Haolin Chen, Deon Metelski, Leon Qi, Tao Xia, Joonyul Lee, Steve Brown, Kevin Riley, Frank Wang 等 33 位作者
End-to-end automation of realistic healthcare operations stresses three capabilities underrepresented in current benchmarks: policy density, decisions must be grounded in a large library of medical, insurance, and operational rules; Multi-role composition: a single task requires the agent to play multiple roles with handoffs; and multilateral interaction: intermediate workflow steps are multi-turn dialogs, such as peer-to-peer review and patient outreach. We introduce $χ$-Bench, a benchmark of long-horizon healthcare workflows across three domains: provider prior authorization, payer utilization management, and care management. Each task hands the agent a clinical case in a high-fidelity simulator of 20 healthcare apps exposed via 87 MCP tools, which it must drive to a terminal status through tool calls and writing the role's artifacts, guided by a 1,290+ document managed-care operations handbook skill. Across 30 agent harness/models configurations, the best agent resolves only 28.0% of tasks, no agent clears 20% on strict pass^3, and executing all tasks in a single session slumps the performance to 3.8%. These results raise the hypothesis that similar gaps are likely to surface in other policy-dense, role-composed, irreversible enterprise domains.
We introduce Nemotron 3.5 Super and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, open and efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer models designed for reasoning, long-context understanding, and agentic workloads. Super is a 120B-parameter, 12B-active multimodal model, while Lightning is a smaller 30B-parameter, 3B-active text model; both designed for efficient deployment. Both models combine large-scale distillation, long-context training, and native speculative decoding, while Super further incorporates Indic continued pretraining and agentic software-engineering mid-training. We develop a comprehensive post-training pipeline spanning supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning (RLVR and RLHF), complemented in Super by specialized teacher training and multi- teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD). This transforms Super from a text-only base model into a multimodal agent capable of reasoning over text, images, video, and interactive tool environments. We further explore test-time scaling through parallel agent execution and self-verification. Across training and deployment, we jointly optimize capability and efficiency. Indic continued pretraining improves Indian-language benchmarks by up to 9.82 percentage points, while agentic mid-training strengthens software-engineering capabilities and robustness across agent harnesses. The post-trained Super model achieves 51.78% on SWE-bench Pro, surpassing Nemotron 3 Ultra despite using approximately 4.6x fewer active parameters. Post-training MTP boosting improves speculative- decoding acceptance length by up to 21.8% under probabilistic draft sampling, while NVFP4 quantization achieves 99.62% median accuracy recovery relative to BF16. Inference optimizations enable up to 4,856 output tokens/s/GPU on GB200 while sustaining at least 50 tokens/s/user.
In Large Language Model (LLM) training, data mixing plays a pivotal role in determining model performance. Recent methods optimize mixture weights via proxy models, but they rely on the assumption of static data distributions. As a result, when the underlying data pool shifts, these methods require costly retraining from scratch. This limitation restricts their ability to scale seamlessly from small settings to larger data pools and model sizes. In this paper, we propose CausalMix to address this limitation by casting data mixture optimization as a causal inference problem. We formulate the statistical features of the data pool as covariates and the domain mixture as the treatment. After fitting a causal model on 512 runs of Qwen2.5-0.5B to estimate the Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE), we extrapolate the optimal mixture for an 800K data pool and apply it to train a 7B model. Furthermore, we successfully generalize the framework to long chain-of-thought data on Qwen3-4B-Base. By leveraging causal modeling to isolate confounding biases, CausalMix infers state-dependent data mixtures offline, with the selected mixture fixed during each training run. Extensive experiments show that the mixture guided by CausalMix achieves competitive performance across downstream tasks compared with other baselines. The CATE Interpreter visualizes the learned mixing strategy. Overall, CausalMix offers a causal and interpretable framework for optimizing LLM data mixtures.
Hang Jiang, Nanxi Liu, Tiantian Wang, Cassandra Overney, Rukun Zhang, Artemisia Luk, Diyi Yang, Deb Roy 等 9 位作者
Given that the Chinese are one of the oldest ethnic groups to immigrate to the US, their cuisine have become central to the US dining scene and an interesting avenue to study how Chinese immigrants have culturally adapted into American life. In that regard, previous research has focused on analyzing the English names that Chinese restaurants adopt, e.g., finding the use of familiar and typical words. To investigate how Chinese immigrants have culturally integrated in the US depending on social, geographic and demographic contexts, we investigate in this work the under-explored relationship between the Chinese and English names of American Chinese restaurants. Specifically, we conduct a study on 3,172 Chinese restaurants (10% of the total on Google Maps) sampled across the US. We present 8-dimension name frames to capture the underlying meanings behind names and create the NameFrames dataset containing 884 annotated parallel Chinese/English names. We also built an NLP pipeline to analyze the semantic discrepancies between names with both frame-based and embedding-based distance metrics. Our frame analysis shows that English names more often emphasize Location and Specialty, while Chinese names more often emphasize Positivity and Ambiance. Furthermore, we observe that for Chinese restaurants located in urban areas, those in counties with a higher concentration of Chinese population, or those that are relatively new, the discrepancies between the English and Chinese names are noticeably larger. Finally, interviews with 10 Chinese restaurant owners reveal additional interesting insights regarding naming conventions.
Yubo Shan, Kun Zhang Tencent, Qiming Xu Beijing Technology and Business University, Liping Cao, Yingying Cao, Jian Zhang, Yu Wang, Jingyuan Li 等 9 位作者
Interleaved multimodal understanding and generation—where models can interactively comprehend and produce images and text in arbitrary orders—has emerged as a key research direction in generative Multimodal Large Language Models(MLLMs). Such interleaved image–text content plays an increasingly important role in information dissemination. However, the compounded persuasive power of multimodal narratives also raises the risk of factual misinformation. Despite this, existing benchmarks lack effective mechanisms to evaluate factual consistency in interleaved image–text content. To bridge this gap, we introduce FactVerse, a benchmark dedicated to evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. FactVerse comprises 3,000 human-verified instances across four categories and 50 domains, supporting both English and Chinese. We also establish a multi-dimensional evaluation framework designed to rigorously assess factual consistency. Experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves high alignment with human judgments, significantly outperforming existing evaluation methods. Furthermore, our analysis reveals systematic deficiencies in current models, offering critical insights for future design.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xiaoling Zhou, Mingjie Zhang, Zhemg Lee, Wei Ye Peking University, Shikun Zhang Peking University
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is an effective approach to enhancing their performance on specialized downstream tasks. Among the various techniques, low-rank adaptation has garnered significant attention due to its ability to maintain the full performance of fine-tuning while enhancing computational efficiency. However, existing approaches often rely on manually specified and fixed hyperparameters to identify the trainable components within weight matrices, resulting in suboptimal performance and low parameter efficiency. This paper presents a novel Learnable Low-Rank Adaptation (LeLoRA) framework that utilizes dynamically learned fine-tuning strategies to facilitate the effective adaptation of LLMs. Our framework integrates an LLM with a policy network that automatically and adaptively generates matrix-specific adaptation strategies to identify the trainable components of each weight matrix, taking into account their unique characteristics, such as singular values and matrix norms. A reinforcement learning-based optimization algorithm is then employed to iteratively update the LLM and the policy network, ensuring that the generated strategies adapt in real time to the evolving states of the LLM. Extensive experiments have been conducted across various natural language processing and multimodal tasks. The results across ten different LLMs, ranging from 125M to 70B parameters, provide compelling evidence that LeLoRA consistently outperforms existing baselines in adapting LLMs. Moreover, analytical experiments provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the generated strategies.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Bo Li Peking University, Mingda Wang Hebei University of Technology, Gexiang Fang, Shikun Zhang Peking University, Wei Ye Peking University
We revisit retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) by embedding retrieval control directly into generation. Instead of treating retrieval as an external intervention, we express retrieval decisions within token-level decoding, enabling end-to-end coordination without additional controllers or classifiers. Under the paradigm of Retrieval as Generation, we propose GRIP (Generation-guided Retrieval with Information Planning), a unified framework in which the model regulates retrieval behavior through control-token emission. Central to GRIP is Self-Triggered Information Planning, which allows the model to decide when to retrieve, how to reformulate queries, and when to terminate, all within a single autoregressive trajectory. This design tightly couples retrieval and reasoning and supports dynamic multi-step inference with on-the-fly evidence integration. To supervise these behaviors, we construct a structured training set covering answerable, partially answerable, and multi-hop queries, each aligned with specific token patterns. Experiments on five QA benchmarks show that GRIP surpasses strong RAG baselines and is competitive with GPT-4o while using substantially fewer parameters. Code and resources are provided in the supplementary materials.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Shaoan Xie Carnegie Mellon University, Lingjing Kong Computer Science Department, School of Computer Science, Xiangchen Song Carnegie Mellon University, Xinshuai Dong, Guangyi Chen Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Carnegie Mellon University, Eric P. Xing, Kun Zhang Carnegie Mellon University and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Diffusion-based large language models offer a non-autoregressive alternative for text generation, but enabling them to perform complex reasoning remains challenging. Reinforcement learning has recently emerged as an effective post-training strategy for improving their performance; however, existing methods rely primarily on outcome-based rewards, which provide no direct supervision over the denoising process and often result in poorly structured reasoning that is difficult to interpret and inconsistently supports the final prediction. To address this limitation, we introduce denoising process reward, a process-level reinforcement signal defined over the denoising trajectory of diffusion language models. This reward is obtained by estimating the contribution of intermediate denoising intervals to the final task outcome, encouraging the model to favor reasoning trajectories that consistently guide generation toward correct predictions. We further propose an efficient stochastic estimator that reuses standard training rollouts, enabling practical process-level supervision at scale. Experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach yields consistent improvements in reasoning stability, interpretability, and overall task performance.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Bo Li Peking University, Mingda Wang Hebei University of Technology, Shikun Zhang Peking University, Wei Ye Peking University
Instruction tuning relies on large instruction–response corpora whose quality and composition strongly affect downstream performance. We propose Answer Divergence-Guided Selection (ADG), which selects instruction data based on the geometric structure of multi-sample outputs. ADG draws several high-temperature generations per instruction, maps responses into an embedding space, and computes an output divergence score that jointly encodes dispersion magnitude and shape anisotropy. High scores correspond to instructions whose answers are both far apart and multi-modal, rather than clustered paraphrases along a single direction. Across two backbones and three public instruction pools, fine-tuning on only 10K ADG-selected examples consistently outperforms strong selectors on six benchmarks spanning reasoning, knowledge, and coding. Analyses further show that both dispersion magnitude and shape anisotropy are necessary, supporting answer divergence as a practical signal for instruction data selection. Code and appendix are included in the supplementary materials.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Shakhrul Iman Siam, Tiantian Feng University of Southern California, Jiankun Zhang, Shrikanth Narayanan University of Southern California, Mi Zhang The Ohio State University
Respiratory diseases remain a leading cause of global mortality, where timely and accurate diagnosis is critical to improving patient outcomes and reducing healthcare burdens. While prior work has explored audio-based models for respiratory disease detection, such unimodal approaches often suffer from limited generalizability and diagnostic precision. In this paper, we propose RespiraMFM, a Multimodal Foundation Model that integrates respiratory sounds with patient medical history and symptoms to enhance diagnostic accuracy and disease detection capabilities. We introduce an effective contrastive alignment strategy for audio-text multimodal integration, allowing the model to learn better cross-modal representations between respiratory sounds and corresponding textual clinical information. We evaluate RespiraMFM across five major respiratory diseases using seven real-world datasets in both supervised fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, achieving a 9.15% improvement in AUROC on supervised tasks and a 20.98% gain on zero-shot tasks over existing baselines. These findings underscore the potential of our framework to advance early diagnosis and improve clinical decision-making in respiratory disease management.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xiangchen Song Carnegie Mellon University, Aashiq Muhamed, Yujia Zheng Carnegie Mellon University, Lingjing Kong Computer Science Department, School of Computer Science, Zeyu Tang Stanford University, Mona T. Diab Carnegie Mellon University, Virginia Smith Carnegie Mellon University, Kun Zhang Carnegie Mellon University and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) are a prominent tool in mechanistic interpretability (MI) for decomposing neural network activations into interpretable features. However, the aspiration to identify a canonical set of features is challenged by the observed inconsistency of learned SAE features across different training runs, undermining reproducibility and complicating model comparison. We study run-to-run feature consistency in SAEs and argue that it should be reported as a standard evaluation axis alongside reconstruction and sparsity. We propose the Pairwise Dictionary Mean Correlation Coefficient (PW-MCC) as an assignment-based metric to quantify consistency and demonstrate that high levels are achievable (PW-MCC ≈ 0.80 for TopK SAEs on LLM activations) with appropriate architectural choices.Our contributions include: (i) theoretical grounding for strong consistency in the idealized setting of TopK SAEs; (ii) synthetic validation using a model organism, which verifies PW-MCC as a reliable proxy for ground-truth recovery; and (iii) empirical analysis on LLM activations, where PW-MCC correlates with the similarity of automatically generated natural-language feature explanations.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表