K. T. Sun

Zongsheng Wang, Kaili Sun, Bowen Wu et al.

Role-playing conversational agents (RPCAs) face persistent challenges in maintaining role consistency. To address this, we propose RAIDEN-R1, a novel reinforcement learning framework that integrates Verifiable Role-Awareness Reward (VRAR). The method introduces both singular and multi-term mining strategies to generate quantifiable rewards by assessing role-specific keys. Additionally, we construct a high-quality, role-aware Chain-of-Thought dataset through multi-LLM collaboration, and implement experiments to enhance reasoning coherence. Experiments on the RAIDEN benchmark demonstrate RAIDEN-R1's superiority: our 14B-GRPO model achieves 88.04% and 88.65% accuracy on Script-Based Knowledge and Conversation Memory metrics, respectively, outperforming baseline models while maintaining robustness. Case analyses further reveal the model's enhanced ability to resolve conflicting contextual cues and sustain first-person narrative consistency. This work bridges the non-quantifiability gap in RPCA training and provides insights into role-aware reasoning patterns, advancing the development of RPCAs.

Derin Cayir, Renjie Tao, Rashi Rungta et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress through preference-based fine-tuning, which critically depends on the quality of the underlying training data. While human feedback is essential for improving data quality, it is costly and does not scale well. In this paper, we introduce Refine-n-Judge, an automated iterative approach that leverages a single LLM as both a refiner and a judge to enhance dataset quality. Unlike existing iterative refinement methods, Refine-n-Judge employs an LLM to both generate refinements and explicitly evaluate each improvement, ensuring that every iteration meaningfully enhances the dataset without requiring additional human annotation or a separate reward model. At each step, the LLM refines a response and judges whether the refinement is an improvement over the previous answer. This process continues until the LLM prefers the initial answer over the refinement, indicating no further improvements. This produces sequences of increasing quality, preference-labeled responses ideal for fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Refine-n-Judge across a range of public datasets spanning five corpora, targeting tasks such as coding, math, and conversation. Models (Llama 3.1-8B and Llama 3.3-70B) fine-tuned on Refine-n-Judge-enhanced datasets were preferred by LLM judges in over 74% of comparisons against models tuned on the original dataset by GPT-4. Additionally, we report performance gains: +5% on AlpacaEval and AlpacaEval 2.0, and +19% on MT-Bench. Our results indicate that Refine-n-Judge produces high-quality datasets and scalable model improvements.

Wang Bill Zhu, Deqing Fu, Kai Sun et al.

Existing recommendation systems either rely on user interaction logs, such as online shopping history for shopping recommendations, or focus on text signals. However, item-based histories are not always accessible, and are not generalizable for multimodal recommendation. We hypothesize that a user's visual history -- comprising images from daily life -- can offer rich, task-agnostic insights into their interests and preferences, and thus be leveraged for effective personalization. To this end, we propose VisualLens, a novel framework that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to enable personalization using task-agnostic visual history. VisualLens extracts, filters, and refines a spectrum user profile from the visual history to support personalized recommendation. We created two new benchmarks, Google-Review-V and Yelp-V, with task-agnostic visual histories, and show that VisualLens improves over state-of-the-art item-based multimodal recommendations by 5-10% on Hit@3, and outperforms GPT-4o by 2-5%. Further analysis shows that VisualLens is robust across varying history lengths and excels at adapting to both longer histories and unseen content categories.