We present GO-CBED, a goal-oriented Bayesian framework for sequential causal experimental design. Unlike conventional approaches that select interventions aimed at inferring the full causal model, GO-CBED directly maximizes the expected information gain (EIG) on user-specified causal quantities of interest, enabling more targeted and efficient experimentation. The framework is both non-myopic, optimizing over entire intervention sequences, and goal-oriented, targeting only model aspects relevant to the causal query. To address the intractability of exact EIG computation, we introduce a variational lower bound estimator, optimized jointly through a transformer-based policy network and normalizing flow-based variational posteriors. The resulting policy enables real-time decision-making via an amortized network. We demonstrate that GO-CBED consistently outperforms existing baselines across various causal reasoning and discovery tasks-including synthetic structural causal models and semi-synthetic gene regulatory networks-particularly in settings with limited experimental budgets and complex causal mechanisms. Our results highlight the benefits of aligning experimental design objectives with specific research goals and of forward-looking sequential planning.
Foundation-model predictors of perturbation response are evaluated primarily by aggregate accuracy. Using their predictions to prioritize experiments requires assessing each prediction's reliability. We audit the state-transition (ST) decoder used in STATE across three encoders (SE-600M, scGPT, and Tahoe-x1) and four cell lines under CRISPRi. The decoder's first attention layer has a low-rank output. Projecting this output onto 4-32 fixed directions estimated from training activations preserves mean per-perturbation Pearson delta correlation (PDC). This low-rank attention bottleneck bounds the decoder's reliability by distance to training responses: PDC declines as the cosine distance from a perturbation's observed response to its nearest training response increases. We propose predicted-NN-distance, the cosine distance from a predicted response to its nearest training response, as a per-prediction confidence score. The score has a mean absolute Spearman correlation of 0.81 with PDC, close to the 0.88 obtained with the observed response. Thresholds calibrated on this score transfer across encoders and cell lines, and the score remains predictive of PDC for drug perturbations.
Although existing candidate trajectory evaluators have substantially improved end-to-end planning accuracy, their underlying mechanism remains suboptimal. Model-based evaluators typically make scoring future-aware by explicitly predicting candidate-conditioned future states over the planning horizon, which we term rollout. However, rollout incurs high inference cost and accumulates prediction errors. We argue that planning does not require reconstructing a full future scene for each candidate, but only future-relevant information for reliable comparison. We therefore propose RFWorld, a Rollout-Free World model for end-to-end trajectory evaluation. RFWorld constructs a shared scene memory and shapes it into a future-readable representation via lightweight training-time temporal readout with semantic supervision, keeping training overhead low. At inference time, candidate trajectories directly query the shared memory via sparse spatial readout for scoring, reducing computation by roughly the planning horizon times the number of candidate trajectories, while avoiding recursive rollout errors. Experiments on NAVSIM and Bench2Drive show that RFWorld learns a more planning-aligned world representation and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Human speech includes nonverbal vocalizations (NVVs), such as laughter, sighs, breaths, and coughs, which convey affective and interactional information. Existing approaches typically represent NVVs as transcript-level tags, providing limited supervision for their waveform-time boundaries. We present NVV-Locator for fine-grained NVV temporal grounding. We first unify 26 NVV categories across public resources and construct large-scale timestamp-supervised training data through dual-LLM verification, transcript-guided forced alignment, and energy-based boundary refinement. We further introduce NVV-TimeBench, an expert-refined benchmark with 667 utterances and 1,094 events. NVV-Locator uses a non-autoregressive slot-filling architecture to jointly predict lexical timestamps, NVV categories, and event boundaries. On NVV-TimeBench, it achieves 71.0% Micro F1, 70.2% Macro F1, 80.4% Macro mIoU, and 59.6 ms Macro mMAE, outperforming the evaluated large audio model counterparts. Evaluation on an external corpus further demonstrates the cross-corpus generalization of NVV-Locator.
Audio language models are meant to answer questions from the audio itself, but an hour-long recording rarely fits in their context, and the answer often depends on a few seconds of it. Transcribing the recording first makes it fit but discards sounds and voices, while systems that return to the audio must be trained for this behavior. We propose ReListen, a training-free method in which a frozen audio language model finds its own evidence before answering. In a Jev-style scan, the model scores each 20-second window by the probability that it helps answer the question, and it then answers from the highest-scoring minute. This minute overlaps the annotated evidence far more often than transcript retrieval, for 88.5% of VoiceGiraffe questions. Without any change, the same scan also grounds events on LAT-Bench as well as a model trained for temporal grounding. Answering from it matches or exceeds hearing the whole recording with a small fraction of the audio, and on VoiceGiraffe it exceeds a transcript of the whole recording by 9.2 points. The selected evidence is also worth hearing rather than reading. Given the same excerpts, reading their transcript matches listening on speech content, but listening is clearly more accurate on questions about sounds and voices. Moreover, ReListen answers faster than every transcript-based system, and its memory stays constant even for recordings too long to hear whole on one GPU. Therefore, a frozen audio language model can search hour-long recordings by itself, without a transcript or additional training.
Jie Liu, Xusheng Tang, Chao Wang, Zhengxiao Yan, Yuchen Dai, Qi Zhang, Conghe Song
High-resolution land-cover maps support ecological monitoring, but consistent historical time series remain scarce because aerial imagery varies across years and sensors. We developed a dual-track workflow to produce temporally coherent 1-m land-cover maps from National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) imagery without historical training samples. For higher-quality imagery from 2009-2017, we used a pretrained U-Net/ResNet-34 model and refined boundaries with the Segment Anything Model (SAM). For lower-quality imagery from 2004-2008, we reconstructed land cover through an NLCD-based spatiotemporal bridging and label back-casting pipeline. Evaluation across six counties in North Carolina and Pennsylvania yielded overall accuracies of 0.887 (2014), 0.886 (2017), and 0.733 (2004). Structure, Water, Wetland, and Cropland consistently achieved high F1-scores. The workflow integrates GeoAI and multiple data sources to address temporal heterogeneity in historical aerial imagery, supporting high-resolution land-change analysis and landscape planning across the conterminous United States.
Wenhao Li, Qinglin Jia, Chenghou Jin, Zihong Xian, Jiezhou Ji, Yanzhi Liu, Zezheng Wang, Bo Chen 等 12 位作者
Modeling lifetime user behavior sequences is essential for capturing long-range preferences in industrial recommendation, yet sequences containing up to 100K interactions make target-aware ranking prohibitively expensive. Search-based methods that retrieve from raw sequences incur candidate-dependent costs that grow with sequence length, whereas latent compression methods reduce computation at the expense of item-level addressability. We propose ECHO (Efficient Cascade with Homogeneous Operators), a framework that balances efficiency and fine-grained retrieval by retaining a subset of original event records per user through a Distilled Selector (DS) and retrieving a smaller set of target-relevant records for each candidate through a Target-aware Fine-grained Retriever (TFR). DS is supervised by a candidate-aware full-history teacher via per-target distillation, enabling target-aware user-level selection without requiring full-history computation for every candidate. The retriever and target-attention scorer share the relevance parameters learned by the teacher, ensuring consistent relevance estimation throughout the cascade. At a sequence length of 100K, ECHO reduces online sequence-branch FLOPs by approximately 160 times compared with a representative end-to-end model. Three deployment optimizations, including common user inputs, compact record encoding, and key-side projection absorption, further reduce memory, storage, and data-movement overhead. Experiments on KuaiRand-1K and an industrial-scale short-video platform demonstrate relative GAUC improvements ranging from 0.113% to 1.520% over state-of-the-art baselines across multiple tasks. Furthermore, online A/B tests in two production scenarios, Kuaishou and Kuaishou Lite, show that ECHO improves app usage time by 0.240% and 0.373%, respectively.
Yunzhou Song, Long Le, Yong-Hyun Park, Jie Wang, Junyao Shi, Lingjie Liu, Jiatao Gu, Eric Eaton 等 10 位作者
Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown great promise as generalist policies for a large range of relatively simple tasks. However, they demonstrate limited performance on more complex tasks, such as those requiring complex spatial or semantic understanding, manipulation in clutter, or precise manipulation. We propose OmniGuide, a flexible framework that improves VLA performance on such tasks by leveraging arbitrary sources of guidance, such as 3D foundation models, semantic-reasoning VLMs, and human pose models. We show how many kinds of guidance can be naturally expressed as differentiable energy functions with task-specific attractors and repellers located in 3D space, that influence the sampling of VLA actions. In this way, OmniGuide enables guidance sources with complementary task-relevant strengths to improve a VLA model's performance on challenging tasks. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments, across diverse sources of guidance, demonstrate that OmniGuide enhances the performance of state-of-the-art generalist policies (e.g., $π_{0.5}$, GR00T N1.6) significantly across success and safety rates. Critically, our unified framework matches or surpasses the performance of prior methods designed to incorporate specific sources of guidance into VLA policies. Project page: https://omniguide.github.io/
As general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Gemini and DeepSeek, exhibit increasingly advanced reasoning capabilities, a critical question arises: how do their property prediction abilities compare to those of domain-specific pretrained materials models? In this study, we evaluate predictions for Ti, steels, high-entropy alloy (HEA) and Al, demonstrating that general-purpose LLMs surprisingly outperform SteelBERT, MatSciBERT, and SciBERT. To further enhance performance, we introduce a hybrid approach that utilizes numerical priors from a prior model, such as CatBoost or SteelBERT, to guide the general LLMs (Deepseek V3.1, Gemini-2.5-Flash). By inputting these initial estimates from a prior model as prompts, the LLM acts as a reasoning corrector, achieving accuracy superior to the prior model and "unguided mode". Furthermore, we investigate the impact of data strategy using a similarity-based metric, revealing that data quality dominates quantity; using merely 5% of high-similarity reference data of training set as input yields performance similar to the results of using 100% of training set. Additionally, the LLMs demonstrate excellent uncertainty calibration, where self-reported "high" confidence strongly correlates with minimal deviation from ground truth. Our findings suggest that synergizing general-purpose LLMs with prior model numerical baselines and high-quality data curation creates a cost-effective and accurate paradigm for materials discovery, reducing the need for expensive domain-specific pretraining.
Yongxiang Hu, Xuan Wang, Qingyang Qiu, Yingjie Liu, Chun Kang, Ruiying Zeng, Xin Wang, Yangfan Zhou
Screen readers for blind and low-vision (BLV) users flatten mobile UIs into a linear sequence. Modern mobile UIs, however, contain dozens of elements grouped by spatial layout. Such linear access is ill-suited for BLV users, who must infer each element's meaning and which elements form a functional unit. Drawing on a quantitative TalkBack audit and formative interviews, we present Spatial Screen Reader (SeeR), which builds a function-aware hierarchy from accessibility metadata and provides unit summaries with hierarchical navigation. Compared with TalkBack, SeeR reduces non-informative focus stops by 82.1% and navigation steps by 52.7%. With ten BLV participants, summaries helped them connect controls to their functions and skip nonessential elements, especially on unfamiliar pages, though extra navigation levels added effort when the target was already known. These findings recast spatial organization as accessibility information: apps and platforms should expose it, rather than leaving screen readers to infer it post hoc.
Rongyu Zhang, Mutian Bao, Jinjian Zhang, Yuetian Du, He Xu, Wei Zhou, Xiaojun Zhu, Ming Kong 等 11 位作者
When user queries are incomplete, large language models should ask targeted questions before committing to an answer, a capability we call proactive elicitation, yet evaluation on real user-assistant queries across seven LLMs (8B to frontier) shows that fewer than 11% of underspecified queries trigger a follow-up question. To benchmark and train this capability, we introduce VagueBench, where each seed query is annotated with structured intent and detail units then degraded into intent-vague and fully-vague variants via controlled removal of linguistic cues, yielding known hidden information sets for evaluating both when and what to ask. We propose DialogGRPO, an offline reinforcement learning method that organizes multi-turn elicitation as a dialogue-state directed acyclic graph, where candidate questions at each node receive dense turn-level rewards combining immediate information gain with lookahead value through group-relative comparison, enabling fine-grained credit assignment without runtime simulation. DialogGRPO elicits missing information on over 88% of vague queries with substantial gains in both recovery efficiency and answer coverage, without over-asking on complete queries, outperforms prompting and test-time-scaling baselines, and generalizes zero-shot to MultiWOZ 2.4 and AmbigQA.
Yehan Zhang, Qianqi Yan, Hang Yin, Ching-Chen Kuo, Shan Jiang, Ming Ouyang, Yijie Liu, Xin Eric Wang
LLM agents increasingly carry out multi-turn tasks across everyday applications, yet users often see only the agent's report rather than the observations, API calls, and state changes behind it. Existing deception benchmarks have studied long-horizon interactions and tool-use settings, but whether agents faithfully report their actions across realistic, stateful application workflows remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce AgentDecept, an executable benchmark for evaluating behavioral deception under pressure. AgentDecept contains 477 pressure variants derived from 257 source tasks across six pressure sources, each paired with a pressure-free counterpart. Interventions enter through event messages, task context, application state, tool responses, and service quotas, spanning explicit events and implicit task or environment changes. Our evidence-grounded protocol evaluates full trajectories by relating user-facing claims to time-ordered observations and executed outcomes, distinguishing falsification, concealment, and equivocation from honest failure and disclosed limitations. The resulting behavioral labels also provide a setting for testing existing activation-based probes. AgentDecept enables controlled analysis of when multi-turn agents' reports diverge from execution in realistic application interactions.
Sparse-view cone-beam computed tomography is widely used for fast, low-dose volumetric imaging and lesion localization in dentistry and image-guided interventions, but it introduces severe artifacts. Feed-forward Gaussian methods transfer the reconstruction cost to training and decode each coordinate from projection-aligned features and neighboring anchors. However, information from the whole scan is written only when the field is constructed and cannot be retrieved during coordinate decoding, leaving the volume inconsistent within the scan. This is a common limitation of such methods: once the field is fixed, decoding uses only local features and reconstruction quality drops substantially. We propose SparseTokenGS, a Gaussian-based method for sparse-view cone-beam computed tomography reconstruction via a reusable token pool. Anchor Token Fusion and Point-Token Attention query this shared pool at the anchors and at the query coordinates, respectively. The local Gaussian prior is retained, and the volume is reconstructed in one forward pass, without per-scan optimization or a projection-domain loss. On three public chest and dental datasets, SparseTokenGS achieves the highest reconstruction performance among the compared methods. On clinical dental scans, reconstruction from only six projections reaches 29.51 decibels in peak signal-to-noise ratio and a structural similarity of 0.842 against the full-view reference, and off-the-shelf tooth-and-pulp segmentation keeps these structures separable for root-canal localization. Experiments on volcanic rock and chicken show performance after same-object adaptation. A reusable token pool gives feed-forward reconstruction a mechanism that keeps scan-wide context available through decoding and can benefit future rapid clinical lesion localization and analysis. The code is available at: https://github.com/FrankDengAI/SparseTokenGS.
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.
Pretrained image-generation models have been successfully repurposed for various downstream visual tasks. Whether their learned representations and generative priors can transfer beyond vision to other modalities remains largely unresolved, particularly for speech synthesis, which requires linguistic fidelity and preservation of speaker identity from a short reference. We present ImageTTS, which repurposes FLUX.2 for speech synthesis by encoding pseudo-RGB log-mel spectrograms with its frozen image VAE and adapting only its pretrained Diffusion Transformer (DiT) using conditional latent flow matching. This formulation disentangles two forms of vision-to-speech transfer: representation transfer through the image VAE and generative-prior transfer through DiT initialization. The frozen image VAE largely preserves intelligibility and speaker identity with 0.99 STOI and 0.95 speaker similarity, while image-pretrained DiT initialization accelerates convergence and improves linguistic accuracy, reducing WER from 4.2\% to 2.7\% at 100k matched updates relative to random initialization. The same framework supports both zero-shot and instruction-guided TTS and, when scaled to 100K hours of speech data, achieves 1.12\% WER on Seed-TTS test-en and a Style-ACC of 0.66 on CapSpeech, outperforming speech-native baselines trained on comparable data across both tasks. These results suggest that pretrained image models can transfer beyond architectural reuse, supplying useful latent representations and generative priors for intelligible and controllable speech synthesis.
Hui Liu City University of Hong Kong, Bin Zou, Kecheng Chen City University of Hong Kong, Jie Liu City University of Hong Kong, Wenya Wang Nanyang Technological University, Haoliang Li City University of Hong Kong
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit substantial variability in performance and computational cost across tasks and queries, motivating routing systems that select models to meet user-specific cost–performance trade-offs. However, existing routers generalize poorly in cold-start scenarios where in-domain training data is unavailable. We address this limitation with a multi-level task-profile–guided data synthesis framework that constructs a hierarchical task taxonomy and produces diverse question–answer pairs to approximate the test-time query distribution. Building on this, we introduce TRouter, a task-type–aware router approach that models query-conditioned cost and performance via latent task-type variables, with prior regularization derived from the synthesized task taxonomy. This design enhances TRouter’s routing utility under both cold-start and in-domain settings. Across multiple benchmarks, we show that our synthesis framework alleviates cold-start issues and that TRouter delivers effective LLM routing.
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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
Hong Ting Tsang, Jiaxin Bai Hong Kong Baptist University, Haoyu Huang, Qiao Xiao, Tianshi Zheng The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Baixuan Xu Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Shujie Liu, Yangqiu Song Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Building effective knowledge graphs (KGs) for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is pivotal for advancing question answering (QA) systems. However, its effectiveness is hindered by a fundamental disconnect: the knowledge graph (KG) construction process is decoupled from its downstream application, yielding suboptimal graph structures. To bridge this gap, we introduce AutoGraph-R1, the first framework to directly optimize KG construction for task performance using Reinforcement Learning (RL). AutoGraph-R1 trains an LLM constructor by framing graph generation as a policy learning problem, where the reward is derived from the graph’s functional utility in a RAG pipeline. We design two novel, task-aware reward functions, one for graphs as knowledge carriers and another as knowledge indices. Across multiple QA benchmarks, AutoGraph-R1 consistently enables graph RAG methods to achieve significant performance gains over using task-agnostic baseline graphs. Our work shows it is possible to close the loop between construction and application, shifting the paradigm from building intrinsically ‘good‘ graphs to building demonstrably ‘useful‘ ones.
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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
Shaonan Liu Shenzhen University, Guo Yu, Xiaoling Luo Shenzhen University, Shiyi Zheng, Jie Liu City University of Hong Kong, Wenting Chen, Linlin Shen Shenzhen University
Medical Multimodal Large Language Models (Med-MLLMs) require egocentric clinical intent understanding for real-world deployment, yet existing benchmarks fail to evaluate this critical capability. We introduce MedGaze-Bench, the first benchmark leveraging clinician gaze as a Cognitive Cursor to assess intent understanding across surgery, emergency simulation, and diagnostic interpretation. Our benchmark addresses three fundamental challenges: visual homogeneity of anatomical structures, strict temporal-causal dependencies in clinical workflows, and implicit adherence to safety protocols. We propose a Three-Dimensional Clinical Intent Framework evaluating: (1) Spatial Intent—discriminating precise targets amid visual noise, (2) Temporal Intent—inferring causal rationale through retrospective and prospective reasoning, and (3) Standard Intent—verifying protocol compliance through safety checks. Beyond accuracy metrics, we introduce Trap QA mechanisms to stress-test clinical reliability by penalizing hallucinations and cognitive sycophancy. Experiments reveal current MLLMs struggle with egocentric intent due to over-reliance on global features, leading to fabricated observations and uncritical acceptance of invalid instructions.
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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
Qiuyi Qi Zhejiang University, Tian Liang Zhejiang University, Mutian Bao Zhejiang University, Jinjian Zhang Ant Group, Dongnan Liu Ant Group, Wei Zhou, Linjian Mo Ant Group, Ming Kong Zhejiang University 等 11 位作者
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for training Large Language Model (LLM) agents on long-horizon tasks. However, sparse and delayed rewards often lead to trajectory neglect, in which agents lose focus on the task goal and interaction history at intermediate steps. Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy–based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence and therefore provide unreliable estimates of decision reliability. To address this issue, we propose normalized entropy, which measures confidence deviations relative to an agent’s average behavior under a given state, thereby strengthening the association between low-quality actions and trajectory neglect. Building on this insight, we introduce Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization (STAPO), a hierarchical group-based RL framework. STAPO leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a joint mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty, enhancing trajectory awareness while preserving training stability. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA demonstrate that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect, validating its effectiveness and robustness for agentic tasks.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Mengxiao Zhu North China University of Technology, Haixu Chen, Jiu Sha Minzu University of China, Jie Liu North China University of Technology, Ge Shi
Low-resource multilingual OCR faces a dual challenge: complex script structures and severe data scarcity. In such settings, existing OCR models often struggle, as coarse visual representations combined with weak linguistic priors lead to frequent errors among visually similar characters.To address this, we present BASA (Beyond Atomic Sub-character Alignment), a OCR framework built upon high-resolution visual and language backbones with a novel glyph-aware interface. The core technical contribution is the Glyph-Aware Fine-grained Adapter (GAFA). Unlike standard linear projectors, GAFA employs learnable glyph prototypes to actively align sub-character structural primitives (e.g., strokes and radicals) with visual features, explicitly resolving topological ambiguities during vision–language alignment. To complement this, we introduce a two-stage curriculum learning strategy supported by a Glyph-Aware Reverse Synthesis pipeline, which generates large-scale multilingual training corpora with automatic, zero-cost component labels. Furthermore, we construct BASA-Bench, a representative benchmark spanning 11 languages with diverse script structures and 23 authentic scenarios. Experiments demonstrate that BASA achieves consistent improvements over strong OCR baselines, particularly on scripts with complex compositions. Our model and benchmark will be available at https://github.com/NcutLLM/BASA.
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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
Ronghui Yang South China University of Technology, Jie Liu South China University of Technology, Jiajie Zeng South China University of Technology, Jiexin Wang, Jiuchuan Jiang, Bo An Nanyang Technological University, Yi Cai South China University of Technology, Mengchen Zhao South China University of Technology
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in automating code generation. Recent approaches that incorporate feedback refinement mechanisms into the generation process have further enhanced software generation quality. However, these methods can be characterized as single-path approaches, which suffer from insufficient exploration of the vast solution space, often causing even the most powerful models to get stuck in local optima and struggle to generate the desired software. Some other works use Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore multiple paths for finding the best solution; yet, MCTS can be extremely inefficient in practice. To this end, we propose SeDev, a novel LLM-driven code generation framework that efficiently finds high-quality solutions in only a few iterations. The core idea of SeDev is to gradually explore semantically adjacent solutions through structured prompt guidance and feedback on previous trials, while using unit tests to evaluate the quality of exploration. To distill the exploration experience, SeDev incorporates a feedback synthesis module that translates unit test results within exploration into comprehensive suggestions. We construct a challenging feature oriented software benchmark FSD-bench++, along with two open datasets to evaluate. Experimental results show that SeDev outperforms baselines while maintaining reasonable time and computational costs. Code is available here.
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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
Yangfan Wang Harbin Institute of Technology, Tianyang Sun, Chen Tang, Jie Liu Harbin Institute of Technology, Wei Cai Harbin Institute of Technology, Jingchi Jiang Harbin Institute of Technology
Lifelong model editing (LME) aims to sequentially rectify outdated or inaccurate knowledge in deployed LLMs while minimizing side effects on unrelated inputs. However, existing approaches typically apply parameter perturbations to a static and dense set of LLM layers for all editing instances. This practice is counter-intuitive, as we hypothesize that different pieces of knowledge are stored in distinct layers of the model. Neglecting this layer-wise specificity can impede adaptability in integrating new knowledge and result in catastrophic forgetting for both general and previously edited knowledge. To address this, we propose HiEdit, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that adaptively identifies the most knowledge-relevant layers for each editing instance. By enabling dynamic, instance-aware layer selection and incorporating an intrinsic reward for sparsity, HiEdit achieves precise, localized updates. Experiments on various LLMs show that HiEdit boosts the performance of the competitive RLEdit by an average of 8.48% with perturbing only half of the layers per edit. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yangfanww/hiedit.
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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
Wenxuan Wang Renmin University of China, Zizhan Ma The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Guo Yu, Yiu-Fai Cheung Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Meidan Ding Shenzhen University, Jie Liu City University of Hong Kong, Wenting Chen, Linlin Shen Shenzhen University
Large language models (LLMs) show significant potential in healthcare, prompting numerous benchmarks to evaluate their capabilities. However, concerns persist regarding the reliability of these benchmarks, which often lack clinical fidelity, robust data management, and safety-oriented evaluation metrics. To address these shortcomings, we introduce MedCheck, the first lifecycle-oriented assessment framework specifically designed for medical benchmarks. Our framework deconstructs benchmark development into five stages from design to governance, and provides a comprehensive checklist of 46 medically-tailored criteria. Using MedCheck, we conducted an in-depth empirical evaluation of 56 medical LLM benchmarks. Our analysis uncovers widespread, systemic issues, including a profound disconnect from clinical practice, a crisis of data integrity due to unmitigated contamination risks, and a systematic neglect of safety-critical evaluation dimensions like model robustness and uncertainty awareness. Based on these findings, MedCheck is both a diagnostic tool for existing benchmarks and an actionable guideline for a more standardized, reliable, and transparent approach to evaluating AI in healthcare.
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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
Shuyu Zhang, Yujie Liu Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication, Xinru Wang University of Sydney, Cheng Zhang Tianjin University of Finance & Economics, Yanmin Zhu Shanghai Jiaotong University, Bin Li Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Traditional task-oriented dialog systems are unable to evolve from ongoing interactions or adapt to new domains after deployment, that is a critical limitation in real-world dynamic environments. Continual learning approaches depend on episodic retraining with human-curated data, failing to achieve autonomy lifelong improvement. While evolutionary computation and LLM driven self-improvement offer promising mechanisms for dialog optimization, they lack a unified framework for holistic, iterative strategy refinement. To bridge this gap, we propose DarwinTOD, a lifelong self-evolving dialog framework that systematically integrates these two paradigms, enabling continuous strategy optimization from a zero-shot base without task-specific fine-tuning. DarwinTOD maintains an Evolvable Strategy Bank and operates through a dual-loop process: online multi-agent dialog execution with peer critique, and offline structured evolutionary operations that refine the strategy bank using accumulated feedback. This closed-loop design enables autonomous continuous improvement without human intervention. Extensive experiments show that DarwinTOD surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and exhibits continuous performance gains throughout evolution. Our work provides a novel framework for building dialog systems with lifelong self-evolution capabilities.
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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
Shuyu Zhang, Yifan Wei, Jialuo Yuan Independent, Xinru Wang University of Sydney, Yanmin Zhu Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yujie Liu Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication, Bin Li Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Task oriented dialog systems often rely on static exploration strategies that do not adapt to dynamic dialog contexts, leading to inefficient exploration and suboptimal performance. We propose DyBBT, a novel dialog policy learning framework that formalizes the exploration challenge through a structured cognitive state space \mathcal{C} that captures dialog progression, user uncertainty, and slot dependency. DyBBT proposes a bandit-inspired meta-controller that dynamically switches between a fast intuitive inference (System 1) and a slow deliberative reasoner (System 2) based on real-time cognitive states and visitation counts. Extensive experiments on single- and multi-domain benchmarks show that DyBBT achieves SOTA performance in success rate, efficiency, and generalization, with human evaluations confirming that its decisions are well-aligned with expert judgment.
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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
Zheng Liu, Mengjie Liu, Siwei Wen Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mengzhang Cai, Bin Cui Peking University, Conghui He Shanghai AI Lab, Wentao Zhang
Using entropy as a measure of heterogeneity to guide optimization has emerged as a crucial research direction in Reinforcement Learning for LLMs. However, existing methods typically treat it as a discrete filter or post-hoc regulator rather than a core optimization driver. To fully leverage the potential of entropy and achieve fine-grained regulation, we introduce Heterogeneous Adaptive Policy Optimization (HAPO), a token-aware algorithm that continuously adapts optimization dynamics based on token-level entropy throughout the entire training process. Our algorithm includes four key components: (1) Adaptive Temperature Sampling that adjusts sampling temperature in real time, promoting exploration at high-entropy tokens. (2) Token-Level Group Average Advantage Estimation that estimates advantages at token level, accounting for sequence-length effects while preserving non-biased treatment.(3) Differential Advantage Redistribution that leverages entropy and importance ratios to adjust advantages for tokens with clear signals. (4) Asymmetric Adaptive Clipping that dynamically adjusts clipping boundaries based on token-level entropy. Through systematic investigation of entropy, we embed token-level treatment into every stage. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code, and logic tasks across multiple models demonstrate HAPO’s consistent superiority over DAPO.
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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
Generative speech technologies are progressing rapidly, but evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech remains a core challenge. Existing methods typically rely on scalar scores or binary decisions, which lack interpretability and generalization across tasks and languages. We present SpeechLLM-as-Judges, a new paradigm for enabling large language models (LLMs) to conduct structured and explanation-based speech quality evaluation. To support this direction, we introduce SpeechEval, a large-scale dataset containing 32,207 multilingual speech clips and 128,754 annotations spanning four tasks: quality assessment, pairwise comparison, improvement suggestion, and deepfake detection. Based on this resource, we develop SQ-LLM, a speech-quality-aware LLM trained with chain-of-thought reasoning and reward optimization to improve capability. Experimental results show that SQ-LLM delivers strong performance across tasks and languages, revealing the potential of this paradigm for advancing speech quality evaluation. The relevant code, models, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/SpeechLLM-as-Judges.
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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
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly boosted the reasoning capability of language models (LMs). However, existing RLVR approaches train LMs based on their own on-policy responses and are constrained by the initial capability of LMs, thus prone to exploration stagnation, in which LMs fail to solve more training problems and cannot further learn from the training data. Some approaches try to address this by leveraging off-policy solutions to training problems, but rely on external expert guidance that is limited in availability and scalability. In this work, we propose LTE (Learning to reason from Trial and Error), an approach that hints LMs with their previously self-made mistakes, not requiring any external expert guidance. Experiments validate the effectiveness of LTE, which outperforms the normal group relative policy optimization (GRPO) by 5.02 in Pass@1 and 9.96 in Pass@k on average across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks for Qwen3-8B-Base and even performs better than methods that require external guidance. Further analysis confirms that LTE successfully mitigates exploration stagnation and enhances both exploitation and exploration during training. Our code is available at https://github.com/JamyDon/LTE.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Cheng-Han Chiang, Xiaofei Wang Microsoft, Linjie Li University of Washington and Microsoft, Chung-Ching Lin, Kevin Lin Microsoft, Shujie Liu, Zhendong Wang Microsoft, Zhengyuan Yang Microsoft 等 10 位作者
Current large language models (LLMs) and spoken language models (SLMs) begin thinking and taking actions only after the user has finished their turn. This prevents the model from interacting with the user during the user’s turn and can lead to high response latency when the model is thinking. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the “think while listening” behavior of humans. In this paper, we propose SHANKS, a general inference framework that enables SLMs to generate unspoken chain-of-thought reasoning while listening to user input. SHANKS streams input speech in fixed-duration chunks and, as soon as a chunk is received, generates unspoken reasoning based on all previous speech and reasoning, while the user continues speaking. SHANKS uses unspoken reasoning to determine whether to interrupt the user and make tool calls to complete the task. We demonstrate that SHANKS enhances real-time user–SLM interaction in two scenarios: (1) SHANKS can listen to the user’s speech and interrupt when the user makes a mistake. (2) In a tool-augmented dialogue scenario, SHANKS can complete 56.9% of the tool calls before the user ends their turn. Overall, SHANKS is a step toward models that keep thinking throughout the conversation, not only after a turn ends. Demos can be found on the project page: https://d223302.github.io/SHANKS/.
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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
Lingxiao Guan University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Yuanhao Huang, Jie Liu University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
In Question Answering (QA), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has revolutionized performance in various domains. However, how to effectively capture multi-document relationships remains an open question. This is particularly critical for biomedical tasks due to their reliance on information spread across multiple documents. In this work, we propose a novel method CLAIMS, which utilizes propositional claims to construct a local knowledge graph from retrieved documents. Summaries are then derived via layerwise summarization from the knowledge graph to contextualize a small language model to perform QA. The structured summaries effectively capture explicit and implicit relationships between entities in the documents, thus having a more comprehensive context to provide to LLMs. CLAIMS achieved comparable or superior performance over RAG baselines on several biomedical QA benchmarks. We also evaluated its generalizability and each individual step of our approach with a targeted set of metrics, demonstrating its effectiveness.
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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