Sha Li

Xinya Du, Sha Li, Heng Ji

Extracting informative arguments of events from news articles is a challenging problem in information extraction, which requires a global contextual understanding of each document. While recent work on document-level extraction has gone beyond single-sentence and increased the cross-sentence inference capability of end-to-end models, they are still restricted by certain input sequence length constraints and usually ignore the global context between events. To tackle this issue, we introduce a new global neural generation-based framework for document-level event argument extraction by constructing a document memory store to record the contextual event information and leveraging it to implicitly and explicitly help with decoding of arguments for later events. Empirical results show that our framework outperforms prior methods substantially and it is more robust to adversarially annotated examples with our constrained decoding design. (Our code and resources are available at https://github.com/xinyadu/memory_docie for research purpose.)

Tianyi Zhang, Isaac Tham, Zhaoyi Hou et al.

Schema induction builds a graph representation explaining how events unfold in a scenario. Existing approaches have been based on information retrieval (IR) and information extraction(IE), often with limited human curation. We demonstrate a human-in-the-loop schema induction system powered by GPT-3. We first describe the different modules of our system, including prompting to generate schematic elements, manual edit of those elements, and conversion of those into a schema graph. By qualitatively comparing our system to previous ones, we show that our system not only transfers to new domains more easily than previous approaches, but also reduces efforts of human curation thanks to our interactive interface.

Ke Yang, Jiateng Liu, John Wu et al.

The prominent large language models (LLMs) of today differ from past language models not only in size, but also in the fact that they are trained on a combination of natural language and formal language (code). As a medium between humans and computers, code translates high-level goals into executable steps, featuring standard syntax, logical consistency, abstraction, and modularity. In this survey, we present an overview of the various benefits of integrating code into LLMs' training data. Specifically, beyond enhancing LLMs in code generation, we observe that these unique properties of code help (i) unlock the reasoning ability of LLMs, enabling their applications to a range of more complex natural language tasks; (ii) steer LLMs to produce structured and precise intermediate steps, which can then be connected to external execution ends through function calls; and (iii) take advantage of code compilation and execution environment, which also provides diverse feedback for model improvement. In addition, we trace how these profound capabilities of LLMs, brought by code, have led to their emergence as intelligent agents (IAs) in situations where the ability to understand instructions, decompose goals, plan and execute actions, and refine from feedback are crucial to their success on downstream tasks. Finally, we present several key challenges and future directions of empowering LLMs with code.

Sha Li, Stefano Petrangeli, Yu Shen et al.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning and planning abilities in textual domains and can effectively follow instructions for complex tasks, their ability to understand and manipulate spatial relationships remains limited. Such capabilities are crucial for content-aware graphic layout design, where the goal is to arrange heterogeneous elements onto a canvas so that final design remains visually balanced and structurally feasible. This problem requires precise coordination of placement, alignment, and structural organization of multiple elements within a constrained visual space. To address this limitation, we introduce LaySPA, a reinforcement learning-based framework that augments LLM-based agents with explicit spatial reasoning capabilities for layout design. LaySPA employs hybrid reward signals that jointly capture geometric constraints, structural fidelity, and visual quality, enabling agents to navigate the canvas, model inter-element relationships, and optimize spatial arrangements. Through group-relative policy optimization, the agent generates content-aware layouts that reflect salient regions, respect spatial constraints, and produces an interpretable reasoning trace explaining placement decisions and a structured layout specification. Experimental results show that LaySPA substantially improves the generation of structurally valid and visually appealing layouts, outperforming larger general-purpose LLMs and achieving performance comparable to state-of-the-art specialized layout models.