Zero-freeness for Random Regular Graphs up to the Replica Symmetry Breaking Threshold
Zejia Chen, Chunyang Wang, Xinyuan Zhang
AI 速览：作者在随机 d-正则图上证明硬核模型与反铁磁 Potts 模型（含正常 q-染色）在副本对称区内具有零点自由区域，并由此得到多项式时间近似配分函数的算法。
We study antiferromagnetic spin systems on random regular graphs through the lens of the phase transitions characterized by the complex zeros of the partition function. Our motivating examples include the hardcore model and the antiferromagnetic Potts model (including proper $q$-colorings at $β=0$). For both models on random $d$-regular graphs, we establish, with high probability over the graph, zero-free regions throughout the interior of the replica-symmetric regime. Asymptotically, this regime extends up to tree occupation density $$α< α_{\mathrm{RSB}}(d) = (2\log d - 2\log\log d + 2 - 2\log 2 + o_d(1))/d$$ for the hardcore model and up to degree $$d < d_{\mathrm{RSB}}(q) = (2q-1)\log q - 2\log 2 + o_q(1)$$ for proper $q$-colorings. Leveraging the standard algorithmic implications of zero-freeness, we obtain deterministic polynomial-time algorithms that multiplicatively approximate the corresponding partition functions at fixed rational parameters throughout this regime, with high probability over the graph. Our algorithmic guarantees significantly improve upon prior work and extend beyond the parameter ranges reached by previously known search algorithms. To establish our results, we first develop reinforced small subgraph conditioning, which resolves short-cycle fluctuations in the complex plane by lifting classical small subgraph conditioning on random regular graphs to random holomorphic functions. Second, we overcome the standard second-moment barrier caused by the exponential blowup of the bare second moment inside the replica-symmetric phase, by showing that replica symmetry implies a nonpositive Bethe functional and upgrading planted overlap concentration to an exponentially small bound, which enables a typical-graph truncation that controls complex second moments up to the replica symmetry breaking threshold.
Liuji Chen, Zeyu Zhang, Xinyuan Zhang, Shuai Nie, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang
Personalized text generation requires models to capture user-specific writing styles from historical data. Existing approaches based on retrieval, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, or activation steering either introduce inference and storage overhead or struggle to separate stylistic signals from semantic content. We propose GLASS, a training-free framework for personalized generation via Global-Local Activation Steering with Sparse priors. GLASS uses sparse autoencoders to extract a global user-style prior from historical responses and constructs local contrastive style vectors over clustered interaction scenarios. During inference, it jointly injects global and local vectors into different model layers, enabling context-aware personalization without retrieval or parameter updates. Experiments on LaMP and LongLaMP show that GLASS outperforms retrieval-, fine-tuning-, and steering-based baselines across ROUGE metrics and LLM-as-judge evaluations. Further analyses show that SAE-based representations are more robust to topic and length shifts, suggesting better disentanglement of stylistic information from semantic residue.
Choosing a robot action model requires evidence about task capability, adaptation cost, deployment requirements, and the reliability of reported conclusions. Success rates alone offer limited guidance to researchers with different computing budgets and goals. We propose RoboSeed, a multidimensional evaluation framework for vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models (WAM), within a continuing program to train, evaluate, and openly release robot models with verifiable evidence for model selection. The framework defines five dimensions: capability, downstream training affordability, deployment affordability, locally verified research value, and reproduction evidence. It maps empirical measurements and audit criteria to 0-100 profiles using fixed normalization anchors, with balanced, training-constrained, and deployment-constrained preference settings. Interface and protocol checks establish when comparisons are appropriate. Missing measurements remain explicit, incomplete aggregate scores are withheld, and weighted input coverage identifies evidence gaps. We apply the framework to representative VLA and WAM models, drawing on local training, released-weight evaluation, task-level audits, and an evaluation-system study. The results reveal budget-dependent backbone choices, sensitivity to adaptation recipes, and differences between language and visual task interfaces. Reproducible scoring code and machine-readable evidence support extension to additional models. The study provides dimension-level assessments and priorities for further measurement, while incomplete serving traces and heterogeneous protocols preclude overall numerical rankings.
Segmentation networks that predict at an output stride are trained against label maps downsampled by strided sampling, nearest-neighbor resampling or majority pooling. These methods label each coarse grid cell on its own, so a region that wins no cell is absent from the target and receives no positive label. We present MatchDown, which builds the coarse target from a minimum-cost matching between regions and the grid cells they occupy. It keeps as many regions as any one-region-per-cell target can, certifies how many losses are unavoidable, and with priority tiers (MatchDown-P) keeps every evaluated region (a region that a metric scores) of at least one cell's area. On COCO, Cityscapes and BBBC038 at factors 2 to 16, MatchDown-P loses exactly the minimum number of regions, whereas the downsampling used by StarDist, nnU-Net and connectomics pyramids loses four to five times as many on COCO at factor 8. Keeping a region in the target and reconstructing its shape are different problems: we show that no region lost by majority pooling can be reconstructed above IoU 0.5 by upsampling any coarse target, yet on BBBC038 a star-convex head trained on MatchDown targets segments 35% of the nuclei that majority pooling loses above IoU 0.5, against 15% when trained on majority targets and 24% on StarDist's strided target. On two nucleus datasets, with thresholds cross-validated for count error, this head has instance accuracy at IoU 0.5 (Acc50) 2.6 to 4.2 points above the strided target and at most 2.8 points below cell-center sampling, and a lower count error than the strided and cell-center targets on BBBC039. On BBBC039, an affinity head, which outputs one label per cell, lowers count error relative to majority targets by 9.3 nuclei per image at 7.2 points lower Acc50. MatchDown runs once, before training, in place of the label-downsampling step.
Recent image generation models have shown strong capabilities in generating high-fidelity and photorealistic images. However, they are fundamentally constrained by frozen internal knowledge, thus often failing on real-world scenarios that are knowledge-intensive or require up-to-date information. In this paper, we present Gen-Searcher, as the first attempt to train a search-augmented image generation agent, which performs multi-hop reasoning and search to collect the textual knowledge and reference images needed for grounded generation. To achieve this, we construct a tailored data pipeline and curate two high-quality datasets, Gen-Searcher-SFT-10k and Gen-Searcher-RL-6k, containing diverse search-intensive prompts and corresponding ground-truth synthesis images. We further introduce KnowGen, a comprehensive benchmark that explicitly requires search-grounded external knowledge for image generation and evaluates models from multiple dimensions. Based on these resources, we train Gen-Searcher with SFT followed by agentic reinforcement learning with dual reward feedback, which combines text-based and image-based rewards to provide more stable and informative learning signals for GRPO training. Experiments show that Gen-Searcher brings substantial gains, improving Qwen-Image by around 16 points on KnowGen and 15 points on WISE. We hope this work can serve as an open foundation for search agents in image generation, and we fully open-source our data, models, and code.
Although Deep Unfolding Networks (DUNs) are predominant in Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI), they are still limited by a uniform design philosophy. The existing approaches stack high-complexity priors with the same structure repeatedly, neglecting the fact that the optimization paths gradually converge to a nearly static state. As a consequence, representation stagnation occurs, and much computational cost is wasted on small feature updates. To solve this inefficiency, we propose Differential Unfolding (DU), a heterogeneous framework that substitutes repeated work with a periodic schedule of heavy and lightweight stages. The core of DU is the Differential Evolutionary Framework (DEF), which divides the unfolding procedure into two complementary roles: structural anchoring and differential evolution. In this method, high-parameter general stages are used sparsely to form high-fidelity feature foundations. On the other hand, lightweight differential stages use a Differential Representation Prior (DRP) to pass on and refine these foundational features by a differential mechanism. By integrating Differential Representation Attention (DRA) for evolving attention maps and a Differential Modulated FFN (DM-FFN) for feature rectification, DRP effectively models cross-stage variations with minimal overhead. By concentrating high-capacity computation on the sparsely-scheduled general stages and delegating incremental refinement to the lightweight differential stages, DU achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments show that DU-9stg achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality, while DU-5stg surpasses all compared methods with the fewest parameters and FLOPs; compared with the unfolding method DADUN, DU-9stg needs about half the parameters and a quarter of the FLOPs. Code: https://github.com/Muyuan-Zhang/DU
Boyuan Zhang, Yingjun Du, Xiantong Zhen, Ling Shao
Joint-embedding world models enable visual planning by learning action-conditioned dynamics in latent space. Yet they are commonly trained for one-step prediction on encoded states, while planning recursively applies the learned transition to its own predictions. One-step accuracy therefore does not capture how prediction errors propagate under recursive rollout. We decompose multi-step rollout error into the errors introduced at individual steps and their propagation through subsequent transitions. We show that state-affine dynamics are precisely the differentiable transitions with state-independent Jacobians, eliminating the nonlinear propagation residual and making the error propagation operators depend only on the action sequence. Guided by this result, we introduce SALT (State-Affine Latent Transition), an action-conditioned state-affine dynamics model in which the action modulates both the state transformation and the additive update. We train SALT through recursive multi-step rollout supervision, feeding each predicted latent state back into the transition so that training matches how the model is used during planning. Across four visual planning environments, SALT exhibits $1.48$--$2.19\times$ higher one-step prediction error than the matched LeWM baseline, yet improves closed-loop success in every environment by $10.0$ percentage points on average. On OGBench-Cube, the fraction of episodes that fail with a sharp rise in model-predicted cost after execution decreases from $23.3%$ to $2.0%$.
We present Youtu-Parsing-Omni, an omni-modal parser that converts documents, images, audio, and video into structured records grounded in space and time, providing a perception layer for agents that read, locate, and cite evidence across modalities. Its design rests on one encoder for every modality and one schema for every task. Youtu-Omni-Encoder, initialized from a pre-trained language model to strengthen text reading, encodes all modalities with shared weights in a unified space-time coordinate system, and a few fusion layers let video frames attend to concurrent audio, bringing cross-modal fusion and temporal alignment into perception itself. OmniSchema unifies the outputs of all ten parsing tasks, allowing a single self-evolving post-training procedure, OmniSchema-Aware On-Policy Distillation (OSAD), to provide a shared token-role-based objective across tasks. In each round, the model is trained on its own rollouts against token-level targets from a reference-conditioned copy of itself, which is then refreshed with the trained weights, so that the parser and its supervision co-evolve. With a single 5 B-parameter checkpoint, Youtu-Parsing-Omni achieves state-of-the-art performance on OmniDocBench v1.6 (96.96 Overall) and leads all open-weight models on OmniParsingBench (75.08 Avg.), with its advantage concentrated on audio and video. It also achieves the best overall chart-parsing score (95.02) and the highest exact chemical-fingerprint agreement among compared systems, and matches a dedicated optical-music model in character-level transcription of typeset sheet music while staying far ahead of general-purpose systems. Code and model weights are publicly available.
Underdamped Langevin dynamics (ULD) is a widely-used sampler for Gibbs distributions $π\propto e^{-V}$, and is often empirically effective in high dimensions. However, existing non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for discretized ULD typically scale polynomially with the ambient dimension $d$, leading to vacuous bounds when $d$ is large. The main known dimension-free result concerns the randomized midpoint discretization in Wasserstein-2 distance (Liu et al.,2023), while dimension-independent guarantees for ULD discretizations in KL divergence have remained open. We close this gap by proving the first dimension-free KL divergence bounds for discretized ULD. Our analysis refines the KL local error framework (Altschuler et al., 2025) to a dimension-free setting and yields bounds that depend on $\mathrm{tr}(\mathbf{H})$, where $\mathbf{H}$ upper bounds the Hessian of $V$, rather than on $d$. As a consequence, we obtain improved iteration complexity for underdamped Langevin Monte Carlo relative to overdamped Langevin methods in regimes where $\mathrm{tr}(\mathbf{H})\ll d$.
Linhan Wang, Zijian An, Mingyuan Zhang, Chen Dai, Yi Xu, Can Cui, Jiayan Wang, Zichong Yang 等 11 位作者
Video generative models provide rich physical priors for robot learning, yet existing world-action models (WAMs) face a fundamental trade-off: synchronous video generation at control rate is latency-prohibitive, while abandoning test-time visual imagination sacrifices task success. We show that visual imagination achieves both real-time inference and superior success rates when generated asynchronously off the critical path and consumed directly in latent space. We introduce GlanceWAM, which decouples imagination from control on a single shared video DiT backbone: an asynchronous proposer glances ahead on a slow clock to imagine a single lookahead frame seconds into the future in the background, while an action head decodes action chunks at control rate (48 ms) purely in latent space without blocking. Enabled by a non-interfering attention mask that isolates video representations and staleness-robust horizon training that accommodates asynchronous lookahead aging, GlanceWAM breaks the speed-success dilemma. Trained purely on demonstrations, it attains 72.2% on the 24-task RoboCasa kitchen benchmark (vs. 67.1% for synchronous Cosmos Policy) and 99.0% on LIBERO while cutting per-chunk control latency 24x relative to synchronous world-action models (48 ms on one A100). In single-arm and bimanual real-robot manipulation, it achieves higher average success than $π_{0.5}$ without any robot-data pretraining. Code is available at https://github.com/linhanwang/GlanceWAM and real-robot videos at https://linhanwang.github.io/glancewam/.
Zongyuan Zhang, Christopher Lehnert, Will N. Browne, Jonathan M. Roberts
Mobile robot manipulators extend contact-task capability beyond the workspace of fixed robot installations, but their bases must also sustain the forces generated by the task. On lightweight platforms, base motion and support compliance can change the force and motion realised at the workpiece. How these non-rigid base effects manifest during sustained contact remains insufficiently characterised. This paper investigates non-rigid base effects in mobile robot manipulators through a sanding case study combining exploratory simulation with experiments on two lightweight, unactuated wheeled testbeds. Joint measurements of contact force, tool motion, and base vibration show that sustained contact coexisted with substantial task error: under low base-ground resistance, only 54-70% of a 100 N command was realised, with tool-centre-point errors reaching 100 mm. Increasing base-ground resistance during contact improved force realisation and arrested further tool displacement, while base vibration did not vary consistently with force-tracking error in the tested conditions. These observations illustrate how non-rigid base behaviour can affect contact-task execution and highlight the value of examining force, motion, and vibration together when characterising lightweight mobile manipulation.
Deformable image registration relies on accurate anatomical correspondences. However, explicitly coupling local matching reliability with spatial context selection and deformation update strength remains insufficiently explored in learning-based registration. This challenge is particularly pronounced in homogeneous, weakly textured, and severely deformed regions, where ambiguous matches may induce erroneous deformation updates. We propose ReliMorph, a reliability-routed symmetric framework for 3D deformable registration that couples correspondence assessment with spatial context selection and update strength.Local correlation distributions characterize correspondence ambiguity using shared anatomical features with modality-specific adaptation. These reliability cues guide spatial expert fusion and gate residual velocities during coarse-to-fine refinement. Updated inverse-inconsistency feedback guides routing and gating at finer pyramid levels. To our knowledge, ReliMorph is the first 3D deformable registration framework to jointly condition spatial expert routing and residual velocity gating on correspondence reliability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReliMorph consistently outperforms competing methods in anatomical overlap, highlighting its effectiveness across unimodal and multimodal registration tasks.
Differences in musculoskeletal morphology challenge policy reuse across individual models. Here we present MyoAcross, a framework that combines individual musculoskeletal model construction, morphology-conditioned policy learning and virtual model augmentation to enable muscle-driven reference-motion tracking without individual fine-tuning. Across 31 held-out individual models, MyoAcross achieves 99.24% completion and reduces tracking error by 22.60% relative to an unconditioned multilayer perceptron. Policy reuse extends to models of 22 held-out individuals constructed from single-image shape estimates, measured height and body mass, and, with asymmetry augmentation, to models with unilateral lower-limb shortening. Comparisons with measurements from 120 additional individuals show agreement in vertical ground reaction force waveforms and channel-dependent agreement between simulated muscle activations and electromyography. These results establish a common control framework for comparative simulations of movement across individual musculoskeletal models.
Self-driving laboratories couple a learned design surrogate to an instrument, and on every new target domain it must answer four questions: when it can be trusted, how many target measurements it needs, which to make first, and when to stop adapting, switch models or escalate. We state a framework making each measurable (a competence ratio, a budget $k^*(\varepsilon)$, a time-to-target and a priced decision) and instantiate it without wet experiments on six public droplet-microfluidic and liposome tables as offline laboratories: 107 leave-one-group tiers whose rows are hidden labels. A sealed, pre-registered programme (two sealed negative validations and a pre-registered test on three more tables) and seven frozen closed-loop protocols, each run twice, yield 23 findings. Shift cost is stratified by shift type; no label-free statistic certifies individual candidates; random-split model-family rankings predicted neither the sealed nor the loop rankings. Warm-start residual boosting returns a surrogate to $1.25\times$ its development reference within 20 target rows in 94% of chemistry tiers (27% under a strict noise-floor reading), 90% of laboratory and 40% of device tiers, and a budget planned from the shift type on other tables is not measurably worse on a new one. In the loop, one gain survives drift and shuffled-label controls on all tiers, carried by the sparsely sampled ones: proposing at once and warm-starting on every measurement reaches a 10% target in 2.80 measurements against 3.31 for the reference, and in 5.72 against 11.35 for random proposals on 301 hard units at a 3% tolerance. No label-free acquisition rule survives the shuffled-label control, no interval-aware proposal or other model family does better, and no threshold rule on the tested diagnostics beats always continuing once escalation is priced. No wet-lab validation is claimed.
Machine learning models are now widely used to predict environmental variable dynamics in domains like hydrology, climate science, agriculture, and ecology. These models are usually compared on fixed benchmark datasets using a single average accuracy score. As models improve, their scores become very close when averaged over large regions and long time periods, so the benchmark can no longer tell them apart, and a single number hides \emph{where} and \emph{when} a model fails. Three failures are common across environmental domains: models get worse as the climate shifts (non-stationarity), models fail at unmonitored sites (spatial extrapolation), and models miss rare but important regimes such as floods and droughts. We present \textbf{EvoBench}, a benchmark framework that shows where a model fails, tracks failures over time, and evolves to focus on model capability gaps. We apply EvoBench to daily streamflow prediction as a case study (\textbf{CAMELS-Evolve}, about 9{,}000 U.S. basins, 1985--2024) and compare an operational physical model (NWM), a conceptual reference (HBV), and several data-driven models. No model wins on every testing scenarios (e.g., in terms of average accuracy, performance at low flows and unmonitored basins). Also we observe that all data-driven models under-predict floods. Additionally, we show that targeted fix based on the reported failures could mitigate weaknesses the benchmark identified in certain scenarios. EvoBench turns model evaluation from a saturated ranking into a moving map of model limitations.
Jiaqi Zhang, Zheng Pang, Rongrong Gao, Qiyuan Zhang, Yang Yang
Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in image restoration tasks. However, when guiding image reconstruction, existing Diffusion Model-based Image Restoration (DMIR) methods typically rely on fixed data constraints and uniform step sizes, thereby overlooking the dynamic nature of the generative process. Such rigid designs render the models vulnerable to spatially non-uniform degradations, thus resulting in structural distortions and loss of fine details. Meanwhile, uniform step sizes introduce computational redundancy, whereas naïve step reduction strategies tend to accumulate approximation errors. To address these limitations, we propose a Local Epistemic Uncertainty Guided Active Sampling framework (LEADer). In the spatial domain, LEADer leverages pixel-wise uncertainty to dynamically modulate the prior strength within the null space, which effectively balances detail preservation and artifact suppression. In the temporal domain, it quantifies sampling stability via the uncertainty trace to enable adaptive trajectory pruning, thereby accelerating convergence. Theoretical proofs demonstrate that our framework achieves strict data consistency, while the trajectory pruning strategy admits a deterministic error bound, thereby guaranteeing stable convergence under skip sampling. Notably, our plug-and-play method can be seamlessly integrated into various DMIR baselines. Extensive experiments show that LEADer improves the performance of multiple state-of-the-art DMIR methods, while significantly reducing sampling time with negligible memory overhead. Code is available at https://www.jiaqizhang-sengoku.com/Code/LEADer.
Raymond Alavo University of Notre Dame, Xinyuan Zhang University of Notre Dame, Gemza Ademaj, Junhui Cai University of Notre Dame, Hyeokhyen Kwon Emory University, Robert Cotes Emory University, Gari D. Clifford Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, Ahmed Abbasi University of Notre Dame
We present Dash-M5H, an interactive dashboard for multi-modal, multi-model mental health assessment that helps clinicians and researchers jointly inspect multimodal behavioral data with multi-model signal outputs of recorded clinical interviews. Guided by signal detection and integrated sensemaking theories, Dash-M5H synchronizes transcript text, audio, and facial behavior (action units and gaze) to support overview-to-detail evidence tracing; and it integrates extracted signals (e.g., sentiment and facial activity) with a clinically grounded VLM prediction pipeline that produces DSM-5-aligned depression predictions. Dash-M5H (https://dash-m5h.io) is implemented in a lightweight, browser-based stack (Quarto + Observable JS + D3), supports local data import and time-synced clinical annotation with export. We demonstrate Dash-M5H through a depression screening scenario, evaluate its note-taking and screening capabilities through a user experiment, and release a live demo (https://youtu.be/w3qCJ02k6bw) and code (https://github.com/nd-hal/M5H-Dashboard-VLM) to facilitate reproducible evaluation.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Haochen Luo, Yifan LI, Ho Tin Ko City University of Hong Kong, An Binh Minh, Junjie Xu, Tang Pok Hin City University of Hong Kong, Wang Chak Wong, Gao Yuan 等 11 位作者
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly applied to financial decision-making tasks that require interaction with external tools, including market data retrieval, news analysis, and trade execution. However, existing trading systems rely on fragmented and task-specific APIs, resulting in inconsistent schemas, complex integration, and limited reproducibility. We present QFinZero, a unified trading environment for LLM-based financial agents. QFinZero standardizes three core capabilities: (i) multi-frequency market and derivatives data access, (ii) structured news and event retrieval, and (iii) stateful brokerage simulation with explicit order lifecycle management. All tools adopt consistent JSON schemas and time-aligned interfaces, enabling agents to acquire information and execute trades within a coherent framework. By abstracting financial interaction into composable, agent-invokable primitives, QFinZero reduces engineering overhead and supports reproducible evaluation through comprehensive logging and deterministic replay. We argue that such a standardized trading environment is essential for scalable research on LLM-based financial agents.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He 等 59 位作者
We introduce MinerU2.5, a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy while maintaining exceptional computational efficiency. Our approach employs a coarse-to-fine, two-stage parsing strategy that decouples global layout analysis from local content recognition. In the first stage, the model performs efficient layout analysis on downsampled images to identify structural elements, circumventing the computational overhead of processing high-resolution inputs. In the second stage, guided by the global layout, it performs targeted content recognition on native-resolution crops extracted from the original image, preserving fine-grained details in dense text, complex formulas, and tables. To support this strategy, we developed a comprehensive data engine that generates diverse, large-scale training corpora for both pretraining and fine-tuning. Ultimately, MinerU2.5 demonstrates strong document parsing ability, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, surpassing both general-purpose and domain-specific models across various recognition tasks, while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Ymyang, Jiang Zhong Chongqing University, Li Jin, Xiao Sun, Jingwang Huang, Gaojinpeng, Qing Liu, Yang Bai 等 12 位作者
Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) enhances reasoning capabilities by integrating external knowledge. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on simple image-text interactions, overlooking complex visual formats like charts that are prevalent in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce a novel task, \textbf{Chart-based MRAG}, to address this limitation. To generate high-quality evaluation samples, we propose \textbf{CHARGE} (\textbf{CHAR}t-based document question-answering \textbf{GE}neration), a semi-automatic framework for generating evaluation samples through multi-modal keypoint extraction, knowledge graph construction, and qa pair synthesis.By combining CHARGE with expert validation, we construct \textbf{Chart-MRAG Bench}, a comprehensive benchmark for chart-based MRAG evaluation, featuring 4,738 question-answering pairs across 8 domains from real-world documents.Our experiments reveal three critical limitations in current approaches: (1) unified multimodal embedding retrieval methods struggles in chart-based scenarios, (2) even with ground-truth retrieval, state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve only 71.15% Correctness and 80.74% Coverage scores, and (3) Widely-used MLLMs demonstrate consistent text-over-visual modality bias. These findings highlight great challenges in processing information-dense visual formats. We will make our code and dataset publicly available.
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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
Shihao Liu, Xiaofei Zhou Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bo Wang University of International Business and Economics, Geyuan Zhang
Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) aims to answer temporal questions using knowledge from Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs).Existing LLM-based TKGQA methods typically utilize RAG-based or Agent-based paradigms, yet both struggle to construct reliable temporal evidence chains. RAG-based approaches primarily rely on semantic retrieval to fetch question-relevant contexts but overlook the structural dependencies within TKGs, leading to broken evidence chains, whereas iterative agents are prone to error propagation during multi-step reasoning.To address these limitations, we propose TECQA, a framework designed to construct temporal evidence chains for LLM reasoning. Firstly, TECQA employs structure-guided subgraph retrieval to capture structural dependencies and intermediate reasoning paths. Subsequently, it utilizes a k-nearest temporal neighbor pruning strategy to filter irrelevant noise while strictly preserving the continuous local history surrounding critical events. Finally, the retained temporal neighbors are serialized by temporal proximity to explicitly reconstruct a coherent temporal evidence chain. Extensive experiments on MultiTQ and CronQuestions demonstrate that TECQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines by 45.3% particularly on complex queries. Code is available at https://github.com/SimonsLiu/TECQA.
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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
Chenyuan Zhang Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Qiguang Chen, Xie Chen, Zhuotao Tian Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Bowen Xing University of Science and Technology Beijing, Meishan Zhang Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), China, Libo Qin Central South University, Baotian Hu Harbin Institute of Technology 等 9 位作者
Cross-lingual chain-of-thought (XCoT) with self-consistency markedly enhances multilingual reasoning, yet existing methods remain costly due to extensive sampling of full trajectories across languages. Moreover, multilingual LLM representations vary strongly by language, hindering direct feature comparisons and effective pruning. To address this, we introduce UL-XCoT, the first efficient unified logic cross-lingual reasoning framework that minimizes redundancy in token usage and latency, yielding the greatest efficiency under limited sampling budgets during inference. Specifically, UL-XCoT (1) achieves less languages by selecting, per query, a small candidate language set in a language-invariant unified logic space, (2) enables less tokens by monitoring logic-space trajectory dynamics during decoding to prune low-quality reasoning paths, and (3) aggregates the remaining high-quality trajectories via voting. Experiments on PolyMath across 18 languages with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B demonstrate that UL-XCoT achieves competitive accuracy while sharply cutting over 50% decoding token cost and latency versus prior sampling baselines. It also delivers more stable gains on low-resource languages, underscoring consistently superior robustness where standard XCoT self-consistency method fails.
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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
Junyi Zhou City University of Hong Kong, Qiyuan Zhang City University of Hong Kong, Yufei Wang Huawei Technologies Ltd., Fuyuan Lyu Vatic Labs, Yidong Ming, Can Xu Tencent Hunyuan, Qingfeng Sun, Kai Zheng Microsoft 等 11 位作者
As Large Language Model (LLM) alignment evolves from simple completions to complex, highly sophisticated generation, Reward Models are increasingly shifting toward rubric-guided evaluation to mitigate surface-level biases. However, the community lacks a unified benchmark to assess this evaluation paradigm, as existing benchmarks lack both the discriminative complexity and the ground-truth rubric annotations required for rigorous analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce RubricBench, a curated benchmark with 1,147 pairwise comparisons specifically designed to assess the reliability of rubric-based evaluation. Our construction employs a multi-dimensional filtration pipeline to target hard samples featuring nuanced input complexity and misleading surface bias, augmenting each with expert-annotated, atomic rubrics derived strictly from instructions. Comprehensive experiments reveal a substantial capability gap between human-annotated and model-generated rubrics, indicating that even state-of-the-art models struggle to autonomously specify valid evaluation criteria, lagging considerably behind human-guided performance.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Shiping Yang, Jie Wu Atlassian Corporation, Wenbiao Ding Microsoft, Ning Wu, Shining Liang Microsoft, Ming Gong Atlassian Corporation, Hongzhi Li Tongji University, Hengyuan Zhang 等 10 位作者
Robustness has become a critical attribute for the deployment of RAG systems in real-world applications. Existing research focuses on robustness to explicit noise (e.g., document semantics) but overlooks implicit noise (spurious features). Moreover, previous studies on spurious features in LLMs are limited to specific types (e.g., formats) and narrow scenarios (e.g., ICL). In this work, we identify and study spurious features in the RAG paradigm, a robustness issue caused by the sensitivity of LLMs to semantic-agnostic features. We then propose a novel framework,SURE, to empirically quantify the robustness of RALMs against spurious features. Beyond providing a comprehensive taxonomy and metrics for evaluation, the framework’s data synthesis pipeline facilitates training-based strategies to improve robustness. Further analysis suggests that spurious features are a widespread and challenging problem in the field of RAG. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RAG-SpuriousFeatures-62B3.
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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
Xiao Liang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zhenghao Lin Microsoft, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Hengyuan Zhang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang University of California, Los Angeles and Amazon, Ying Nian Wu 等 10 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities through step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. Nevertheless, at the limits of model capability, CoT often proves insufficient, and its strictly sequential nature constrains test-time scalability. A potential alternative is divide-and-conquer (DAC) reasoning, which decomposes a complex problem into subproblems to facilitate more effective exploration of the solution space. Although promising, our analysis reveals a fundamental misalignment between general-purpose post-training and DAC-style inference, which limits the model’s capacity to fully leverage this potential. To bridge this gap and fully unlock LLMs’ reasoning capabilities on the most challenging tasks, we propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) framework to enhance their DAC-style reasoning capacity. At each step, the policy decomposes a problem into a group of subproblems, solves them sequentially, and addresses the original problem conditioned on the subproblem solutions, with both decomposition and solution integrated into RL training. Under comparable training settings, our DAC-style framework endows the model with a higher performance ceiling and stronger test-time scalability, surpassing CoT by 8.6% in Pass@1 and 6.3% in Pass@32 on competition-level benchmarks. The code is available at the provided link.
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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
Kunpeng Kang, Shuaimin Li, Kaiyuan Zhang, Luyang Zhang, Jiasheng Si Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Bing Xu, Kehai Chen Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Muyun Yang 等 9 位作者
Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a foundational task in natural language processing. Recent research has reformulated WSD for large language models (LLMs) as a generative task, where the model produces a definition to convey the intended meaning of an ambiguous word in context.In practice, most existing approaches implement this formulation through straightforward supervised fine-tuning, which tends to prioritize superficial context-to-gloss memorization over true contextual sense discrimination, leading to degraded performance on less frequent senses (LFS), particularly in unseen settings.To address this issue, we propose WSDPO, a training framework for generative WSD with chain-of-thought (CoT) and preference optimization. WSDPO consists of three stages: (1) disambiguation-aware CoT construction, which produces training data containing explicit disambiguation steps for the later stage;(2) disambiguation-guided supervised fine-tuning, which explicitly trains the model to discriminate word sense before generating the final definition; and(3) preference-based optimization, which further strengthens the model’s ability to generate sense-faithful definitions by optimizing it using preference pairs constructed from multiple sampled CoT outputs.Extensive experiments across benchmark datasets and multiple backbone LLMs demonstrate that WSDPO achieves substantial performance gains on rare and unseen settings, and exhibits strong generalization in standard evaluation settings.
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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
Juwei Yue Institute of Information Engineering，Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chuanrui Hu Qihoo 360, Jiawei Sheng, Zuyi Zhou Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wenyuan Zhang, Tingwen Liu Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Li Guo Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yafeng Deng
Long-term memory is essential for conversational agents to maintain coherence, track persistent tasks, and provide personalized interactions across extended dialogues. However, existing approaches as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and graph-based memory mostly rely on pairwise relations, which can hardly capture high-order associations, i.e., joint dependencies among multiple elements, causing fragmented retrieval. To this end, we propose HyperMem, a hypergraph-based hierarchical memory architecture that explicitly models such associations using hyperedges. Particularly, HyperMem structures memory into three levels: topics, episodes, and facts, and groups related episodes and their facts via hyperedges, unifying scattered content into coherent units. Leveraging this structure, we design a hybrid lexical-semantic index and a coarse-to-fine retrieval strategy, supporting accurate and efficient retrieval of high-order associations. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark show that HyperMem achieves state-of-the-art performance with 92.73% LLM-as-a-judge accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of HyperMem for long-term conversations.
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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
Yinghao Tang State key laboratory of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, Xueding Liu University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Boyuan Zhang, Tingfeng Lan, Yupeng Xie, Jiale Lao, Yiyao Wang, Haoxuan Li Zhejiang University 等 16 位作者
Infographics are composite visual artifacts that combine data visualizations with textual and illustrative elements to communicate information. While recent text-to-image (T2I) models can generate aesthetically appealing images, their reliability in generating infographics remains unclear. Generated infographics may appear correct at first glance but contain easily overlooked issues, such as distorted data encoding or incorrect textual content. We present IGenBench, the first benchmark for evaluating the reliability of text-to-infographic generation, comprising 600 curated test cases spanning 30 infographic types. We design an automated evaluation framework that decomposes reliability verification into atomic yes/no questions based on a taxonomy of 10 question types. We employ multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to verify each question, yielding question-level accuracy (Q-ACC) and infographic-level accuracy (I-ACC). We comprehensively evaluate 10 state-of-the-art T2I models on IGenBench. Our systematic analysis reveals key insights for future model development: (i) a three-tier performance hierarchy with the top model achieving Q-ACC of 0.90 but I-ACC of only 0.49; (ii) data-related dimensions emerging as universal bottlenecks (e.g., Data Completeness: 0.21); and (iii) the challenge of achieving end-to-end correctness across all models.
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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
Shuaiyi Nie Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dingsiyu Baidu, Wenyuan Zhang, Linhao Yu, Tianmeng Yang ERNIE Team, Baidu, Yao Chen, Weichong Yin, Yu Sun Baidu 等 10 位作者
Large reasoning models trained with reinforcement learning and verifiable rewards (RLVR) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet often overthink, generating redundant reasoning without performance gains. Existing trajectory-level length penalties often fail to effectively shorten reasoning length and degrade accuracy, as they uniformly treat all reasoning steps and lack fine-grained signals to distinguish redundancy from necessity. Meanwhile, process-supervised methods are typically resource-intensive and suffer from inaccurate credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose ATTNPO, a low-overhead process-supervised RL framework that leverages the model’s intrinsic attention signals for step-level credit assignment. We first identify a set of special attention heads that naturally focus on essential steps while suppressing redundant ones. By leveraging the attention scores of these heads, We then employ two sub-strategies to mitigate overthinking by discouraging redundant steps while preserving accuracy by reducing penalties on essential steps. Experimental results show that ATTNPO substantially reduces reasoning length while significantly improving performance across 9 benchmarks.
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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
Ada Chen CMU, Carnegie Mellon University, Yongjiang Wu, Junyuan Zhang, Jingyu Xiao The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shu Yang, Jen-tse Huang, Kun Wang, Wenxuan Wang Renmin University of China 等 9 位作者
Recently, AI-driven interactions with computing devices have advanced from basic prototype tools to sophisticated, LLM-based systems that emulate human-like operations in graphical user interfaces. We are now witnessing the emergence of Computer-Using Agents (CUAs), capable of autonomously performing tasks such as navigating desktop applications, web pages, and mobile apps. However, as these agents grow in capability, they also introduce novel safety and security risks. Vulnerabilities in LLM-driven reasoning, with the added complexity of integrating multiple software components and multimodal inputs, further complicate the security landscape. In this paper, we present a systematization of knowledge on the safety and security threats of CUAs. We conduct a comprehensive literature review and distill our findings along four research objectives: (i) define the CUA that suits safety analysis; (ii) categorize current safety threats among CUAs; (iii) propose a comprehensive taxonomy of existing defensive strategies; (iv) summarize prevailing benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation metrics used to assess the safety and performance of CUAs. Building on these insights, our work provides future researchers with a structured foundation for exploring unexplored vulnerabilities and offers practitioners actionable guidance in designing and deploying secure Computer-Using Agents.
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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