Feiteng Nie, Yuan Sun, Shengkun Zhu, Sheng Wang, Zhiyong Peng
k-means provides a simple and efficient foundation for text clustering, but embedding alone can miss task-specific semantic boundaries. Must-link (ML) and cannot-link (CL) constraints can correct such errors, yet conventional constrained clustering assumes that these relations are already supplied. LLMs can generate them without task-specific labels, but exhaustive querying is costly and their judgments can be incorrect. We present GPKmeans, an efficient Group-Penalty k-means method for text clustering with noisy LLM-generated constraints. GPKmeans uses LLM as an offline local pairwise annotator, querying selected anchor-candidate pairs for sparse ML links and constructing set-valued CL evidence without all-pairs queries. It converts connected components of the ML-link graph and the generated CL sets into groups with normalized, bounded soft penalties, limiting each group's influence independently of its size. Cached coordinate descent is proposed to efficiently solve the constraints clustering problem. We prove finite-step convergence and derive deterministic and probabilistic oracle-referenced bounds that relate objective distortion to the penalty coefficients and to the group-level error probabilities of the generated constraints. Across nine datasets, GPKmeans uses fewer LLM calls and yields more accurate constraints. It achieves the best average ACC, NMI, and ARI while running approximately 30 times faster than state-of-the-art constrained clustering methods.
Chenxing Wei, Jiazhen Kang, Hong Wang, Jianqing Zhang, Hao Jiang, Xiaolong Xu, Ningyuan Sun, Ying He 等 11 位作者
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) successfully aligns autoregressive models in rigorous domains like mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, applying RLVR to Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) is hindered by intractable sequence-level likelihoods, forcing existing methods to rely on unstable, high-variance approximations. We propose Sequence Likelihood-Free Policy Optimization (LFPO), an efficient framework that circumvents this bottleneck by formulating policy alignment as discrete velocity alignment. Inspired by continuous flow matching, LFPO eschews trajectory-level estimation and directly optimizes denoising logits via contrastive token-level updates, providing a stable, low-variance surrogate. Furthermore, predicting terminal solutions from intermediate states implicitly straightens the generation trajectory, enabling high-quality sampling with significantly fewer denoising iterations. Extensive experiments on reasoning and coding benchmarks demonstrate that LFPO matches or exceeds the accuracy of likelihood-based baselines while substantially accelerating inference.
Zongyuan Sun, Shuai Zhao, Yingjun Du, Ke Shu, Ziyue Zhu, Haoran Luo
Large language models (LLMs) can answer many factual questions correctly, but a correct answer is not necessarily a supported one. For an LLM agent, a knowledge graph (KG) plays two roles: as a source of answers, it supplies facts that the model lacks; as a source of evidence, it supplies the supporting triples that make an answer traceable and auditable. However, existing KG agents treat the KG only as a source of answers: their training data carries answers but not evidence, and their training rewards check the answer but not the retrieved evidence, so agents often answer correctly without retrieving the supporting triples. We propose FoG, a framework that trains KG agents to retrieve the evidence behind their answers. FoG consists of evidence-grounded synthesis, a KG interaction agent, and an evidence-coverage process reward (ECPR): the synthesis recursively hides explicit entities behind verifiable sub-questions, so that every question carries its supporting triples by construction; the agent records the triples returned by the KG; and ECPR credits each supporting triple to the turn that first retrieves it. Experiments on three KGQA benchmarks demonstrate that FoG enables 3B--4B open-source agents to outperform substantially larger baselines in answer accuracy and evidence coverage, with zero-shot cross-KG transfer.
Zongyuan Sun, Shuai Zhao, Ke Shu, Ziyue Zhu, Shangyang Wu, Yuanlin Lin, Tao Wang, Shiyue Li 等 11 位作者
Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide reliable external knowledge for multi-hop factual reasoning with large language models (LLMs), yet most KGs in real-world domains such as finance and industry lack question--answer (QA) annotations. Without such annotations, existing methods struggle to improve LLM graph reasoning: training-free agents cannot improve their exploration through interaction; reinforcement learning (RL) agents depend on QA data annotated by humans or synthesized by closed-source models; and training data is typically built offline, so its topology mix is fixed and cannot follow the agent's ability. We propose Evolve on Graph (EoG), a framework that lets an LLM self-evolve its graph reasoning without any QA annotations. Through Graph Self-Play, a single LLM alternates between a Proposer that poses questions and a Solver that answers them. To make questions verifiable, Symbolically Verifiable Topology Synthesis (SVTS) samples reasoning topologies on the KG and executes the corresponding first-order logic queries, yielding topology skeletons with correct and complete answer sets; guided by a skeleton, the Proposer explores the graph to pose a multi-hop question. To let task topologies follow the Solver, a Boundary-Aware Graph Curriculum rewards the Proposer by the Solver's score variance, keeping questions at the Solver's capability boundary so that complex topologies enter training as the Solver improves. On six benchmarks over Freebase, Wikidata, and an industrial KG, EoG consistently outperforms prompting-, retrieval-, and agent-based methods, showing that LLM graph reasoning can improve through self-play without QA annotations. Our code is available at https://github.com/Szy5/EoG
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to solve complex scientific and practical problems via iterative optimization. However, dynamically coordinating diverse search mechanisms as candidate quality, failure modes, and resource budgets evolve remains a critical open challenge. Targeted empirical diagnostics reveal that mechanism effectiveness is highly state-dependent. Motivated by this, we analyze how individual decisions drive final outcomes, decomposing the expected terminal improvement under a shared budget into cumulative decision opportunities minus cumulative selection losses. Guided by this opportunity-loss theoretical foundation, we propose OptiCom, a unified framework that represents LLM-driven optimizers within a shared configuration space: C=(A,Q,O,E,M,S), corresponding to artifact, query, operator, evaluation, memory, and strategy. Operating within this space, a fast LLM-based Optimization Controller dynamically composes immediate mechanisms through structured Action Packages, while a slower Strategy Adapter refines long-term selection preferences, operator weights, and templates based on accumulated trajectory feedback. Comprehensive evaluations across 32 benchmark groups demonstrate the superiority of framework: OptiCom achieves an average Max-score rank of 1.72 among 14 evaluated configurations, securing the top score in 23 groups. Ultimately, these results highlight the broad applicability and high extensibility of OptiCom as a general-purpose paradigm for robust LLM test-time scaling.
Conversational AI systems are increasingly used to fulfill both functional and affective needs, yet how users perceive the AI-adoption effects varies. Existing research tends to treat these two needs as binary categories and to classify users by a single dominant need. However, this approach fails to capture users who engage with AI for both affective and functional purposes simultaneously, leaving it unclear how these needs combine in real-world AI use. To capture the multifaceted nature of users' AI engagement, we developed the AI-Support measurement with 1,090 participants, grounded in social support theory, which evaluates four dimensions of perceived AI support: emotional/esteem, social companionship, informational, and instrumental support. This study provided (1) an AI-Support Scale developed to measure the perceived support types from human-AI interaction, (2) evidence that users might adopt AI with a high level of both functional and affective use, and (3) exploratory indicators of users' real-life social support and well-being, enabling descriptive results aligning with theoretical expectations. Overall, this study highlights the importance of understanding individual differences in AI affordance use, enabling AI systems to be designed in alignment with different user adoption profiles rather than assuming uniform benefits across all users.
Jingjie Zeng, Huayang Li, Liang Yang Dalian University of Technology, Yuanyuan Sun Dalian University of Technology, Shaowu Zhang Dalian University of Technology, Hongfei Lin
Human cognition excels at extending knowledge through analogy, where word meanings evolve along structured pathways from concrete prototypes to abstract senses via metaphor and metonymy. Do Large Language Models (LLMs) internalize this generative logic, or merely mimic statistical patterns? To investigate this, we introduce CogEvolve, a cognitive linguistic benchmark designed to test these evolutionary pathways across textual and visual modalities. Our evaluation reveals a distinct cognitive profile: models function as “Super-Associators” expert at static recognition yet fail at causal reasoning. In text, they exhibit a Frequency-Primacy Conflation, confusing statistical prevalence with cognitive basicness. Crucially, this reasoning collapses further in the visual domain. We term this deficit the Ungrounded Arrow: models possess high-fidelity concept representations (the “dots”) but lack the transformational operators (the “arrows”) essential for true relational understanding.
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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
Kai Qin, Liangxin Liu Baidu, Yu Liang, Longzheng Wang Baidu, Wangyan Research, Baidu, Zhang Yueyang Baidu, Long Xia Baidu Inc., Zhiyuan Sun Baidu 等 10 位作者
Reward Models (RMs) are critical components in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline, directly determining the alignment quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have emerged as a superior paradigm, offering higher interpretability and stronger generalization than traditional scalar RMs. However, existing methods for GRMs focus primarily on outcome-level supervision, neglecting analytical process quality, which constrains their potential. To address this, we propose ReflectRM, a novel GRM that leverages self-reflection to assess analytical quality and enhance preference modeling. ReflectRM is trained under a unified generative framework for joint modeling of response preference and analysis preference. During inference, we use its self-reflection capability to identify the most reliable analysis, from which the final preference prediction is derived. Experiments across four benchmarks show that ReflectRM consistently improves performance, achieving an average accuracy gain of +3.7 on Qwen3-4B. Further experiments confirm that response preference and analysis preference are mutually reinforcing. Notably, ReflectRM substantially mitigates positional bias, yielding +10.2 improvement compared with leading GRMs and establishing itself as a more stable evaluator. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuliangCarmelo/ReflectRM.
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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
Yijie Li, Xi Cao, Yuan Sun Minzu University of China, Quulgan Minggad, Abdulla Ablikim, Jia Qing Cai Wang
Despite the rapid advancement of LLMs, their performance on linguistically and culturally diverse minority languages within a unified national context remains underexplored. We present CMiLBench, a collection of hierarchical multitask benchmarks designed to translate theoretical notions of “diversity in unity” into practical evaluation for three representative Chinese minority languages: Tibetan, Mongolian, and Uyghur. CMiLBench comprises 24,663 instances across 5 difficulty levels and 17 tasks spanning foundational ability, cultural specificity, and safety alignment. We adopt existing dataset adaptation, minority knowledge construction, and high-resource benchmark translation to construct CMiLBench. We assess 14 state-of-the-art commercial and open-source LLMs with a hybrid framework that integrates automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge scoring. The comparative experimental results reveal the gap between theoretical capability and practical utility. CMiLBench serves as a foundational and scalable evaluation resource to bridge the digital language divide and promote the informatization and intelligentization of low-resource Chinese minority languages.
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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
Yu Liang, Liangxin Liu Baidu, Longzheng Wang Baidu, Wangyan Research, Baidu, Zhang Yueyang Baidu, Long Xia Baidu Inc., Zhiyuan Sun Baidu, Daiting Shi Baidu
Generative reward models (GRMs) have emerged as a promising approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences by offering greater representational capacity and flexibility than traditional scalar reward models. However, GRMs face two major challenges: reliance on costly human-annotated data restricts scalability, and self-training approaches often suffer from instability and vulnerability to reward hacking. To address these issues, we propose ConsistRM, a self-training framework that enables effective and stable GRM training without human annotations. ConsistRM incorporates the Consistency-Aware Answer Reward, which produces reliable pseudo-labels with temporal consistency, thereby providing more stable model optimization. Moreover, the Consistency-Aware Critique Reward is introduced to assess semantic consistency across multiple critiques and allocates fine-grained and differentiated rewards. Experiments on five benchmark datasets across four base models demonstrate that ConsistRM outperforms vanilla Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) by an average of 1.5%. Further analysis shows that ConsistRM enhances output consistency and mitigates position bias caused by input order, highlighting the effectiveness of consistency-aware rewards in improving GRMs.Our implementation is available at https://github.com/yuliangCarmelo/ConsistRM.
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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