Jingtong Wu

Tao Tan, Yining Qian, Ang Lv et al.

Large language models (LLMs) enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have introduced a new paradigm for web search. However, the limited context awareness of LLMs degrades their performance on RAG tasks. Existing methods to enhance context awareness are often inefficient, incurring time or memory overhead during inference, and many are tailored to specific position embeddings. In this paper, we propose Position-Embedding-Agnostic attention Re-weighting (PEAR), which enhances the context awareness of LLMs with zero inference overhead. Specifically, on a proxy task focused on context copying, we first detect heads which suppress the models' context awareness thereby diminishing RAG performance. To weaken the impact of these heads, we re-weight their outputs with learnable coefficients. The LLM (with frozen parameters) is optimized by adjusting these coefficients to minimize loss on the proxy task. As a result, the coefficients are optimized to values less than one, thereby reducing their tendency to suppress RAG performance. During inference, the optimized coefficients are fixed to re-weight these heads, regardless of the specific task at hand. Our proposed PEAR offers two major advantages over previous approaches: (1) It introduces zero additional inference overhead in terms of memory usage or inference time, while outperforming competitive baselines in accuracy and efficiency across various RAG tasks. (2) It is independent of position embedding algorithms, ensuring broader applicability.

Linghua Zhang, Jun Wang, Jingtong Wu et al.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have achieved notable success on short-horizon and highly structured tasks. However, their ability to maintain coherent decision-making over long horizons in realistic and dynamic environments remains an open challenge. We introduce RetailBench, a high-fidelity benchmark designed to evaluate long-horizon autonomous decision-making in realistic commercial scenarios, where agents must operate under stochastic demand and evolving external conditions. We further propose the Evolving Strategy & Execution framework, which separates high-level strategic reasoning from low-level action execution. This design enables adaptive and interpretable strategy evolution over time. It is particularly important for long-horizon tasks, where non-stationary environments and error accumulation require strategies to be revised at a different temporal scale than action execution. Experiments on eight state-of-the-art LLMs across progressively challenging environments show that our framework improves operational stability and efficiency compared to other baselines. However, performance degrades substantially as task complexity increases, revealing fundamental limitations in current LLMs for long-horizon, multi-factor decision-making.

Shiyu Ni, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo et al.

Honesty alignment-the ability of large language models (LLMs) to recognize their knowledge boundaries and express calibrated confidence-is essential for trustworthy deployment. Existing methods either rely on training-free confidence estimation (e.g., token probabilities, self-consistency) or training-based calibration with correctness annotations. While effective, achieving universal honesty alignment with training-based calibration requires costly, large-scale labeling. To support annotation-efficient training, we introduce Elicitation-Then-Calibration (EliCal), a two-stage framework that first elicits internal confidence using inexpensive self-consistency supervision, then calibrates this confidence with a small set of correctness annotations. To support a large-scale study, we release HonestyBench, a benchmark covering ten free-form QA datasets with 560k training and 70k evaluation instances annotated with correctness and self-consistency signals. Experiments show that EliCal achieves near-optimal alignment with only 1k correctness annotations (0.18% of full supervision) and better alignment performance on unseen MMLU tasks than the calibration-only baseline, offering a scalable solution toward universal honesty alignment in LLMs.