Kang Liu

Yuan Xiong, Ziqi Miao, Qian Chen et al.

Recent AI agents can flexibly invoke skills to solve complex tasks, but their long-term improvement is fundamentally constrained by a lack of systematic skill construction, accumulation, and transfer. In particular, without a unified framework for skill consolidation, agents tend to redundantly construct similar capabilities across different tasks, are unable to effectively transform experience into reusable assets, and struggle to generalize task-specific skills to novel scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose SkillPyramid, a skill consolidation framework that reuses existing skill experience for broader task generalization. Operating on a hierarchical skill topology, SkillPyramid further introduces a self-evolution mechanism that enables agents to compose, validate, and incorporate new skills during task execution. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld across four backbone models show that SkillPyramid substantially increases the average reward by 38.0% and reduces execution steps by 27.7%. Overall, our method transforms a skill collection from a static resource pool into a dynamic evolution system.

Yixuan Weng, Minjun Zhu, Fei Xia et al.

Recently, with the chain of thought (CoT) prompting, large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-3, have shown strong reasoning ability in several natural language processing tasks such as arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning. However, LLMs with CoT require multi-step prompting and multi-token prediction, which is highly sensitive to individual mistakes and vulnerable to error accumulation. The above issues make the LLMs need the ability to verify the answers. In fact, after inferring conclusions in some thinking decision tasks, people often check them by re-verifying steps to avoid some mistakes. In this paper, we propose and prove that LLMs also have similar self-verification abilities. We take the conclusion obtained by CoT as one of the conditions for solving the original problem. By performing a backward verification of the answers that LLM deduced for itself, we can obtain interpretable answer validation scores to select the candidate answer with the highest score. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the reasoning performance on various arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning datasets. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/WENGSYX/Self-Verification.

ByteDance Seed, Jiaze Chen, Tiantian Fan et al. · bytedance

We introduce Seed1.5-Thinking, capable of reasoning through thinking before responding, resulting in improved performance on a wide range of benchmarks. Seed1.5-Thinking achieves 86.7 on AIME 2024, 55.0 on Codeforces and 77.3 on GPQA, demonstrating excellent reasoning abilities in STEM and coding. Beyond reasoning tasks, the method demonstrates notable generalization across diverse domains. For instance, it surpasses DeepSeek R1 by 8% in win rate on non-reasoning tasks, indicating its broader applicability. Compared to other state-of-the-art reasoning models, Seed1.5-Thinking is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with a relatively small size, featuring 20B activated and 200B total parameters. As part of our effort to assess generalized reasoning, we develop two internal benchmarks, BeyondAIME and Codeforces, both of which will be publicly released to support future research. Model trial link: https://www.volcengine.com/experience/ark.

Fei Xia, Bin Li, Yixuan Weng et al.

The medical conversational system can relieve the burden of doctors and improve the efficiency of healthcare, especially during the pandemic. This paper presents a medical conversational question answering (CQA) system based on the multi-modal knowledge graph, namely "LingYi", which is designed as a pipeline framework to maintain high flexibility. Our system utilizes automated medical procedures including medical triage, consultation, image-text drug recommendation and record. To conduct knowledge-grounded dialogues with patients, we first construct a Chinese Medical Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph (CM3KG) and collect a large-scale Chinese Medical CQA (CMCQA) dataset. Compared with the other existing medical question-answering systems, our system adopts several state-of-the-art technologies including medical entity disambiguation and medical dialogue generation, which is more friendly to provide medical services to patients. In addition, we have open-sourced our codes which contain back-end models and front-end web pages at https://github.com/WENGSYX/LingYi. The datasets including CM3KG at https://github.com/WENGSYX/CM3KG and CMCQA at https://github.com/WENGSYX/CMCQA are also released to further promote future research.

Fangyu Lei, Shizhu He, Xiang Li et al.

In the real-world question answering scenarios, hybrid form combining both tabular and textual contents has attracted more and more attention, among which numerical reasoning problem is one of the most typical and challenging problems. Existing methods usually adopt encoder-decoder framework to represent hybrid contents and generate answers. However, it can not capture the rich relationship among numerical value, table schema, and text information on the encoder side. The decoder uses a simple predefined operator classifier which is not flexible enough to handle numerical reasoning processes with diverse expressions. To address these problems, this paper proposes a \textbf{Re}lational \textbf{G}raph enhanced \textbf{H}ybrid table-text \textbf{N}umerical reasoning model with \textbf{T}ree decoder (\textbf{RegHNT}). It models the numerical question answering over table-text hybrid contents as an expression tree generation task. Moreover, we propose a novel relational graph modeling method, which models alignment between questions, tables, and paragraphs. We validated our model on the publicly available table-text hybrid QA benchmark (TAT-QA). The proposed RegHNT significantly outperform the baseline model and achieve state-of-the-art results. We openly released the source code and data at https://github.com/lfy79001/RegHNT (2022-05-05).

Yuheng Chen, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen et al.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) contain vast amounts of factual knowledge, but how the knowledge is stored in the parameters remains unclear. This paper delves into the complex task of understanding how factual knowledge is stored in multilingual PLMs, and introduces the Architecture-adapted Multilingual Integrated Gradients method, which successfully localizes knowledge neurons more precisely compared to current methods, and is more universal across various architectures and languages. Moreover, we conduct an in-depth exploration of knowledge neurons, leading to the following two important discoveries: (1) The discovery of Language-Independent Knowledge Neurons, which store factual knowledge in a form that transcends language. We design cross-lingual knowledge editing experiments, demonstrating that the PLMs can accomplish this task based on language-independent neurons; (2) The discovery of Degenerate Knowledge Neurons, a novel type of neuron showing that different knowledge neurons can store the same fact. Its property of functional overlap endows the PLMs with a robust mastery of factual knowledge. We design fact-checking experiments, proving that the degenerate knowledge neurons can help the PLMs to detect wrong facts. Experiments corroborate these findings, shedding light on the mechanisms of factual knowledge storage in multilingual PLMs, and contribute valuable insights to the field. The code is available at https://github.com/heng840/AMIG.

Huanxuan Liao, Shizhu He, Yao Xu et al.

In this paper, we propose $\textbf{Ne}$ural-$\textbf{Sy}$mbolic $\textbf{C}$ollaborative $\textbf{D}$istillation ($\textbf{NesyCD}$), a novel knowledge distillation method for learning the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g., \textgreater 13B). We argue that complex reasoning tasks are difficult for Small Language Models (SLMs, e.g., $\leq$ 7B), as these tasks demand not only general cognitive abilities but also specialized knowledge, which is often sparse and difficult for these neural-based SLMs to effectively capture. Therefore, NesyCD distills the general capabilities and specialized knowledge in LLMs using different manners. On the one hand, we distill only general abilities from teacher LLMs into the student SLMs of parameterized neural networks. On the other hand, for the specialized abilities and uncommon knowledge of a complex reasoning task, we employ a symbolic knowledge distillation approach to obtain and store the specialized knowledge within a symbolic knowledge base (KB). By decoupling general and specialized capabilities, the proposed NesyCD can achieve superior performance cost-effectively, utilizing smaller models and blending parameterized neural networks with symbolic KB. Moreover, the specialized KB generalizes well and is comprehended and manipulated by humans. Our experiments show that NesyCD significantly boosts SLMs' complex reasoning performance on in-domain (BBH, GSM8K) and out-of-domain (AGIEval, ARC) datasets. Notably, our approach enabled the LLaMA3-8B and Qwen2-7B to surpass GPT-3.5-turbo in performance and come close to matching LLaMA3-70B, despite the latter having nine times more parameters. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/NesyCD.

Jiajun Shen, Tong Zhou, Yubo Chen et al.

Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate citations in Question-Answering (QA) tasks is an emerging paradigm aimed at enhancing the verifiability of their responses when LLMs are utilizing external references to generate an answer. However, there is currently no unified framework to standardize and fairly compare different citation generation methods, leading to difficulties in reproducing different methods and a comprehensive assessment. To cope with the problems above, we introduce \name, an open-source and modular toolkit designed to facilitate the implementation and evaluation of existing citation generation methods, while also fostering the development of new approaches to improve citation quality in LLM outputs. This tool is highly extensible, allowing users to utilize 4 main modules and 14 components to construct a pipeline, evaluating an existing method or innovative designs. Our experiments with two state-of-the-art LLMs and 11 citation generation baselines demonstrate varying strengths of different modules in answer accuracy and citation quality improvement, as well as the challenge of enhancing granularity. Based on our analysis of the effectiveness of components, we propose a new method, self-RAG \snippet, obtaining a balanced answer accuracy and citation quality. Citekit is released at https://github.com/SjJ1017/Citekit.

Yiqun Yao, Siqi fan, Xiusheng Huang et al. · tencent-ai, tsinghua

As language models scale up, it becomes increasingly expensive to verify research ideas because conclusions on small models do not trivially transfer to large ones. A possible solution is to establish a generic system that accurately predicts certain metrics for large models without training them. Existing scaling laws require hyperparameter search on the largest models, limiting their predicative capability. In this paper, we present an approach (namely μScaling) to predict the pre-training loss, based on our observations that Maximal Update Parametrization (μP) enables accurate fitting of scaling laws close to common loss basins in hyperparameter space. With μScaling, different model designs can be compared on large scales by training only their smaller counterparts. Further, we introduce nanoLM: an affordable LLM pre-training benchmark that facilitates this new research paradigm. With around 14% of the one-time pre-training cost, we can accurately forecast the loss for models up to 52B. Our goal with nanoLM is to empower researchers with limited resources to reach meaningful conclusions on large models. We also aspire for our benchmark to serve as a bridge between the academic community and the industry. Code for μScaling is available at https://github.com/cofe-ai/Mu-scaling. Code for nanoLLM will be available later.

Chenhui Hu, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen et al.

Knowledge editing aims to update outdated or incorrect knowledge in large language models (LLMs). However, current knowledge editing methods have limited scalability for lifelong editing. This study explores the fundamental reason why knowledge editing fails in lifelong editing. We begin with the closed-form solution derived from linear associative memory, which underpins state-of-the-art knowledge editing methods. We extend the solution from single editing to lifelong editing, and through rigorous mathematical derivation, identify an interference term in the final solution, suggesting that editing knowledge may impact irrelevant knowledge. Further analysis of the interference term reveals a close relationship with superposition between knowledge representations. When knowledge superposition does not exist in language models, the interference term vanishes, allowing for lossless knowledge editing. Experiments across numerous language models reveal that knowledge superposition is universal, exhibiting high kurtosis, zero mean, and heavy-tailed distributions with clear scaling laws. Ultimately, by combining theory and experiments, we demonstrate that knowledge superposition is the fundamental reason for the failure of lifelong editing. Moreover, this is the first study to investigate knowledge editing from the perspective of superposition and provides a comprehensive observation of superposition across numerous real-world language models. Code available at https://github.com/ChenhuiHu/knowledge_in_superposition.

Fangyu Lei, Tongxu Luo, Pengqi Yang et al.

Table-based question answering (TableQA) is an important task in natural language processing, which requires comprehending tables and employing various reasoning ways to answer the questions. This paper introduces TableQAKit, the first comprehensive toolkit designed specifically for TableQA. The toolkit designs a unified platform that includes plentiful TableQA datasets and integrates popular methods of this task as well as large language models (LLMs). Users can add their datasets and methods according to the friendly interface. Also, pleasantly surprised using the modules in this toolkit achieves new SOTA on some datasets. Finally, \tableqakit{} also provides an LLM-based TableQA Benchmark for evaluating the role of LLMs in TableQA. TableQAKit is open-source with an interactive interface that includes visual operations, and comprehensive data for ease of use.

Wangtao Sun, Xuanqing Yu, Shizhu He et al.

Black-box Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great power in solving various tasks and are considered general problem solvers. However, LLMs still fail in many specific tasks although understand the task instruction. In this paper, we focus on the problem of boosting the ability of black-box LLMs to solve downstream tasks. We propose ExpNote, an automated framework to help LLMs better adapt to unfamiliar tasks through reflecting and noting experiences from training data and retrieving them from external memory during testing. We evaluate ExpNote on multiple tasks and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the performance of black-box LLMs. The data and code are available at https://github.com/forangel2014/ExpNote

Yuqiao Tan, Minzheng Wang, Shizhu He et al.

Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches treat large language models (LLMs) as a single unified policy, overlooking their internal mechanisms. Understanding how policy evolves across layers and modules is therefore crucial for enabling more targeted optimization and raveling out complex reasoning mechanisms. In this paper, we decompose the language model policy by leveraging the intrinsic split of the Transformer residual stream and the equivalence between the composition of hidden states with the unembedding matrix and the resulting samplable policy. This decomposition reveals Internal Layer Policies, corresponding to contributions from individual layers, and Internal Modular Policies, which align with the self-attention and feed-forward network (FFN) components within each layer. By analyzing the entropy of internal policy, we find that: (a) Early layers keep high entropy for exploration, top layers converge to near-zero entropy for refinement, with convergence patterns varying across model series. (b) LLama's prediction space rapidly converges in the final layer, whereas Qwen-series models, especially Qwen3, exhibit a more human-like, progressively structured reasoning pattern. Motivated by these findings, we propose Bottom-up Policy Optimization (BuPO), a novel RL paradigm that directly optimizes the internal layer policy during early training. By aligning training objective at lower layer, BuPO reconstructs foundational reasoning capabilities and achieves superior performance. Extensive experiments on complex reasoning benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trae1ounG/BuPO.

Lu Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yupu Hao et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on offline video understanding, but most are limited to offline inference or have weak online reasoning, making multi-turn interaction over continuously arriving video streams difficult. Existing streaming methods typically use an interleaved perception-generation paradigm, which prevents concurrent perception and generation and leads to early memory decay as streams grow, hurting long-range dependency modeling. We propose Think While Watching, a memory-anchored streaming video reasoning framework that preserves continuous segment-level memory during multi-turn interaction. We build a three-stage, multi-round chain-of-thought dataset and adopt a stage-matched training strategy, while enforcing strict causality through a segment-level streaming causal mask and streaming positional encoding. During inference, we introduce an efficient pipeline that overlaps watching and thinking and adaptively selects the best attention backend. Under both single-round and multi-round streaming input protocols, our method achieves strong results. Built on Qwen3-VL, it improves single-round accuracy by 2.6% on StreamingBench and by 3.79% on OVO-Bench. In the multi-round setting, it maintains performance while reducing output tokens by 56%. Code is available at: https://github.com/wl666hhh/Think_While_Watching/

Weihao Liu, Fangyu Lei, Tongxu Luo et al.

In the real world, knowledge often exists in a multimodal and heterogeneous form. Addressing the task of question answering with hybrid data types, including text, tables, and images, is a challenging task (MMHQA). Recently, with the rise of large language models (LLM), in-context learning (ICL) has become the most popular way to solve QA problems. We propose MMHQA-ICL framework for addressing this problems, which includes stronger heterogeneous data retriever and an image caption module. Most importantly, we propose a Type-specific In-context Learning Strategy for MMHQA, enabling LLMs to leverage their powerful performance in this task. We are the first to use end-to-end LLM prompting method for this task. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms all baselines and methods trained on the full dataset, achieving state-of-the-art results under the few-shot setting on the MultimodalQA dataset.

Yuancheng Sun, Yimeng Chen, Weizhi Ma et al.

Molecular property prediction is essential for drug discovery. In recent years, deep learning methods have been introduced to this area and achieved state-of-the-art performances. However, most of existing methods ignore the intrinsic relations between molecular properties which can be utilized to improve the performances of corresponding prediction tasks. In this paper, we propose a new approach, namely Physics properties Enhanced Molecular Property prediction (PEMP), to utilize relations between molecular properties revealed by previous physics theory and physical chemistry studies. Specifically, we enhance the training of the chemical and physiological property predictors with related physics property prediction tasks. We design two different methods for PEMP, respectively based on multi-task learning and transfer learning. Both methods include a model-agnostic molecule representation module and a property prediction module. In our implementation, we adopt both the state-of-the-art molecule embedding models under the supervised learning paradigm and the pretraining paradigm as the molecule representation module of PEMP, respectively. Experimental results on public benchmark MoleculeNet show that the proposed methods have the ability to outperform corresponding state-of-the-art models.

Pengfei Cao, Mingxuan Yang, Yubo Chen et al.

Understanding why real-world events occur is important for both natural language processing and practical decision-making, yet direct-cause inference remains underexplored in evidence-rich settings. To address this gap, we organized SemEval-2026 Task 12: Abductive Event Reasoning (AER).\footnote{The task data is available at https://github.com/sooo66/semeval2026-task12-dataset.git} The task asks systems to identify the most plausible direct cause of a target event from supporting evidence. We formulate AER as an evidence-grounded multiple-choice benchmark that captures key challenges of real-world causal reasoning, including distributed evidence, indirect background factors, and semantically related but non-causal distractors. The shared task attracted 122 participants and received 518 submissions. This paper presents the task formulation, dataset construction pipeline, evaluation setup, and system results. AER provides a focused benchmark for abductive reasoning over real-world events and highlights challenges for future work on causal reasoning and multi-document understanding.

Huanxuan Liao, Zhongtao Jiang, Yupu Hao et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve stronger visual understanding by scaling input fidelity, yet the resulting visual token growth makes jointly sustaining high spatial resolution and long temporal context prohibitive. We argue that the bottleneck lies not in how post-encoding representations are compressed but in the volume of pixels the encoder receives, and address it with ResAdapt, an Input-side adaptation framework that learns how much visual budget each frame should receive before encoding. ResAdapt couples a lightweight Allocator with an unchanged MLLM backbone, so the backbone retains its native visual-token interface while receiving an operator-transformed input. We formulate allocation as a contextual bandit and train the Allocator with Cost-Aware Policy Optimization (CAPO), which converts sparse rollout feedback into a stable accuracy-cost learning signal. Across budget-controlled video QA, temporal grounding, and image reasoning tasks, ResAdapt improves low-budget operating points and often lies on or near the efficiency-accuracy frontier, with the clearest gains on reasoning-intensive benchmarks under aggressive compression. Notably, ResAdapt supports up to 16x more frames at the same visual budget while delivering over 15% performance gain. Code is available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/ResAdapt.

Wei Peng, Jianchen Hu, Kang Liu et al.

Bayesian optimization is an effective method for solving expensive black-box optimization problems. Most existing methods use Gaussian processes (GP) as the surrogate model for approximating the black-box objective function, it is well-known that it can fail in high-dimensional space (e.g., dimension over 500). We argue that the reliance of GP on precise numerical fitting is fundamentally ill-suited in high-dimensional space, where it leads to prohibitive computational complexity. In order to address this, we propose a simple order-preserving Bayesian optimization (OPBO) method, where the surrogate model preserves the order, instead of the value, of the black-box objective function. Then we can use a simple but effective OP neural network (NN) to replace GP as the surrogate model. Moreover, instead of searching for the best solution from the acquisition model, we select good-enough solutions in the ordinal set to reduce computational cost. The experimental results show that for high-dimensional (over 500) black-box optimization problems, the proposed OPBO significantly outperforms traditional BO methods based on regression NN and GP. The source code is available at https://github.com/pengwei222/OPBO.

Huanxuan Liao, Shizhu He, Yupu Hao et al.

Small Language Models (SLMs) are attracting attention due to the high computational demands and privacy concerns of Large Language Models (LLMs). Some studies fine-tune SLMs using Chains of Thought (CoT) data distilled from LLMs, aiming to enhance their reasoning ability. Furthermore, Some CoT distillation methods introduce external symbolic knowledge into the generation process to improve the limited knowledge memory, reasoning ability and out-of-domain (OOD) generalization of SLMs. However, the introduction of symbolic knowledge increases computational overhead and introduces potential noise. In this paper, we introduce $\textit{SKIntern}$, an innovative approach that empowers SLMs to internalize symbolic knowledge and few-shot examples gradually through a progressive fine-tuning process, guided by a predefined linear decay schedule under curriculum learning. By efficiently internalizing knowledge, $\textit{SKIntern}$ reduces computational overhead and speeds up the reasoning process by focusing solely on the question during inference. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 5\%, while reducing inference costs (measured in FLOPs) by up to $4\times$ across a wide range of SLMs in both in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) tasks. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/SKIntern}.

Sirui Liang, Pengfei Cao, Jian Zhao et al.

Parameter-Efficient finetuning (PEFT) enhances model performance on downstream tasks by updating a minimal subset of parameters. Representation finetuning (ReFT) methods further improve efficiency by freezing model weights and optimizing internal representations with fewer parameters than PEFT, outperforming PEFT on several tasks. However, ReFT exhibits a significant performance decline on mathematical reasoning tasks. To address this problem, the paper demonstrates that ReFT's poor performance on mathematical tasks primarily stems from its struggle to generate effective reasoning prefixes during the early inference phase. Moreover, ReFT disturbs the numerical encoding and the error accumulats during the CoT stage. Based on these observations, this paper proposes Bias-REstrained Prefix Representation FineTuning (BREP ReFT), which enhances ReFT's mathematical reasoning capability by truncating training data to optimize the generation of initial reasoning prefixes, intervening on the early inference stage to prevent error accumulation, and constraining the intervention vectors' magnitude to avoid disturbing numerical encoding. Extensive experiments across diverse model architectures demonstrate BREP's superior effectiveness, efficiency, and robust generalization capability, outperforming both standard ReFT and weight-based PEFT methods on the task of mathematical reasoning. The source code is available at https://github.com/LiangThree/BREP.

Yixuan Weng, Minjun Zhu, Fei Xia et al.

Language models' (LMs) proficiency in handling deterministic symbolic reasoning and rule-based tasks remains limited due to their dependency implicit learning on textual data. To endow LMs with genuine rule comprehension abilities, we propose "Neural Comprehension" - a framework that synergistically integrates compiled neural networks (CoNNs) into the standard transformer architecture. CoNNs are neural modules designed to explicitly encode rules through artificially generated attention weights. By incorporating CoNN modules, the Neural Comprehension framework enables LMs to accurately and robustly execute rule-intensive symbolic tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing techniques in terms of length generalization, efficiency, and interpretability for symbolic operations. Furthermore, it can be applied to LMs across different model scales, outperforming tool-calling methods in arithmetic reasoning tasks while maintaining superior inference efficiency. Our work highlights the potential of seamlessly unifying explicit rule learning via CoNNs and implicit pattern learning in LMs, paving the way for true symbolic comprehension capabilities.

Tongxu Luo, Fangyu Lei, Jiahe Lei et al.

Answering numerical questions over hybrid contents from the given tables and text(TextTableQA) is a challenging task. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention in the NLP community. With the emergence of large language models, In-Context Learning and Chain-of-Thought prompting have become two particularly popular research topics in this field. In this paper, we introduce a new prompting strategy called Hybrid prompt strategy and Retrieval of Thought for TextTableQA. Through In-Context Learning, we prompt the model to develop the ability of retrieval thinking when dealing with hybrid data. Our method achieves superior performance compared to the fully-supervised SOTA on the MultiHiertt dataset in the few-shot setting.

Shuwen Xu, Yao Xu, Jiaxiang Liu et al.

Agentic knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) requires an agent to iteratively interact with knowledge graphs (KGs), posing challenges in both training data scarcity and reasoning generalization. Specifically, existing approaches often restrict agent exploration: prompting-based methods lack autonomous navigation training, while current training pipelines usually confine reasoning to predefined trajectories. To this end, this paper proposes \textit{GraphWalker}, a novel agentic KGQA framework that addresses these challenges through \textit{Automated Trajectory Synthesis} and \textit{Stage-wise Fine-tuning}. GraphWalker adopts a two-stage SFT training paradigm: First, the agent is trained on structurally diverse trajectories synthesized from constrained random-walk paths, establishing a broad exploration prior over the KG; Second, the agent is further fine-tuned on a small set of expert trajectories to develop reflection and error recovery capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our stage-wise SFT paradigm unlocks a higher performance ceiling for a lightweight reinforcement learning (RL) stage, enabling GraphWalker to achieve state-of-the-art performance on CWQ and WebQSP. Additional results on GrailQA and our constructed GraphWalkerBench confirm that GraphWalker enhances generalization to out-of-distribution reasoning paths. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/XuShuwenn/GraphWalker

Yuxiao Luo, Songming Zhang, Sijie Ruan et al.

Modeling human mobility is vital for extensive applications such as transportation planning and epidemic modeling. With the rise of the Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) paradigm, recent works explore synthetic trajectory generation using autoregressive and diffusion models. While these methods show promise for generating single-day trajectories, they remain limited by inefficiencies in long-term generation (e.g., weekly trajectories) and a lack of explicit spatiotemporal multi-scale modeling. This study proposes Multi-Scale Spatio-Temporal AutoRegression (M-STAR), a new framework that generates long-term trajectories through a coarse-to-fine spatiotemporal prediction process. M-STAR combines a Multi-scale Spatiotemporal Tokenizer that encodes hierarchical mobility patterns with a Transformer-based decoder for next-scale autoregressive prediction. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that M-STAR outperforms existing methods in fidelity and significantly improves generation speed. The data and codes are available at https://github.com/YuxiaoLuo0013/M-STAR.

Minjun Zhu, Yixuan Weng, Shizhu He et al.

The ability of reasoning over evidence has received increasing attention in question answering (QA). Recently, natural language database (NLDB) conducts complex QA in knowledge base with textual evidences rather than structured representations, this task attracts a lot of attention because of the flexibility and richness of textual evidence. However, existing text-based complex question answering datasets fail to provide explicit reasoning process, while it's important for retrieval effectiveness and reasoning interpretability. Therefore, we present a benchmark \textbf{ReasonChainQA} with explanatory and explicit evidence chains. ReasonChainQA consists of two subtasks: answer generation and evidence chains extraction, it also contains higher diversity for multi-hop questions with varying depths, 12 reasoning types and 78 relations. To obtain high-quality textual evidences for answering complex question. Additional experiment on supervised and unsupervised retrieval fully indicates the significance of ReasonChainQA. Dataset and codes will be made publicly available upon accepted.

Zhongtao Jiang, Yuanzhe Zhang, Cao Liu et al.

As one of the most exciting features of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning is a mixed blessing. While it allows users to fast-prototype a task solver with only a few training examples, the performance is generally sensitive to various configurations of the prompt such as the choice or order of the training examples. In this paper, we for the first time theoretically and empirically identify that such a paradox is mainly due to the label shift of the in-context model to the data distribution, in which LLMs shift the label marginal $p(y)$ while having a good label conditional $p(x|y)$. With this understanding, we can simply calibrate the in-context predictive distribution by adjusting the label marginal, which is estimated via Monte-Carlo sampling over the in-context model, i.e., generation of LLMs. We call our approach as generative calibration. We conduct exhaustive experiments with 12 text classification tasks and 12 LLMs scaling from 774M to 33B, generally find that the proposed method greatly and consistently outperforms the ICL as well as state-of-the-art calibration methods, by up to 27% absolute in macro-F1. Meanwhile, the proposed method is also stable under different prompt configurations.

Hongbang Yuan, Zhuoran Jin, Pengfei Cao et al.

LLM have achieved success in many fields but still troubled by problematic content in the training corpora. LLM unlearning aims at reducing their influence and avoid undesirable behaviours. However, existing unlearning methods remain vulnerable to adversarial queries and the unlearned knowledge resurfaces after the manually designed attack queries. As part of a red-team effort to proactively assess the vulnerabilities of unlearned models, we design Dynamic Unlearning Attack (DUA), a dynamic and automated framework to attack these models and evaluate their robustness. It optimizes adversarial suffixes to reintroduce the unlearned knowledge in various scenarios. We find that unlearned knowledge can be recovered in $55.2\%$ of the questions, even without revealing the unlearned model's parameters. In response to this vulnerability, we propose Latent Adversarial Unlearning (LAU), a universal framework that effectively enhances the robustness of the unlearned process. It formulates the unlearning process as a min-max optimization problem and resolves it through two stages: an attack stage, where perturbation vectors are trained and added to the latent space of LLMs to recover the unlearned knowledge, and a defense stage, where previously trained perturbation vectors are used to enhance unlearned model's robustness. With our LAU framework, we obtain two robust unlearning methods, AdvGA and AdvNPO. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple unlearning benchmarks and various models, and demonstrate that they improve the unlearning effectiveness by over $53.5\%$, cause only less than a $11.6\%$ reduction in neighboring knowledge, and have almost no impact on the model's general capabilities.

Fangyu Lei, Qian Liu, Yiming Huang et al.

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to great strides in model capabilities like long-context understanding and reasoning. However, as LLMs are able to process longer contexts, it becomes more challenging to evaluate whether they have acquired certain capabilities, since the length of text (e.g., 200K tokens) they can process far exceeds what humans can reliably assess in a reasonable duration. In this paper, we propose using complex synthetic tasks as a proxy evaluation method, and present S3Eval, a Synthetic, Scalable, Systematic evaluation suite for LLMs evaluation. The synthetic nature of S3Eval provides users full control over the dataset, allowing them to systematically probe LLM capabilities by scaling text length and varying task difficulty across diverse scenarios. The strong correlation between S3Eval and real-world benchmarks demonstrates the soundness of using S3Eval for evaluation of LLMs. S3Eval provides a flexible and infinite long-context data generation method. We have generated a comprehensive dataset called S3Eval-Standard, and experimental results have shown that it poses significant challenges for all existing LLMs.

Yifan Wei, Yisong Su, Huanhuan Ma et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown nearly saturated performance on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. As a result, it is natural for people to believe that LLMs have also mastered abilities such as time understanding and reasoning. However, research on the temporal sensitivity of LLMs has been insufficiently emphasized. To fill this gap, this paper constructs Multiple Sensitive Factors Time QA (MenatQA), which encompasses three temporal factors (scope factor, order factor, counterfactual factor) with total 2,853 samples for evaluating the time comprehension and reasoning abilities of LLMs. This paper tests current mainstream LLMs with different parameter sizes, ranging from billions to hundreds of billions. The results show most LLMs fall behind smaller temporal reasoning models with different degree on these factors. In specific, LLMs show a significant vulnerability to temporal biases and depend heavily on the temporal information provided in questions. Furthermore, this paper undertakes a preliminary investigation into potential improvement strategies by devising specific prompts and leveraging external tools. These approaches serve as valuable baselines or references for future research endeavors.

Yixuan Weng, Zhiqi Wang, Huanxuan Liao et al.

With the burgeoning development in the realm of large language models (LLMs), the demand for efficient incremental training tailored to specific industries and domains continues to increase. Currently, the predominantly employed frameworks lack modular design, it often takes a lot of coding work to kickstart the training of LLM. To address this, we present "LMTuner", a highly usable, integrable, and scalable system for training LLMs expeditiously and with minimal user-input. LMTuner comprises three main modules - the Interaction, Training, and Inference Modules. We advocate that LMTuner's usability and integrality alleviate the complexities in training large language models. Remarkably, even a novice user could commence training large language models within five minutes. Furthermore, it integrates DeepSpeed frameworks and supports Efficient Fine-Tuning methodologies like Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Quantized LoRA (QLoRA), etc., enabling the training of language models scaling from 300M to a whopping 130B parameters using a single server. The LMTuner's homepage (https://wengsyx.github.io/LMTuner/)and screencast video (https://youtu.be/nsXmWOmN3rE) are now publicly available.

Yinyu Lan, Shizhu He, Kang Liu et al.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) play a crucial role in many applications, such as question answering, but incompleteness is an urgent issue for their broad application. Much research in knowledge graph completion (KGC) has been performed to resolve this issue. The methods of KGC can be classified into two major categories: rule-based reasoning and embedding-based reasoning. The former has high accuracy and good interpretability, but a major challenge is to obtain effective rules on large-scale KGs. The latter has good efficiency and scalability, but it relies heavily on data richness and cannot fully use domain knowledge in the form of logical rules. We propose a novel method that injects rules and learns representations iteratively to take full advantage of rules and embeddings. Specifically, we model the conclusions of rule groundings as 0-1 variables and use a rule confidence regularizer to remove the uncertainty of the conclusions. The proposed approach has the following advantages: 1) It combines the benefits of both rules and knowledge graph embeddings (KGEs) and achieves a good balance between efficiency and scalability. 2) It uses an iterative method to continuously improve KGEs and remove incorrect rule conclusions. Evaluations on two public datasets show that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods, improving performance by 2.7\% and 4.3\% in mean reciprocal rank (MRR).

Kun Luo, Minghao Qin, Zheng Liu et al.

Pretrained language models like BERT and T5 serve as crucial backbone encoders for dense retrieval. However, these models often exhibit limited generalization capabilities and face challenges in improving in domain accuracy. Recent research has explored using large language models (LLMs) as retrievers, achieving SOTA performance across various tasks. Despite these advancements, the specific benefits of LLMs over traditional retrievers and the impact of different LLM configurations, such as parameter sizes, pretraining duration, and alignment processes on retrieval tasks remain unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on a wide range of retrieval tasks, including in domain accuracy, data efficiency, zero shot generalization, lengthy retrieval, instruction based retrieval, and multi task learning. We evaluate over 15 different backbone LLMs and non LLMs. Our findings reveal that larger models and extensive pretraining consistently enhance in domain accuracy and data efficiency. Additionally, larger models demonstrate significant potential in zero shot generalization, lengthy retrieval, instruction based retrieval, and multi task learning. These results underscore the advantages of LLMs as versatile and effective backbone encoders in dense retrieval, providing valuable insights for future research and development in this field.

Yiming Ju, Yuanzhe Zhang, Kang Liu et al.

The opaqueness of deep NLP models has motivated the development of methods for interpreting how deep models predict. Recently, work has introduced hierarchical attribution, which produces a hierarchical clustering of words, along with an attribution score for each cluster. However, existing work on hierarchical attribution all follows the connecting rule, limiting the cluster to a continuous span in the input text. We argue that the connecting rule as an additional prior may undermine the ability to reflect the model decision process faithfully. To this end, we propose to generate hierarchical explanations without the connecting rule and introduce a framework for generating hierarchical clusters. Experimental results and further analysis show the effectiveness of the proposed method in providing high-quality explanations for reflecting model predicting process.

Kang Liu, Zhuoqi Ma, Siyu Liang et al.

Despite recent advances in medical vision-language pretraining, existing models still struggle to capture the diagnostic workflow: radiographs are typically treated as context-agnostic images, while radiologists' gaze -- a crucial cue for visual reasoning -- remains largely underexplored by existing methods. These limitations hinder the modeling of disease-specific patterns and weaken cross-modal alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce CoGaze, a Context- and Gaze-guided vision-language pretraining framework for chest X-rays. We first propose a context-infused vision encoder that models how radiologists integrate clinical context -- including patient history, symptoms, and diagnostic intent -- to guide diagnostic reasoning. We then present a multi-level supervision paradigm that (1) enforces intra- and inter-modal semantic alignment through hybrid-positive contrastive learning, (2) injects diagnostic priors via disease-aware cross-modal representation learning, and (3) leverages radiologists' gaze as probabilistic priors to guide attention toward diagnostically salient regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoGaze consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks, achieving up to +2.0% CheXbertF1 and +1.2% BLEU2 for free-text and structured report generation, +23.2% AUROC for zero-shot classification, and +12.2% Precision@1 for image-text retrieval. Code is available at https://github.com/mk-runner/CoGaze.

Wangtao Sun, Chenxiang Zhang, XueYou Zhang et al.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong ability, they are further supposed to be controlled and guided by in real-world scenarios to be safe, accurate, and intelligent. This demands the possession of capability of LLMs. However, no prior work has made a clear evaluation of the inferential rule-following capability of LLMs. Previous studies that try to evaluate the inferential rule-following capability of LLMs fail to distinguish the inferential rule-following scenarios from the instruction-following scenarios. Therefore, this paper first clarifies the concept of inferential rule-following and proposes a comprehensive benchmark, RuleBench, to evaluate a diversified range of inferential rule-following abilities. Our experimental results on a variety of LLMs show that they are still limited in following rules. Our analysis based on the evaluation results provides insights into the improvements for LLMs toward a better inferential rule-following intelligent agent. We further propose Inferential Rule-Following Tuning (IRFT). The experimental results show that through IRFT, LLMs can learn abstract rule-following abilities from purely synthetic data and then generalize to RuleBench. The data and code can be found at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/llm-rule-following-B3E3/

Yao Xu, Shizhu He, Cunguang Wang et al.

Complex Query Answering (CQA) is a challenge task of Knowledge Graph (KG). Due to the incompleteness of KGs, query embedding (QE) methods have been proposed to encode queries and entities into the same embedding space, and treat logical operators as neural set operators to obtain answers. However, these methods train KG embeddings and neural set operators concurrently on both simple (one-hop) and complex (multi-hop and logical) queries, which causes performance degradation on simple queries and low training efficiency. In this paper, we propose Query to Triple (Q2T), a novel approach that decouples the training for simple and complex queries. Q2T divides the training into two stages: (1) Pre-training a neural link predictor on simple queries to predict tail entities based on the head entity and relation. (2) Training a query encoder on complex queries to encode diverse complex queries into a unified triple form that can be efficiently solved by the pretrained neural link predictor. Our proposed Q2T is not only efficient to train, but also modular, thus easily adaptable to various neural link predictors that have been studied well. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, even without explicit modeling for neural set operators, Q2T still achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse complex queries over three public benchmarks.

Kang Liu, Di Wu, Yiru Wang et al.

Deep learning techniques have shown promising results in image compression, with competitive bitrate and image reconstruction quality from compressed latent. However, while image compression has progressed towards a higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and fewer bits per pixel (bpp), their robustness to adversarial images has never received deliberation. In this work, we, for the first time, investigate the robustness of image compression systems where imperceptible perturbation of input images can precipitate a significant increase in the bitrate of their compressed latent. To characterize the robustness of state-of-the-art learned image compression, we mount white-box and black-box attacks. Our white-box attack employs fast gradient sign method on the entropy estimation of the bitstream as its bitrate approximation. We propose DCT-Net simulating JPEG compression with architectural simplicity and lightweight training as the substitute in the black-box attack and enable fast adversarial transferability. Our results on six image compression models, each with six different bitrate qualities (thirty-six models in total), show that they are surprisingly fragile, where the white-box attack achieves up to 56.326x and black-box 1.947x bpp change. To improve robustness, we propose a novel compression architecture factorAtn which incorporates attention modules and a basic factorized entropy model, resulting in a promising trade-off between the rate-distortion performance and robustness to adversarial attacks that surpasses existing learned image compressors.

Kang Liu, Jianchen Hu

Classical ReLU-based Input Convex Neural Networks (ICNNs) are equivalent to the optimal value functions of Linear Programming (LP). This intrinsic structural equivalence restricts their representational capacity to piecewise-linear polyhedral functions. To overcome this representational bottleneck, we propose the SOC-ICNN, an architecture that generalizes the underlying optimization class from LP to Second-Order Cone Programming (SOCP). By explicitly injecting positive semi-definite curvature and Euclidean norm-based conic primitives, our formulation introduces native smooth curvature into the representation while preserving a rigorous optimization-theoretic interpretation. We formally prove that SOC-ICNNs strictly expand the representational space of ReLU-ICNNs without increasing the asymptotic order of forward-pass complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SOC-ICNN substantially improves function approximation, while delivering competitive downstream decision quality. The code is available at https://github.com/Kanyooo/SOC-ICNN.

Yuchen Guan, Runxi Cheng, Kang Liu et al.

Knowledge distillation typically minimizes the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between teacher and student logits. However, optimizing the KL divergence can be challenging for the student and often leads to sub-optimal solutions. We further show that gradients induced by KL divergence scale with the magnitude of the teacher logits, thereby diminishing updates on low-probability channels. This imbalance weakens the transfer of inter-class information and in turn limits the performance improvements achievable by the student. To mitigate this issue, we propose a plug-and-play auxiliary ranking loss based on Kendall's $τ$ coefficient that can be seamlessly integrated into any logit-based distillation framework. It supplies inter-class relational information while rebalancing gradients toward low-probability channels. We demonstrate that the proposed ranking loss is largely invariant to channel scaling and optimizes an objective aligned with that of KL divergence, making it a natural complement rather than a replacement. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and COCO datasets, as well as various CNN and ViT teacher-student architecture combinations, demonstrate that our plug-and-play ranking loss consistently boosts the performance of multiple distillation baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/OvernighTea/RankingLoss-KD

Zhongtao Jiang, Yuanzhe Zhang, Cao Liu et al.

As the key to sentiment analysis, sentiment composition considers the classification of a constituent via classifications of its contained sub-constituents and rules operated on them. Such compositionality has been widely studied previously in the form of hierarchical trees including untagged and sentiment ones, which are intrinsically suboptimal in our view. To address this, we propose semantic tree, a new tree form capable of interpreting the sentiment composition in a principled way. Semantic tree is a derivation of a context-free grammar (CFG) describing the specific composition rules on difference semantic roles, which is designed carefully following previous linguistic conclusions. However, semantic tree is a latent variable since there is no its annotation in regular datasets. Thus, in our method, it is marginalized out via inside algorithm and learned to optimize the classification performance. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our method not only achieves better or competitive results compared to baselines in the setting of regular and domain adaptation classification, and also generates plausible tree explanations.

Tong Zhou, Yubo Chen, Pengfei Cao et al.

Data is one of the most critical elements in building a large language model. However, existing systems either fail to customize a corpus curation pipeline or neglect to leverage comprehensive corpus assessment for iterative optimization of the curation. To this end, we present a pretraining corpus curation and assessment platform called Oasis -- a one-stop system for data quality improvement and quantification with user-friendly interactive interfaces. Specifically, the interactive modular rule filter module can devise customized rules according to explicit feedback. The debiased neural filter module builds the quality classification dataset in a negative-centric manner to remove the undesired bias. The adaptive document deduplication module could execute large-scale deduplication with limited memory resources. These three parts constitute the customized data curation module. And in the holistic data assessment module, a corpus can be assessed in local and global views, with three evaluation means including human, GPT-4, and heuristic metrics. We exhibit a complete process to use Oasis for the curation and assessment of pretraining data. In addition, an 800GB bilingual corpus curated by Oasis is publicly released.

Baoli Zhang, Haining Xie, Pengfan Du et al.

The unprecedented performance of large language models (LLMs) requires comprehensive and accurate evaluation. We argue that for LLMs evaluation, benchmarks need to be comprehensive and systematic. To this end, we propose the ZhuJiu benchmark, which has the following strengths: (1) Multi-dimensional ability coverage: We comprehensively evaluate LLMs across 7 ability dimensions covering 51 tasks. Especially, we also propose a new benchmark that focuses on knowledge ability of LLMs. (2) Multi-faceted evaluation methods collaboration: We use 3 different yet complementary evaluation methods to comprehensively evaluate LLMs, which can ensure the authority and accuracy of the evaluation results. (3) Comprehensive Chinese benchmark: ZhuJiu is the pioneering benchmark that fully assesses LLMs in Chinese, while also providing equally robust evaluation abilities in English. (4) Avoiding potential data leakage: To avoid data leakage, we construct evaluation data specifically for 37 tasks. We evaluate 10 current mainstream LLMs and conduct an in-depth discussion and analysis of their results. The ZhuJiu benchmark and open-participation leaderboard are publicly released at http://www.zhujiu-benchmark.com/ and we also provide a demo video at https://youtu.be/qypkJ89L1Ic.

Chenxi Zhou, Pengfei Cao, Jiang Li et al.

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is critical for the efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). While 4-bit quantization is widely regarded as an optimal trade-off, reducing the precision to 2-bit usually triggers a catastrophic ``performance cliff.'' It remains unclear whether the underlying mechanisms differ fundamentally. Consequently, we conduct a systematic mechanistic analysis, revealing two qualitatively distinct failure modes: Signal Degradation, where the computational patterns remain intact but information precision is impaired by cumulative error; and Computation Collapse, where key components fail to function, preventing correct information processing and destroying the signal in the early layers. Guided by this diagnosis, we conduct mechanism-aware interventions, demonstrating that targeted, training-free repair can mitigate Signal Degradation, but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse. Our findings provide a systematic diagnostic framework for PTQ failures and suggest that addressing Computation Collapse requires structural reconstruction rather than mere compensation.

Yifan Wei, Xiaoyan Yu, Huanhuan Ma et al.

Knowledge Editing (KE) for modifying factual knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) has been receiving increasing attention. However, existing knowledge editing methods are entity-centric, and it is unclear whether this approach is suitable for a relation-centric perspective. To address this gap, this paper constructs a new benchmark named RaKE, which focuses on Relation based Knowledge Editing. In this paper, we establish a suite of innovative metrics for evaluation and conduct comprehensive experiments involving various knowledge editing baselines. We notice that existing knowledge editing methods exhibit the potential difficulty in their ability to edit relations. Therefore, we further explore the role of relations in factual triplets within the transformer. Our research results confirm that knowledge related to relations is not only stored in the FFN network but also in the attention layers. This provides experimental support for future relation-based knowledge editing methods.

Jiachun Li, Shaoping Huang, Zhuoran Jin et al.

Recent progress in the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has empowered them to address more complex tasks such as scientific analysis and mathematical reasoning. Despite their promise, MLLMs' reasoning abilities across different scenarios in real life remain largely unexplored and lack standardized benchmarks for evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce MMR-Life, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the diverse multimodal multi-image reasoning capabilities of MLLMs across real-life scenarios. MMR-Life consists of 2,646 multiple-choice questions based on 19,108 images primarily sourced from real-world contexts, comprehensively covering seven reasoning types: abductive, analogical, causal, deductive, inductive, spatial, and temporal. Unlike existing reasoning benchmarks, MMR-Life does not rely on domain-specific expertise but instead requires models to integrate information across multiple images and apply diverse reasoning abilities. The evaluation of 37 advanced models highlights the substantial challenge posed by MMR-Life. Even top models like GPT-5 achieve only 58% accuracy and display considerable variance in performance across reasoning types. Moreover, we analyze the reasoning paradigms of existing MLLMs, exploring how factors such as thinking length, reasoning method, and reasoning type affect their performance. In summary, MMR-Life establishes a comprehensive foundation for evaluating, analyzing, and improving the next generation of multimodal reasoning systems.

Ruoling Peng, Kang Liu, Po Yang et al.

Pest identification is a crucial aspect of pest control in agriculture. However, most farmers are not capable of accurately identifying pests in the field, and there is a limited number of structured data sources available for rapid querying. In this work, we explored using domain-agnostic general pre-trained large language model(LLM) to extract structured data from agricultural documents with minimal or no human intervention. We propose a methodology that involves text retrieval and filtering using embedding-based retrieval, followed by LLM question-answering to automatically extract entities and attributes from the documents, and transform them into structured data. In comparison to existing methods, our approach achieves consistently better accuracy in the benchmark while maintaining efficiency.

Yupu Hao, Pengfei Cao, Zhuoran Jin et al.

Tool learning enables the Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with the external environment by invoking tools, enriching the accuracy and capability scope of LLMs. However, previous works predominantly focus on improving model's tool-utilizing accuracy and the ability to generalize to new, unseen tools, excessively forcing LLMs to adjust specific tool-invoking pattern without considering the harm to model's general performance. This deviates from the actual applications and original intention of integrating tools to enhance model. To tackle this problem, we dissect the capability trade-offs by examining the hidden representation changes and the gradient-based importance score of model's components. Based on the analysis result, we propose a Component Importance-based Tool-utilizing ability Injection method (CITI). According to the gradient-based importance score of different components, it alleviates the capability conflicts caused by fine-tuning process by applying distinct training strategies to different components. CITI applies Mixture-Of-LoRA (MOLoRA) for important components. Meanwhile, it fine-tunes the parameters of few components deemed less important in the backbone of the LLM, while keeping other parameters frozen. CITI can effectively enhance the model's tool-utilizing capability without excessively compromising its general performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves outstanding performance across a range of evaluation metrics.

Kang Liu, Wei Peng, Jianchen Hu

Optimizer states occupy massive GPU memory in large-scale model training. However, gradients in different network blocks exhibit distinct behaviors, such as varying directional stability and scale anisotropy, implying that expensive optimizer states are not universally necessary and using a global optimizer is often memory-inefficient. We propose the Budget-Aware Optimizer Configurator (BAOC) to reduce memory cost by assigning suitable optimizer configurations to individual blocks under given budgets. Specifically, BAOC samples gradient streams to derive statistical metrics that quantify the potential performance risk of applying cheaper configurations (e.g., low precision or removing momentum). It then solves a constrained allocation problem to minimize total risk under memory and time budgets, selecting a budget-feasible configuration for each block. Experiments across vision, language, and diffusion workloads demonstrate that BAOC maintains training quality while significantly reducing the memory usage of optimizer states. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/BAOC-45C6.

Kang Liu, Jianchen Hu, Wei Peng

Input Convex Neural Networks (ICNNs) are commonly used in a two-stage manner: one first trains a convex network and then minimizes it over its input in a downstream inference problem. Recent second-order-cone ICNNs (SOC-ICNNs) enrich ReLU-based ICNNs with quadratic and conic modules and admit an exact representation as value functions of second-order cone programs (SOCPs). This value-function structure enables an explicit convex-analytic treatment of SOC-ICNN inference. In this paper, we study the exact first-order and local second-order geometry of SOC-ICNNs from the dual viewpoint. We show that supporting slopes, subdifferentials, directional derivatives, and local Hessians can be recovered directly from optimal dual variables. These results provide the geometric primitives for white-box SOC-ICNN inference, going beyond black-box automatic differentiation. Numerical experiments validate the exact multiplier readout, the local Hessian formula, and the set-valued behavior at structurally degenerate inputs. We also provide a step-by-step tutorial showing how the readout mechanism instantiates a complete white-box inference loop. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SOC-ICNN-Theory-BEFC/.