Yulan He

Zhengyi Zhao, Shubo Zhang, Huimin Wang et al.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many tasks, yet they struggle with reliably following multiple instructions, either by failing to satisfy individual constraints or by struggling to balance competing constraints simultaneously. We formalize this challenge as the Constraint Adherence Problem (CAP). This paper introduces a novel framework that addresses CAP by representing instructions as a structured knowledge graph of constraints. Our approach, Constraint Relationship Graph Completion (CRGC), explicitly models relationships between constraints, identifies adherence challenges, and discovers ``bridge constraints'' that help the model better focus on and reconcile requirements. Bridge constraints act as auxiliary instructions that make primary constraints more salient and compatible. Unlike existing approaches that enhance instruction following through general training methods, CRGC specifically improves constraint satisfaction by leveraging the model's own knowledge to create better pathways for generation. Experiments across three popular instruction following datasets demonstrate that our approach reduces constraint violations by 39% compared to standard prompting while maintaining reasoning abilities of large reasoning models.

Zhengyi Zhao, Shubo Zhang, Zezhong Wang et al.

When asked what a meme or sarcastic post means, Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) tend to describe what the image shows rather than what the author is trying to communicate. Standard instruction tuning entangles a post's literal content with its pragmatic meaning, letting surface-level details contaminate the final response. We reframe meme understanding as a problem of literal-pragmatic decomposition and propose \textbf{Intent Projection}, a framework that separates the two signals at the representation, output, and objective levels within a single LVLM backbone. At the representation level, an orthogonal projection module removes dominant unimodal directions from the fused image-text representation, retaining only the pragmatic residual, while a surface-real affect classifier anchors the decoder with a discrete tag that names the polarity gap. At the output level, the model externalizes a structured reasoning chain, and at the objective level a contrastive reward explicitly penalizes answers that restate the literal description. Across six multimodal benchmarks, Intent Projection consistently outperforms open-source baselines and narrows the gap to proprietary models, with the largest gains on high-divergence posts where literal collapse is most damaging.

Junru Lu, Jiazheng Li, Byron C. Wallace et al.

Accessing medical literature is difficult for laypeople as the content is written for specialists and contains medical jargon. Automated text simplification methods offer a potential means to address this issue. In this work, we propose a summarize-then-simplify two-stage strategy, which we call NapSS, identifying the relevant content to simplify while ensuring that the original narrative flow is preserved. In this approach, we first generate reference summaries via sentence matching between the original and the simplified abstracts. These summaries are then used to train an extractive summarizer, learning the most relevant content to be simplified. Then, to ensure the narrative consistency of the simplified text, we synthesize auxiliary narrative prompts combining key phrases derived from the syntactical analyses of the original text. Our model achieves results significantly better than the seq2seq baseline on an English medical corpus, yielding 3%~4% absolute improvements in terms of lexical similarity, and providing a further 1.1% improvement of SARI score when combined with the baseline. We also highlight shortcomings of existing evaluation methods, and introduce new metrics that take into account both lexical and high-level semantic similarity. A human evaluation conducted on a random sample of the test set further establishes the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Codes and models are released here: https://github.com/LuJunru/NapSS.

Junru Lu, Siyu An, Mingbao Lin et al.

We propose MemoChat, a pipeline for refining instructions that enables large language models (LLMs) to effectively employ self-composed memos for maintaining consistent long-range open-domain conversations. We demonstrate a long-range open-domain conversation through iterative "memorization-retrieval-response" cycles. This requires us to carefully design tailored tuning instructions for each distinct stage. The instructions are reconstructed from a collection of public datasets to teach the LLMs to memorize and retrieve past dialogues with structured memos, leading to enhanced consistency when participating in future conversations. We invite experts to manually annotate a test set designed to evaluate the consistency of long-range conversations questions. Experiments on three testing scenarios involving both open-source and API-accessible chatbots at scale verify the efficacy of MemoChat, which outperforms strong baselines. Our codes, data and models are available here: https://github.com/LuJunru/MemoChat.

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.

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.

Zhihao Wu, Linhai Zhang, Taiyi Wang et al.

Reliable rubric grading requires more than accurate score prediction. Each judgement must be grounded in the mark scheme and evidence from the student answer. Existing credit-assignment and intervention methods, primarily designed for self-contained reasoning tasks such as mathematics reasoning, struggle in this setting because they do not identify where grading reasoning goes wrong or how the model's belief about the final mark changes during reasoning. We propose Evidence-Diagnosed Intervention Training (EDIT), a two-phase framework for training more rubric-faithful LLM graders. First, EDIT-SFT locates problematic reasoning steps using internal model signals: posterior belief over the final mark and input-grounding scores. It then revises only these local steps with help from a rubric checklist. Second, EDIT-RL calibrates the grader with belief-guided reward shaping, penalising large harmful belief drifts while still allowing helpful exploration. Experiments on two real-world, multi-subject grading benchmarks demonstrate that EDIT consistently outperforms strong supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning baselines on both in-domain and out-of-domain splits, with ablation studies confirming that internal-state diagnostics drive these gains.

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.

Salvatore Greco, Hainiu Xu, Jacopo Domenicucci et al.

LLMs are increasingly deployed as Artificial Moral Advisors (AMA) in a variety of contexts: what kind of conversational patterns should they display? In this paper, we study how AMA can help their interlocutors "stay with the uncertainty". We propose three modes of uncertainty (Perspective-Multiplying, Tension-Preserving, Process-Reflecting) and compare them against three control conditions (Baseline, Persuasive, Sycophantic). A user-agent LLM engages in a dialogue on an ethical dilemma with an AMA following a specific uncertainty strategy, and completes pre- and post-conversation questionnaires. We further examine the effect of two persona prompt formats (Declarative and Narrative). We found that (1) no single model dominates as a simulated user agent, with open models aligning with human ambiguity through between-persona divergence and closed models through within-persona hedging; (2) declarative personas better capture initial stance diversity while narrative personas show more realistic belief revision; (3) all six AMA strategies produce distinguishable conversational patterns; and (4) uncertainty strategies differ not in how much stance revision they produce, but in the quality of engagement they sustain.

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.

Wei Liu, Xinyi Mou, Hanqi Yan et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant post-training paradigm, enabling large language models (LLMs) to learn from rewards. We observe that societal regulations are structurally similar to reward functions. They define measurable outcomes, thresholds, and exceptions, while often leaving institutional intent only partially specified. We hypothesise that the RL training process may exploit these gaps and therefore ask whether models' well-known tendency to hack reward functions during RL can scale into a more consequential failure mode named societal hacking: discovering loopholes in the rules society runs on. To study this phenomenon, we introduce SocioHack, a sandbox of 72 societal environments, and find that within these environments, reward hacking naturally emerges and leads to regulatory loophole discovery. Models learn to hack the social rules and generate strategies that remain technically compliant while defeating regulatory intent, and current LLM safeguards provide only limited mitigation. Therefore, collecting in-the-wild feedback for model training requires greater caution, and we need a next-generation post-training paradigm for safely iterating LLMs in real society.=

Zhaoyue Sun, Jiazheng Li, Gabriele Pergola et al.

The primary goal of drug safety researchers and regulators is to promptly identify adverse drug reactions. Doing so may in turn prevent or reduce the harm to patients and ultimately improve public health. Evaluating and monitoring drug safety (i.e., pharmacovigilance) involves analyzing an ever growing collection of spontaneous reports from health professionals, physicians, and pharmacists, and information voluntarily submitted by patients. In this scenario, facilitating analysis of such reports via automation has the potential to rapidly identify safety signals. Unfortunately, public resources for developing natural language models for this task are scant. We present PHEE, a novel dataset for pharmacovigilance comprising over 5000 annotated events from medical case reports and biomedical literature, making it the largest such public dataset to date. We describe the hierarchical event schema designed to provide coarse and fine-grained information about patients' demographics, treatments and (side) effects. Along with the discussion of the dataset, we present a thorough experimental evaluation of current state-of-the-art approaches for biomedical event extraction, point out their limitations, and highlight open challenges to foster future research in this area.

Jun Wang, Abhir Bhalerao, Yulan He

Radiology report generation (RRG) aims to describe automatically a radiology image with human-like language and could potentially support the work of radiologists, reducing the burden of manual reporting. Previous approaches often adopt an encoder-decoder architecture and focus on single-modal feature learning, while few studies explore cross-modal feature interaction. Here we propose a Cross-modal PROtotype driven NETwork (XPRONET) to promote cross-modal pattern learning and exploit it to improve the task of radiology report generation. This is achieved by three well-designed, fully differentiable and complementary modules: a shared cross-modal prototype matrix to record the cross-modal prototypes; a cross-modal prototype network to learn the cross-modal prototypes and embed the cross-modal information into the visual and textual features; and an improved multi-label contrastive loss to enable and enhance multi-label prototype learning. XPRONET obtains substantial improvements on the IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR benchmarks, where its performance exceeds recent state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin on IU-Xray and comparable performance on MIMIC-CXR.

Jun Wang, Abhir Bhalerao, Terry Yin et al.

Radiology report generation (RRG) has gained increasing research attention because of its huge potential to mitigate medical resource shortages and aid the process of disease decision making by radiologists. Recent advancements in RRG are largely driven by improving a model's capabilities in encoding single-modal feature representations, while few studies explicitly explore the cross-modal alignment between image regions and words. Radiologists typically focus first on abnormal image regions before composing the corresponding text descriptions, thus cross-modal alignment is of great importance to learn a RRG model which is aware of abnormalities in the image. Motivated by this, we propose a Class Activation Map guided Attention Network (CAMANet) which explicitly promotes crossmodal alignment by employing aggregated class activation maps to supervise cross-modal attention learning, and simultaneously enrich the discriminative information. CAMANet contains three complementary modules: a Visual Discriminative Map Generation module to generate the importance/contribution of each visual token; Visual Discriminative Map Assisted Encoder to learn the discriminative representation and enrich the discriminative information; and a Visual Textual Attention Consistency module to ensure the attention consistency between the visual and textual tokens, to achieve the cross-modal alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that CAMANet outperforms previous SOTA methods on two commonly used RRG benchmarks.

John Dougrez-Lewis, Elena Kochkina, M. Arana-Catania et al.

Work on social media rumour verification utilises signals from posts, their propagation and users involved. Other lines of work target identifying and fact-checking claims based on information from Wikipedia, or trustworthy news articles without considering social media context. However works combining the information from social media with external evidence from the wider web are lacking. To facilitate research in this direction, we release a novel dataset, PHEMEPlus, an extension of the PHEME benchmark, which contains social media conversations as well as relevant external evidence for each rumour. We demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such evidence in improving rumour verification models. Additionally, as part of the evidence collection, we evaluate various ways of query formulation to identify the most effective method.

M. Arana-Catania, Elena Kochkina, Arkaitz Zubiaga et al.

We present a comprehensive work on automated veracity assessment from dataset creation to developing novel methods based on Natural Language Inference (NLI), focusing on misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We first describe the construction of the novel PANACEA dataset consisting of heterogeneous claims on COVID-19 and their respective information sources. The dataset construction includes work on retrieval techniques and similarity measurements to ensure a unique set of claims. We then propose novel techniques for automated veracity assessment based on Natural Language Inference including graph convolutional networks and attention based approaches. We have carried out experiments on evidence retrieval and veracity assessment on the dataset using the proposed techniques and found them competitive with SOTA methods, and provided a detailed discussion.

Wei Liu, Siya Qi, Yali Du et al.

Large language models (LLMs) make it plausible to build systems that improve through self-evolving loops, but many existing proposals are better understood as self-play and often plateau quickly. A central failure mode is that the loop synthesises more data without increasing learnable information for the next iteration. Through experiments on a self-play coding task, we reveal that sustainable self-evolution requires a self-synthesised data pipeline with learnable information that increases across iterations. We identify triadic roles that self-evolving LLMs play: the Proposer, which generates tasks; the Solver, which attempts solutions; and the Verifier, which provides training signals, and we identify three system designs that jointly target learnable information gain from this triadic roles perspective. Asymmetric co-evolution closes a weak-to-strong-to-weak loop across roles. Capacity growth expands parameter and inference-time budgets to match rising learnable information. Proactive information seeking introduces external context and new task sources that prevent saturation. Together, these modules provide a measurable, system-level path from brittle self-play dynamics to sustained self-evolution.

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.

Xingwei Tan, Gabriele Pergola, Yulan He

Existing models to extract temporal relations between events lack a principled method to incorporate external knowledge. In this study, we introduce Bayesian-Trans, a Bayesian learning-based method that models the temporal relation representations as latent variables and infers their values via Bayesian inference and translational functions. Compared to conventional neural approaches, instead of performing point estimation to find the best set parameters, the proposed model infers the parameters' posterior distribution directly, enhancing the model's capability to encode and express uncertainty about the predictions. Experimental results on the three widely used datasets show that Bayesian-Trans outperforms existing approaches for event temporal relation extraction. We additionally present detailed analyses on uncertainty quantification, comparison of priors, and ablation studies, illustrating the benefits of the proposed approach.

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.

Yingjie Zhu, Jiasheng Si, Yibo Zhao et al.

Automatic multi-hop fact verification task has gained significant attention in recent years. Despite impressive results, these well-designed models perform poorly on out-of-domain data. One possible solution is to augment the training data with counterfactuals, which are generated by minimally altering the causal features of the original data. However, current counterfactual data augmentation techniques fail to handle multi-hop fact verification due to their incapability to preserve the complex logical relationships within multiple correlated texts. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by developing a rationale-sensitive method to generate linguistically diverse and label-flipping counterfactuals while preserving logical relationships. In specific, the diverse and fluent counterfactuals are generated via an Explain-Edit-Generate architecture. Moreover, the checking and filtering modules are proposed to regularize the counterfactual data with logical relations and flipped labels. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the SOTA baselines and can generate linguistically diverse counterfactual data without disrupting their logical relationships.

Lixing Zhu, Zheng Fang, Gabriele Pergola et al.

Building models to detect vaccine attitudes on social media is challenging because of the composite, often intricate aspects involved, and the limited availability of annotated data. Existing approaches have relied heavily on supervised training that requires abundant annotations and pre-defined aspect categories. Instead, with the aim of leveraging the large amount of unannotated data now available on vaccination, we propose a novel semi-supervised approach for vaccine attitude detection, called VADet. A variational autoencoding architecture based on language models is employed to learn from unlabelled data the topical information of the domain. Then, the model is fine-tuned with a few manually annotated examples of user attitudes. We validate the effectiveness of VADet on our annotated data and also on an existing vaccination corpus annotated with opinions on vaccines. Our results show that VADet is able to learn disentangled stance and aspect topics, and outperforms existing aspect-based sentiment analysis models on both stance detection and tweet clustering.

Zheng Fang, Lama Alqazlan, Du Liu et al.

Human-in-the-loop topic modelling incorporates users' knowledge into the modelling process, enabling them to refine the model iteratively. Recent research has demonstrated the value of user feedback, but there are still issues to consider, such as the difficulty in tracking changes, comparing different models and the lack of evaluation based on real-world examples of use. We developed a novel, interactive human-in-the-loop topic modeling system with a user-friendly interface that enables users compare and record every step they take, and a novel topic words suggestion feature to help users provide feedback that is faithful to the ground truth. Our system also supports not only what traditional topic models can do, i.e., learning the topics from the whole corpus, but also targeted topic modelling, i.e., learning topics for specific aspects of the corpus. In this article, we provide an overview of the system and present the results of a series of user studies designed to assess the value of the system in progressively more realistic applications of topic modelling.

Rilwan A. Adewoyin, Ritabrata Dutta, Yulan He

In this paper, we study the task of improving the cohesion and coherence of long-form text generated by language models. To this end, we propose RSTGen, a framework that utilises Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), a classical language theory, to control the discourse structure, semantics and topics of generated text. Firstly, we demonstrate our model's ability to control structural discourse and semantic features of generated text in open generation evaluation. Then we experiment on the two challenging long-form text tasks of argument generation and story generation. Evaluation using automated metrics and a metric with high correlation to human evaluation, shows that our model performs competitively against existing models, while offering significantly more controls over generated text than alternative methods.

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.

Jiasheng Si, Yingjie Zhu, Xingyu Shi et al.

Given a controversial target such as ``nuclear energy'', argument mining aims to identify the argumentative text from heterogeneous sources. Current approaches focus on exploring better ways of integrating the target-associated semantic information with the argumentative text. Despite their empirical successes, two issues remain unsolved: (i) a target is represented by a word or a phrase, which is insufficient to cover a diverse set of target-related subtopics; (ii) the sentence-level topic information within an argument, which we believe is crucial for argument mining, is ignored. To tackle the above issues, we propose a novel explainable topic-enhanced argument mining approach. Specifically, with the use of the neural topic model and the language model, the target information is augmented by explainable topic representations. Moreover, the sentence-level topic information within the argument is captured by minimizing the distance between its latent topic distribution and its semantic representation through mutual learning. Experiments have been conducted on the benchmark dataset in both the in-target setting and the cross-target setting. Results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model against the state-of-the-art baselines.

Xinyi Mou, Siyuan Wang, Zejun Li et al.

Communication protocol design is a central challenge in large language model-based multi-agent systems. Existing single-channel approaches face an inherent communication trilemma: text-based methods are interpretable but verbose, while latent-space methods are efficient but opaque and limited to unidirectional workflows. Inspired by multi-channel communication theory, we propose HyLaT, a hybrid latent-text communication protocol that transmits elaborate cognitive signals through a latent channel for efficiency, while expressing concise critical signals in natural language to preserve interpretability and precision. We introduce a two-stage training framework combining single-agent hybrid generation learning and multi-agent interactive co-training, enabling agents to generate and interpret hybrid messages across multiple rounds of interaction. Experiments demonstrate that HyLaT reduces communication overhead significantly while maintaining competitive task performance, with strong generalization and robustness across diverse settings.

Jun Wang, Lixing Zhu, Abhir Bhalerao et al.

Radiology report generation aims to automatically provide clinically meaningful descriptions of radiology images such as MRI and X-ray. Although great success has been achieved in natural scene image captioning tasks, radiology report generation remains challenging and requires prior medical knowledge. In this paper, we propose PromptRRG, a method that utilizes prompt learning to activate a pretrained model and incorporate prior knowledge. Since prompt learning for radiology report generation has not been explored before, we begin with investigating prompt designs and categorise them based on varying levels of knowledge: common, domain-specific and disease-enriched prompts. Additionally, we propose an automatic prompt learning mechanism to alleviate the burden of manual prompt engineering. This is the first work to systematically examine the effectiveness of prompt learning for radiology report generation. Experimental results on the largest radiology report generation benchmark, MIMIC-CXR, demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code will be available upon the acceptance.

Zhenyi Shen, Hanqi Yan, Linhai Zhang et al.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by encouraging step-by-step reasoning in natural language. However, leveraging a latent continuous space for reasoning may offer benefits in terms of both efficiency and robustness. Prior implicit CoT methods attempt to bypass language completely by reasoning in continuous space but have consistently underperformed compared to the standard explicit CoT approach. We introduce CODI (Continuous Chain-of-Thought via Self-Distillation), a novel training framework that effectively compresses natural language CoT into continuous space. CODI jointly trains a teacher task (Explicit CoT) and a student task (Implicit CoT), distilling the reasoning ability from language into continuous space by aligning the hidden states of a designated token. Our experiments show that CODI is the first implicit CoT approach to match the performance of explicit CoT on GSM8k at the GPT-2 scale, achieving a 3.1x compression rate and outperforming the previous state-of-the-art by 28.2% in accuracy. CODI also demonstrates robustness, generalizable to complex datasets, and interpretability. These results validate that LLMs can reason effectively not only in natural language, but also in a latent continuous space. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenyi4/codi.

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.

Congzhi Zhang, Linhai Zhang, Jialong Wu et al.

Despite the notable advancements of existing prompting methods, such as In-Context Learning and Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models (LLMs), they still face challenges related to various biases. Traditional debiasing methods primarily focus on the model training stage, including approaches based on data augmentation and reweighting, yet they struggle with the complex biases inherent in LLMs. To address such limitations, the causal relationship behind the prompting methods is uncovered using a structural causal model, and a novel causal prompting method based on front-door adjustment is proposed to effectively mitigate LLMs biases. In specific, causal intervention is achieved by designing the prompts without accessing the parameters and logits of LLMs. The chain-of-thought generated by LLM is employed as the mediator variable and the causal effect between input prompts and output answers is calculated through front-door adjustment to mitigate model biases. Moreover, to accurately represent the chain-of-thoughts and estimate the causal effects, contrastive learning is used to fine-tune the encoder of chain-of-thought by aligning its space with that of the LLM. Experimental results show that the proposed causal prompting approach achieves excellent performance across seven natural language processing datasets on both open-source and closed-source LLMs.

Zhaoyue Sun, Jiazheng Li, Gabriele Pergola et al.

Predicting unknown drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is crucial for improving medication safety. Previous efforts in DDI prediction have typically focused on binary classification or predicting DDI categories, with the absence of explanatory insights that could enhance trust in these predictions. In this work, we propose to generate natural language explanations for DDI predictions, enabling the model to reveal the underlying pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics mechanisms simultaneously as making the prediction. To do this, we have collected DDI explanations from DDInter and DrugBank and developed various models for extensive experiments and analysis. Our models can provide accurate explanations for unknown DDIs between known drugs. This paper contributes new tools to the field of DDI prediction and lays a solid foundation for further research on generating explanations for DDI predictions.

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.

Yuxiang Zhou, Yulan He

Adjusting for latent covariates is crucial for estimating causal effects from observational textual data. Most existing methods only account for confounding covariates that affect both treatment and outcome, potentially leading to biased causal effects. This bias arises from insufficient consideration of non-confounding covariates, which are relevant only to either the treatment or the outcome. In this work, we aim to mitigate the bias by unveiling interactions between different variables to disentangle the non-confounding covariates when estimating causal effects from text. The disentangling process ensures covariates only contribute to their respective objectives, enabling independence between variables. Additionally, we impose a constraint to balance representations from the treatment group and control group to alleviate selection bias. We conduct experiments on two different treatment factors under various scenarios, and the proposed model significantly outperforms recent strong baselines. Furthermore, our thorough analysis on earnings call transcripts demonstrates that our model can effectively disentangle the variables, and further investigations into real-world scenarios provide guidance for investors to make informed decisions.

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.

Ziqing Zhuang, Linhai Zhang, Jiasheng Si et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, and as existing approaches for enhancing LLM reasoning continue to mature, increasing attention has shifted toward meta-reasoning as a promising direction for further improvement. However, most existing meta-reasoning methods remain episodic: they focus on executing complex meta-reasoning routines within individual instances, but ignore the accumulation of reusable meta-reasoning skills across instances, leading to recurring failure modes and repeatedly high metacognitive effort. In this paper, we introduce Metacognitive Consolidation, a novel framework in which a model consolidates metacognitive experience from past reasoning episodes into reusable knowledge that improves future meta-reasoning. We instantiate this framework by structuring instance-level problem solving into distinct roles for reasoning, monitoring, and control to generate rich, attributable meta-level traces. These traces are then consolidated through a hierarchical, multi-timescale update mechanism that gradually forms evolving meta-knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate consistent performance gains across benchmarks and backbone models, and show that performance improves as metacognitive experience accumulates over time.

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.

Jiangnan Ye, Hanqi Yan, Zhenyi Shen et al.

Long-context inference with Large Language Models (LLMs) is costly due to quadratic attention and growing key-value caches, motivating context compression. In this work, we study soft context compression, where a long context is condensed into a small set of continuous representations. Existing methods typically re-purpose the LLM itself as a trainable compressor, relying on layer-by-layer self-attention to iteratively aggregate information. We argue that this paradigm suffers from two structural limitations: (i) progressive representation overwriting across layers (ii) uncoordinated allocation of compression capacity across tokens. We propose ComprExIT (Context Compression via Explicit Information Transmission), a lightweight framework that formulates soft compression into a new paradigm: explicit information transmission over frozen LLM hidden states. This decouples compression from the model's internal self-attention dynamics. ComprExIT performs (i) depth-wise transmission to selectively transmit multi-layer information into token anchors, mitigating progressive overwriting, and (ii) width-wise transmission to aggregate anchors into a small number of slots via a globally optimized transmission plan, ensuring coordinated allocation of information. Across six question-answering benchmarks, ComprExIT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art context compression methods while introducing only ~1% additional parameters, demonstrating that explicit and coordinated information transmission enables more effective and robust long-context compression.

Junru Lu, Siyu An, Min Zhang et al.

When the quality of naive prompts is carefully optimized by human experts, the task performance of large language models (LLMs) can be significantly improved. However, expert-based prompt optimizations are expensive. Herein, some works have proposed Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO), to optimize naive prompts according to task outputs of given in-box testing models, with the help of advanced LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) in an ad-hoc way. Although effective, existing schemes suffer from poor generalization ability and privacy risk. To this end, we collect the first large-scale Prompt Optimization Preference dataset (POP), fine-tune offline local LLM-based optimizers, then fairly test with various downstream models. Our method allows accurate optimization of the core task instruction part within the naive prompt in a model-agnostic manner, and thus is named Free-from Instruction-oriented Prompt Optimization (FIPO). In specific, FIPO uses a modular APO template that dynamically integrate the naive task instruction, optional instruction responses, and optional ground truth to produce finely optimized prompts. The POP dataset is meticulously constructed using advanced LLMs, undergoing rigorous cross-validation by human experts and analytical models. Leveraging insights from the data with Tulu2 models and diverse fine-tuning strategies, we validate the efficacy of FIPO framework across five public benchmarks and six testing models. Check codes and data here: https://github.com/LuJunru/FIPO_Project.

Zhaoyue Sun, Hainiu Xu, Andero Uusberg et al.

Emotion understanding is a core capability for LLMs to interact effectively with humans, yet existing evaluation paradigms rely on discrete emotion label prediction and fail to capture the cognitive processes underlying emotion generation. Grounded in appraisal theory, we introduce CAREBench, the first benchmark with complete inferential chain annotations from both first- and third-person perspectives on real-world narratives, spanning appraisal reasoning, appraisal ratings, and multi-label emotion annotation. We propose a process-level evaluation framework and conduct systematic experiments across six LLMs organized around four research questions. We find that stronger models match or surpass human observers on certain tasks, yet fall short on appraisal reasoning and positive emotion recognition; performance across chain steps and sensitivity to appraisal interventions exhibit dissociations across models; and current models have not internalized the mechanisms needed to capture human subjective heterogeneity. These findings suggest that downstream emotion prediction metrics may overestimate LLMs' true emotion understanding, and CAREBench provides a foundation for more diagnostically informative evaluation of LLMs' affective cognitive capabilities.

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.