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Automatic detection of misinformation in the scientific domain is challenging because of the distinct styles of writing in these two media types and is still in its nascence. Most research on the validity of scientific reporting treats this problem as a claim verification challenge. In doing so, significant expert human effort is required to generate appropriate claims. Our solution bypasses this step and addresses a more real-world scenario where such explicit, labeled claims may not be available. The central research question of this paper is whether it is possible to use large language models (LLMs) to detect misinformation in scientific reporting. To this end, we first present a new labeled dataset SciNews, containing 2.4k scientific news stories drawn from trusted and untrustworthy sources, paired with related abstracts from the CORD-19 database. Our dataset includes both human-written and LLM-generated news articles, making it more comprehensive in terms of capturing the growing trend of using LLMs to generate popular press articles. Then, we identify dimensions of scientific validity in science news articles and explore how this can be integrated into the automated detection of scientific misinformation. We propose several baseline architectures using LLMs to automatically detect false representations of scientific findings in the popular press. For each of these architectures, we use several prompt engineering strategies including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting. We also test these architectures and prompting strategies on GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama2-7B, Llama2-13B.
♻ ★ GMoE: Empowering LLMs Fine-Tuning via MoE Graph Collaboration
The sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture of large language models (LLMs) confronts an inherent issue of load imbalance arising from the simplistic linear router strategy, which ultimately causes the instability and inefficient learning of LLMs. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel MoE graph-based framework $\textbf{GMoE}$, aimed at enhancing the collaboration among multiple experts. In GMoE, a graph router function is designed to capture the collaboration signals among experts. This enables all experts to dynamically allocate information derived from input data by sharing information with their neighboring experts. Moreover, we put forward two coordination strategies in GMoE: the $\textit{Poisson distribution-based distinction strategy}$ and the $\textit{Normal distribution-based balance strategy}$, to further release the capacity of each expert and increase the model stability in the fine-tuning of LLMs. Specifically, we leverage a parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique, i.e., Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), to implement the graph MoE architecture. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GMoE, showing the benefits of facilitating collaborations of multiple experts in LLM fine-tuning. The code of experimental implementation is available at https://github.com/BAI-LAB/GMoE
comment: 9 pages, 25 figures
♻ ☆ Ellipsoid-Based Decision Boundaries for Open Intent Classification
Textual open intent classification is crucial for real-world dialogue systems, enabling robust detection of unknown user intents without prior knowledge and contributing to the robustness of the system. While adaptive decision boundary methods have shown great potential by eliminating manual threshold tuning, existing approaches assume isotropic distributions of known classes, restricting boundaries to balls and overlooking distributional variance along different directions. To address this limitation, we propose EliDecide, a novel method that learns ellipsoid decision boundaries with varying scales along different feature directions. First, we employ supervised contrastive learning to obtain a discriminative feature space for known samples. Second, we apply learnable matrices to parameterize ellipsoids as the boundaries of each known class, offering greater flexibility than spherical boundaries defined solely by centers and radii. Third, we optimize the boundaries via a novelly designed dual loss function that balances empirical and open-space risks: expanding boundaries to cover known samples while contracting them against synthesized pseudo-open samples. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple text intent benchmarks and further on a question classification dataset. The flexibility of the ellipsoids demonstrates superior open intent detection capability and strong potential for generalization to more text classification tasks in diverse complex open-world scenarios.
♻ ☆ Beyond Multiple Choice: Verifiable OpenQA for Robust Vision-Language RFT
Yesheng Liu, Hao Li, Haiyu Xu, Baoqi Pei, Jiahao Wang, Mingxuan Zhao, Jingshu Zheng, Zheqi He, JG Yao, Bowen Qin, Xi Yang, Jiajun Zhang
Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) has been a popular format for evaluating and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) of modern multimodal language models. Its constrained output format allows for simplified, deterministic automatic verification. However, we find that the options may leak exploitable signals, which makes the accuracy metrics unreliable for indicating real capabilities and encourages explicit or implicit answer guessing behaviors during RFT. We propose ReVeL (Rewrite and Verify by LLM), a framework that rewrites multiple-choice questions into open-form questions while keeping answers verifiable whenever possible. The framework categorizes questions according to different answer types, apply different rewriting and verification schemes, respectively. When applied for RFT, we converted 20k MCQA examples and use GRPO to finetune Qwen2.5-VL models. Models trained on ReVeL-OpenQA match MCQA accuracy on multiple-choice benchmarks and improve OpenQA accuracy by about six percentage points, indicating better data efficiency and more robust reward signals than MCQA-based training. When used for evaluation, ReVeL also reveals up to 20 percentage points of score inflation in MCQA benchmarks (relative to OpenQA), improves judging accuracy, and reduces both cost and latency. We will release code and data publicly.
comment: Project url: https://flageval-baai.github.io/ReVeL/
♻ ☆ Personalized LLM Decoding via Contrasting Personal Preference EMNLP 2025
As large language models (LLMs) are progressively deployed in various real-world applications, personalization of LLMs has become increasingly important. While various approaches to LLM personalization such as prompt-based and training-based methods have been actively explored, the development of effective decoding-time algorithms remains largely overlooked, despite their demonstrated potential. In this paper, we propose CoPe (Contrasting Personal Preference), a novel decoding-time approach applied after performing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) on user-specific data. Our core idea is to leverage reward-guided decoding specifically for personalization by maximizing each user's implicit reward signal. We evaluate CoPe across five open-ended personalized text generation tasks. Our empirical results demonstrate that CoPe achieves strong performance, improving personalization by an average of 10.57% in ROUGE-L, without relying on external reward models or additional training procedures.
comment: EMNLP 2025 Main
♻ ☆ Advancing Multi-Agent RAG Systems with Minimalist Reinforcement Learning
Yihong Wu, Liheng Ma, Muzhi Li, Jiaming Zhou, Lei Ding, Jianye Hao, Ho-fung Leung, Irwin King, Yingxue Zhang, Jian-Yun Nie
Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often employ multi-turn interaction pipelines to interface with search engines for complex reasoning tasks. However, such multi-turn interactions inevitably produce long intermediate contexts, as context length grows exponentially with exploration depth. This leads to a well-known limitation of LLMs: their difficulty in effectively leveraging information from long contexts. This problem is further amplified in RAG systems that depend on in-context learning, where few-shot demonstrations must also be included in the prompt, compounding the context-length bottleneck. To address these challenges, we propose Mujica-MyGo, a unified framework for efficient multi-turn reasoning in RAG. Inspired by the divide-and-conquer principle, we introduce Mujica (Multi-hop Joint Intelligence for Complex Question Answering), a multi-agent RAG workflow that decomposes multi-turn interactions into cooperative sub-interactions, thereby mitigating long-context issues. To eliminate the dependency on in-context learning, we further develop MyGO (Minimalist Policy Gradient Optimization), a lightweight and efficient reinforcement learning algorithm that enables effective post-training of LLMs within complex RAG pipelines. We provide theoretical guarantees for MyGO's convergence to the optimal policy. Empirical evaluations across diverse question-answering benchmarks, covering both text corpora and knowledge graphs, show that Mujica-MyGO achieves superior performance.