Shizhu He

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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}.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Zhiyuan Fan, Shizhu He

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) is a fundamental yet challenging task in Natural Language Processing, which involves extracting all triples (subject, predicate, object) from a given sentence. While labeling-based methods have their merits, generation-based techniques offer unique advantages, such as the ability to generate tokens not present in the original sentence. However, these generation-based methods often require a significant amount of training data to learn the task form of OpenIE and substantial training time to overcome slow model convergence due to the order penalty. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, OK-IE, that ingeniously transforms the task form of OpenIE into the pre-training task form of the T5 model, thereby reducing the need for extensive training data. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative concept of Anchor to control the sequence of model outputs, effectively eliminating the impact of order penalty on model convergence and significantly reducing training time. Experimental results indicate that, compared to previous SOTA methods, OK-IE requires only 1/100 of the training data (900 instances) and 1/120 of the training time (3 minutes) to achieve comparable results.

Fangyu Lei, Jinxiang Meng, Yiming Huang et al.

Real-world enterprise data intelligence workflows encompass data engineering that turns raw sources into analytical-ready tables and data analysis that convert those tables into decision-oriented insights. We introduce DAComp, a benchmark of 210 tasks that mirrors these complex workflows. Data engineering (DE) tasks require repository-level engineering on industrial schemas, including designing and building multi-stage SQL pipelines from scratch and evolving existing systems under evolving requirements. Data analysis (DA) tasks pose open-ended business problems that demand strategic planning, exploratory analysis through iterative coding, interpretation of intermediate results, and the synthesis of actionable recommendations. Engineering tasks are scored through execution-based, multi-metric evaluation. Open-ended tasks are assessed by a reliable, experimentally validated LLM-judge, which is guided by hierarchical, meticulously crafted rubrics. Our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art agents falter on DAComp. Performance on DE tasks is particularly low, with success rates under 20%, exposing a critical bottleneck in holistic pipeline orchestration, not merely code generation. Scores on DA tasks also average below 40%, highlighting profound deficiencies in open-ended reasoning and demonstrating that engineering and analysis are distinct capabilities. By clearly diagnosing these limitations, DAComp provides a rigorous and realistic testbed to drive the development of truly capable autonomous data agents for enterprise settings. Our data and code are available at https://da-comp.github.io

Jiaheng Liu, Dawei Zhu, Zhiqi Bai et al. · pku

Efficient processing of long contexts has been a persistent pursuit in Natural Language Processing. With the growing number of long documents, dialogues, and other textual data, it is important to develop Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) that can process and analyze extensive inputs in an effective and efficient way. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in long-context modeling for large language models. Our survey is structured around three key aspects: how to obtain effective and efficient LCLMs, how to train and deploy LCLMs efficiently, and how to evaluate and analyze LCLMs comprehensively. For the first aspect, we discuss data strategies, architectural designs, and workflow approaches oriented with long context processing. For the second aspect, we provide a detailed examination of the infrastructure required for LCLM training and inference. For the third aspect, we present evaluation paradigms for long-context comprehension and long-form generation, as well as behavioral analysis and mechanism interpretability of LCLMs. Beyond these three key aspects, we thoroughly explore the diverse application scenarios where existing LCLMs have been deployed and outline promising future development directions. This survey provides an up-to-date review of the literature on long-context LLMs, which we wish to serve as a valuable resource for both researchers and engineers. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: \href{https://github.com/LCLM-Horizon/A-Comprehensive-Survey-For-Long-Context-Language-Modeling}{\color[RGB]{175,36,67}{LCLM-Horizon}}.

Yuqiao Tan, Minzheng Wang, Bo Liu et al.

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances LLM reasoning by optimizing the conditional distribution P(y|x), its potential is fundamentally bounded by the base model's existing output distribution. Optimizing the marginal distribution P(y) in the Pre-train Space addresses this bottleneck by encoding reasoning ability and preserving broad exploration capacity. Yet, conventional pre-training relies on static corpora for passive learning, leading to a distribution shift that hinders targeted reasoning enhancement. In this paper, we introduce PreRL (Pre-train Space RL), which applies reward-driven online updates directly to P(y). We theoretically and empirically validate the strong gradient alignment between log P(y) and log P(y|x), establishing PreRL as a viable surrogate for standard RL. Furthermore, we uncover a critical mechanism: Negative Sample Reinforcement (NSR) within PreRL serves as an exceptionally effective driver for reasoning. NSR-PreRL rapidly prunes incorrect reasoning spaces while stimulating endogenous reflective behaviors, increasing transition and reflection thoughts by 14.89x and 6.54x, respectively. Leveraging these insights, we propose Dual Space RL (DSRL), a Policy Reincarnation strategy that initializes models with NSR-PreRL to expand the reasoning horizon before transitioning to standard RL for fine-grained optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSRL consistently outperforms strong baselines, proving that pre-train space pruning effectively steers the policy toward a refined correct reasoning subspace.

Yixuan Weng, Shizhu He, Kang Liu et al.

As language models continue to scale in size and capability, they display an array of emerging behaviors, both beneficial and concerning. This heightens the need to control model behaviors. We hope to be able to control the personality traits of language models at the inference-time so as to have various character features, on top of which the requirements of different types of tasks can be met. Personality is a higher-level and more abstract behavioral representation for language models. We introduce ControlLM, which leverages differential activation patterns, derived from contrasting behavioral prompts in the model's latent space, to influence the model's personality traits at inference. This approach allows for the precise, real-time adjustment of model behavior. First, we demonstrate ControlLM's capacity to elicit diverse persona behaviors without any training, while precision control allows personality traits to closely match average human values. Subsequently, we showcase improved reasoning and question answering through selective amplification of beneficial attributes like conscientiousness and friendliness. We hope that this work will inspire research on controlling human-like behaviors of language models and provide insights for future research. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/wengsyx/ControlLM.

Jinxiang Meng, Shaoping Huang, Fangyu Lei et al.

Real-world data visualization (DV) requires native environmental grounding, cross-platform evolution, and proactive intent alignment. Yet, existing benchmarks often suffer from code-sandbox confinement, single-language creation-only tasks, and assumption of perfect intent. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DV-World, a benchmark of 260 tasks designed to evaluate DV agents across real-world professional lifecycles. DV-World spans three domains: DV-Sheet for native spreadsheet manipulation including chart and dashboard creation as well as diagnostic repair; DV-Evolution for adapting and restructuring reference visual artifacts to fit new data across diverse programming paradigms and DV-Interact for proactive intent alignment with a user simulator that mimics real-world ambiguous requirements. Our hybrid evaluation framework integrates Table-value Alignment for numerical precision and MLLM-as-a-Judge with rubrics for semantic-visual assessment. Experiments reveal that state-of-the-art models achieve less than 50% overall performance, exposing critical deficits in handling the complex challenges of real-world data visualization. DV-World provides a realistic testbed to steer development toward the versatile expertise required in enterprise workflows. Our data and code are available at \href{https://github.com/DA-Open/DV-World}{this project page}.

Yuqiao Tan, Shizhu He, Huanxuan Liao et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by retrieving relevant documents from external sources and incorporating them into the context. While it improves reliability by providing factual texts, it significantly increases inference costs as context length grows and introduces challenging issue of RAG hallucination, primarily caused by the lack of corresponding parametric knowledge in LLMs. An efficient solution is to enhance the knowledge of LLMs at test-time. Parametric RAG (PRAG) addresses this by embedding document into LLMs parameters to perform test-time knowledge enhancement, effectively reducing inference costs through offline training. However, its high training and storage costs, along with limited generalization ability, significantly restrict its practical adoption. To address these challenges, we propose Dynamic Parametric RAG (DyPRAG), a novel framework that leverages a lightweight parameter translator model to efficiently convert documents into parametric knowledge. DyPRAG not only reduces inference, training, and storage costs but also dynamically generates parametric knowledge, seamlessly enhancing the knowledge of LLMs and resolving knowledge conflicts in a plug-and-play manner at test-time. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization capabilities of DyPRAG, offering a powerful and practical RAG paradigm which enables superior knowledge fusion and mitigates RAG hallucination in real-world applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trae1ounG/DyPRAG.

Huanxuan Liao, Shizhu He, Yao Xu et al.

Retrieval-Augmented-Generation and Generation-Augmented-Generation have been proposed to enhance the knowledge required for question answering with Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging richer context. However, the former relies on external resources, and both require incorporating explicit documents into the context, which increases execution costs and susceptibility to noise data during inference. Recent works indicate that LLMs model rich knowledge, but it is often not effectively activated and awakened. Inspired by this, we propose a novel knowledge-augmented framework, $\textbf{Awakening-Augmented-Generation}$ (AAG), which mimics the human ability to answer questions using only thinking and recalling to compensate for knowledge gaps, thereby awaking relevant knowledge in LLMs without relying on external resources. AAG consists of two key components for awakening richer context. Explicit awakening fine-tunes a context generator to create a synthetic, compressed document that functions as symbolic context. Implicit awakening utilizes a hypernetwork to generate adapters based on the question and synthetic document, which are inserted into LLMs to serve as parameter context. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that AAG exhibits significant advantages in both open-domain and closed-book settings, as well as in out-of-distribution generalization. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/IAG}.

Qianren Mao, Shaobo Zhao, Jiarui Li et al.

Pre-trained sentence representations are crucial for identifying significant sentences in unsupervised document extractive summarization. However, the traditional two-step paradigm of pre-training and sentence-ranking, creates a gap due to differing optimization objectives. To address this issue, we argue that utilizing pre-trained embeddings derived from a process specifically designed to optimize cohensive and distinctive sentence representations helps rank significant sentences. To do so, we propose a novel graph pre-training auto-encoder to obtain sentence embeddings by explicitly modelling intra-sentential distinctive features and inter-sentential cohesive features through sentence-word bipartite graphs. These pre-trained sentence representations are then utilized in a graph-based ranking algorithm for unsupervised summarization. Our method produces predominant performance for unsupervised summarization frameworks by providing summary-worthy sentence representations. It surpasses heavy BERT- or RoBERTa-based sentence representations in downstream tasks.

Yuqiao Tan, Shizhu He, Kang Liu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a transparent brain with accessible parameters that encode extensive knowledge, which can be analyzed, located and transferred. Consequently, a key research challenge is to transcend traditional knowledge transfer paradigms rooted in symbolic language and achieve genuine Parametric Knowledge Transfer (PKT). Significantly, exploring effective methods for transferring knowledge across LLMs of different scales through parameters presents an intriguing and valuable research direction. In this paper, we first demonstrate $\textbf{Alignment}$ in parametric space is the fundamental prerequisite to achieve successful cross-scale PKT. We redefine the previously explored knowledge transfer as Post-Align PKT (PostPKT), which utilizes extracted parameters for LoRA initialization and requires subsequent fine-tune for alignment. Hence, to reduce cost for further fine-tuning, we introduce a novel Pre-Align PKT (PrePKT) paradigm and propose a solution called $\textbf{LaTen}$ ($\textbf{L}$oc$\textbf{a}$te-$\textbf{T}$h$\textbf{e}$n-Alig$\textbf{n}$) that aligns the parametric spaces of LLMs across scales only using several training steps without following training. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that both PostPKT and PrePKT face challenges in achieving consistently stable transfer. Through in-depth analysis, we identify $\textbf{Neural Incompatibility}$ as the ethological and parametric structural differences between LLMs of varying scales, presenting fundamental challenges to achieving effective PKT. These findings provide fresh insights into the parametric architectures of LLMs and highlight promising directions for future research on efficient PKT. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trae1ounG/Neural_Incompatibility.

Jianwen Luo, Yiming Huang, Jinxiang Meng et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in tool-making, yet existing frameworks often struggle to efficiently construct reliable toolsets and are limited to single-task settings. To address these challenges, we propose GATE (Graph-based Adaptive Tool Evolution), an adaptive framework that dynamically constructs and evolves a hierarchical graph of reusable tools across multiple scenarios. We evaluate GATE on open-ended tasks (Minecraft), agent-based tasks (TextCraft, DABench), and code generation tasks (MATH, Date, TabMWP). Our results show that GATE achieves up to 4.3x faster milestone completion in Minecraft compared to the previous SOTA, and provides an average improvement of 9.23% over existing tool-making methods in code generation tasks and 10.03% in agent tasks. GATE demonstrates the power of adaptive evolution, balancing tool quantity, complexity, and functionality while maintaining high efficiency. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/ayanami2003/GATE}.

Yuqiao Tan, Shizhu He, Kang Liu et al.

Reasoning models have demonstrated exceptional performance in tasks such as mathematics and logical reasoning, primarily due to their ability to engage in step-by-step thinking during the reasoning process. However, this often leads to overthinking, resulting in unnecessary computational overhead. To address this issue, Mode Selection aims to automatically decide between Long-CoT (Chain-of-Thought) or Short-CoT by utilizing either a Thinking or NoThinking mode. Simultaneously, Early Exit determines the optimal stopping point during the iterative reasoning process. Both methods seek to reduce the computational burden. In this paper, we first identify Mode Selection as a more challenging variant of the Early Exit problem, as they share similar objectives but differ in decision timing. While Early Exit focuses on determining the best stopping point for concise reasoning at inference time, Mode Selection must make this decision at the beginning of the reasoning process, relying on pre-defined fake thoughts without engaging in an explicit reasoning process, referred to as zero-step thinking. Through empirical studies on nine baselines, we observe that prompt-based approaches often fail due to their limited classification capabilities when provided with minimal hand-crafted information. In contrast, approaches that leverage internal information generally perform better across most scenarios but still exhibit issues with stability. Our findings indicate that existing methods relying solely on the information provided by models are insufficient for effectively addressing Mode Selection in scenarios with limited information, highlighting the ongoing challenges of this task. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trae1ounG/Zero_Step_Thinking.

Wangtao Sun, Xiang Cheng, Jialin Fan et al.

We study whether self-learning can scale LLM-based agents without relying on human-curated datasets or predefined rule-based rewards. Through controlled experiments in a search-agent setting, we identify two key determinants of scalable agent training: the source of reward signals and the scale of agent task data. We find that rewards from a Generative Reward Model (GRM) outperform rigid rule-based signals for open-domain learning, and that co-evolving the GRM with the policy further boosts performance. Increasing the volume of agent task data-even when synthetically generated-substantially enhances agentic capabilities. Building on these insights, we propose \textbf{Agentic Self-Learning} (ASL), a fully closed-loop, multi-role reinforcement learning framework that unifies task generation, policy execution, and evaluation within a shared tool environment and LLM backbone. ASL coordinates a Prompt Generator, a Policy Model, and a Generative Reward Model to form a virtuous cycle of harder task setting, sharper verification, and stronger solving. Empirically, ASL delivers steady, round-over-round gains, surpasses strong RLVR baselines (e.g., Search-R1) that plateau or degrade, and continues improving under zero-labeled-data conditions, indicating superior sample efficiency and robustness. We further show that GRM verification capacity is the main bottleneck: if frozen, it induces reward hacking and stalls progress; continual GRM training on the evolving data distribution mitigates this, and a small late-stage injection of real verification data raises the performance ceiling. This work establishes reward source and data scale as critical levers for open-domain agent learning and demonstrates the efficacy of multi-role co-evolution for scalable, self-improving agents. The data and code of this paper are released at https://github.com/forangel2014/Towards-Agentic-Self-Learning

Cunli Mao, Xiaofei Gao, Ran Song et al.

Large language models (LLMs) based Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion (MKGC) aim to predict missing facts by leveraging LLMs' multilingual understanding capabilities, improving the completeness of multilingual knowledge graphs (KGs). However, existing MKGC research underutilizes the multilingual capabilities of LLMs and ignores the shareability of cross-lingual knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel MKGC framework that leverages multilingual shared knowledge to significantly enhance performance through two components: Knowledge-level Grouped Mixture of Experts (KL-GMoE) and Iterative Entity Reranking (IER). KL-GMoE efficiently models shared knowledge, while IER significantly enhances its utilization. To evaluate our framework, we constructed a mKG dataset containing 5 languages and conducted comprehensive comparative experiments with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) MKGC method. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves improvements of 5.47%, 3.27%, and 1.01% in the Hits@1, Hits@3, and Hits@10 metrics, respectively, compared with SOTA MKGC method. Further experimental analysis revealed the properties of knowledge sharing in settings of unseen and unbalanced languages. We have released the dataset and code for our work on https://github.com/gaoxiaofei07/KL-GMoE.

Huanxuan Liao, Yixing Xu, Shizhu He et al.

Long-context inference in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by the KV cache bottleneck: memory usage grows linearly with sequence length, while attention computation scales quadratically. Existing approaches address this issue by compressing the KV cache along the temporal axis through strategies such as token eviction or merging to reduce memory and computational overhead. However, these methods often neglect fine-grained importance variations across feature dimensions (i.e., the channel axis), thereby limiting their ability to effectively balance efficiency and model accuracy. In reality, we observe that channel saliency varies dramatically across both queries and positions: certain feature channels carry near-zero information for a given query, while others spike in relevance. To address this oversight, we propose SPARK, a training-free plug-and-play method that applies unstructured sparsity by pruning KV at the channel level, while dynamically restoring the pruned entries during attention score computation. Notably, our approach is orthogonal to existing KV compression and quantization techniques, making it compatible for integration with them to achieve further acceleration. By reducing channel-level redundancy, SPARK enables processing of longer sequences within the same memory budget. For sequences of equal length, SPARK not only preserves or improves model accuracy but also reduces KV cache storage by over 30% compared to eviction-based methods. Furthermore, even with an aggressive pruning ratio of 80%, SPARK maintains performance with less degradation than 5% compared to the baseline eviction method, demonstrating its robustness and effectiveness. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/SparK.

Yixuan Weng, Bin Li, Fei Xia et al.

The medical conversational question answering (CQA) system aims at providing a series of professional medical services to improve the efficiency of medical care. Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks in various fields, such as mathematics, logic, and commonsense QA, they still need to improve with the increased complexity and specialization of the medical field. This is because medical CQA tasks require not only strong medical reasoning, but also the ability to think broadly and deeply. In this paper, to address these challenges in medical CQA tasks that need to be considered and understood in many aspects, we propose the Holistically Thought (HoT) method, which is designed to guide the LLMs to perform the diffused and focused thinking for generating high-quality medical responses. The proposed HoT method has been evaluated through automated and manual assessments in three different medical CQA datasets containing the English and Chinese languages. The extensive experimental results show that our method can produce more correctness, professional, and considerate answers than several state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, manifesting its effectiveness. Our code in https://github.com/WENGSYX/HoT.

Yixuan Weng, Fei Xia, Bin Li et al.

Scientific documents often contain a large number of acronyms. Disambiguation of these acronyms will help researchers better understand the meaning of vocabulary in the documents. In the past, thanks to large amounts of data from English literature, acronym task was mainly applied in English literature. However, for other low-resource languages, this task is difficult to obtain good performance and receives less attention due to the lack of large amount of annotation data. To address the above issue, this paper proposes an new method for acronym disambiguation, named as ADBCMM, which can significantly improve the performance of low-resource languages by building counterfactuals and multilingual mixing. Specifically, by balancing data bias in low-resource langauge, ADBCMM will able to improve the test performance outside the data set. In SDU@AAAI-22 - Shared Task 2: Acronym Disambiguation, the proposed method won first place in French and Spanish. You can repeat our results here https://github.com/WENGSYX/ADBCMM.

Yao Xu, Shizhu He, Jiabei Chen et al.

To address the issues of insufficient knowledge and hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs), numerous studies have explored integrating LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs). However, these methods are typically evaluated on conventional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) with complete KGs, where all factual triples required for each question are entirely covered by the given KG. In such cases, LLMs primarily act as an agent to find answer entities within the KG, rather than effectively integrating the internal knowledge of LLMs and external knowledge sources such as KGs. In fact, KGs are often incomplete to cover all the knowledge required to answer questions. To simulate these real-world scenarios and evaluate the ability of LLMs to integrate internal and external knowledge, we propose leveraging LLMs for QA under Incomplete Knowledge Graph (IKGQA), where the provided KG lacks some of the factual triples for each question, and construct corresponding datasets. To handle IKGQA, we propose a training-free method called Generate-on-Graph (GoG), which can generate new factual triples while exploring KGs. Specifically, GoG performs reasoning through a Thinking-Searching-Generating framework, which treats LLM as both Agent and KG in IKGQA. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that our GoG outperforms all previous methods.

Tongxu Luo, Jiahe Lei, Fangyu Lei et al.

Fine-tuning is often necessary to enhance the adaptability of Large Language Models (LLM) to downstream tasks. Nonetheless, the process of updating billions of parameters demands significant computational resources and training time, which poses a substantial obstacle to the widespread application of large-scale models in various scenarios. To address this issue, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a prominent paradigm in recent research. However, current PEFT approaches that employ a limited set of global parameters (such as LoRA, which adds low-rank approximation matrices to all weights) face challenges in flexibly combining different computational modules in downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce a novel PEFT method: MoELoRA. We consider LoRA as Mixture of Experts (MoE), and to mitigate the random routing phenomenon observed in MoE, we propose the utilization of contrastive learning to encourage experts to learn distinct features. We conducted experiments on 11 tasks in math reasoning and common-sense reasoning benchmarks. With the same number of parameters, our approach outperforms LoRA significantly. In math reasoning, MoELoRA achieved an average performance that was 4.2% higher than LoRA, and demonstrated competitive performance compared to the 175B GPT-3.5 on several benchmarks.

Shiqiang Cai, Nianhong Niu, Shizhu He et al.

Scientific literature is expanding at an unprecedented pace, making it increasingly challenging to efficiently organize and access domain knowledge. A high-quality scientific taxonomy offers a structured and hierarchical representation of a research field, facilitating literature exploration and topic navigation, as well as enabling downstream applications such as trend analysis, idea generation, and information retrieval. However, existing taxonomy generation approaches often suffer from structural inconsistencies and semantic misalignment across hierarchical levels. Through empirical analysis, we find that these issues largely stem from inadequate modeling of hierarchical semantic consistency. To address this limitation, we propose a semantic-consistent taxonomy generation (SC-Taxo) framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) with hierarchy-aware refinement stages to ensure semantic consistency. Specifically, SC-Taxo introduces a bidirectional heading generation mechanism that jointly performs bottom-up abstraction and top-down semantic constraint, while further capturing peer-level semantic dependencies to enhance horizontal consistency. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in hierarchy alignment and heading quality, and additional evaluation on Chinese scientific literature validates its robust cross-lingual generalization.

Wangtao Sun, Haotian Xu, Xuanqing Yu et al.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) are showing impressive performance on a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks, researchers have found that they still have limited ability to conduct induction. Recent works mainly adopt ``post processes'' paradigms to improve the performance of LLMs on induction (e.g., the hypothesis search & refinement methods), but their performance is still constrained by the inherent inductive capability of the LLMs. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Induction through Deduction (ItD), to enable the LLMs to teach themselves induction through deduction. The ItD framework is composed of two main components: a Deductive Data Generation module to generate induction data and a Naive Bayesian Induction module to optimize the fine-tuning and decoding of LLMs. Our empirical results showcase the effectiveness of ItD on two induction benchmarks, achieving relative performance improvement of 36% and 10% compared with previous state-of-the-art, respectively. Our ablation study verifies the effectiveness of two key modules of ItD. We also verify the effectiveness of ItD across different LLMs and deductors. The data and code of this paper can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ItD-E844.

Fangyu Lei, Jinxiang Meng, Yiming Huang et al.

Table reasoning, encompassing tasks such as table question answering, fact verification, and text-to-SQL, requires precise understanding of structured tabular data, coupled with numerical computation and code manipulation for effective inference. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approaches have achieved notable success but often struggle with generalization and robustness due to biases inherent in imitative learning. We introduce Reasoning-Table, the first application of reinforcement learning (RL) to table reasoning, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Through rigorous data preprocessing, reward design, and tailored training strategies, our method leverages simple rule-based outcome rewards to outperform SFT across multiple benchmarks. Unified training across diverse tasks enables Reasoning-Table to emerge as a robust table reasoning large language model, surpassing larger proprietary models like Claude-3.7-Sonnet by 4.0% on table reasoning benchmarks. The approach also achieves excellent performance on text-to-SQL tasks, reaching 68.3% performance on the BIRD dev dataset with a 7B model. Further experiments demonstrate that Reasoning-Table enhances the model's generalization capabilities and robustness.

Yuhong He, Yongqi Zhang, Shizhu He et al.

Medical dialogue generation (MDG) has gained increasing attention due to its substantial practical value. Previous works typically employ a sequence-to-sequence framework to generate medical responses by modeling dialogue context as sequential text with annotated medical entities. While these methods have been successful in generating fluent responses, they fail to provide process explanations of reasoning and require extensive entity annotation. To address these limitations, we propose the method Bootstrap Prompting for Explicit Reasoning in MDG (BP4ER), which explicitly model MDG's multi-step reasoning process and iteratively enhance this reasoning process. We employ a least-to-most prompting strategy to guide a large language model (LLM) in explicit reasoning, breaking down MDG into simpler sub-questions. These sub-questions build on answers from previous ones. Additionally, we also introduce two distinct bootstrapping techniques for prompting, which autonomously correct errors and facilitate the LLM's explicit reasoning. This approach eliminates the need for entity annotation and increases the transparency of the MDG process by explicitly generating the intermediate reasoning chain. The experimental findings on the two public datasets indicate that BP4ER outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both objective and subjective evaluation metrics.

Huanxuan Liao, Shizhu He, Yupu Hao et al.

Continual learning (CL) is essential for Large Language Models (LLMs) to adapt to evolving real-world demands, yet they are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting (CF). While traditional CF solutions rely on expensive data rehearsal, recent rehearsal-free methods employ model-based and regularization-based strategies to address this issue. However, these approaches often neglect the model's plasticity, which is crucial to achieving optimal performance on newly learned tasks. Consequently, a key challenge in CL is striking a balance between preserving plasticity and mitigating CF. To tackle this challenge, we propose the $\textbf{D}$ecomposed $\textbf{A}$ttention-based $\textbf{T}$ask $\textbf{A}$daptation (DATA), which explicitly decouples and learns both task-specific and task-shared knowledge using high-rank and low-rank task adapters (e.g., LoRAs). For new tasks, DATA dynamically adjusts the weights of adapters of different ranks based on their relevance and distinction from previous tasks, allowing the model to acquire new task-specific skills while effectively retaining previously learned knowledge. Specifically, we implement a decomposed component weighting strategy comprising learnable components that collectively generate attention-based weights, allowing the model to integrate and utilize diverse knowledge from each DATA. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our approach significantly enhances model plasticity and mitigates CF by extending learnable components and employing stochastic restoration during training iterations.

Xiang Li, Haiyang Yu, Xinghua Zhang et al.

Process Reward Models (PRMs) are crucial in complex reasoning and problem-solving tasks (e.g., LLM agents with long-horizon decision-making) by verifying the correctness of each intermediate reasoning step. In real-world scenarios, LLMs may apply various reasoning patterns (e.g., decomposition) to solve a problem, potentially suffering from errors under various reasoning patterns. Therefore, PRMs are required to identify errors under various reasoning patterns during the reasoning process. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating PRMs with stepwise correctness, ignoring a systematic evaluation of PRMs under various reasoning patterns. To mitigate this gap, we introduce Socratic-PRMBench, a new benchmark to evaluate PRMs systematically under six reasoning patterns, including Transformation, Decomposition, Regather, Deduction, Verification, and Integration. Socratic-PRMBench}comprises 2995 reasoning paths with flaws within the aforementioned six reasoning patterns. Through our experiments on both PRMs and LLMs prompted as critic models, we identify notable deficiencies in existing PRMs. These observations underscore the significant weakness of current PRMs in conducting evaluations on reasoning steps under various reasoning patterns. We hope Socratic-PRMBench can serve as a comprehensive testbed for systematic evaluation of PRMs under diverse reasoning patterns and pave the way for future development of PRMs.

Yao Xu, Mingyu Xu, Fangyu Lei et al.

Recently, models such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks through Long Chain-of-Thought (Long-CoT) reasoning. Although distilling this capability into student models significantly enhances their performance, this paper finds that fine-tuning LLMs with full parameters or LoRA with a low rank on long CoT data often leads to Cyclical Reasoning, where models repeatedly reiterate previous inference steps until the maximum length limit. Further analysis reveals that smaller differences in representations between adjacent tokens correlates with a higher tendency toward Cyclical Reasoning. To mitigate this issue, this paper proposes Shift Feedforward Networks (Shift-FFN), a novel approach that edits the current token's representation with the previous one before inputting it to FFN. This architecture dynamically amplifies the representation differences between adjacent tokens. Extensive experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate that LoRA combined with Shift-FFN achieves higher accuracy and a lower rate of Cyclical Reasoning across various data sizes compared to full fine-tuning and standard LoRA. Our data and code are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Shift-FFN

Huanxuan Liao, Wen Hu, Yao Xu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter significant challenges in long-sequence inference due to computational inefficiency and redundant processing, driving interest in context compression techniques. Existing methods often rely on token importance to perform hard local compression or encode context into latent representations for soft global compression. However, the uneven distribution of textual content relevance and the diversity of demands for user instructions mean these approaches frequently lead to the loss of potentially valuable information. To address this, we propose $\textbf{Hy}$brid $\textbf{Co}$ntext $\textbf{Co}$mpression (HyCo$_2$) for LLMs, which integrates both global and local perspectives to guide context compression while retaining both the essential semantics and critical details for task completion. Specifically, we employ a hybrid adapter to refine global semantics with the global view, based on the observation that different adapters excel at different tasks. Then we incorporate a classification layer that assigns a retention probability to each context token based on the local view, determining whether it should be retained or discarded. To foster a balanced integration of global and local compression, we introduce auxiliary paraphrasing and completion pretraining before instruction tuning. This promotes a synergistic integration that emphasizes instruction-relevant information while preserving essential local details, ultimately balancing local and global information retention in context compression. Experiments show that our HyCo$_2$ method significantly enhances long-text reasoning while reducing token usage. It improves the performance of various LLM series by an average of 13.1\% across seven knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. Moreover, HyCo$_2$ matches the performance of uncompressed methods while reducing token consumption by 88.8\%.

Wangtao Sun, Xiang Cheng, Xing Yu et al.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a critical technique for training large language models. However, conventional reward models based on the Bradley-Terry model (BTRM) often suffer from overconfidence when faced with inconsistent labels or out-of-distribution samples, leading to reward hacking, where the policy model blindly optimizes for proxy rewards while degrading true performance. This paper proposes the Probabilistic Uncertain Reward Model (PURM), which generalizes the Bradley-Terry model to learn the reward distributions that emerged from the preference data. We theoretically derive the loss function of PURM and introduce a novel method that uses the overlap between distributions to quantify uncertainty. Empirical results show that PURM outperforms existing methods with more accurate reward and sound uncertainty estimations, and sustains effective learning for more optimization steps and obtain higher maximum win rate in RLHF. The data and code of this paper are released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Probabilistic-Uncertain-Reward-Model/

Yao Xu, Shizhu He, Jiabei Chen et al.

Structured data, such as tables, graphs, and databases, play a critical role in plentiful NLP tasks such as question answering and dialogue system. Recently, inspired by Vision-Language Models, Graph Neutral Networks (GNNs) have been introduced as an additional modality into the input of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve their performance on Structured Knowledge Grounding (SKG) tasks. However, those GNN-enhanced LLMs have the following limitations: (1) They employ diverse GNNs to model varying types of structured data, rendering them unable to uniformly process various forms of structured data. (2) The pretraining of GNNs is coupled with specific LLMs, which prevents GNNs from fully aligning with the textual space and limits their adaptability to other LLMs. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{L}arge \textbf{L}anguage and \textbf{S}tructured Data \textbf{A}ssistant (LLaSA), a general framework for enhancing LLMs' ability to handle structured data. Specifically, we represent various types of structured data in a unified hypergraph format, and use self-supervised learning to pretrain a hypergraph encoder, and a G-Former compressing encoded hypergraph representations with cross-attention. The compressed hypergraph representations are appended to the serialized inputs during training and inference stages of LLMs. Experimental results on multiple SKG tasks show that our pretrained hypergraph encoder can adapt to various LLMs and enhance their ability to process different types of structured data. Besides, LLaSA, with LoRA fine-tuning, outperforms previous SOTA method using full parameters tuning.

Wangtao Sun, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao et al.

With good explanatory power and controllability, rule-based methods play an important role in many tasks such as knowledge reasoning and decision support. However, existing studies primarily focused on learning chain-like rules, which limit their semantic expressions and accurate prediction abilities. As a result, chain-like rules usually fire on the incorrect grounding values, producing inaccurate or even erroneous reasoning results. In this paper, we propose the concept of tree-like rules on knowledge graphs to expand the application scope and improve the reasoning ability of rule-based methods. Meanwhile, we propose an effective framework for refining chain-like rules into tree-like rules. Experimental comparisons on four public datasets show that the proposed framework can easily adapt to other chain-like rule induction methods and the refined tree-like rules consistently achieve better performances than chain-like rules on link prediction. The data and code of this paper can be available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/tree-rule-E3CD/.

Ziyang Huang, Haolin Ren, Xiaowei Yuan et al.

Search intelligence is evolving from Deep Research to Wide Research, a paradigm essential for retrieving and synthesizing comprehensive information under complex constraints in parallel. However, progress in this field is impeded by the lack of dedicated benchmarks and optimization methodologies for search breadth. To address these challenges, we take a deep dive into Wide Research from two perspectives: Data Pipeline and Agent Optimization. First, we produce WideSeekBench, a General Broad Information Seeking (GBIS) benchmark constructed via a rigorous multi-phase data pipeline to ensure diversity across the target information volume, logical constraints, and domains. Second, we introduce WideSeek, a dynamic hierarchical multi-agent architecture that can autonomously fork parallel sub-agents based on task requirements. Furthermore, we design a unified training framework that linearizes multi-agent trajectories and optimizes the system using end-to-end RL. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of WideSeek and multi-agent RL, highlighting that scaling the number of agents is a promising direction for advancing the Wide Research paradigm.

Wangtao Sun, Haotian Xu, Huanxuan Liao et al.

The interaction with Large Language Models (LLMs) through instructions has been extensively investigated in the research community. While instructions have been widely used as the guidelines for task solving, this paper further notices that both instructions and parameters are the compression of task data. Therefore, they could be strongly correlated and can be learned to predict one from the other. This paper proposes a novel neural network framework, SHIP (\textbf{Sh}uttle between the \textbf{I}nstructions and the \textbf{P}arameters), to model and learn the mutual mappings between the instructions and the parameters of LLMs. We verify that SHIP can effectively map one of the instructions/parameters to the other by evaluating it on the tasks of instruction deduction and induction. The results show that SHIP performs better than existing baseline methods in terms of deductive capabilities while significantly surpassing them in inductive capabilities. Moreover, SHIP can effectively combine the two mapping processes to perform excellent inductive reasoning. The code and data for this paper are released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Shuttle-Between-Instructions-Parameters/.