Minda Hu

Jingyan Zhou, Minda Hu, Junan Li et al.

Making moral judgments is an essential step toward developing ethical AI systems. Prevalent approaches are mostly implemented in a bottom-up manner, which uses a large set of annotated data to train models based on crowd-sourced opinions about morality. These approaches have been criticized for overgeneralizing the moral stances of a limited group of annotators and lacking explainability. This work proposes a flexible top-down framework to steer (Large) Language Models (LMs) to perform moral reasoning with well-established moral theories from interdisciplinary research. The theory-guided top-down framework can incorporate various moral theories. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on datasets derived from moral theories. Furthermore, we show the alignment between different moral theories and existing morality datasets. Our analysis exhibits the potential and flaws in existing resources (models and datasets) in developing explainable moral judgment-making systems.

Ziliang Zhao, Zenan Xu, Shuting Wang et al.

Planning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) because such complex tasks require models to coordinate goals, constraints, resources, and long-term consequences into executable and verifiable solutions. Existing planning benchmarks, however, usually treat planning data as fixed collections of instances rather than controllable generation targets. This limits scenario coverage, ties difficulty to surface-level proxies rather than structural sources, and offers limited support for scalable generation, automatic verification, or planning-oriented training. We introduce PlanningBench, a framework for generating scalable, diverse, and verifiable planning data for both evaluation and training. PlanningBench starts from real planning scenarios and abstracts practical workflows into a structured taxonomy of more than 30 task types, subtasks, constraint families, and difficulty factors. Guided by this taxonomy, a constraint-driven synthesis pipeline instantiates self-contained planning problems with adaptive difficulty control, quality filtering, and instance-level verification checklists. This shifts planning data construction from fixed benchmark collection to controllable generation while preserving realistic task grounding. We use PlanningBench to evaluate open-source and closed-source frontier LLMs, and find that current models still struggle to produce complete solutions under coupled constraints. Beyond evaluation, reinforcement learning on verified PlanningBench data improves performance on unseen planning benchmarks and broader instruction-following tasks. Further analysis suggests that determinate or well-specified optimal solutions provide clearer reward signals and more stable training dynamics. Overall, PlanningBench provides a controllable source of planning data for diagnosing and improving generalizable planning abilities in LLMs.

Hongru Wang, Minda Hu, Yang Deng et al.

Open-domain dialogue system usually requires different sources of knowledge to generate more informative and evidential responses. However, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems either focus on a single knowledge source or overlook the dependency between multiple sources of knowledge, which may result in generating inconsistent or even paradoxical responses. To incorporate multiple knowledge sources and dependencies between them, we propose SAFARI, a novel framework that leverages the exceptional capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in planning, understanding, and incorporating under both supervised and unsupervised settings. Specifically, SAFARI decouples the knowledge grounding into multiple sources and response generation, which allows easy extension to various knowledge sources including the possibility of not using any sources. To study the problem, we construct a personalized knowledge-grounded dialogue dataset \textit{\textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{B}ehind \textbf{P}ersona}~(\textbf{KBP}), which is the first to consider the dependency between persona and implicit knowledge. Experimental results on the KBP dataset demonstrate that the SAFARI framework can effectively produce persona-consistent and knowledge-enhanced responses.

Hongru Wang, Huimin Wang, Lingzhi Wang et al.

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

Minda Hu, Muzhi Li, Yasheng Wang et al.

Existing pre-training methods for extractive Question Answering (QA) generate cloze-like queries different from natural questions in syntax structure, which could overfit pre-trained models to simple keyword matching. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel Momentum Contrastive pRe-training fOr queStion anSwering (MCROSS) method for extractive QA. Specifically, MCROSS introduces a momentum contrastive learning framework to align the answer probability between cloze-like and natural query-passage sample pairs. Hence, the pre-trained models can better transfer the knowledge learned in cloze-like samples to answering natural questions. Experimental results on three benchmarking QA datasets show that our method achieves noticeable improvement compared with all baselines in both supervised and zero-shot scenarios.

Dianzhi Yu, Vireo Zhang, Hongru Wang et al.

Achieving self-evolution in intelligent agents requires the continual accumulation of new knowledge across changing task sequences without forgetting previously acquired abilities. Existing approaches either internalize knowledge by updating model parameters, which induces catastrophic forgetting, or rely on external memory, which fails to genuinely enhance the model's intrinsic capabilities. We propose MoLEM, a generative mixture of latent memory framework based on a dynamic mixture-of-experts (MoE). We treat multiple experts as independent carriers to generate memory. A router selects and weights experts through key-query matching, and the aggregated latent memory is injected into the reasoning process. The base model for reasoning remains entirely frozen, with all experiential knowledge internalized into the additional modules, avoiding catastrophic forgetting. For continual learning, each training stage is paired with a lightweight autoencoder that selects the appropriate routing group at inference, and inputs that match no stage fall back to the pretrained model. Experiments train the framework on continual-learning sequences spanning math, science, and code domains. After training, we evaluate the framework on the corresponding test sets to measure task learning and competence preservation across continual adaptation stages. After the full continual-learning sequence, our method improves the average accuracy by 10.40% over the Vanilla pretrained baseline, while none of the competing methods consistently exceed this baseline across different training orders.

Jiahong Liu, Zexuan Qiu, Zhongyang Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in handling general knowledge tasks, yet they struggle with user-specific personalization, such as understanding individual emotions, writing styles, and preferences. Personalized Large Language Models (PLLMs) tackle these challenges by leveraging individual user data, such as user profiles, historical dialogues, content, and interactions, to deliver responses that are contextually relevant and tailored to each user's specific needs. This is a highly valuable research topic, as PLLMs can significantly enhance user satisfaction and have broad applications in conversational agents, recommendation systems, emotion recognition, medical assistants, and more. This survey reviews recent advancements in PLLMs from three technical perspectives: prompting for personalized context (input level), finetuning for personalized adapters (model level), and alignment for personalized preferences (objective level). To provide deeper insights, we also discuss current limitations and outline several promising directions for future research. Updated information about this survey can be found at the https://github.com/JiahongLiu21/Awesome-Personalized-Large-Language-Models.

Jingyan Zhou, Kun Li, Junan Li et al.

Existing efforts in safeguarding LLMs are limited in actively exposing the vulnerabilities of the target LLM and readily adapting to newly emerging safety risks. To address this, we present Purple-teaming LLMs with Adversarial Defender training (PAD), a pipeline designed to safeguard LLMs by novelly incorporating the red-teaming (attack) and blue-teaming (safety training) techniques. In PAD, we automatically collect conversational data that cover the vulnerabilities of an LLM around specific safety risks in a self-play manner, where the attacker aims to elicit unsafe responses and the defender generates safe responses to these attacks. We then update both modules in a generative adversarial network style by training the attacker to elicit more unsafe responses and updating the defender to identify them and explain the unsafe reason. Experimental results demonstrate that PAD significantly outperforms existing baselines in both finding effective attacks and establishing a robust safe guardrail. Furthermore, our findings indicate that PAD excels in striking a balance between safety and overall model quality. We also reveal key challenges in safeguarding LLMs, including defending multi-turn attacks and the need for more delicate strategies to identify specific risks.

Bowei He, Minda Hu, Zenan Xu et al.

Search-integrated reasoning enables language agents to transcend static parametric knowledge by actively querying external sources. However, training these agents via reinforcement learning is hindered by the multi-scale credit assignment problem: existing methods typically rely on sparse, trajectory-level rewards that fail to distinguish between high-quality reasoning and fortuitous guesses, leading to redundant or misleading search behaviors. To address this, we propose Search-R2, a novel Actor-Refiner collaboration framework that enhances reasoning through targeted intervention, with both components jointly optimized during training. Our approach decomposes the generation process into an Actor, which produces initial reasoning trajectories, and a Meta-Refiner, which selectively diagnoses and repairs flawed steps via a 'cut-and-regenerate' mechanism. To provide fine-grained supervision, we introduce a hybrid reward design that couples outcome correctness with a dense process reward quantifying the information density of retrieved evidence. Theoretically, we formalize the Actor-Refiner interaction as a smoothed mixture policy, proving that selective correction yields strict performance gains over strong baselines. Extensive experiments across various general and multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that Search-R2 consistently outperforms strong RAG and RL-based baselines across model scales, achieving superior reasoning accuracy with minimal overhead.

Wenhao Yu, Shaohang Wei, Jiahong Liu et al.

Token-level reweighting is a simple yet effective mechanism for controlling supervised fine-tuning, but common indicators are largely one-dimensional: the ground-truth probability reflects downstream alignment, while token entropy reflects intrinsic uncertainty induced by the pre-training prior. Ignoring entropy can misidentify noisy or easily replaceable tokens as learning-critical, while ignoring probability fails to reflect target-specific alignment. RankTuner introduces a probability--entropy calibration signal, the Relative Rank Indicator, which compares the rank of the ground-truth token with its expected rank under the prediction distribution. The inverse indicator is used as a token-wise Relative Scale to reweight the fine-tuning objective, focusing updates on truly under-learned tokens without over-penalizing intrinsically uncertain positions. Experiments on multiple backbones show consistent improvements on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, transfer gains on out-of-distribution reasoning, and pre code generation performance over probability-only or entropy-only reweighting baselines.

Boyang Xue, Qi Zhu, Rui Wang et al.

Although demonstrating remarkable performance on reasoning tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) still tend to fabricate unreliable responses when confronted with problems that are unsolvable or beyond their capability, severely undermining the reliability. Prior studies of LLM reliability have primarily focused on knowledge tasks to identify unanswerable questions, while mathematical reasoning tasks have remained unexplored due to the dearth of unsolvable math problems. To systematically investigate LLM reliability in mathematical reasoning tasks, we formulate the reliability evaluation for both solvable and unsolvable problems. We then develop a ReliableMath dataset which incorporates open-source solvable problems and high-quality unsolvable problems synthesized by our proposed construction workflow with human evaluations. Experiments are conducted on various LLMs with several key findings uncovered. LLMs fail to directly identify unsolvable problems and always generate fabricated responses. When instructing LLMs to indicate unsolvability using a reliable prompt, the reliability of larger-sized LLMs remains on solvable problems, but notably improves on unsolvable problems yet still falls short of solvable problems. However, small LLMs rarely show any progress despite employing reliable prompts. Therefore, we further propose an alignment strategy to enhance small LLMs' reliability, which can significantly improve LLM reliability performances on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks.

Zhihan Guo, Jiele Wu, Wenqian Cui et al.

Current research on long-form context in Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily focuses on the understanding of long-contexts, the Open-ended Long Text Generation (Open-LTG) remains insufficiently explored. Training a long-context generation model requires curation of gold standard reference data, which is typically nonexistent for informative Open-LTG tasks. However, previous methods only utilize general assessments as reward signals, which limits accuracy. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProxyReward, an innovative reinforcement learning (RL) based framework, which includes a dataset and a reward signal computation method. Firstly, ProxyReward Dataset generation is accomplished through simple prompts that enables the model to create automatically, obviating extensive labeled data or significant manual effort. Secondly, ProxyReward Signal offers a targeted evaluation of information comprehensiveness and accuracy for specific questions. The experimental results indicate that our method ProxyReward surpasses even GPT-4-Turbo. It can significantly enhance performance by 20% on the Open-LTG task when training widely used open-source models, while also surpassing the LLM-as-a-Judge approach. Our work presents effective methods to enhance the ability of LLMs to address complex open-ended questions posed by human.

Minda Hu, Zexuan Qiu, Zenan Xu et al.

Recent breakthroughs in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated that extensive Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation is critical for enabling intricate cognitive behaviors, such as self-verification and backtracking, to solve complex tasks. However, this capability often leads to ``overthinking'', where models generate redundant reasoning paths that inflate computational costs without improving accuracy. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on reasoning traces is a standard paradigm for the 'cold start' phase, applying existing compression techniques to these traces often compromises logical coherence or incurs prohibitive sampling costs. In this paper, we introduce ConMax (Confidence-Maximizing Compression), a novel reinforcement learning framework designed to automatically compress reasoning traces while preserving essential reasoning patterns. ConMax formulates compression as a reward-driven optimization problem, training a policy to prune redundancy by maximizing a weighted combination of answer confidence for predictive fidelity and thinking confidence for reasoning validity through a frozen auxiliary LRM. Extensive experiments across five reasoning datasets demonstrate that ConMax achieves a superior efficiency-performance trade-off. Specifically, it reduces inference length by 43% over strong baselines at the cost of a mere 0.7% dip in accuracy, proving its effectiveness in generating high-quality, efficient training data for LRMs.

Huan-ang Gao, Jiayi Geng, Wenyue Hua et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities but remain fundamentally static, unable to adapt their internal parameters to novel tasks, evolving knowledge domains, or dynamic interaction contexts. As LLMs are increasingly deployed in open-ended, interactive environments, this static nature has become a critical bottleneck, necessitating agents that can adaptively reason, act, and evolve in real time. This paradigm shift -- from scaling static models to developing self-evolving agents -- has sparked growing interest in architectures and methods enabling continual learning and adaptation from data, interactions, and experiences. This survey provides the first systematic and comprehensive review of self-evolving agents, organized around three foundational dimensions -- what to evolve, when to evolve, and how to evolve. We examine evolutionary mechanisms across agent components (e.g., models, memory, tools, architecture), categorize adaptation methods by stages (e.g., intra-test-time, inter-test-time), and analyze the algorithmic and architectural designs that guide evolutionary adaptation (e.g., scalar rewards, textual feedback, single-agent and multi-agent systems). Additionally, we analyze evaluation metrics and benchmarks tailored for self-evolving agents, highlight applications in domains such as coding, education, and healthcare, and identify critical challenges and research directions in safety, scalability, and co-evolutionary dynamics. By providing a structured framework for understanding and designing self-evolving agents, this survey establishes a roadmap for advancing adaptive agentic systems in both research and real-world deployments, ultimately shedding lights to pave the way for the realization of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), where agents evolve autonomously, performing at or beyond human-level intelligence across a wide array of tasks.

Shaoteng Liu, Haoqi Yuan, Minda Hu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in utilizing various tools by coding, yet they face limitations in handling intricate logic and precise control. In embodied tasks, high-level planning is amenable to direct coding, while low-level actions often necessitate task-specific refinement, such as Reinforcement Learning (RL). To seamlessly integrate both modalities, we introduce a two-level hierarchical framework, RL-GPT, comprising a slow agent and a fast agent. The slow agent analyzes actions suitable for coding, while the fast agent executes coding tasks. This decomposition effectively focuses each agent on specific tasks, proving highly efficient within our pipeline. Our approach outperforms traditional RL methods and existing GPT agents, demonstrating superior efficiency. In the Minecraft game, it rapidly obtains diamonds within a single day on an RTX3090. Additionally, it achieves SOTA performance across all designated MineDojo tasks.

Shihan Dou, Yujiong Shen, Chenhao Huang et al.

Today's AI assistants such as OpenClaw are designed to handle context effectively, making context learning an increasingly important capability for models. As these systems move beyond professional settings into everyday life, the nature of the contexts they must handle also shifts. Real-life contexts are often messy, fragmented, and deeply tied to personal and social experience, such as multi-party conversations, personal archives, and behavioral traces. Yet it remains unclear whether current frontier language models can reliably learn from such contexts and solve tasks grounded in them. To this end, we introduce CL-bench Life, a fully human-curated benchmark comprising 405 context-task pairs and 5,348 verification rubrics, covering common real-life scenarios. Solving tasks in CL-bench Life requires models to reason over complex, messy real-life contexts, calling for strong real-life context learning abilities that go far beyond those evaluated in existing benchmarks. We evaluate ten frontier LMs and find that real-life context learning remains highly challenging: even the best-performing model achieves only 19.3% task solving rate, while the average performance across models is only 13.8%. Models still struggle to reason over contexts such as messy group chat histories and fragmented behavioral records from everyday life. CL-bench Life provides a crucial testbed for advancing real-life context learning, and progress on it can enable more intelligent and reliable AI assistants in everyday life.

Muzhi Li, Minda Hu, Irwin King et al.

The Knowledge Graph Entity Typing (KGET) task aims to predict missing type annotations for entities in knowledge graphs. Recent works only utilize the \textit{\textbf{structural knowledge}} in the local neighborhood of entities, disregarding \textit{\textbf{semantic knowledge}} in the textual representations of entities, relations, and types that are also crucial for type inference. Additionally, we observe that the interaction between semantic and structural knowledge can be utilized to address the false-negative problem. In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{\underline{S}}emantic and \textbf{\underline{S}}tructure-aware KG \textbf{\underline{E}}ntity \textbf{\underline{T}}yping~{(SSET)} framework, which is composed of three modules. First, the \textit{Semantic Knowledge Encoding} module encodes factual knowledge in the KG with a Masked Entity Typing task. Then, the \textit{Structural Knowledge Aggregation} module aggregates knowledge from the multi-hop neighborhood of entities to infer missing types. Finally, the \textit{Unsupervised Type Re-ranking} module utilizes the inference results from the two models above to generate type predictions that are robust to false-negative samples. Extensive experiments show that SSET significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Shizhan Gong, Minda Hu, Qiyuan Zhang et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks. However, concerns about their trustworthiness persist, particularly regarding tendencies to lean more on textual cues than visual evidence and the risk of producing ungrounded or fabricated responses. To address these issues, we propose Saliency-R1, a framework for improving the interpretability and faithfulness of VLMs reasoning. Specifically, we introduce a novel saliency map technique that efficiently highlights critical image regions contributing to generated tokens without additional computational overhead. This can further be extended to trace how visual information flows through the reasoning process to the final answers, revealing the alignment between the thinking process and the visual context. We use the overlap between the saliency maps and human-annotated bounding boxes as the reward function, and apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to align the salient parts and critical regions, encouraging models to focus on relevant areas when conduct reasoning. Experiments show Saliency-R1 improves reasoning faithfulness, interpretability, and overall task performance.

Minda Hu, Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang et al.

As a crucial step to enhance LLMs alignment with human intentions, Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) has a high demand on dataset quality. However, existing IFT datasets often contain knowledge that is inconsistent with LLMs' internal knowledge learned from the pre-training phase, which can greatly affect the efficacy of IFT. To address this issue, we introduce NILE (iNternal consIstency aLignmEnt) framework, aimed at optimizing IFT datasets to unlock LLMs' capability further. NILE operates by eliciting target pre-trained LLM's internal knowledge corresponding to instruction data. The internal knowledge is leveraged to revise the answer in IFT datasets. Additionally, we propose a novel Internal Consistency Filtering (ICF) method to filter training samples, ensuring its high consistency with LLM's internal knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate that NILE-aligned IFT datasets sharply boost LLM performance across multiple LLM ability evaluation datasets, achieving up to 66.6% gain on Arena-Hard and 68.5% on Alpaca-Eval V2. Further analysis confirms that each component of the NILE}framework contributes to these substantial performance improvements, and provides compelling evidence that dataset consistency with pre-trained internal knowledge is pivotal for maximizing LLM potential.

Minda Hu, Bowei He, Yufei Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, they are prone to generating fluent yet untruthful responses, known as "hallucinations". Hallucinations can lead to the spread of misinformation and cause harm in critical applications. Mitigating hallucinations is challenging as they arise from factors such as noisy data, model overconfidence, lack of knowledge, and the generation process itself. Recent efforts have attempted to address this issue through representation editing and decoding algorithms, reducing hallucinations without major structural changes or retraining. However, these approaches either implicitly edit LLMs' behavior in latent space or suppress the tendency to output unfaithful results during decoding instead of explicitly modeling on hallucination. In this work, we introduce Faithful Finetuning (F2), a novel method that explicitly models the process of faithful question answering through carefully designed loss functions during fine-tuning. We conduct extensive experiments on popular datasets and demonstrate that F2 achieves significant improvements over vanilla models and baselines.

Minda Hu, Licheng Zong, Hongru Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in the biomedical domain with the advancement of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, existing retrieval-augmented approaches face challenges in addressing diverse queries and documents, particularly for medical knowledge queries, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel plug-and-play LLM-based retrieval method called Self-Rewarding Tree Search (SeRTS) based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and a self-rewarding paradigm. By combining the reasoning capabilities of LLMs with the effectiveness of tree search, SeRTS boosts the zero-shot performance of retrieving high-quality and informative results for RAG. We further enhance retrieval performance by fine-tuning LLMs with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) objectives using the trajectories collected by SeRTS as feedback. Controlled experiments using the BioASQ-QA dataset with GPT-3.5-Turbo and LLama2-7b demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of the BM25 retriever and surpasses the strong baseline of self-reflection in both efficiency and scalability. Moreover, SeRTS generates higher-quality feedback for PPO training than self-reflection. Our proposed method effectively adapts LLMs to document retrieval tasks, enhancing their ability to retrieve highly relevant documents for RAG in the context of medical knowledge queries. This work presents a significant step forward in leveraging LLMs for accurate and comprehensive biomedical question answering.