Lin Gui

Qinglin Zhu, Tianyu Chen, Shuai Lu et al.

Repository-level code editing requires models to understand complex dependencies and execute precise multi-file modifications across a large codebase. While recent gains on SWE-bench rely heavily on complex agent scaffolding, it remains unclear how much of this capability can be internalised via high-quality training signals. To address this, we propose Clean Pull Request (Clean-PR), a mid-training paradigm that leverages real-world GitHub pull requests as a training signal for repository-level editing. We introduce a scalable pipeline that converts noisy pull request diffs into Search/Replace edit blocks through reconstruction and validation, resulting in the largest publicly available corpus of 2 million pull requests spanning 12 programming languages. Using this training signal, we perform a mid-training stage followed by an agentless-aligned supervised fine-tuning process with error-driven data augmentation. On SWE-bench, our model significantly outperforms the instruction-tuned baseline, achieving absolute improvements of 13.6% on SWE-bench Lite and 12.3% on SWE-bench Verified. These results demonstrate that repository-level code understanding and editing capabilities can be effectively internalised into model weights under a simplified, agentless protocol, without relying on heavy inference-time scaffolding.

Zihao Wang, Lin Gui, Jeffrey Negrea et al.

This paper concerns the structure of learned representations in text-guided generative models, focusing on score-based models. A key property of such models is that they can compose disparate concepts in a `disentangled' manner. This suggests these models have internal representations that encode concepts in a `disentangled' manner. Here, we focus on the idea that concepts are encoded as subspaces of some representation space. We formalize what this means, show there's a natural choice for the representation, and develop a simple method for identifying the part of the representation corresponding to a given concept. In particular, this allows us to manipulate the concepts expressed by the model through algebraic manipulation of the representation. We demonstrate the idea with examples using Stable Diffusion. Code in https://github.com/zihao12/concept-algebra-code

Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui, Wenjie Li et al.

Token uniformity is commonly observed in transformer-based models, in which different tokens share a large proportion of similar information after going through stacked multiple self-attention layers in a transformer. In this paper, we propose to use the distribution of singular values of outputs of each transformer layer to characterise the phenomenon of token uniformity and empirically illustrate that a less skewed singular value distribution can alleviate the `token uniformity' problem. Base on our observations, we define several desirable properties of singular value distributions and propose a novel transformation function for updating the singular values. We show that apart from alleviating token uniformity, the transformation function should preserve the local neighbourhood structure in the original embedding space. Our proposed singular value transformation function is applied to a range of transformer-based language models such as BERT, ALBERT, RoBERTa and DistilBERT, and improved performance is observed in semantic textual similarity evaluation and a range of GLUE tasks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/hanqi-qi/tokenUni.git.

Junru Lu, Xingwei Tan, Gabriele Pergola et al.

Human reading comprehension often requires reasoning of event semantic relations in narratives, represented by Event-centric Question-Answering (QA). To address event-centric QA, we propose a novel QA model with contrastive learning and invertible event transformation, call TranCLR. Our proposed model utilizes an invertible transformation matrix to project semantic vectors of events into a common event embedding space, trained with contrastive learning, and thus naturally inject event semantic knowledge into mainstream QA pipelines. The transformation matrix is fine-tuned with the annotated event relation types between events that occurred in questions and those in answers, using event-aware question vectors. Experimental results on the Event Semantic Relation Reasoning (ESTER) dataset show significant improvements in both generative and extractive settings compared to the existing strong baselines, achieving over 8.4% gain in the token-level F1 score and 3.0% gain in Exact Match (EM) score under the multi-answer setting. Qualitative analysis reveals the high quality of the generated answers by TranCLR, demonstrating the feasibility of injecting event knowledge into QA model learning. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/LuJunru/TranCLR.

Hongjing Li, Hanqi Yan, Yanran Li et al.

Recent years have witnessed increasing interests in prompt-based learning in which models can be trained on only a few annotated instances, making them suitable in low-resource settings. When using prompt-based learning for text classification, the goal is to use a pre-trained language model (PLM) to predict a missing token in a pre-defined template given an input text, which can be mapped to a class label. However, PLMs built on the transformer architecture tend to generate similar output embeddings, making it difficult to discriminate between different class labels. The problem is further exacerbated when dealing with classification tasks involving many fine-grained class labels. In this work, we alleviate this information diffusion issue, i.e., different tokens share a large proportion of similar information after going through stacked multiple self-attention layers in a transformer, by proposing a calibration method built on feature transformations through rotation and scaling to map a PLM-encoded embedding into a new metric space to guarantee the distinguishability of the resulting embeddings. Furthermore, we take the advantage of hyperbolic embeddings to capture the hierarchical relations among fine-grained class-associated token embedding by a coarse-to-fine metric learning strategy to enhance the distinguishability of the learned output embeddings. Extensive experiments on the three datasets under various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our code can be found at https://github.com/donttal/TARA.

Jiazheng Li, Zhaoyue Sun, Bin Liang et al.

Text classifiers built on Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in various tasks including sentiment analysis, natural language inference, and question-answering. However, the occurrence of uncertain predictions by these classifiers poses a challenge to their reliability when deployed in practical applications. Much effort has been devoted to designing various probes in order to understand what PLMs capture. But few studies have delved into factors influencing PLM-based classifiers' predictive uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, called CUE, which aims to interpret uncertainties inherent in the predictions of PLM-based models. In particular, we first map PLM-encoded representations to a latent space via a variational auto-encoder. We then generate text representations by perturbing the latent space which causes fluctuation in predictive uncertainty. By comparing the difference in predictive uncertainty between the perturbed and the original text representations, we are able to identify the latent dimensions responsible for uncertainty and subsequently trace back to the input features that contribute to such uncertainty. Our extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets encompassing linguistic acceptability classification, emotion classification, and natural language inference show the feasibility of our proposed framework. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/lijiazheng99/CUE.

Fei Liu, Chengyu Lu, Lin Gui et al.

Vehicle routing is a well-known optimization research topic with significant practical importance. Among different approaches to solving vehicle routing, heuristics can produce a satisfactory solution at a reasonable computational cost. Consequently, much effort has been made in the past decades to develop vehicle routing heuristics. In this article, we systematically survey the existing vehicle routing heuristics, particularly on works carried out in recent years. A classification of vehicle routing heuristics is presented, followed by a review of their methodologies, recent developments, and applications. Moreover, we present a general framework of state-of-the-art methods and provide insights into their success. Finally, three emerging research topics with notable works and future directions are discussed.

Runcong Zhao, Miguel Arana-Catania, Lixing Zhu et al.

In this demo, we introduce a web-based misinformation detection system PANACEA on COVID-19 related claims, which has two modules, fact-checking and rumour detection. Our fact-checking module, which is supported by novel natural language inference methods with a self-attention network, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. It is also able to give automated veracity assessment and ranked supporting evidence with the stance towards the claim to be checked. In addition, PANACEA adapts the bi-directional graph convolutional networks model, which is able to detect rumours based on comment networks of related tweets, instead of relying on the knowledge base. This rumour detection module assists by warning the users in the early stages when a knowledge base may not be available.

Lin Gui, Victor Veitch

Consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of some attribute of a text document; for example: what effect does writing a polite vs. rude email have on response time? To estimate a causal effect from observational data, we need to adjust for confounding aspects of the text that affect both the treatment and outcome -- e.g., the topic or writing level of the text. These confounding aspects are unknown a priori, so it seems natural to adjust for the entirety of the text (e.g., using a transformer). However, causal identification and estimation procedures rely on the assumption of overlap: for all levels of the adjustment variables, there is randomness leftover so that every unit could have (not) received treatment. Since the treatment here is itself an attribute of the text, it is perfectly determined, and overlap is apparently violated. The purpose of this paper is to show how to handle causal identification and obtain robust causal estimation in the presence of apparent overlap violations. In brief, the idea is to use supervised representation learning to produce a data representation that preserves confounding information while eliminating information that is only predictive of the treatment. This representation then suffices for adjustment and can satisfy overlap. Adapting results on non-parametric estimation, we find that this procedure is robust to conditional outcome misestimation, yielding a low-bias estimator with valid uncertainty quantification under weak conditions. Empirical results show strong improvements in bias and uncertainty quantification relative to the natural baseline.

Runcong Zhao, Lin Gui, Hanqi Yan et al.

Monitoring online customer reviews is important for business organisations to measure customer satisfaction and better manage their reputations. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic Brand-Topic Model (dBTM) which is able to automatically detect and track brand-associated sentiment scores and polarity-bearing topics from product reviews organised in temporally-ordered time intervals. dBTM models the evolution of the latent brand polarity scores and the topic-word distributions over time by Gaussian state space models. It also incorporates a meta learning strategy to control the update of the topic-word distribution in each time interval in order to ensure smooth topic transitions and better brand score predictions. It has been evaluated on a dataset constructed from MakeupAlley reviews and a hotel review dataset. Experimental results show that dBTM outperforms a number of competitive baselines in brand ranking, achieving a good balance of topic coherence and uniqueness, and extracting well-separated polarity-bearing topics across time intervals.

Yuxiang Zhou, Jiazheng Li, Yanzheng Xiang et al.

Understanding in-context learning (ICL) capability that enables large language models (LLMs) to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples is of utmost importance. This importance stems not only from the better utilization of this capability across various tasks, but also from the proactive identification and mitigation of potential risks, including concerns regarding truthfulness, bias, and toxicity, that may arise alongside the capability. In this paper, we present a thorough survey on the interpretation and analysis of in-context learning. First, we provide a concise introduction to the background and definition of in-context learning. Then, we give an overview of advancements from two perspectives: 1) a theoretical perspective, emphasizing studies on mechanistic interpretability and delving into the mathematical foundations behind ICL; and 2) an empirical perspective, concerning studies that empirically analyze factors associated with ICL. We conclude by highlighting the challenges encountered and suggesting potential avenues for future research. We believe that our work establishes the basis for further exploration into the interpretation of in-context learning. Additionally, we have created a repository containing the resources referenced in our survey.

Runcong Zhao, Wenjia Zhang, Jiazheng Li et al.

In this paper, we introduce NarrativePlay, a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives such as novels in an immersive environment. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate human-like responses, guided by personality traits extracted from narratives. The system incorporates auto-generated visual display of narrative settings, character portraits, and character speech, greatly enhancing user experience. Our approach eschews predefined sandboxes, focusing instead on main storyline events extracted from narratives from the perspective of a user-selected character. NarrativePlay has been evaluated on two types of narratives, detective and adventure stories, where users can either explore the world or improve their favorability with the narrative characters through conversations.

Lixing Zhu, Runcong Zhao, Lin Gui et al.

Narrative understanding involves capturing the author's cognitive processes, providing insights into their knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Although large language models (LLMs) excel in generating grammatically coherent text, their ability to comprehend the author's thoughts remains uncertain. This limitation hinders the practical applications of narrative understanding. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of narrative understanding tasks, thoroughly examining their key features, definitions, taxonomy, associated datasets, training objectives, evaluation metrics, and limitations. Furthermore, we explore the potential of expanding the capabilities of modularized LLMs to address novel narrative understanding tasks. By framing narrative understanding as the retrieval of the author's imaginative cues that outline the narrative structure, our study introduces a fresh perspective on enhancing narrative comprehension.

Guimin Hu, Yi Xin, Weimin Lyu et al.

Multimodal affective computing (MAC) has garnered increasing attention due to its broad applications in analyzing human behaviors and intentions, especially in text-dominated multimodal affective computing field. This survey presents the recent trends of multimodal affective computing from NLP perspective through four hot tasks: multimodal sentiment analysis, multimodal emotion recognition in conversation, multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis and multimodal multi-label emotion recognition. The goal of this survey is to explore the current landscape of multimodal affective research, identify development trends, and highlight the similarities and differences across various tasks, offering a comprehensive report on the recent progress in multimodal affective computing from an NLP perspective. This survey covers the formalization of tasks, provides an overview of relevant works, describes benchmark datasets, and details the evaluation metrics for each task. Additionally, it briefly discusses research in multimodal affective computing involving facial expressions, acoustic signals, physiological signals, and emotion causes. Additionally, we discuss the technical approaches, challenges, and future directions in multimodal affective computing. To support further research, we released a repository that compiles related works in multimodal affective computing, providing detailed resources and references for the community.

Xinyu Wang, Lin Gui, Yulan He

Table of contents (ToC) extraction centres on structuring documents in a hierarchical manner. In this paper, we propose a new dataset, ESGDoc, comprising 1,093 ESG annual reports from 563 companies spanning from 2001 to 2022. These reports pose significant challenges due to their diverse structures and extensive length. To address these challenges, we propose a new framework for Toc extraction, consisting of three steps: (1) Constructing an initial tree of text blocks based on reading order and font sizes; (2) Modelling each tree node (or text block) independently by considering its contextual information captured in node-centric subtree; (3) Modifying the original tree by taking appropriate action on each tree node (Keep, Delete, or Move). This construction-modelling-modification (CMM) process offers several benefits. It eliminates the need for pairwise modelling of section headings as in previous approaches, making document segmentation practically feasible. By incorporating structured information, each section heading can leverage both local and long-distance context relevant to itself. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art baseline with a fraction of running time. Our framework proves its scalability by effectively handling documents of any length.

Shao Wang, Rui Ren, Lin Gui

The serving paradigm of large language models (LLMs) is rapidly shifting towards complex multi-agent workflows where specialized agents collaborate over massive shared contexts. While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables the efficient co-hosting of these specialized agents on a single base model, it introduces a critical memory footprint bottleneck during serving. Specifically, unique LoRA activations cause Key-Value (KV) cache divergence across agents, rendering traditional prefix caching ineffective for shared contexts. This forces redundant KV cache maintenance, rapidly saturating GPU capacity and degrading throughput. To address this challenge, we introduce ForkKV, a serving system for multi-LoRA agent workflows centered around a novel memory management paradigm in OS: fork with copy-on-write (CoW). By exploiting the structural properties of LoRA, ForkKV physically decouples the KV cache into a massive shared component (analogous to the parent process's memory pages) and lightweight agent-specific components (the child process's pages). To support this mechanism, we propose a DualRadixTree architecture that allows newly forked agents to inherit the massive shared cache and apply CoW semantics for their lightweight unique cache. Furthermore, to guarantee efficient execution, we design ResidualAttention, a specialized kernel that reconstructs the disaggregated KV cache directly within on-chip SRAM. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse language models and practical datasets of different tasks demonstrate that ForkKV achieves up to 3.0x the throughput of state-of-the-art multi-LoRA serving systems with a negligible impact on generation quality.

Yanzheng Xiang, Hanqi Yan, Shuyin Ouyang et al.

This study evaluates large language models (LLMs) in generating code from algorithm descriptions in recent NLP papers. The task requires two key competencies: (1) algorithm comprehension: synthesizing information from papers and academic literature to understand implementation logic, and (2) coding expertise: identifying dependencies and correctly implementing necessary APIs. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce SciReplicate-Bench, a benchmark of 100 tasks from 36 NLP papers published in 2024, featuring detailed annotations and comprehensive test cases. Building on SciReplicate-Bench, we propose Sci-Reproducer, a dual-agent framework consisting of a Paper Agent that interprets algorithmic concepts from literature and a Code Agent that retrieves dependencies from repositories and implements solutions. To assess algorithm understanding, we introduce reasoning graph accuracy, which quantifies similarity between generated and reference reasoning graphs derived from code comments and structure. For evaluating implementation quality, we employ execution accuracy, CodeBLEU, and repository dependency/API recall metrics. In our experiments, we evaluate various powerful non-reasoning and reasoning LLMs as foundational models. The best-performing LLM using \ModelName~achieves only 39% execution accuracy, highlighting the benchmark's difficulty. Our analysis identifies missing or inconsistent algorithm descriptions as key barriers to successful reproduction. We make available our benchmark and code at https://github.com/xyzCS/SciReplicate-Bench and project homepage at https://xyzcs.github.io/scireplicate.github.io/.

Hanqi Yan, Lingjing Kong, Lin Gui et al.

Counterfactual generation lies at the core of various machine learning tasks, including image translation and controllable text generation. This generation process usually requires the identification of the disentangled latent representations, such as content and style, that underlie the observed data. However, it becomes more challenging when faced with a scarcity of paired data and labeling information. Existing disentangled methods crucially rely on oversimplified assumptions, such as assuming independent content and style variables, to identify the latent variables, even though such assumptions may not hold for complex data distributions. For instance, food reviews tend to involve words like tasty, whereas movie reviews commonly contain words such as thrilling for the same positive sentiment. This problem is exacerbated when data are sampled from multiple domains since the dependence between content and style may vary significantly over domains. In this work, we tackle the domain-varying dependence between the content and the style variables inherent in the counterfactual generation task. We provide identification guarantees for such latent-variable models by leveraging the relative sparsity of the influences from different latent variables. Our theoretical insights enable the development of a doMain AdapTive counTerfactual gEneration model, called (MATTE). Our theoretically grounded framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised style transfer tasks, where neither paired data nor style labels are utilized, across four large-scale datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/hanqi-qi/Matte.git

Zhanghao Hu, Qinglin Zhu, Hanqi Yan et al.

Agent memory systems often adopt the standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, yet its underlying assumptions differ in this setting. RAG targets large, heterogeneous corpora where retrieved passages are diverse, whereas agent memory is a bounded, coherent dialogue stream with highly correlated spans that are often duplicates. Under this shift, fixed top-$k$ similarity retrieval tends to return redundant context, and post-hoc pruning can delete temporally linked prerequisites needed for correct reasoning. We argue retrieval should move beyond similarity matching and instead operate over latent components, following decoupling to aggregation: disentangle memories into semantic components, organise them into a hierarchy, and use this structure to drive retrieval. We propose xMemory, which builds a hierarchy of intact units and maintains a searchable yet faithful high-level node organisation via a sparsity--semantics objective that guides memory split and merge. At inference, xMemory retrieves top-down, selecting a compact, diverse set of themes and semantics for multi-fact queries, and expanding to episodes and raw messages only when it reduces the reader's uncertainty. Experiments on LoCoMo and PerLTQA across the three latest LLMs show consistent gains in answer quality and token efficiency.

Qinglin Zhu, Runcong Zhao, Hanqi Yan et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with complex reasoning due to limited diversity and inefficient search. We propose Soft Reasoning, an embedding-based search framework that optimises the embedding of the first token to guide generation. It combines (1) embedding perturbation for controlled exploration and (2) Bayesian optimisation to refine embeddings via a verifier-guided objective, balancing exploration and exploitation. This approach improves reasoning accuracy and coherence while avoiding reliance on heuristic search. Experiments demonstrate superior correctness with minimal computation, making it a scalable, model-agnostic solution. The code is released at https://github.com/alickzhu/Soft-Reasoning.

Jiazheng Li, Yuxiang Zhou, Junru Lu et al.

Although preference optimization methods have improved reasoning performance in Large Language Models (LLMs), they often lack transparency regarding why one reasoning outcome is preferred over another. This limitation is especially critical in Automated Student Answer Scoring (ASAS), where explainability is essential to justify assessment outcomes. Verbal reinforcement learning offers the potential to generate explicit reflection, but it tends to produce superficial critiques that can harm assessment performance. Existing LLMs also struggle to reliably detect subtle reasoning errors in ASAS tasks. Moreover, manually identifying intermediate reasoning errors is expensive and difficult to scale. To address these challenges, we introduce a contrastive reflection synthesis pipeline that generates precise verbal feedback by identifying discrepancies in structure reasoning graph paths. Leveraging these synthetic reflection data, we propose DARS, a Dual-model Reflective Scoring framework featuring a dedicated Critic model trained for effective reflection. DARS achieves strong performance and consistently outperforms existing ASAS baselines across all evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments further provide novel insights into the value of reflection data, framework design, and the scaling behavior of DARS. We release the DARS code at https://github.com/lijiazheng99/DARS.

Junru Lu, Jiazheng Li, Guodong Shen et al.

Role-playing is important for Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow diverse instructions while maintaining role identity and the role's pre-defined ability limits. Existing role-playing datasets mostly contribute to controlling role style and knowledge boundaries, but overlook role-playing in instruction-following scenarios. We introduce a fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following composite benchmark, named RoleMRC, including: (1) Multi-turn dialogues between ideal roles and humans, including free chats or discussions upon given passages; (2) Role-playing machine reading comprehension, involving response, refusal, and attempts according to passage answerability and role ability; (3) More complex scenarios with nested, multi-turn and prioritized instructions. The final RoleMRC features a 10.2k role profile meta-pool, 37.9k well-synthesized role-playing instructions, and 1.4k testing samples. We develop a pipeline to quantitatively evaluate the fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following capabilities of several mainstream LLMs, as well as models that are fine-tuned on our data. Moreover, cross-evaluation on external role-playing datasets confirms that models fine-tuned on RoleMRC enhances instruction-following without compromising general role-playing and reasoning capabilities. We also probe the neural-level activation maps of different capabilities over post-tuned LLMs. Access to our RoleMRC, RoleMRC-mix and Codes: https://github.com/LuJunru/RoleMRC.

Zipeng Zhu, Zhanghao Hu, Qinglin Zhu et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly by aligning visual patches with the text embedding space, but a fixed visual-token budget forces images to be resized to a uniform pretraining resolution, often erasing fine-grained details and causing hallucinations via over-reliance on language priors. Recent attention-guided enhancement (e.g., cropping or region-focused attention allocation) alleviates this, yet it commonly hinges on a static "magic layer" empirically chosen on simple recognition benchmarks and thus may not transfer to complex reasoning tasks. In contrast to this static assumption, we propose a dynamic perspective on visual grounding. Through a layer-wise sensitivity analysis, we demonstrate that visual grounding is a dynamic process: while simple object recognition tasks rely on middle layers, complex visual search and reasoning tasks require visual information to be reactivated at deeper layers. Based on this observation, we introduce Visual Activation by Query (VAQ), a metric that identifies the layer whose attention map is most relevant to query-specific visual grounding by measuring attention sensitivity to the input query. Building on VAQ, we further propose LASER (Layer-adaptive Attention-guided Selective visual and decoding Enhancement for Reasoning), a training-free inference procedure that adaptively selects task-appropriate layers for visual localization and question answering. Experiments across diverse VQA benchmarks show that LASER significantly improves VQA accuracy across tasks with varying levels of complexity.

Yanzheng Xiang, Lan Wei, Yizhen Yao et al.

Parallel diffusion decoding can accelerate diffusion language model inference by unmasking multiple tokens per step, but aggressive parallelism often harms quality. Revocable decoding mitigates this by rechecking earlier tokens, yet we observe that existing verification schemes frequently trigger flip-flop oscillations, where tokens are remasked and later restored unchanged. This behaviour slows inference in two ways: remasking verified positions weakens the conditioning context for parallel drafting, and repeated remask cycles consume the revision budget with little net progress. We propose COVER (Cache Override Verification for Efficient Revision), which performs leave-one-out verification and stable drafting within a single forward pass. COVER constructs two attention views via KV cache override: selected seeds are masked for verification, while their cached key value states are injected for all other queries to preserve contextual information, with a closed form diagonal correction preventing self leakage at the seed positions. COVER further prioritises seeds using a stability aware score that balances uncertainty, downstream influence, and cache drift, and it adapts the number of verified seeds per step. Across benchmarks, COVER markedly reduces unnecessary revisions and yields faster decoding while preserving output quality.

Junkai Zhang, Zihao Wang, Lin Gui et al.

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) often suffers from \emph{reward over-optimization}, where a policy model hacks the reward signals to achieve high scores while producing low-quality outputs. Our theoretical analysis shows that the key lies in reward misspecification at the high-reward tail: the inability to reliably distinguish Excellent responses from merely Great ones. This motivate us to focus on the high-reward region. However, such tail examples are scarce under the base LLM. While off-policy exemplars (e.g. from stronger models or rewrites) are easier to obtain, naively training on them yields a misspecified reward for the policy we aim to align. To address this, we study rubric-based rewards. By design, rubrics can leverage off-policy examples while remaining insensitive to their artifacts. To elicit rubrics that capture the high-reward tail, we highlight the importance of distinguishing among great and diverse responses, and introduce a workflow to implement this idea. We empirically demonstrate that rubric-based rewards substantially mitigate reward over-optimization and deliver effective LLM post-training improvements. Our code can be accessed at https://github.com/Jun-Kai-Zhang/rubrics.git .

Han Zhang, Lin Gui, Yuanzhao Zhai et al.

The technique of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a commonly employed method to improve pre-trained Language Models (LM), enhancing their ability to conform to human preferences. Nevertheless, the current RLHF-based LMs necessitate full retraining each time novel queries or feedback are introduced, which becomes a challenging task because human preferences can vary between different domains or tasks. Retraining LMs poses practical difficulties in many real-world situations due to the significant time and computational resources required, along with concerns related to data privacy. To address this limitation, we propose a new method called Continual Optimal Policy Regularization (COPR), in which we compute the distribution of optimal policy bypassing the partition function and then regularize the current policy based on the historically optimal distribution to mitigate Catastrophic Forgetting (CF). COPR involves a single learning phase and doesn't necessitate complex reinforcement learning. Importantly, it shares the capability with RLHF to learn from unlabeled data by maintaining a scoring module, similar to reward model, making it flexible for continually learning without human feedback. Our experimental results show that COPR outperforms strong Continuous Learning (CL) baselines when it comes to consistently aligning with human preferences on incremental tasks and domains.

Pollawat Hongwimol, Haoning Shang, Chutong Wang et al.

Product attribute extraction in e-commerce is bottlenecked by ontologies that are inconsistent, incomplete, and costly to maintain. We present AutoPKG, a multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) framework that automatically constructs a Product-attribute Knowledge Graph (PKG) from multimodal product content. AutoPKG induces product types and type-specific attribute keys on demand, extracts attribute values from text and images, and consolidates updates through a centralized decision agent that maintains a globally consistent canonical graph. We also propose an evaluation protocol for dynamic PKGs that measures type and key validity, consolidation quality, and edge-level accuracy for value assertions after canonicalization. On a large real-world marketplace catalog dataset from Lazada (Alibaba), AutoPKG achieves up to 0.953 Weighted Knowledge Efficiency (WKE) for product types, 0.724 WKE for attribute keys, and 0.531 edge-level F1 for multimodal value extraction. Across three public benchmarks, our method improves edge-level exact-match F1 by 0.152 and yields a precision gain of 0.208 on the attribute extraction application. Online A/B tests show that AutoPKG-derived attributes increase Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) in Badge by 3.81 percent, in Search by 5.32 percent, and in Recommendation by 7.89 percent, supporting the practical value of AutoPKG in production.

Zhenyi Shen, Junru Lu, Lin Gui et al.

Sparse attention reduces the quadratic complexity of full self-attention but faces two challenges: (1) an attention gap, where applying sparse attention to full-attention-trained models causes performance degradation due to train-inference distribution mismatch, and (2) a capability gap, where models trained purely with sparse attention lack complete gradient flow, preventing them from matching full-attention performance. We propose SSA (Sparse Sparse Attention), a training framework that integrates both sparse and full attention with bidirectional attention-output alignment. We prove that the approximation error scales linearly with the attention mass dropped under sparse attention, and show that SSA's alignment objective substantially reduces this quantity compared to baselines. Experiments demonstrate that SSA achieves state-of-the-art performance under both inference modes, adapts smoothly to varying sparsity budgets, and demonstrates superior long-context capabilities. The code is available at https://github.com/zhenyi4/ssa.

Italo Luis da Silva, Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong reasoning and text generation capabilities, prompting their use in scientific literature analysis, including novelty assessment. While evaluating novelty of scientific papers is crucial for peer review, it requires extensive knowledge of related work, something not all reviewers have. While recent work on LLM-assisted scientific literature analysis supports literature comparison, existing approaches offer limited transparency and lack mechanisms for result traceability via an information retrieval module. To address this gap, we introduce $\textbf{GraphMind}$, an easy-to-use interactive web tool designed to assist users in evaluating the novelty of scientific papers or drafted ideas. Specially, $\textbf{GraphMind}$ enables users to capture the main structure of a scientific paper, explore related ideas through various perspectives, and assess novelty via providing verifiable contextual insights. $\textbf{GraphMind}$ enables users to annotate key elements of a paper, explore related papers through various relationships, and assess novelty with contextual insight. This tool integrates external APIs such as arXiv and Semantic Scholar with LLMs to support annotation, extraction, retrieval and classification of papers. This combination provides users with a rich, structured view of a scientific idea's core contributions and its connections to existing work. $\textbf{GraphMind}$ is available at https://oyarsa.github.io/graphmind and a demonstration video at https://youtu.be/wKbjQpSvwJg. The source code is available at https://github.com/oyarsa/graphmind.

Yuemei Xu, Kexin Xu, Jian Zhou et al.

The current Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges in improving their performance on low-resource languages and urgently need data-efficient methods without costly fine-tuning. From the perspective of language-bridge, we propose a simple yet effective method, namely BridgeX-ICL, to improve the zero-shot Cross-lingual In-Context Learning (X-ICL) for low-resource languages. Unlike existing works focusing on language-specific neurons, BridgeX-ICL explores whether sharing neurons can improve cross-lingual performance in LLMs. We construct neuron probe data from the ground-truth MUSE bilingual dictionaries, and define a subset of language overlap neurons accordingly to ensure full activation of these anchored neurons. Subsequently, we propose an HSIC-based metric to quantify LLMs' internal linguistic spectrum based on overlapping neurons, guiding optimal bridge selection. The experiments conducted on 4 cross-lingual tasks and 15 language pairs from 7 diverse families, covering both high-low and moderate-low pairs, validate the effectiveness of BridgeX-ICL and offer empirical insights into the underlying multilingual mechanisms of LLMs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/xuyuemei/BridgeX-ICL.

Zhanghao Hu, Qinglin Zhu, Siya Qi et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown improved generation performance through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) following the retriever-reader paradigm, which supplements model inputs with externally retrieved knowledge. However, prior work often evaluates RAG holistically, assessing the retriever and reader jointly, making it difficult to isolate the true contribution of retrieval, particularly given the prompt sensitivity of LLMs used as readers. We move beyond perplexity and introduce Spectrum Projection Score (SPS), a lightweight and supervision-free metric that allows the reader to gauge the semantic alignment of a retrieved summary with its hidden representation by comparing the area formed by generated tokens from the summary, and the principal directions of subspace in the reader and to measure the relevance. Building on SPS we present xCompress, an inference-time controller framework that dynamically samples, ranks, and compresses retrieval summary candidates. Extensive experiments on five QA benchmarks with four open-sourced LLMs show that SPS not only enhances performance across a range of tasks but also provides a principled perspective on the interaction between retrieval and generation.

Italo Luis da Silva, Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui et al.

The inherent ambiguity of cause and effect boundaries poses a challenge in evaluating causal event extraction tasks. Traditional metrics like Exact Match and BertScore poorly reflect model performance, so we trained evaluation models to approximate human evaluation, achieving high agreement. We used them to perform Reinforcement Learning with extraction models to align them with human preference, prioritising semantic understanding. We successfully explored our approach through multiple datasets, including transferring an evaluator trained on one dataset to another as a way to decrease the reliance on human-annotated data. In that vein, we also propose a weak-to-strong supervision method that uses a fraction of the annotated data to train an evaluation model while still achieving high performance in training an RL model. Our code is available at https://github.com/oyarsa/event_extraction/tree/causal-event-extraction.

Zhanghao Hu, Hanqi Yan, Qinglin Zhu et al.

Large language models have recently pushed open domain question answering (ODQA) to new frontiers. However, prevailing retriever-reader pipelines often depend on multiple rounds of prompt level instructions, leading to high computational overhead, instability, and suboptimal retrieval coverage. In this paper, we propose EmbQA, an embedding-level framework that alleviates these shortcomings by enhancing both the retriever and the reader. Specifically, we refine query representations via lightweight linear layers under an unsupervised contrastive learning objective, thereby reordering retrieved passages to highlight those most likely to contain correct answers. Additionally, we introduce an exploratory embedding that broadens the model's latent semantic space to diversify candidate generation and employs an entropy-based selection mechanism to choose the most confident answer automatically. Extensive experiments across three open-source LLMs, three retrieval methods, and four ODQA benchmarks demonstrate that EmbQA substantially outperforms recent baselines in both accuracy and efficiency.

Jiazheng Li, Lin Gui, Yuxiang Zhou et al.

Providing explainable and faithful feedback is crucial for automated student answer assessment. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that explores using ChatGPT, a cutting-edge large language model, for the concurrent tasks of student answer scoring and rationale generation. We identify the appropriate instructions by prompting ChatGPT with different templates to collect the rationales, where inconsistent rationales are refined to align with marking standards. The refined ChatGPT outputs enable us to fine-tune a smaller language model that simultaneously assesses student answers and provides rationales. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show that the proposed method improves the overall QWK score by 11% compared to ChatGPT. Furthermore, our thorough analysis and human evaluation demonstrate that the rationales generated by our proposed method are comparable to those of ChatGPT. Our approach provides a viable solution to achieve explainable automated assessment in education. Code available at https://github.com/lijiazheng99/aera.

Junru Lu, Gabriele Pergola, Lin Gui et al.

We propose a simple yet effective strategy to incorporate event knowledge extracted from event trigger annotations via posterior regularization to improve the event reasoning capability of mainstream question-answering (QA) models for event-centric QA. In particular, we define event-related knowledge constraints based on the event trigger annotations in the QA datasets, and subsequently use them to regularize the posterior answer output probabilities from the backbone pre-trained language models used in the QA setting. We explore two different posterior regularization strategies for extractive and generative QA separately. For extractive QA, the sentence-level event knowledge constraint is defined by assessing if a sentence contains an answer event or not, which is later used to modify the answer span extraction probability. For generative QA, the token-level event knowledge constraint is defined by comparing the generated token from the backbone language model with the answer event in order to introduce a reward or penalty term, which essentially adjusts the answer generative probability indirectly. We conduct experiments on two event-centric QA datasets, TORQUE and ESTER. The results show that our proposed approach can effectively inject event knowledge into existing pre-trained language models and achieves strong performance compared to existing QA models in answer evaluation. Code and models can be found: https://github.com/LuJunru/EventQAviaPR.

Runcong Zhao, Qinglin Zhu, Hainiu Xu et al.

Existing datasets for narrative understanding often fail to represent the complexity and uncertainty of relationships in real-life social scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, Conan, designed for extracting and analysing intricate character relation graphs from detective narratives. Specifically, we designed hierarchical relationship categories and manually extracted and annotated role-oriented relationships from the perspectives of various characters, incorporating both public relationships known to most characters and secret ones known to only a few. Our experiments with advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama2 reveal their limitations in inferencing complex relationships and handling longer narratives. The combination of the Conan dataset and our pipeline strategy is geared towards understanding the ability of LLMs to comprehend nuanced relational dynamics in narrative contexts.

Yanzheng Xiang, Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui et al.

In-context learning has become a popular paradigm in natural language processing. However, its performance can be significantly influenced by the order of in-context demonstration examples. In this paper, we found that causal language models (CausalLMs) are more sensitive to this order compared to prefix language models (PrefixLMs). We attribute this phenomenon to the auto-regressive attention masks within CausalLMs, which restrict each token from accessing information from subsequent tokens. This results in different receptive fields for samples at different positions, thereby leading to representation disparities across positions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce an unsupervised fine-tuning method, termed the Information-Augmented and Consistency-Enhanced approach. This approach utilizes contrastive learning to align representations of in-context examples across different positions and introduces a consistency loss to ensure similar representations for inputs with different permutations. This enhances the model's predictive consistency across permutations. Experimental results on five benchmarks suggest that our proposed method can reduce the sensitivity of CausalLMs to the order of in-context examples and exhibit robust generalizability, particularly when demonstrations are sourced from a candidate pool different from that used in the training phase, or when the number of in-context examples differs from what is used during training.

Hanqi Yan, Qinglin Zhu, Xinyu Wang et al.

While Large language models (LLMs) have the capability to iteratively reflect on their own outputs, recent studies have observed their struggles with knowledge-rich problems without access to external resources. In addition to the inefficiency of LLMs in self-assessment, we also observe that LLMs struggle to revisit their predictions despite receiving explicit negative feedback. Therefore, We propose Mirror, a Multiple-perspective self-reflection method for knowledge-rich reasoning, to avoid getting stuck at a particular reflection iteration. Mirror enables LLMs to reflect from multiple-perspective clues, achieved through a heuristic interaction between a Navigator and a Reasoner. It guides agents toward diverse yet plausibly reliable reasoning trajectory without access to ground truth by encouraging (1) diversity of directions generated by Navigator and (2) agreement among strategically induced perturbations in responses generated by the Reasoner. The experiments on five reasoning datasets demonstrate that Mirror's superiority over several contemporary self-reflection approaches. Additionally, the ablation study studies clearly indicate that our strategies alleviate the aforementioned challenges.

Bin Liang, Ang Li, Jingqian Zhao et al.

Stance detection is a challenging task that aims to identify public opinion from social media platforms with respect to specific targets. Previous work on stance detection largely focused on pure texts. In this paper, we study multi-modal stance detection for tweets consisting of texts and images, which are prevalent in today's fast-growing social media platforms where people often post multi-modal messages. To this end, we create five new multi-modal stance detection datasets of different domains based on Twitter, in which each example consists of a text and an image. In addition, we propose a simple yet effective Targeted Multi-modal Prompt Tuning framework (TMPT), where target information is leveraged to learn multi-modal stance features from textual and visual modalities. Experimental results on our five benchmark datasets show that the proposed TMPT achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal stance detection.

Qinglin Zhu, Runcong Zhao, Bin Liang et al.

We introduce WellPlay, a reasoning dataset for multi-agent conversational inference in Murder Mystery Games (MMGs). WellPlay comprises 1,482 inferential questions across 12 games, spanning objectives, reasoning, and relationship understanding, and establishes a systematic benchmark for evaluating agent reasoning abilities in complex social settings. Building on this foundation, we present PLAYER*, a novel framework for Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents in MMGs. MMGs pose unique challenges, including undefined state spaces, absent intermediate rewards, and the need for strategic reasoning through natural language. PLAYER* addresses these challenges with a sensor-based state representation and an information-driven strategy that optimises questioning and suspect pruning. Experiments show that PLAYER* outperforms existing methods in reasoning accuracy, efficiency, and agent-human interaction, advancing reasoning agents for complex social scenarios.

Shenzhi Yang, Bin Liang, An Liu et al.

Given the critical role of graphs in real-world applications and their high-security requirements, improving the ability of graph neural networks (GNNs) to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) data is an urgent research problem. The recent work GNNSAFE proposes a framework based on the aggregation of negative energy scores that significantly improves the performance of GNNs to detect node-level OOD data. However, our study finds that score aggregation among nodes is susceptible to extreme values due to the unboundedness of the negative energy scores and logit shifts, which severely limits the accuracy of GNNs in detecting node-level OOD data. In this paper, we propose NODESAFE: reducing the generation of extreme scores of nodes by adding two optimization terms that make the negative energy scores bounded and mitigate the logit shift. Experimental results show that our approach dramatically improves the ability of GNNs to detect OOD data at the node level, e.g., in detecting OOD data induced by Structure Manipulation, the metric of FPR95 (lower is better) in scenarios without (with) OOD data exposure are reduced from the current SOTA by 28.4% (22.7%).

Han Zhang, Lin Gui, Yu Lei et al.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is commonly utilized to improve the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Given the evolving nature of human preferences, continual alignment becomes more crucial and practical in comparison to traditional static alignment. Nevertheless, making RLHF compatible with Continual Learning (CL) is challenging due to its complex process. Meanwhile, directly learning new human preferences may lead to Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) of historical preferences, resulting in helpless or harmful outputs. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Continual Optimal Policy Regularization (COPR) method, which draws inspiration from the optimal policy theory. COPR utilizes a sampling distribution as a demonstration and regularization constraints for CL. It adopts the Lagrangian Duality (LD) method to dynamically regularize the current policy based on the historically optimal policy, which prevents CF and avoids over-emphasizing unbalanced objectives. We also provide formal proof for the learnability of COPR. The experimental results show that COPR outperforms strong CL baselines on our proposed benchmark, in terms of reward-based, GPT-4 evaluations and human assessment. Furthermore, we validate the robustness of COPR under various CL settings, including different backbones, replay memory sizes, and learning orders.

Siya Qi, Lin Gui, Yulan He et al.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought a pressing challenge: how to reliably assess hallucinations to guarantee model trustworthiness. Although Automatic Hallucination Evaluation (AHE) has become an indispensable component of this effort, the field remains fragmented in its methodologies, limiting both conceptual clarity and practical progress. This survey addresses this critical gap through a systematic analysis of 105 evaluation methods, revealing that 77.1% specifically target LLMs, a paradigm shift that demands new evaluation frameworks. We formulate a structured framework to organize the field, based on a survey of foundational datasets and benchmarks and a taxonomy of evaluation methodologies, which together systematically document the evolution from pre-LLM to post-LLM approaches. Beyond taxonomical organization, we identify fundamental limitations in current approaches and their implications for real-world deployment. To guide future research, we delineate key challenges and propose strategic directions, including enhanced interpretability mechanisms and integration of application-specific evaluation criteria, ultimately providing a roadmap for developing more robust and practical hallucination evaluation systems.

Han Zhang, Zhuo Zhang, Yi Zhang et al.

Recent advancements in AI alignment techniques have significantly improved the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with static human preferences. However, the dynamic nature of human preferences can render some prior training data outdated or even erroneous, ultimately causing LLMs to deviate from contemporary human preferences and societal norms. Existing methodologies, whether they involve the curation of new data for continual alignment or the manual correction of outdated data for re-alignment, demand costly human resources. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, Large Language Model Behavior Correction with Influence Function Recall and Post-Training (LANCET), which requires no human involvement. LANCET consists of two phases: (1) using influence functions to identify the training data that significantly impact undesirable model outputs, and (2) applying an Influence function-driven Bregman Optimization (IBO) technique to adjust the model's behavior based on these influence distributions. Our experiments demonstrate that LANCET effectively and efficiently correct inappropriate behaviors of LLMs. Furthermore, LANCET can outperform methods that rely on collecting human preferences, and it enhances the interpretability of learning human preferences within LLMs.

Runcong Zhao, Chengyu Cao, Qinglin Zhu et al.

Complex narrative contexts often challenge language models' ability to follow instructions, and existing benchmarks fail to capture these difficulties. To address this, we propose Concise-SAE, a training-free framework that improves instruction following by identifying and editing instruction-relevant neurons using only natural language instructions, without requiring labelled data. To thoroughly evaluate our method, we introduce FreeInstruct, a diverse and realistic benchmark of 1,212 examples that highlights the challenges of instruction following in narrative-rich settings. While initially motivated by complex narratives, Concise-SAE demonstrates state-of-the-art instruction adherence across varied tasks without compromising generation quality.

Xinyu Wang, Hainiu Xu, Lin Gui et al.

Task embedding, a meta-learning technique that captures task-specific information, has gained popularity, especially in areas such as multi-task learning, model editing, and interpretability. However, it faces challenges with the emergence of prompt-guided Large Language Models (LLMs) operating in a gradient-free manner. Existing task embedding methods rely on fine-tuned, task-specific language models, which hinders the adaptability of task embeddings across diverse models, especially prompt-based LLMs. To hardness the potential of task embeddings in the era of LLMs, we propose a framework for unified task embeddings (FUTE), harmonizing task embeddings from various models, including smaller language models and LLMs with varied prompts, within a single vector space. Such uniformity enables comparison and analysis of similarities amongst different models, broadening the scope and utility of existing task embedding methods in multi-model scenarios, while maintaining their performance comparable to architecture-specific methods.

Ang Li, Jingqian Zhao, Bin Liang et al.

Stance detection is critical for understanding the underlying position or attitude expressed toward a topic. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements across various natural language processing tasks including stance detection, however, their performance in stance detection is limited by biases and spurious correlations inherent due to their data-driven nature. Our statistical experiment reveals that LLMs are prone to generate biased stances due to sentiment-stance spurious correlations and preference towards certain individuals and topics. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a strong negative correlation between stance bias and stance detection performance, underscoring the importance of mitigating bias to enhance the utility of LLMs in stance detection. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Counterfactual Augmented Calibration Network (FACTUAL), which a novel calibration network is devised to calibrate potential bias in the stance prediction of LLMs. Further, to address the challenge of effectively learning bias representations and the difficulty in the generalizability of debiasing, we construct counterfactual augmented data. This approach enhances the calibration network, facilitating the debiasing and out-of-domain generalization. Experimental results on in-target and zero-shot stance detection tasks show that the proposed FACTUAL can effectively mitigate biases of LLMs, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Siya Qi, Yudong Chen, Runcong Zhao et al.

Hallucination detection is critical for ensuring the reliability of large language models (LLMs) in context-based generation. Prior work has explored intrinsic signals available during generation, among which attention offers a direct view of grounding behavior. However, existing approaches typically rely on coarse summaries that fail to capture fine-grained instabilities in attention. Inspired by signal processing, we introduce a frequency-aware perspective on attention by analyzing its variation during generation. We model attention distributions as discrete signals and extract high-frequency components that reflect rapid local changes in attention. Our analysis reveals that hallucinated tokens are associated with high-frequency attention energy, reflecting fragmented and unstable grounding behavior. Based on this insight, we develop a lightweight hallucination detector using high-frequency attention features. Experiments on the RAGTruth and HalluRAG benchmarks show that our approach achieves performance gains over verification-based, internal-representation-based, and attention-based methods across models and tasks.

Qinglin Zhu, Yizhen Yao, Runcong Zhao et al.

Autoregressive (AR) models remain the standard for natural language generation but still suffer from high latency due to strictly sequential decoding. Recent diffusion-inspired approaches, such as LlaDA and Dream, mitigate this by generating in parallel, yet they suffer from two core limitations: information loss, as predictive distributions for non-finalized tokens are discarded at each step, and premature commitment, where local decisions are made without sufficient global coordination. We introduce Latent Refinement Decoding (LRD), a two-stage framework with Latent Refinement and a Predictive Feedback Loop. The first stage maintains masked positions as distributional mixtures of predicted tokens and the mask embedding, allowing the model to establish more globally consistent beliefs. The second stage progressively finalizes confident tokens while retaining uncertain ones for iterative feedback. KL-divergence dynamics provide a principled and reliable criterion for convergence and early stopping. Experiments across coding (HumanEval +6.3, MBPP +2.6) and reasoning (GSM8K +2.9, MATH500 +3.8) show that LRD improves accuracy while delivering speedups of up to 10.6x, making it a strong and versatile alternative for parallel sequence generation.

Chenghao Yang, Lin Gui, Chenxiao Yang et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet its success hinges on effective exploration. An ideal exploration strategy must navigate two fundamental challenges: it must preserve sample quality while also ensuring training stability. While standard fixed-temperature sampling is simple, it struggles to balance these competing demands, as high temperatures degrade sample quality and low temperatures limit discovery. In this work, we propose a simpler and more effective strategy, Exploratory Annealed Decoding (EAD), grounded in the insight that exploration is most impactful on early tokens which define a sequence's semantic direction. EAD implements an intuitive **explore-at-the-beginning, exploit-at-the-end** strategy by annealing the sampling temperature from high to low during generation. This dynamic schedule encourages meaningful, high-level diversity at the start, then gradually lowers the temperature to preserve sample quality and keep the sampling distribution close to the target policy, which is essential for stable training. We demonstrate that EAD is a lightweight, plug-and-play method that significantly improves sample efficiency, consistently outperforming fixed-temperature sampling across various RLVR algorithms and model sizes. Our work suggests that aligning exploration with the natural dynamics of sequential generation offers a robust path to improving LLM reasoning.