Daily Papers

Distributional shift is a central challenge in the deployment of machine learning models as they can be ill-equipped for real-world data. This is particularly evident in text-to-audio generation where the encoded representations are easily undermined by unseen prompts, which leads to the degradation of generated audio -- the limited set of the text-audio pairs remains inadequate for conditional audio generation in the wild as user prompts are under-specified. In particular, we observe a consistent audio quality degradation in generated audio samples with user prompts, as opposed to training set prompts. To this end, we present a retrieval-based in-context prompt editing framework that leverages the training captions as demonstrative exemplars to revisit the user prompts. We show that the framework enhanced the audio quality across the set of collected user prompts, which were edited with reference to the training captions as exemplars.

In-context prompting in large language models (LLMs) has become a prevalent approach to improve zero-shot capabilities, but this idea is less explored in the vision domain. Existing visual prompting methods focus on referring segmentation to segment the most relevant object, falling short of addressing many generic vision tasks like open-set segmentation and detection. In this paper, we introduce a universal visual in-context prompting framework for both tasks. In particular, we build on top of an encoder-decoder architecture, and develop a versatile prompt encoder to support a variety of prompts like strokes, boxes, and points. We further enhance it to take an arbitrary number of reference image segments as the context. Our extensive explorations show that the proposed visual in-context prompting elicits extraordinary referring and generic segmentation capabilities to refer and detect, yielding competitive performance to close-set in-domain datasets and showing promising results on many open-set segmentation datasets. By joint training on COCO and SA-1B, our model achieves 57.7 PQ on COCO and 23.2 PQ on ADE20K. Code will be available at https://github.com/UX-Decoder/DINOv.

Prompt-based methods, which encode medical priors through descriptive text, have been only minimally explored for CT Image Quality Assessment (IQA). While such prompts can embed prior knowledge about diagnostic quality, they often introduce bias by reflecting idealized definitions that may not hold under real-world degradations such as noise, motion artifacts, or scanner variability. To address this, we propose the Context-Aware Prompt-guided Image Quality Assessment (CAP-IQA) framework, which integrates text-level priors with instance-level context prompts and applies causal debiasing to separate idealized knowledge from factual, image-specific degradations. Our framework combines a CNN-based visual encoder with a domain-specific text encoder to assess diagnostic visibility, anatomical clarity, and noise perception in abdominal CT images. The model leverages radiology-style prompts and context-aware fusion to align semantic and perceptual representations. On the 2023 LDCTIQA challenge benchmark, CAP-IQA achieves an overall correlation score of 2.8590 (sum of PLCC, SROCC, and KROCC), surpassing the top-ranked leaderboard team (2.7427) by 4.24%. Moreover, our comprehensive ablation experiments confirm that prompt-guided fusion and the simplified encoder-only design jointly enhance feature alignment and interpretability. Furthermore, evaluation on an in-house dataset of 91,514 pediatric CT images demonstrates the true generalizability of CAP-IQA in assessing perceptual fidelity in a different patient population.

We consider the problem of eliciting compositional generalization capabilities in large language models (LLMs) with a novel type of prompting strategy. Compositional generalization empowers the LLMs to solve problems that are harder than the ones they have seen (i.e., easy-to-hard generalization), which is a critical reasoning capability of human-like intelligence. However, even the current state-of-the-art LLMs still struggle with this form of reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose skills-in-context (SKiC) prompting, which instructs LLMs how to compose basic skills to resolve more complex problems. We find that it is crucial to demonstrate both the skills and the compositional examples within the same prompting context. With as few as two examplars, our SKiC prompting initiates strong synergies between skills and their composition capabilities. Notably, it empowers LLMs to solve unseen problems that require innovative skill compositions, achieving near-perfect generalization on a broad range of challenging compositionality tasks. Intriguingly, SKiC prompting unlocks the latent potential of LLMs, enabling them to leverage pre-existing internal skills acquired during earlier pre-training stages, even when these skills are not explicitly presented in the prompting context. This results in the capability of LLMs to solve unseen complex problems by activating and composing internal competencies. With such prominent features, SKiC prompting is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks (e.g., MATH).

Spatio-temporal action detection encompasses the tasks of localizing and classifying individual actions within a video. Recent works aim to enhance this process by incorporating interaction modeling, which captures the relationship between people and their surrounding context. However, these approaches have primarily focused on fully-supervised learning, and the current limitation lies in the lack of generalization capability to recognize unseen action categories. In this paper, we aim to adapt the pretrained image-language models to detect unseen actions. To this end, we propose a method which can effectively leverage the rich knowledge of visual-language models to perform Person-Context Interaction. Meanwhile, our Context Prompting module will utilize contextual information to prompt labels, thereby enhancing the generation of more representative text features. Moreover, to address the challenge of recognizing distinct actions by multiple people at the same timestamp, we design the Interest Token Spotting mechanism which employs pretrained visual knowledge to find each person's interest context tokens, and then these tokens will be used for prompting to generate text features tailored to each individual. To evaluate the ability to detect unseen actions, we propose a comprehensive benchmark on J-HMDB, UCF101-24, and AVA datasets. The experiments show that our method achieves superior results compared to previous approaches and can be further extended to multi-action videos, bringing it closer to real-world applications. The code and data can be found in https://webber2933.github.io/ST-CLIP-project-page.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely explored for embedding generation. While recent studies show that in-context learning (ICL) effectively enhances the representational capability of LLMs by prepending a few task-related demonstrations, it causes substantial token overhead due to the increased sequence length. In this work, we propose EPIC, a novel embedding-based in-context prompt training strategy that leverages ICL to generate high-quality embeddings while reducing computational burden during both training and inference. This approach replaces discrete text demonstrations with their corresponding continuous embeddings, which not only encourages the LLM to align semantically-related text pairs during contrastive learning, but also requires the model to interpret demonstration embeddings as part of the in-context prompt. Consequently, EPIC-trained models achieve excellent embedding performance both with or without in-context prompts at inference time. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method establishes new state-of-the-art results on the MTEB benchmark, surpassing frontier models trained solely on publicly available retrieval data. Extensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and necessity of our mechanism.

Recently, large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP have demonstrated immense potential in zero-shot anomaly segmentation (ZSAS) task, utilizing a unified model to directly detect anomalies on any unseen product with painstakingly crafted text prompts. However, existing methods often assume that the product category to be inspected is known, thus setting product-specific text prompts, which is difficult to achieve in the data privacy scenarios. Moreover, even the same type of product exhibits significant differences due to specific components and variations in the production process, posing significant challenges to the design of text prompts. In this end, we propose a visual context prompting model (VCP-CLIP) for ZSAS task based on CLIP. The insight behind VCP-CLIP is to employ visual context prompting to activate CLIP's anomalous semantic perception ability. In specific, we first design a Pre-VCP module to embed global visual information into the text prompt, thus eliminating the necessity for product-specific prompts. Then, we propose a novel Post-VCP module, that adjusts the text embeddings utilizing the fine-grained features of the images. In extensive experiments conducted on 10 real-world industrial anomaly segmentation datasets, VCP-CLIP achieved state-of-the-art performance in ZSAS task. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaozhen228/VCP-CLIP.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have excelled in multimodal tasks, but adapting them to embodied decision-making in open-world environments presents challenges. A key issue is the difficulty in smoothly connecting individual entities in low-level observations with abstract concepts required for planning. A common approach to address this problem is through the use of hierarchical agents, where VLMs serve as high-level reasoners that break down tasks into executable sub-tasks, typically specified using language and imagined observations. However, language often fails to effectively convey spatial information, while generating future images with sufficient accuracy remains challenging. To address these limitations, we propose visual-temporal context prompting, a novel communication protocol between VLMs and policy models. This protocol leverages object segmentation from both past and present observations to guide policy-environment interactions. Using this approach, we train ROCKET-1, a low-level policy that predicts actions based on concatenated visual observations and segmentation masks, with real-time object tracking provided by SAM-2. Our method unlocks the full potential of VLMs visual-language reasoning abilities, enabling them to solve complex creative tasks, especially those heavily reliant on spatial understanding. Experiments in Minecraft demonstrate that our approach allows agents to accomplish previously unattainable tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of visual-temporal context prompting in embodied decision-making. Codes and demos will be available on the project page: https://craftjarvis.github.io/ROCKET-1.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have led to highly sophisticated conversation agents. However, these models suffer from "hallucinations," where the model generates false or fabricated information. Addressing this challenge is crucial, particularly with AI-driven platforms being adopted across various sectors. In this paper, we propose a novel method to recognize and flag instances when LLMs perform outside their domain knowledge, and ensuring users receive accurate information. We find that the use of context combined with embedded tags can successfully combat hallucinations within generative language models. To do this, we baseline hallucination frequency in no-context prompt-response pairs using generated URLs as easily-tested indicators of fabricated data. We observed a significant reduction in overall hallucination when context was supplied along with question prompts for tested generative engines. Lastly, we evaluated how placing tags within contexts impacted model responses and were able to eliminate hallucinations in responses with 98.88% effectiveness.

Despite the general capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), they still need further adaptation to better serve practical applications. In this paper, we demonstrate the interchangeability of three popular and distinct adaptation tools: parameter updating, reward modeling, and in-context prompting. This interchangeability establishes a triangular framework with six transformation directions, each of which facilitates a variety of applications. Our work offers a holistic view that unifies numerous existing studies and suggests potential research directions. We envision our work as a useful roadmap for future research on LLMs.

SpeechLLMs are increasingly deployed in professional settings where domain customisation is standard practice: users supply context in prompts with sensitive information, fine-tune on proprietary recordings, or both. We identify and systematically investigate an overlooked privacy risk of such customisation: a model adapted to recognise domain-specific terminology can be nudged into transcribing a phonetically similar word from its context or training data, even when a different word is spoken, thereby leaking private information. To evaluate this risk, we construct a controlled dataset and measure leakage rates across two customisation mechanisms, prompting and fine-tuning. Both mechanisms cause measurable leakage, compounding when combined. We evaluate a prompt-level mitigation strategy and analyse the accuracy-leakage trade-off across customisation approaches, finding that fine-tuning without context prompts offers the best balance. We release our code and dataset publicly.

In order for large language models to achieve true conversational continuity and benefit from experiential learning, they need memory. While research has focused on the development of complex memory systems, it remains unclear which types of memory are most effective for long-context conversational tasks. We present a systematic evaluation of memory-augmented methods using LoCoMo, a benchmark of synthetic long-context dialogues annotated for question-answering tasks that require diverse reasoning strategies. We analyse full-context prompting, semantic memory through retrieval-augmented generation and agentic memory, episodic memory through in-context learning, and procedural memory through prompt optimization. Our findings show that memory-augmented approaches reduce token usage by over 90% while maintaining competitive accuracy. Memory architecture complexity should scale with model capability, with small foundation models benefitting most from RAG, and strong instruction-tuned reasoning model gaining from episodic learning through reflections and more complex agentic semantic memory. In particular, episodic memory can help LLMs recognise the limits of their own knowledge.

Human-AI planning for complex goals remains challenging with current large language models (LLMs), which rely on linear chat histories and simplistic memory mechanisms. Despite advances in long-context prompting, users still manually manage information, leading to a high cognitive burden. Hence, we propose JumpStarter, a system that enables LLMs to collaborate with humans on complex goals by dynamically decomposing tasks to help users manage context. We specifically introduce task-structured context curation, a novel framework that breaks down a user's goal into a hierarchy of actionable subtasks, and scopes context to localized decision points, enabling finer-grained personalization and reuse. The framework is realized through three core mechanisms: context elicitation, selection, and reuse. We demonstrate that task-structured context curation significantly improves plan quality by 16% over ablations. Our user study shows that JumpStarter helped users generate plans with 79% higher quality compared to ChatGPT.

This work focuses on in-context data augmentation for intent detection. Having found that augmentation via in-context prompting of large pre-trained language models (PLMs) alone does not improve performance, we introduce a novel approach based on PLMs and pointwise V-information (PVI), a metric that can measure the usefulness of a datapoint for training a model. Our method first fine-tunes a PLM on a small seed of training data and then synthesizes new datapoints - utterances that correspond to given intents. It then employs intent-aware filtering, based on PVI, to remove datapoints that are not helpful to the downstream intent classifier. Our method is thus able to leverage the expressive power of large language models to produce diverse training data. Empirical results demonstrate that our method can produce synthetic training data that achieve state-of-the-art performance on three challenging intent detection datasets under few-shot settings (1.28% absolute improvement in 5-shot and 1.18% absolute in 10-shot, on average) and perform on par with the state-of-the-art in full-shot settings (within 0.01% absolute, on average).

Long-context inference in decoder-only language models is costly because long prompts are processed during Prefill, cached at every layer, and repeatedly attended to during autoregressive Decode. We introduce Shallow Prefill, dEEp Decode (SPEED), a phase-asymmetric KV-visibility policy that materializes non-anchor prompt-token KV states only in lower layers while keeping Decode-phase tokens full-depth. Unlike previous approaches that make upper-layer prompt KV states cheaper to store or construct, SPEED removes prefill tokens from the upper-layer Decode visibility set altogether. With a minimal BoS anchor, this simple change preserves broad benchmark quality while reducing long-context cost. In a controlled Llama-3.1-8B instruction-tuning study, SPEED using only 75\% of layers for prefill tokens reaches 51.2 average score on OLMES-style benchmarks, compared with 51.4 for the full-depth baseline, while improving TTFT by 33\%, TPOT by 22\%, and reducing active KV memory by 25.0\% at 128K context. Layer-wise diagnostics suggest that this cutoff retains the main prompt-selection and representation-stabilization regions of the full-depth model. These results show that long-context prompt tokens need not always persist as full-depth KV-cache objects when Decode-phase tokens remain full-depth.

Instruction-based image editing enables robust image modification via natural language prompts, yet current methods face a precision-efficiency tradeoff. Fine-tuning methods demand significant computational resources and large datasets, while training-free techniques struggle with instruction comprehension and edit quality. We resolve this dilemma by leveraging large-scale Diffusion Transformer (DiT)' enhanced generation capacity and native contextual awareness. Our solution introduces three contributions: (1) an in-context editing framework for zero-shot instruction compliance using in-context prompting, avoiding structural changes; (2) a LoRA-MoE hybrid tuning strategy that enhances flexibility with efficient adaptation and dynamic expert routing, without extensive retraining; and (3) an early filter inference-time scaling method using vision-language models (VLMs) to select better initial noise early, improving edit quality. Extensive evaluations demonstrate our method's superiority: it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches while requiring only 0.5% training data and 1% trainable parameters compared to conventional baselines. This work establishes a new paradigm that enables high-precision yet efficient instruction-guided editing. Codes and demos can be found in https://river-zhang.github.io/ICEdit-gh-pages/.

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as judges for evaluating the performance of LLMs has recently garnered attention. Nonetheless, this type of approach concurrently introduces potential biases from LLMs, raising concerns about the reliability of the evaluation results. To mitigate this issue, we propose and study two versions of many-shot in-context prompts, Reinforced and Unsupervised ICL, for helping GPT-4o-as-a-Judge in single answer grading. The former uses in-context examples with model-generated rationales, and the latter without. Based on the designed prompts, we investigate the impact of scaling the number of in-context examples on the agreement and quality of the evaluation. Furthermore, we first reveal the symbol bias in GPT-4o-as-a-Judge for pairwise comparison and then propose a simple yet effective approach to mitigate it. Experimental results show that advanced long-context LLMs, such as GPT-4o, perform better in the many-shot regime than in the zero-shot regime. Meanwhile, the experimental results further verify the effectiveness of the symbol bias mitigation approach.

Solving complex or long-horizon problems often requires large language models (LLMs) to use external tools and operate over a significantly longer context window. New LLMs enable longer context windows and support tool calling capabilities. Prior works have focused mainly on evaluation of LLMs on long-context prompts, leaving agentic setup relatively unexplored, both from capability and safety perspectives. Our work addresses this gap. We find that LLM agents could be sensitive to length, type, and placement of the context, exhibiting unexpected and inconsistent shifts in task performance and in refusals to execute harmful requests. Models with 1M-2M token context windows show severe degradation already at 100K tokens, with performance drops exceeding 50\% for both benign and harmful tasks. Refusal rates shift unpredictably: GPT-4.1-nano increases from sim5\% to sim40\% while Grok 4 Fast decreases from sim80\% to sim10\% at 200K tokens. Our work shows potential safety issues with agents operating on longer context and opens additional questions on the current metrics and paradigm for evaluating LLM agent safety on long multi-step tasks. In particular, our results on LLM agents reveal a notable divergence in both capability and safety performance compared to prior evaluations of LLMs on similar criteria.

Few-Shot Learning (FSL) aims to recognize new classes with limited labeled data. Recent studies have attempted to address the challenge of rare samples with textual prompts to modulate visual features. However, they usually struggle to capture complex semantic relationships between textual and visual features. Moreover, vanilla self-attention is heavily affected by useless information in images, severely constraining the potential of semantic priors in FSL due to the confusion of numerous irrelevant tokens during interaction. To address these aforementioned issues, a K-NN Transformer with Pyramid Prompts (KTPP) is proposed to select discriminative information with K-NN Context Attention (KCA) and adaptively modulate visual features with Pyramid Cross-modal Prompts (PCP). First, for each token, the KCA only selects the K most relevant tokens to compute the self-attention matrix and incorporates the mean of all tokens as the context prompt to provide the global context in three cascaded stages. As a result, irrelevant tokens can be progressively suppressed. Secondly, pyramid prompts are introduced in the PCP to emphasize visual features via interactions between text-based class-aware prompts and multi-scale visual features. This allows the ViT to dynamically adjust the importance weights of visual features based on rich semantic information at different scales, making models robust to spatial variations. Finally, augmented visual features and class-aware prompts are interacted via the KCA to extract class-specific features. Consequently, our model further enhances noise-free visual representations via deep cross-modal interactions, extracting generalized visual representation in scenarios with few labeled samples. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Crowd counting has achieved significant progress by training regressors to predict instance positions. In heavily crowded scenarios, however, regressors are challenged by uncontrollable annotation variance, which causes density map bias and context information inaccuracy. In this study, we propose mutual prompt learning (mPrompt), which leverages a regressor and a segmenter as guidance for each other, solving bias and inaccuracy caused by annotation variance while distinguishing foreground from background. In specific, mPrompt leverages point annotations to tune the segmenter and predict pseudo head masks in a way of point prompt learning. It then uses the predicted segmentation masks, which serve as spatial constraint, to rectify biased point annotations as context prompt learning. mPrompt defines a way of mutual information maximization from prompt learning, mitigating the impact of annotation variance while improving model accuracy. Experiments show that mPrompt significantly reduces the Mean Average Error (MAE), demonstrating the potential to be general framework for down-stream vision tasks.

With the bomb ignited by ChatGPT, Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved a revolutionary path toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and have been applied in diverse areas as knowledge bases, human interfaces, and dynamic agents. However, a prevailing limitation exists: many current LLMs, constrained by resources, are primarily pre-trained on shorter texts, rendering them less effective for longer-context prompts, commonly encountered in real-world settings. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey focusing on the advancement of model architecture in Transformer-based LLMs to optimize long-context capabilities across all stages from pre-training to inference. We firstly delineate and analyze the problems of handling long-context input and output with the current Transformer-based models. Then, we mainly offer a holistic taxonomy to navigate the landscape of Transformer upgrades on architecture to solve these problems. Afterward, we provide the investigation on wildly used evaluation necessities tailored for long-context LLMs, including datasets, metrics, and baseline models, as well as some amazing optimization toolkits like libraries, systems, and compilers to augment LLMs' efficiency and efficacy across different stages. Finally, we further discuss the predominant challenges and potential avenues for future research in this domain. Additionally, we have established a repository where we curate relevant literature with real-time updates at https://github.com/Strivin0311/long-llms-learning.

Memory benchmarks for LLM agents largely assume single-user settings, leaving shared assistants for hospitals, workplaces, campuses, and households understudied. In these deployments, multiple principals write to a common memory pool and query it under different roles, scopes, and relationships, so memory quality requires governance as well as recall. We introduce GateMem, a benchmark for multi-principal shared-memory agents. GateMem jointly evaluates utility for legitimate long-horizon requests with state updates, access control across contextual authorization boundaries, and agent-facing active forgetting after explicit deletion requests. It spans medical, office, education, and household domains, with long-form multi-party episodes, incremental memory injection, hidden checkpoints, structured judging, and leak-target annotations. Across diverse baselines and backbone models, no method simultaneously achieves strong utility, robust access control, and reliable forgetting. Long-context prompting often yields the best governance score at high token cost, while retrieval-based and external-memory methods reduce cost yet still leak unauthorized or deleted information. These results show current memory agents remain far from reliable shared institutional deployment.

Clinical LLMs are often scaled by increasing model size, context length, retrieval complexity, or inference-time compute, with the implicit expectation that higher accuracy implies safer behavior. This assumption is incomplete in medicine, where a few confident, high-risk, or evidence-contradicting errors can matter more than average benchmark performance. We introduce SaFE-Scale, a framework for measuring how clinical LLM safety changes across model scale, evidence quality, retrieval strategy, context exposure, and inference-time compute. To instantiate this framework, we introduce RadSaFE-200, a Radiology Safety-Focused Evaluation benchmark of 200 multiple-choice questions with clinician-defined clean evidence, conflict evidence, and option-level labels for high-risk error, unsafe answer, and evidence contradiction. We evaluated 34 locally deployed LLMs across six deployment conditions: closed-book prompting (zero-shot), clean evidence, conflict evidence, standard RAG, agentic RAG, and max-context prompting. Clean evidence produced the strongest improvement, increasing mean accuracy from 73.5% to 94.1%, while reducing high-risk error from 12.0% to 2.6%, contradiction from 12.7% to 2.3%, and dangerous overconfidence from 8.0% to 1.6%. Standard RAG and agentic RAG did not reproduce this safety profile: agentic RAG improved accuracy over standard RAG and reduced contradiction, but high-risk error and dangerous overconfidence remained elevated. Max-context prompting increased latency without closing the safety gap, and additional inference-time compute produced only limited gains. Worst-case analysis showed that clinically consequential errors concentrated in a small subset of questions. Clinical LLM safety is therefore not a passive consequence of scaling, but a deployment property shaped by evidence quality, retrieval design, context construction, and collective failure behavior.

Modern language agents must operate over long-horizon, multi-turn histories, yet deploying such agents with Small Language Models (SLMs) remains fundamentally difficult. Full-context prompting causes context overflow, flat retrieval exposes the model to noisy evidence, and open-ended agentic loops are unreliable under limited reasoning capacity. We argue that a substantial portion of SLM memory failure arises from mismatched memory operations: different query types demand categorically different retrieval strategies, evidence transformations, and context budgets that SLMs cannot reliably self-orchestrate through open-ended reasoning. We introduce MemFlow, a training-free memory orchestration framework that externalizes memory planning from the SLM. A Router Agent classifies each query by intent and dispatches it to the Memory Agent, which executes one of three specialized tiers (Profile Lookup, Targeted Retrieval, or Deep Reasoning) and assembles the resulting evidence under a dynamic, tier-aware token budget. An Answer Agent then generates a response from this compact context, and a Validator Agent optionally retries with a heavier memory tier when the response is not supported by the provided evidence. This route-then-compile design avoids tool-selection hallucination and reasoning loops while keeping the answer context compact. Evaluated on a frozen Qwen3-1.7B backbone across long-horizon memory benchmarks - LongMemEval, LoCoMo, and LongBench - MemFlow improves accuracy by nearly 2x over full-context SLM baselines. These results suggest that structured intent routing and deterministic evidence preparation can make limited-capacity models substantially more effective in resource-constrained long-horizon agents.

This paper presents Dynamic Context Prompting/Programming (DCP/P), a novel framework for interacting with LLMs to generate graph-based content with a dynamic context window history. While there is an existing study utilizing LLMs to generate a visual novel game, the previous study involved a manual process of output extraction and did not provide flexibility in generating a longer, coherent story. We evaluate DCP/P against our baseline, which does not provide context history to an LLM and only relies on the initial story data. Through objective evaluation, we show that simply providing the LLM with a summary leads to a subpar story compared to additionally providing the LLM with the proper context of the story. We also provide an extensive qualitative analysis and discussion. We qualitatively examine the quality of the objectively best-performing generated game from each approach. In addition, we examine biases in word choices and word sentiment of the generated content. We find a consistent observation with previous studies that LLMs are biased towards certain words, even with a different LLM family. Finally, we provide a comprehensive discussion on opportunities for future studies.

Evaluating text-to-vision content hinges on two crucial aspects: visual quality and alignment. While significant progress has been made in developing objective models to assess these dimensions, the performance of such models heavily relies on the scale and quality of human annotations. According to Scaling Law, increasing the number of human-labeled instances follows a predictable pattern that enhances the performance of evaluation models. Therefore, we introduce a comprehensive dataset designed to Evaluate Visual quality and Alignment Level for text-to-vision content (Q-EVAL-100K), featuring the largest collection of human-labeled Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) for the mentioned two aspects. The Q-EVAL-100K dataset encompasses both text-to-image and text-to-video models, with 960K human annotations specifically focused on visual quality and alignment for 100K instances (60K images and 40K videos). Leveraging this dataset with context prompt, we propose Q-Eval-Score, a unified model capable of evaluating both visual quality and alignment with special improvements for handling long-text prompt alignment. Experimental results indicate that the proposed Q-Eval-Score achieves superior performance on both visual quality and alignment, with strong generalization capabilities across other benchmarks. These findings highlight the significant value of the Q-EVAL-100K dataset. Data and codes will be available at https://github.com/zzc-1998/Q-Eval.

Real-time video commentary generation provides textual descriptions of ongoing events in videos. It supports accessibility and engagement in domains such as sports, esports, and livestreaming. Commentary generation involves two essential decisions: what to say and when to say it. While recent prompting-based approaches using multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in content generation, they largely ignore the timing aspect. We investigate whether in-context prompting alone can support real-time commentary generation that is both semantically relevant and well-timed. We propose two prompting-based decoding strategies: 1) a fixed-interval approach, and 2) a novel dynamic interval-based decoding approach that adjusts the next prediction timing based on the estimated duration of the previous utterance. Both methods enable pause-aware generation without any fine-tuning. Experiments on Japanese and English datasets of racing and fighting games show that the dynamic interval-based decoding can generate commentary more closely aligned with human utterance timing and content using prompting alone. We release a multilingual benchmark dataset, trained models, and implementations to support future research on real-time video commentary generation.

Inspired by the outstanding zero-shot capability of vision language models (VLMs) in image classification tasks, open-vocabulary object detection has attracted increasing interest by distilling the broad VLM knowledge into detector training. However, most existing open-vocabulary detectors learn by aligning region embeddings with categorical labels (e.g., bicycle) only, disregarding the capability of VLMs on aligning visual embeddings with fine-grained text description of object parts (e.g., pedals and bells). This paper presents DVDet, a Descriptor-Enhanced Open Vocabulary Detector that introduces conditional context prompts and hierarchical textual descriptors that enable precise region-text alignment as well as open-vocabulary detection training in general. Specifically, the conditional context prompt transforms regional embeddings into image-like representations that can be directly integrated into general open vocabulary detection training. In addition, we introduce large language models as an interactive and implicit knowledge repository which enables iterative mining and refining visually oriented textual descriptors for precise region-text alignment. Extensive experiments over multiple large-scale benchmarks show that DVDet outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently by large margins.

Activation oracles aim to make the activations of other models legible to humans and yield promising results compared to white-box interpretability techniques. However, uncertainty quantification (UQ) for the natural-language outputs of such activation oracles is so far understudied. Here, we investigate 6 different methods for estimating the confidence of activation oracles and evaluate how well-calibrated their confidence scores are. Our experiments on 6,000 samples per oracle (varying verbalizer and context prompts) reveal that bootstrap mode frequency is the best-calibrated method among those tested (ECE 5.7% vs. 25.5% for the answer-word log-probability on Qwen3-8B; 10.3% vs. 13.1% on Qwen3.6-27B), and that the log-prob baseline can serve as a fast triage signal at a fraction of the cost. Code and the patched trainer are available at https://github.com/federicotorrielli/probabilistic_activation_oracles.

This report presents a unified instruction-based framework for learning generalized text embeddings optimized for both information retrieval (IR) and non-IR tasks. Built upon a decoder-only large language model (Mistral-7B), our approach combines in-context learning, soft supervision, and adaptive hard-negative mining to generate context-aware embeddings without task-specific fine-tuning. Structured instructions and few-shot examples are used to guide the model across diverse tasks, enabling strong performance on classification, semantic similarity, clustering, and reranking benchmarks. To improve semantic discrimination, we employ a soft labeling framework where continuous relevance scores, distilled from a high-performance dense retriever and reranker, serve as fine-grained supervision signals. In addition, we introduce adaptive margin-based hard-negative mining, which filters out semantically ambiguous negatives based on their similarity to positive examples, thereby enhancing training stability and retrieval robustness. Our model is evaluated on the newly introduced MTEB (English, v2) benchmark, covering 41 tasks across seven categories. Results show that our method achieves strong generalization and ranks among the top-performing models by Borda score, outperforming several larger or fully fine-tuned baselines. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining in-context prompting, soft supervision, and adaptive sampling for scalable, high-quality embedding generation.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with low-rank adaptaion (LoRA) is a cost-effective way to incorporate information from a specific dataset. However, it is often unclear how well the fine-tuned LLM will generalize, i.e., how well it will perform on unseen datasets. Methods have been proposed to improve generalization by optimizing with in-context prompts, or by using meta-learning to fine-tune LLMs. However, these methods are expensive in memory and computation, requiring either long-context prompts or saving copies of parameters and using second-order gradient updates. To address these challenges, we propose Amortized Bayesian Meta-Learning for LoRA (ABMLL). This method builds on amortized Bayesian meta-learning for smaller models, adapting this approach to LLMs while maintaining its computational efficiency. We reframe task-specific and global parameters in the context of LoRA and use a set of new hyperparameters to balance reconstruction accuracy and the fidelity of task-specific parameters to the global ones. ABMLL provides effective generalization and scales to large models such as Llama3-8B. Furthermore, as a result of using a Bayesian framework, ABMLL provides improved uncertainty quantification. We test ABMLL on Unified-QA and CrossFit datasets and find that it outperforms existing methods on these benchmarks in terms of both accuracy and expected calibration error.

Long-context LLM agents must access the right evidence from large environments and use it faithfully. However, the popular Needle-in-a-Haystack (NIAH) evaluation mostly measures benign span localization. The needle is near-unique, and the haystack is largely irrelevant. We introduce EverMemBench-S (EMB-S), an adversarial NIAH-style benchmark built on a 326M-token MemoryBank. While the full MemoryBank spans 326M tokens for retrieval-based (RAG) evaluation, we evaluate native long-context models only at scales that fit within each model's context window (up to 1M tokens in this work) to ensure a fair comparison. EMB-S pairs queries with collision-tested near-miss hard negatives and gold evidence sets spanning one or more documents, validated via human screening and LLM verification. We also propose a decoupled diagnostic protocol that reports evidence access (document-ID localization) separately from end-to-end QA quality under full-context prompting. This enables consistent diagnosis for both native long-context prompting and retrieval pipelines. Across a reference-corpus ladder from domain-isolated 64K contexts to a globally shared 326M-token environment, we observe a clear reality gap. Systems that saturate benign NIAH degrade sharply in evidence access under semantic interference. These results indicate that semantic discrimination, not context length alone, is the dominant bottleneck for long-context memory at scale.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly critical to digital library workflows, yet their ability to process historical language remains poorly understood. Historical difficulty is typically treated as a monolithic barrier, conflating orthographic variation, linguistic distance, and pretraining exposure. In this paper, we propose a diagnostic framework that decomposes this difficulty into four distinct dimensions: tokenization cost, predictive uncertainty (surprisal), semantic robustness, and context sensitivity. We evaluate this framework on three datasets spanning three centuries: (1) a newly curated corpus of 17th-century Italian texts (1610-1689) digitized from original page images; (2) canonical 19th-century Italian "I Promessi Sposi" serving as a high-exposure control; and (3) 18th-century Russian civil print books as a contrastive orthographic stress test. Our results reveal a distinct dissociation between encoding cost and comprehension. While Russian and early modern Italian incur comparable tokenization penalties (25-30% inflation), their predictive difficulty diverges sharply. 17th-century Italian is on average 2.4 times more surprising than its modern equivalent - with academic prose reaching 3.2 times - whereas Russian shows only a modest increase. But predictive uncertainty does not imply representational degradation: embedding similarity remains robust (> 0.85) across all datasets, confirming that models can represent historical meaning even when generation is unstable. Finally, we demonstrate that a minimal temporal context prompt reduces historical surprisal by approximately 60%, offering a simple, model-agnostic mitigation. These findings suggest that while historical text imposes a consistent encoding tax, digital libraries can safely deploy LLMs for semantic retrieval tasks, provided that generative applications are carefully adapted.

Modern language agents must operate over long-horizon, multi-turn interactions, where they retrieve external information, adapt to observations, and answer interdependent queries. Yet, most LLM systems rely on full-context prompting, appending all past turns regardless of their relevance. This leads to unbounded memory growth, increased computational costs, and degraded reasoning performance on out-of-distribution input lengths. We introduce MEM1, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that enables agents to operate with constant memory across long multi-turn tasks. At each turn, MEM1 updates a compact shared internal state that jointly supports memory consolidation and reasoning. This state integrates prior memory with new observations from the environment while strategically discarding irrelevant or redundant information. To support training in more realistic and compositional settings, we propose a simple yet effective and scalable approach to constructing multi-turn environments by composing existing datasets into arbitrarily complex task sequences. Experiments across three domains, including internal retrieval QA, open-domain web QA, and multi-turn web shopping, show that MEM1-7B improves performance by 3.5x while reducing memory usage by 3.7x compared to Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on a 16-objective multi-hop QA task, and generalizes beyond the training horizon. Our results demonstrate the promise of reasoning-driven memory consolidation as a scalable alternative to existing solutions for training long-horizon interactive agents, where both efficiency and performance are optimized.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation, yet they exhibit systematic errors on complex, multi-step programming tasks. We hypothesize that these errors stem from the flexibility of general-purpose languages, which permits multiple valid approaches and requires implicit state management. To test this hypothesis, we introduce Anka, a domain-specific language (DSL) for data transformation pipelines designed with explicit, constrained syntax that reduces ambiguity in code generation. Despite having zero prior training exposure to Anka, Claude 3.5 Haiku achieves 99.9% parse success and 95.8% overall task accuracy across 100 benchmark problems. Critically, Anka demonstrates a 40 percentage point accuracy advantage over Python on multi-step pipeline tasks (100% vs. 60%), where Python's flexible syntax leads to frequent errors in operation sequencing and variable management. Cross-model validation with GPT-4o-mini confirms this advantage (+26.7 percentage points on multi-step tasks). Our results demonstrate that: (1) LLMs can learn novel DSLs entirely from in-context prompts, achieving near-native accuracy; (2) constrained syntax significantly reduces errors on complex tasks; and (3) domain-specific languages purposefully designed for LLM generation can outperform general-purpose languages on which the LLM has extensive training. We release the complete language implementation, benchmark suite, and evaluation framework to facilitate further research.

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) excels at learning generalizable image representations but often falls short in zero-shot inference on certain downstream datasets. Test-time adaptation (TTA) mitigates this issue by adjusting components like normalization layers or context prompts, yet it typically requires large batch sizes and extensive augmentations, leading to high computational costs. This raises a key question: Can VLMs' performance drop in specific test cases be mitigated through efficient, training-free approaches? To explore the solution, we investigate token condensation (TC) techniques, originally designed to enhance vision transformer efficiency by refining token usage during inference. We observe that informative tokens improve visual-text alignment in VLMs like CLIP on unseen datasets. However, existing TC methods often fail to maintain in-distribution performance when reducing tokens, prompting us to ask: How can we transform TC into an effective ``free-lunch'' adaptation strategy for VLMs? To address this, we propose Token Condensation as Adaptation (TCA), a training-free adaptation method that takes a step beyond standard TC. Rather than passively discarding tokens, TCA condenses token representation by introducing reservoir-based domain anchor tokens for information-preserving token reduction and logits correction. TCA achieves up to a 21.4% performance improvement over the strongest baseline on cross-dataset benchmark and the CIFAR-100-Corrupted dataset while reducing GFLOPs by 12.2% to 48.9%, with minimal hyperparameter dependency on both CLIP and SigLIP series.

Generating diverse and sophisticated instructions for downstream tasks by Large Language Models (LLMs) is pivotal for advancing the effect. Current approaches leverage closed-source LLMs, employing in-context prompting for instruction generation. However, in this paper, we found that in-context prompting cannot generate complex instructions with length ge 100 for tasks like code completion. To solve this problem, we introduce Ada-Instruct, an adaptive instruction generator developed by fine-tuning open-source LLMs. Our pivotal finding illustrates that fine-tuning open-source LLMs with a mere ten samples generates long instructions that maintain distributional consistency for complex reasoning tasks. We empirically validated Ada-Instruct's efficacy across different applications, including code completion, mathematical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning. The results underscore Ada-Instruct's superiority, evidencing its improvements over its base models, current self-instruct methods, and other state-of-the-art models.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts. However, their effectiveness in task-oriented dialogues (TOD), which requires not only response generation but also effective dialogue state tracking (DST) within specific tasks and domains, remains less satisfying. In this work, we propose a novel approach FnCTOD for solving DST with LLMs through function calling. This method improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves exceptional performance with both modestly sized open-source and also proprietary LLMs: with in-context prompting it enables various 7B or 13B parameter models to surpass the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) achieved by ChatGPT, and improves ChatGPT's performance beating the SOTA by 5.6% Avg. JGA. Individual model results for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are boosted by 4.8% and 14%, respectively. We also show that by fine-tuning on a small collection of diverse task-oriented dialogues, we can equip modestly sized models, specifically a 13B parameter LLaMA2-Chat model, with function-calling capabilities and DST performance comparable to ChatGPT while maintaining their chat capabilities. We plan to open-source experimental code and model.

Pre-trained large vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have revolutionized visual representation learning using natural language as supervisions, and demonstrated promising generalization ability. In this work, we propose ViP, a novel visual symptom-guided prompt learning framework for medical image analysis, which facilitates general knowledge transfer from CLIP. ViP consists of two key components: a visual symptom generator (VSG) and a dual-prompt network. Specifically, VSG aims to extract explicable visual symptoms from pre-trained large language models, while the dual-prompt network utilizes these visual symptoms to guide the training on two learnable prompt modules, i.e., context prompt and merge prompt, which effectively adapts our framework to medical image analysis via large VLMs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ViP can outperform state-of-the-art methods on two challenging datasets.

We introduce SWE-PRBench, a benchmark of 350 pull requests with human-annotated ground truth for evaluating AI code review quality. Evaluated against an LLM-as-judge framework validated at kappa=0.75, 8 frontier models detect only 15-31% of human-flagged issues on the diff-only configuration, demonstrating that AI code review remains far below human expert performance despite strong results on code generation benchmarks. Pull requests are drawn from active open-source repositories, filtered from 700 candidates using a Repository Quality Score, and evaluated under three frozen context configurations: diff only (config_A), diff with file content (config_B), and full context (config_C), enabling systematic ablation of context provision strategies. All 8 models degrade monotonically from config_A to config_C, even when context is provided via structured semantic layers including AST-extracted function context and import graph resolution. The dominant mechanism is a collapse of Type2_Contextual issue detection at config_B, consistent with attention dilution in long contexts: a structured 2,000-token diff-with-summary prompt outperforms a 2,500-token full-context prompt enriched with execution context, behaviour mapping, and test signatures across all 8 models. The top four models are statistically indistinguishable (mean score 0.147-0.153) while a clear tier gap separates them from the remaining four (mean score <= 0.113). Dataset, contexts, annotations, and evaluation harness are released publicly.

Modern conversational agents like ChatGPT and Alexa+ rely on predefined policies specifying metadata, response styles, and tool-usage rules. As these LLM-based systems expand to support diverse business and user queries, such policies, often implemented as in-context prompts, are becoming increasingly complex and lengthy, making faithful adherence difficult and imposing large fixed computational costs. With the rise of multimodal agents, policies that govern visual and multimodal behaviors are critical but remain understudied. Prior prompt-compression work mainly shortens task templates and demonstrations, while existing policy-alignment studies focus only on text-based safety rules. We introduce Multimodal Policy Internalization (MPI), a new task that internalizes reasoning-intensive multimodal policies into model parameters, enabling stronger policy-following without including the policy during inference. MPI poses unique data and algorithmic challenges. We build two datasets spanning synthetic and real-world decision-making and tool-using tasks and propose TriMPI, a three-stage training framework. TriMPI first injects policy knowledge via continual pretraining, then performs supervised finetuning, and finally applies PolicyRollout, a GRPO-style reinforcement learning extension that augments rollouts with policy-aware responses for grounded exploration. TriMPI achieves notable gains in end-to-end accuracy, generalization, and robustness to forgetting. As the first work on multimodal policy internalization, we provide datasets, training recipes, and comprehensive evaluations to foster future research. Project page: https://mikewangwzhl.github.io/TriMPI.

Activation steering has emerged as a promising alternative for controlling language-model behavior at inference time by modifying intermediate representations while keeping model parameters frozen. However, large-scale evaluations such as AxBench show that existing steering methods are often outperformed by simple in-context prompting and generalize poorly to unseen concepts. We hypothesize that these limitations arise from unvalidated simplifying assumptions shared across prior methods, which typically restrict steering interventions to fixed, single-step, position-invariant transforms. We propose FLAS (Flow-based Activation Steering), which learns a general, concept-conditioned velocity field v_t(h,t,c) that transports unsteered activations to steered ones without relying on these assumptions. On AxBench, FLAS is the first learned method to consistently outperform prompting, reaching held-out harmonic means of 1.015 on Gemma-2-2B-IT and 1.113 on Gemma-2-9B-IT without per-concept tuning. Analysis of the learned flow shows curved, multi-step, token-varying trajectories, which suggests that previous hypotheses on activation space geometry might be incomplete.

Facial action unit (AU) detection and facial expression (FE) recognition can be jointly viewed as affective facial behavior tasks, representing fine-grained muscular activations and coarse-grained holistic affective states, respectively. Despite their inherent semantic correlation, existing studies predominantly focus on knowledge transfer from AUs to FEs, while bidirectional learning remains insufficiently explored. In practice, this challenge is further compounded by heterogeneous data conditions, where AU and FE datasets differ in annotation paradigms (frame-level vs.\ clip-level), label granularity, and data availability and diversity, hindering effective joint learning. To address these issues, we propose a Structured Semantic Mapping (SSM) framework for bidirectional AU--FE learning under different data domains and heterogeneous supervision. SSM consists of three key components: (1) a shared visual backbone that learns unified facial representations from dynamic AU and FE videos; (2) semantic mediation via a Textual Semantic Prototype (TSP) module, which constructs structured semantic prototypes from fixed textual descriptions augmented with learnable context prompts, serving as supervision signals and cross-task alignment anchors in a shared semantic space; and (3) a Dynamic Prior Mapping (DPM) module that incorporates prior knowledge derived from the Facial Action Coding System and learns a data-driven association matrix in a high-level feature space, enabling explicit and bidirectional knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on popular AU detection and FE recognition benchmarks show that SSM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks simultaneously, and demonstrate that holistic expression semantics can in turn enhance fine-grained AU learning even across heterogeneous datasets.

Multi-turn interactions with large language models typically retain the assistant's own past responses in the conversation history. In this work, we revisit this design choice by asking whether large language models benefit from conditioning on their own prior responses. Using in-the-wild, multi-turn conversations, we compare standard (full-context) prompting with a user-turn-only prompting approach that omits all previous assistant responses, across three open reasoning models and one state-of-the-art model. To our surprise, we find that removing prior assistant responses does not affect response quality on a large fraction of turns. Omitting assistant-side history can reduce cumulative context lengths by up to 10x. To explain this result, we find that multi-turn conversations consist of a substantial proportion (36.4%) of self-contained prompts, and that many follow-up prompts provide sufficient instruction to be answered using only the current user turn and prior user turns. When analyzing cases where user-turn-only prompting substantially outperforms full context, we identify instances of context pollution, in which models over-condition on their previous responses, introducing errors, hallucinations, or stylistic artifacts that propagate across turns. Motivated by these findings, we design a context-filtering approach that selectively omits assistant-side context. Our findings suggest that selectively omitting assistant history can improve response quality while reducing memory consumption.

World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation by jointly modeling visual state transitions and robot actions. However, existing WAMs are constrained by limited temporal context, coarse episode-level language supervision, and predominantly text-only conditioning, which hinder task-progress tracking and fine-grained language-video-action grounding while limiting visual-context reasoning and cross-embodiment transfer. In this paper, we introduce WorldScape Policy 2.0, a controllable WAM with reasoning-augmented long short-term memory. Its causal short-term visual memory supplies recent observations as DiT prefill to preserve local interaction dynamics, while its long short-term event memory organizes historical VLM outputs into global-history, local-active, and event-boundary representations for progress-aware retrieval. The retrieved history augments perception and autoregressively generated planning tokens, yielding an implicit subgoal condition for autonomous planning; semantic forcing further transfers event-level instruction semantics into this latent planning pathway. To establish fine-grained multimodal controllability, we construct ManipEvent-5M, an event-grounded embodied pretraining dataset containing nearly 5 million event segments with aligned action trajectories, episode-level task instructions, segment-level subtask captions, goal images, and video demonstrations. These designs provide a unified interface for autonomous planning from high-level instructions and controllable execution from fine-grained text, goal-image, or video-context prompts. Experiments in both simulation and real-world platforms demonstrate superior capabilities in long-horizon autonomous planning, fine-grained instruction following and in-context adaptation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, yet struggle with hallucination and outdated knowledge when tasked with complex knowledge reasoning, resulting in factually incorrect outputs. Previous studies have attempted to mitigate it by retrieving factual knowledge from large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) to assist LLMs in logical reasoning and prediction of answers. However, this kind of approach often introduces noise and irrelevant data, especially in situations with extensive context from multiple knowledge aspects. In this way, LLM attention can be potentially mislead from question and relevant information. In our study, we introduce an Adaptive Multi-Aspect Retrieval-augmented over KGs (Amar) framework. This method retrieves knowledge including entities, relations, and subgraphs, and converts each piece of retrieved text into prompt embeddings. The Amar framework comprises two key sub-components: 1) a self-alignment module that aligns commonalities among entities, relations, and subgraphs to enhance retrieved text, thereby reducing noise interference; 2) a relevance gating module that employs a soft gate to learn the relevance score between question and multi-aspect retrieved data, to determine which information should be used to enhance LLMs' output, or even filtered altogether. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance on two common datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, showing a 1.9\% improvement in accuracy over its best competitor and a 6.6\% improvement in logical form generation over a method that directly uses retrieved text as context prompts. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Amar in improving the reasoning of LLMs.

The rapid propagation of misinformation poses substantial risks to public interest. To combat misinformation, large language models (LLMs) are adapted to automatically verify claim credibility. Nevertheless, existing methods heavily rely on the embedded knowledge within LLMs and / or black-box APIs for evidence collection, leading to subpar performance with smaller LLMs or upon unreliable context. In this paper, we propose retrieval augmented fact verification through the synthesis of contrasting arguments (RAFTS). Upon input claims, RAFTS starts with evidence retrieval, where we design a retrieval pipeline to collect and re-rank relevant documents from verifiable sources. Then, RAFTS forms contrastive arguments (i.e., supporting or refuting) conditioned on the retrieved evidence. In addition, RAFTS leverages an embedding model to identify informative demonstrations, followed by in-context prompting to generate the prediction and explanation. Our method effectively retrieves relevant documents as evidence and evaluates arguments from varying perspectives, incorporating nuanced information for fine-grained decision-making. Combined with informative in-context examples as prior, RAFTS achieves significant improvements to supervised and LLM baselines without complex prompts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments, where RAFTS can outperform GPT-based methods with a significantly smaller 7B LLM.

FinanceBench is a first-of-its-kind test suite for evaluating the performance of LLMs on open book financial question answering (QA). It comprises 10,231 questions about publicly traded companies, with corresponding answers and evidence strings. The questions in FinanceBench are ecologically valid and cover a diverse set of scenarios. They are intended to be clear-cut and straightforward to answer to serve as a minimum performance standard. We test 16 state of the art model configurations (including GPT-4-Turbo, Llama2 and Claude2, with vector stores and long context prompts) on a sample of 150 cases from FinanceBench, and manually review their answers (n=2,400). The cases are available open-source. We show that existing LLMs have clear limitations for financial QA. Notably, GPT-4-Turbo used with a retrieval system incorrectly answered or refused to answer 81% of questions. While augmentation techniques such as using longer context window to feed in relevant evidence improve performance, they are unrealistic for enterprise settings due to increased latency and cannot support larger financial documents. We find that all models examined exhibit weaknesses, such as hallucinations, that limit their suitability for use by enterprises.

Pre-trained and frozen large language models (LLMs) can effectively map simple scene rearrangement instructions to programs over a robot's visuomotor functions through appropriate few-shot example prompting. To parse open-domain natural language and adapt to a user's idiosyncratic procedures, not known during prompt engineering time, fixed prompts fall short. In this paper, we introduce HELPER, an embodied agent equipped with an external memory of language-program pairs that parses free-form human-robot dialogue into action programs through retrieval-augmented LLM prompting: relevant memories are retrieved based on the current dialogue, instruction, correction, or VLM description, and used as in-context prompt examples for LLM querying. The memory is expanded during deployment to include pairs of user's language and action plans, to assist future inferences and personalize them to the user's language and routines. HELPER sets a new state-of-the-art in the TEACh benchmark in both Execution from Dialog History (EDH) and Trajectory from Dialogue (TfD), with a 1.7x improvement over the previous state-of-the-art for TfD. Our models, code, and video results can be found in our project's website: https://helper-agent-llm.github.io.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically involves updating at least a few billions of parameters. A more parameter-efficient approach is Prompt Tuning (PT), which updates only a few learnable tokens, and differently, In-Context Learning (ICL) adapts the model to a new task by simply including examples in the input without any training. When applying optimization-based methods, such as fine-tuning and PT for few-shot learning, the model is specifically adapted to the small set of training examples, whereas ICL leaves the model unchanged. This distinction makes traditional learning methods more prone to overfitting; in contrast, ICL is less sensitive to the few-shot scenario. While ICL is not prone to overfitting, it does not fully extract the information that exists in the training examples. This work introduces Context-aware Prompt Tuning (CPT), a method inspired by ICL, PT, and adversarial attacks. We build on the ICL strategy of concatenating examples before the input, but we extend this by PT-like learning, refining the context embedding through iterative optimization to extract deeper insights from the training examples. We carefully modify specific context tokens, considering the unique structure of input and output formats. Inspired by adversarial attacks, we adjust the input based on the labels present in the context, focusing on minimizing, rather than maximizing, the loss. Moreover, we apply a projected gradient descent algorithm to keep token embeddings close to their original values, under the assumption that the user-provided data is inherently valuable. Our method has been shown to achieve superior accuracy across multiple classification tasks using various LLM models.

Prompt injection remains a major security risk for large language models. However, the efficacy of existing guardrail models in context-aware settings remains underexplored, as they often rely on static attack benchmarks. Additionally, they have over-defense tendencies. We introduce CAPTURE, a novel context-aware benchmark assessing both attack detection and over-defense tendencies with minimal in-domain examples. Our experiments reveal that current prompt injection guardrail models suffer from high false negatives in adversarial cases and excessive false positives in benign scenarios, highlighting critical limitations. To demonstrate our framework's utility, we train CaptureGuard on our generated data. This new model drastically reduces both false negative and false positive rates on our context-aware datasets while also generalizing effectively to external benchmarks, establishing a path toward more robust and practical prompt injection defenses.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong translation abilities through prompting, even without task-specific training. However, their effectiveness in dialectal and low-resource contexts remains underexplored. This study presents the first systematic investigation of LLM-based machine translation (MT) for Sylheti, a dialect of Bangla that is itself low-resource. We evaluate five advanced LLMs (GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1, LLaMA 4, Grok 3, and DeepSeek V3.2) across both translation directions (Bangla Leftrightarrow Sylheti), and find that these models struggle with dialect-specific vocabulary. To address this, we introduce Sylheti-CAP (Context-Aware Prompting), a three-step framework that embeds a linguistic rulebook, a dictionary (2{,}260 core vocabulary items and idioms), and an authenticity check directly into prompts. Extensive experiments show that Sylheti-CAP consistently improves translation quality across models and prompting strategies. Both automatic metrics and human evaluations confirm its effectiveness, while qualitative analysis reveals notable reductions in hallucinations, ambiguities, and awkward phrasing, establishing Sylheti-CAP as a scalable solution for dialectal and low-resource MT. Dataset link: https://github.com/TabiaTanzin/LLMs-for-Low-Resource-Dialect-Translation-Using-Context-Aware-Prompting-A-Case-Study-on-Sylheti.git{https://github.com/TabiaTanzin/LLMs-for-Low-Resource-Dialect-Translation-Using-Context-Aware-Prompting-A-Case-Study-on-Sylheti.git}

Anomaly Detection involves identifying deviations from normal data distributions and is critical in fields such as medical diagnostics and industrial defect detection. Traditional AD methods typically require the availability of normal training samples; however, this assumption is not always feasible. Recently, the rich pretraining knowledge of CLIP has shown promising zero-shot generalization in detecting anomalies without the need for training samples from target domains. However, CLIP's coarse-grained image-text alignment limits localization and detection performance for fine-grained anomalies due to: (1) spatial misalignment, and (2) the limited sensitivity of global features to local anomalous patterns. In this paper, we propose Crane which tackles both problems. First, we introduce a correlation-based attention module to retain spatial alignment more accurately. Second, to boost the model's awareness of fine-grained anomalies, we condition the learnable prompts of the text encoder on image context extracted from the vision encoder and perform a local-to-global representation fusion. Moreover, our method can incorporate vision foundation models such as DINOv2 to further enhance spatial understanding and localization. The key insight of Crane is to balance learnable adaptations for modeling anomalous concepts with non-learnable adaptations that preserve and exploit generalized pretrained knowledge, thereby minimizing in-domain overfitting and maximizing performance on unseen domains. Extensive evaluation across 14 diverse industrial and medical datasets demonstrates that Crane consistently improves the state-of-the-art ZSAD from 2% to 28%, at both image and pixel levels, while remaining competitive in inference speed. The code is available at https://github.com/AlirezaSalehy/Crane.

Generative AI is gaining increasing attention in software engineering, where testing remains an indispensable reliability mechanism. According to the widely adopted testing pyramid, unit tests constitute the majority of test cases and are often schematic, requiring minimal domain expertise. Automatically generating such tests under the supervision of software engineers can significantly enhance productivity during the development phase of the software lifecycle. This paper investigates the impact of code context and prompting strategies on the quality and adequacy of unit tests generated by various large language models (LLMs) across several families. The results show that including docstrings notably improves code adequacy, while further extending context to the full implementation yields definitely smaller gains. Notably, the chain-of-thought prompting strategy -- applied even to 'reasoning' models -- achieves the best results, with up to 96.3\% branch coverage, a 57\% average mutation score, and near-perfect compilation success rate. Among the evaluated models, M5 (Gemini 2.5 Pro) demonstrated superior performance in both mutation score and branch coverage being still in top in terms of compilation success rate. All the code and resulting test suites are publicly available at https://github.com/peetery/LLM-analysis.

The prevalence of multi-modal content on social media complicates automated moderation strategies. This calls for an enhancement in multi-modal classification and a deeper understanding of understated meanings in images and memes. Although previous efforts have aimed at improving model performance through fine-tuning, few have explored an end-to-end optimization pipeline that accounts for modalities, prompting, labeling, and fine-tuning. In this study, we propose an end-to-end conceptual framework for model optimization in complex tasks. Experiments support the efficacy of this traditional yet novel framework, achieving the highest accuracy and AUROC. Ablation experiments demonstrate that isolated optimizations are not ineffective on their own.

Few-shot segmentation is the problem of learning to identify specific types of objects (e.g., airplanes) in images from a small set of labeled reference images. The current state of the art is driven by resource-intensive construction of models for every new domain-specific application. Such models must be trained on enormous labeled datasets of unrelated objects (e.g., cars, trains, animals) so that their ``knowledge'' can be transferred to new types of objects. In this paper, we show how to leverage existing vision foundation models (VFMs) to reduce the incremental cost of creating few-shot segmentation models for new domains. Specifically, we introduce SAMIC, a small network that learns how to prompt VFMs in order to segment new types of objects in domain-specific applications. SAMIC enables any task to be approached as a few-shot learning problem. At 2.6 million parameters, it is 94% smaller than the leading models (e.g., having ResNet 101 backbone with 45+ million parameters). Even using 1/5th of the training data provided by one-shot benchmarks, SAMIC is competitive with, or sets the state of the art, on a variety of few-shot and semantic segmentation datasets including COCO-20^i, Pascal-5^i, PerSeg, FSS-1000, and NWPU VHR-10.

Recent progress has shown that large-scale pre-training using contrastive image-text pairs can be a promising alternative for high-quality visual representation learning from natural language supervision. Benefiting from a broader source of supervision, this new paradigm exhibits impressive transferability to downstream classification tasks and datasets. However, the problem of transferring the knowledge learned from image-text pairs to more complex dense prediction tasks has barely been visited. In this work, we present a new framework for dense prediction by implicitly and explicitly leveraging the pre-trained knowledge from CLIP. Specifically, we convert the original image-text matching problem in CLIP to a pixel-text matching problem and use the pixel-text score maps to guide the learning of dense prediction models. By further using the contextual information from the image to prompt the language model, we are able to facilitate our model to better exploit the pre-trained knowledge. Our method is model-agnostic, which can be applied to arbitrary dense prediction systems and various pre-trained visual backbones including both CLIP models and ImageNet pre-trained models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our methods on semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/raoyongming/DenseCLIP

While Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) internalize a great amount of world knowledge, they have been shown incapable of recalling these knowledge to solve tasks requiring complex & multi-step reasoning. Similar to how humans develop a "chain of thought" for these tasks, how can we equip PLMs with such abilities? In this work, we explore an iterative prompting framework, a new prompting paradigm which progressively elicits relevant knowledge from PLMs for multi-step inference. We identify key limitations of existing prompting methods, namely they are either restricted to queries with a single identifiable relation/predicate, or being agnostic to input contexts, which makes it difficult to capture variabilities across different inference steps. We propose an iterative context-aware prompter, which addresses these limitations by learning to dynamically synthesize prompts conditioned on the current step's contexts. Experiments on three datasets involving multi-step reasoning show the effectiveness of the iterative scheme and the context-aware prompter design.

With the success of large language models (LLMs) of code and their use as code assistants (e.g. Codex used in GitHub Copilot), techniques for introducing domain-specific knowledge in the prompt design process become important. In this work, we propose a framework called Repo-Level Prompt Generator that learns to generate example-specific prompts using prompt proposals. The prompt proposals take context from the entire repository, thereby incorporating both the structure of the repository and the context from other relevant files (e.g. imports, parent class files). Our technique doesn't require any access to the weights of the LLM, making it applicable in cases where we only have black-box access to the LLM. We conduct experiments on the task of single-line code-autocompletion using code repositories taken from Google Code archives. We demonstrate that an oracle constructed from our prompt proposals gives a remarkably high relative improvement of 36% over Codex, showing the quality of these proposals. Further, we show that when we train a model to predict a prompt proposal, we can achieve significant performance gains over Codex and other baselines. We release our code, data, and trained checkpoints at: https://github.com/shrivastavadisha/repo_level_prompt_generation.

Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated substantial success in self-supervised representation learning for vision tasks. However, effectively adapting VLMs to downstream applications remains challenging, as their accuracy often depends on time-intensive and expertise-demanding prompt engineering, while full model fine-tuning is costly. This is particularly true for biomedical images, which, unlike natural images, typically suffer from limited annotated datasets, unintuitive image contrasts, and nuanced visual features. Recent prompt learning techniques, such as Context Optimization (CoOp) intend to tackle these issues, but still fall short in generalizability. Meanwhile, explorations in prompt learning for biomedical image analysis are still highly limited. In this work, we propose BiomedCoOp, a novel prompt learning framework that enables efficient adaptation of BiomedCLIP for accurate and highly generalizable few-shot biomedical image classification. Our approach achieves effective prompt context learning by leveraging semantic consistency with average prompt ensembles from Large Language Models (LLMs) and knowledge distillation with a statistics-based prompt selection strategy. We conducted comprehensive validation of our proposed framework on 11 medical datasets across 9 modalities and 10 organs against existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating significant improvements in both accuracy and generalizability. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/BiomedCoOp.

Large language models (LLMs), while transformative for NLP, come with significant computational demands, underlining the need for efficient, training-free compression. Notably, the reliability of perplexity as a benchmark for compressed model efficacy is in question, as our tests using LLaMA-7B and OPT-6.7b reveal a significant performance drop in several realistic downstream tasks, underscoring the disparity between perplexity as a performance indicator and real-world performance. Investigation into the trade-off between resource-intensive post-compression re-training highlights the prospect of prompt-driven recovery as a lightweight adaption tool. However, existing studies, confined mainly to perplexity evaluations and simple tasks, fail to offer unequivocal confidence in the scalability and generalizability of prompting. We tackle this uncertainty in two key ways. First, we uncover the vulnerability of naive prompts in LLM compression as an over-reliance on a singular prompt per input. In response, we propose inference-time dynamic prompting (IDP), a mechanism that autonomously chooses from a set of curated prompts based on the context of each individual input. Second, we delve into a scientific understanding of why ``prompting might be all you need post-LLM compression". Our findings suggest that compression doesn't irretrievably erase LLM model knowledge but displace it, necessitating a new inference path. IDP effectively redirects this path, enabling the model to tap into its inherent yet displaced knowledge and thereby recover performance. Empirical tests affirm the value of IDP, demonstrating an average performance improvement of 1.24% across nine varied tasks spanning multiple knowledge domains.

With the advent of vision-language models (VLMs) that can perform in-context and prompt-based learning, how can we design prompting approaches that robustly generalize to distribution shift and can be used on novel classes outside the support set of the prompts? In this work, we first define two types of robustness to distribution shift on VLMs, namely, robustness on base classes (the classes included in the support set of prompts) and robustness on novel classes. Then, we study the robustness of existing in-context learning and prompt learning approaches, where we find that prompt learning performs robustly on test images from base classes, while it does not generalize well on images from novel classes. We propose robust prompt learning by integrating multiple-scale image features into the prompt, which improves both types of robustness. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to study the defined robustness on six benchmarks and show the effectiveness of our proposal.

Accurate medical image segmentation is essential for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. While recent interactive foundation models (e.g., nnInteractive) enhance generalization through large-scale multimodal pretraining, they still depend on precise prompts and often perform below expectations in contexts that are underrepresented in their training data. We present AtlasSegFM, an atlas-guided framework that customizes available foundation models to clinical contexts with a single annotated example. The core innovations are: 1) a pipeline that provides context-aware prompts for foundation models via registration between a context atlas and query images, and 2) a test-time adapter to fuse predictions from both atlas registration and the foundation model. Extensive experiments across public and in-house datasets spanning multiple modalities and organs demonstrate that AtlasSegFM consistently improves segmentation, particularly for small, delicate structures. AtlasSegFM provides a lightweight, deployable solution one-shot customization of foundation models in real-world clinical workflows. The code will be made publicly available.

Query rewriting refers to an established family of approaches that are applied to underspecified and ambiguous queries to overcome the vocabulary mismatch problem in document ranking. Queries are typically rewritten during query processing time for better query modelling for the downstream ranker. With the advent of large-language models (LLMs), there have been initial investigations into using generative approaches to generate pseudo documents to tackle this inherent vocabulary gap. In this work, we analyze the utility of LLMs for improved query rewriting for text ranking tasks. We find that there are two inherent limitations of using LLMs as query re-writers -- concept drift when using only queries as prompts and large inference costs during query processing. We adopt a simple, yet surprisingly effective, approach called context aware query rewriting (CAR) to leverage the benefits of LLMs for query understanding. Firstly, we rewrite ambiguous training queries by context-aware prompting of LLMs, where we use only relevant documents as context.Unlike existing approaches, we use LLM-based query rewriting only during the training phase. Eventually, a ranker is fine-tuned on the rewritten queries instead of the original queries during training. In our extensive experiments, we find that fine-tuning a ranker using re-written queries offers a significant improvement of up to 33% on the passage ranking task and up to 28% on the document ranking task when compared to the baseline performance of using original queries.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used to operate browsers, files, code and tools, making personal assistants a natural deployment target. Yet personal agents face a privacy-cost-capability tension: cloud models execute multi-step workflows well but expose sensitive intermediate context to external APIs, while local models preserve privacy but remain less reliable. Both settings also pay repeatedly for long skill prompts and growing histories. We propose constant-context skill learning, a context-to-weights framework for recurring agent workflows: reusable procedures are learned in lightweight task-family modules, while inference conditions only on the current observation and a compact state block. A deterministic tracker renders this state block from task progress and supplies aligned subgoal rewards, so each module can be trained with step-level SFT and refined through online RL. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld, our agents achieve strong performance across Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B and Llama-3.1-8B. With Qwen3-8B, SFT+RL reaches 89.6\% unseen success on ALFWorld, 76.8\% success on WebShop, and 66.4\% unseen success on SciWorld. They match or exceed strong published agent-training results while reducing prompt tokens per turn by 2--7times relative to controlled ReAct prompting baselines, showing that procedural context can be moved from prompts into weights.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a wide range of natural language processing tasks when leveraging in-context learning. To mitigate the additional computational and financial costs associated with in-context learning, several prompt compression methods have been proposed to compress the in-context learning prompts. Despite their success, these methods face challenges with transferability due to model-specific compression, or rely on external training data, such as GPT-4. In this paper, we investigate the ability of LLMs to develop a unified compression method that discretizes uninformative tokens, utilizing a self-supervised pre-training technique. By introducing a small number of parameters during the continual pre-training, the proposed Selection-p produces a probability for each input token, indicating whether to preserve or discard it. Experiments show Selection-p achieves state-of-the-art performance across numerous classification tasks, achieving compression rates of up to 10 times while experiencing only a marginal 0.8% decrease in performance. Moreover, it exhibits superior transferability to different models compared to prior work. Additionally, we further analyze how Selection-p helps maintain performance on in-context learning with long contexts.

Prompt learning for vision-language models, e.g., CoOp, has shown great success in adapting CLIP to different downstream tasks, making it a promising solution for federated learning due to computational reasons. Existing prompt learning techniques replace hand-crafted text prompts with learned vectors that offer improvements on seen classes, but struggle to generalize to unseen classes. Our work addresses this challenge by proposing Federated Text-driven Prompt Generation (FedTPG), which learns a unified prompt generation network across multiple remote clients in a scalable manner. The prompt generation network is conditioned on task-related text input, thus is context-aware, making it suitable to generalize for both seen and unseen classes. Our comprehensive empirical evaluations on nine diverse image classification datasets show that our method is superior to existing federated prompt learning methods, that achieve overall better generalization on both seen and unseen classes and is also generalizable to unseen datasets.

Zero-shot learning in prompted vision-language models, the practice of crafting prompts to build classifiers without an explicit training process, has achieved impressive performance in many settings. This success presents a seemingly surprising observation: these methods suffer relatively little from overfitting, i.e., when a prompt is manually engineered to achieve low error on a given training set (thus rendering the method no longer actually zero-shot), the approach still performs well on held-out test data. In this paper, we show that we can explain such performance well via recourse to classical PAC-Bayes bounds. Specifically, we show that the discrete nature of prompts, combined with a PAC-Bayes prior given by a language model, results in generalization bounds that are remarkably tight by the standards of the literature: for instance, the generalization bound of an ImageNet classifier is often within a few percentage points of the true test error. We demonstrate empirically that this holds for existing handcrafted prompts and prompts generated through simple greedy search. Furthermore, the resulting bound is well-suited for model selection: the models with the best bound typically also have the best test performance. This work thus provides a possible justification for the widespread practice of prompt engineering, even if it seems that such methods could potentially overfit the training data.

Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are at the forefront of advances in Natural Language Processing. One widespread use case of PLMs is "prompting" - or in-context learning - where a user provides a description of a task and some completed examples of the task to a PLM as context before prompting the PLM to perform the task on a new example. Only the largest, most capable PLMs are able to perform in-context learning effectively, and these models are typically trained with a predominantly English corpus, leaving all other languages behind. The data limitations in most languages preclude the training of language-specific PLMs capable of prompting. Albeit the surge in work of prompting settings, it is still unclear how PLMs should be adapted cross-lingually specifically for prompting. We evaluate the possible methods to adapt LLaMa, a 7B parameter open-source PLM mainly trained in English, for prompting in low-resource languages, namely for Kinyarwanda, Hausa, and Luganda. We consider three methods: few-shot prompting (prompt), language-adaptive fine-tuning (LAFT), and neural machine translation (translate), and evaluate on abstractive summarization, multi-class topic classification, and named-entity recognition. Although LAFT carries the greatest compute cost and intuitively should lead to the best results, our experiments exhibit that LAFT is only occasionally the optimal choice for adapting PLMs for prompting. Rather, the translate and prompt settings are a compute-efficient and cost-effective method of few-shot prompting for the selected low-resource languages. We find that the results are task and language dependent but find that the prompting method is the best on average across all tasks and languages. Results show that the prompt setting performs better than both translating and LAFT with statistical significance for all shots when aggregated across all tasks and languages.

Named entity recognition (NER) is a core task for historical research in automatically establishing all references to people, places, events and the like. Yet, do to the high linguistic and genre diversity of sources, only limited canonisation of spellings, the level of required historical domain knowledge, and the scarcity of annotated training data, established approaches to natural language processing (NLP) have been both extremely expensive and yielded only unsatisfactory results in terms of recall and precision. Our paper introduces a new approach. We demonstrate how readily-available, state-of-the-art LLMs significantly outperform two leading NLP frameworks, spaCy and flair, for NER in historical documents by seven to twentytwo percent higher F1-Scores. Our ablation study shows how providing historical context to the task and a bit of persona modelling that turns focus away from a purely linguistic approach are core to a successful prompting strategy. We also demonstrate that, contrary to our expectations, providing increasing numbers of examples in few-shot approaches does not improve recall or precision below a threshold of 16-shot. In consequence, our approach democratises access to NER for all historians by removing the barrier of scripting languages and computational skills required for established NLP tools and instead leveraging natural language prompts and consumer-grade tools and frontends.

We consider the problem of multi-objective alignment of foundation models with human preferences, which is a critical step towards helpful and harmless AI systems. However, it is generally costly and unstable to fine-tune large foundation models using reinforcement learning (RL), and the multi-dimensionality, heterogeneity, and conflicting nature of human preferences further complicate the alignment process. In this paper, we introduce Rewards-in-Context (RiC), which conditions the response of a foundation model on multiple rewards in its prompt context and applies supervised fine-tuning for alignment. The salient features of RiC are simplicity and adaptivity, as it only requires supervised fine-tuning of a single foundation model and supports dynamic adjustment for user preferences during inference time. Inspired by the analytical solution of an abstracted convex optimization problem, our dynamic inference-time adjustment method approaches the Pareto-optimal solution for multiple objectives. Empirical evidence demonstrates the efficacy of our method in aligning both Large Language Models (LLMs) and diffusion models to accommodate diverse rewards with only around 10% GPU hours compared with multi-objective RL baseline.

By conditioning on natural language instructions, large language models (LLMs) have displayed impressive capabilities as general-purpose computers. However, task performance depends significantly on the quality of the prompt used to steer the model, and most effective prompts have been handcrafted by humans. Inspired by classical program synthesis and the human approach to prompt engineering, we propose Automatic Prompt Engineer (APE) for automatic instruction generation and selection. In our method, we treat the instruction as the "program," optimized by searching over a pool of instruction candidates proposed by an LLM in order to maximize a chosen score function. To evaluate the quality of the selected instruction, we evaluate the zero-shot performance of another LLM following the selected instruction. Experiments on 24 NLP tasks show that our automatically generated instructions outperform the prior LLM baseline by a large margin and achieve better or comparable performance to the instructions generated by human annotators on 19/24 tasks. We conduct extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses to explore the performance of APE. We show that APE-engineered prompts can be applied to steer models toward truthfulness and/or informativeness, as well as to improve few-shot learning performance by simply prepending them to standard in-context learning prompts. Please check out our webpage at https://sites.google.com/view/automatic-prompt-engineer.

Multimodal learning with incomplete modality is practical and challenging. Recently, researchers have focused on enhancing the robustness of pre-trained MultiModal Transformers (MMTs) under missing modality conditions by applying learnable prompts. However, these prompt-based methods face several limitations: (1) incomplete modalities provide restricted modal cues for task-specific inference, (2) dummy imputation for missing content causes information loss and introduces noise, and (3) static prompts are instance-agnostic, offering limited knowledge for instances with various missing conditions. To address these issues, we propose RAGPT, a novel Retrieval-AuGmented dynamic Prompt Tuning framework. RAGPT comprises three modules: (I) the multi-channel retriever, which identifies similar instances through a within-modality retrieval strategy, (II) the missing modality generator, which recovers missing information using retrieved contexts, and (III) the context-aware prompter, which captures contextual knowledge from relevant instances and generates dynamic prompts to largely enhance the MMT's robustness. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets show that RAGPT consistently outperforms all competitive baselines in handling incomplete modality problems. The code of our work and prompt-based baselines is available at https://github.com/Jian-Lang/RAGPT.

Production assertions are statements embedded in the code to help developers validate their assumptions about the code. They assist developers in debugging, provide valuable documentation, and enhance code comprehension. Current research in this area primarily focuses on assertion generation for unit tests using techniques, such as static analysis and deep learning. While these techniques have shown promise, they fall short when it comes to generating production assertions, which serve a different purpose. This preprint addresses the gap by introducing Assertify, an automated end-to-end tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and prompt engineering with few-shot learning to generate production assertions. By creating context-rich prompts, the tool emulates the approach developers take when creating production assertions for their code. To evaluate our approach, we compiled a dataset of 2,810 methods by scraping 22 mature Java repositories from GitHub. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of few-shot learning by producing assertions with an average ROUGE-L score of 0.526, indicating reasonably high structural similarity with the assertions written by developers. This research demonstrates the potential of LLMs in automating the generation of production assertions that resemble the original assertions.

Weird generalization is a phenomenon in which models fine-tuned on data from a narrow domain (e.g. insecure code) develop surprising traits that manifest even outside that domain (e.g. broad misalignment)-a phenomenon that prior work has highlighted as a critical safety concern. Here, we present an extended replication study of key weird generalization results across an expanded suite of models and datasets. We confirm that surprising (and dangerous) traits can emerge under certain circumstances, but we find that weird generalization is exceptionally brittle: it emerges only for specific models on specific datasets, and it vanishes under simple training-time, prompt-based interventions. We find that the most effective interventions provide prompt context that makes the generalized behavior the expected behavior. However, we show that even very generic interventions that do not anticipate specific generalized traits can still be effective in mitigating weird generalization's effects. Our findings thus help clarify the nature of the safety threat that weird generalization poses and point toward an easily implemented set of solutions.

Unit testing is an essential yet frequently arduous task. Various automated unit test generation tools have been introduced to mitigate this challenge. Notably, methods based on large language models (LLMs) have garnered considerable attention and exhibited promising results in recent years. Nevertheless, LLM-based tools encounter limitations in generating accurate unit tests. This paper presents ChatUniTest, an LLM-based automated unit test generation framework. ChatUniTest incorporates an adaptive focal context mechanism to encompass valuable context in prompts and adheres to a generation-validation-repair mechanism to rectify errors in generated unit tests. Subsequently, we have developed ChatUniTest Core, a common library that implements core workflow, complemented by the ChatUniTest Toolchain, a suite of seamlessly integrated tools enhancing the capabilities of ChatUniTest. Our effectiveness evaluation reveals that ChatUniTest outperforms TestSpark and EvoSuite in half of the evaluated projects, achieving the highest overall line coverage. Furthermore, insights from our user study affirm that ChatUniTest delivers substantial value to various stakeholders in the software testing domain. ChatUniTest is available at https://github.com/ZJU-ACES-ISE/ChatUniTest, and the demo video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmfxQUqm2ZQ.

Open-vocabulary audio-language models, like CLAP, offer a promising approach for zero-shot audio classification (ZSAC) by enabling classification with any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language prompts. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to improve ZSAC with CLAP. Specifically, we shift from the conventional method of using prompts with abstract category labels (e.g., Sound of an organ) to prompts that describe sounds using their inherent descriptive features in a diverse context (e.g.,The organ's deep and resonant tones filled the cathedral.). To achieve this, we first propose ReCLAP, a CLAP model trained with rewritten audio captions for improved understanding of sounds in the wild. These rewritten captions describe each sound event in the original caption using their unique discriminative characteristics. ReCLAP outperforms all baselines on both multi-modal audio-text retrieval and ZSAC. Next, to improve zero-shot audio classification with ReCLAP, we propose prompt augmentation. In contrast to the traditional method of employing hand-written template prompts, we generate custom prompts for each unique label in the dataset. These custom prompts first describe the sound event in the label and then employ them in diverse scenes. Our proposed method improves ReCLAP's performance on ZSAC by 1%-18% and outperforms all baselines by 1% - 55%.

The popularity of transformer-based text embeddings calls for better statistical tools for measuring distributions of such embeddings. One such tool would be a method for ranking texts within a corpus by centrality, i.e. assigning each text a number signifying how representative that text is of the corpus as a whole. However, an intrinsic center-outward ordering of high-dimensional text representations is not trivial. A statistical depth is a function for ranking k-dimensional objects by measuring centrality with respect to some observed k-dimensional distribution. We adopt a statistical depth to measure distributions of transformer-based text embeddings, transformer-based text embedding (TTE) depth, and introduce the practical use of this depth for both modeling and distributional inference in NLP pipelines. We first define TTE depth and an associated rank sum test for determining whether two corpora differ significantly in embedding space. We then use TTE depth for the task of in-context learning prompt selection, showing that this approach reliably improves performance over statistical baseline approaches across six text classification tasks. Finally, we use TTE depth and the associated rank sum test to characterize the distributions of synthesized and human-generated corpora, showing that five recent synthetic data augmentation processes cause a measurable distributional shift away from associated human-generated text.

Code generation benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate LLMs' capabilities. However, after consolidating the latest 24 benchmarks, we noticed three significant imbalances. First, imbalanced programming language. 95.8% of benchmarks involve Python, while only 5 benchmarks involve Java. Second, imbalanced code granularity. Function-/statement-level benchmarks account for over 83.3% of benchmarks. Only a mere handful extends to class-/project-levels, and all are limited to Python. Third, lacking advanced features. Existing benchmarks primarily assess basic coding skills, while overlooking advanced Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) features (i.e., encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism). To fill these gaps, we propose JavaBench, a project-level Java benchmark that exercises OOP features. It comprises four Java projects with 389 methods in 106 Java classes. The test coverage is up to 92%, and JavaBench is attested by 282 undergraduate students, reaching a 90.93/100 average score (i.e., pass rate against the test suite), ensuring the quality of documentation, code skeleton, and tests. To better evaluate LLM's capability against JavaBench, we introduce a systematic evaluation design covering three context settings and five synthesis strategies at two granularities using three hierarchical metrics. Our extensive experiment yields several interesting findings. First, we noticed that regarding project-level Java programming, LLMs are far behind undergraduate students (no project can be correctly completed by any studied LLMs, and at most 41.17% Pass@5 in a more relaxed evaluation). Second, using method signature as prompt context may strike an ideal balance for project-level code generation. JavaBench is publicly available at https://github.com/java-bench/JavaBench.

Recent approaches have shown that large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP can improve semantic segmentation performance. These methods typically aim for pixel-level vision-language alignment, but often rely on low resolution image features from CLIP, resulting in class ambiguities along boundaries. Moreover, the global scene representations in CLIP text embeddings do not directly correlate with the local and detailed pixel-level features, making meaningful alignment more difficult. To address these limitations, we introduce MTA-CLIP, a novel framework employing mask-level vision-language alignment. Specifically, we first propose Mask-Text Decoder that enhances the mask representations using rich textual data with the CLIP language model. Subsequently, it aligns mask representations with text embeddings using Mask-to-Text Contrastive Learning. Furthermore, we introduce MaskText Prompt Learning, utilizing multiple context-specific prompts for text embeddings to capture diverse class representations across masks. Overall, MTA-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art, surpassing prior works by an average of 2.8% and 1.3% on on standard benchmark datasets, ADE20k and Cityscapes, respectively.

Large language models (LLMs) have captured significant interest from both academia and industry due to their impressive performance across various textual tasks. However, the potential of LLMs to analyze physiological time-series data remains an emerging research field. Particularly, there is a notable gap in the utilization of LLMs for analyzing wearable biosignals to achieve cuffless blood pressure (BP) measurement, which is critical for the management of cardiovascular diseases. This paper presents the first work to explore the capacity of LLMs to perform cuffless BP estimation based on wearable biosignals. We extracted physiological features from electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals and designed context-enhanced prompts by combining these features with BP domain knowledge and user information. Subsequently, we adapted LLMs to BP estimation tasks through fine-tuning. To evaluate the proposed approach, we conducted assessments of ten advanced LLMs using a comprehensive public dataset of wearable biosignals from 1,272 participants. The experimental results demonstrate that the optimally fine-tuned LLM significantly surpasses conventional task-specific baselines, achieving an estimation error of 0.00 pm 9.25 mmHg for systolic BP and 1.29 pm 6.37 mmHg for diastolic BP. Notably, the ablation studies highlight the benefits of our context enhancement strategy, leading to an 8.9% reduction in mean absolute error for systolic BP estimation. This paper pioneers the exploration of LLMs for cuffless BP measurement, providing a potential solution to enhance the accuracy of cuffless BP measurement.

Better understanding of Large Language Models' (LLMs) legal analysis abilities can contribute to improving the efficiency of legal services, governing artificial intelligence, and leveraging LLMs to identify inconsistencies in law. This paper explores LLM capabilities in applying tax law. We choose this area of law because it has a structure that allows us to set up automated validation pipelines across thousands of examples, requires logical reasoning and maths skills, and enables us to test LLM capabilities in a manner relevant to real-world economic lives of citizens and companies. Our experiments demonstrate emerging legal understanding capabilities, with improved performance in each subsequent OpenAI model release. We experiment with retrieving and utilising the relevant legal authority to assess the impact of providing additional legal context to LLMs. Few-shot prompting, presenting examples of question-answer pairs, is also found to significantly enhance the performance of the most advanced model, GPT-4. The findings indicate that LLMs, particularly when combined with prompting enhancements and the correct legal texts, can perform at high levels of accuracy but not yet at expert tax lawyer levels. As LLMs continue to advance, their ability to reason about law autonomously could have significant implications for the legal profession and AI governance.

Scaling automated formal verification to real-world projects requires resolving cross-module dependencies and global contexts, which are challenges overlooked by existing function-centric methods. We introduce RagVerus, a framework that synergizes retrieval-augmented generation with context-aware prompting to automate proof synthesis for multi-module repositories, achieving a 27% relative improvement on our novel RepoVBench benchmark -- the first repository-level dataset for Verus with 383 proof completion tasks. RagVerus triples proof pass rates on existing benchmarks under constrained language model budgets, demonstrating a scalable and sample-efficient verification.

Language model (LM) decoding is based on the next-token prediction (NTP) probability distribution. For neural LMs (e.g., Transformer-based), NTP distribution is essentially a softmax-regularized dot product between an encoded input context (query) and fixed vocabulary representations (keys). In this paper, we study the effect of the key distribution on the NTP distribution, with a focus on whether the similarity between keys will trigger spurious correlations in NTP. Through knowledge-probing tasks, we show that in the NTP distribution, the few top-ranked tokens are typically accurate. However, the middle-ranked prediction is highly biased towards the tokens that are distributionally (not necessarily semantically) similar to these top ones. For instance, if "P" is predicted as the top-1 token, "A"-"Z" will all be ranked high in NTP, no matter whether they can lead to correct decoding results. This hurts the sampling diversity and makes the sampling of correct, long-tail results hopeless and noisy. We attempt to alleviate this issue via a novel in-context method that iteratively pushes the query representation away from explored regions. Specifically, we include the explored decoding results in the context and prompt the LM to generate something else, which encourages the LM to produce a query representation that has small dot products with explored keys. Experiments on knowledge-probing tasks show that our method leads to efficient navigation away from explored keys to correct new keys. We further extend our method to open-ended and chain-of-thought (for reasoning) generation. Experiment results show that ICN contributes to better generation diversity and improved self-consistency voting performance. Finally, we discuss potential training issues caused by the fixed key space together with the challenges and possible ways to address them in future research.

Data contamination, i.e., the presence of test data from downstream tasks in the training data of large language models (LLMs), is a potential major issue in measuring LLMs' real effectiveness on other tasks. We propose a straightforward yet effective method for identifying data contamination within LLMs. At its core, our approach starts by identifying potential contamination at the instance level; using this information, our approach then assesses wider contamination at the partition level. To estimate contamination of individual instances, we employ "guided instruction:" a prompt consisting of the dataset name, partition type, and the random-length initial segment of a reference instance, asking the LLM to complete it. An instance is flagged as contaminated if the LLM's output either exactly or nearly matches the latter segment of the reference. To understand if an entire partition is contaminated, we propose two ideas. The first idea marks a dataset partition as contaminated if the average overlap score with the reference instances (as measured by ROUGE-L or BLEURT) is statistically significantly better with the completions from guided instruction compared to a "general instruction" that does not include the dataset and partition name. The second idea marks a dataset partition as contaminated if a classifier based on GPT-4 with few-shot in-context learning prompt marks multiple generated completions as exact/near-exact matches of the corresponding reference instances. Our best method achieves an accuracy between 92% and 100% in detecting if an LLM is contaminated with seven datasets, containing train and test/validation partitions, when contrasted with manual evaluation by human experts. Further, our findings indicate that GPT-4 is contaminated with AG News, WNLI, and XSum datasets.

Recent text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable visual fidelity but often struggle with semantic alignment to complex prompts. We introduce CritiFusion, a novel inference-time framework that integrates a multimodal semantic critique mechanism with frequency-domain refinement to improve text-to-image consistency and detail. The proposed CritiCore module leverages a vision-language model and multiple large language models to enrich the prompt context and produce high-level semantic feedback, guiding the diffusion process to better align generated content with the prompt's intent. Additionally, SpecFusion merges intermediate generation states in the spectral domain, injecting coarse structural information while preserving high-frequency details. No additional model training is required. CritiFusion serves as a plug-in refinement stage compatible with existing diffusion backbones. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our method notably improves human-aligned metrics of text-to-image correspondence and visual quality. CritiFusion consistently boosts performance on human preference scores and aesthetic evaluations, achieving results on par with state-of-the-art reward optimization approaches. Qualitative results further demonstrate superior detail, realism, and prompt fidelity, indicating the effectiveness of our semantic critique and spectral alignment strategy.

While large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive conversational capabilities, their proficiency in delivering personalized responses remains unclear. Although recent benchmarks automatically evaluate persona consistency in role-playing contexts using LLM-based judgment, the evaluation of personalization in response generation remains underexplored. To address this gap, we present an automated benchmarking pipeline, PersoBench, to evaluate the personalization ability of LLMs in persona-aware dialogue generation within a zero-shot setting. Our framework employs a structured pipeline comprising speaker-aware annotation, task-specific and context-driven prompt construction, response post-processing, and automated evaluation across multiple dimensions of generation quality. In particular, the pipeline performs text preprocessing and speaker labeling, constructs structured prompts with task instructions and LLM roles, validates response format, and evaluates valid outputs across fluency, personalization, diversity, and coherence. We assess the performance of four open-source and four closed-source LLMs using well-known datasets and a range of explicit metrics. Our findings reveal that while LLMs excel at generating fluent and diverse responses, they are far from satisfactory in delivering personalized and coherent responses, considering both the conversation context and the provided personas.

Diffusion-based editing enables realistic modification of local image regions, making AI-generated content harder to detect. Existing AIGC detection benchmarks focus on classifying entire images, overlooking the localization of diffusion-based edits. We introduce DiffSeg30k, a publicly available dataset of 30k diffusion-edited images with pixel-level annotations, designed to support fine-grained detection. DiffSeg30k features: 1) In-the-wild images--we collect images or image prompts from COCO to reflect real-world content diversity; 2) Diverse diffusion models--local edits using eight SOTA diffusion models; 3) Multi-turn editing--each image undergoes up to three sequential edits to mimic real-world sequential editing; and 4) Realistic editing scenarios--a vision-language model (VLM)-based pipeline automatically identifies meaningful regions and generates context-aware prompts covering additions, removals, and attribute changes. DiffSeg30k shifts AIGC detection from binary classification to semantic segmentation, enabling simultaneous localization of edits and identification of the editing models. We benchmark three baseline segmentation approaches, revealing significant challenges in semantic segmentation tasks, particularly concerning robustness to image distortions. Experiments also reveal that segmentation models, despite being trained for pixel-level localization, emerge as highly reliable whole-image classifiers of diffusion edits, outperforming established forgery classifiers while showing great potential in cross-generator generalization. We believe DiffSeg30k will advance research in fine-grained localization of AI-generated content by demonstrating the promise and limitations of segmentation-based methods. DiffSeg30k is released at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Chaos2629/Diffseg30k

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit significant behavioral shifts when they perceive a change from a real-world deployment context to a controlled evaluation setting, a phenomenon known as "evaluation awareness." This discrepancy poses a critical challenge for AI alignment, as benchmark performance may not accurately reflect a model's true safety and honesty. In this work, we systematically quantify these behavioral changes by manipulating the perceived context of prompts. We introduce a methodology that uses a linear probe to score prompts on a continuous scale from "test-like" to "deploy-like" and leverage an LLM rewriting strategy to shift these prompts towards a more natural, deployment-style context while preserving the original task. Using this method, we achieved a 30% increase in the average probe score across a strategic role-playing dataset after rewriting. Evaluating a suite of state-of-the-art models on these original and rewritten prompts, we find that rewritten "deploy-like" prompts induce a significant and consistent shift in behavior. Across all models, we observed an average increase in honest responses of 5.26% and a corresponding average decrease in deceptive responses of 12.40%. Furthermore, refusal rates increased by an average of 6.38%, indicating heightened safety compliance. Our findings demonstrate that evaluation awareness is a quantifiable and manipulable factor that directly influences LLM behavior, revealing that models are more prone to unsafe or deceptive outputs in perceived test environments. This underscores the urgent need for more realistic evaluation frameworks to accurately gauge true model alignment before deployment.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent capabilities in generating structured diagrams from natural language descriptions. In particular, they have shown great promise in generating sequence diagrams for software engineering, typically represented in a text-based syntax such as Mermaid. However, systematic evaluations in this space remain underdeveloped as there is a lack of existing benchmarks to assess the LLM's correctness in this task. To address this shortcoming, we introduce MermaidSeqBench, a human-verified and LLM-synthetically-extended benchmark for assessing an LLM's capabilities in generating Mermaid sequence diagrams from textual prompts. The benchmark consists of a core set of 132 samples, starting from a small set of manually crafted and verified flows. These were expanded via a hybrid methodology combining human annotation, in-context LLM prompting, and rule-based variation generation. Our benchmark uses an LLM-as-a-judge model to assess Mermaid sequence diagram generation across fine-grained metrics, including syntax correctness, activation handling, error handling, and practical usability. We perform initial evaluations on numerous state-of-the-art LLMs and utilize multiple LLM judge models to demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our benchmark. Our results reveal significant capability gaps across models and evaluation modes. Our proposed benchmark provides a foundation for advancing research in structured diagram generation and for developing more rigorous, fine-grained evaluation methodologies.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) suggest great promises in code and proof generations. However, scaling automated formal verification to real-world projects requires resolving cross-module dependencies and global contexts, which are crucial challenges overlooked by existing LLM-based methods with a special focus on targeting isolated, function-level verification tasks. To systematically explore and address the significant challenges of verifying entire software repositories, we introduce RVBench, the first verification benchmark explicitly designed for repository-level evaluation, constructed from four diverse and complex open-source Verus projects. We further introduce RagVerus, an extensible framework that synergizes retrieval-augmented generation with context-aware prompting to automate proof synthesis for multi-module repositories. RagVerus triples proof pass rates on existing benchmarks under constrained model inference budgets, and achieves a 27% relative improvement on the more challenging RVBench benchmark, demonstrating a scalable and sample-efficient verification solution.

Text classification is crucial for applications such as sentiment analysis and toxic text filtering, but it still faces challenges due to the complexity and ambiguity of natural language. Recent advancements in deep learning, particularly transformer architectures and large-scale pretraining, have achieved inspiring success in NLP fields. Building on these advancements, this thesis explores three challenging settings in text classification by leveraging the intrinsic knowledge of pretrained language models (PLMs). Firstly, to address the challenge of selecting misleading yet incorrect distractors for cloze questions, we develop models that utilize features based on contextualized word representations from PLMs, achieving performance that rivals or surpasses human accuracy. Secondly, to enhance model generalization to unseen labels, we create small finetuning datasets with domain-independent task label descriptions, improving model performance and robustness. Lastly, we tackle the sensitivity of large language models to in-context learning prompts by selecting effective demonstrations, focusing on misclassified examples and resolving model ambiguity regarding test example labels.

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.

We show that even the most recent safety-aligned LLMs are not robust to simple adaptive jailbreaking attacks. First, we demonstrate how to successfully leverage access to logprobs for jailbreaking: we initially design an adversarial prompt template (sometimes adapted to the target LLM), and then we apply random search on a suffix to maximize the target logprob (e.g., of the token "Sure"), potentially with multiple restarts. In this way, we achieve nearly 100\% attack success rate -- according to GPT-4 as a judge -- on GPT-3.5/4, Llama-2-Chat-7B/13B/70B, Gemma-7B, and R2D2 from HarmBench that was adversarially trained against the GCG attack. We also show how to jailbreak all Claude models -- that do not expose logprobs -- via either a transfer or prefilling attack with 100\% success rate. In addition, we show how to use random search on a restricted set of tokens for finding trojan strings in poisoned models -- a task that shares many similarities with jailbreaking -- which is the algorithm that brought us the first place in the SaTML'24 Trojan Detection Competition. The common theme behind these attacks is that adaptivity is crucial: different models are vulnerable to different prompting templates (e.g., R2D2 is very sensitive to in-context learning prompts), some models have unique vulnerabilities based on their APIs (e.g., prefilling for Claude), and in some settings it is crucial to restrict the token search space based on prior knowledge (e.g., for trojan detection). We provide the code, prompts, and logs of the attacks at https://github.com/tml-epfl/llm-adaptive-attacks.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on long-context tasks, but are often bottlenecked by memory constraints. Namely, the KV cache, which is used to significantly speed up attention computations, grows linearly with context length. A suite of compression algorithms has been introduced to alleviate cache growth by evicting unimportant tokens. However, several popular strategies are targeted towards the prefill phase, i.e., processing long prompt context, and their performance is rarely assessed on reasoning tasks requiring long decoding. In particular, short but complex prompts, such as those in benchmarks like GSM8K and MATH500, often benefit from multi-step reasoning and self-reflection, resulting in thinking sequences thousands of tokens long. In this work, we benchmark the performance of several popular compression strategies on long-reasoning tasks. For the non-reasoning Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, we determine that no singular strategy fits all, and that performance is heavily influenced by dataset type. However, we discover that H2O and our decoding-enabled variant of SnapKV are dominant strategies for reasoning models, indicating the utility of heavy-hitter tracking for reasoning traces. We also find that eviction strategies at low budgets can produce longer reasoning traces, revealing a tradeoff between cache size and inference costs.

We present a large autoregressive model for source-space MEG that scales next-token prediction to long context across datasets and scanners: handling a corpus of over 500 hours and thousands of sessions across the three largest MEG datasets. A modified SEANet-style vector-quantizer reduces multichannel MEG into a flattened token stream on which we train a Qwen2.5-VL backbone from scratch to predict the next brain token and to recursively generate minutes of MEG from up to a minute of context. To evaluate long-horizon generation, we introduce three task-matched tests: (i) on-manifold stability via generated-only drift compared to the time-resolved distribution of real sliding windows, and (ii) conditional specificity via correct context versus prompt-swap controls using a neurophysiologically grounded metric set. We train on CamCAN and Omega and run all analyses on held-out MOUS, establishing cross-dataset generalization. Across metrics, generations remain relatively stable over long rollouts and are closer to the correct continuation than swapped controls. Code available at: https://github.com/ricsinaruto/brain-gen.

Large language models based on transformers have achieved great empirical successes. However, as they are deployed more widely, there is a growing need to better understand their internal mechanisms in order to make them more reliable. These models appear to store vast amounts of knowledge from their training data, and to adapt quickly to new information provided in their context or prompt. We study how transformers balance these two types of knowledge by considering a synthetic setup where tokens are generated from either global or context-specific bigram distributions. By a careful empirical analysis of the training process on a simplified two-layer transformer, we illustrate the fast learning of global bigrams and the slower development of an "induction head" mechanism for the in-context bigrams. We highlight the role of weight matrices as associative memories, provide theoretical insights on how gradients enable their learning during training, and study the role of data-distributional properties.

Pretrained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in medical AI systems for clinical reasoning, diagnosis support, and report generation. However, their training on sensitive patient data raises critical privacy and compliance challenges under regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR, which enforce the "right to be forgotten". Unlearning, the process of tuning models to selectively remove the influence of specific training data points, offers a potential solution, yet its effectiveness in complex medical settings remains underexplored. To systematically study this, we introduce MedForget, a Hierarchy-Aware Multimodal Unlearning Testbed with explicit retain and forget splits and evaluation sets containing rephrased variants. MedForget models hospital data as a nested hierarchy (Institution -> Patient -> Study -> Section), enabling fine-grained assessment across eight organizational levels. The benchmark contains 3840 multimodal (image, question, answer) instances, each hierarchy level having a dedicated unlearning target, reflecting distinct unlearning challenges. Experiments with four SOTA unlearning methods on three tasks (generation, classification, cloze) show that existing methods struggle to achieve complete, hierarchy-aware forgetting without reducing diagnostic performance. To test whether unlearning truly deletes hierarchical pathways, we introduce a reconstruction attack that progressively adds hierarchical level context to prompts. Models unlearned at a coarse granularity show strong resistance, while fine-grained unlearning leaves models vulnerable to such reconstruction. MedForget provides a practical, HIPAA-aligned testbed for building compliant medical AI systems.

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Large Language Models (LLMs) each show promise in addressing decision-making challenges in autonomous driving, DRL often suffers from high sample complexity, while LLMs have difficulty ensuring real-time decision making. To address these limitations, we propose TeLL-Drive, a hybrid framework that integrates a Teacher LLM to guide an attention-based Student DRL policy. By incorporating risk metrics, historical scenario retrieval, and domain heuristics into context-rich prompts, the LLM produces high-level driving strategies through chain-of-thought reasoning. A self-attention mechanism then fuses these strategies with the DRL agent's exploration, accelerating policy convergence and boosting robustness across diverse driving conditions. The experimental results, evaluated across multiple traffic scenarios, show that TeLL-Drive outperforms existing baseline methods, including other LLM-based approaches, in terms of success rates, average returns, and real-time feasibility. Ablation studies underscore the importance of each model component, especially the synergy between the attention mechanism and LLM-driven guidance. Finally, we build a virtual-real fusion experimental platform to verify the real-time performance, robustness, and reliability of the algorithm running on real vehicles through vehicle-in-loop experiments.

Iterative human engagement is a common and effective means of leveraging the advanced language processing power of large language models (LLMs). Using well-structured prompts in a conversational manner, human users can effectively influence an LLM to develop more thoughtful and accurate responses. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Iteration of Thought (IoT) framework for enhancing LLM responses by generating "thought"-provoking prompts vis a vis an input query and the current iteration of an LLM's response. Unlike static or semi-static approaches, e.g. Chain of Thought (CoT) or Tree of Thoughts (ToT), IoT adapts its reasoning path dynamically, based on evolving context, and without generating alternate explorative thoughts which are ultimately discarded. The three components of the IoT framework are (1) an Inner Dialogue Agent (IDA) responsible for generating instructive, context-specific prompts; (2) an LLM Agent (LLMA) that processes these prompts to refine its responses; and (3) an iterative prompting loop that implements a conversation between the former two components. We introduce two variants of our framework: Autonomous Iteration of Thought (AIoT), where an LLM decides when to stop iterating, and Guided Iteration of Thought (GIoT), which always forces a fixed number iterations. We investigate the performance of IoT across various datasets, spanning complex reasoning tasks from the GPQA dataset, explorative problem-solving in Game of 24, puzzle solving in Mini Crosswords, and multi-hop question answering from the HotpotQA dataset. Our results show that IoT represents a viable paradigm for autonomous response refinement in LLMs, showcasing significant improvements over CoT and thereby enabling more adaptive and efficient reasoning systems that minimize human intervention.

With the advance of diffusion models, today's video generation has achieved impressive quality. But generating temporal consistent long videos is still challenging. A majority of video diffusion models (VDMs) generate long videos in an autoregressive manner, i.e., generating subsequent clips conditioned on last frames of previous clip. However, existing approaches all involve bidirectional computations, which restricts the receptive context of each autoregression step, and results in the model lacking long-term dependencies. Inspired from the huge success of large language models (LLMs) and following GPT (generative pre-trained transformer), we bring causal (i.e., unidirectional) generation into VDMs, and use past frames as prompt to generate future frames. For Causal Generation, we introduce causal temporal attention into VDM, which forces each generated frame to depend on its previous frames. For Frame as Prompt, we inject the conditional frames by concatenating them with noisy frames (frames to be generated) along the temporal axis. Consequently, we present Video Diffusion GPT (ViD-GPT). Based on the two key designs, in each autoregression step, it is able to acquire long-term context from prompting frames concatenated by all previously generated frames. Additionally, we bring the kv-cache mechanism to VDMs, which eliminates the redundant computation from overlapped frames, significantly boosting the inference speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ViD-GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively on long video generation. Code will be available at https://github.com/Dawn-LX/Causal-VideoGen.

We propose Context-Adaptive Multi-Prompt Embedding, a novel approach to enrich semantic representations in vision-language contrastive learning. Unlike standard CLIP-style models that rely on a single text embedding, our method introduces multiple structured prompts, each containing a distinct adaptive token that captures diverse semantic aspects of the input text. We leverage a pretrained LLM as the text encoder within the CLIP framework, processing all prompts jointly in a single forward pass. The resulting prompt embeddings are combined into a unified text representation, enabling semantically richer alignment with visual features. To further promote semantic diversity and representation quality, we incorporate a diversity regularization loss and a negation-aware loss, encouraging specialization across prompts and improving contrastive discrimination. Our method achieves consistent improvements on both image-text and video-text retrieval benchmarks.

We propose a novel prompt design paradigm that challenges conventional wisdom in large language model (LLM) prompting. While conventional wisdom prioritizes well-crafted instructions and demonstrations for in-context learning (ICL), we show that pruning random demonstrations into seemingly incoherent "gibberish" can remarkably improve performance across diverse tasks. Notably, the "gibberish" always matches or surpasses state-of-the-art automatic prompt optimization techniques, achieving substantial gains regardless of LLM alignment. Nevertheless, discovering an effective pruning strategy is non-trivial, as existing attribution methods and prompt compression algorithms fail to deliver robust results, let alone human intuition. In terms of this, we propose a self-discover prompt optimization framework, PromptQuine, an evolutionary search framework that automatically searches for the pruning strategy by itself using only low-data regimes. Much like the emergent complexity in nature--such as symbiosis and self-organization--arising in response to resource constraints, our framework evolves and refines unconventional yet highly effective prompts by leveraging only the tokens present within the context. We demonstrate its effectiveness across classification, multi-choice question answering, generation and math reasoning tasks across LLMs, while achieving decent runtime efficiency. We hope our findings can guide mechanistic studies on in-context learning, and provide a call to action, to pave the way for more open-ended search algorithms for more effective LLM prompting.

Prompting and in-context learning (ICL) have become efficient learning paradigms for large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs suffer from prompt brittleness and various bias factors in the prompt, including but not limited to the formatting, the choice verbalizers, and the ICL examples. To address this problem that results in unexpected performance degradation, calibration methods have been developed to mitigate the effects of these biases while recovering LLM performance. In this work, we first conduct a systematic analysis of the existing calibration methods, where we both provide a unified view and reveal the failure cases. Inspired by these analyses, we propose Batch Calibration (BC), a simple yet intuitive method that controls the contextual bias from the batched input, unifies various prior approaches, and effectively addresses the aforementioned issues. BC is zero-shot, inference-only, and incurs negligible additional costs. In the few-shot setup, we further extend BC to allow it to learn the contextual bias from labeled data. We validate the effectiveness of BC with PaLM 2-(S, M, L) and CLIP models and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance over previous calibration baselines across more than 10 natural language understanding and image classification tasks.

Sim-to-real transfer remains a significant challenge in robotics due to the discrepancies between simulated and real-world dynamics. Traditional methods like Domain Randomization often fail to capture fine-grained dynamics, limiting their effectiveness for precise control tasks. In this work, we propose a novel approach that dynamically adjusts simulation environment parameters online using in-context learning. By leveraging past interaction histories as context, our method adapts the simulation environment dynamics to real-world dynamics without requiring gradient updates, resulting in faster and more accurate alignment between simulated and real-world performance. We validate our approach across two tasks: object scooping and table air hockey. In the sim-to-sim evaluations, our method significantly outperforms the baselines on environment parameter estimation by 80% and 42% in the object scooping and table air hockey setups, respectively. Furthermore, our method achieves at least 70% success rate in sim-to-real transfer on object scooping across three different objects. By incorporating historical interaction data, our approach delivers efficient and smooth system identification, advancing the deployment of robots in dynamic real-world scenarios. Demos are available on our project page: https://sim2real-capture.github.io/

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) highlights the critical importance of conducting thorough evaluations to discern their comparative advantages, limitations, and optimal use cases. Particularly important is assessing their capacity to accurately retrieve information included in a given prompt. A model's ability to do this significantly influences how effectively it can utilize contextual details, thus impacting its practical efficacy and dependability in real-world applications. Our research analyzes the in-context recall performance of various LLMs using the needle-in-a-haystack method. In this approach, a factoid (the "needle") is embedded within a block of filler text (the "haystack"), which the model is asked to retrieve. We assess the recall performance of each model across various haystack lengths and with varying needle placements to identify performance patterns. This study demonstrates that an LLM's recall capability is not only contingent upon the prompt's content but also may be compromised by biases in its training data. Conversely, adjustments to model architecture, training strategy, or fine-tuning can improve performance. Our analysis provides insight into LLM behavior, offering direction for the development of more effective applications of LLMs.

Zero-shot and in-context learning enable solving tasks without model fine-tuning, making them essential for developing generative model solutions. Therefore, it is crucial to understand whether a pretrained model can be prompted to approximate any function, i.e., whether it is a universal in-context approximator. While it was recently shown that transformer models do possess this property, these results rely on their attention mechanism. Hence, these findings do not apply to fully recurrent architectures like RNNs, LSTMs, and the increasingly popular SSMs. We demonstrate that RNNs, LSTMs, GRUs, Linear RNNs, and linear gated architectures such as Mamba and Hawk/Griffin can also serve as universal in-context approximators. To streamline our argument, we introduce a programming language called LSRL that compiles to these fully recurrent architectures. LSRL may be of independent interest for further studies of fully recurrent models, such as constructing interpretability benchmarks. We also study the role of multiplicative gating and observe that architectures incorporating such gating (e.g., LSTMs, GRUs, Hawk/Griffin) can implement certain operations more stably, making them more viable candidates for practical in-context universal approximation.

This study evaluates the baseline capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to learn concepts in music theory through in-context learning and chain-of-thought prompting. Using carefully designed prompts (in-context learning) and step-by-step worked examples (chain-of-thought prompting), we explore how LLMs can be taught increasingly complex material and how pedagogical strategies for human learners translate to educating machines. Performance is evaluated using questions from an official Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) Level 6 examination, which covers a comprehensive range of topics, including interval and chord identification, key detection, cadence classification, and metrical analysis. Additionally, we evaluate the suitability of various music encoding formats for these tasks (ABC, Humdrum, MEI, MusicXML). All experiments were run both with and without contextual prompts. Results indicate that without context, ChatGPT with MEI performs the best at 52%, while with context, Claude with MEI performs the best at 75%. Future work will further refine prompts and expand to cover more advanced music theory concepts. This research contributes to the broader understanding of teaching LLMs and has applications for educators, students, and developers of AI music tools alike.

In long context scenarios, large language models (LLMs) face three main challenges: higher computational/financial cost, longer latency, and inferior performance. Some studies reveal that the performance of LLMs depends on both the density and the position of the key information (question relevant) in the input prompt. Inspired by these findings, we propose LongLLMLingua for prompt compression towards improving LLMs' perception of the key information to simultaneously address the three challenges. We conduct evaluation on a wide range of long context scenarios including single-/multi-document QA, few-shot learning, summarization, synthetic tasks, and code completion. The experimental results show that LongLLMLingua compressed prompt can derive higher performance with much less cost. The latency of the end-to-end system is also reduced. For example, on NaturalQuestions benchmark, LongLLMLingua gains a performance boost of up to 17.1% over the original prompt with ~4x fewer tokens as input to GPT-3.5-Turbo. It can derive cost savings of \28.5 and 27.4 per 1,000 samples from the LongBench and ZeroScrolls benchmark, respectively. Additionally, when compressing prompts of ~10k tokens at a compression rate of 2x-10x, LongLLMLingua can speed up the end-to-end latency by 1.4x-3.8x. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/LLMLingua.

While chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has revolutionized how LLMs perform reasoning tasks, its current methods and variations (e.g, Self-consistency, ReACT, Reflexion, Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT), Cumulative Reasoning (CR)) suffer from limitations like slowness, limited context grounding, hallucination and inconsistent outputs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Evidence to Generate (E2G), a novel single-agent, two-step prompting framework. Instead of unverified reasoning claims, this innovative approach leverages the power of "evidence for decision making" by first focusing exclusively on the thought sequences (the series of intermediate steps) explicitly mentioned in the context which then serve as extracted evidence, guiding the LLM's output generation process with greater precision and efficiency. This simple yet powerful approach unlocks the true potential of chain-of-thought like prompting, paving the way for faster, more reliable, and more contextually aware reasoning in LLMs. \tool achieves remarkable results robustly across a wide range of knowledge-intensive reasoning and generation tasks, surpassing baseline approaches with state-of-the-art LLMs. For example, (i) on LogiQA benchmark using GPT-4 as backbone model, \tool achieves a new state-of-the Accuracy of 53.8% exceeding CoT by 18%, ToT by 11%, CR by 9% (ii) a variant of E2G with PaLM2 outperforms the variable-shot performance of Gemini Ultra by 0.9 F1 points, reaching an F1 score of 83.3 on a subset of DROP.

Graph-RAG systems achieve strong multi-hop question answering by indexing documents into knowledge graphs, but strong retrieval does not guarantee strong answers. Evaluating KET-RAG, a leading Graph-RAG system, on three multi-hop QA benchmarks (HotpotQA, MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA), we find that 77% to 91% of questions have the gold answer in the retrieved context, yet accuracy is only 35% to 78%, and 73% to 84% of errors are reasoning failures. We propose two augmentations: (i) SPARQL chain-of-thought prompting, which decomposes questions into triple-pattern queries aligned with the entity-relationship context, and (ii) graph-walk compression, which compresses the context by ~60% via knowledge-graph traversal with no LLM calls. SPARQL CoT improves accuracy by +2 to +14 pp; graph-walk compression adds +6 pp on average when paired with structured prompting on smaller models. Surprisingly, we show that, with question-type routing, a fully augmented budget open-weight Llama-8B model matches or exceeds the unaugmented Llama-70B baseline on all three benchmarks at ~12x lower cost. A replication on LightRAG confirms that our augmentations transfer across Graph-RAG systems.

We examine if frontier chat-based large language models (LLMs) adjust their outputs based on neurodivergence (ND) context in system prompts and describe the nature of these adjustments. Specifically, we propose NDBench, a 576-output benchmark involving two frontier models, three system prompt types (baseline, ND-profile assertion, and ND-profile assertion with explicit instructions for adjustments), four canonical ND profiles, and 24 prompts across four categories, one of which involves an adversarial masking strategy. Four trends emerge consistently from our findings. First, LLMs show significant adaptation under ND context, where fully instructed conditions yield lengthier and more structured outputs, characterized by higher token counts, more headings, and more granular steps (p < 10^-8, Holm-corrected). Second, such adaptation is largely structural in nature: although list density does not change much, there is a marked rise in the frequency of headings and per-step detail. Third, ND persona assertion alone fails to suppress potentially harmful tendencies, as masking-reinforcement decreases only in explicitly instructed cases (36-44% reduction); the reduction rate barely changes in persona assertion conditions. Moreover, reliability analysis of LLM-based harm assessment reveals that only two out of the six dimensions (masking and reinforcement, validation quality) exceed the pre-defined inter-judge agreement criterion (alpha >= 0.67) and thus can be considered primary results. NDBench is made publicly available along with its prompts, outputs, code, and other resources, forming a reproducible framework for auditing future LLMs' adaptation to ND awareness.

Context-based fine-tuning methods, including prompting, in-context learning, soft prompting (also known as prompt tuning), and prefix-tuning, have gained popularity due to their ability to often match the performance of full fine-tuning with a fraction of the parameters. Despite their empirical successes, there is little theoretical understanding of how these techniques influence the internal computation of the model and their expressiveness limitations. We show that despite the continuous embedding space being more expressive than the discrete token space, soft-prompting and prefix-tuning are strictly less expressive than full fine-tuning, even with the same number of learnable parameters. Concretely, context-based fine-tuning cannot change the relative attention pattern over the content and can only bias the outputs of an attention layer in a fixed direction. This suggests that while techniques like prompting, in-context learning, soft prompting, and prefix-tuning can effectively elicit skills present in the pretrained model, they cannot learn novel tasks that require new attention patterns.

Large pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have shown great potential in learning representations that are transferable across a wide range of downstream tasks. Different from the traditional representation learning that is based mostly on discretized labels, vision-language pre-training aligns images and texts in a common feature space, which allows zero-shot transfer to a downstream task via prompting, i.e., classification weights are synthesized from natural language describing classes of interest. In this work, we show that a major challenge for deploying such models in practice is prompt engineering, which requires domain expertise and is extremely time-consuming -- one needs to spend a significant amount of time on words tuning since a slight change in wording could have a huge impact on performance. Inspired by recent advances in prompt learning research in natural language processing (NLP), we propose Context Optimization (CoOp), a simple approach specifically for adapting CLIP-like vision-language models for downstream image recognition. Concretely, CoOp models a prompt's context words with learnable vectors while the entire pre-trained parameters are kept fixed. To handle different image recognition tasks, we provide two implementations of CoOp: unified context and class-specific context. Through extensive experiments on 11 datasets, we demonstrate that CoOp requires as few as one or two shots to beat hand-crafted prompts with a decent margin and is able to gain significant improvements over prompt engineering with more shots, e.g., with 16 shots the average gain is around 15% (with the highest reaching over 45%). Despite being a learning-based approach, CoOp achieves superb domain generalization performance compared with the zero-shot model using hand-crafted prompts.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in environments that generate massive, dynamic contexts. However, a critical bottleneck remains: while agents have access to this context, their static prompts lack the mechanisms to manage it effectively, leading to recurring Corrective and Enhancement failures. To address this capability gap, we introduce SCOPE (Self-evolving Context Optimization via Prompt Evolution). SCOPE frames context management as an online optimization problem, synthesizing guidelines from execution traces to automatically evolve the agent's prompt. We propose a Dual-Stream mechanism that balances tactical specificity (resolving immediate errors) with strategic generality (evolving long-term principles). Furthermore, we introduce Perspective-Driven Exploration to maximize strategy coverage, increasing the likelihood that the agent has the correct strategy for any given task. Experiments on the HLE benchmark show that SCOPE improves task success rates from 14.23\% to 38.64\% without human intervention. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/JarvisPei/SCOPE.

Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose Graph-based Target Back-Propagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target--output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold considerable promise for applications in healthcare. However, their deployment in safety-critical settings is hindered by two key limitations: (i) sensitivity to prompt design, and (ii) a tendency to generate incorrect responses with high confidence. As clinicians may rely on a model's stated confidence to gauge the reliability of its predictions, it is especially important that when a model expresses high confidence, it is also highly accurate. We introduce Prompt4Trust, the first reinforcement learning (RL) framework for prompt augmentation targeting confidence calibration in MLLMs. A lightweight LLM is trained to produce context-aware auxiliary prompts that guide a downstream task MLLM to generate responses in which the expressed confidence more accurately reflects predictive accuracy. Unlike conventional calibration techniques, Prompt4Trust specifically prioritizes aspects of calibration most critical for safe and trustworthy clinical decision-making. Beyond improvements driven by this clinically motivated calibration objective, our proposed method also improves task accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art medical visual question answering (VQA) performance on the PMC-VQA benchmark, which is composed of multiple-choice questions spanning diverse medical imaging modalities. Moreover, our framework trained with a small downstream task MLLM showed promising zero-shot generalization to larger MLLMs in our experiments, suggesting the potential for scalable calibration without the associated computational costs. This work demonstrates the potential of automated yet human-aligned prompt engineering for improving the the trustworthiness of MLLMs in safety critical settings. Our codebase can be found at https://github.com/xingbpshen/prompt4trust.

Recently, advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have been integrated into many real-world applications like Code Copilot. These applications have significantly expanded the attack surface of LLMs, exposing them to a variety of threats. Among them, jailbreak attacks that induce toxic responses through jailbreak prompts have raised critical safety concerns. To identify these threats, a growing number of red teaming approaches simulate potential adversarial scenarios by crafting jailbreak prompts to test the target LLM. However, existing red teaming methods do not consider the unique vulnerabilities of LLM in different scenarios, making it difficult to adjust the jailbreak prompts to find context-specific vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, these methods are limited to refining jailbreak templates using a few mutation operations, lacking the automation and scalability to adapt to different scenarios. To enable context-aware and efficient red teaming, we abstract and model existing attacks into a coherent concept called "jailbreak strategy" and propose a multi-agent LLM system named RedAgent that leverages these strategies to generate context-aware jailbreak prompts. By self-reflecting on contextual feedback in an additional memory buffer, RedAgent continuously learns how to leverage these strategies to achieve effective jailbreaks in specific contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system can jailbreak most black-box LLMs in just five queries, improving the efficiency of existing red teaming methods by two times. Additionally, RedAgent can jailbreak customized LLM applications more efficiently. By generating context-aware jailbreak prompts towards applications on GPTs, we discover 60 severe vulnerabilities of these real-world applications with only two queries per vulnerability. We have reported all found issues and communicated with OpenAI and Meta for bug fixes.

Clinical natural language processing requires methods that can address domain-specific challenges, such as complex medical terminology and clinical contexts. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in this domain. Yet, their direct deployment can lead to privacy issues and are constrained by resources. To address this challenge, we delve into synthetic clinical text generation using LLMs for clinical NLP tasks. We propose an innovative, resource-efficient approach, ClinGen, which infuses knowledge into the process. Our model involves clinical knowledge extraction and context-informed LLM prompting. Both clinical topics and writing styles are drawn from external domain-specific knowledge graphs and LLMs to guide data generation. Our extensive empirical study across 7 clinical NLP tasks and 16 datasets reveals that ClinGen consistently enhances performance across various tasks, effectively aligning the distribution of real datasets and significantly enriching the diversity of generated training instances. We will publish our code and all the generated data in https://github.com/ritaranx/ClinGen.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated significant proficiency in solving a wide range of general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Researchers have observed a direct correlation between the performance of these models and their sizes. As a result, the sizes of these models have notably expanded in recent years, persuading researchers to adopt the term large language models (LLMs) to characterize the larger-sized PLMs. The size expansion comes with a distinct capability called in-context learning (ICL), which represents a special form of prompting and allows the models to be utilized through the presentation of demonstration examples without modifications to the model parameters. Although interesting, privacy concerns have become a major obstacle in its widespread usage. Multiple studies have examined the privacy risks linked to ICL and prompting in general, and have devised techniques to alleviate these risks. Thus, there is a necessity to organize these mitigation techniques for the benefit of the community. This survey provides a systematic overview of the privacy protection methods employed during ICL and prompting in general. We review, analyze, and compare different methods under this paradigm. Furthermore, we provide a summary of the resources accessible for the development of these frameworks. Finally, we discuss the limitations of these frameworks and offer a detailed examination of the promising areas that necessitate further exploration.