BoWen Yan

Bowen Yan, Zhengsong Zhang, Liqiang Jing et al.

The rapid development of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often comes with widespread hallucination issues, making cost-effective and comprehensive assessments increasingly vital. Current approaches mainly rely on costly annotations and are not comprehensive -- in terms of evaluating all aspects such as relations, attributes, and dependencies between aspects. Therefore, we introduce the FIHA (autonomous Fine-graIned Hallucination evAluation evaluation in LVLMs), which could access hallucination LVLMs in the LLM-free and annotation-free way and model the dependency between different types of hallucinations. FIHA can generate Q&A pairs on any image dataset at minimal cost, enabling hallucination assessment from both image and caption. Based on this approach, we introduce a benchmark called FIHA-v1, which consists of diverse questions on various images from MSCOCO and Foggy. Furthermore, we use the Davidson Scene Graph (DSG) to organize the structure among Q&A pairs, in which we can increase the reliability of the evaluation. We evaluate representative models using FIHA-v1, highlighting their limitations and challenges. We released our code and data.

Zecheng Tang, Keyan Zhou, Juntao Li et al.

Text detoxification aims to minimize the risk of language models producing toxic content. Existing detoxification methods of directly constraining the model output or further training the model on the non-toxic corpus fail to achieve a decent balance between detoxification effectiveness and generation quality. This issue stems from the neglect of constrain imposed by the context since language models are designed to generate output that closely matches the context while detoxification methods endeavor to ensure the safety of the output even if it semantically deviates from the context. In view of this, we introduce a Context-aware Model self-Detoxification~(CMD) framework that pays attention to both the context and the detoxification process, i.e., first detoxifying the context and then making the language model generate along the safe context. Specifically, CMD framework involves two phases: utilizing language models to synthesize data and applying these data for training. We also introduce a toxic contrastive loss that encourages the model generation away from the negative toxic samples. Experiments on various LLMs have verified the effectiveness of our MSD framework, which can yield the best performance compared to baselines.

Jikai Wang, Juntao Li, Jianye Hou et al.

Large reasoning language models such as OpenAI-o1 and Deepseek-R1 have recently attracted widespread attention due to their impressive task-solving abilities. However, the enormous model size and the generation of lengthy thought chains introduce significant reasoning costs and response latency. Existing methods for efficient reasoning mainly focus on reducing the number of model parameters or shortening the chain-of-thought length. In this paper, we introduce Speculative Chain-of-Thought (SCoT), which reduces reasoning latency from another perspective by accelerated average reasoning speed through large and small model collaboration. SCoT conducts thought-level drafting using a lightweight draft model. Then it selects the best CoT draft and corrects the error cases with the target model. The proposed thinking behavior alignment improves the efficiency of drafting and the draft selection strategy maintains the prediction accuracy of the target model for complex tasks. Experimental results on GSM8K, MATH, GaoKao, CollegeMath and Olympiad datasets show that SCoT reduces reasoning latency by 48\%$\sim$66\% and 21\%$\sim$49\% for Deepseek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and Deepseek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B while achieving near-target-model-level performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jikai0Wang/Speculative_CoT.

Yuyang Ding, Juntao Li, Pinzheng Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for generalizing in unseen tasks. In the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task, recent advancements have seen the remarkable improvement of LLMs in a broad range of entity domains via instruction tuning, by adopting entity-centric schema. In this work, we explore the potential enhancement of the existing methods by incorporating negative instances into training. Our experiments reveal that negative instances contribute to remarkable improvements by (1) introducing contextual information, and (2) clearly delineating label boundaries. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient longest common subsequence (LCS) matching algorithm, which is tailored to transform unstructured predictions into structured entities. By integrating these components, we present GNER, a Generative NER system that shows improved zero-shot performance across unseen entity domains. Our comprehensive evaluation illustrates our system's superiority, surpassing state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods by 9 $F_1$ score in zero-shot evaluation.

Jiahao Xiao, Jianbo Zhang, BoWen Yan et al.

Embodied intelligence is advancing rapidly, driving the need for efficient evaluation. Current benchmarks typically rely on interactive simulated environments or real-world setups, which are costly, fragmented, and hard to scale. To address this, we introduce StaticEmbodiedBench, a plug-and-play benchmark that enables unified evaluation using static scene representations. Covering 42 diverse scenarios and 8 core dimensions, it supports scalable and comprehensive assessment through a simple interface. Furthermore, we evaluate 19 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and 11 Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs), establishing the first unified static leaderboard for Embodied intelligence. Moreover, we release a subset of 200 samples from our benchmark to accelerate the development of embodied intelligence.

Jingyuan Yang, Bowen Yan, Rongjun Li et al.

Unsafe prompts pose significant safety risks to large language models (LLMs). Existing methods for detecting unsafe prompts rely on data-driven fine-tuning to train guardrail models, necessitating significant data and computational resources. In contrast, recent few-shot gradient-based methods emerge, requiring only few safe and unsafe reference prompts. A gradient-based approach identifies unsafe prompts by analyzing consistent patterns of the gradients of safety-critical parameters in LLMs. Although effective, its restriction to directional similarity (cosine similarity) introduces ``directional bias'', limiting its capability to identify unsafe prompts. To overcome this limitation, we introduce GradCoo, a novel gradient co-occurrence analysis method that expands the scope of safety-critical parameter identification to include unsigned gradient similarity, thereby reducing the impact of ``directional bias'' and enhancing the accuracy of unsafe prompt detection. Comprehensive experiments on the widely-used benchmark datasets ToxicChat and XStest demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared to existing methods. Moreover, we confirm the generalizability of GradCoo in detecting unsafe prompts across a range of LLM base models with various sizes and origins.

Yi Su, Yunpeng Tai, Yixin Ji et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an impressive capability known as In-context Learning (ICL), which enables them to acquire knowledge from textual demonstrations without the need for parameter updates. However, many studies have highlighted that the model's performance is sensitive to the choice of demonstrations, presenting a significant challenge for practical applications where we lack prior knowledge of user queries. Consequently, we need to construct an extensive demonstration pool and incorporate external databases to assist the model, leading to considerable time and financial costs. In light of this, some recent research has shifted focus towards zero-shot ICL, aiming to reduce the model's reliance on external information by leveraging their inherent generative capabilities. Despite the effectiveness of these approaches, the content generated by the model may be unreliable, and the generation process is time-consuming. To address these issues, we propose Demonstration Augmentation for In-context Learning (DAIL), which employs the model's previously predicted historical samples as demonstrations for subsequent ones. DAIL brings no additional inference cost and does not rely on the model's generative capabilities. Our experiments reveal that DAIL can significantly improve the model's performance over direct zero-shot inference and can even outperform few-shot ICL without any external information.

Bowen Yan, Jianxi Luo

In the information science literature, recent studies have used patent databases and patent classification information to construct network maps of patent technology classes. In such a patent technology map, almost all pairs of technology classes are connected, whereas most of the connections between them are extremely weak. This observation suggests the possibility of filtering the patent network map by removing weak links. However, removing links may reduce the explanatory power of the network on inventor or organization diversification. The network links may explain the patent portfolio diversification paths of inventors and inventing organizations. We measure the diversification explanatory power of the patent network map, and present a method to objectively choose an optimal trade-off between explanatory power and removing weak links. We show that this method can remove a degree of arbitrariness compared with previous filtering methods based on arbitrary thresholds, and also identify previous filtering methods that created filters outside the optimal trade-off. The filtered map aims to aid in network visualization analyses of the technological diversification of inventors, organizations and other innovation agents, and potential foresight analysis. Such applications to a prolific inventor (Leonard Forbes) and company (Google) are demonstrated.