Weiming Lü

Yongliang Shen, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan et al. · microsoft-research

Solving complicated AI tasks with different domains and modalities is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. While there are numerous AI models available for various domains and modalities, they cannot handle complicated AI tasks autonomously. Considering large language models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional abilities in language understanding, generation, interaction, and reasoning, we advocate that LLMs could act as a controller to manage existing AI models to solve complicated AI tasks, with language serving as a generic interface to empower this. Based on this philosophy, we present HuggingGPT, an LLM-powered agent that leverages LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) to connect various AI models in machine learning communities (e.g., Hugging Face) to solve AI tasks. Specifically, we use ChatGPT to conduct task planning when receiving a user request, select models according to their function descriptions available in Hugging Face, execute each subtask with the selected AI model, and summarize the response according to the execution results. By leveraging the strong language capability of ChatGPT and abundant AI models in Hugging Face, HuggingGPT can tackle a wide range of sophisticated AI tasks spanning different modalities and domains and achieve impressive results in language, vision, speech, and other challenging tasks, which paves a new way towards the realization of artificial general intelligence.

Wenqi Zhang, Zhenglin Cheng, Yuanyu He et al.

Although most current large multimodal models (LMMs) can already understand photos of natural scenes and portraits, their understanding of abstract images, e.g., charts, maps, or layouts, and visual reasoning capabilities remains quite rudimentary. They often struggle with simple daily tasks, such as reading time from a clock, understanding a flowchart, or planning a route using a road map. In light of this, we design a multi-modal self-instruct, utilizing large language models and their code capabilities to synthesize massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions across daily scenarios. Our strategy effortlessly creates a multimodal benchmark with 11,193 instructions for eight visual scenarios: charts, tables, simulated maps, dashboards, flowcharts, relation graphs, floor plans, and visual puzzles. \textbf{This benchmark, constructed with simple lines and geometric elements, exposes the shortcomings of most advanced LMMs} like Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o in abstract image understanding, spatial relations reasoning, and visual element induction. Besides, to verify the quality of our synthetic data, we fine-tune an LMM using 62,476 synthetic chart, table and road map instructions. The results demonstrate improved chart understanding and map navigation performance, and also demonstrate potential benefits for other visual reasoning tasks. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/zwq2018/Multi-modal-Self-instruct}.

Yechun Tang, Xiaoxia Cheng, Weiming Lu

Complex knowledge base question answering can be achieved by converting questions into sequences of predefined actions. However, there is a significant semantic and structural gap between natural language and action sequences, which makes this conversion difficult. In this paper, we introduce an alignment-enhanced complex question answering framework, called ALCQA, which mitigates this gap through question-to-action alignment and question-to-question alignment. We train a question rewriting model to align the question and each action, and utilize a pretrained language model to implicitly align the question and KG artifacts. Moreover, considering that similar questions correspond to similar action sequences, we retrieve top-k similar question-answer pairs at the inference stage through question-to-question alignment and propose a novel reward-guided action sequence selection strategy to select from candidate action sequences. We conduct experiments on CQA and WQSP datasets, and the results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and obtains a 9.88\% improvements in the F1 metric on CQA dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/TTTTTTTTy/ALCQA.

Xinyu Wang, Yongliang Shen, Jiong Cai et al.

The MultiCoNER shared task aims at detecting semantically ambiguous and complex named entities in short and low-context settings for multiple languages. The lack of contexts makes the recognition of ambiguous named entities challenging. To alleviate this issue, our team DAMO-NLP proposes a knowledge-based system, where we build a multilingual knowledge base based on Wikipedia to provide related context information to the named entity recognition (NER) model. Given an input sentence, our system effectively retrieves related contexts from the knowledge base. The original input sentences are then augmented with such context information, allowing significantly better contextualized token representations to be captured. Our system wins 10 out of 13 tracks in the MultiCoNER shared task.

Xinyin Ma, Xinchao Wang, Gongfan Fang et al.

Data-free knowledge distillation (DFKD) conducts knowledge distillation via eliminating the dependence of original training data, and has recently achieved impressive results in accelerating pre-trained language models. At the heart of DFKD is to reconstruct a synthetic dataset by inverting the parameters of the uncompressed model. Prior DFKD approaches, however, have largely relied on hand-crafted priors of the target data distribution for the reconstruction, which can be inevitably biased and often incompetent to capture the intrinsic distributions. To address this problem, we propose a prompt-based method, termed as PromptDFD, that allows us to take advantage of learned language priors, which effectively harmonizes the synthetic sentences to be semantically and grammatically correct. Specifically, PromptDFD leverages a pre-trained generative model to provide language priors and introduces a reinforced topic prompter to control data synthesis, making the generated samples thematically relevant and semantically plausible, and thus friendly to downstream tasks. As shown in our experiments, the proposed method substantially improves the synthesis quality and achieves considerable improvements on distillation performance. In some cases, PromptDFD even gives rise to results on par with those from the data-driven knowledge distillation with access to the original training data.

Yongliang Shen, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan et al.

In recent years, the remarkable progress of large language models (LLMs) has sparked interest in task automation, which involves decomposing complex tasks described by user instructions into sub-tasks and invoking external tools to execute them, playing a central role in autonomous agents. However, there is a lack of systematic and standardized benchmarks to promote the development of LLMs in task automation. To address this, we introduce TaskBench, a comprehensive framework to evaluate the capability of LLMs in task automation. Specifically, task automation can be divided into three critical stages: task decomposition, tool selection, and parameter prediction. To tackle the complexities inherent in these stages, we introduce the concept of Tool Graph to represent decomposed tasks and adopt a back-instruct method to generate high-quality user instructions. We propose TaskEval, a multi-faceted evaluation methodology that assesses LLM performance across these three stages. Our approach combines automated construction with rigorous human verification, ensuring high consistency with human evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that TaskBench effectively reflects the capabilities of various LLMs in task automation. It provides insights into model performance across different task complexities and domains, pushing the boundaries of what current models can achieve. TaskBench offers a scalable, adaptable, and reliable benchmark for advancing LLM-based autonomous agents.

Yongliang Shen, Xiaobin Wang, Zeqi Tan et al.

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Recent works treat named entity recognition as a reading comprehension task, constructing type-specific queries manually to extract entities. This paradigm suffers from three issues. First, type-specific queries can only extract one type of entities per inference, which is inefficient. Second, the extraction for different types of entities is isolated, ignoring the dependencies between them. Third, query construction relies on external knowledge and is difficult to apply to realistic scenarios with hundreds of entity types. To deal with them, we propose Parallel Instance Query Network (PIQN), which sets up global and learnable instance queries to extract entities from a sentence in a parallel manner. Each instance query predicts one entity, and by feeding all instance queries simultaneously, we can query all entities in parallel. Instead of being constructed from external knowledge, instance queries can learn their different query semantics during training. For training the model, we treat label assignment as a one-to-many Linear Assignment Problem (LAP) and dynamically assign gold entities to instance queries with minimal assignment cost. Experiments on both nested and flat NER datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

Wenqi Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Yanna Ma et al.

Math word problem solver requires both precise relation reasoning about quantities in the text and reliable generation for the diverse equation. Current sequence-to-tree or relation extraction methods regard this only from a fixed view, struggling to simultaneously handle complex semantics and diverse equations. However, human solving naturally involves two consistent reasoning views: top-down and bottom-up, just as math equations also can be expressed in multiple equivalent forms: pre-order and post-order. We propose a multi-view consistent contrastive learning for a more complete semantics-to-equation mapping. The entire process is decoupled into two independent but consistent views: top-down decomposition and bottom-up construction, and the two reasoning views are aligned in multi-granularity for consistency, enhancing global generation and precise reasoning. Experiments on multiple datasets across two languages show our approach significantly outperforms the existing baselines, especially on complex problems. We also show after consistent alignment, multi-view can absorb the merits of both views and generate more diverse results consistent with the mathematical laws.

Xinyu Zhu, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu

Concomitant administration of drugs can cause drug-drug interactions (DDIs). Some drug combinations are beneficial, but other ones may cause negative effects which are previously unrecorded. Previous works on DDI prediction usually rely on hand-engineered domain knowledge, which is laborious to obtain. In this work, we propose a novel model, Molecular Substructure-Aware Network (MSAN), to effectively predict potential DDIs from molecular structures of drug pairs. We adopt a Transformer-like substructure extraction module to acquire a fixed number of representative vectors that are associated with various substructure patterns of the drug molecule. Then, interaction strength between the two drugs' substructures will be captured by a similarity-based interaction module. We also perform a substructure dropping augmentation before graph encoding to alleviate overfitting. Experimental results from a real-world dataset reveal that our proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance. We also show that the predictions of our model are highly interpretable through a case study.

Guiyang Hou, Wenqi Zhang, Yongliang Shen et al.

Theory of Mind (ToM)-the cognitive ability to reason about mental states of ourselves and others, is the foundation of social interaction. Although ToM comes naturally to humans, it poses a significant challenge to even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to the complex logical chains in ToM reasoning, especially in higher-order ToM questions, simply utilizing reasoning methods like Chain of Thought (CoT) will not improve the ToM capabilities of LLMs. We present TimeToM, which constructs a temporal space and uses it as the foundation to improve the ToM capabilities of LLMs in multiple scenarios. Specifically, within the temporal space, we construct Temporal Belief State Chain (TBSC) for each character and inspired by the cognition perspective of the social world model, we divide TBSC into self-world beliefs and social world beliefs, aligning with first-order ToM (first-order beliefs) and higher-order ToM (higher-order beliefs) questions, respectively. Moreover, we design a novel tool-belief solver that, by considering belief communication between characters in temporal space, can transform a character's higher-order beliefs into another character's first-order beliefs under belief communication period. Experimental results indicate that TimeToM can dramatically improve the reasoning performance of LLMs on ToM questions while taking a big step towards coherent and robust ToM reasoning.

Shuhui Wu, Yongliang Shen, Zeqi Tan et al.

Nested named entity recognition (nested NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Various span-based methods have been proposed to detect nested entities with span representations. However, span-based methods do not consider the relationship between a span and other entities or phrases, which is helpful in the NER task. Besides, span-based methods have trouble predicting long entities due to limited span enumeration length. To mitigate these issues, we present the Propose-and-Refine Network (PnRNet), a two-stage set prediction network for nested NER. In the propose stage, we use a span-based predictor to generate some coarse entity predictions as entity proposals. In the refine stage, proposals interact with each other, and richer contextual information is incorporated into the proposal representations. The refined proposal representations are used to re-predict entity boundaries and classes. In this way, errors in coarse proposals can be eliminated, and the boundary prediction is no longer constrained by the span enumeration length limitation. Additionally, we build multi-scale sentence representations, which better model the hierarchical structure of sentences and provide richer contextual information than token-level representations. Experiments show that PnRNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on four nested NER datasets and one flat NER dataset.

Zeqi Tan, Yongliang Shen, Xuming Hu et al.

Joint entity and relation extraction has been a core task in the field of information extraction. Recent approaches usually consider the extraction of relational triples from a stereoscopic perspective, either learning a relation-specific tagger or separate classifiers for each relation type. However, they still suffer from error propagation, relation redundancy and lack of high-level connections between triples. To address these issues, we propose a novel query-based approach to construct instance-level representations for relational triples. By metric-based comparison between query embeddings and token embeddings, we can extract all types of triples in one step, thus eliminating the error propagation problem. In addition, we learn the instance-level representation of relational triples via contrastive learning. In this way, relational triples can not only enclose rich class-level semantics but also access to high-order global connections. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the state of the art on five widely used benchmarks.

Wenqi Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Qingpeng Nong et al.

Generating mathematical equations from natural language requires an accurate understanding of the relations among math expressions. Existing approaches can be broadly categorized into token-level and expression-level generation. The former treats equations as a mathematical language, sequentially generating math tokens. Expression-level methods generate each expression one by one. However, each expression represents a solving step, and there naturally exist parallel or dependent relations between these steps, which are ignored by current sequential methods. Therefore, we integrate tree structure into the expression-level generation and advocate an expression tree decoding strategy. To generate a tree with expression as its node, we employ a layer-wise parallel decoding strategy: we decode multiple independent expressions (leaf nodes) in parallel at each layer and repeat parallel decoding layer by layer to sequentially generate these parent node expressions that depend on others. Besides, a bipartite matching algorithm is adopted to align multiple predictions with annotations for each layer. Experiments show our method outperforms other baselines, especially for these equations with complex structures.

Shuhui Wu, Yongliang Shen, Zeqi Tan et al.

Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) aims to locate entity mentions and classify their types with only knowledge bases or gazetteers and unlabeled corpus. However, distant annotations are noisy and degrade the performance of NER models. In this paper, we propose a noise-robust prototype network named MProto for the DS-NER task. Different from previous prototype-based NER methods, MProto represents each entity type with multiple prototypes to characterize the intra-class variance among entity representations. To optimize the classifier, each token should be assigned an appropriate ground-truth prototype and we consider such token-prototype assignment as an optimal transport (OT) problem. Furthermore, to mitigate the noise from incomplete labeling, we propose a novel denoised optimal transport (DOT) algorithm. Specifically, we utilize the assignment result between Other class tokens and all prototypes to distinguish unlabeled entity tokens from true negatives. Experiments on several DS-NER benchmarks demonstrate that our MProto achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is now available on Github.

Chang Zong, Yueting Zhuang, Weiming Lu et al.

Predicting the impact of publications in science and technology has become an important research area, which is useful in various real world scenarios such as technology investment, research direction selection, and technology policymaking. Citation trajectory prediction is one of the most popular tasks in this area. Existing approaches mainly rely on mining temporal and graph data from academic articles. Some recent methods are capable of handling cold-start prediction by aggregating metadata features of new publications. However, the implicit factors causing citations and the richer information from handling temporal and attribute features still need to be explored. In this paper, we propose CTPIR, a new citation trajectory prediction framework that is able to represent the influence (the momentum of citation) of either new or existing publications using the history information of all their attributes. Our framework is composed of three modules: difference-preserved graph embedding, fine-grained influence representation, and learning-based trajectory calculation. To test the effectiveness of our framework in more situations, we collect and construct a new temporal knowledge graph dataset from the real world, named AIPatent, which stems from global patents in the field of artificial intelligence. Experiments are conducted on both the APS academic dataset and our contributed AIPatent dataset. The results demonstrate the strengths of our approach in the citation trajectory prediction task.

Wenqi Zhang, Hang Zhang, Xin Li et al.

Compared to image-text pair data, interleaved corpora enable Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to understand the world more naturally like humans. However, such existing datasets are crawled from webpage, facing challenges like low knowledge density, loose image-text relations, and poor logical coherence between images. On the other hand, the internet hosts vast instructional videos (e.g., online geometry courses) that are widely used by humans to learn foundational subjects, yet these valuable resources remain underexplored in VLM training. In this paper, we introduce a high-quality \textbf{multimodal textbook} corpus with richer foundational knowledge for VLM pretraining. It collects over 2.5 years of instructional videos, totaling 22,000 class hours. We first use an LLM-proposed taxonomy to systematically gather instructional videos. Then we progressively extract and refine visual (keyframes), audio (ASR), and textual knowledge (OCR) from the videos, and organize as an image-text interleaved corpus based on temporal order. Compared to its counterparts, our video-centric textbook offers more coherent context, richer knowledge, and better image-text alignment. Experiments demonstrate its superb pretraining performance, particularly in knowledge- and reasoning-intensive tasks like ScienceQA and MathVista. Moreover, VLMs pre-trained on our textbook exhibit outstanding interleaved context awareness, leveraging visual and textual cues in their few-shot context for task solving. Our code are available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/multimodal_textbook.

Wenqi Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Linjuan Wu et al.

The reflection capacity of Large Language Model (LLM) has garnered extensive attention. A post-hoc prompting strategy, e.g., reflexion and self-refine, refines LLM's response based on self-evaluated or external feedback. However, recent research indicates without external feedback, LLM's intrinsic reflection is unstable. Our investigation unveils that the key bottleneck is the quality of the self-evaluated feedback. We find LLMs often exhibit overconfidence or high randomness when self-evaluate, offering stubborn or inconsistent feedback, which causes poor reflection. To remedy this, we advocate Self-Contrast: It adaptively explores diverse solving perspectives tailored to the request, contrasts the differences, and summarizes these discrepancies into a checklist which could be used to re-examine and eliminate discrepancies. Our method endows LLM with diverse perspectives to alleviate stubborn biases. Moreover, their discrepancies indicate potential errors or inherent uncertainties that LLM often overlooks. Reflecting upon these can catalyze more accurate and stable reflection. Experiments conducted on a series of reasoning and translation tasks with different LLMs serve to underscore the effectiveness and generality of our strategy.

Wenqi Zhang, Ke Tang, Hai Wu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit robust problem-solving capabilities for diverse tasks. However, most LLM-based agents are designed as specific task solvers with sophisticated prompt engineering, rather than agents capable of learning and evolving through interactions. These task solvers necessitate manually crafted prompts to inform task rules and regulate LLM behaviors, inherently incapacitating to address complex dynamic scenarios e.g., large interactive games. In light of this, we propose Agent-Pro: an LLM-based Agent with Policy-level Reflection and Optimization that can learn a wealth of expertise from interactive experiences and progressively elevate its behavioral policy. Specifically, it involves a dynamic belief generation and reflection process for policy evolution. Rather than action-level reflection, Agent-Pro iteratively reflects on past trajectories and beliefs, fine-tuning its irrational beliefs for a better policy. Moreover, a depth-first search is employed for policy optimization, ensuring continual enhancement in policy payoffs. Agent-Pro is evaluated across two games: Blackjack and Texas Hold'em, outperforming vanilla LLM and specialized models. Our results show Agent-Pro can learn and evolve in complex and dynamic scenes, which also benefits numerous LLM-based applications.

Fei Tang, Haolei Xu, Hang Zhang et al.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents have emerged as a transformative paradigm in human-computer interaction, evolving from rule-based automation scripts to sophisticated AI-driven systems capable of understanding and executing complex interface operations. This survey provides a comprehensive examination of the rapidly advancing field of LLM-based GUI Agents, systematically analyzing their architectural foundations, technical components, and evaluation methodologies. We identify and analyze four fundamental components that constitute modern GUI Agents: (1) perception systems that integrate text-based parsing with multimodal understanding for comprehensive interface comprehension; (2) exploration mechanisms that construct and maintain knowledge bases through internal modeling, historical experience, and external information retrieval; (3) planning frameworks that leverage advanced reasoning methodologies for task decomposition and execution; and (4) interaction systems that manage action generation with robust safety controls. Through rigorous analysis of these components, we reveal how recent advances in large language models and multimodal learning have revolutionized GUI automation across desktop, mobile, and web platforms. We critically examine current evaluation frameworks, highlighting methodological limitations in existing benchmarks while proposing directions for standardization. This survey also identifies key technical challenges, including accurate element localization, effective knowledge retrieval, long-horizon planning, and safety-aware execution control, while outlining promising research directions for enhancing GUI Agents' capabilities. Our systematic review provides researchers and practitioners with a thorough understanding of the field's current state and offers insights into future developments in intelligent interface automation.

Haoran Zhao, Yuchen Yan, Yongliang Shen et al.

Large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have significantly enhanced their reasoning capabilities by generating longer chains of thought, demonstrating outstanding performance across a variety of tasks. However, this performance gain comes at the cost of a substantial increase in redundant reasoning during the generation process, leading to high computational overhead and exacerbating the issue of overthinking. Although numerous existing approaches aim to address the problem of overthinking, they often rely on external interventions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Self-Braking Tuning (SBT), which tackles overthinking from the perspective of allowing the model to regulate its own reasoning process, thus eliminating the reliance on external control mechanisms. We construct a set of overthinking identification metrics based on standard answers and design a systematic method to detect redundant reasoning. This method accurately identifies unnecessary steps within the reasoning trajectory and generates training signals for learning self-regulation behaviors. Building on this foundation, we develop a complete strategy for constructing data with adaptive reasoning lengths and introduce an innovative braking prompt mechanism that enables the model to naturally learn when to terminate reasoning at an appropriate point. Experiments across mathematical benchmarks (AIME, AMC, MATH500, GSM8K) demonstrate that our method reduces token consumption by up to 60% while maintaining comparable accuracy to unconstrained models.

Mingqian He, Yongliang Shen, Wenqi Zhang et al.

Generating step-by-step "chain-of-thought" rationales has proven effective for improving the performance of large language models on complex reasoning tasks. However, applying such techniques to structured tasks, such as text-to-SQL, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Self-Taught Reasoner for text-to-SQL (STaR-SQL), a novel approach that reframes SQL query generation as a reasoning-driven process. Our method prompts the LLM to produce detailed reasoning steps for SQL queries and fine-tunes it on rationales that lead to correct outcomes. Unlike traditional methods, STaR-SQL dedicates additional test-time computation to reasoning, thereby positioning LLMs as spontaneous reasoners rather than mere prompt-based agents. To further scale the inference process, we incorporate an outcome-supervised reward model (ORM) as a verifier, which enhances SQL query accuracy. Experimental results on the challenging Spider benchmark demonstrate that STaR-SQL significantly improves text-to-SQL performance, achieving an execution accuracy of 86.6%. This surpasses a few-shot baseline by 31.6% and a baseline fine-tuned to predict answers directly by 18.0%. Additionally, STaR-SQL outperforms agent-like prompting methods that leverage more powerful yet closed-source models such as GPT-4. These findings underscore the potential of reasoning-augmented training for structured tasks and open the door to extending self-improving reasoning models to text-to-SQL generation and beyond.

Shangke Lyu, Linjuan Wu, Yuchen Yan et al.

Large reasoning models achieve remarkable performance through extensive chain-of-thought generation, yet they suffer from a critical inefficiency: applying uniformly extensive reasoning regardless of problem complexity. We present Hierarchical Budget Policy Optimization (HBPO), a reinforcement learning framework that enables models to learn problem-specific reasoning depths without sacrificing capability. Unlike existing approaches that impose rigid constraints or rely on discrete mode selection, HBPO partitions the exploration space into budget-constrained hierarchies (512-2560 tokens), each with differentiated reward structures that preserve both efficiency incentives and reasoning capabilities. This design addresses a fundamental challenge in efficient reasoning training: traditional length penalties systematically bias models away from necessary long reasoning paths, causing exploration space collapse. Through hierarchical sampling and budget-aware rewards, HBPO maintains exploration diversity while teaching models to recognize when extended deliberation is warranted. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HBPO reduces average token usage by up to 60.6% while improving accuracy by 3.14% across four reasoning benchmarks. Most notably, HBPO exhibits emergent adaptive behavior where models automatically adjust reasoning depth based on problem complexity. Our results suggest that reasoning efficiency and capability are not inherently conflicting, and can be simultaneously optimized through appropriately structured hierarchical training that preserves exploration diversity.

Xuan Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Zhe Zheng et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tool learning. In real-world scenarios, user queries are often ambiguous and incomplete, requiring effective clarification. However, existing interactive clarification approaches face two critical limitations: reliance on manually constructed datasets, which inherently constrains training data scale and diversity, and lack of error correction mechanisms during multi-turn clarification, leading to error accumulation that compromises both accuracy and efficiency. We present AskToAct, which addresses these challenges by exploiting the structural mapping between queries and their tool invocation solutions. Our key insight is that tool parameters naturally represent explicit user intents. By systematically removing key parameters from queries while retaining them as ground truth, we enable automated construction of high-quality training data. We further enhance model robustness through error-correction pairs and selective masking, enabling dynamic error detection during clarification interactions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that AskToAct significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving above 57% accuracy in recovering critical unspecified intents and enhancing clarification efficiency by an average of 10.46% while maintaining high accuracy in tool invocation. Our framework exhibits robust performance across different model architectures and successfully generalizes to entirely unseen APIs without additional training, achieving performance comparable to GPT-4o with substantially fewer computational resources.

Haolei Xu, Xinyu Mei, Yuchen Yan et al.

Large language model (LLM) steering has emerged as a promising paradigm for controlling model behavior at inference time through targeted manipulation of hidden states, offering a lightweight alternative to expensive retraining. However, existing steering frameworks suffer from critical limitations: computational inefficiency, limited extensibility, and restricted functionality that hinder both research progress and practical deployment. We present EasySteer, a unified framework for high-performance, extensible LLM steering built on vLLM. Our system features modular architecture with pluggable interfaces for both analysis-based and learning-based methods, fine-grained parameter control, pre-computed steering vectors for eight application domains, and an interactive demonstration system. Through deep integration with vLLM's optimized inference engine, EasySteer achieves 5.5-11.4$\times$ speedup over existing frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in overthinking mitigation, hallucination reduction, and other key applications. EasySteer transforms steering from research technique to production-ready capability, establishing critical infrastructure for deployable, controllable language models.

Jialu Du, Guiyang Hou, Yihui Fu et al.

While large language models (LLMs) excel in mathematical and code reasoning, we observe they struggle with social reasoning tasks, exhibiting cognitive confusion, logical inconsistencies, and conflation between objective world states and subjective belief states. Through deteiled analysis of DeepSeek-R1's reasoning trajectories, we find that LLMs frequently encounter reasoning impasses and tend to output contradictory terms like "tricky" and "confused" when processing scenarios with multiple participants and timelines, leading to erroneous reasoning or infinite loops. The core issue is their inability to disentangle objective reality from agents' subjective beliefs. To address this, we propose an adaptive world model-enhanced reasoning mechanism that constructs a dynamic textual world model to track entity states and temporal sequences. It dynamically monitors reasoning trajectories for confusion indicators and promptly intervenes by providing clear world state descriptions, helping models navigate through cognitive dilemmas. The mechanism mimics how humans use implicit world models to distinguish between external events and internal beliefs. Evaluations on three social benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy (e.g., +10% in Hi-ToM) while reducing computational costs (up to 33.8% token reduction), offering a simple yet effective solution for deploying LLMs in social contexts.

Guiyang Hou, Xing Gao, Yuchuan Wu et al.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in IQ-related domains that require careful thinking, such as mathematics and coding. However, enhancing LLMs' cognitive development in social domains, particularly from a post-training perspective, remains underexplored. Recognizing that the social world follows a distinct timeline and requires a richer blend of cognitive modes (from intuitive reactions (System 1) and surface-level thinking to deliberate thinking (System 2)) than mathematics, which primarily relies on System 2 cognition (careful, step-by-step reasoning), we introduce Temporal-aware Hierarchical Cognitive Reinforcement Learning (TimeHC-RL) for enhancing LLMs' social intelligence. In our experiments, we systematically explore improving LLMs' social intelligence and validate the effectiveness of the TimeHC-RL method, through five other post-training paradigms and two test-time intervention paradigms on eight datasets with diverse data patterns. Experimental results reveal the superiority of our proposed TimeHC-RL method compared to the widely adopted System 2 RL method. It gives the 7B backbone model wings, enabling it to rival the performance of advanced models like DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-O3. Additionally, the systematic exploration from post-training and test-time interventions perspectives to improve LLMs' social intelligence has uncovered several valuable insights.

Fei Tang, Yongliang Shen, Hang Zhang et al.

Large language model-based explainable recommendation (LLM-based ER) systems show promise in generating human-like explanations for recommendations. However, they face challenges in modeling user-item collaborative preferences, personalizing explanations, and handling sparse user-item interactions. To address these issues, we propose GaVaMoE, a novel Gaussian-Variational Gated Mixture of Experts framework for explainable recommendation. GaVaMoE introduces two key components: (1) a rating reconstruction module that employs Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to capture complex user-item collaborative preferences, serving as a pre-trained multi-gating mechanism; and (2) a set of fine-grained expert models coupled with the multi-gating mechanism for generating highly personalized explanations. The VAE component models latent factors in user-item interactions, while the GMM clusters users with similar behaviors. Each cluster corresponds to a gate in the multi-gating mechanism, routing user-item pairs to appropriate expert models. This architecture enables GaVaMoE to generate tailored explanations for specific user types and preferences, mitigating data sparsity by leveraging user similarities. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GaVaMoE significantly outperforms existing methods in explanation quality, personalization, and consistency. Notably, GaVaMoE exhibits robust performance in scenarios with sparse user-item interactions, maintaining high-quality explanations even for users with limited historical data.

Mingqian He, Yongliang Shen, Wenqi Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling complex reasoning tasks by generating step-by-step rationales.Some methods have proven effective in boosting accuracy by introducing extra verifiers to assess these paths. However, existing verifiers, typically trained on binary-labeled reasoning paths, fail to fully utilize the relative merits of intermediate steps, thereby limiting the effectiveness of the feedback provided. To overcome this limitation, we propose Tree-based Preference Learning Verifier (Tree-PLV), a novel approach that constructs reasoning trees via a best-first search algorithm and collects step-level paired data for preference training. Compared to traditional binary classification, step-level preferences more finely capture the nuances between reasoning steps, allowing for a more precise evaluation of the complete reasoning path. We empirically evaluate Tree-PLV across a range of arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks, where it significantly outperforms existing benchmarks. For instance, Tree-PLV achieved substantial performance gains over the Mistral-7B self-consistency baseline on GSM8K (67.55% to 82.79%), MATH (17.00% to 26.80%), CSQA (68.14% to 72.97%), and StrategyQA (82.86% to 83.25%).Additionally, our study explores the appropriate granularity for applying preference learning, revealing that step-level guidance provides feedback that better aligns with the evaluation of the reasoning process.

Yongliang Shen, Zeqi Tan, Shuhui Wu et al.

Prompt learning is a new paradigm for utilizing pre-trained language models and has achieved great success in many tasks. To adopt prompt learning in the NER task, two kinds of methods have been explored from a pair of symmetric perspectives, populating the template by enumerating spans to predict their entity types or constructing type-specific prompts to locate entities. However, these methods not only require a multi-round prompting manner with a high time overhead and computational cost, but also require elaborate prompt templates, that are difficult to apply in practical scenarios. In this paper, we unify entity locating and entity typing into prompt learning, and design a dual-slot multi-prompt template with the position slot and type slot to prompt locating and typing respectively. Multiple prompts can be input to the model simultaneously, and then the model extracts all entities by parallel predictions on the slots. To assign labels for the slots during training, we design a dynamic template filling mechanism that uses the extended bipartite graph matching between prompts and the ground-truth entities. We conduct experiments in various settings, including resource-rich flat and nested NER datasets and low-resource in-domain and cross-domain datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves a significant performance improvement, especially in the cross-domain few-shot setting, which outperforms the state-of-the-art model by +7.7% on average.

Yongliang Shen, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan et al.

In this paper, we propose DiffusionNER, which formulates the named entity recognition task as a boundary-denoising diffusion process and thus generates named entities from noisy spans. During training, DiffusionNER gradually adds noises to the golden entity boundaries by a fixed forward diffusion process and learns a reverse diffusion process to recover the entity boundaries. In inference, DiffusionNER first randomly samples some noisy spans from a standard Gaussian distribution and then generates the named entities by denoising them with the learned reverse diffusion process. The proposed boundary-denoising diffusion process allows progressive refinement and dynamic sampling of entities, empowering DiffusionNER with efficient and flexible entity generation capability. Experiments on multiple flat and nested NER datasets demonstrate that DiffusionNER achieves comparable or even better performance than previous state-of-the-art models.

Wei Xue, Yongliang Shen, Wenqi Ren et al.

Taxonomy completion, enriching existing taxonomies by inserting new concepts as parents or attaching them as children, has gained significant interest. Previous approaches embed concepts as vectors in Euclidean space, which makes it difficult to model asymmetric relations in taxonomy. In addition, they introduce pseudo-leaves to convert attachment cases into insertion cases, leading to an incorrect bias in network learning dominated by numerous pseudo-leaves. Addressing these, our framework, TaxBox, leverages box containment and center closeness to design two specialized geometric scorers within the box embedding space. These scorers are tailored for insertion and attachment operations and can effectively capture intrinsic relationships between concepts by optimizing on a granular box constraint loss. We employ a dynamic ranking loss mechanism to balance the scores from these scorers, allowing adaptive adjustments of insertion and attachment scores. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that TaxBox significantly outperforms previous methods, yielding substantial improvements over prior methods in real-world datasets, with average performance boosts of 6.7%, 34.9%, and 51.4% in MRR, Hit@1, and Prec@1, respectively.