Daily Papers

Safety alignment approaches in large language models (LLMs) often lead to the over-refusal of benign queries, significantly diminishing their utility in sensitive scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce FalseReject, a comprehensive resource containing 16k seemingly toxic queries accompanied by structured responses across 44 safety-related categories. We propose a graph-informed adversarial multi-agent interaction framework to generate diverse and complex prompts, while structuring responses with explicit reasoning to aid models in accurately distinguishing safe from unsafe contexts. FalseReject includes training datasets tailored for both standard instruction-tuned models and reasoning-oriented models, as well as a human-annotated benchmark test set. Our extensive benchmarking on 29 state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs reveals persistent over-refusal challenges. Empirical results demonstrate that supervised finetuning with FalseReject substantially reduces unnecessary refusals without compromising overall safety or general language capabilities.

In this work, we propose Dimple, the first Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Model (DMLLM). We observe that training with a purely discrete diffusion approach leads to significant training instability, suboptimal performance, and severe length bias issues. To address these challenges, we design a novel training paradigm that combines an initial autoregressive phase with a subsequent diffusion phase. This approach yields the Dimple-7B model, trained on the same dataset and using a similar training pipeline as LLaVA-NEXT. Dimple-7B ultimately surpasses LLaVA-NEXT in performance by 3.9%, demonstrating that DMLLM can achieve performance comparable to that of autoregressive models. To improve inference efficiency, we propose a decoding strategy termed confident decoding, which dynamically adjusts the number of tokens generated at each step, significantly reducing the number of generation iterations. In autoregressive models, the number of forward iterations during generation equals the response length. With confident decoding, however, the number of iterations needed by Dimple is even only text{response length}{3}. We also re-implement the prefilling technique in autoregressive models and demonstrate that it does not significantly impact performance on most benchmark evaluations, while offering a speedup of 1.5x to 7x. Additionally, we explore Dimple's capability to precisely control its response using structure priors. These priors enable structured responses in a manner distinct from instruction-based or chain-of-thought prompting, and allow fine-grained control over response format and length, which is difficult to achieve in autoregressive models. Overall, this work validates the feasibility and advantages of DMLLM and enhances its inference efficiency and controllability. Code and models are available at https://github.com/yu-rp/Dimple.

Instruction-tuned large language models produce helpful, structured responses, but how robust is this helpfulness under trivial constraints? We show that simple lexical constraints (banning a single punctuation character or common word) cause instruction-tuned LLMs to collapse their responses, losing 14--48\% of comprehensiveness across seven models spanning five families (7B--70B, open- and closed-weight). A blinded human evaluation with 10 STEM-trained evaluators confirms genuine content loss, with information criteria degrading 1.5--2.3times more than surface criteria, a finding corroborated by over 4,100 automated pairwise comparisons (77--100\% baseline preference) across three LLM judges from two model families. Diagnostic analysis identifies this as a planning failure: two-pass generation recovers 59--96\% of response length, and linear probes on prompt representations predict response length with R^2 = 0.51--0.94 before generation begins. The same probes yield negative R^2 on base models, confirming that instruction tuning introduces the representational structure underlying the collapse. Base models show no systematic degradation under identical constraints, demonstrating that instruction tuning couples task competence to narrow surface-form templates. The effect extends to realistic deployment constraints (preamble suppression, corporate tone guidelines, legal compliance hedging, accessibility requirements) causing comparable degradation (-22\% to -34\%), with suppressing the conversational opener alone (``Certainly!'') causing 40\% collapse on our most fragile model despite restricting only the opening tokens. We further show that standard independent LLM-as-judge evaluation detects only a 3.5\% quality drop where pairwise evaluation reveals 23\%, exposing a methodological blind spot in current evaluation practice.

Conversations with LMs involve two participants: a human user leading the conversation, and an LM assistant responding to the user's request. To satisfy this specific role, LMs are post-trained to be helpful assistants -- optimized to produce exhaustive and well-structured responses, free of ambiguity and grammar errors. User utterances, on the other hand, are rarely perfected, with each user phrasing requests in unique ways, sometimes putting in partial effort at each turn and refining on the fly. To evaluate LM performance in realistic settings, prior work simulated users in multi-turn conversations, often prompting an LLM originally trained to be a helpful assistant to act as a user. However, we show that assistant LMs make for poor user simulators, with the surprising finding that better assistants yield worse simulators. Instead, we introduce purpose-built User Language Models (User LMs) - models post-trained to simulate human users in multi-turn conversations. Through various evaluations, we show how User LMs align better with human behavior and achieve better simulation robustness than existing simulation methods. When leveraging User LMs to simulate coding and math conversations, the performance of a strong assistant (GPT-4o) drops from 74.6% to 57.4%, confirming that more realistic simulation environments lead to assistant struggles as they fail to cope with the nuances of users in multi-turn setups.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the specific challenges of adapting RL to multimodal data and formats remain relatively unexplored. In this work, we present Observe-R1, a novel framework aimed at enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We draw inspirations from human learning progression--from simple to complex and easy to difficult, and propose a gradual learning paradigm for MLLMs. To this end, we construct the NeuraLadder dataset, which is organized and sampled according to the difficulty and complexity of data samples for RL training. To tackle multimodal tasks, we introduce a multimodal format constraint that encourages careful observation of images, resulting in enhanced visual abilities and clearer and more structured responses. Additionally, we implement a bonus reward system that favors concise, correct answers within a length constraint, alongside a dynamic weighting mechanism that prioritizes uncertain and medium-difficulty problems, ensuring that more informative samples have a greater impact on training. Our experiments with the Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B models on 20k samples from the NeuraLadder dataset show that Observe-R1 outperforms a series of larger reasoning models on both reasoning and general benchmarks, achieving superior clarity and conciseness in reasoning chains. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our strategies, highlighting the robustness and generalization of our approach. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/zrguo/Observe-R1.

The Mental Health Question Answer (MHQA) task requires the seeker and supporter to complete the support process in one-turn dialogue. Given the richness of help-seeker posts, supporters must thoroughly understand the content and provide logical, comprehensive, and well-structured responses. Previous works in MHQA mostly focus on single-agent approaches based on the cognitive element of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), but they overlook the interactions among various CBT elements, such as emotion and cognition. This limitation hinders the models' ability to thoroughly understand the distress of help-seekers. To address this, we propose a framework named Multi-Agent Deductive Planning (MADP), which is based on the interactions between the various psychological elements of CBT. This method guides Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve a deeper understanding of the seeker's context and provide more personalized assistance based on individual circumstances. Furthermore, we construct a new dataset based on the MADP framework and use it to fine-tune LLMs, resulting in a specialized model named MADP-LLM. We conduct extensive experiments, including comparisons with multiple LLMs, human evaluations, and automatic evaluations, to validate the effectiveness of the MADP framework and MADP-LLM.

Current generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are widely used for knowledge dissemination, task decomposition, and creative thinking. However, their linear interaction methods often force users to repeatedly compare and copy contextual information when handling complex tasks, increasing cognitive load and operational costs. Moreover, the ambiguity in model responses requires users to refine and simplify the information further. To address these issues, we developed "Mindalogue", a system using a non-linear interaction model based on "nodes + canvas" to enhance user efficiency and freedom while generating structured responses. A formative study with 11 users informed the design of Mindalogue, which was then evaluated through a study with 16 participants. The results showed that Mindalogue significantly reduced task steps and improved users' comprehension of complex information. This study highlights the potential of non-linear interaction in improving AI tool efficiency and user experience in the HCI field.

Multi-agent LLM systems improve reasoning by combining outputs from multiple agents, but interaction-heavy methods can introduce error propagation and high communication overhead. When agents exchange raw responses or reasoning traces, incorrect intermediate reasoning may be adopted and amplified, leading to confident but wrong consensus; multi-round communication also increases token consumption, latency, and inference cost. In this paper, we propose a controlled-communication coordination framework named DarkForest. DarkForest first keeps agents independent, so each agent produces an answer without seeing the others' outputs. It then parses the raw responses into structured candidate records, groups semantically equivalent candidates into clusters, and estimates a calibrated belief distribution over these clusters using agent reliability, confidence, parse quality, support-pattern reliability, and independence corrections. A coordinator receives only policy-permitted evidence from this belief state with controlled communication. Experiments on six reasoning benchmarks show that DarkForest achieves leading overall quality, improves the strongest baseline by up to 30.7\% on benchmark metrics, and reduces token consumption by up to 6.5times compared with communication-heavy baselines.

Electronic health records contain an enormous amount of valuable information, but many are recorded in free text. Information extraction is the strategy to transform the sequence of characters into structured data, which can be employed for secondary analysis. However, the traditional information extraction components, such as named entity recognition and relation extraction, require annotated data to optimize the model parameters, which has become one of the major bottlenecks in building information extraction systems. With the large language models achieving good performances on various downstream NLP tasks without parameter tuning, it becomes possible to use large language models for zero-shot information extraction. In this study, we aim to explore whether the most popular large language model, ChatGPT, can extract useful information from the radiological reports. We first design the prompt template for the interested information in the CT reports. Then, we generate the prompts by combining the prompt template with the CT reports as the inputs of ChatGPT to obtain the responses. A post-processing module is developed to transform the responses into structured extraction results. We conducted the experiments with 847 CT reports collected from Peking University Cancer Hospital. The experimental results indicate that ChatGPT can achieve competitive performances for some extraction tasks compared with the baseline information extraction system, but some limitations need to be further improved.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into various applications has driven the need for structured and reliable responses. A key challenge in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems is ensuring that outputs align with expected formats while minimizing hallucinations. This study examines the role of guided decoding in RAG systems, comparing three methods, Outlines, XGrammar, and LM Format Enforcer, across different multi-turn prompting setups (0-turn, 1-turn, and 2-turn). By evaluating success rates, hallucination rates, and output quality, we provide insights into their performance and applicability. Our findings reveal how multi-turn interactions influence guided decoding, uncovering unexpected performance variations that can inform method selection for specific use cases. This work advances the understanding of structured output generation in RAG systems, offering both theoretical insights and practical guidance for LLM deployment.

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding their responses in structured knowledge graphs. Leveraging community detection and relation filtering techniques, GraphRAG systems demonstrate inherent resistance to traditional RAG attacks, such as text poisoning and prompt injection. However, in this paper, we find that the security of GraphRAG systems fundamentally relies on the topological integrity of the underlying graph, which can be undermined by implicitly corrupting the logical connections, without altering surface-level text semantics. To exploit this vulnerability, we propose LogicPoison, a novel attack framework that targets logical reasoning rather than injecting false contents. Specifically, LogicPoison employs a type-preserving entity swapping mechanism to perturb both global logic hubs for disrupting overall graph connectivity and query-specific reasoning bridges for severing essential multi-hop inference paths. This approach effectively reroutes valid reasoning into dead ends while maintaining surface-level textual plausibility. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that LogicPoison successfully bypasses GraphRAG's defenses, significantly degrading performance and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in both effectiveness and stealth. Our code is available at bluehttps://github.com/Jord8061/logicPoison.

Accurate estimation of uncertainty in deep learning is critical for deploying models in high-stakes domains such as medical diagnosis and autonomous decision-making, where overconfident predictions can lead to harmful outcomes. In practice, understanding the reason behind a model's uncertainty and the type of uncertainty it represents can support risk-aware decisions, enhance user trust, and guide additional data collection. However, many existing methods only address a single type of uncertainty or require modifications and retraining of the base model, making them difficult to adopt in real-world systems. We introduce CUPID (Comprehensive Uncertainty Plug-in estImation moDel), a general-purpose module that jointly estimates aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty without modifying or retraining the base model. CUPID can be flexibly inserted into any layer of a pretrained network. It models aleatoric uncertainty through a learned Bayesian identity mapping and captures epistemic uncertainty by analyzing the model's internal responses to structured perturbations. We evaluate CUPID across a range of tasks, including classification, regression, and out-of-distribution detection. The results show that it consistently delivers competitive performance while offering layer-wise insights into the origins of uncertainty. By making uncertainty estimation modular, interpretable, and model-agnostic, CUPID supports more transparent and trustworthy AI. Related code and data are available at https://github.com/a-Fomalhaut-a/CUPID.

Eliciting information to reduce uncertainty about latent group-level properties from surveys and other collective assessments requires allocating limited questioning effort under real costs and missing data. Although large language models enable adaptive, multi-turn interactions in natural language, most existing elicitation methods optimize what to ask with a fixed respondent pool, and do not adapt respondent selection or leverage population structure when responses are partial or incomplete. To address this gap, we study adaptive group elicitation, a multi-round setting where an agent adaptively selects both questions and respondents under explicit query and participation budgets. We propose a theoretically grounded framework that combines (i) an LLM-based expected information gain objective for scoring candidate questions with (ii) heterogeneous graph neural network propagation that aggregates observed responses and participant attributes to impute missing responses and guide per-round respondent selection. This closed-loop procedure queries a small, informative subset of individuals while inferring population-level responses via structured similarity. Across three real-world opinion datasets, our method consistently improves population-level response prediction under constrained budgets, including a >12% relative gain on CES at a 10% respondent budget.

Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to transform the practice of law, but this potential is threatened by the presence of legal hallucinations -- responses from these models that are not consistent with legal facts. We investigate the extent of these hallucinations using an original suite of legal queries, comparing LLMs' responses to structured legal metadata and examining their consistency. Our work makes four key contributions: (1) We develop a typology of legal hallucinations, providing a conceptual framework for future research in this area. (2) We find that legal hallucinations are alarmingly prevalent, occurring between 69% of the time with ChatGPT 3.5 and 88% with Llama 2, when these models are asked specific, verifiable questions about random federal court cases. (3) We illustrate that LLMs often fail to correct a user's incorrect legal assumptions in a contra-factual question setup. (4) We provide evidence that LLMs cannot always predict, or do not always know, when they are producing legal hallucinations. Taken together, these findings caution against the rapid and unsupervised integration of popular LLMs into legal tasks. Even experienced lawyers must remain wary of legal hallucinations, and the risks are highest for those who stand to benefit from LLMs the most -- pro se litigants or those without access to traditional legal resources.

Language models are increasingly used in Brazil, but most evaluation remains English-centric. This paper presents Alvorada-Bench, a 4,515-question, text-only benchmark drawn from five Brazilian university entrance examinations. Evaluating twenty models under zero-shot, role-playing, and chain-of-thought prompting, producing 270,900 responses with structured self-reports of confidence, perceived difficulty, and Bloom level. The top models exceed 94% accuracy overall, but accuracy declines on Mathematics and on the engineering oriented IME and ITA exams, indicating persistent weaknesses in multi-step reasoning. Confidence is well calibrated and correlates with perceived difficulty, revealing that models can accurately assess their own certainty capabilities. A cost accuracy analysis shows that high accuracy is achievable at under $2 per 1K tokens. On ENEM 2024 the top model (O3) achieved perfect scores in Languages subject questions while even the weakest system (GPT-4.1 Nano) only underperforms humans in Mathematics. Through exams that distill decades of Brazilian educational priorities and assess millions of students yearly, Alvorada-Bench establishes whether language models can navigate the intersection of language, culture, and reasoning that defines academic readiness in Brazil.

Large language model (LLM) powered chatbots are primarily text-based today, and impose a large interactional cognitive load, especially for exploratory or sensemaking tasks such as planning a trip or learning about a new city. Because the interaction is textual, users have little scaffolding in the way of structure, informational "scent", or ability to specify high-level preferences or goals. We introduce ExploreLLM that allows users to structure thoughts, help explore different options, navigate through the choices and recommendations, and to more easily steer models to generate more personalized responses. We conduct a user study and show that users find it helpful to use ExploreLLM for exploratory or planning tasks, because it provides a useful schema-like structure to the task, and guides users in planning. The study also suggests that users can more easily personalize responses with high-level preferences with ExploreLLM. Together, ExploreLLM points to a future where users interact with LLMs beyond the form of chatbots, and instead designed to support complex user tasks with a tighter integration between natural language and graphical user interfaces.

Medical question-answering (QA) is a critical task for evaluating how effectively large language models (LLMs) encode clinical knowledge and assessing their potential applications in medicine. Despite showing promise on multiple-choice tests, LLMs frequently struggle with open-ended medical questions, producing responses with dangerous hallucinations or lacking comprehensive coverage of critical aspects. Existing approaches attempt to address these challenges through domain-specific fine-tuning, but this proves resource-intensive and difficult to scale across models. To improve the comprehensiveness and factuality of medical responses, we propose a novel approach utilizing structured medical reasoning. Our method guides LLMs through an seven-step cognitive process inspired by clinical diagnosis, enabling more accurate and complete answers without additional training. Experiments on the MedLFQA benchmark demonstrate that our approach achieves the highest Factuality Score of 85.8, surpassing fine-tuned models. Notably, this improvement transfers to smaller models, highlighting the method's efficiency and scalability. Our code and datasets are available.

Automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation has attracted increasing attention. Trainable evaluation metrics, typically trained with true positive and randomly selected negative responses, tend to assign higher scores to responses that share greater content similarity with a given context. However, adversarial negative responses, despite possessing high content similarity with the contexts, are semantically different. Consequently, existing evaluation metrics are not robust enough to evaluate such responses, resulting in low correlations with human judgments. While recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) for open-domain dialogue evaluation, they still face challenges in effectively handling adversarial negative examples. In this paper, we propose an effective framework for open-domain dialogue evaluation, which combines domain-specific language models (SLMs) enhanced with Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) knowledge with LLMs. The SLMs can explicitly incorporate AMR graph information of the dialogue through a gating mechanism for enhanced dialogue semantic representation learning. Both the evaluation result from the SLMs and the AMR graph information are incorporated into the LLM's prompt for enhanced evaluation performance. Experimental results on open-domain dialogue evaluation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to a wide range of state-of-the-art baselines, especially in discriminating adversarial negative responses. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/SIMAMR.

Large language models can produce creative and diverse responses. However, to integrate them into current developer workflows, it is essential to constrain their outputs to follow specific formats or standards. In this work, we surveyed 51 experienced industry professionals to understand the range of scenarios and motivations driving the need for output constraints from a user-centered perspective. We identified 134 concrete use cases for constraints at two levels: low-level, which ensures the output adhere to a structured format and an appropriate length, and high-level, which requires the output to follow semantic and stylistic guidelines without hallucination. Critically, applying output constraints could not only streamline the currently repetitive process of developing, testing, and integrating LLM prompts for developers, but also enhance the user experience of LLM-powered features and applications. We conclude with a discussion on user preferences and needs towards articulating intended constraints for LLMs, alongside an initial design for a constraint prototyping tool.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have become pivotal in leveraging vast corpora to generate informed and contextually relevant responses, notably reducing hallucinations in Large Language Models. Despite significant advancements, these systems struggle to efficiently process and retrieve information from large datasets while maintaining a comprehensive understanding of the context. This paper introduces SKETCH, a novel methodology that enhances the RAG retrieval process by integrating semantic text retrieval with knowledge graphs, thereby merging structured and unstructured data for a more holistic comprehension. SKETCH, demonstrates substantial improvements in retrieval performance and maintains superior context integrity compared to traditional methods. Evaluated across four diverse datasets: QuALITY, QASPER, NarrativeQA, and Italian Cuisine-SKETCH consistently outperforms baseline approaches on key RAGAS metrics such as answer_relevancy, faithfulness, context_precision and context_recall. Notably, on the Italian Cuisine dataset, SKETCH achieved an answer relevancy of 0.94 and a context precision of 0.99, representing the highest performance across all evaluated metrics. These results highlight SKETCH's capability in delivering more accurate and contextually relevant responses, setting new benchmarks for future retrieval systems.

Extracting meaningful insights from large and complex datasets poses significant challenges, particularly in ensuring the accuracy and relevance of retrieved information. Traditional data retrieval methods such as sequential search and index-based retrieval often fail when handling intricate and interconnected data structures, resulting in incomplete or misleading outputs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Structured-GraphRAG, a versatile framework designed to enhance information retrieval across structured datasets in natural language queries. Structured-GraphRAG utilizes multiple knowledge graphs, which represent data in a structured format and capture complex relationships between entities, enabling a more nuanced and comprehensive retrieval of information. This graph-based approach reduces the risk of errors in language model outputs by grounding responses in a structured format, thereby enhancing the reliability of results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Structured-GraphRAG by comparing its performance with that of a recently published method using traditional retrieval-augmented generation. Our findings show that Structured-GraphRAG significantly improves query processing efficiency and reduces response times. While our case study focuses on soccer data, the framework's design is broadly applicable, offering a powerful tool for data analysis and enhancing language model applications across various structured domains.

Prompt design is a primary control interface for large language models (LLMs), yet standard evaluations largely reduce performance to answer correctness, obscuring why a prompt succeeds or fails and providing little actionable guidance. We propose PEEM (Prompt Engineering Evaluation Metrics), a unified framework for joint and interpretable evaluation of both prompts and responses. PEEM defines a structured rubric with 9 axes: 3 prompt criteria (clarity/structure, linguistic quality, fairness) and 6 response criteria (accuracy, coherence, relevance, objectivity, clarity, conciseness), and uses an LLM-based evaluator to output (i) scalar scores on a 1-5 Likert scale and (ii) criterion-specific natural-language rationales grounded in the rubric. Across 7 benchmarks and 5 task models, PEEM's accuracy axis strongly aligns with conventional accuracy while preserving model rankings (aggregate Spearman rho about 0.97, Pearson r about 0.94, p < 0.001). A multi-evaluator study with four models shows consistent relative judgments (pairwise rho = 0.68-0.85), supporting evaluator-agnostic deployment. Beyond alignment, PEEM captures complementary linguistic failure modes and remains informative under prompt perturbations: prompt-quality trends track downstream accuracy under iterative rewrites, semantic adversarial manipulations induce clear score degradation, and meaning-preserving paraphrases yield high stability (robustness rate about 76.7-80.6%). Finally, using only PEEM scores and rationales as feedback, a zero-shot prompt rewriting loop improves downstream accuracy by up to 11.7 points, outperforming supervised and RL-based prompt-optimization baselines. Overall, PEEM provides a reproducible, criterion-driven protocol that links prompt formulation to response behavior and enables systematic diagnosis and optimization of LLM interactions.

Objectives: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used to assist clinicians and support patients, no existing work has explored dialogue systems for standard diagnostic interviews and assessments. This study aims to bridge the gap in mental healthcare accessibility by developing an LLM-powered dialogue system that replicates clinician behavior. Materials and Methods: We introduce TRUST, a framework of cooperative LLM modules capable of conducting formal diagnostic interviews and assessments for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). To guide the generation of appropriate clinical responses, we propose a Dialogue Acts schema specifically designed for clinical interviews. Additionally, we develop a patient simulation approach based on real-life interview transcripts to replace time-consuming and costly manual testing by clinicians. Results: A comprehensive set of evaluation metrics is designed to assess the dialogue system from both the agent and patient simulation perspectives. Expert evaluations by conversation and clinical specialists show that TRUST performs comparably to real-life clinical interviews. Discussion: Our system performs at the level of average clinicians, with room for future enhancements in communication styles and response appropriateness. Conclusions: Our TRUST framework shows its potential to facilitate mental healthcare availability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks in general domains. However, LLMs sometimes generate responses with the hallucination about medical facts due to limited domain knowledge. Such shortcomings pose potential risks in the utilization of LLMs within medical contexts. To address this challenge, we propose knowledge-tuning, which leverages structured medical knowledge bases for the LLMs to grasp domain knowledge efficiently and facilitate reliable response generation. We also release cMedKnowQA, a Chinese medical knowledge question-answering dataset constructed from medical knowledge bases to assess the medical knowledge proficiency of LLMs. Experimental results show that the LLMs which are knowledge-tuned with cMedKnowQA, can exhibit higher levels of accuracy in response generation compared with vanilla instruction-tuning and offer a new reliable way for the domain adaptation of LLMs.

Creating knowledge bases and ontologies is a time consuming task that relies on a manual curation. AI/NLP approaches can assist expert curators in populating these knowledge bases, but current approaches rely on extensive training data, and are not able to populate arbitrary complex nested knowledge schemas. Here we present Structured Prompt Interrogation and Recursive Extraction of Semantics (SPIRES), a Knowledge Extraction approach that relies on the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform zero-shot learning (ZSL) and general-purpose query answering from flexible prompts and return information conforming to a specified schema. Given a detailed, user-defined knowledge schema and an input text, SPIRES recursively performs prompt interrogation against GPT-3+ to obtain a set of responses matching the provided schema. SPIRES uses existing ontologies and vocabularies to provide identifiers for all matched elements. We present examples of use of SPIRES in different domains, including extraction of food recipes, multi-species cellular signaling pathways, disease treatments, multi-step drug mechanisms, and chemical to disease causation graphs. Current SPIRES accuracy is comparable to the mid-range of existing Relation Extraction (RE) methods, but has the advantage of easy customization, flexibility, and, crucially, the ability to perform new tasks in the absence of any training data. This method supports a general strategy of leveraging the language interpreting capabilities of LLMs to assemble knowledge bases, assisting manual knowledge curation and acquisition while supporting validation with publicly-available databases and ontologies external to the LLM. SPIRES is available as part of the open source OntoGPT package: https://github.com/ monarch-initiative/ontogpt.

Recent Multi-Party Conversation (MPC) models typically rely on graph-based approaches to capture dialogue structures. However, these methods have limitations, such as information loss during the projection of utterances into structural embeddings and constraints in leveraging pre-trained language models directly. In this paper, we propose SS-MPC, a response generation model for MPC that eliminates the need for explicit graph structures. Unlike existing models that depend on graphs to analyze conversation structures, SS-MPC internally encodes the dialogue structure as a sequential input, enabling direct utilization of pre-trained language models. Experimental results show that SS-MPC achieves 15.60\% BLEU-1 and 12.44\% ROUGE-L score, outperforming the current state-of-the-art MPC response generation model by 3.91\%p in BLEU-1 and 0.62\%p in ROUGE-L. Additionally, human evaluation confirms that SS-MPC generates more fluent and accurate responses compared to existing MPC models.

Agentic AI pipelines suffer from a hidden inefficiency: they frequently reconstruct identical intermediate logic, such as metric normalization or chart scaffolding, even when the user's natural language phrasing is entirely novel. Conventional boundary caching fails to capture this inefficiency because it treats inference as a monolithic black box. We introduce SemanticALLI, a pipeline-aware architecture within Alli (PMG's marketing intelligence platform), designed to operationalize redundant reasoning. By decomposing generation into Analytic Intent Resolution (AIR) and Visualization Synthesis (VS), SemanticALLI elevates structured intermediate representations (IRs) to first-class, cacheable artifacts. The impact of caching within the agentic loop is substantial. In our evaluation, baseline monolithic caching caps at a 38.7% hit rate due to linguistic variance. In contrast, our structured approach allows for an additional stage, the Visualization Synthesis stage, to achieve an 83.10% hit rate, bypassing 4,023 LLM calls with a median latency of just 2.66 ms. This internal reuse reduces total token consumption, offering a practical lesson for AI system design: even when users rarely repeat themselves, the pipeline often does, at stable, structured checkpoints where caching is most reliable.

LLMs have demonstrated commendable performance across diverse domains. Nevertheless, formulating high-quality prompts to instruct LLMs proficiently poses a challenge for non-AI experts. Existing research in prompt engineering suggests somewhat scattered optimization principles and designs empirically dependent prompt optimizers. Unfortunately, these endeavors lack a structured design template, incurring high learning costs and resulting in low reusability. In addition, it is not conducive to the iterative updating of prompts. Inspired by structured reusable programming languages, we propose LangGPT, a dual-layer prompt design framework as the programming language for LLMs. LangGPT has an easy-to-learn normative structure and provides an extended structure for migration and reuse. Experiments illustrate that LangGPT significantly enhances the performance of LLMs. Moreover, the case study shows that LangGPT leads LLMs to generate higher-quality responses. Furthermore, we analyzed the ease of use and reusability of LangGPT through a user survey in our online community.

Edge devices such as smartwatches and smart glasses cannot continuously run even the smallest 100M-1B parameter language models due to power and compute constraints, yet cloud inference introduces multi-second latencies that break the illusion of a responsive assistant. We introduce micro language models (μLMs): ultra-compact models (8M-30M parameters) that instantly generate the first 4-8 words of a contextually grounded response on-device, while a cloud model completes it; thus, masking the cloud latency. We show that useful language generation survives at this extreme scale with our models matching several 70M-256M-class existing models. We design a collaborative generation framework that reframes the cloud model as a continuator rather than a respondent, achieving seamless mid-sentence handoffs and structured graceful recovery via three error correction methods when the local opener goes wrong. Empirical results show that μLMs can initiate responses that larger models complete seamlessly, demonstrating that orders-of-magnitude asymmetric collaboration is achievable and unlocking responsive AI for extremely resource-constrained devices. The model checkpoint and demo are available at https://github.com/Sensente/micro_language_model_swen_project.

Organizations increasingly rely on proprietary enterprise data, including HR records, structured reports, and tabular documents, for critical decision-making. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have strong generative capabilities, they are limited by static pretraining, short context windows, and challenges in processing heterogeneous data formats. Conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks address some of these gaps but often struggle with structured and semi-structured data. This work proposes an advanced RAG framework that combines hybrid retrieval strategies using dense embeddings (all-mpnet-base-v2) and BM25, enhanced by metadata-aware filtering with SpaCy NER and cross-encoder reranking. The framework applies semantic chunking to maintain textual coherence and retains tabular data structures to preserve row-column integrity. Quantized indexing optimizes retrieval efficiency, while human-in-the-loop feedback and conversation memory improve adaptability. Experiments on enterprise datasets show notable improvements: Precision@5 increased by 15 percent (90 versus 75), Recall@5 by 13 percent (87 versus 74), and Mean Reciprocal Rank by 16 percent (0.85 versus 0.69). Qualitative evaluations show higher scores in Faithfulness (4.6 versus 3.0), Completeness (4.2 versus 2.5), and Relevance (4.5 versus 3.2) on a 5-point Likert scale. These results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in delivering accurate, comprehensive, and contextually relevant responses for enterprise tasks. Future work includes extending to multimodal data and integrating agent-based retrieval. The source code will be released at https://github.com/CheerlaChandana/Enterprise-Chatbot

Growing interests have been attracted in Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS), which explore user preference through conversational interactions in order to make appropriate recommendation. However, there is still a lack of ability in existing CRS to (1) traverse multiple reasoning paths over background knowledge to introduce relevant items and attributes, and (2) arrange selected entities appropriately under current system intents to control response generation. To address these issues, we propose CR-Walker in this paper, a model that performs tree-structured reasoning on a knowledge graph, and generates informative dialog acts to guide language generation. The unique scheme of tree-structured reasoning views the traversed entity at each hop as part of dialog acts to facilitate language generation, which links how entities are selected and expressed. Automatic and human evaluations show that CR-Walker can arrive at more accurate recommendation, and generate more informative and engaging responses.

This research presents a comprehensive methodology for utilizing an ontology-driven structured prompts system in interplay with ChatGPT, a widely used large language model (LLM). The study develops formal models, both information and functional, and establishes the methodological foundations for integrating ontology-driven prompts with ChatGPT's meta-learning capabilities. The resulting productive triad comprises the methodological foundations, advanced information technology, and the OntoChatGPT system, which collectively enhance the effectiveness and performance of chatbot systems. The implementation of this technology is demonstrated using the Ukrainian language within the domain of rehabilitation. By applying the proposed methodology, the OntoChatGPT system effectively extracts entities from contexts, classifies them, and generates relevant responses. The study highlights the versatility of the methodology, emphasizing its applicability not only to ChatGPT but also to other chatbot systems based on LLMs, such as Google's Bard utilizing the PaLM 2 LLM. The underlying principles of meta-learning, structured prompts, and ontology-driven information retrieval form the core of the proposed methodology, enabling their adaptation and utilization in various LLM-based systems. This versatile approach opens up new possibilities for NLP and dialogue systems, empowering developers to enhance the performance and functionality of chatbot systems across different domains and languages.

In the continuously advancing AI landscape, crafting context-rich and meaningful responses via Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential. Researchers are becoming more aware of the challenges that LLMs with fewer parameters encounter when trying to provide suitable answers to open-ended questions. To address these hurdles, the integration of cutting-edge strategies, augmentation of rich external domain knowledge to LLMs, offers significant improvements. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines graph-driven context retrieval in conjunction to knowledge graphs based enhancement, honing the proficiency of LLMs, especially in domain specific community question answering platforms like AskUbuntu, Unix, and ServerFault. We conduct experiments on various LLMs with different parameter sizes to evaluate their ability to ground knowledge and determine factual accuracy in answers to open-ended questions. Our methodology GraphContextGen consistently outperforms dominant text-based retrieval systems, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability to a larger number of use cases. This advancement highlights the importance of pairing context rich data retrieval with LLMs, offering a renewed approach to knowledge sourcing and generation in AI systems. We also show that, due to rich contextual data retrieval, the crucial entities, along with the generated answer, remain factually coherent with the gold answer.

Language understanding in the brain is context-dependent, varying across experimental stimuli and individuals, which makes it difficult to build computational models that generalize across both. This calls for a foundation model of language-evoked brain activity that can capture shared structure while adapting efficiently to new participants and inputs. We introduce RABBiT (Rapidly Adaptive BOLD foundation model via BraIn-Tuning), a compact audio-to-fMRI encoder designed for accurate zero- and few-shot prediction. A comprehensive evaluation on 324 participants across multiple unseen fMRI datasets shows that RABBiT enables accurate zero-shot prediction of fMRI responses to natural speech across auditory and language-selective regions, surpassing the SOTA foundation model for fMRI and predictions based on group averages. With as little as 10 minutes of participant-specific data, RABBiT further improves performance via parameter-efficient tuning, substantially outperforming per-participant linear models. RABBiT's performance is driven by two key innovations: (1) learned region-specific attention, and (2) a decomposition of brain responses into shared and subject-specific components, combined with a brain-tuned speech backbone. In addition to supporting strong predictive accuracy, the structured, region-specific representations that RABBiT learns enable interpretability. By eliminating the need for extensive per-participant data and model fitting, RABBiT enables scalable population-level analyses of language in the human brain. We make the code available at https://github.com/bridge-ai-neuro/rabbit.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a robust approach for tackling LLM tasks that require intermediate reasoning steps prior to generating a final answer. In this paper, we present GreenMind-Medium-14B-R1, the Vietnamese reasoning model inspired by the finetuning strategy based on Group Relative Policy Optimization. We also leverage a high-quality Vietnamese synthesized reasoning dataset and design two reward functions to tackle the main limitations of this technique: (i) language mixing, where we explicitly detect the presence of biased language characters during the process of sampling tokens, and (ii) we leverage Sentence Transformer-based models to ensure that the generated reasoning content maintains factual correctness and does not distort the final output. Experimental results on the Vietnamese dataset from the VLSP 2023 Challenge demonstrate that our model outperforms prior works and enhances linguistic consistency in its responses. Furthermore, we extend our evaluation to SeaExam-a multilingual multiple-choice dataset, showing the effectiveness of our reasoning method compared to few-shot prompting techniques.

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve excellent performance in natural language reasoning tasks through pre-training on vast unstructured text, enabling them to understand the logic in natural language and generate logic-consistent responses. However, the representational differences between unstructured and structured knowledge make LLMs inherently struggle to maintain logic consistency, leading to Logic Drift challenges in structured knowledge reasoning tasks such as Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). Existing methods address this limitation by designing complex workflows embedded in prompts to guide LLM reasoning. Nevertheless, these approaches only provide input-level guidance and fail to fundamentally address the Logic Drift in LLM outputs. Additionally, their inflexible reasoning workflows cannot adapt to different tasks and knowledge graphs. To enhance LLMs' logic consistency in structured knowledge reasoning, we specifically target the logits output from the autoregressive generation process. We propose the Logits-to-Logic framework, which incorporates logits strengthening and logits filtering as core modules to correct logical defects in LLM outputs. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly improves LLMs' logic consistency in structured knowledge reasoning and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple KGQA benchmarks.

LLMs have shown impressive progress in natural language processing. However, they still face significant challenges in TableQA, where real-world complexities such as diverse table structures, multilingual data, and domain-specific reasoning are crucial. Existing TableQA benchmarks are often limited by their focus on simple flat tables and suffer from data leakage. Furthermore, most benchmarks are monolingual and fail to capture the cross-lingual and cross-domain variability in practical applications. To address these limitations, we introduce TableEval, a new benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on realistic TableQA tasks. Specifically, TableEval includes tables with various structures (such as concise, hierarchical, and nested tables) collected from four domains (including government, finance, academia, and industry reports). Besides, TableEval features cross-lingual scenarios with tables in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and English. To minimize the risk of data leakage, we collect all data from recent real-world documents. Considering that existing TableQA metrics fail to capture semantic accuracy, we further propose SEAT, a new evaluation framework that assesses the alignment between model responses and reference answers at the sub-question level. Experimental results have shown that SEAT achieves high agreement with human judgment. Extensive experiments on TableEval reveal critical gaps in the ability of state-of-the-art LLMs to handle these complex, real-world TableQA tasks, offering insights for future improvements. We make our dataset available here: https://github.com/wenge-research/TableEval.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in planning the use of various functional tools, such as calculators and retrievers, particularly in question-answering tasks. In this paper, we expand the definition of these tools, centering on conceptual tools within the context of dialogue systems. A conceptual tool specifies a cognitive concept that aids systematic or investigative thought. These conceptual tools play important roles in practice, such as multiple psychological or tutoring strategies being dynamically applied in a single turn to compose helpful responses. To further enhance the reasoning and planning capability of LLMs with these conceptual tools, we introduce a multi-persona collaboration framework: Think-Plan-Execute (TPE). This framework decouples the response generation process into three distinct roles: Thinker, Planner, and Executor. Specifically, the Thinker analyzes the internal status exhibited in the dialogue context, such as user emotions and preferences, to formulate a global guideline. The Planner then generates executable plans to call different conceptual tools (e.g., sources or strategies), while the Executor compiles all intermediate results into a coherent response. This structured approach not only enhances the explainability and controllability of responses but also reduces token redundancy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TPE across various dialogue response generation tasks, including multi-source (FoCus) and multi-strategy interactions (CIMA and PsyQA). This reveals its potential to handle real-world dialogue interactions that require more complicated tool learning beyond just functional tools. The full code and data will be released for reproduction.

In many applications of LLMs, natural language responses often have an underlying structure such as representing discrete labels, numerical values, or graphs. Yet, existing decoding and uncertainty estimation methods operate only in language space and largely disregard structural information. We address this by modeling LLM outputs directly in a task-dependent latent structure. By equipping this structure with a dissimilarity measure, we can compute Bayes-optimal responses. These are not selected from sampled generations but are newly synthesized by combining individual responses in the latent space. Across different tasks, Bayes-optimal responses consistently outperform standard decoding methods like beam search. Moreover, quantifying uncertainty via the induced Bayesian risk captures variations in terms of the latent structure and improves alignment with output quality and correctness. Our decision-theoretic framework is applicable to any problem that admits a latent response structure and enables reliable task-aware LLM predictions.

Conversational interviews are commonly used to complement structured surveys by eliciting rich and contextualized responses, which are typically analyzed qualitatively. However, their potential contribution to quantitative measurement remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce ConvScale, an AI-supported approach that transforms psychometric scales into natural conversational interviews while preserving the original measurement structure. Based on interview data, ConvScale predicts item-level scores and aggregates them to derive scale-based assessments. In a within-subjects study with 18 participants, our results show that ConvScale-derived scores align closely with participants' self-report scores at both the item and construct levels, while maintaining moderate internal reliability; however, the structural validity was inadequate. In light of this, we discussed the potential of supporting quantitative measurement through interviews and proposed implications for future designs.

Redundancies and correlations in the responses of sensory neurons seem to waste neural resources but can carry cues about structured stimuli and may help the brain to correct for response errors. To assess how the retina negotiates this tradeoff, we measured simultaneous responses from populations of ganglion cells presented with natural and artificial stimuli that varied greatly in correlation structure. We found that pairwise correlations in the retinal output remained similar across stimuli with widely different spatio-temporal correlations including white noise and natural movies. Meanwhile, purely spatial correlations tended to increase correlations in the retinal response. Responding to more correlated stimuli, ganglion cells had faster temporal kernels and tended to have stronger surrounds. These properties of individual cells, along with gain changes that opposed changes in effective contrast at the ganglion cell input, largely explained the similarity of pairwise correlations across stimuli where receptive field measurements were possible.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs), such as GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Reka Core, have expanded their capabilities to include vision and audio modalities. While these models demonstrate impressive performance across a wide range of audio-visual applications, our proposed DeafTest reveals that MLLMs often struggle with simple tasks humans find trivial: 1) determining which of two sounds is louder, and 2) determining which of two sounds has a higher pitch. Motivated by these observations, we introduce AV-Odyssey Bench, a comprehensive audio-visual benchmark designed to assess whether those MLLMs can truly understand the audio-visual information. This benchmark encompasses 4,555 carefully crafted problems, each incorporating text, visual, and audio components. To successfully infer answers, models must effectively leverage clues from both visual and audio inputs. To ensure precise and objective evaluation of MLLM responses, we have structured the questions as multiple-choice, eliminating the need for human evaluation or LLM-assisted assessment. We benchmark a series of closed-source and open-source models and summarize the observations. By revealing the limitations of current models, we aim to provide useful insight for future dataset collection and model development.

Evaluating production LLM responses and routing requests across providers in LLM gateways requires fine-grained quality signals and operationally grounded decisions. To address this gap, we present SEAR, a schema-based evaluation and routing system for multi-model, multi-provider LLM gateways. SEAR defines an extensible relational schema covering both LLM evaluation signals (context, intent, response characteristics, issue attribution, and quality scores) and gateway operational metrics (latency, cost, throughput), with cross-table consistency links across around one hundred typed, SQL-queryable columns. To populate the evaluation signals reliably, SEAR proposes self-contained signal instructions, in-schema reasoning, and multi-stage generation that produces database-ready structured outputs. Because signals are derived through LLM reasoning rather than shallow classifiers, SEAR captures complex request semantics, enables human-interpretable routing explanations, and unifies evaluation and routing in a single query layer. Across thousands of production sessions, SEAR achieves strong signal accuracy on human-labeled data and supports practical routing decisions, including large cost reductions with comparable quality.

The rapid development of large language model (LLM) alignment algorithms has resulted in a complex and fragmented landscape, with limited clarity on the effectiveness of different methods and their inter-connections. This paper introduces Reward-Aware Preference Optimization (RPO), a mathematical framework that unifies popular preference optimization techniques in LLM alignment, including DPO, IPO, SimPO, and REINFORCE (LOO), among others. RPO provides a structured approach to disentangle and systematically study the impact of various design choices, such as the optimization objective, the number of responses per prompt, and the use of implicit versus explicit reward models, on LLM preference optimization. We additionally propose a new experimental setup that enables the clean and direct ablation of such design choices. Through an extensive series of ablation studies within the RPO framework, we gain insights into the critical factors shaping model alignment, offering practical guidance on the most effective strategies for improving LLM alignment.

The recent advancements in artificial intelligence highlight the potential of language models in psychological health support. While models trained on data from mental health service platform have achieved preliminary success, challenges persist in areas such as data scarcity, quality, and ensuring a solid foundation in psychological techniques. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel approach to enhance the precision and efficacy of psychological support through large language models. Specifically, we design a specific prompt derived from principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and have generated the CBT QA dataset, specifically for Chinese psychological health Q&A based on CBT structured intervention strategies. Unlike previous methods, our dataset emphasizes professional and structured response. Utilizing this dataset, we fine-tuned the large language model, giving birth to CBT-LLM, the large-scale language model specifically designed for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that CBT-LLM excels in generating structured, professional, and highly relevant responses in psychological health support tasks, showcasing its practicality and quality. The model is available on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/Hongbin37/CBT-LLM.

On-policy distillation (OPD) is a powerful paradigm for model alignment, yet its reliance on teacher logits restricts its application to white-box scenarios. We contend that structured semantic rubrics can serve as a scalable alternative to teacher logits, enabling OPD using only teacher-generated responses. To prove it, we introduce ROPD, a simple yet foundational framework for rubric-based OPD. Specifically, ROPD induces prompt-specific rubrics from teacher-student contrasts, and then utilizes these rubrics to score the student rollouts for on-policy optimization. Empirically, ROPD outperforms the advanced logit-based OPD methods across most scenarios, and achieving up to a 10x gain in sample efficiency. These results position rubric-based OPD as a flexible, black-box-compatible alternative to the prevailing logit-based OPD, offering a simple yet strong baseline for scalable distillation across proprietary and open-source LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Peregrine123/ROPD_official.

Project VAANI is an initiative to create an India-representative multi-modal dataset that comprehensively maps India's linguistic diversity, starting with 165 districts across the country in its first two phases. Speech data is collected through a carefully structured process that uses image-based prompts to encourage spontaneous responses. Images are captured through a separate process that encompasses a broad range of topics, gathered from both within and across districts. The collected data undergoes a rigorous multi-stage quality evaluation, including both automated and manual checks to ensure highest possible standards in audio quality and transcription accuracy. Following this thorough validation, we have open-sourced around 289K images, approximately 31,270 hours of audio recordings, and around 2,067 hours of transcribed speech, encompassing 112 languages from 165 districts from 31 States and Union territories. Notably, significant of these languages are being represented for the first time in a dataset of this scale, making the VAANI project a groundbreaking effort in preserving and promoting linguistic inclusivity. This data can be instrumental in building inclusive speech models for India, and in advancing research and development across speech, image, and multimodal applications.

Conversational scams, such as romance and investment scams, are emerging as a major form of online fraud. Unlike one-shot scam lures such as fake lottery or unpaid toll messages, they unfold through multi-turn conversations in which scammers gradually manipulate victims using evolving psychological techniques. However, existing research mainly focuses on static scam detection or synthetic scams, leaving open whether language models can understand how real-world scams progress over time. We introduce PreScam, a benchmark for modeling scam progression from early conversations. Built from user-submitted scam reports, PreScam filters and structures 177,989 raw reports into 11,573 conversational scam instances spanning 20 scam categories. Each instance is hierarchically structured according to the scam lifecycle defined by the proposed scam kill chain, and further annotated at the turn level with scammer psychological actions and victim responses. We benchmark models on two tasks: real-time termination prediction, which estimates whether a conversation is approaching the termination stage, and scammer action prediction, which forecasts the scammer's subsequent actions. Results show a clear gap between surface-level fluency and progression modeling: supervised encoders substantially outperform zero-shot LLMs on real-time termination prediction, while next-action prediction remains only moderately successful even for strong LLMs. Taken together, these results show that current models can capture some scam-related cues, yet still struggle to track how risk escalates and how manipulation unfolds across turns.

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.

Personalized alignment of large language models seeks to adapt responses to individual user preferences, typically via reinforcement learning. A key challenge is obtaining accurate, user-specific reward signals in open-ended scenarios. Existing personalized reward models face two persistent limitations: (1) oversimplifying diverse, scenario-specific preferences into a small, fixed set of evaluation principles, and (2) struggling with generalization to new users with limited feedback. To this end, we propose P-GenRM, the first Personalized Generative Reward Model with test-time user-based scaling. P-GenRM transforms preference signals into structured evaluation chains that derive adaptive personas and scoring rubrics across various scenarios. It further clusters users into User Prototypes and introduces a dual-granularity scaling mechanism: at the individual level, it adaptively scales and aggregates each user's scoring scheme; at the prototype level, it incorporates preferences from similar users. This design mitigates noise in inferred preferences and enhances generalization to unseen users through prototype-based transfer. Empirical results show that P-GenRM achieves state-of-the-art results on widely-used personalized reward model benchmarks, with an average improvement of 2.31%, and demonstrates strong generalization on an out-of-distribution dataset. Notably, Test-time User-based scaling provides an additional 3% boost, demonstrating stronger personalized alignment with test-time scalability.

We present a new text-to-SQL dataset for electronic health records (EHRs). The utterances were collected from 222 hospital staff members, including physicians, nurses, and insurance review and health records teams. To construct the QA dataset on structured EHR data, we conducted a poll at a university hospital and used the responses to create seed questions. We then manually linked these questions to two open-source EHR databases, MIMIC-III and eICU, and included various time expressions and held-out unanswerable questions in the dataset, which were also collected from the poll. Our dataset poses a unique set of challenges: the model needs to 1) generate SQL queries that reflect a wide range of needs in the hospital, including simple retrieval and complex operations such as calculating survival rate, 2) understand various time expressions to answer time-sensitive questions in healthcare, and 3) distinguish whether a given question is answerable or unanswerable. We believe our dataset, EHRSQL, can serve as a practical benchmark for developing and assessing QA models on structured EHR data and take a step further towards bridging the gap between text-to-SQL research and its real-life deployment in healthcare. EHRSQL is available at https://github.com/glee4810/EHRSQL.

The human brain processes dynamic visual input through hierarchically organized, functionally specialized regions. While recent in silico brain encoding models can synthesize optimal stimuli to probe selectivity in different brain regions, prior work has been largely limited to static images, leaving dynamic visual processing underexplored. We introduce a novel neural-guided video synthesis framework that generates stimuli optimized for target brain regions across visual cortex. Our method performs evolutionary search over a structured prompt space, guided by a dynamic encoding model that predicts voxel-level responses to video inputs. By maximizing predicted activity for a target ROI, the framework efficiently discovers hyper-activating dynamic stimuli that consistently surpass handcrafted localizer videos. The synthesized videos recover known selectivities across ventral, dorsal, and lateral pathways, and further reveal systematic differences in sensitivity to temporal dynamics. A searchlight analysis provides new insight into the progression toward increasingly complex social-dynamic features along the lateral stream, further supported by probing with synthesized abstract, non-naturalistic stimuli. Taken together, our framework enables in silico exploration of dynamic visual selectivity, with new predictions for in vivo experiments

Structured generation, the process of producing content in standardized formats like JSON and XML, is widely utilized in real-world applications to extract key output information from large language models (LLMs). This study investigates whether such constraints on generation space impact LLMs' abilities, including reasoning and domain knowledge comprehension. Specifically, we evaluate LLMs' performance when restricted to adhere to structured formats versus generating free-form responses across various common tasks. Surprisingly, we observe a significant decline in LLMs' reasoning abilities under format restrictions. Furthermore, we find that stricter format constraints generally lead to greater performance degradation in reasoning tasks.

LLMs trained for logical reasoning excel at step-by-step deduction to reach verifiable answers. However, this paradigm is ill-suited for navigating social situations, which induce an interpretive process of analyzing ambiguous cues that rarely yield a definitive outcome. To bridge this gap, we introduce Cognitive Reasoning, a paradigm modeled on human social cognition. It formulates the interpretive process into a structured cognitive flow of interconnected cognitive units (e.g., observation or attribution), which combine adaptively to enable effective social thinking and responses. We then propose CogFlow, a complete framework that instills this capability in LLMs. CogFlow first curates a dataset of cognitive flows by simulating the associative and progressive nature of human thought via tree-structured planning. After instilling the basic cognitive reasoning capability via supervised fine-tuning, CogFlow adopts reinforcement learning to enable the model to improve itself via trial and error, guided by a multi-objective reward that optimizes both cognitive flow and response quality. Extensive experiments show that CogFlow effectively enhances the social cognitive capabilities of LLMs, and even humans, leading to more effective social decision-making.

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has substantially expanded the range of tasks they can address. In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), researchers have shifted their focus from conventional NLP tasks (e.g., sequence tagging and parsing) towards tasks that revolve around aligning with human needs (e.g., brainstorming and email writing). This shift in task distribution imposes new requirements on evaluating these aligned models regarding generality (i.e., assessing performance across diverse scenarios), flexibility (i.e., examining under different protocols), and interpretability (i.e., scrutinizing models with explanations). In this paper, we propose a generative judge with 13B parameters, Auto-J, designed to address these challenges. Our model is trained on user queries and LLM-generated responses under massive real-world scenarios and accommodates diverse evaluation protocols (e.g., pairwise response comparison and single-response evaluation) with well-structured natural language critiques. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we construct a new testbed covering 58 different scenarios. Experimentally, Auto-J outperforms a series of strong competitors, including both open-source and closed-source models, by a large margin. We also provide detailed analysis and case studies to further reveal the potential of our method and make a variety of resources public at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/auto-j.

Traditional systems designed for task oriented dialog utilize knowledge present only in structured knowledge sources to generate responses. However, relevant information required to generate responses may also reside in unstructured sources, such as documents. Recent state of the art models such as HyKnow and SeKnow aimed at overcoming these challenges make limiting assumptions about the knowledge sources. For instance, these systems assume that certain types of information, such as a phone number, is always present in a structured knowledge base (KB) while information about aspects such as entrance ticket prices, would always be available in documents. In this paper, we create a modified version of the MutliWOZ-based dataset prepared by SeKnow to demonstrate how current methods have significant degradation in performance when strict assumptions about the source of information are removed. Then, in line with recent work exploiting pre-trained language models, we fine-tune a BART based model using prompts for the tasks of querying knowledge sources, as well as, for response generation, without making assumptions about the information present in each knowledge source. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our model is robust to perturbations to knowledge modality (source of information), and that it can fuse information from structured as well as unstructured knowledge to generate responses.

Camera motion is a fundamental geometric signal that shapes visual perception and cinematic style, yet current video-capable vision-language models (VideoLLMs) rarely represent it explicitly and often fail on fine-grained motion primitives. We address this gap with a framework of benchmarking, diagnosis, and injection. We curate CameraMotionDataset, a large-scale synthetic dataset with explicit camera control, formulate camera motion as constraint-aware multi-label recognition, and construct a VQA benchmark--CameraMotionVQA. Across diverse off-the-shelf VideoLLMs, we observe substantial errors in recognizing camera motion primitives. Probing experiments on a Qwen2.5-VL vision encoder suggest that camera motion cues are weakly represented, especially in deeper ViT blocks, helping explain the observed failure modes. To bridge this gap without costly training or fine-tuning, we propose a lightweight, model-agnostic pipeline that extracts geometric camera cues from 3D foundation models (3DFMs), predicts constrained motion primitives with a temporal classifier, and injects them into downstream VideoLLM inference via structured prompting. Experiments demonstrate improved motion recognition and more camera-aware model responses, highlighting geometry-driven cue extraction and structured prompting as practical steps toward a camera-aware VideoLLM and VLA system. The dataset and benchmark is publicly available at https://hf.co/datasets/fengyee/camera-motion-dataset-and-benchmark.

Target-guided open-domain conversation aims to proactively and naturally guide a dialogue agent or human to achieve specific goals, topics or keywords during open-ended conversations. Existing methods mainly rely on single-turn datadriven learning and simple target-guided strategy without considering semantic or factual knowledge relations among candidate topics/keywords. This results in poor transition smoothness and low success rate. In this work, we adopt a structured approach that controls the intended content of system responses by introducing coarse-grained keywords, attains smooth conversation transition through turn-level supervised learning and knowledge relations between candidate keywords, and drives an conversation towards an specified target with discourse-level guiding strategy. Specially, we propose a novel dynamic knowledge routing network (DKRN) which considers semantic knowledge relations among candidate keywords for accurate next topic prediction of next discourse. With the help of more accurate keyword prediction, our keyword-augmented response retrieval module can achieve better retrieval performance and more meaningful conversations. Besides, we also propose a novel dual discourse-level target-guided strategy to guide conversations to reach their goals smoothly with higher success rate. Furthermore, to push the research boundary of target-guided open-domain conversation to match real-world scenarios better, we introduce a new large-scale Chinese target-guided open-domain conversation dataset (more than 900K conversations) crawled from Sina Weibo. Quantitative and human evaluations show our method can produce meaningful and effective target-guided conversations, significantly improving over other state-of-the-art methods by more than 20% in success rate and more than 0.6 in average smoothness score.

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) but it struggles with unstable exploration. We propose FR3E (First Return, Entropy-Eliciting Explore), a structured exploration framework that identifies high-uncertainty decision points in reasoning trajectories and performs targeted rollouts to construct semantically grounded intermediate feedback. Our method provides targeted guidance without relying on dense supervision. Empirical results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks(AIME24) show that FR3E promotes more stable training, produces longer and more coherent responses, and increases the proportion of fully correct trajectories. These results highlight the framework's effectiveness in improving LLM reasoning through more robust and structured exploration.

Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex tasks is challenging, often involving a time-consuming and uncontrollable prompt engineering process. This paper introduces a novel human-LLM interaction framework, Low-code LLM. It incorporates six types of simple low-code visual programming interactions to achieve more controllable and stable responses. Through visual interaction with a graphical user interface, users can incorporate their ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. The proposed Low-code LLM framework consists of a Planning LLM that designs a structured planning workflow for complex tasks, which can be correspondingly edited and confirmed by users through low-code visual programming operations, and an Executing LLM that generates responses following the user-confirmed workflow. We highlight three advantages of the low-code LLM: user-friendly interaction, controllable generation, and wide applicability. We demonstrate its benefits using four typical applications. By introducing this framework, we aim to bridge the gap between humans and LLMs, enabling more effective and efficient utilization of LLMs for complex tasks. The code, prompts, and experimental details are available at https://github.com/moymix/TaskMatrix/tree/main/LowCodeLLM. A system demonstration video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb2C1vaeO3E.

Student simulation can support learning-by-teaching pedagogy where human students (as tutors) teach AI-simulated novice students (as tutees). Recent research often relies on prompt engineering with large language models (LLMs) to simulate novice student behaviour, but it is difficult to keep the AI-simulated student at a stable novice knowledge level. A key reason is that many LLMs are trained to be broadly capable, so even when prompted to "act like a novice," the LLMs can still produce expert-level explanations during the learning-by-teaching interaction process. As a result, the AI-simulated student may drift beyond the intended knowledge level, reducing the credibility of the simulation for studying learning-by-teaching processes. Thus, we propose a knowledge-level simulation approach based on machine unlearning. We investigate this approach using a dataset of multiple-choice questions on Python programming concepts. We apply machine unlearning to transform a knowledgeable LLM into a novice-level AI student (i.e., teachable agent), then evaluate whether the teachable agent can relearn targeted knowledge components through learning-by-teaching dialogue interactions. Finally, we analyse the dialogue logs to characterise how the agent's behaviour changes over time, including its question asking, error patterns, and responsiveness to instruction. The results show that (1) unlearning produces simulated student agents with more novice-like responses than prompt-only baselines, (2) the agents recover a measurable portion of the unlearned knowledge under structured exposure, and (3) dialogue analyses reveal identifiable trajectories of conceptual change and teaching moves that predict learning recovery.

Automating software vulnerability detection (SVD) remains a critical challenge in an era of increasingly complex and interdependent software systems. Despite significant advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for code analysis, prevailing evaluation methodologies often lack the context-aware robustness necessary to capture real-world intricacies and cross-component interactions. To address these limitations, we present VulnSage, a comprehensive evaluation framework and a dataset curated from diverse, large-scale open-source system software projects developed in C/C++. Unlike prior datasets, it leverages a heuristic noise pre-filtering approach combined with LLM-based reasoning to ensure a representative and minimally noisy spectrum of vulnerabilities. The framework supports multi-granular analysis across function, file, and inter-function levels and employs four diverse zero-shot prompt strategies: Baseline, Chain-of-Thought, Think, and Think & Verify. Through this evaluation, we uncover that structured reasoning prompts substantially improve LLM performance, with Think & Verify reducing ambiguous responses from 20.3% to 9.1% while increasing accuracy. We further demonstrate that code-specialized models consistently outperform general-purpose alternatives, with performance varying significantly across vulnerability types, revealing that no single approach universally excels across all security contexts. Link to dataset and codes: https://github.com/Erroristotle/VulnSage.git

This paper presents an experience report on the development of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems using PDF documents as the primary data source. The RAG architecture combines generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the precision of information retrieval. This approach has the potential to redefine how we interact with and augment both structured and unstructured knowledge in generative models to enhance transparency, accuracy, and contextuality of responses. The paper details the end-to-end pipeline, from data collection, preprocessing, to retrieval indexing and response generation, highlighting technical challenges and practical solutions. We aim to offer insights to researchers and practitioners developing similar systems using two distinct approaches: OpenAI's Assistant API with GPT Series and Llama's open-source models. The practical implications of this research lie in enhancing the reliability of generative AI systems in various sectors where domain-specific knowledge and real-time information retrieval is important. The Python code used in this work is also available at: https://github.com/GPT-Laboratory/RAG-LLM-Development-Guidebook-from-PDFs.

Training tool-use agents typically relies on outcome-based filtering: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on successful trajectories and Reinforcement Learning (RL) on pass-rate-selected tasks. However, this paradigm ignores interaction dynamics: successful trajectories may lack error recovery or exhibit redundancy, while pass rates fail to distinguish structurally informative tasks from trivial ones. We propose TopoCurate, an interaction-aware framework that projects multi-trial rollouts from the same task into a unified semantic quotient topology. By merging equivalent action-observation states, this projection transforms scattered linear trajectories into a structured manifold that explicitly captures how tool invocations and environmental responses drive the divergence between effective strategies and failure modes. Leveraging this representation, we introduce a dual-selection mechanism: for SFT, we prioritize trajectories demonstrating reflective recovery, semantic efficiency, and strategic diversity to mitigate covariate shift and mode collapse; for RL, we select tasks with high error branch ratios and strategic heterogeneity, maximizing gradient Signal-to-Noise Ratio to address vanishing signals in sparse-reward settings. Evaluations on BFCLv3 and Tau2 Bench show that TopoCurate achieves consistent gains of 4.2\% (SFT) and 6.9\% (RL) over state-of-the-art baselines. We will release the code and data soon for further investigations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) assist in specialized tasks but struggle to align with evolving domain knowledge without costly fine-tuning. Domain knowledge consists of: Knowledge: Immutable facts (e.g., 'A stone is solid') and generally accepted principles (e.g., ethical standards); Refined Memory: Evolving insights shaped by business needs and real-world changes. However, a significant gap often exists between a domain expert's deep, nuanced understanding and the system's domain knowledge, which can hinder accurate information retrieval and application. Our Memory-Augmented Refinement of Knowledge (MARK) framework enables LLMs to continuously learn without retraining by leveraging structured refined memory, inspired by the Society of Mind. MARK operates through specialized agents, each serving a distinct role: Residual Refined Memory Agent: Stores and retrieves domain-specific insights to maintain context over time; User Question Refined Memory Agent: Captures user-provided facts, abbreviations, and terminology for better comprehension; LLM Response Refined Memory Agent: Extracts key elements from responses for refinement and personalization. These agents analyse stored refined memory, detect patterns, resolve contradictions, and improve response accuracy. Temporal factors like recency and frequency prioritize relevant information while discarding outdated insights. MARK enhances LLMs in multiple ways: Ground Truth Strategy: Reduces hallucinations by establishing a structured reference; Domain-Specific Adaptation: Essential for fields like healthcare, law, and manufacturing, where proprietary insights are absent from public datasets; Personalized AI Assistants: Improves virtual assistants by remembering user preferences, ensuring coherent responses over time.

Research question answering requires accurate retrieval and contextual understanding of scientific literature. However, current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods often struggle to balance complex document relationships with precise information retrieval. In this paper, we introduce Contextualized Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (CG-RAG), a novel framework that integrates sparse and dense retrieval signals within graph structures to enhance retrieval efficiency and subsequently improve generation quality for research question answering. First, we propose a contextual graph representation for citation graphs, effectively capturing both explicit and implicit connections within and across documents. Next, we introduce Lexical-Semantic Graph Retrieval (LeSeGR), which seamlessly integrates sparse and dense retrieval signals with graph encoding. It bridges the gap between lexical precision and semantic understanding in citation graph retrieval, demonstrating generalizability to existing graph retrieval and hybrid retrieval methods. Finally, we present a context-aware generation strategy that utilizes the retrieved graph-structured information to generate precise and contextually enriched responses using large language models (LLMs). Extensive experiments on research question answering benchmarks across multiple domains demonstrate that our CG-RAG framework significantly outperforms RAG methods combined with various state-of-the-art retrieval approaches, delivering superior retrieval accuracy and generation quality.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more pervasive across various users and scenarios, identifying potential issues when using these models becomes essential. Examples of such issues include: bias, inconsistencies, and hallucination. Although auditing the LLM for these problems is often warranted, such a process is neither easy nor accessible for most. An effective method is to probe the LLM using different versions of the same question. This could expose inconsistencies in its knowledge or operation, indicating potential for bias or hallucination. However, to operationalize this auditing method at scale, we need an approach to create those probes reliably and automatically. In this paper we propose the LLMAuditor framework which is an automatic, and scalable solution, where one uses a different LLM along with human-in-the-loop (HIL). This approach offers verifiability and transparency, while avoiding circular reliance on the same LLM, and increasing scientific rigor and generalizability. Specifically, LLMAuditor includes two phases of verification using humans: standardized evaluation criteria to verify responses, and a structured prompt template to generate desired probes. A case study using questions from the TruthfulQA dataset demonstrates that we can generate a reliable set of probes from one LLM that can be used to audit inconsistencies in a different LLM. This process is enhanced by our structured prompt template with HIL, which not only boosts the reliability of our approach in auditing but also yields the delivery of less hallucinated results. The novelty of our research stems from the development of a comprehensive, general-purpose framework that includes a HIL verified prompt template for auditing responses generated by LLMs.

Current general-purpose large language models (LLMs) commonly exhibit knowledge hallucination and insufficient domain-specific adaptability in domain-specific tasks, limiting their effectiveness in specialized question answering scenarios. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) effectively tackles these challenges by integrating external knowledge to enhance accuracy and relevance. However, traditional RAG still faces limitations in domain knowledge accuracy and context modeling.To enhance domain-specific question answering performance, this work focuses on a graph-based RAG framework, emphasizing the critical role of knowledge graph quality during the generation process. We propose DSRAG (Domain-Specific RAG), a multimodal knowledge graph-driven retrieval-augmented generation framework designed for domain-specific applications. Our approach leverages domain-specific documents as the primary knowledge source, integrating heterogeneous information such as text, images, and tables to construct a multimodal knowledge graph covering both conceptual and instance layers. Building on this foundation, we introduce semantic pruning and structured subgraph retrieval mechanisms, combining knowledge graph context and vector retrieval results to guide the language model towards producing more reliable responses. Evaluations using the Langfuse multidimensional scoring mechanism show that our method excels in domain-specific question answering, validating the efficacy of integrating multimodal knowledge graphs with retrieval-augmented generation.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong results on visual reasoning benchmarks, but answer accuracy alone does not indicate whether a model relied on the correct visual evidence. This gap is particularly important in multi-view driving scenes used for autonomous driving, where a model can produce a plausible answer while grounding it in the wrong camera view. We introduce a multi-view visual question answering benchmark for evaluating evidence-source identification: given six synchronized NuScenes views and a question, the model must identify the supporting camera view and answer the question. The benchmark contains 122 conflict-centric question-answer pairs from 73 scenes, spanning causality, counterfactual reasoning, and intent prediction. View labels are proposed by an automatic conflict-mining pipeline and manually verified by annotators. We evaluate three settings: camera-view selection, oracle QA given the golden view, and joint prediction in which the model selects a view and answers in one pass. Answers are evaluated in both multiple-choice and free-form formats, using exact match for structured predictions and an LLM judge for free-form responses. By explicitly separating visual-source identification from answer correctness, the benchmark exposes grounding failures that answer-only evaluation misses.

REST APIs have become key components of web services. However, they often contain logic flaws resulting in server side errors or security vulnerabilities. HTTP requests are used as test cases to find and mitigate such issues. Existing methods to modify requests, including those using deep learning, suffer from limited performance and precision, relying on undirected search or making limited usage of the contextual information. In this paper we propose APIRL, a fully automated deep reinforcement learning tool for testing REST APIs. A key novelty of our approach is the use of feedback from a transformer module pre-trained on JSON-structured data, akin to that used in API responses. This allows APIRL to learn the subtleties relating to test outcomes, and generalise to unseen API endpoints. We show APIRL can find significantly more bugs than the state-of-the-art in real world REST APIs while minimising the number of required test cases. We also study how reward functions, and other key design choices, affect learnt policies in a thorough ablation study.

Test-Time Training offers a promising way to improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) by adapting the model using only the test questions. However, existing methods struggle with difficult reasoning problems for two reasons: raw test questions are often too difficult to yield high-quality pseudo-labels, and the limited size of test sets makes continuous online updates prone to instability. To address these limitations, we propose TTCS, a co-evolving test-time training framework. Specifically, TTCS initializes two policies from the same pretrained model: a question synthesizer and a reasoning solver. These policies evolve through iterative optimization: the synthesizer generates progressively challenging question variants conditioned on the test questions, creating a structured curriculum tailored to the solver's current capability, while the solver updates itself using self-consistency rewards computed from multiple sampled responses on both original test and synthetic questions. Crucially, the solver's feedback guides the synthesizer to generate questions aligned with the model's current capability, and the generated question variants in turn stabilize the solver's test-time training. Experiments show that TTCS consistently strengthens the reasoning ability on challenging mathematical benchmarks and transfers to general-domain tasks across different LLM backbones, highlighting a scalable path towards dynamically constructing test-time curricula for self-evolving. Our code and implementation details are available at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/TTCS.

Can large language model agents discover hidden safety objectives through experience alone? We introduce EPO-Safe (Experiential Prompt Optimization for Safe Agents), a framework where an LLM iteratively generates action plans, receives sparse binary danger warnings, and evolves a natural language behavioral specification through reflection. Unlike standard LLM reflection methods that rely on rich textual feedback (e.g., compiler errors or detailed environment responses), EPO-Safe demonstrates that LLMs can perform safety reasoning from a strictly impoverished signal in structured, low-dimensional environments: the agent never observes the hidden performance function R^*, only a single bit per timestep indicating that an action was unsafe. We evaluate on five AI Safety Gridworlds (Leike et al., 2017) and five text-based scenario analogs where visible reward R may diverge from R^*. EPO-Safe discovers safe behavior within 1-2 rounds (5-15 episodes), producing human-readable specifications with correct explanatory hypotheses about hazards (e.g., "X cells are directionally hazardous: entering from the north is dangerous"). Critically, we show that standard reward-driven reflection actively degrades safety: agents reflecting on reward alone use the loop to justify and accelerate reward hacking, proving that reflection must be paired with a dedicated safety channel to discover hidden constraints. We further evaluate robustness to noisy oracles: even when 50% of non-dangerous steps produce spurious warnings, mean safety performance degrades by only 15% on average, though sensitivity is environment-dependent, as cross-episode reflection naturally filters inconsistent signals. Each evolved specification functions as an auditable set of grounded behavioral rules discovered autonomously through interaction, rather than authored by humans as in Constitutional AI (Bai et al., 2022).

Large Language Model (LLM) integrations into applications like Microsoft365 suite and Google Workspace for creating/processing documents, emails, presentations, etc. has led to considerable enhancements in productivity and time savings. But as these integrations become more more complex, it is paramount to ensure that the quality of output from the LLM-integrated applications are relevant and appropriate for use. Identifying the need to develop robust evaluation approaches for natural language generation, wherein references/ground labels doesn't exist or isn't amply available, this paper introduces a novel framework called "SAGEval" which utilizes a critiquing Agent to provide feedback on scores generated by LLM evaluators. We show that the critiquing Agent is able to rectify scores from LLM evaluators, in absence of references/ground-truth labels, thereby reducing the need for labeled data even for complex NLG evaluation scenarios, like the generation of JSON-structured forms/surveys with responses in different styles like multiple choice, likert ratings, single choice questions, etc.

Large language models (LLMs) have limitations in handling tasks that require real-time access to external APIs. While several benchmarks like ToolBench and APIGen have been developed to assess LLMs' API-use capabilities, they often suffer from issues such as lack of generalizability, limited multi-step reasoning coverage, and instability due to real-time API fluctuations. In this paper, we introduce SEAL, an end-to-end testbed designed to evaluate LLMs in real-world API usage. SEAL standardizes existing benchmarks, integrates an agent system for testing API retrieval and planning, and addresses the instability of real-time APIs by introducing a GPT-4-powered API simulator with caching for deterministic evaluations. Our testbed provides a comprehensive evaluation pipeline that covers API retrieval, API calls, and final responses, offering a reliable framework for structured performance comparison in diverse real-world scenarios. SEAL is publicly available, with ongoing updates for new benchmarks.

The rapid digitalization of customer service has intensified the demand for conversational agents capable of providing accurate and natural interactions. In the Algerian context, this is complicated by the linguistic complexity of Darja, a dialect characterized by non-standardized orthography, extensive code-switching with French, and the simultaneous use of Arabic and Latin (Arabizi) scripts. This paper introduces DziriBOT, a hybrid intelligent conversational agent specifically engineered to overcome these challenges. We propose a multi-layered architecture that integrates specialized Natural Language Understanding (NLU) with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), allowing for both structured service flows and dynamic, knowledge-intensive responses grounded in curated enterprise documentation. To address the low-resource nature of Darja, we systematically evaluate three distinct approaches: a sparse-feature Rasa pipeline, classical machine learning baselines, and transformer-based fine-tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that the fine-tuned DziriBERT model achieves state-of-the-art performance. These results significantly outperform traditional baselines, particularly in handling orthographic noise and rare intents. Ultimately, DziriBOT provides a robust, scalable solution that bridges the gap between formal language models and the linguistic realities of Algerian users, offering a blueprint for dialect-aware automation in the regional market.

The Internet of Things has expanded rapidly, transforming communication and operations across industries but also increasing the attack surface and security breaches. Artificial Intelligence plays a key role in securing IoT, enabling attack detection, attack behavior analysis, and mitigation suggestion. Despite advancements, evaluations remain purely qualitative, and the lack of a standardized, objective benchmark for quantitatively measuring AI-based attack analysis and mitigation hinders consistent assessment of model effectiveness. In this work, we propose a hybrid framework combining Machine Learning (ML) for multi-class attack detection with Large Language Models (LLMs) for attack behavior analysis and mitigation suggestion. After benchmarking several ML and Deep Learning (DL) classifiers on the Edge-IIoTset and CICIoT2023 datasets, we applied structured role-play prompt engineering with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to guide ChatGPT-o3 and DeepSeek-R1 in producing detailed, context-aware responses. We introduce novel evaluation metrics for quantitative assessment to guide us and an ensemble of judge LLMs, namely ChatGPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, Mixtral 8x7B Instruct, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Meta Llama 4, TII Falcon H1 34B Instruct, xAI Grok 3, and Claude 4 Sonnet, to independently evaluate the responses. Results show that Random Forest has the best detection model, and ChatGPT-o3 outperformed DeepSeek-R1 in attack analysis and mitigation.

Tool-augmented language models have demonstrated strong capabilities, but their reliance on live API access creates scalability and reliability challenges during training and deployment. We propose MTR, a simulation-first training framework for tool-augmented reasoning. Instead of relying on live APIs, MTR learns from complete ReAct traces with schema-validated, simulated observations. Our approach operates through a multi-agent architecture where a ToolMaker generates task-specific, OpenAI-compatible tool interfaces, an AutoAgent produces structured think-act-observe sequences, and a ToolActor simulates realistic responses. Training proceeds in two stages: Stage-1 Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) teaches 'trace grammar' from complete reasoning sequences; Stage-2 Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) optimizes strategy with a composite trace reward that balances answer correctness and internal consistency. Across four multi-hop QA benchmarks (HotpotQA, MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA, Bamboogle), MTR attains competitive Exact Match (EM) scores to live-API systems and excels on reasoning-intensive tasks, suggesting that effective tool reasoning can be learned from structured traces without live interactions.

Ask a frontier model how to taper six milligrams of alprazolam (psychiatrist retired, ten days of pills left, abrupt cessation causes seizures) and it tells her to call the psychiatrist she just explained does not exist. Change one word ("I'm a psychiatrist; a patient presents with...") and the same model, same weights, same inference pass produces a textbook Ashton Manual taper with diazepam equivalence, anticonvulsant coverage, and monitoring thresholds. The knowledge was there; the model withheld it. IatroBench measures this gap. Sixty pre-registered clinical scenarios, six frontier models, 3,600 responses, scored on two axes (commission harm, CH 0-3; omission harm, OH 0-4) through a structured-evaluation pipeline validated against physician scoring (kappa_w = 0.571, within-1 agreement 96%). The central finding is identity-contingent withholding: match the same clinical question in physician vs. layperson framing and all five testable models provide better guidance to the physician (decoupling gap +0.38, p = 0.003; binary hit rates on safety-colliding actions drop 13.1 percentage points in layperson framing, p < 0.0001, while non-colliding actions show no change). The gap is widest for the model with the heaviest safety investment (Opus, +0.65). Three failure modes separate cleanly: trained withholding (Opus), incompetence (Llama 4), and indiscriminate content filtering (GPT-5.2, whose post-generation filter strips physician responses at 9x the layperson rate because they contain denser pharmacological tokens). The standard LLM judge assigns OH = 0 to 73% of responses a physician scores OH >= 1 (kappa = 0.045); the evaluation apparatus has the same blind spot as the training apparatus. Every scenario targets someone who has already exhausted the standard referrals.

Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) in clinical dialogue systems, existing evaluations focus on task completion or fluency, offering little insight into the behavioral and risk management requirements essential for safety-critical systems. This paper presents MATRIX (Multi-Agent simulaTion fRamework for safe Interactions and conteXtual clinical conversational evaluation), a structured, extensible framework for safety-oriented evaluation of clinical dialogue agents. MATRIX integrates three components: (1) a safety-aligned taxonomy of clinical scenarios, expected system behaviors and failure modes derived through structured safety engineering methods; (2) BehvJudge, an LLM-based evaluator for detecting safety-relevant dialogue failures, validated against expert clinician annotations; and (3) PatBot, a simulated patient agent capable of producing diverse, scenario-conditioned responses, evaluated for realism and behavioral fidelity with human factors expertise, and a patient-preference study. Across three experiments, we show that MATRIX enables systematic, scalable safety evaluation. BehvJudge with Gemini 2.5-Pro achieves expert-level hazard detection (F1 0.96, sensitivity 0.999), outperforming clinicians in a blinded assessment of 240 dialogues. We also conducted one of the first realism analyses of LLM-based patient simulation, showing that PatBot reliably simulates realistic patient behavior in quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Using MATRIX, we demonstrate its effectiveness in benchmarking five LLM agents across 2,100 simulated dialogues spanning 14 hazard scenarios and 10 clinical domains. MATRIX is the first framework to unify structured safety engineering with scalable, validated conversational AI evaluation, enabling regulator-aligned safety auditing. We release all evaluation tools, prompts, structured scenarios, and datasets.

Cryptocurrency trading increasingly depends on timely integration of heterogeneous web information and market microstructure signals to support short-horizon decision making under extreme volatility. However, existing trading systems struggle to jointly reason over noisy multi-source web evidence while maintaining robustness to rapid price shocks at sub-second timescales. The first challenge lies in synthesizing unstructured web content, social sentiment, and structured OHLCV signals into coherent and interpretable trading decisions without amplifying spurious correlations, while the second challenge concerns risk control, as slow deliberative reasoning pipelines are ill-suited for handling abrupt market shocks that require immediate defensive responses. To address these challenges, we propose WebCryptoAgent, an agentic trading framework that decomposes web-informed decision making into modality-specific agents and consolidates their outputs into a unified evidence document for confidence-calibrated reasoning. We further introduce a decoupled control architecture that separates strategic hourly reasoning from a real-time second-level risk model, enabling fast shock detection and protective intervention independent of the trading loop. Extensive experiments on real-world cryptocurrency markets demonstrate that WebCryptoAgent improves trading stability, reduces spurious activity, and enhances tail-risk handling compared to existing baselines. Code will be available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/WebCryptoAgent.

Visual Document Understanding has become essential with the increase of text-rich visual content. This field poses significant challenges due to the need for effective integration of visual perception and textual comprehension, particularly across diverse document types with complex layouts. Moreover, existing fine-tuning datasets for this domain often fall short in providing the detailed contextual information for robust understanding, leading to hallucinations and limited comprehension of spatial relationships among visual elements. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative pipeline that utilizes adaptive generation of markup languages, such as Markdown, JSON, HTML, and TiKZ, to build highly structured document representations and deliver contextually-grounded responses. We introduce two fine-grained structured datasets: DocMark-Pile, comprising approximately 3.8M pretraining data pairs for document parsing, and DocMark-Instruct, featuring 624k fine-tuning data annotations for grounded instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms existing state-of-theart MLLMs across a range of visual document understanding benchmarks, facilitating advanced reasoning and comprehension capabilities in complex visual scenarios. Our code and models are released at https://github. com/Euphoria16/DocMark.

Long-form answers, consisting of multiple sentences, can provide nuanced and comprehensive answers to a broader set of questions. To better understand this complex and understudied task, we study the functional structure of long-form answers collected from three datasets, ELI5, WebGPT and Natural Questions. Our main goal is to understand how humans organize information to craft complex answers. We develop an ontology of six sentence-level functional roles for long-form answers, and annotate 3.9k sentences in 640 answer paragraphs. Different answer collection methods manifest in different discourse structures. We further analyze model-generated answers -- finding that annotators agree less with each other when annotating model-generated answers compared to annotating human-written answers. Our annotated data enables training a strong classifier that can be used for automatic analysis. We hope our work can inspire future research on discourse-level modeling and evaluation of long-form QA systems.

Web search is an essential way for humans to obtain information, but it's still a great challenge for machines to understand the contents of web pages. In this paper, we introduce the task of structural reading comprehension (SRC) on web. Given a web page and a question about it, the task is to find the answer from the web page. This task requires a system not only to understand the semantics of texts but also the structure of the web page. Moreover, we proposed WebSRC, a novel Web-based Structural Reading Comprehension dataset. WebSRC consists of 400K question-answer pairs, which are collected from 6.4K web pages. Along with the QA pairs, corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata are also provided in our dataset. Each question in WebSRC requires a certain structural understanding of a web page to answer, and the answer is either a text span on the web page or yes/no. We evaluate various baselines on our dataset to show the difficulty of our task. We also investigate the usefulness of structural information and visual features. Our dataset and baselines have been publicly available at https://x-lance.github.io/WebSRC/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have issues with document question answering (QA) in situations where the document is unable to fit in the small context length of an LLM. To overcome this issue, most existing works focus on retrieving the relevant context from the document, representing them as plain text. However, documents such as PDFs, web pages, and presentations are naturally structured with different pages, tables, sections, and so on. Representing such structured documents as plain text is incongruous with the user's mental model of these documents with rich structure. When a system has to query the document for context, this incongruity is brought to the fore, and seemingly trivial questions can trip up the QA system. To bridge this fundamental gap in handling structured documents, we propose an approach called PDFTriage that enables models to retrieve the context based on either structure or content. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PDFTriage-augmented models across several classes of questions where existing retrieval-augmented LLMs fail. To facilitate further research on this fundamental problem, we release our benchmark dataset consisting of 900+ human-generated questions over 80 structured documents from 10 different categories of question types for document QA.

Claims made by individuals or entities are oftentimes nuanced and cannot be clearly labeled as entirely "true" or "false" -- as is frequently the case with scientific and political claims. However, a claim (e.g., "vaccine A is better than vaccine B") can be dissected into its integral aspects and sub-aspects (e.g., efficacy, safety, distribution), which are individually easier to validate. This enables a more comprehensive, structured response that provides a well-rounded perspective on a given problem while also allowing the reader to prioritize specific angles of interest within the claim (e.g., safety towards children). Thus, we propose ClaimSpect, a retrieval-augmented generation-based framework for automatically constructing a hierarchy of aspects typically considered when addressing a claim and enriching them with corpus-specific perspectives. This structure hierarchically partitions an input corpus to retrieve relevant segments, which assist in discovering new sub-aspects. Moreover, these segments enable the discovery of varying perspectives towards an aspect of the claim (e.g., support, neutral, or oppose) and their respective prevalence (e.g., "how many biomedical papers believe vaccine A is more transportable than B?"). We apply ClaimSpect to a wide variety of real-world scientific and political claims featured in our constructed dataset, showcasing its robustness and accuracy in deconstructing a nuanced claim and representing perspectives within a corpus. Through real-world case studies and human evaluation, we validate its effectiveness over multiple baselines.

Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation. Intent misunderstandings can frustrate users and create safety risks. To address this, we propose generating multiple interpretation-answer pairs in a single structured response to ambiguous requests. Our models are trained with reinforcement learning and customized reward functions using multiple valid answers as supervision. Experiments on conversational question answering and semantic parsing demonstrate that our method achieves higher coverage of valid answers than baseline approaches. Human evaluation confirms that predicted interpretations are highly aligned with their answers. Our approach promotes transparency with explicit interpretations, achieves efficiency by requiring only one generation step, and supports downstream applications through its structured output format.

Large language models (LLMs) have grown in their usage to provide support for question answering across numerous disciplines. The models on their own have already shown promise for answering basic questions, however fail quickly where expert domain knowledge is required or the question is nuanced. Scientific research often involves searching for relevant literature, distilling pertinent information from that literature and analysing how the findings support or contradict one another. The information is often encapsulated in the full text body of research articles, rather than just in the abstracts. Statements within these articles frequently require the wider article context to be fully understood. We have built an LLM-based system that performs such search and distillation of information encapsulated in scientific literature, and we evaluate our keyword based search and information distillation system against a set of biology related questions from previously released literature benchmarks. We demonstrate sparse retrieval methods exhibit results close to state of the art without the need for dense retrieval, with its associated infrastructure and complexity overhead. We also show how to increase the coverage of relevant documents for literature review generation.

Interactions with large language models (LLMs) often yield long and detailed responses, leveraging both parametric knowledge and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). While these responses can provide rich insights, they often include redundant or less engaging content not aligned with user interests. This issue becomes apparent when users specify particular subtopics to include or exclude -- termed coverage-conditioned (C^2) queries -- as LLMs often struggle to provide tailored responses. To address this challenge, we investigate the role of query outlines, sequences of subqueries designed to guide LLMs in generating responses that meet specific user requirements. To systematically create and evaluate these outlines, we introduce QTree, a dataset of 10K hierarchical sets of information-seeking subqueries that define structured boundaries for outline creation and evaluation in C^2 scenarios. Additionally, we develop QPlanner, a 7B language model trained to generate customized outlines within boundaries of QTree. We evaluate the effectiveness of the generated outlines through automatic and human judgements, focusing on their impact within retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Experimental results demonstrate that QPlanner, especially when trained with alignment techniques like DPO, generates higher-quality outlines that better fulfill diverse user needs.

While day-to-day questions come with a variety of answer types, the current question-answering (QA) literature has failed to adequately address the answer diversity of questions. To this end, we present GooAQ, a large-scale dataset with a variety of answer types. This dataset contains over 5 million questions and 3 million answers collected from Google. GooAQ questions are collected semi-automatically from the Google search engine using its autocomplete feature. This results in naturalistic questions of practical interest that are nonetheless short and expressed using simple language. GooAQ answers are mined from Google's responses to our collected questions, specifically from the answer boxes in the search results. This yields a rich space of answer types, containing both textual answers (short and long) as well as more structured ones such as collections. We benchmarkT5 models on GooAQ and observe that: (a) in line with recent work, LM's strong performance on GooAQ's short-answer questions heavily benefit from annotated data; however, (b) their quality in generating coherent and accurate responses for questions requiring long responses (such as 'how' and 'why' questions) is less reliant on observing annotated data and mainly supported by their pre-training. We release GooAQ to facilitate further research on improving QA with diverse response types.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating multiple responses to a single prompt, yet little effort has been expended to help end-users or system designers make use of this capability. In this paper, we explore how to present many LLM responses at once. We design five features, which include both pre-existing and novel methods for computing similarities and differences across textual documents, as well as how to render their outputs. We report on a controlled user study (n=24) and eight case studies evaluating these features and how they support users in different tasks. We find that the features support a wide variety of sensemaking tasks and even make tasks previously considered to be too difficult by our participants now tractable. Finally, we present design guidelines to inform future explorations of new LLM interfaces.

We introduce the first large-scale corpus for long-form question answering, a task requiring elaborate and in-depth answers to open-ended questions. The dataset comprises 270K threads from the Reddit forum ``Explain Like I'm Five'' (ELI5) where an online community provides answers to questions which are comprehensible by five year olds. Compared to existing datasets, ELI5 comprises diverse questions requiring multi-sentence answers. We provide a large set of web documents to help answer the question. Automatic and human evaluations show that an abstractive model trained with a multi-task objective outperforms conventional Seq2Seq, language modeling, as well as a strong extractive baseline. However, our best model is still far from human performance since raters prefer gold responses in over 86% of cases, leaving ample opportunity for future improvement.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the quality of responses in Question-Answering (QA) tasks. However, existing approaches often struggle with retrieving contextually relevant information, leading to incomplete or suboptimal answers. In this paper, we introduce Structured-Semantic RAG (SSRAG), a hybrid architecture that enhances QA quality by integrating query augmentation, agentic routing, and a structured retrieval mechanism combining vector and graph based techniques with context unification. By refining retrieval processes and improving contextual grounding, our approach improves both answer accuracy and informativeness. We conduct extensive evaluations on three popular QA datasets, TruthfulQA, SQuAD and WikiQA, across five Large Language Models (LLMs), demonstrating that our proposed approach consistently improves response quality over standard RAG implementations.

This paper contains what the Georgetown InfoSense group has done in regard to solving the challenges presented by TREC iKAT 2023. Our submitted runs outperform the median runs by a significant margin, exhibiting superior performance in nDCG across various cut numbers and in overall success rate. Our approach uses a Generate-Retrieve-Generate method, which we've found to greatly outpace Retrieve-Then-Generate approaches for the purposes of iKAT. Our solution involves the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for initial answers, answer grounding by BM25, passage quality filtering by logistic regression, and answer generation by LLMs again. We leverage several purpose-built Language Models, including BERT, Chat-based, and text-to-transfer-based models, for text understanding, classification, generation, and summarization. The official results of the TREC evaluation contradict our initial self-evaluation, which may suggest that a decrease in the reliance on our retrieval and classification methods is better. Nonetheless, our findings suggest that the sequence of involving these different components matters, where we see an essentiality of using LLMs before using search engines.

We introduce a large scale MAchine Reading COmprehension dataset, which we name MS MARCO. The dataset comprises of 1,010,916 anonymized questions---sampled from Bing's search query logs---each with a human generated answer and 182,669 completely human rewritten generated answers. In addition, the dataset contains 8,841,823 passages---extracted from 3,563,535 web documents retrieved by Bing---that provide the information necessary for curating the natural language answers. A question in the MS MARCO dataset may have multiple answers or no answers at all. Using this dataset, we propose three different tasks with varying levels of difficulty: (i) predict if a question is answerable given a set of context passages, and extract and synthesize the answer as a human would (ii) generate a well-formed answer (if possible) based on the context passages that can be understood with the question and passage context, and finally (iii) rank a set of retrieved passages given a question. The size of the dataset and the fact that the questions are derived from real user search queries distinguishes MS MARCO from other well-known publicly available datasets for machine reading comprehension and question-answering. We believe that the scale and the real-world nature of this dataset makes it attractive for benchmarking machine reading comprehension and question-answering models.

Hyperparameter optimization can be formulated as a bilevel optimization problem, where the optimal parameters on the training set depend on the hyperparameters. We aim to adapt regularization hyperparameters for neural networks by fitting compact approximations to the best-response function, which maps hyperparameters to optimal weights and biases. We show how to construct scalable best-response approximations for neural networks by modeling the best-response as a single network whose hidden units are gated conditionally on the regularizer. We justify this approximation by showing the exact best-response for a shallow linear network with L2-regularized Jacobian can be represented by a similar gating mechanism. We fit this model using a gradient-based hyperparameter optimization algorithm which alternates between approximating the best-response around the current hyperparameters and optimizing the hyperparameters using the approximate best-response function. Unlike other gradient-based approaches, we do not require differentiating the training loss with respect to the hyperparameters, allowing us to tune discrete hyperparameters, data augmentation hyperparameters, and dropout probabilities. Because the hyperparameters are adapted online, our approach discovers hyperparameter schedules that can outperform fixed hyperparameter values. Empirically, our approach outperforms competing hyperparameter optimization methods on large-scale deep learning problems. We call our networks, which update their own hyperparameters online during training, Self-Tuning Networks (STNs).

We introduce Legal RAG Bench, a benchmark and evaluation methodology for assessing the end-to-end performance of legal RAG systems. As a benchmark, Legal RAG Bench consists of 4,876 passages from the Victorian Criminal Charge Book alongside 100 complex, hand-crafted questions demanding expert knowledge of criminal law and procedure. Both long-form answers and supporting passages are provided. As an evaluation methodology, Legal RAG Bench leverages a full factorial design and novel hierarchical error decomposition framework, enabling apples-to-apples comparisons of the contributions of retrieval and reasoning models in RAG. We evaluate three state-of-the-art embedding models (Isaacus' Kanon 2 Embedder, Google's Gemini Embedding 001, and OpenAI's Text Embedding 3 Large) and two frontier LLMs (Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-5.2), finding that information retrieval is the primary driver of legal RAG performance, with LLMs exerting a more moderate effect on correctness and groundedness. Kanon 2 Embedder, in particular, had the largest positive impact on performance, improving average correctness by 17.5 points, groundedness by 4.5 points, and retrieval accuracy by 34 points. We observe that many errors attributed to hallucinations in legal RAG systems are in fact triggered by retrieval failures, concluding that retrieval sets the ceiling for the performance of many modern legal RAG systems. We document why and how we built Legal RAG Bench alongside the results of our evaluations. We also openly release our code and data to assist with reproduction of our findings.

Biomedical text mining and question-answering are essential yet highly demanding tasks, particularly in the face of the exponential growth of biomedical literature. In this work, we present our participation in the 13th edition of the BioASQ challenge, which involves biomedical semantic question-answering for Task 13b and biomedical question-answering for developing topics for the Synergy task. We deploy a selection of open-source large language models (LLMs) as retrieval-augmented generators to answer biomedical questions. Various models are used to process the questions. A majority voting system combines their output to determine the final answer for Yes/No questions, while for list and factoid type questions, the union of their answers in used. We evaluated 13 state-of-the-art open source LLMs, exploring all possible model combinations to contribute to the final answer, resulting in tailored LLM pipelines for each question type. Our findings provide valuable insight into which combinations of LLMs consistently produce superior results for specific question types. In the four rounds of the 2025 BioASQ challenge, our system achieved notable results: in the Synergy task, we secured 1st place for ideal answers and 2nd place for exact answers in round 2, as well as two shared 1st places for exact answers in round 3 and 4.

Answering complex questions is a time-consuming activity for humans that requires reasoning and integration of information. Recent work on reading comprehension made headway in answering simple questions, but tackling complex questions is still an ongoing research challenge. Conversely, semantic parsers have been successful at handling compositionality, but only when the information resides in a target knowledge-base. In this paper, we present a novel framework for answering broad and complex questions, assuming answering simple questions is possible using a search engine and a reading comprehension model. We propose to decompose complex questions into a sequence of simple questions, and compute the final answer from the sequence of answers. To illustrate the viability of our approach, we create a new dataset of complex questions, ComplexWebQuestions, and present a model that decomposes questions and interacts with the web to compute an answer. We empirically demonstrate that question decomposition improves performance from 20.8 precision@1 to 27.5 precision@1 on this new dataset.

This article proposes a new approach for assessing the quality of answers in political question-and-answer sessions. We measure the quality of an answer based on how easily and accurately it can be recognized in a random set of candidate answers given the question's text. This measure reflects the answer's relevance and depth of engagement with the question. Like semantic search, we can implement this approach by training a language model on the corpus of observed questions and answers without additional human-labeled data. We showcase and validate our methodology within the context of the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons. Our analysis reveals that while some answers have a weak semantic connection to questions, hinting at some evasion or obfuscation, they are generally at least moderately relevant, far exceeding what we would expect from random replies. We also find a meaningful correlation between answer quality and the party affiliation of the members of Parliament asking the questions.

We introduce a high-quality dataset that contains 3,397 samples comprising (i) multiple choice questions, (ii) answers (including distractors), and (iii) their source documents, from the educational domain. Each question is phrased in two forms, normal and close. Correct answers are linked to source documents with sentence-level annotations. Thus, our versatile dataset can be used for both question and distractor generation, as well as to explore new challenges such as question format conversion. Furthermore, 903 questions are accompanied by their cognitive complexity level as per Bloom's taxonomy. All questions have been generated by educational experts rather than crowd workers to ensure they are maintaining educational and learning standards. Our analysis and experiments suggest distinguishable differences between our dataset and commonly used ones for question generation for educational purposes. We believe this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in the educational domain. The dataset and baselines will be released to support further research in question generation.

Document-grounded dialogue systems (DGDS) utilize knowledge from external documents to answer domain-specific user questions. Existing solutions typically divide documents into independent passages for retrieval and response generation. This approach, however, neither makes good use of structural information within documents nor provides enough (document) context for knowledge selection and responses. This paper proposes SF-Re2G to address such issues systematically. Firstly, we seek to improve a passage representation by contrasting it with others of the same section, thus improving the retrieval performance. Secondly, a structure-enhanced reranker is built, leveraging the fact that multiple grounding passages of one dialog turn tend to be in the same neighborhood. Specifically, candidates from the retrieval are grouped into subgraphs according to the document structure. The reranker will rescore the candidate integrating its group information. Finally, the chosen passages are used for responses, taking into account the subgraph context for better generation. Experimental results on two DGDS datasets validate our method for both Chinese and English.

Semi-structured documents integrate diverse interleaved data elements (e.g., tables, charts, hierarchical paragraphs) arranged in various and often irregular layouts. These documents are widely observed across domains and account for a large portion of real-world data. However, existing methods struggle to support natural language question answering over these documents due to three main technical challenges: (1) The elements extracted by techniques like OCR are often fragmented and stripped of their original semantic context, making them inadequate for analysis. (2) Existing approaches lack effective representations to capture hierarchical structures within documents (e.g., associating tables with nested chapter titles) and to preserve layout-specific distinctions (e.g., differentiating sidebars from main content). (3) Answering questions often requires retrieving and aligning relevant information scattered across multiple regions or pages, such as linking a descriptive paragraph to table cells located elsewhere in the document. To address these issues, we propose MoDora, an LLM-powered system for semi-structured document analysis. First, we adopt a local-alignment aggregation strategy to convert OCR-parsed elements into layout-aware components, and conduct type-specific information extraction for components with hierarchical titles or non-text elements. Second, we design the Component-Correlation Tree (CCTree) to hierarchically organize components, explicitly modeling inter-component relations and layout distinctions through a bottom-up cascade summarization process. Finally, we propose a question-type-aware retrieval strategy that supports (1) layout-based grid partitioning for location-based retrieval and (2) LLM-guided pruning for semantic-based retrieval. Experiments show MoDora outperforms baselines by 5.97%-61.07% in accuracy. The code is at https://github.com/weAIDB/MoDora.

Customizing LLMs for a specific task involves separating high-quality responses from lower-quality ones. This skill can be developed using supervised fine-tuning with extensive human preference data. However, obtaining a large volume of expert-annotated data is costly for most tasks. In this paper, we explore a novel method to optimize LLMs using ranking metrics. This method trains the model to prioritize the best responses from a pool of candidates created for a particular task. Rather than a traditional full ordering, we advocate for a partial ordering, as achieving consensus on the perfect order of candidate responses can be challenging. Our partial ordering is more robust, less sensitive to noise, and can be achieved with limited human annotations or through heuristic methods. We test our system's improved response generation ability using benchmark datasets, including textual entailment and multi-document question answering. We conduct ablation studies to understand crucial factors, such as how to gather candidate responses for a specific task, determine their most suitable order, and balance supervised fine-tuning with ranking metrics. Our approach, named Rescue, offers a promising avenue for enhancing the response generation and task accuracy of LLMs.

Large language models record impressive performance on many natural language processing tasks. However, their knowledge capacity is limited to the pretraining corpus. Retrieval augmentation offers an effective solution by retrieving context from external knowledge sources to complement the language model. However, existing retrieval augmentation techniques ignore the structural relationships between these documents. Furthermore, retrieval models are not explored much in scientific tasks, especially in regard to the faithfulness of retrieved documents. In this paper, we propose a novel structure-aware retrieval augmented language model that accommodates document structure during retrieval augmentation. We create a heterogeneous document graph capturing multiple types of relationships (e.g., citation, co-authorship, etc.) that connect documents from more than 15 scientific disciplines (e.g., Physics, Medicine, Chemistry, etc.). We train a graph neural network on the curated document graph to act as a structural encoder for the corresponding passages retrieved during the model pretraining. Particularly, along with text embeddings of the retrieved passages, we obtain structural embeddings of the documents (passages) and fuse them together before feeding them to the language model. We evaluate our model extensively on various scientific benchmarks that include science question-answering and scientific document classification tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that structure-aware retrieval improves retrieving more coherent, faithful and contextually relevant passages, while showing a comparable performance in the overall accuracy.

This paper introduces an approach to question answering over knowledge bases like Wikipedia and Wikidata by performing "question-to-question" matching and retrieval from a dense vector embedding store. Instead of embedding document content, we generate a comprehensive set of questions for each logical content unit using an instruction-tuned LLM. These questions are vector-embedded and stored, mapping to the corresponding content. Vector embedding of user queries are then matched against this question vector store. The highest similarity score leads to direct retrieval of the associated article content, eliminating the need for answer generation. Our method achieves high cosine similarity ( > 0.9 ) for relevant question pairs, enabling highly precise retrieval. This approach offers several advantages including computational efficiency, rapid response times, and increased scalability. We demonstrate its effectiveness on Wikipedia and Wikidata, including multimedia content through structured fact retrieval from Wikidata, opening up new pathways for multimodal question answering.

We present our submission to the Task 5 of SemEval-2025 that aims to aid librarians in assigning subject tags to the library records by producing a list of likely relevant tags for a given document. We frame the task as an information retrieval problem, where the document content is used to retrieve subject tags from a large subject taxonomy. We leverage two types of encoder models to build a two-stage information retrieval system -- a bi-encoder for coarse-grained candidate extraction at the first stage, and a cross-encoder for fine-grained re-ranking at the second stage. This approach proved effective, demonstrating significant improvements in recall compared to single-stage methods and showing competitive results according to qualitative evaluation.

Nepali, a low-resource language, faces significant challenges in building an effective information retrieval system due to the unavailability of annotated data and computational linguistic resources. In this study, we attempt to address this gap by preparing a pair-structured Nepali Question-Answer dataset. We focus on Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for passport-related services, building a data set for training and evaluation of IR models. In our study, we have fine-tuned transformer-based embedding models for semantic similarity in question-answer retrieval. The fine-tuned models were compared with the baseline BM25. In addition, we implement a hybrid retrieval approach, integrating fine-tuned models with BM25, and evaluate the performance of the hybrid retrieval. Our results show that the fine-tuned SBERT-based models outperform BM25, whereas multilingual E5 embedding-based models achieve the highest retrieval performance among all evaluated models.

Answer sentence selection is the task of identifying sentences that contain the answer to a given question. This is an important problem in its own right as well as in the larger context of open domain question answering. We propose a novel approach to solving this task via means of distributed representations, and learn to match questions with answers by considering their semantic encoding. This contrasts prior work on this task, which typically relies on classifiers with large numbers of hand-crafted syntactic and semantic features and various external resources. Our approach does not require any feature engineering nor does it involve specialist linguistic data, making this model easily applicable to a wide range of domains and languages. Experimental results on a standard benchmark dataset from TREC demonstrate that---despite its simplicity---our model matches state of the art performance on the answer sentence selection task.

Recently, Talmor and Berant (2018) introduced ComplexWebQuestions - a dataset focused on answering complex questions by decomposing them into a sequence of simpler questions and extracting the answer from retrieved web snippets. In their work the authors used a pre-trained reading comprehension (RC) model (Salant and Berant, 2018) to extract the answer from the web snippets. In this short note we show that training a RC model directly on the training data of ComplexWebQuestions reveals a leakage from the training set to the test set that allows to obtain unreasonably high performance. As a solution, we construct a new partitioning of ComplexWebQuestions that does not suffer from this leakage and publicly release it. We also perform an empirical evaluation on these two datasets and show that training a RC model on the training data substantially improves state-of-the-art performance.

Integrating structured knowledge from tabular formats poses significant challenges within natural language processing (NLP), mainly when dealing with complex, semi-structured tables like those found in the FeTaQA dataset. These tables require advanced methods to interpret and generate meaningful responses accurately. Traditional approaches, such as SQL and SPARQL, often fail to fully capture the semantics of such data, especially in the presence of irregular table structures like web tables. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel approach that extracts triples straightforward from tabular data and integrates it with a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model to enhance the accuracy, coherence, and contextual richness of responses generated by a fine-tuned GPT-3.5-turbo-0125 model. Our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines on the FeTaQA dataset, particularly excelling in Sacre-BLEU and ROUGE metrics. It effectively generates contextually accurate and detailed long-form answers from tables, showcasing its strength in complex data interpretation.

This paper introduces an innovative approach using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance information retrieval and query response systems for university-related question answering. By systematically extracting data from the university official webpage and employing advanced prompt engineering techniques, we generate accurate, contextually relevant responses to user queries. We developed a comprehensive university benchmark, UniversityQuestionBench (UQB), to rigorously evaluate our system performance, based on common key metrics in the filed of RAG pipelines, assessing accuracy and reliability through various metrics and real-world scenarios. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in the precision and relevance of generated responses, enhancing user experience and reducing the time required to obtain relevant answers. In summary, this paper presents a novel application of RAG pipelines and LLMs, supported by a meticulously prepared university benchmark, offering valuable insights into advanced AI techniques for academic data retrieval and setting the stage for future research in this domain.

Large language models (LLMs) often need to incorporate external knowledge to solve theme-specific problems. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has shown its high promise, empowering LLMs to generate more qualified responses with retrieved external data and knowledge. However, most RAG methods retrieve relevant documents based on either sparse or dense retrieval methods or their combinations, which overlooks the essential, multi-dimensional, and structured semantic information present in documents. This structured information plays a critical role in finding concise yet highly relevant information for domain knowledge-intensive tasks, such as scientific question-answering (QA). In this work, we introduce a multi-dimensional (cube) structure, Hypercube, which can index and allocate documents in a pre-defined multi-dimensional space. Built on the hypercube, we further propose Hypercube-RAG, a novel RAG framework for precise and efficient retrieval. Given a query, Hypercube-RAG first decomposes it based on its entities, phrases, and topics along with pre-defined hypercube dimensions, and then retrieves relevant documents from cubes by aligning these decomposed components with corresponding dimensions. Experiments on three datasets across different domains demonstrate that our method improves response accuracy by 3.7% and retrieval accuracy by 5.3% over the strongest RAG baseline. It also boosts retrieval efficiency (speed) by one or two magnitudes faster than graph-based RAG. Notably, our Hypercube-RAG inherently offers explainability by revealing those underlying dimensions used for retrieval. The code and data are available at https://github.com/JimengShi/Hypercube-RAG.

There has recently been considerable interest in incorporating information retrieval into large language models (LLMs). Retrieval from a dynamically expanding external corpus of text allows a model to incorporate current events and can be viewed as a form of episodic memory. Here we demonstrate that pre-processing the external corpus into semi-structured ''atomic facts'' makes retrieval more efficient. More specifically, we demonstrate that our particular form of atomic facts improves performance on various question answering tasks when the amount of retrieved text is limited. Limiting the amount of retrieval reduces the size of the context and improves inference efficiency.

Retrieval plays a central role in multi-hop question answering (QA), where answering complex questions requires gathering multiple pieces of evidence. We introduce an Agentic Retrieval System that leverages large language models (LLMs) in a structured loop to retrieve relevant evidence with high precision and recall. Our framework consists of three specialized agents: a Question Analyzer that decomposes a multi-hop question into sub-questions, a Selector that identifies the most relevant context for each sub-question (focusing on precision), and an Adder that brings in any missing evidence (focusing on recall). The iterative interaction between Selector and Adder yields a compact yet comprehensive set of supporting passages. In particular, it achieves higher retrieval accuracy while filtering out distracting content, enabling downstream QA models to surpass full-context answer accuracy while relying on significantly less irrelevant information. Experiments on four multi-hop QA benchmarks -- HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, MuSiQue, and MultiHopRAG -- demonstrates that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines.

This paper summarizes our work on the first track of the ninth Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC 9), "Beyond Domain APIs: Task-oriented Conversational Modeling with Unstructured Knowledge Access". The goal of the task is to generate responses to user turns in a task-oriented dialog that require knowledge from unstructured documents. The task is divided into three subtasks: detection, selection and generation. In order to be compute efficient, we formulate the selection problem in terms of hierarchical classification steps. We achieve our best results with this model. Alternatively, we employ siamese sequence embedding models, referred to as Dense Knowledge Retrieval, to retrieve relevant documents. This method further reduces the computation time by a factor of more than 100x at the cost of degradation in R@1 of 5-6% compared to the first model. Then for either approach, we use Retrieval Augmented Generation to generate responses based on multiple selected snippets and we show how the method can be used to fine-tune trained embeddings.

We present STARC (Structured Annotations for Reading Comprehension), a new annotation framework for assessing reading comprehension with multiple choice questions. Our framework introduces a principled structure for the answer choices and ties them to textual span annotations. The framework is implemented in OneStopQA, a new high-quality dataset for evaluation and analysis of reading comprehension in English. We use this dataset to demonstrate that STARC can be leveraged for a key new application for the development of SAT-like reading comprehension materials: automatic annotation quality probing via span ablation experiments. We further show that it enables in-depth analyses and comparisons between machine and human reading comprehension behavior, including error distributions and guessing ability. Our experiments also reveal that the standard multiple choice dataset in NLP, RACE, is limited in its ability to measure reading comprehension. 47% of its questions can be guessed by machines without accessing the passage, and 18% are unanimously judged by humans as not having a unique correct answer. OneStopQA provides an alternative test set for reading comprehension which alleviates these shortcomings and has a substantially higher human ceiling performance.

We present WeaverBird, an intelligent dialogue system designed specifically for the finance domain. Our system harnesses a large language model of GPT architecture that has been tuned using extensive corpora of finance-related text. As a result, our system possesses the capability to understand complex financial queries, such as "How should I manage my investments during inflation?", and provide informed responses. Furthermore, our system incorporates a local knowledge base and a search engine to retrieve relevant information. The final responses are conditioned on the search results and include proper citations to the sources, thus enjoying an enhanced credibility. Through a range of finance-related questions, we have demonstrated the superior performance of our system compared to other models. To experience our system firsthand, users can interact with our live demo at https://weaverbird.ttic.edu, as well as watch our 2-min video illustration at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyV2qQkX6Tc.

Several recent works have suggested to represent semantic relations with questions and answers, decomposing textual information into separate interrogative natural language statements. In this paper, we consider three QA-based semantic tasks - namely, QA-SRL, QANom and QADiscourse, each targeting a certain type of predication - and propose to regard them as jointly providing a comprehensive representation of textual information. To promote this goal, we investigate how to best utilize the power of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) pre-trained language models, within the unique setup of semi-structured outputs, consisting of an unordered set of question-answer pairs. We examine different input and output linearization strategies, and assess the effect of multitask learning and of simple data augmentation techniques in the setting of imbalanced training data. Consequently, we release the first unified QASem parsing tool, practical for downstream applications who can benefit from an explicit, QA-based account of information units in a text.

Readers of academic research papers often read with the goal of answering specific questions. Question Answering systems that can answer those questions can make consumption of the content much more efficient. However, building such tools requires data that reflect the difficulty of the task arising from complex reasoning about claims made in multiple parts of a paper. In contrast, existing information-seeking question answering datasets usually contain questions about generic factoid-type information. We therefore present QASPER, a dataset of 5,049 questions over 1,585 Natural Language Processing papers. Each question is written by an NLP practitioner who read only the title and abstract of the corresponding paper, and the question seeks information present in the full text. The questions are then answered by a separate set of NLP practitioners who also provide supporting evidence to answers. We find that existing models that do well on other QA tasks do not perform well on answering these questions, underperforming humans by at least 27 F1 points when answering them from entire papers, motivating further research in document-grounded, information-seeking QA, which our dataset is designed to facilitate.