Shuijin Lin, Shaozhen Yan, Tuo Liu, Haifeng Wang, Chunfeng Lian, Jie Lu, Jianhua Ma, Lin Xie
The biological definition of Alzheimer's disease (AD) relies on multi-modal neuroimaging, yet the clinical utility of positron emission tomography (PET) is limited by cost and radiation exposure, hindering early screening at preclinical or prodromal stages. While generative models offer a promising alternative by synthesizing PET from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), achieving subject-specific precision remains a primary challenge. Here, we introduce DIReCT$++$, a Domain-Informed ReCTified flow model for synthesizing multi-tracer PET from MRI combined with fundamental clinical information. Our approach integrates a 3D rectified flow architecture to capture complex cross-modal and cross-tracer relationships with a domain-adapted vision-language model (BiomedCLIP) that provides text-guided, personalized generation using clinical scores and imaging knowledge. Extensive evaluations on multi-center datasets demonstrate that DIReCT$++$ not only produces synthetic PET images ($^{18}$F-AV-45 and $^{18}$F-FDG) of superior fidelity and generalizability but also accurately recapitulates disease-specific patterns. Crucially, combining these synthesized PET images with MRI enables precise personalized stratification of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), advancing a scalable, data-efficient tool for the early diagnosis and prognostic prediction of AD. The source code will be released on https://github.com/ladderlab-xjtu/DIReCT-PLUS.
Larger models and longer contexts make the KV cache a memory and bandwidth bottleneck. We introduce Block-GTQ, a framework that uses the two-dimensional frequency blocks of rotary position embeddings (RoPE) to allocate cached-key precision. A blockwise logit-error bound motivates a label-free query-key energy score, which we combine with codec-dependent rate penalties. Under equal-cost budgets and diminishing marginal gains, largest-marginal-gain allocation exactly minimizes the separable integer proxy. We instantiate Block-GTQ with TurboQuant-MSE (TQ-MSE), grouping equal-rate blocks to support attention over packed caches without materializing a decoded fp16 KV cache. Across ten model configurations, K-only diagnostics reduce layer-averaged logit mean absolute error by about 32-80% relative to uniform TQ-MSE, improving all 367 layers at both 2- and 3-bit average logical key rates. At K2V2 (2 average logical bits per K/V coordinate) on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Block-GTQ raises the six-task needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) average from 70.6 to 97.4 and LongBench-EN from 33.7 to 44.9; K2V2 gains also hold on the tested 32B and 70B models. On DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B at K3V2, without fp16 sink or recent-token buffers, it achieves 49.6/38.8% avg@8 on AIME 2024/2025 versus fp16's 54.2/37.9%, where uniform TQ-MSE scores zero on both. On Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, packed K3V3 serving on one H800 reduces resident KV footprint by a factor of 3.24 and retains perplexity close to fp16 at 128K, while uniform TQ-MSE degrades severely.
Evaluating autonomous agents requires examining whether they can translate goals into coherent action across extended interactions. In persistent environments, this requires coordinating interdependent actions under incomplete observations, accounting for delayed effects, and adapting as earlier decisions shape subsequent opportunities. We introduce ASIWorld, a survival sandbox that combines persistent world and character state with character-scoped observations and a programmable asynchronous interface to study sustained goal execution. Agents pursue interdependent production and exploration tasks through direct actions or agent-authored programs that continue running between model calls. The evaluation assesses task success, the attainment of development achievements, and survival costs, complemented by an analysis of execution behavior. In an exploratory study of nine agent configurations using a common harness, eight complete the production task and six complete both tasks. Analyses of execution trajectories and performance across difficulty levels reveal different preparation, combat, and recovery behaviors among configurations with similar task outcomes. Incomplete preparation is associated with stalled progression, while configurations that complete the tasks differ in survival costs and the fulfillment of additional achievement criteria. These findings illustrate the value of assessing sustained goal execution through both task outcomes and the behaviors and costs associated with achieving them.
A memory can be outdated for present-day reasoning yet indispensable for reconstructing the past. Relevance-based retrieval overlooks this tension: semantic relevance, evidence-grounded validity, and query-specific eligibility are distinct. We propose CALM, a conflict-aware lifecycle memory governance framework that decouples persistent memory preservation from query-time admission. CALM converts heterogeneous records into evidence-grounded memory cells, updates validity and lifecycle states using support, conflict, and dependency signals, and admits query-appropriate evidence through training-free or learned gating informed by temporal applicability. Across LongMemEval-S and LoCoMo with Qwen and GPT backbones, CALM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving the best overall accuracy. Compared with simple filtering and reranking, query-conditioned admission further improves evidence selection. Conflict-blocking and robustness analyses show CALM suppresses erroneous retrieved memories while retaining useful evidence. Historical-reconstruction experiments demonstrate that preserving superseded records supports accurate earlier-state reasoning without compromising current-state answers.
Zejian Wang, Yifan Zhao, Kaihui Ren, Xiaoling Zhou, Yubin Wang, Chenhao Guan, Lin Zhang, Yufeng Li 等 14 位作者
Fully Sharded Data Parallelism (FSDP2) maintains parameters and gradients as per-parameter tensors, whereas its collective path operates on flat, rank-major buffers. Converting between these layouts copies all-gather outputs into parameter storage and packs gradients into full-group fp32 buffers. Layout conversion alone accounts for 6.4% of step time in Llama-3.1 70B training at 8K tokens per GPU. Communication kernels impose a second cost: a default NCCL reduce-scatter can slow a concurrent GEMM that would otherwise complete in a single wave by 69%. We present TIDE, a set of zero-copy collectives built on public NCCL 2.31+ APIs. TIDE preserves FSDP2's per-parameter storage and compute kernels while folding layout placement into collective addressing. TIDE-AG delivers shards directly to parameter storage using NVSwitch multicast and paced recursive-doubling RDMA, with no SMs used for transport or placement. TIDE-RS consumes per-parameter bf16 gradients directly and reduces them into fp32 shards (a mixed-precision mode that NCCL does not provide) using copy engines and short-lived thread blocks (CTAs) for node-local accumulation and NVSwitch for cross-node reduction. A two-phase pipeline separates gradient reads from network progress; Slot-Reuse optionally stages gradients in vacated all-gather slots. On 64 GPUs, TIDE reduces step time by up to 27.1% relative to Stock FSDP2 and 6.0% relative to FSDP2+SymmMem across Llama-3.1 70B, Wan2.2, and Qwen3-30B-A3B. It reduces reduce-scatter SM time by factors of 12.5-14.5 and cuts interference with concurrent compute by up to an order of magnitude. Its reduce-scatter buffer remains nearly constant from 16 to 64 GPUs at a fixed per-GPU output size, and its peak memory is up to 4.7 GiB below FSDP2+SymmMem's and, with Slot-Reuse on Wan2.2, below Stock FSDP2's.
Numbers computed from trained models, such as an example's difficulty or a model's benchmark lead, change with seed and prompt. We ask when such measurements can be corrected or compared. Noise shrinks correlations, and the textbook correction divides by the square root of two estimated reliabilities. On two CIFAR-100 difficulty scores, it returned correlations above one in 70 of 100 classes. We prove that its mean squared error is infinite even when the correlation and the reliabilities use separate seeds. Our rule corrects only when both reliabilities pass a significance test, then divides by their upper confidence bounds. Its output is always bounded, and its coverage guarantees assume Gaussian noise. It helps once reliability is well estimated, more than halving the error with 500 simulated units. Prompt settings can reverse rankings. On ARC, Qwen2-1.5B trails Llama-3.2-3B by 3.8 points with no examples in the prompt and leads by 16.6 with two. Across four benchmarks, averaging the two settings names one winner for 15 of 16 such reversals. We compare models within each setting, controlling family-wise error asymptotically in the number of items for a fixed prompt grid. Aligning embedding coordinates across seeds raises held-out per-dimension reliability from 0.003 to 0.813.
Predictive maintenance is vital for commercial aviation, yet progress remains hindered by the lack of public, large-scale real-world datasets. As a result, most methods are developed and evaluated on proprietary data, limiting reproducibility. We introduce Pneuma, the first publicly available large-scale benchmark for predictive maintenance using onboard time series from in-service commercial aircraft. Built around bleed air systems, Pneuma contains over 920 million multivariate time steps across four aircraft types and 9 verified fault scenarios, directly aligned with real maintenance logs. The dataset exhibits key real-world challenges, including substantial class imbalance, subtle fault evolution patterns, and significant variance across aircraft configurations. We structure the benchmark around three tasks: multivariate forecasting, supervised fault classification, and unsupervised anomaly detection, with labels derived from actual maintenance records. Under unified settings, we evaluate over 25 models from four methodological families on 9 carefully curated subsets. The results reveal that even strong contemporary models struggle with subtle fault signatures. Further analyses show consistent gains from additional in-context examples and multivariate inference, while forecasting quality is strongly associated with anomaly detection performance. Together, these findings provide practical insights into effectively modeling complex real-world aviation time series. We hope Pneuma will serve as a rigorous and reproducible foundation for advancing data-driven predictive maintenance toward real-world deployment in commercial aviation.
Jiafeng Liang, Xianhao Ou, Tao Ren, Rongchuan Mu, Runxuan Liu, Dandan Tu, Ming Liu, See-Kiong Ng 等 9 位作者
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for enhancing the video reasoning capability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). Despite its empirical effectiveness, we show that outcome-level optimization can introduce an undesirable shortcut amplification effect, whereby models increasingly favor text-prior answers even when they are not supported by the visual evidence. To characterize this behavior, we investigate the training dynamics of video RLVR through the lens of perceptual uncertainty, analyzing how predictive uncertainty evolves under video-conditioned and text-only contexts. Our analysis identifies a perceptual uncertainty collapse phenomenon, in which RL training continuously sharpens the model's answer distribution while the uncertainty reduction attributable to visual evidence progressively diminishes. A further gradient-direction analysis reveals that such confidence enhancement becomes increasingly less aligned with visually grounded uncertainty reduction and is instead dominated by text-prior compression. Motivated by these findings, we propose Bifocal Self-distillation Policy Optimization (BSPO), a self-distillation framework that regulates policy updates with two complementary distributional signals. Specifically, BSPO derives empirical reasoning principles from intra-group correct and incorrect rollouts to identify reasoning-sensitive tokens, and introduces shortcut-aware visual perturbation to penalize predictions that remain invariant when task-relevant visual evidence is weakened. By adaptively reweighting the original RL advantage, BSPO preserves the task-solving benefits of RLVR while promoting updates that are both reasoning-sensitive and visually grounded. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of BSPO in improving video reasoning performance and strengthening visual faithfulness.
Web systems increasingly predict users' decisions from what users say, yet when interests partly conflict, users may promise to cooperate to win the other side's cooperation and then not do so. Sales or service agents that rely on such promises may grant concessions to users who then do not keep their promises, at a cost to the party they represent. We test how LLMs combine users' statements with decision records to predict users' decisions, using 1,260 rounds in which 42 users played a repeated prisoner's dilemma-style game with five agents, each prompted to express a dominant Big Five trait, and could talk with the agent before every decision. Across eight open-weight LLMs, predictions from decision records separated cooperation from defection well (AUC = .80), and adding dialogue brought no detectable gain. With dialogue, predictions agreed with users' statements more often, and errors concentrated on rounds in which users broke their statements: accuracy on rounds with a statement barely changed (.73 to .74), while it rose on kept statements (.76 to .95) and fell sharply on broken ones (.65 to .17). Predictions weighted statements more heavily than users' behavior warranted: when users stated a decision they had not yet made in that game, the predicted probability of keeping it rose from .13 to .69, whereas users kept .40 of such statements. Users' decisions also varied with the agent they faced, but predictions hardly reflected this: users cooperated more with the Agreeableness agent than with the Extraversion agent (70.6% vs. 54.5%), whereas predicted cooperation was nearly identical (64.5% vs. 63.1%). Users also cooperated more with an agent when they themselves scored higher on that agent's trait, whereas predicted cooperation barely changed with these scores. Dialogue-based predictions should therefore weigh users' statements by their earlier decisions and the agent they face.
Unsafe deserialization turns untrusted data into attacker-controlled execution, and a single vulnerability can admit diverse exploit variants that evade defenses tailored to a known exploit. Existing defenses typically operate at a single enforcement point with limited visibility into the full attack. Combining controls across layers offers complementary protection, but coordinating them to preserve legitimate functionality and adapting them to new variants requires substantial expert effort. We propose JANUS, a red-blue adversarial framework for automated cross-layer defense synthesis. Starting from a known exploit, \sys iteratively refines deployment-specific policies in an isolated offline environment. A black-box attacker probes the current policy for exploit variants using only externally observable feedback. The defender summarizes each verified variant into its security-relevant effects, uses counterfactual replay to separate complementary coverage from redundant enforcement, and jointly selects and scopes controls across layers. Each candidate policy is validated against accumulated exploits and benign workflows. We evaluate JANUS on sixteen vulnerability deployments across six Java and PHP applications against gateway, application, system, and cross-layer defenses. JANUS reduces held-out attack success to 6.2%, compared with 18.8-55.0% for the baselines, fully mitigates 13 of 16 deployments, and preserves 98.4% of benign functionality tests at a 6.9% targeted P95 latency increase.
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) addresses problems where derivatives are unavailable or costly to obtain. This setting often arises in simulation-based and experimental applications, where evaluating the black-box objective can itself be costly. Thus, it remains a central challenge in DFO to effectively exploit accumulated observations to select informative evaluation points under a limited budget. In this light, we introduce the NextEval solver, an agent-based DFO solver, which integrates the capabilities of a large language model (LLM) to guide the sequential selection of evaluation points. Specifically, we establish a system that combines an LLM agent with a numerical environment. The environment provides tools for analyzing past evaluations and executing numerical methods, while maintaining a shared evaluation history and method-specific state to support continuation across method switches. Using observations and tool feedback, the LLM agent selects tools, configures their parameters, and allocates the evaluation budget, while numerical methods compute and evaluate candidate points. Building on this system, we also introduce NextEval Bench, a benchmark protocol for comparing agent configurations on shared DFO tasks using the same numerical tools under matched evaluation budgets and information constraints. Numerical results on low-dimensional DFO problems demonstrate that the NextEval solver outperforms the state-of-the-art DFO baselines in function-evaluation efficiency.
Chao-Yeh Chen, Tiffany Chen, Lin Duan, Tianyi Hu, Yu-Hsiang Huang, Umar Iqbal, Jiefeng Li, Edy Lim 等 15 位作者
We introduce EgoHand, a monocular 3D hand reconstruction model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on egocentric video. Central to our approach is the curation of a high-quality training corpus of 14 million images, combining synthetic data, in-the-wild video, and multi-camera motion capture to balance scene diversity and supervision quality. The model adopts SOMA-Hand as its parametric representation and processes 2D hand crops with a transformer encoder, incorporating camera cues and an auxiliary 2D branch to improve geometric consistency and image alignment. Zero-shot evaluations on HOT3D, ARCTIC, and H2O demonstrate strong out-of-domain generalization, with lower joint-position, root-translation, and acceleration errors than competing baselines at an inference latency of approximately 9.01 ms. A blinded user preference study further shows that participants favor EgoHand's reconstructed hand poses over those from Apple EgoDex and Ropedia Xperience-10M. We release the EgoHand model and source code under the OpenMDW license, allowing free commercial use of the model.
X-Era AI Lab Team, :, Jianhao Lai, Zhihao Zhan, Zhiquan Liao, Qichang Li, Shubin Chen, Zhiyuan Liu 等 28 位作者
World-action models (WAMs) offer a promising framework for embodied intelligence, yet mainstream approaches remain centered on video foundation models or vision-language models. Even when geometric features extracted by 3D models such as VGGT are incorporated, they are typically passed into a video model or VLM that serves as the primary backbone, leaving 3D geometry as an auxiliary input or prediction target rather than the native foundation for world modeling. We present E0.5, a geometry-native world-action model built directly on 3D foundation models. E0.5 introduces two key innovations. First, it adopts a 3D foundation model as the primary backbone, making 3D geometry the native representation for both world modeling and action prediction. Second, it explicitly predicts future 3D states together with actions, enabling the model to capture geometric world dynamics beyond action-only modeling or future video prediction. Experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 first demonstrate the effectiveness of E0.5 without embodied-data pretraining, achieving success rates of 89.90\% and 50.09\% under clean and randomized settings, respectively. Building on these results, we further pretrain E0.5 on more than 160k robot trajectories from AgiBotWorld-Beta, jointly learning robot actions and future geometry within the pretrained 3D foundation. This embodied pretraining improves mean real-world manipulation success rates by approximately 15 and 7 percentage points on AgileX Piper and Zerith H1, respectively. Together, these results demonstrate the potential of geometry-native foundations to acquire robot interaction knowledge and transfer it to physical manipulation. E0.5 embodies this geometry-native approach as a member of the VWA family of world-action models.
Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, enabling bidirectional context modeling and parallel token refinement. Recent studies have applied reinforcement learning (RL) to DLMs and improved their reasoning performance. However, the iterative denoising process makes credit assignment more challenging, as final outcome rewards provide limited information about how different tokens contribute to the final output. In this paper, we propose Denoising Token Credit Assignment (DTCA), a framework for token-level credit assignment in reinforcement learning for diffusion language models. DTCA estimates token contributions by measuring the improvement in prediction confidence of remaining masked positions after token commitment and groups these signals according to part-of-speech (POS) categories. These contribution weights are used to select informative denoising timesteps and assign token-level learning signals during RL training. DTCA further calibrates these learning signals according to token-level entropy changes induced by policy updates. Experiments on LLaDA-8B-Instruct show that DTCA consistently improves mathematical reasoning performance across different generation budgets, with gains of up to 9.0 points on MATH500 and 5.3 points on GSM8K over the base model.
Long-horizon LLM agents interact with their environments through complete assistant turns while generating each action token by token. We observe that critic values vary primarily across turns, motivating optimization anchored at turns with finer credit allocation among tokens. We propose Multiscale Policy Optimization (MPO), combining Multiscale Advantage Estimation (MAE) and turn-level importance sampling to align credit assignment and policy updates at the turn scale. Extensive experiments across search, tool-use, and automation tasks with 4B and 30B-A3B models demonstrate consistent gains over strong RL baselines.
Shifang Zhao, Long Bai, Kun Yuan, Feng Li, Jieming Yu, Wenzhen Dong, Guankun Wang, Mobarakol Islam 等 11 位作者
In surgical instrument segmentation, the increasing variety of instruments over time poses a significant challenge for existing neural networks, as they are unable to effectively learn such incremental tasks and suffer from catastrophic forgetting. When learning new data, the model experiences a sharp performance drop on previously learned data. Although several continual learning methods have been proposed for incremental understanding tasks in surgical scenarios, the issue of data imbalance often leads to a strong bias in the segmentation head, resulting in poor performance. Data imbalance can occur in two forms: (i) class imbalance between new and old data, and (ii) class imbalance within the same time point of data. Such imbalances often cause the dominant classes to take over the training process of continual semantic segmentation (CSS). To address this issue, we propose SurgCSS, a novel plug-and-play CSS framework for surgical instrument segmentation under data imbalance. Specifically, we generate realistic surgical backgrounds through inpainting and blend instrument foregrounds with the generated backgrounds in a class-aware manner to balance the data distribution in various scenarios. We further propose the Class Desensitization Loss by employing contrastive learning to correct edge biases caused by data imbalance. Moreover, we dynamically fuse the weight parameters of the old and new models to achieve a better trade-off between the biased and unbiased model weights. To investigate the data imbalance problem in surgical scenarios, we construct a new benchmark for surgical instrument CSS by integrating datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, achieving significant performance improvement against existing baselines.
Estimating the correctness of large language model (LLM) predictions without access to ground truth is critical for reliable deployment in high-stakes settings. Existing approaches, such as entropy and perplexity, operate solely on final output statistics, discarding the rich information encoded in intermediate reasoning steps. To address this limitation, we propose STEP (Soft Trajectory Estimation of Prediction correctness), a training-free framework that scores each reasoning step via lightweight forward passes to obtain a soft probability distribution qi over candidate answers, from which we derive a set of soft trajectory features capturing per-step confidence and its progression toward the final answer. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate consistent and substantial improvements, particularly in AUROC, over output-based baselines and hard-indicator trajectory methods. Notably, Temporally-Weighted Consistency, which assigns higher importance to later reasoning steps where answer distributions have stabilized, contributes the largest gains, highlighting the importance of temporal structure in reasoning trajectories. These results further validate the advantage of preserving continuous probability signals over binary discretization.
Junhong Lai, Shuzhong Lai, Yanhao Yu, Wanlin Chen Hangzhou City University, Chenyu Yan Zhejiang University, Haifeng Li Zhejiang University, Lin Yao Zhejiang University, Yueming Wang Zhejiang University
The development of AI-assisted Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI) for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is severely constrained by data scarcity. Furthermore, while Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) serves as the gold standard for clinical intervention, general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to strictly adhere to its standardized procedures, often resulting in interactions that are linguistically fluent but strategically inconsistent. To address these challenges, we introduce ASDAgent, a strategy-aware framework designed to unify high-fidelity intervention dialogue synthesis and clinical decision support. ASDAgent incorporates two specialized components to solve distinct problems: (i) a DoctorAgent equipped with an Observe-Think-Act-Correct (O-T-A-C) reasoning loop, which resolves the issue of strategy collapse in LLMs by making ABA execution explicit and controllable; and (ii) a ChildAgent that utilizes probabilistic behavior modeling to mitigate data homogeneity, simulating diverse and non-deterministic ASD response patterns. Experiments demonstrate that dialogues generated by ASDAgent closely mirror the strategy distribution of human therapists (KL divergence: 0.083). In real autism intervention, ASDAgent achieves nearly 80% strategic consistency with human experts. Moreover, we show that synthetic data produced by ASDAgent effectively distills professional clinical knowledge into small language models (SLMs), significantly enhancing their therapeutic capabilities.
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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
Xinyu Chen Soochow University, Peifeng Li, Qiaoming Zhu Soochow University
Previous work on cross-document event coreference resolution (CDECR) primarily focused on enhancing semantic coherence between event mentions, largely overlooking the critical aspect of temporal coherence. To address this issue, we propose CohTP, a novel Temporal Cohorence-driven event coreference framework. CohTP explicitly models and enforces temporal constraints by first constructing a temporal event graph via a fine-tuned natural language inference (NLI) model. The graph is then refined using an Edge-Aware GNN to resolve conflicts and partitioned into ordered time segments, where undirected edges group contemporaneous events. Event coreference resolution is subsequently performed within these temporally coherent segments, where event representations are further augmented with temporally consistent contexts. Experiments on the ECB+, GVC, WEC, and ECB+META datasets show that CohTP outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.
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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
Zhuofeng Li, Yi Lu University of Waterloo and Texas A&M University - College Station, Dongfu Jiang, Haoxiang Zhang, Yuyang Bai, Chuan Li Lambda, Yu Wang University of Oregon and Vanderbilt University, Shuiwang Ji Texas A&M University 等 10 位作者
The rapid rise in AI conference submissions has driven increasing exploration of large language models (LLMs) for peer review support. However, LLM-based reviewers often generate superficial, formulaic comments lacking substantive, evidence-grounded feedback. We attribute this to the underutilization of two key components of human reviewing: explicit rubrics and contextual grounding in existing work. To address this, we introduce ReviewBench, a benchmark evaluating review text according to paper-specific rubrics derived from official guidelines, the paper’s content, and human-written reviews. We further propose ReviewGrounder, a rubric-guided, tool-integrated multi-agent framework that decomposes reviewing into drafting and grounding stages, enriching shallow drafts via targeted evidence consolidation. Experiments on ReviewBench show that ReviewGrounder, using a Phi-4-14B-based drafter and a GPT-OSS-120B-based grounding stage, consistently outperforms baselines with substantially stronger/larger backbones (e.g., GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-R1-670B) in both alignment with human judgments and rubric-based review quality across 8 dimensions. The code is available at https://github.com/EigenTom/ReviewGrounder.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Pengfei Li, Shijie Wang, Fangyuan Li, Yikun Fu, Kaifeng Liu, Kaiyan Zhang, Dazhi Zhang Harbin Institute of Technology, Yuqiang Li 等 10 位作者
Reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms have demonstrated strong performance on reasoning-intensive tasks such as code generation. However, limited trajectory diversity often leads to diminishing returns, which constrains the achievable performance ceiling. Search-enhanced RL alleviates this issue by introducing structured exploration, which remains constrained by the single-agent policy priors. Meanwhile, leveraging multiple interacting policies can acquire more diverse exploratory signals, but existing approaches are typically decoupled from structured search. We propose MARS^2 (Multi-Agent Reinforced Tree-Search Scaling), a unified RL framework in which multiple independently-optimized agents collaborate within a shared tree-structured search environment. MARS^2 models the search tree as a learnable multi-agent interaction environment, enabling heterogeneous agents to collaboratively generate and refine candidate solutions within a shared search topology. To support effective learning, we introduce a path-level group advantage formulation based on tree-consistent reward shaping, which facilitates effective credit assignment across complex search trajectories. Experiments on code generation benchmarks show that MARS^2 consistently improves performance across diverse model combinations and training settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of coupling multi-agent collaboration with tree search for enhancing reinforcement learning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/TsinghuaC3I/MARTI.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Runxuan Liu, Xianhao Ou Harbin Institute of Technology, Xinyan Ma Harbin Institute of Technology, Jiyuan Wang, Jiafeng Liang Harbin Institute of Technology, Jiaqi Li Tianjin Normal University, Tao He Harbin Institute of Technology, Zheng Chu Harbin Institute of Technology 等 16 位作者
Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT), achieved by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, reasoning in current LLMs is primarily generated as plain text, where performing semantic evaluation on such unstructured data creates a computational bottleneck during training. Despite RLVR-based optimization, existing methods still suffer from coarse-grained supervision, reward hacking, high training costs, and poor generalization.To address these issues, we propose the Graph Reasoning Paradigm (GRP), which realizes structured and symbolic reasoning, implemented via graph-structured representations with step-level cognitive labels. Building upon GRP, we further design Process-Aware Stratified Clipping Group Relative Policy Optimization (PASC-GRPO), which leverages structured evaluation to replace semantic evaluation, achieves process-aware verification through graph-structured outcome rewards, and mitigates reward hacking via stratified clipping advantage estimation. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements across mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks. Data, models, and code will be released later.
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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
Pengfeng Li, Chen Huang National University of Singapore, Chaoqun Hao, Hongyao Chen, Xiao-Yong Wei, Wenqiang Lei Sichuan University, See-Kiong Ng National University of Singapore
Contextual causal reasoning is a critical yet challenging capability for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing benchmarks, however, often evaluate this skill in fragmented settings, failing to ensure context consistency or cover the full causal hierarchy. To address this, we pioneer METER to systematically benchmark LLMs across all three levels of the causal ladder under a unified context setting. Our extensive evaluation of various LLMs reveals a significant decline in proficiency as tasks ascend the causal hierarchy. To diagnose this degradation, we conduct a deep mechanistic analysis via both error pattern identification and internal information flow tracing. Our analysis reveals two primary failure modes: (1) LLMs are susceptible to distraction by causally irrelevant but factually correct information at lower level of causality; and (2) as tasks ascend the causal hierarchy, faithfulness to the provided context degrades, leading to a reduced performance. We belive our work advances our understanding of the mechanisms behind LLM contextual causal reasoning and establishes a critical foundation for future research. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SCUNLP/METER.
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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
Eric Hanchen Jiang, Weixuan Ou, Run Liu, Shengyuan Pang, Guancheng Wan WanFlow AI and Wuhan University, Ranjie Duan Tencent, Wei Dong Nanyang Technological University, Kai-Wei Chang University of California, Los Angeles and Amazon 等 11 位作者
Safety alignment of large language models currently faces a central challenge: existing alignment techniques often prioritize mitigating responses to harmful prompts at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly refuse benign requests. A key goal of safe alignment is therefore to improve safety while simultaneously minimizing false refusals. In this work, we introduce Energy Landscape Steering (ELS), a novel, fine-tuning free framework designed to resolve this challenge through dynamic, inference-time intervention. We trained a lightweight, external Energy-Based Model (EBM) to assign high energy to undesirable (false refusal or jailbreak) states and low energy to desirable (helpful response or safe reject) ones. During inference, the EBM maps the LLM’s internal activations to an energy landscape, and we use the gradient of the energy function to steer the hidden states toward low-energy regions in real time. This dynamically guides the model toward desirable behavior without modifying its parameters. By decoupling behavioral control from the model’s core knowledge, ELS provides a flexible and computationally efficient solution. Extensive experiments across diverse models demonstrate its effectiveness: raising compliance on the ORB-H benchmark from 57.3% to 82.6% while maintaining the baseline safety performance. Our work establishes a promising paradigm for building LLMs that simultaneously achieve high safety and low false refusal rates.
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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
Eric Hanchen Jiang, Levina Li, Frank Wan, Xiao Liang, Sophia Yin, Yuchen Wu University of Washington, Xinfeng Li Nanyang Technological University, Yizhou Sun University of California, Los Angeles and Amazon 等 11 位作者
The efficiency of multi-agent systems driven by large language models (LLMs) largely hinges on their communication topology. However, designing an optimal topology is a non-trivial challenge, as it requires balancing competing objectives such as task performance, communication cost, and robustness. Existing frameworks often rely on static or hand-crafted topologies, which inherently fail to adapt to diverse task requirements, leading to either excessive token consumption for simple problems or performance bottlenecks for complex ones. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel generative framework called Guided Topology Diffusion (GTD). Inspired by conditional discrete graph diffusion models, GTD formulates topology synthesis as an iterative construction process. At each step, the generation is steered by a lightweight proxy model that predicts multi-objective rewards (e.g., accuracy, utility, cost), enabling real-time, gradient-free optimization towards task-adaptive topologies. This iterative, guided synthesis process distinguishes GTD from single-step generative frameworks, enabling it to better navigate complex design trade-offs. We validated GTD across multiple benchmarks, and experiments show that this framework can generate highly task-adaptive, sparse, and efficient communication topologies, significantly outperforming existing methods in LLM agent collaboration. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/diffusion_agent-953C.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Junchao Wu University of Macau, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Hao Zhang, Zeyu Wu, Tianqi Shi, Yichao Du, Longyue Wang Alibaba Group 等 11 位作者
The effective detection and governance of Large Language Model (LLM) generated content has become increasingly critical due to the growing risk of misuse. Despite the impressive performance of existing detectors, their reliability and potential in multilingual, real-world scenarios remain largely underexplored.In this study, we introduce DetectRL-X, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate advanced detectors across 8 dimensions. The benchmark encompasses 8 languages commonly used in commercial contexts and collects human-written texts from 6 domains highly susceptible to LLM misuse. To better aligned with real-world applications, We create LLM-generated texts using 4 popular commercial LLMs, and include typical AI-assisted writing operations such as polishing, expanding, and condensing to capture authentic usage patterns. Furthermore, we develop a multilingual framework for paraphrasing and perturbation attacks to simulate diverse human modifications and writing noise, enabling stress testing of detectors across languages.Experimental results on DetectRL-X reveal the strengths and limitations of current state-of-the-art detectors when applied to diverse linguistic resources. We further analyze how domains, generators, attack strategies, text length, and refinement operations influence performance in different languages, underscoring DetectRL-X as an effective benchmark for strengthening multilingual and language-specific detectors.
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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
Tianlun Liu National University of Defense Technology, Zhiliang Tian National University of Defense Technology, Zhen Huang National University of Defense Technology, Xingzhi Zhou Huawei Technologies Ltd., Wanlong Yu, Tianle Liu, Feng Liu National University of Defense Technology, Dongsheng Li National University of Defense Technology
Text understanding application often suffers from domain shifts. To handle testing domains, domain adaptation (DA) is trained to adapt to a fixed and observed testing domain; a more challenging paradigm, test-time adaptation (TTA), cannot access the testing domain during training and online adapts to the testing samples during testing, where the samples are from a fixed domain. We aim to explore a more practical and underexplored scenario, continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) for text understanding, which involves a sequence of testing (unobserved) domains in testing. Current CTTA methods struggle in reducing error accumulation over domains and enhancing generalization to handle unobserved domains: 1) Noise-filtering reduces accumulated errors but discards useful information, and 2) accumulating historical domains enhances generalization, but it is hard to achieve adaptive accumulation. In this paper, we propose a CTTA-T (continual test-time adaptation for text understanding) framework adaptable to evolving target domains: CTTA-T adopts a teacher-student framework, where the teacher is equipped with domain awareness and generalization for evolving domains. To improve teacher predictions, we propose a refine-then-filter based on dropout-driven consistency, which calibrates predictions and removes unreliable guidance. For the adaptation–generalization trade-off, we construct a domain-aware teacher by dynamically accumulating cross-domain semantics via incremental PCA, which continuously tracks domain shifts. Experiments show CTTA-T excels baselines.
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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
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales capacity via conditional computation, but Transformers lack a native knowledge lookup primitive. We introduce conditional memory, instantiated via Deep Sparse Embedding (DSE), which indexes a massive embedding table using local n-grams for retrieval. We formalize sparsity allocation problem—how to split a fixed parameter budget between MoE experts and DSE memory—and find a U-shaped scaling law that identifies an optimal balance. Scaling to 27B parameters, DSE outperform an iso-parameter and iso-FLOPs MoE baseline across knowledge and reasoning benchmarks, and achieve markedly stronger long-context performance. Mechanistic analyses show that DSE offloads early-layer static recall into memory, freeing effective depth and attention for higher-level reasoning. DSE is also infrastructure-efficient: its deterministic hashing enables offloading massive parameters into host memory during inference with negligible throughput overhead.
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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
Ao Wang China University of Petroleum (East China), Xinghao Yang, Yongshun Gong Shandong University, Wei Liu University of Technology Sydney, Bao-di Liu, Weifeng Liu China University of Petroleum (East China)
Jailbreak attacks serve as a pivotal technique for evaluating the safety alignment of Large language models. Current token-level attacks have shown remarkable efficacy on open-source models by leveraging gradient-based optimization. However, these attacks suffer from poor cross-model transferability, severely limiting their utility on proprietary ones. To address this limitation, we propose Reparameterization Invariance Gradient-based Jailbreak (RIGJ), a natural gradient based framework designed to improve cross-model transferability. Unlike prior token-level methods whose optimization paths are constrained by model-specific Euclidean geometry, RIGJ defines update directions according to differences in output distributions rather than parameter-space distances. Since language models are trained to capture similar dependency structures of natural language, their output distributions share common geometry across architectures, yielding intrinsically model-agnostic optimization trajectories and substantially stronger jailbreak transferability. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance, increasing the cross-model Attack Success Rate and Average Harmfulness Score by 14.9 and 1.23, respectively. Our code is provided https://github.com/nohuma/AISafety_transfer_jailbreak_RIGJ_2026.
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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
YiFan Zhang, Tao Yu, Feng Li, Chaoyou Fu Nanjing University, Yibo Hu Taobao, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Zhang Zhang Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences 等 10 位作者
The supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage is crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), yet a comprehensive scaling law to guide the optimal model-data configuration remains lacking. In this paper, we make an initial attempt to address this gap. First, we theoretically demonstrate that directly computing the optimal computation frontier for MLLM-SFT, as we can for traditional LLMs, is a challenging task. This complexity arises because MLLM-SFT is influenced by a broader range of factors, including model size, LLM pre-training tokens, and MLLM SFT tokens. To tackle this issue, we propose two scaling laws based on LLM paradigms: one applicable when training data volumes are well defined by researchers, and another for cases where models are sourced from open communities with unknown training data. Through theoretical modeling and approximations, we provide researchers with valuable recommendations for optimal resource allocation. Furthermore, we establish a strong correlation ( R^2 = 0.98) between training loss and downstream performance, enabling accurate performance estimation without the need for exhaustive benchmarking. To validate our scaling laws, we construct a testbed of 60 models ranging from 50 million to 8 billion parameters, totaling 1,560 checkpoints. Each checkpoint is evaluated on than 10 MLLM benchmarks, ensuring robust fitting of our formulations.
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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