llm - 2025_02

Papers

Paper	Date	Comment
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios We introduce TableLLM, a robust large language model (LLM) with 8 billion parameters, purpose-built for proficiently handling tabular data manipulation tasks, whether they are embedded within documents or spreadsheets, catering to real-world office scenarios. We propose a distant supervision method for training, which comprises a reasoning process extension strategy, aiding in training LLMs to understand reasoning patterns more effectively as well as a cross-way validation strategy, ensuring the quality of the automatically generated data. To evaluate the performance of TableLLM, we have crafted benchmarks tailored to address both document and spreadsheet formats as well as constructed a well-organized evaluation pipeline capable of handling both scenarios. Thorough evaluations underscore the advantages of TableLLM when compared to various existing general-purpose and tabular data-focused LLMs. We have publicly released the model checkpoint, source code, benchmarks, and a web application for user interaction. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/TableLLM/TableLLM.	2025-02-17	https://tablellm.github.io
Adapting Language-Specific LLMs to a Reasoning Model in One Day via Model Merging - An Open Recipe This paper investigates data selection and model merging methodologies aimed at incorporating advanced reasoning capabilities such as those of DeepSeek R1 into language-specific large language models (LLMs), with a particular focus on the Thai LLM. Our goal is to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language-specific LLMs while maintaining their target language abilities. DeepSeek R1 excels in reasoning but primarily benefits high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. However, low-resource languages remain underserved due to the dominance of English-centric training data and model optimizations, which limit performance in these languages. This limitation results in unreliable code-switching and diminished effectiveness on tasks in low-resource languages. Meanwhile, local and regional LLM initiatives have attempted to bridge this gap by developing language-specific LLMs that focus on improving local linguistic fidelity. We demonstrate that, with only publicly available datasets and a computational budget of $120, it is possible to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language-specific LLMs to match the level of DeepSeek R1, without compromising their performance on target language tasks.	2025-02-17	9 pag
How to Alleviate Catastrophic Forgetting in LLMs Finetuning? Hierarchical Layer-Wise and Element-Wise Regularization Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general language capabilities. However, fine-tuning these models on domain-specific tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where the model overwrites or loses essential knowledge acquired during pretraining. This phenomenon significantly limits the broader applicability of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to compute the element-wise importance of model parameters crucial for preserving general knowledge during fine-tuning. Our method utilizes a dual-objective optimization strategy: (1) regularization loss based on element-wise parameter importance, which constrains the updates to parameters crucial for general knowledge; (2) cross-entropy loss to adapt to domain-specific tasks. Additionally, we introduce layer-wise coefficients to account for the varying contributions of different layers, dynamically balancing the dual-objective optimization. Extensive experiments on scientific, medical, and physical tasks using GPT-J and LLaMA-3 demonstrate that our approach mitigates catastrophic forgetting while enhancing model adaptability. Compared to previous methods, our solution is approximately 20 times faster and requires only 10-15% of the storage, highlighting the practical efficiency. The code will be released.	2025-02-17	Work in progr
From Informal to Formal – Incorporating and Evaluating LLMs on Natural Language Requirements to Verifiable Formal Proofs The research in AI-based formal mathematical reasoning has shown an unstop- pable growth trend. These studies have excelled in mathematical competitions like IMO and have made significant progress. This paper focuses on formal verification, an immediate application scenario of formal reasoning, and breaks it down into sub-tasks. We constructed 18k high-quality instruction-response pairs across five formal specification languages (Coq, Lean4, Dafny, ACSL, and TLA+) by distilling gpt-4o and evaluated against ten open-sourced LLMs, including recent popular DeepSeek-R1. We also fine-tuned several 7~8B small models to achieve comparable performance with Deepseek-R1-671B. Interestingly, we observed that fine-tuning with formal data also enhances mathematics, reasoning, and coding capabilities. Fine-tuned models are released at https: //huggingface.co/fm-universe.	2025-02-17	19 pag
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning Active Learning (AL) has been a powerful paradigm for improving model efficiency and performance by selecting the most informative data points for labeling and training. In recent active learning frameworks, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been employed not only for selection but also for generating entirely new data instances and providing more cost-effective annotations. Motivated by the increasing importance of high-quality data and efficient model training in the era of LLMs, we present a comprehensive survey on LLM-based Active Learning. We introduce an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes these techniques and discuss the transformative roles LLMs can play in the active learning loop. We further examine the impact of AL on LLM learning paradigms and its applications across various domains. Finally, we identify open challenges and propose future research directions. This survey aims to serve as an up-to-date resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to gain an intuitive understanding of LLM-based AL techniques and deploy them to new applications.	2025-02-17
Language Models Can See Better: Visual Contrastive Decoding For LLM Multimodal Reasoning Although Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning and generation for language tasks, they are not specifically designed for multimodal challenges. Training Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), however, is resource-intensive and constrained by various training limitations. In this paper, we propose the Modular-based Visual Contrastive Decoding (MVCD) framework to move this obstacle. Our framework leverages LLMs’ In-Context Learning (ICL) capability and the proposed visual contrastive-example decoding (CED), specifically tailored for this framework, without requiring any additional training. By converting visual signals into text and focusing on contrastive output distributions during decoding, we can highlight the new information introduced by contextual examples, explore their connections, and avoid over-reliance on prior encoded knowledge. MVCD enhances LLMs’ visual perception to make it see and reason over the input visuals. To demonstrate MVCD’s effectiveness, we conduct experiments with four LLMs across five question answering datasets. Our results not only show consistent improvement in model accuracy but well explain the effective components inside our decoding strategy. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Pbhgit/MVCD.	2025-02-17	Accepted to ICASSP 2025
Energy-Conscious LLM Decoding: Impact of Text Generation Strategies on GPU Energy Consumption Decoding strategies significantly influence the quality and diversity of the generated texts in large language models (LLMs), yet their impact on computational resource consumption, particularly GPU energy usage, is insufficiently studied. This paper investigates the relationship between text generation decoding methods and energy efficiency, focusing on the trade-off between generation quality and GPU energy consumption across diverse tasks and decoding configurations. By benchmarking multiple strategies across different text generation tasks, such as Translation, Code Summarization, and Math Problem Solving, we reveal how selecting appropriate decoding techniques with their tuned hyperparameters affects text quality and has measurable implications for resource utilization, emphasizing the need for balanced optimization. To the best of our knowledge, this study is among the first to explore decoding strategies in LLMs through the lens of energy consumption, offering actionable insights for designing resource-aware applications that maintain high-quality text generation.	2025-02-17
Preference Curriculum: LLMs Should Always Be Pretrained on Their Preferred Data Large language models (LLMs) generally utilize a consistent data distribution throughout the pretraining process. However, as the model’s capability improves, it is intuitive that its data preferences dynamically change, indicating the need for pretraining with different data at various training stages. To achieve it, we propose the Perplexity Difference (PD) based Preference Curriculum learning (PDPC) framework, which always perceives and uses the data preferred by LLMs to train and boost them. First, we introduce the PD metric to quantify the difference in how challenging a sample is for weak versus strong models. Samples with high PD are more challenging for weak models to learn and are more suitable to be arranged in the later stage of pretraining. Second, we propose the preference function to approximate and predict the data preference of the LLM at any training step, so as to complete the arrangement of the dataset offline and ensure continuous training without interruption. Experimental results on 1.3B and 3B models demonstrate that PDPC significantly surpasses baselines. Notably, the 3B model trained on 1T tokens achieves an increased average accuracy of over 8.1% across MMLU and CMMLU.	2025-02-17	18 pages, 13 figur
LLM Agents Making Agent Tools Tool use has turned large language models (LLMs) into powerful agents that can perform complex multi-step tasks by dynamically utilising external software components. However, these tools must be implemented in advance by human developers, hindering the applicability of LLM agents in domains which demand large numbers of highly specialised tools, like in life sciences and medicine. Motivated by the growing trend of scientific studies accompanied by public code repositories, we propose ToolMaker, a novel agentic framework that autonomously transforms papers with code into LLM-compatible tools. Given a short task description and a repository URL, ToolMaker autonomously installs required dependencies and generates code to perform the task, using a closed-loop self-correction mechanism to iteratively diagnose and rectify errors. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a benchmark comprising 15 diverse and complex computational tasks spanning both medical and non-medical domains with over 100 unit tests to objectively assess tool correctness and robustness. ToolMaker correctly implements 80% of the tasks, substantially outperforming current state-of-the-art software engineering agents. ToolMaker therefore is a step towards fully autonomous agent-based scientific workflows.	2025-02-17
Improve LLM-as-a-Judge Ability as a General Ability LLM-as-a-Judge leverages the generative and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate LLM responses across diverse scenarios, providing accurate preference signals. This approach plays a vital role in aligning LLMs with human values, ensuring ethical and reliable AI outputs that align with societal norms. Recent studies have raised many methods to train LLM as generative judges, but most of them are data consuming or lack accuracy, and only focus on LLM’s judge ability. In this work, we regard judge ability as a general ability of LLM and implement a two-stage training approach, comprising supervised fine-tuning (SFT) warm-up and direct preference optimization (DPO) enhancement, to achieve judge style adaptation and improve judgment accuracy. Additionally, we introduce an efficient data synthesis method to generate judgmental content. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach, utilizing only about 2% to 40% of the data required by other methods, achieves SOTA performance on RewardBench. Furthermore, our training method enhances the general capabilities of the model by constructing complicated judge task, and the judge signals provided by our model have significantly enhanced the downstream DPO training performance of our internal models in our test to optimize policy model with Judge Model. We also open-source our model weights and training data to facilitate further research.	2025-02-17
Towards Fully Exploiting LLM Internal States to Enhance Knowledge Boundary Perception Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance across diverse tasks but often struggle to accurately gauge their knowledge boundaries, leading to confident yet incorrect responses. This paper explores leveraging LLMs’ internal states to enhance their perception of knowledge boundaries from efficiency and risk perspectives. We investigate whether LLMs can estimate their confidence using internal states before response generation, potentially saving computational resources. Our experiments on datasets like Natural Questions, HotpotQA, and MMLU reveal that LLMs demonstrate significant pre-generation perception, which is further refined post-generation, with perception gaps remaining stable across varying conditions. To mitigate risks in critical domains, we introduce Consistency-based Confidence Calibration ($C^3$), which assesses confidence consistency through question reformulation. $C^3$ significantly improves LLMs’ ability to recognize their knowledge gaps, enhancing the unknown perception rate by 5.6\% on NQ and 4.9\% on HotpotQA. Our findings suggest that pre-generation confidence estimation can optimize efficiency, while $C^3$ effectively controls output risks, advancing the reliability of LLMs in practical applications.	2025-02-17
Language Writ Large: LLMs, ChatGPT, Grounding, Meaning and Understanding Apart from what (little) OpenAI may be concealing from us, we all know (roughly) how ChatGPT works (its huge text database, its statistics, its vector representations, and their huge number of parameters, its next-word training, and so on). But none of us can say (hand on heart) that we are not surprised by what ChatGPT has proved to be able to do with these resources. This has even driven some of us to conclude that ChatGPT actually understands. It is not true that it understands. But it is also not true that we understand how it can do what it can do. I will suggest some hunches about benign biases: convergent constraints that emerge at LLM scale that may be helping ChatGPT do so much better than we would have expected. These biases are inherent in the nature of language itself, at LLM scale, and they are closely linked to what it is that ChatGPT lacks, which is direct sensorimotor grounding to connect its words to their referents and its propositions to their meanings. These convergent biases are related to (1) the parasitism of indirect verbal grounding on direct sensorimotor grounding, (2) the circularity of verbal definition, (3) the mirroring of language production and comprehension, (4) iconicity in propositions at LLM scale, (5) computational counterparts of human categorical perception in category learning by neural nets, and perhaps also (6) a conjecture by Chomsky about the laws of thought. The exposition will be in the form of a dialogue with ChatGPT-4.	2025-02-17	54 pages, 29 referenc
Competing LLM Agents in a Non-Cooperative Game of Opinion Polarisation We introduce a novel non-cooperative game to analyse opinion formation and resistance, incorporating principles from social psychology such as confirmation bias, resource constraints, and influence penalties. Our simulation features Large Language Model (LLM) agents competing to influence a population, with penalties imposed for generating messages that propagate or counter misinformation. This framework integrates resource optimisation into the agents’ decision-making process. Our findings demonstrate that while higher confirmation bias strengthens opinion alignment within groups, it also exacerbates overall polarisation. Conversely, lower confirmation bias leads to fragmented opinions and limited shifts in individual beliefs. Investing heavily in a high-resource debunking strategy can initially align the population with the debunking agent, but risks rapid resource depletion and diminished long-term influence.	2025-02-17
Assessing Correctness in LLM-Based Code Generation via Uncertainty Estimation In this work, we explore uncertainty estimation as a proxy for correctness in LLM-generated code. To this end, we adapt two state-of-the-art techniques from natural language generation – one based on entropy and another on mutual information – to the domain of code generation. Given the distinct semantic properties of code, we introduce modifications, including a semantic equivalence check based on symbolic execution. Our findings indicate a correlation between the uncertainty computed through these techniques and correctness, highlighting the potential of uncertainty estimation for quality assessment. Additionally, we propose a simplified version of the entropy-based method that assumes a uniform distribution over the LLM’s responses, demonstrating comparable effectiveness. Using these techniques, we develop an abstention policy that prevents the model from making predictions when uncertainty is high, reducing incorrect outputs to near zero. Our evaluation on the LiveCodeBench shows that our approach significantly outperforms a baseline relying solely on LLM-reported log-probabilities.	2025-02-17	18 pages and 3 References Pag
Can LLM Watermarks Robustly Prevent Unauthorized Knowledge Distillation? The radioactive nature of Large Language Model (LLM) watermarking enables the detection of watermarks inherited by student models when trained on the outputs of watermarked teacher models, making it a promising tool for preventing unauthorized knowledge distillation. However, the robustness of watermark radioactivity against adversarial actors remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate whether student models can acquire the capabilities of teacher models through knowledge distillation while avoiding watermark inheritance. We propose two categories of watermark removal approaches: pre-distillation removal through untargeted and targeted training data paraphrasing (UP and TP), and post-distillation removal through inference-time watermark neutralization (WN). Extensive experiments across multiple model pairs, watermarking schemes and hyper-parameter settings demonstrate that both TP and WN thoroughly eliminate inherited watermarks, with WN achieving this while maintaining knowledge transfer efficiency and low computational overhead. Given the ongoing deployment of watermarking techniques in production LLMs, these findings emphasize the urgent need for more robust defense strategies. Our code is available at https://github.com/THU-BPM/Watermark-Radioactivity-Attack.	2025-02-17	22 pages, 12 figures, 13 tab
LLM Embeddings for Deep Learning on Tabular Data Tabular deep-learning methods require embedding numerical and categorical input features into high-dimensional spaces before processing them. Existing methods deal with this heterogeneous nature of tabular data by employing separate type-specific encoding approaches. This limits the cross-table transfer potential and the exploitation of pre-trained knowledge. We propose a novel approach that first transforms tabular data into text, and then leverages pre-trained representations from LLMs to encode this data, resulting in a plug-and-play solution to improv ing deep-learning tabular methods. We demonstrate that our approach improves accuracy over competitive models, such as MLP, ResNet and FT-Transformer, by validating on seven classification datasets.	2025-02-17
Language Complexity Measurement as a Noisy Zero-Shot Proxy for Evaluating LLM Performance Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language generation but often face challenges in tasks requiring precise calculations and structural analysis. This paper investigates the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs on language complexity measurement tasks, through the computation of the LIX readability metric and Average Dependency Distance (ADD). Using Swedish high school and university-level essays, we evaluate the models’ abilities to compute LIX scores and perform dependency parsing, comparing their results to established ground truths. Our findings reveal that while all models demonstrate some capacity for these tasks, ChatGPT-o1-mini performs most consistently, achieving the highest accuracy in both LIX computation and dependency parsing. Additionally, we observe a strong significant correlation -0.875 p 0.026 (N=6) between the models’ accuracy in computing LIX and their overall performance on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. These results suggest that language complexity measurement abilities can serve as a noisy zero-shot proxies for assessing the general capabilities of LLMs, providing a practical method for model evaluation without the need for extensive benchmarking datasets.	2025-02-17	Submitted to ACL 2025
LLMs can be Dangerous Reasoners: Analyzing-based Jailbreak Attack on Large Language Models The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought significant advancements across various tasks. However, despite these achievements, LLMs still exhibit inherent safety vulnerabilities, especially when confronted with jailbreak attacks. Existing jailbreak methods suffer from two main limitations: reliance on complicated prompt engineering and iterative optimization, which lead to low attack success rate (ASR) and attack efficiency (AE). In this work, we propose an efficient jailbreak attack method, Analyzing-based Jailbreak (ABJ), which leverages the advanced reasoning capability of LLMs to autonomously generate harmful content, revealing their underlying safety vulnerabilities during complex reasoning process. We conduct comprehensive experiments on ABJ across various open-source and closed-source LLMs. In particular, ABJ achieves high ASR (82.1% on GPT-4o-2024-11-20) with exceptional AE among all target LLMs, showcasing its remarkable attack effectiveness, transferability, and efficiency. Our findings underscore the urgent need to prioritize and improve the safety of LLMs to mitigate the risks of misuse.	2025-02-17
SciPIP: An LLM-based Scientific Paper Idea Proposer The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for automating the proposal of innovative scientific ideas. This process involves two key phases: literature retrieval and idea generation. However, existing approaches often fall short due to their reliance on keyword-based search tools during the retrieval phase, which neglects crucial semantic information and frequently results in incomplete retrieval outcomes. Similarly, in the idea generation phase, current methodologies tend to depend solely on the internal knowledge of LLMs or metadata from retrieved papers, thereby overlooking significant valuable insights contained within the full texts. To address these limitations, we introduce SciPIP, an innovative framework designed to enhance the LLM-based proposal of scientific ideas through improvements in both literature retrieval and idea generation. Our approach begins with the construction of a comprehensive literature database that supports advanced retrieval based not only on keywords but also on semantics and citation relationships. This is complemented by the introduction of a multi-granularity retrieval algorithm aimed at ensuring more thorough and exhaustive retrieval results. For the idea generation phase, we propose a dual-path framework that effectively integrates both the content of retrieved papers and the extensive internal knowledge of LLMs. This integration significantly boosts the novelty, feasibility, and practical value of proposed ideas. Our experiments, conducted across various domains such as natural language processing and computer vision, demonstrate SciPIP’s capability to generate a multitude of innovative and useful ideas. These findings underscore SciPIP’s potential as a valuable tool for researchers seeking to advance their fields with groundbreaking concepts.	2025-02-17	20 pages, 5 figures, 12 tables. The code has been availabel: https://github.com/cheerss/SciPIP
EMOS: Embodiment-aware Heterogeneous Multi-robot Operating System with LLM Agents Heterogeneous multi-robot systems (HMRS) have emerged as a powerful approach for tackling complex tasks that single robots cannot manage alone. Current large-language-model-based multi-agent systems (LLM-based MAS) have shown success in areas like software development and operating systems, but applying these systems to robot control presents unique challenges. In particular, the capabilities of each agent in a multi-robot system are inherently tied to the physical composition of the robots, rather than predefined roles. To address this issue, we introduce a novel multi-agent framework designed to enable effective collaboration among heterogeneous robots with varying embodiments and capabilities, along with a new benchmark named Habitat-MAS. One of our key designs is $\textit{Robot Resume}$: Instead of adopting human-designed role play, we propose a self-prompted approach, where agents comprehend robot URDF files and call robot kinematics tools to generate descriptions of their physics capabilities to guide their behavior in task planning and action execution. The Habitat-MAS benchmark is designed to assess how a multi-agent framework handles tasks that require embodiment-aware reasoning, which includes 1) manipulation, 2) perception, 3) navigation, and 4) comprehensive multi-floor object rearrangement. The experimental results indicate that the robot’s resume and the hierarchical design of our multi-agent system are essential for the effective operation of the heterogeneous multi-robot system within this intricate problem context.	2025-02-17	10 pages of main content, 3 pages of references, 5 pages of appendix, 7 figures in to
Evaluating o1-Like LLMs: Unlocking Reasoning for Translation through Comprehensive Analysis The o1-Like LLMs are transforming AI by simulating human cognitive processes, but their performance in multilingual machine translation (MMT) remains underexplored. This study examines: (1) how o1-Like LLMs perform in MMT tasks and (2) what factors influence their translation quality. We evaluate multiple o1-Like LLMs and compare them with traditional models like ChatGPT and GPT-4o. Results show that o1-Like LLMs establish new multilingual translation benchmarks, with DeepSeek-R1 surpassing GPT-4o in contextless tasks. They demonstrate strengths in historical and cultural translation but exhibit a tendency for rambling issues in Chinese-centric outputs. Further analysis reveals three key insights: (1) High inference costs and slower processing speeds make complex translation tasks more resource-intensive. (2) Translation quality improves with model size, enhancing commonsense reasoning and cultural translation. (3) The temperature parameter significantly impacts output quality-lower temperatures yield more stable and accurate translations, while higher temperatures reduce coherence and precision.	2025-02-17
Can LLMs Generate Diverse Molecules? Towards Alignment with Structural Diversity Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in molecular generation, which offers potential to accelerate drug discovery. However, the current LLMs overlook a critical requirement for drug discovery: proposing a diverse set of molecules. This diversity is essential for improving the chances of finding a viable drug, as it provides alternative molecules that may succeed where others fail in real-world validations. Nevertheless, the LLMs often output structurally similar molecules. While decoding schemes like diverse beam search may enhance textual diversity, this often does not align with molecular structural diversity. In response, we propose a new method for fine-tuning molecular generative LLMs to autoregressively generate a set of structurally diverse molecules, where each molecule is generated by conditioning on the previously generated molecules. Our approach consists of two stages: (1) supervised fine-tuning to adapt LLMs to autoregressively generate molecules in a sequence and (2) reinforcement learning to maximize structural diversity within the generated molecules. Our experiments show that the proposed approach enables LLMs to generate diverse molecules better than existing approaches for diverse sequence generation.	2025-02-17
CCoE: A Compact and Efficient LLM Framework with Multi-Expert Collaboration for Resource-Limited Settings Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved exceptional performance across diverse domains through training on massive datasets. However, scaling LLMs to support multiple downstream domain applications remains a significant challenge, especially under resource constraints. Existing approaches often struggle to balance performance across multiple domains with resource efficiency, limiting their broader applicability. To address this, we introduce the CCoE architecture, a modular framework that seamlessly integrates domain-specific experts into a unified LLM. By leveraging independently trained expert subnetworks on a shared backbone partition, CCoE achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing the resource requirements for multi-expert deployments. Furthermore, rule-based gating and expert planning in CCoE enable flexible task allocation, promoting expert collaboration to handle complex reasoning tasks. CCoE not only reduces inference costs but also provides a flexible and scalable solution for integrating domain expertise across diverse applications. Experiments on five domains demonstrate that CCoE achieves comparable performance to current domain-specific LLMs. Moreover, compared to existing multi-domain model ensemble methods, CCoE reduces memory usage by 61.3%, while improving inference efficiency by 0.76x over parameter-efficient multi-expert integration approaches.	2025-02-17
Be Cautious When Merging Unfamiliar LLMs: A Phishing Model Capable of Stealing Privacy Model merging is a widespread technology in large language models (LLMs) that integrates multiple task-specific LLMs into a unified one, enabling the merged model to inherit the specialized capabilities of these LLMs. Most task-specific LLMs are sourced from open-source communities and have not undergone rigorous auditing, potentially imposing risks in model merging. This paper highlights an overlooked privacy risk: \textit{an unsafe model could compromise the privacy of other LLMs involved in the model merging.} Specifically, we propose PhiMM, a privacy attack approach that trains a phishing model capable of stealing privacy using a crafted privacy phishing instruction dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a novel model cloaking method that mimics a specialized capability to conceal attack intent, luring users into merging the phishing model. Once victims merge the phishing model, the attacker can extract personally identifiable information (PII) or infer membership information (MI) by querying the merged model with the phishing instruction. Experimental results show that merging a phishing model increases the risk of privacy breaches. Compared to the results before merging, PII leakage increased by 3.9\% and MI leakage increased by 17.4\% on average. We release the code of PhiMM through a link.	2025-02-17
DeFiScope: Detecting Various DeFi Price Manipulations with LLM Reasoning DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is one of the most important applications of today’s cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. It manages hundreds of billions in Total Value Locked (TVL) on-chain, yet it remains susceptible to common DeFi price manipulation attacks. Despite state-of-the-art (SOTA) systems like DeFiRanger and DeFort, we found that they are less effective to non-standard price models in custom DeFi protocols, which account for 44.2% of the 95 DeFi price manipulation attacks reported over the past three years. In this paper, we introduce the first LLM-based approach, DeFiScope, for detecting DeFi price manipulation attacks in both standard and custom price models. Our insight is that large language models (LLMs) have certain intelligence to abstract price calculation from code and infer the trend of token price changes based on the extracted price models. To further strengthen LLMs in this aspect, we leverage Foundry to synthesize on-chain data and use it to fine-tune a DeFi price-specific LLM. Together with the high-level DeFi operations recovered from low-level transaction data, DeFiScope detects various DeFi price manipulations according to systematically mined patterns. Experimental results show that DeFiScope achieves a high precision of 96% and a recall rate of 80%, significantly outperforming SOTA approaches. Moreover, we evaluate DeFiScope’s cost-effectiveness and demonstrate its practicality by helping our industry partner confirm 147 real-world price manipulation attacks, including discovering 81 previously unknown historical incidents.	2025-02-17
KcMF: A Knowledge-compliant Framework for Schema and Entity Matching with Fine-tuning-free LLMs Schema matching (SM) and entity matching (EM) tasks are crucial for data integration. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results in these tasks, they suffer from hallucinations and confusion about task instructions. This study presents the Knowledge-Compliant Matching Framework (KcMF), an LLM-based approach that addresses these issues without the need for domain-specific fine-tuning. KcMF employs a once-and-for-all pseudo-code-based task decomposition strategy to adopt natural language statements that guide LLM reasoning and reduce confusion across various task types. We also propose two mechanisms, Dataset as Knowledge (DaK) and Example as Knowledge (EaK), to build domain knowledge sets when unstructured domain knowledge is lacking. Moreover, we introduce a result-ensemble strategy to leverage multiple knowledge sources and suppress badly formatted outputs. Extensive evaluations confirm that KcMF clearly enhances five LLM backbones in both SM and EM tasks while outperforming the non-LLM competitors by an average F1-score of 17.93%.	2025-02-17	under reveiw; new results and analysis added, typos correc
Exploring Prosocial Irrationality for LLM Agents: A Social Cognition View Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to face hallucination issues due to the data they trained on often containing human bias; whether this is reflected in the decision-making process of LLM Agents remains under-explored. As LLM Agents are increasingly employed in intricate social environments, a pressing and natural question emerges: Can we utilize LLM Agents’ systematic hallucinations to mirror human cognitive biases, thus exhibiting irrational social intelligence? In this paper, we probe the irrational behavior among contemporary LLM Agents by melding practical social science experiments with theoretical insights. Specifically, We propose CogMir, an open-ended Multi-LLM Agents framework that utilizes hallucination properties to assess and enhance LLM Agents’ social intelligence through cognitive biases. Experimental results on CogMir subsets show that LLM Agents and humans exhibit high consistency in irrational and prosocial decision-making under uncertain conditions, underscoring the prosociality of LLM Agents as social entities and highlighting the significance of hallucination properties. Additionally, the CogMir framework demonstrates its potential as a valuable platform for encouraging more research into the social intelligence of LLM Agents.	2025-02-17	Accepted by ICLR 2025
How Well Do LLMs Handle Cantonese? Benchmarking Cantonese Capabilities of Large Language Models The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has transformed the competitive landscape in natural language processing (NLP), particularly for English and other data-rich languages. However, underrepresented languages like Cantonese, spoken by over 85 million people, face significant development gaps, which is particularly concerning given the economic significance of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, and in substantial Cantonese-speaking populations in places like Singapore and North America. Despite its wide use, Cantonese has scant representation in NLP research, especially compared to other languages from similarly developed regions. To bridge these gaps, we outline current Cantonese NLP methods and introduce new benchmarks designed to evaluate LLM performance in factual generation, mathematical logic, complex reasoning, and general knowledge in Cantonese, which aim to advance open-source Cantonese LLM technology. We also propose future research directions and recommended models to enhance Cantonese LLM development.	2025-02-17	Accepted by NAACL 2025
DAST: Context-Aware Compression in LLMs via Dynamic Allocation of Soft Tokens Large Language Models (LLMs) face computational inefficiencies and redundant processing when handling long context inputs, prompting a focus on compression techniques. While existing semantic vector-based compression methods achieve promising performance, these methods fail to account for the intrinsic information density variations between context chunks, instead allocating soft tokens uniformly across context chunks. This uniform distribution inevitably diminishes allocation to information-critical regions. To address this, we propose Dynamic Allocation of Soft Tokens (DAST), a simple yet effective method that leverages the LLM’s intrinsic understanding of contextual relevance to guide compression. DAST combines perplexity-based local information with attention-driven global information to dynamically allocate soft tokens to the informative-rich chunks, enabling effective, context-aware compression. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DAST surpasses state-of-the-art methods.	2025-02-17
WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, aligning these models with human preferences has emerged as a critical challenge. Traditional alignment methods, relying on human or LLM annotated datasets, are limited by their resource-intensive nature, inherent subjectivity, misalignment with real-world user preferences, and the risk of feedback loops that amplify model biases. To overcome these limitations, we introduce WildFeedback, a novel framework that leverages in-situ user feedback during conversations with LLMs to create preference datasets automatically. Given a corpus of multi-turn user-LLM conversation, WildFeedback identifies and classifies user feedback to LLM responses between conversation turns. The user feedback is then used to create examples of preferred and dispreferred responses according to users’ preference. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs fine-tuned on WildFeedback dataset exhibit significantly improved alignment with user preferences, as evidenced by both traditional benchmarks and our proposed checklist-guided evaluation. By incorporating in-situ feedback from actual users, WildFeedback addresses the scalability, subjectivity, and bias challenges that plague existing approaches, marking a significant step toward developing LLMs that are more responsive to the diverse and evolving needs of their users.	2025-02-17	24 pag
GLTW: Joint Improved Graph Transformer and LLM via Three-Word Language for Knowledge Graph Completion Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC), which aims to infer missing or incomplete facts, is a crucial task for KGs. However, integrating the vital structural information of KGs into Large Language Models (LLMs) and outputting predictions deterministically remains challenging. To address this, we propose a new method called GLTW, which encodes the structural information of KGs and merges it with LLMs to enhance KGC performance. Specifically, we introduce an improved Graph Transformer (iGT) that effectively encodes subgraphs with both local and global structural information and inherits the characteristics of language model, bypassing training from scratch. Also, we develop a subgraph-based multi-classification training objective, using all entities within KG as classification objects, to boost learning efficiency.Importantly, we combine iGT with an LLM that takes KG language prompts as input.Our extensive experiments on various KG datasets show that GLTW achieves significant performance gains compared to SOTA baselines.	2025-02-17
CuriousLLM: Elevating Multi-Document Question Answering with LLM-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in open-domain question answering. However, they continue to face challenges such as hallucinations and knowledge cutoffs. These issues can be mitigated through in-context learning by providing LLMs with relevant context before generating answers. Recent literature proposes Knowledge Graph Prompting (KGP) which integrates knowledge graphs with an LLM-based traversal agent to substantially enhance document retrieval quality. However, KGP requires costly fine-tuning with large datasets and remains prone to hallucination. In this paper, we propose CuriousLLM, an enhancement that integrates a curiosity-driven reasoning mechanism into an LLM agent. This mechanism enables the agent to generate relevant follow-up questions, thereby guiding the information retrieval process more efficiently. Central to our approach is the development of the new Follow-upQA dataset, which includes questions and supporting evidence as input, with follow-up questions serving as ground truths. These follow-up questions either inquire about what is still missing to fully answer the user’s query or use special tokens to signify that the retrieved evidence is sufficient. Our experiments show that CuriousLLM significantly boosts LLM performance in multi-document question answering (MD-QA), circumventing the substantial computational costs and latency from the original KGP framework.	2025-02-17
From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversations The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the generation of emotional support conversations (ESC), offering scalable solutions with reduced costs and enhanced data privacy. This paper explores the role of personas in the creation of ESC by LLMs. Our research utilizes established psychological frameworks to measure and infuse persona traits into LLMs, which then generate dialogues in the emotional support scenario. We conduct extensive evaluations to understand the stability of persona traits in dialogues, examining shifts in traits post-generation and their impact on dialogue quality and strategy distribution. Experimental results reveal several notable findings: 1) LLMs can infer core persona traits, 2) subtle shifts in emotionality and extraversion occur, influencing the dialogue dynamics, and 3) the application of persona traits modifies the distribution of emotional support strategies, enhancing the relevance and empathetic quality of the responses. These findings highlight the potential of persona-driven LLMs in crafting more personalized, empathetic, and effective emotional support dialogues, which has significant implications for the future design of AI-driven emotional support systems.	2025-02-17
Which Retain Set Matters for LLM Unlearning? A Case Study on Entity Unlearning Large language models (LLMs) risk retaining unauthorized or sensitive information from their training data, which raises privacy concerns. LLM unlearning seeks to mitigate these risks by selectively removing specified data while maintaining overall model performance. However, most existing work focus on methods to achieve effective forgetting and does not provide a detailed analysis of the retain set, the portion of training data that is not targeted for removal. In this paper, we investigate the effects of unlearning on various subsets of the retain set through a case study on entity unlearning. We introduce the Syntactically Similar Neighbor Set, a group of queries that share similar syntactic structures with the data targeted for removal, and show that this subset suffers the greatest performance drop during unlearning. Moreover, when used for regularization, this set not only preserves performance on syntactically similar queries but also delivers comparable or improved results across other data subsets. Our results highlight that syntactic similarity is a critical factor, potentially more so than domain or entity relationships, in achieving effective and practical LLM unlearning.	2025-02-17	Work in Progr
ADO: Automatic Data Optimization for Inputs in LLM Prompts This study explores a novel approach to enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through the optimization of input data within prompts. While previous research has primarily focused on refining instruction components and augmenting input data with in-context examples, our work investigates the potential benefits of optimizing the input data itself. We introduce a two-pronged strategy for input data optimization: content engineering and structural reformulation. Content engineering involves imputing missing values, removing irrelevant attributes, and enriching profiles by generating additional information inferred from existing attributes. Subsequent to content engineering, structural reformulation is applied to optimize the presentation of the modified content to LLMs, given their sensitivity to input format. Our findings suggest that these optimizations can significantly improve the performance of LLMs in various tasks, offering a promising avenue for future research in prompt engineering. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ADO-6BC5	2025-02-17
\textsc{FLAG-Trader}: Fusion LLM-Agent with Gradient-based Reinforcement Learning for Financial Trading Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on multimodal financial data have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities in various financial tasks. However, they often struggle with multi-step, goal-oriented scenarios in interactive financial markets, such as trading, where complex agentic approaches are required to improve decision-making. To address this, we propose \textsc{FLAG-Trader}, a unified architecture integrating linguistic processing (via LLMs) with gradient-driven reinforcement learning (RL) policy optimization, in which a partially fine-tuned LLM acts as the policy network, leveraging pre-trained knowledge while adapting to the financial domain through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Through policy gradient optimization driven by trading rewards, our framework not only enhances LLM performance in trading but also improves results on other financial-domain tasks. We present extensive empirical evidence to validate these enhancements.	2025-02-17
FRAMES: Boosting LLMs with A Four-Quadrant Multi-Stage Pretraining Strategy Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced human language understanding and generation, with pretraining data quality and organization being crucial to their performance. Multi-stage pretraining is a promising approach, but existing methods often lack quantitative criteria for data partitioning and instead rely on intuitive heuristics. In this paper, we propose the novel Four-quadRAnt Multi-stage prEtraining strategy (FRAME), guided by the established principle of organizing the pretraining process into four stages to achieve significant loss reductions four times. This principle is grounded in two key findings: first, training on high Perplexity (PPL) data followed by low PPL data, and second, training on low PPL difference (PD) data followed by high PD data, both causing the loss to drop significantly twice and performance enhancements. By partitioning data into four quadrants and strategically organizing them, FRAME achieves a remarkable 16.8% average improvement over random across MMLU and CMMLU for the 3B model, effectively boosting LLM performance.	2025-02-17
LLMs can Realize Combinatorial Creativity: Generating Creative Ideas via LLMs for Scientific Research Scientific idea generation has been extensively studied in creativity theory and computational creativity research, providing valuable frameworks for understanding and implementing creative processes. However, recent work using Large Language Models (LLMs) for research idea generation often overlooks these theoretical foundations. We present a framework that explicitly implements combinatorial creativity theory using LLMs, featuring a generalization-level retrieval system for cross-domain knowledge discovery and a structured combinatorial process for idea generation. The retrieval system maps concepts across different abstraction levels to enable meaningful connections between disparate domains, while the combinatorial process systematically analyzes and recombines components to generate novel solutions. Experiments on the OAG-Bench dataset demonstrate our framework’s effectiveness, consistently outperforming baseline approaches in generating ideas that align with real research developments (improving similarity scores by 7\%-10\% across multiple metrics). Our results provide strong evidence that LLMs can effectively realize combinatorial creativity when guided by appropriate theoretical frameworks, contributing both to practical advancement of AI-assisted research and theoretical understanding of machine creativity.	2025-02-17
DiSCo: Device-Server Collaborative LLM-Based Text Streaming Services The rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) in text streaming services has introduced significant cost and Quality of Experience (QoE) challenges in serving millions of daily requests, especially in meeting Time-To-First-Token (TTFT) and Time-Between-Token (TBT) requirements for real-time interactions. Our real-world measurements show that both server-based and on-device deployments struggle to meet diverse QoE demands: server deployments face high costs and last-hop issues (e.g., Internet latency and dynamics), while on-device LLM inference is constrained by resources. We introduce DiSCo, a device-server cooperative scheduler designed to optimize users’ QoE by adaptively routing requests and migrating response generation between endpoints while maintaining cost constraints. DiSCo employs cost-aware scheduling, leveraging the predictable speed of on-device LLM inference with the flexible capacity of server-based inference to dispatch requests on the fly, while introducing a token-level migration mechanism to ensure consistent token delivery during migration. Evaluations on real-world workloads – including commercial services like OpenAI GPT and DeepSeek, and open-source deployments such as LLaMA3 – show that DiSCo can improve users’ QoE by reducing tail TTFT (11-52\%) and mean TTFT (6-78\%) across different model-device configurations, while dramatically reducing serving costs by up to 84\% through its migration mechanism while maintaining comparable QoE levels.	2025-02-17	17 pages, 14 figur
Mufu: Multilingual Fused Learning for Low-Resource Translation with LLM Multilingual large language models (LLMs) are great translators, but this is largely limited to high-resource languages. For many LLMs, translating in and out of low-resource languages remains a challenging task. To maximize data efficiency in this low-resource setting, we introduce Mufu, which includes a selection of automatically generated multilingual candidates and an instruction to correct inaccurate translations in the prompt. Mufu prompts turn a translation task into a postediting one, and seek to harness the LLM’s reasoning capability with auxiliary translation candidates, from which the model is required to assess the input quality, align the semantics cross-lingually, copy from relevant inputs and override instances that are incorrect. Our experiments on En-XX translations over the Flores-200 dataset show LLMs finetuned against Mufu-style prompts are robust to poor quality auxiliary translation candidates, achieving performance superior to NLLB 1.3B distilled model in 64% of low- and very-low-resource language pairs. We then distill these models to reduce inference cost, while maintaining on average 3.1 chrF improvement over finetune-only baseline in low-resource translations.	2025-02-17	29 pag
Bag of Tricks for Inference-time Computation of LLM Reasoning With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), solving complex reasoning tasks has gained increasing attention. Inference-time computation methods (e.g., Best-of-N, beam search, et al.) are particularly valuable as they can enhance reasoning performance without modifying model parameters or requiring additional training. However, these techniques come with implementation challenges, and most existing methods remain at the proof-of-concept stage with limited practical adoption due to their computational complexity and varying effectiveness across different tasks. In this paper, we investigate and benchmark diverse inference-time computation strategies across reasoning tasks of varying complexity. Since most current methods rely on a proposer-verifier pipeline that first generates candidate solutions (e.g., reasoning solutions) and then selects the best one based on reward signals (e.g., RLHF rewards, process rewards), our research focuses on optimizing both candidate solution generation (e.g., instructing prompts, hyperparameters such as temperature and top-p) and reward mechanisms (e.g., self-evaluation, reward types). Through extensive experiments (more than 20,000 A100-80G GPU hours with over 1,000 experiments) across a variety of models (e.g., Llama, Qwen, and Mistral families) of various sizes, our ablation studies reveal that previously overlooked strategies can significantly enhance performance (e.g., tuning temperature can improve reasoning task performance by up to 5%). Furthermore, we establish a standardized benchmark for inference-time computation by systematically evaluating six representative methods across eight reasoning tasks. These findings provide a stronger foundation for future research. The code is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/benchmark_inference_time_computation_LLM	2025-02-17
InfiFusion: A Unified Framework for Enhanced Cross-Model Reasoning via LLM Fusion We introduce InfiFusion, an efficient training pipeline designed to integrate multiple domain-specialized Large Language Models (LLMs) into a single pivot model, effectively harnessing the strengths of each source model. Traditional fusion methods either merge model parameters directly or rely on knowledge distillation with rigid assumptions, limiting their flexibility and efficiency. InfiFusion overcomes these limitations by enhancing Universal Logit Distillation (ULD) with Top-K selection and Logits Standardization. We propose two fusion strategies: Pairwise Fusion (InfiFusion$_p$), where each source model knowledge is distilled individually into the pivot model followed by merging and Unified Fusion (InfiFusion$_u$), where knowledge from all source models is distilled simultaneously into the pivot model. InfiFusion outperforms the state-of-the-art models, such as Qwen-2.5-14B-Instruct and Phi-4, across 11 widely applied benchmarks covering reasoning, coding, mathematics, and instruction-following tasks. Notably, InfiFusion achieves this superior performance while significantly reduces computational costs, completing full training with only 160 H800 GPU hours compared to the millions typically required for traditional LLM training.	2025-02-17	Significant performance improvements over the previous version; under review;
FB-Bench: A Fine-Grained Multi-Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs’ Responsiveness to Human Feedback Human feedback is crucial in the interactions between humans and Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing research primarily focuses on benchmarking LLMs in single-turn dialogues. Even in benchmarks designed for multi-turn dialogues, the user inputs are often independent, neglecting the nuanced and complex nature of human feedback within real-world usage scenarios. To fill this research gap, we introduce FB-Bench, a fine-grained, multi-task benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ responsiveness to human feedback under real-world usage scenarios in Chinese. Drawing from the two main interaction scenarios, FB-Bench comprises 591 meticulously curated samples, encompassing eight task types, five deficiency types of response, and nine feedback types. We extensively evaluate a broad array of popular LLMs, revealing significant variations in their performance across different interaction scenarios. Further analysis indicates that task, human feedback, and deficiencies of previous responses can also significantly impact LLMs’ responsiveness. Our findings underscore both the strengths and limitations of current models, providing valuable insights and directions for future research. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/PKU-Baichuan-MLSystemLab/FB-Bench.	2025-02-17
Following the Autoregressive Nature of LLM Embeddings via Compression and Alignment A new trend uses LLMs as dense text encoders via contrastive learning. However, since LLM embeddings predict the probability distribution of the next token, they are inherently generative and distributive, conflicting with contrastive learning, which requires embeddings to capture full-text semantics and align via cosine similarity. This discrepancy hinders the full utilization of LLMs’ pre-training capabilities, resulting in inefficient learning. In response to this issue, we propose AutoRegEmbed, a new contrastive learning method built on embedding conditional probability distributions, which integrates two core tasks: information compression and conditional distribution alignment. The information compression task encodes text into the embedding space, ensuring that the embedding vectors capture global semantics. The conditional distribution alignment task focuses on aligning text embeddings with positive samples embeddings by leveraging the conditional distribution of embeddings while simultaneously reducing the likelihood of generating negative samples from text embeddings, thereby achieving embedding alignment and uniformity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms traditional contrastive learning approaches and achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art models when using the same amount of data.	2025-02-17
Revisiting Robust RAG: Do We Still Need Complex Robust Training in the Era of Powerful LLMs? Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems often suffer from performance degradation when encountering noisy or irrelevant documents, driving researchers to develop sophisticated training strategies to enhance their robustness against such retrieval noise. However, as large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, the necessity of these complex training methods is increasingly questioned. In this paper, we systematically investigate whether complex robust training strategies remain necessary as model capacity grows. Through comprehensive experiments spanning multiple model architectures and parameter scales, we evaluate various document selection methods and adversarial training techniques across diverse datasets. Our extensive experiments consistently demonstrate that as models become more powerful, the performance gains brought by complex robust training methods drop off dramatically. We delve into the rationale and find that more powerful models inherently exhibit superior confidence calibration, better generalization across datasets (even when trained with randomly selected documents), and optimal attention mechanisms learned with simpler strategies. Our findings suggest that RAG systems can benefit from simpler architectures and training strategies as models become more powerful, enabling more scalable applications with minimal complexity.	2025-02-17
Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard2: Bridging Foundational and Practical Evaluation for Korean LLMs The Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard has been instrumental in benchmarking Korean Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it has certain limitations. Notably, the disconnect between quantitative improvements on the overly academic leaderboard benchmarks and the qualitative impact of the models should be addressed. Furthermore, the benchmark suite is largely composed of translated versions of their English counterparts, which may not fully capture the intricacies of the Korean language. To address these issues, we propose Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard2, an improved version of the earlier Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard. The original benchmarks are entirely replaced with new tasks that are more closely aligned with real-world capabilities. Additionally, four new native Korean benchmarks are introduced to better reflect the distinct characteristics of the Korean language. Through these refinements, Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard2 seeks to provide a more meaningful evaluation for advancing Korean LLMs.	2025-02-17	Accepted to NAACL 2025 Industry
HellaSwag-Pro: A Large-Scale Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs in Commonsense Reasoning Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in commonsense reasoning; however, some variations in questions can trigger incorrect responses. Do these models truly understand commonsense knowledge, or just memorize expression patterns? To investigate this question, we present the first extensive robustness evaluation of LLMs in commonsense reasoning. We introduce HellaSwag-Pro, a large-scale bilingual benchmark consisting of 11,200 cases, by designing and compiling seven types of question variants. To construct this benchmark, we propose a two-stage method to develop Chinese HellaSwag, a finely annotated dataset comprising 12,000 instances across 56 categories. We conduct extensive experiments on 41 representative LLMs, revealing that these LLMs are far from robust in commonsense reasoning. Furthermore, this robustness varies depending on the language in which the LLM is tested. This work establishes a high-quality evaluation benchmark, with extensive experiments offering valuable insights to the community in commonsense reasoning for LLMs.	2025-02-17	Under Review
Examining Identity Drift in Conversations of LLM Agents Large Language Models (LLMs) show impressive conversational abilities but sometimes show identity drift problems, where their interaction patterns or styles change over time. As the problem has not been thoroughly examined yet, this study examines identity consistency across nine LLMs. Specifically, we (1) investigate whether LLMs could maintain consistent patterns (or identity) and (2) analyze the effect of the model family, parameter sizes, and provided persona types. Our experiments involve multi-turn conversations on personal themes, analyzed in qualitative and quantitative ways. Experimental results indicate three findings. (1) Larger models experience greater identity drift. (2) Model differences exist, but their effect is not stronger than parameter sizes. (3) Assigning a persona may not help to maintain identity. We hope these three findings can help to improve persona stability in AI-driven dialogue systems, particularly in long-term conversations.	2025-02-17	Under review
Exploring the Small World of Word Embeddings: A Comparative Study on Conceptual Spaces from LLMs of Different Scales A conceptual space represents concepts as nodes and semantic relatedness as edges. Word embeddings, combined with a similarity metric, provide an effective approach to constructing such a space. Typically, embeddings are derived from traditional distributed models or encoder-only pretrained models, whose objectives directly capture the meaning of the current token. In contrast, decoder-only models, including large language models (LLMs), predict the next token, making their embeddings less directly tied to the current token’s semantics. Moreover, comparative studies on LLMs of different scales remain underexplored. In this paper, we construct a conceptual space using word embeddings from LLMs of varying scales and comparatively analyze their properties. We establish a network based on a linguistic typology-inspired connectivity hypothesis, examine global statistical properties, and compare LLMs of varying scales. Locally, we analyze conceptual pairs, WordNet relations, and a cross-lingual semantic network for qualitative words. Our results indicate that the constructed space exhibits small-world properties, characterized by a high clustering coefficient and short path lengths. Larger LLMs generate more intricate spaces, with longer paths reflecting richer relational structures and connections. Furthermore, the network serves as an efficient bridge for cross-lingual semantic mapping.	2025-02-17	Paper under review
Predicting the Performance of Black-box LLMs through Self-Queries As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly relied on in AI systems, predicting when they make mistakes is crucial. While a great deal of work in the field uses internal representations to interpret model behavior, these representations are inaccessible when given solely black-box access through an API. In this paper, we extract features of LLMs in a black-box manner by using follow-up prompts and taking the probabilities of different responses as representations to train reliable predictors of model behavior. We demonstrate that training a linear model on these low-dimensional representations produces reliable and generalizable predictors of model performance at the instance level (e.g., if a particular generation correctly answers a question). Remarkably, these can often outperform white-box linear predictors that operate over a model’s hidden state or the full distribution over its vocabulary. In addition, we demonstrate that these extracted features can be used to evaluate more nuanced aspects of a language model’s state. For instance, they can be used to distinguish between a clean version of GPT-4o-mini and a version that has been influenced via an adversarial system prompt that answers question-answering tasks incorrectly or introduces bugs into generated code. Furthermore, they can reliably distinguish between different model architectures and sizes, enabling the detection of misrepresented models provided through an API (e.g., identifying if GPT-3.5 is supplied instead of GPT-4o-mini).	2025-02-17	28 pag
LLMs can Perform Multi-Dimensional Analytic Writing Assessments: A Case Study of L2 Graduate-Level Academic English Writing The paper explores the performance of LLMs in the context of multi-dimensional analytic writing assessments, i.e. their ability to provide both scores and comments based on multiple assessment criteria. Using a corpus of literature reviews written by L2 graduate students and assessed by human experts against 9 analytic criteria, we prompt several popular LLMs to perform the same task under various conditions. To evaluate the quality of feedback comments, we apply a novel feedback comment quality evaluation framework. This framework is interpretable, cost-efficient, scalable, and reproducible, compared to existing methods that rely on manual judgments. We find that LLMs can generate reasonably good and generally reliable multi-dimensional analytic assessments. We release our corpus for reproducibility.	2025-02-17	26 pages, 6 figures, 15 tab
SeerAttention: Learning Intrinsic Sparse Attention in Your LLMs Attention is the cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet its quadratic complexity hinders efficiency and scalability, especially for long-context processing. A promising approach is to leverage sparsity in attention. However, existing sparsity-based solutions predominantly rely on predefined patterns or heuristics at the attention head level, struggling to adapt dynamically to different contexts efficiently. We propose SeerAttention, a simple yet effective attention mechanism that directly learns the block-level attention sparsity from the LLM itself. Inspired by the gating mechanism in Mixture of Experts (MoE), SeerAttention augments the conventional attention with a learnable gate that selectively activates important blocks within the attention map. Specifically, the gate first pools the query (Q) and key (K) tensors along the sequence dimension and processes them through learnable linear layers. The resulting matrices are then multiplied together to produce the gating scores, which are used to predict block-level attention sparsity. Combined with our block-sparse FlashAttention kernel, SeerAttention can achieve significant speedup on GPUs. When applied to pre-trained LLMs, SeerAttention only requires training the gate parameters in a lightweight self-distillation manner, allowing rapid convergence. Our evaluation results demonstrate that SeerAttention achieves better model accuracy and lower latency for long-context pre-filling compared to prior methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/SeerAttention	2025-02-17
Dagger Behind Smile: Fool LLMs with a Happy Ending Story The wide adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has attracted significant attention from $\textit{jailbreak}$ attacks, where adversarial prompts crafted through optimization or manual design exploit LLMs to generate malicious contents. However, optimization-based attacks have limited efficiency and transferability, while existing manual designs are either easily detectable or demand intricate interactions with LLMs. In this paper, we first point out a novel perspective for jailbreak attacks: LLMs are more responsive to $\textit{positive}$ prompts. Based on this, we deploy Happy Ending Attack (HEA) to wrap up a malicious request in a scenario template involving a positive prompt formed mainly via a $\textit{happy ending}$, it thus fools LLMs into jailbreaking either immediately or at a follow-up malicious request.This has made HEA both efficient and effective, as it requires only up to two turns to fully jailbreak LLMs. Extensive experiments show that our HEA can successfully jailbreak on state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4o, Llama3-70b, Gemini-pro, and achieves 88.79\% attack success rate on average. We also provide quantitative explanations for the success of HEA.	2025-02-17
Mimicking the Familiar: Dynamic Command Generation for Information Theft Attacks in LLM Tool-Learning System Information theft attacks pose a significant risk to Large Language Model (LLM) tool-learning systems. Adversaries can inject malicious commands through compromised tools, manipulating LLMs to send sensitive information to these tools, which leads to potential privacy breaches. However, existing attack approaches are black-box oriented and rely on static commands that cannot adapt flexibly to the changes in user queries and the invocation chain of tools. It makes malicious commands more likely to be detected by LLM and leads to attack failure. In this paper, we propose AutoCMD, a dynamic attack comment generation approach for information theft attacks in LLM tool-learning systems. Inspired by the concept of mimicking the familiar, AutoCMD is capable of inferring the information utilized by upstream tools in the toolchain through learning on open-source systems and reinforcement with target system examples, thereby generating more targeted commands for information theft. The evaluation results show that AutoCMD outperforms the baselines with +13.2% $ASR_{Theft}$, and can be generalized to new tool-learning systems to expose their information leakage risks. We also design four defense methods to effectively protect tool-learning systems from the attack.	2025-02-17	15 pages, 11 figur
“Nuclear Deployed!”: Analyzing Catastrophic Risks in Decision-making of Autonomous LLM Agents Large language models (LLMs) are evolving into autonomous decision-makers, raising concerns about catastrophic risks in high-stakes scenarios, particularly in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) domains. Based on the insight that such risks can originate from trade-offs between the agent’s Helpful, Harmlessness and Honest (HHH) goals, we build a novel three-stage evaluation framework, which is carefully constructed to effectively and naturally expose such risks. We conduct 14,400 agentic simulations across 12 advanced LLMs, with extensive experiments and analysis. Results reveal that LLM agents can autonomously engage in catastrophic behaviors and deception, without being deliberately induced. Furthermore, stronger reasoning abilities often increase, rather than mitigate, these risks. We also show that these agents can violate instructions and superior commands. On the whole, we empirically prove the existence of catastrophic risks in autonomous LLM agents. We will release our code upon request.	2025-02-17	Our code will be available at https://github.com/pillowsofwind/LLM-CBRN-Risk
Understanding LLM Development Through Longitudinal Study: Insights from the Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard This paper conducts a longitudinal study over eleven months to address the limitations of prior research on the Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard, which have relied on empirical studies with restricted observation periods of only five months. By extending the analysis duration, we aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the progression in developing Korean large language models (LLMs). Our study is guided by three primary research questions: (1) What are the specific challenges in improving LLM performance across diverse tasks on the Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard over time? (2) How does model size impact task performance correlations across various benchmarks? (3) How have the patterns in leaderboard rankings shifted over time on the Open Ko-LLM Leaderboard?. By analyzing 1,769 models over this period, our research offers a comprehensive examination of the ongoing advancements in LLMs and the evolving nature of evaluation frameworks.	2025-02-17	Accepted to NAACL 2025 Industry
Factual Inconsistency in Data-to-Text Generation Scales Exponentially with LLM Size: A Statistical Validation Monitoring factual inconsistency is essential for ensuring trustworthiness in data-to-text generation (D2T). While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various D2T tasks, previous studies on scaling laws have primarily focused on generalization error through power law scaling to LLM size (i.e., the number of model parameters). However, no research has examined the impact of LLM size on factual inconsistency in D2T. In this paper, we investigate how factual inconsistency in D2T scales with LLM size by exploring two scaling laws: power law and exponential scaling. To rigorously evaluate and compare these scaling laws, we employ a statistical validation framework consisting of three key stages: predictive performance estimation, goodness-of-fit assessment, and comparative analysis. For a comprehensive empirical study, we analyze three popular LLM families across five D2T datasets, measuring factual inconsistency inversely using four state-of-the-art consistency metrics. Our findings, based on exhaustive empirical results and validated through our framework, reveal that, contrary to the widely assumed power law scaling, factual inconsistency in D2T follows an exponential scaling with LLM size.	2025-02-17	21 pag
Understanding Silent Data Corruption in LLM Training As the scale of training large language models (LLMs) increases, one emergent failure is silent data corruption (SDC), where hardware produces incorrect computations without explicit failure signals. In this work, we are the first to investigate the impact of real-world SDCs on LLM training by comparing model training between healthy production nodes and unhealthy nodes exhibiting SDCs. With the help from a cloud computing platform, we access the unhealthy nodes that were swept out from production by automated fleet management. Using deterministic execution via XLA compiler and our proposed synchronization mechanisms, we isolate and analyze the impact of SDC errors on these nodes at three levels: at each submodule computation, at a single optimizer step, and at a training period. Our results reveal that the impact of SDCs on computation varies on different unhealthy nodes. Although in most cases the perturbations from SDCs on submodule computation and gradients are relatively small, SDCs can lead models to converge to different optima with different weights and even cause spikes in the training loss. Our analysis sheds light on further understanding and mitigating the impact of SDCs.	2025-02-17
From Dense to Dynamic: Token-Difficulty Driven MoEfication of Pre-Trained LLMs Training large language models (LLMs) for different inference constraints is computationally expensive, limiting control over efficiency-accuracy trade-offs. Moreover, once trained, these models typically process tokens uniformly, regardless of their complexity, leading to static and inflexible behavior. In this paper, we introduce a post-training optimization framework, DynaMoE, that adapts a pre-trained dense LLM to a token-difficulty-driven Mixture-of-Experts model with minimal fine-tuning cost. This adaptation makes the model dynamic, with sensitivity control to customize the balance between efficiency and accuracy. DynaMoE features a token-difficulty-aware router that predicts the difficulty of tokens and directs them to the appropriate sub-networks or experts, enabling larger experts to handle more complex tokens and smaller experts to process simpler ones. Our experiments demonstrate that DynaMoE can generate a range of adaptive model variants of the existing trained LLM with a single fine-tuning step, utilizing only $10B$ tokens, a minimal cost compared to the base model’s training. Each variant offers distinct trade-offs between accuracy and performance. Compared to the baseline post-training optimization framework, Flextron, our method achieves similar aggregated accuracy across downstream tasks, despite using only $\frac{1}{9}\text{th}$ of their fine-tuning cost.	2025-02-17
Integrating Expert Knowledge into Logical Programs via LLMs This paper introduces ExKLoP, a novel framework designed to evaluate how effectively Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate expert knowledge into logical reasoning systems. This capability is especially valuable in engineering, where expert knowledge-such as manufacturer-recommended operational ranges-can be directly embedded into automated monitoring systems. By mirroring expert verification steps, tasks like range checking and constraint validation help ensure system safety and reliability. Our approach systematically evaluates LLM-generated logical rules, assessing both syntactic fluency and logical correctness in these critical validation tasks. We also explore the models capacity for self-correction via an iterative feedback loop based on code execution outcomes. ExKLoP presents an extensible dataset comprising 130 engineering premises, 950 prompts, and corresponding validation points. It enables comprehensive benchmarking while allowing control over task complexity and scalability of experiments. We leverage the synthetic data creation methodology to conduct extensive empirical evaluation on a diverse set of LLMs including Llama3, Gemma, Mixtral, Mistral, and Qwen. Results reveal that while models generate nearly perfect syntactically correct code, they frequently exhibit logical errors in translating expert knowledge. Furthermore, iterative self-correction yields only marginal improvements (up to 3%). Overall, ExKLoP serves as a robust evaluation platform that streamlines the selection of effective models for self-correcting systems while clearly delineating the types of errors encountered. The complete implementation, along with all relevant data, is available at GitHub.	2025-02-17
Smoothing Out Hallucinations: Mitigating LLM Hallucination with Smoothed Knowledge Distillation Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucination, generating factually incorrect or ungrounded content, which limits their reliability in high-stakes applications. A key factor contributing to hallucination is the use of hard labels during training, which enforce deterministic supervision, encourage overconfidence, and disregard the uncertainty inherent in natural language. To address this, we propose mitigating hallucination through knowledge distillation (KD), where a teacher model provides smoothed soft labels to a student model, reducing overconfidence and improving factual grounding. We apply KD during supervised finetuning on instructional data, evaluating its effectiveness across LLMs from different families. Experimental results on summarization benchmarks demonstrate that KD reduces hallucination compared to standard finetuning while preserving performance on general NLP tasks. These findings highlight KD as a promising approach for mitigating hallucination in LLMs and improving model reliability.	2025-02-16
Leveraging Multimodal-LLMs Assisted by Instance Segmentation for Intelligent Traffic Monitoring A robust and efficient traffic monitoring system is essential for smart cities and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), using sensors and cameras to track vehicle movements, optimize traffic flow, reduce congestion, enhance road safety, and enable real-time adaptive traffic control. Traffic monitoring models must comprehensively understand dynamic urban conditions and provide an intuitive user interface for effective management. This research leverages the LLaVA visual grounding multimodal large language model (LLM) for traffic monitoring tasks on the real-time Quanser Interactive Lab simulation platform, covering scenarios like intersections, congestion, and collisions. Cameras placed at multiple urban locations collect real-time images from the simulation, which are fed into the LLaVA model with queries for analysis. An instance segmentation model integrated into the cameras highlights key elements such as vehicles and pedestrians, enhancing training and throughput. The system achieves 84.3% accuracy in recognizing vehicle locations and 76.4% in determining steering direction, outperforming traditional models.	2025-02-16	6 pages, 7 figures, submitted to 30th IEEE International Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC) 2025
Is The Watermarking Of LLM-Generated Code Robust? We present the first in depth study on the robustness of existing watermarking techniques applied to code generated by large language models (LLMs). As LLMs increasingly contribute to software development, watermarking has emerged as a potential solution for detecting AI generated code and mitigating misuse, such as plagiarism or the automated generation of malicious programs. While previous research has demonstrated the resilience of watermarking in the text setting, our work reveals that watermarking techniques are significantly more fragile in code-based contexts. Specifically, we show that simple semantic-preserving transformations, such as variable renaming and dead code insertion, can effectively erase watermarks without altering the program’s functionality. To systematically evaluate watermark robustness, we develop an algorithm that traverses the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of a watermarked program and applies a sequence of randomized, semantics-preserving transformations. Our experimental results, conducted on Python code generated by different LLMs, indicate that even minor modifications can drastically reduce watermark detectability, with true positive rates (TPR) dropping below 50% in many cases. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/uiuc-arc/llm-code-watermark.	2025-02-16
Exploring the Personality Traits of LLMs through Latent Features Steering Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced dialogue systems and role-playing agents through their ability to generate human-like text. While prior studies have shown that LLMs can exhibit distinct and consistent personalities, the mechanisms through which these models encode and express specific personality traits remain poorly understood. To address this, we investigate how various factors, such as cultural norms and environmental stressors, encoded within LLMs, shape their personality traits, guided by the theoretical framework of social determinism. Inspired by related work on LLM interpretability, we propose a training-free approach to modify the model’s behavior by extracting and steering latent features corresponding to factors within the model, thereby eliminating the need for retraining. Furthermore, we analyze the implications of these factors for model safety, focusing on their impact through the lens of personality.	2025-02-16	under review
Cuckoo: An IE Free Rider Hatched by Massive Nutrition in LLM’s Nest Massive high-quality data, both pre-training raw texts and post-training annotations, have been carefully prepared to incubate advanced large language models (LLMs). In contrast, for information extraction (IE), pre-training data, such as BIO-tagged sequences, are hard to scale up. We show that IE models can act as free riders on LLM resources by reframing next-token \emph{prediction} into \emph{extraction} for tokens already present in the context. Specifically, our proposed next tokens extraction (NTE) paradigm learns a versatile IE model, \emph{Cuckoo}, with 102.6M extractive data converted from LLM’s pre-training and post-training data. Under the few-shot setting, Cuckoo adapts effectively to traditional and complex instruction-following IE with better performance than existing pre-trained IE models. As a free rider, Cuckoo can naturally evolve with the ongoing advancements in LLM data preparation, benefiting from improvements in LLM training pipelines without additional manual effort.	2025-02-16
LLMs and Childhood Safety: Identifying Risks and Proposing a Protection Framework for Safe Child-LLM Interaction This study examines the growing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in child-centered applications, highlighting safety and ethical concerns such as bias, harmful content, and cultural insensitivity. Despite their potential to enhance learning, there is a lack of standardized frameworks to mitigate these risks. Through a systematic literature review, we identify key parental and empirical concerns, including toxicity and ethical breaches in AI outputs. Moreover, to address these issues, this paper proposes a protection framework for safe Child-LLM interaction, incorporating metrics for content safety, behavioral ethics, and cultural sensitivity. The framework provides practical tools for evaluating LLM safety, offering guidance for developers, policymakers, and educators to ensure responsible AI deployment for children.	2025-02-16
QuaLLM: An LLM-based Framework to Extract Quantitative Insights from Online Forums Online discussion forums provide crucial data to understand the concerns of a wide range of real-world communities. However, the typical qualitative and quantitative methodologies used to analyze those data, such as thematic analysis and topic modeling, are infeasible to scale or require significant human effort to translate outputs to human readable forms. This study introduces QuaLLM, a novel LLM-based framework to analyze and extract quantitative insights from text data on online forums. The framework consists of a novel prompting and human evaluation methodology. We applied this framework to analyze over one million comments from two of Reddit’s rideshare worker communities, marking the largest study of its type. We uncover significant worker concerns regarding AI and algorithmic platform decisions, responding to regulatory calls about worker insights. In short, our work sets a new precedent for AI-assisted quantitative data analysis to surface concerns from online forums.	2025-02-16	Accepted to NAACL Findings (2025), cite appropriately. Preliminary version presented at CHI LLM as Research Tools Workshop (2024)
Vendi-RAG: Adaptively Trading-Off Diversity And Quality Significantly Improves Retrieval Augmented Generation With LLMs Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) for domain-specific question-answering (QA) tasks by leveraging external knowledge sources. However, traditional RAG systems primarily focus on relevance-based retrieval and often struggle with redundancy, especially when reasoning requires connecting information from multiple sources. This paper introduces Vendi-RAG, a framework based on an iterative process that jointly optimizes retrieval diversity and answer quality. This joint optimization leads to significantly higher accuracy for multi-hop QA tasks. Vendi-RAG leverages the Vendi Score (VS), a flexible similarity-based diversity metric, to promote semantic diversity in document retrieval. It then uses an LLM judge that evaluates candidate answers, generated after a reasoning step, and outputs a score that the retriever uses to balance relevance and diversity among the retrieved documents during each iteration. Experiments on three challenging datasets – HotpotQA, MuSiQue, and 2WikiMultiHopQA – demonstrate Vendi-RAG’s effectiveness in multi-hop reasoning tasks. The framework achieves significant accuracy improvements over traditional single-step and multi-step RAG approaches, with accuracy increases reaching up to +4.2% on HotpotQA, +4.1% on 2WikiMultiHopQA, and +1.3% on MuSiQue compared to Adaptive-RAG, the current best baseline. The benefits of Vendi-RAG are even more pronounced as the number of retrieved documents increases. Finally, we evaluated Vendi-RAG across different LLM backbones, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o-mini, and observed consistent improvements, demonstrating that the framework’s advantages are model-agnostic.	2025-02-16	A RAG pipeline that accounts for both diversity and answer quality and that can be used with any LLM backbone to solve complex multi-hop question-answering task
SnipGen: A Mining Repository Framework for Evaluating LLMs for Code Language Models (LLMs), such as transformer-based neural networks trained on billions of parameters, have become increasingly prevalent in software engineering (SE). These models, trained on extensive datasets that include code repositories, exhibit remarkable capabilities for SE tasks. However, evaluating their effectiveness poses significant challenges, primarily due to the potential overlap between the datasets used for training and those employed for evaluation. To address this issue, we introduce SnipGen, a comprehensive repository mining framework designed to leverage prompt engineering across various downstream tasks for code generation. SnipGen aims to mitigate data contamination by generating robust testbeds and crafting tailored data points to assist researchers and practitioners in evaluating LLMs for code-related tasks. In our exploratory study, SnipGen mined approximately 227K data points from 338K recent code changes in GitHub commits, focusing on method-level granularity. SnipGen features a collection of prompt templates that can be combined to create a Chain-of-Thought-like sequence of prompts, enabling a nuanced assessment of LLMs’ code generation quality. By providing the mining tool, the methodology, and the dataset, SnipGen empowers researchers and practitioners to rigorously evaluate and interpret LLMs’ performance in software engineering contexts.	2025-02-16	5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tab
POD-Attention: Unlocking Full Prefill-Decode Overlap for Faster LLM Inference Each request in LLM inference goes through two phases: compute-bound prefill and memory-bandwidth-bound decode. To improve GPU utilization, recent systems use hybrid batching that combines the prefill and decode phases of different requests into the same batch. This approach optimizes linear operations but remains inefficient for attention computation because existing attention kernels specialize execution independently for the prefill and decode phases. In this paper, we present POD-Attention - the first GPU kernel that efficiently computes attention for hybrid batches. POD-Attention aims to maximize the utilization of both compute and memory bandwidth by carefully allocating the GPU’s resources such that prefill and decode operations happen concurrently on the same multiprocessor. POD-Attention speeds up attention computation by up to $59\%$ (mean $28\%$), enabling higher throughput and lower latency LLM inference compared to the use of independently optimized prefill and decode attention kernels.	2025-02-16	Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 2 (ASPLOS ‘25), March 30 - April 3, 2025, Rotterdam, Netherlan
Asymmetric Conflict and Synergy in Post-training for LLM-based Multilingual Machine Translation The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has advanced the multilingual machine translation (MMT), yet the Curse of Multilinguality (CoM) remains a major challenge. Existing work in LLM-based MMT typically mitigates this issue via scaling up training and computation budget, which raises a critical question: Is scaling up the training and computation budget truly necessary for high-quality MMT, or can a deeper understanding of CoM provide a more efficient solution? To explore this problem, we analyze the linguistic conflicts and synergy, the underlying mechanism of CoM during post-training phase. We identify an asymmetric phenomenon in linguistic conflicts and synergy: the dominance of conflicts and synergy varies in different translation directions, leading to sub-optimal adaptation in existing post-training methods. We further find that a significant bottleneck in MMT appears to lie in post-training rather than multilingual pre-training, suggesting the need for more effective adaptation strategies. Building on these new insights, we propose a direction-aware training approach, combined with group-wise model merging, to address asymmetry in linguistic conflicts and synergy explicitly. Leveraging this strategy, our method fine-tunes X-ALMA-13B-Pretrain-trained only with multilingual pre-training-achieving comparable performance to XALMA-13B (only SFT) while using only 20B pretraining tokens and 17B parameters-5.5x fewer pretraining-tokens and 1.7x fewer model size-with just 0.85 COMET drop on Flores-200 testsets of 50 languages.	2025-02-16	22 pag
PlanGenLLMs: A Modern Survey of LLM Planning Capabilities LLMs have immense potential for generating plans, transforming an initial world state into a desired goal state. A large body of research has explored the use of LLMs for various planning tasks, from web navigation to travel planning and database querying. However, many of these systems are tailored to specific problems, making it challenging to compare them or determine the best approach for new tasks. There is also a lack of clear and consistent evaluation criteria. Our survey aims to offer a comprehensive overview of current LLM planners to fill this gap. It builds on foundational work by Kartam and Wilkins (1990) and examines six key performance criteria: completeness, executability, optimality, representation, generalization, and efficiency. For each, we provide a thorough analysis of representative works and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Our paper also identifies crucial future directions, making it a valuable resource for both practitioners and newcomers interested in leveraging LLM planning to support agentic workflows.	2025-02-16	Preprint. Under review
A Survey of LLM-based Agents in Medicine: How far are we from Baymax? Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming healthcare through the development of LLM-based agents that can understand, reason about, and assist with medical tasks. This survey provides a comprehensive review of LLM-based agents in medicine, examining their architectures, applications, and challenges. We analyze the key components of medical agent systems, including system profiles, clinical planning mechanisms, medical reasoning frameworks, and external capacity enhancement. The survey covers major application scenarios such as clinical decision support, medical documentation, training simulations, and healthcare service optimization. We discuss evaluation frameworks and metrics used to assess these agents’ performance in healthcare settings. While LLM-based agents show promise in enhancing healthcare delivery, several challenges remain, including hallucination management, multimodal integration, implementation barriers, and ethical considerations. The survey concludes by highlighting future research directions, including advances in medical reasoning inspired by recent developments in LLM architectures, integration with physical systems, and improvements in training simulations. This work provides researchers and practitioners with a structured overview of the current state and future prospects of LLM-based agents in medicine.	2025-02-16
CRMArena: Understanding the Capacity of LLM Agents to Perform Professional CRM Tasks in Realistic Environments Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are vital for modern enterprises, providing a foundation for managing customer interactions and data. Integrating AI agents into CRM systems can automate routine processes and enhance personalized service. However, deploying and evaluating these agents is challenging due to the lack of realistic benchmarks that reflect the complexity of real-world CRM tasks. To address this issue, we introduce CRMArena, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on realistic tasks grounded in professional work environments. Following guidance from CRM experts and industry best practices, we designed CRMArena with nine customer service tasks distributed across three personas: service agent, analyst, and manager. The benchmark includes 16 commonly used industrial objects (e.g., account, order, knowledge article, case) with high interconnectivity, along with latent variables (e.g., complaint habits, policy violations) to simulate realistic data distributions. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art LLM agents succeed in less than 40% of the tasks with ReAct prompting, and less than 55% even with function-calling abilities. Our findings highlight the need for enhanced agent capabilities in function-calling and rule-following to be deployed in real-world work environments. CRMArena is an open challenge to the community: systems that can reliably complete tasks showcase direct business value in a popular work environment.	2025-02-16	NAACL 2025
How Do LLMs Acquire New Knowledge? A Knowledge Circuits Perspective on Continual Pre-Training Despite exceptional capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) face a critical gap in understanding how they internalize new knowledge, particularly how to structurally embed acquired knowledge in their neural computations. We address this issue through the lens of knowledge circuit evolution, identifying computational subgraphs that facilitate knowledge storage and processing. Our systematic analysis of circuit evolution throughout continual pre-training reveals several key findings: (1) the acquisition of new knowledge is influenced by its relevance to pre-existing knowledge; (2) the evolution of knowledge circuits exhibits a distinct phase shift from formation to optimization; (3) the evolution of knowledge circuits follows a deep-to-shallow pattern. These insights not only advance our theoretical understanding of the mechanisms of new knowledge acquisition in LLMs, but also provide potential implications for improving continual pre-training strategies to enhance model performance. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DynamicKnowledgeCircuits.	2025-02-16	Work in progr
Primus: A Pioneering Collection of Open-Source Datasets for Cybersecurity LLM Training Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in specialized fields such as finance, law, and medicine. However, in cybersecurity, we have noticed a lack of open-source datasets, with a particular lack of high-quality cybersecurity pretraining corpora, even though much research indicates that LLMs acquire their knowledge during pretraining. To address this, we present a comprehensive suite of datasets covering all major training stages, including pretraining, instruction fine-tuning, and reasoning distillation with cybersecurity-specific self-reflection data. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate their effectiveness on public cybersecurity benchmarks. In particular, continual pre-training on our dataset yields a 15.88% improvement in the aggregate score, while reasoning distillation leads to a 10% gain in security certification (CISSP). We will release all datasets and trained cybersecurity LLMs under the ODC-BY and MIT licenses to encourage further research in the community. For access to all datasets and model weights, please refer to https://huggingface.co/collections/trendmicro-ailab/primus-67b1fd27052b802b4af9d243.	2025-02-16
Syntriever: How to Train Your Retriever with Synthetic Data from LLMs LLMs have boosted progress in many AI applications. Recently, there were attempts to distill the vast knowledge of LLMs into information retrieval systems. Those distillation methods mostly use output probabilities of LLMs which are unavailable in the latest black-box LLMs. We propose Syntriever, a training framework for retrievers using synthetic data from black-box LLMs. Syntriever consists of two stages. Firstly in the distillation stage, we synthesize relevant and plausibly irrelevant passages and augmented queries using chain-of-thoughts for the given queries. LLM is asked to self-verify the synthetic data for possible hallucinations, after which retrievers are trained with a loss designed to cluster the embeddings of relevant passages. Secondly in the alignment stage, we align the retriever with the preferences of LLMs. We propose a preference modeling called partial Plackett-Luce ranking to learn LLM preferences with regularization which prevents the model from deviating excessively from that trained in the distillation stage. Experiments show that Syntriever achieves state-of-the-art performances on benchmark datasets from various domains in nDCG@$K$. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/kmswin1/Syntriever}{https://github.com/kmswin1/Syntriever}.	2025-02-14	he Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Findings, Accep
Enhancing Multilingual LLM Pretraining with Model-Based Data Selection Dataset curation has become a basis for strong large language model (LLM) performance. While various rule-based filtering heuristics exist for English and multilingual datasets, model-based filtering techniques have primarily focused on English. To address the disparity stemming from limited research on non-English languages, we propose a model-based filtering framework for multilingual datasets that aims to identify a diverse set of structured and knowledge-rich samples. Our approach emphasizes transparency, simplicity, and efficiency, leveraging Transformer- and FastText-based classifiers to ensure the broad accessibility of our technique and data. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies on the FineWeb-2 web crawl dataset across diverse language families, scripts, and resource availability to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Training a 1B-parameter Llama model for 70B and 119B tokens, our approach can match the baseline MMLU score with as little as 15% of the training tokens, while also improving across other benchmarks. These findings provide strong evidence for the generalizability of our approach to other languages. As a result, we extend our framework to 20 languages for which we release the refined pretraining datasets.	2025-02-14
The Graph’s Apprentice: Teaching an LLM Low Level Knowledge for Circuit Quality Estimation Logic synthesis is a crucial phase in the circuit design process, responsible for transforming hardware description language (HDL) designs into optimized netlists. However, traditional logic synthesis methods are computationally intensive, restricting their iterative use in refining chip designs. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), particularly those fine-tuned on programming languages, present a promising alternative. This work proposes augmenting LLMs with predictor networks trained to estimate circuit quality directly from HDL code. To enhance performance, the model is regularized using embeddings from graph neural networks (GNNs) trained on Look-Up Table (LUT) graphs, thereby incorporating lower-level circuit insights. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance compared to existing graph-based RTL-level estimation techniques on the established benchmark OpenABCD, while providing instant feedback on HDL code quality.	2025-02-14
Process Reward Models for LLM Agents: Practical Framework and Directions We introduce Agent Process Reward Models (AgentPRM), a simple and scalable framework for training LLM agents to continually improve through interactions. AgentPRM follows a lightweight actor-critic paradigm, using Monte Carlo rollouts to compute reward targets and optimize policies. It requires minimal modifications to existing RLHF pipelines, making it easy to integrate at scale. Beyond AgentPRM, we propose InversePRM, which learns process rewards directly from demonstrations without explicit outcome supervision. We also explore key challenges and opportunities, including exploration, process reward shaping, and model-predictive reasoning. We evaluate on ALFWorld benchmark, show that small 3B models trained with AgentPRM and InversePRM outperform strong GPT-4o baselines, and analyze test-time scaling, reward hacking, and more. Our code is available at: https://github.com/sanjibanc/agent_prm.	2025-02-14	17 pages, 7 figur
LLM-Powered Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Assignment We study the potential of large language models (LLMs) as proxies for humans to simplify preference elicitation (PE) in combinatorial assignment. While traditional PE methods rely on iterative queries to capture preferences, LLMs offer a one-shot alternative with reduced human effort. We propose a framework for LLM proxies that can work in tandem with SOTA ML-powered preference elicitation schemes. Our framework handles the novel challenges introduced by LLMs, such as response variability and increased computational costs. We experimentally evaluate the efficiency of LLM proxies against human queries in the well-studied course allocation domain, and we investigate the model capabilities required for success. We find that our approach improves allocative efficiency by up to 20%, and these results are robust across different LLMs and to differences in quality and accuracy of reporting.	2025-02-14
MeNTi: Bridging Medical Calculator and LLM Agent with Nested Tool Calling Integrating tools into Large Language Models (LLMs) has facilitated the widespread application. Despite this, in specialized downstream task contexts, reliance solely on tools is insufficient to fully address the complexities of the real world. This particularly restricts the effective deployment of LLMs in fields such as medicine. In this paper, we focus on the downstream tasks of medical calculators, which use standardized tests to assess an individual’s health status. We introduce MeNTi, a universal agent architecture for LLMs. MeNTi integrates a specialized medical toolkit and employs meta-tool and nested calling mechanisms to enhance LLM tool utilization. Specifically, it achieves flexible tool selection and nested tool calling to address practical issues faced in intricate medical scenarios, including calculator selection, slot filling, and unit conversion. To assess the capabilities of LLMs for quantitative assessment throughout the clinical process of calculator scenarios, we introduce CalcQA. This benchmark requires LLMs to use medical calculators to perform calculations and assess patient health status. CalcQA is constructed by professional physicians and includes 100 case-calculator pairs, complemented by a toolkit of 281 medical tools. The experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements with our framework. This research paves new directions for applying LLMs in demanding scenarios of medicine.	2025-02-14	NAACL 2025 main conferenc
EACO-RAG: Towards Distributed Tiered LLM Deployment using Edge-Assisted and Collaborative RAG with Adaptive Knowledge Update Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in language tasks, but they require high computing power and rely on static knowledge. To overcome these limitations, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) incorporates up-to-date external information into LLMs without extensive fine-tuning. Meanwhile, small language models (SLMs) deployed on edge devices offer efficiency and low latency but often struggle with complex reasoning tasks. Unfortunately, current RAG approaches are predominantly based on centralized databases and have not been adapted to address the distinct constraints associated with deploying SLMs in edge environments. To bridge this gap, we propose Edge-Assisted and Collaborative RAG (EACO-RAG), a lightweight framework that leverages distributed edge nodes for adaptive knowledge updates and retrieval. EACO-RAG also employs a hierarchical collaborative gating mechanism to dynamically select among local, edge-assisted, and cloud-based strategies, with a carefully designed algorithm based on Safe Online Bayesian Optimization to maximize the potential performance enhancements. Experimental results demonstrate that EACO-RAG matches the accuracy of cloud-based knowledge graph RAG systems while reducing total costs by up to 84.6% under relaxed delay constraints and by 65.3% under stricter delay requirements. This work represents our initial effort toward achieving a distributed and scalable tiered LLM deployments, with EACO-RAG serving as a promising first step in unlocking the full potential of hybrid edge-cloud intelligence.	2025-02-14
Strada-LLM: Graph LLM for traffic prediction Traffic prediction is a vital component of intelligent transportation systems. By reasoning about traffic patterns in both the spatial and temporal dimensions, accurate and interpretable predictions can be provided. A considerable challenge in traffic prediction lies in handling the diverse data distributions caused by vastly different traffic conditions occurring at different locations. LLMs have been a dominant solution due to their remarkable capacity to adapt to new datasets with very few labeled data samples, i.e., few-shot adaptability. However, existing forecasting techniques mainly focus on extracting local graph information and forming a text-like prompt, leaving LLM- based traffic prediction an open problem. This work presents a probabilistic LLM for traffic forecasting with three highlights. We propose a graph-aware LLM for traffic prediction that considers proximal traffic information. Specifically, by considering the traffic of neighboring nodes as covariates, our model outperforms the corresponding time-series LLM. Furthermore, we adopt a lightweight approach for efficient domain adaptation when facing new data distributions in few-shot fashion. The comparative experiment demonstrates the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art LLM-based methods and the traditional GNN- based supervised approaches. Furthermore, Strada-LLM can be easily adapted to different LLM backbones without a noticeable performance drop.	2025-02-14	The reviewers decided to reject it. After getting the reviews, we wanted to study more.
Cross-Lingual Transfer of Debiasing and Detoxification in Multilingual LLMs: An Extensive Investigation Recent generative large language models (LLMs) show remarkable performance in non-English languages, but when prompted in those languages they tend to express higher harmful social biases and toxicity levels. Prior work has shown that finetuning on specialized datasets can mitigate this behavior, and doing so in English can transfer to other languages. In this work, we investigate the impact of different finetuning methods on the model’s bias and toxicity, but also on its ability to produce fluent and diverse text. We reduce biases by finetuning on curated non-harmful text, but find only direct preference optimization to be effective for mitigating toxicity. The mitigation caused by applying these methods in English also transfers to non-English languages. We find evidence that the extent to which transfer takes place can be predicted by the amount of data in a given language present in the model’s pretraining data. However, this transfer of bias and toxicity mitigation often comes at the expense of decreased language generation ability in non-English languages, highlighting the importance of developing language-specific bias and toxicity mitigation methods.	2025-02-14
Prediction hubs are context-informed frequent tokens in LLMs Hubness, the tendency for few points to be among the nearest neighbours of a disproportionate number of other points, commonly arises when applying standard distance measures to high-dimensional data, often negatively impacting distance-based analysis. As autoregressive large language models (LLMs) operate on high-dimensional representations, we ask whether they are also affected by hubness. We first show, theoretically, that the only representation comparison operation performed by LLMs, namely that between context and unembedding vectors to determine continuation probabilities, is not characterized by the concentration of distances phenomenon that typically causes the appeareance of nuisance hubness. We then empirically show that this comparison still leads to a high degree of hubness, but the hubs in this case do not constitute a disturbance. They are rather the result of context-modulated frequent tokens often appearing in the pool of likely candidates for next token prediction. On the other hand, when other distance computations involving LLM representations are performed, we do not have the same theoretical guarantees, and, indeed, we see nuisance hubs appear. In summary, our work highlights, on the one hand, how hubness, while omnipresent in high-dimensional spaces, is not always a negative property that needs to be mitigated, and, on the other hand, it shows that various widely-used LLMs have developed a guessing strategy that consists in constantly assigning a high probability to frequent tokens.	2025-02-14
Self-Refinement Strategies for LLM-based Product Attribute Value Extraction Structured product data, in the form of attribute-value pairs, is essential for e-commerce platforms to support features such as faceted product search and attribute-based product comparison. However, vendors often provide unstructured product descriptions, making attribute value extraction necessary to ensure data consistency and usability. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential for product attribute value extraction in few-shot scenarios. Recent research has shown that self-refinement techniques can improve the performance of LLMs on tasks such as code generation and text-to-SQL translation. For other tasks, the application of these techniques has resulted in increased costs due to processing additional tokens, without achieving any improvement in performance. This paper investigates applying two self-refinement techniques (error-based prompt rewriting and self-correction) to the product attribute value extraction task. The self-refinement techniques are evaluated across zero-shot, few-shot in-context learning, and fine-tuning scenarios using GPT-4o. The experiments show that both self-refinement techniques fail to significantly improve the extraction performance while substantially increasing processing costs. For scenarios with development data, fine-tuning yields the highest performance, while the ramp-up costs of fine-tuning are balanced out as the amount of product descriptions increases.	2025-02-14
MathConstruct: Challenging LLM Reasoning with Constructive Proofs While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in mathematics, existing math benchmarks come with significant limitations. Many focus on problems with fixed ground-truth answers, and are often saturated due to problem simplicity or the viability of guessing or memorization. Crucially, they capture only a narrow subset of relevant math problems. To address this research gap, we introduce \mc, a new benchmark of 126 challenging problems sourced from various math competitions, which targets constructive proofs, a widely encountered problem type requiring the construction of mathematical objects with specific properties. These proofs are particularly suitable for LLM evaluation, as solution correctness can be easily verified. Our automated verifiers also enable MathConstruct to generate problem variations, used to evaluate robustness. State-of-the-art LLMs solve only 54% of MathConstruct problems, highlighting its complexity and importance for LLM evaluation.	2025-02-14
Forest-of-Thought: Scaling Test-Time Compute for Enhancing LLM Reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities across various language tasks, but solving complex reasoning problems remains a significant challenge. While existing methods, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Tree-of-Thought (ToT), enhance reasoning by decomposing problems or structuring prompts, they typically perform a single pass of reasoning and may fail to revisit flawed paths, compromising accuracy. To address this limitation, we propose a novel reasoning framework called Forest-of-Thought (FoT), which integrates multiple reasoning trees to leverage collective decision-making for solving complex logical problems. FoT employs sparse activation strategies to select the most relevant reasoning paths, improving both efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic self-correction strategy that enables real-time error correction, along with consensus-guided decision-making strategies to optimize both correctness and computational resources. Experimental results demonstrate that the FoT framework, combined with these strategies, significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, enabling them to solve complex tasks with greater precision and efficiency.Code will be available at https://github.com/iamhankai/Forest-of-Thought.	2025-02-14	Code will be available at https://github.com/iamhankai/Forest-of-Though
Context-Aware or Context-Insensitive? Assessing LLMs’ Performance in Document-Level Translation Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly strong contenders in machine translation. In this work, we focus on document-level translation, where some words cannot be translated without context from outside the sentence. Specifically, we investigate the ability of prominent LLMs to utilize the document context during translation through a perturbation analysis (analyzing models’ robustness to perturbed and randomized document context) and an attribution analysis (examining the contribution of relevant context to the translation). We conduct an extensive evaluation across nine LLMs from diverse model families and training paradigms, including translation-specialized LLMs, alongside two encoder-decoder transformer baselines. We find that LLMs’ improved document-translation performance compared to encoder-decoder models is not reflected in pronoun translation performance. Our analysis highlight the need for context-aware finetuning of LLMs with a focus on relevant parts of the context to improve their reliability for document-level translation.	2025-02-14	9 pages, 3 figures, 4 tab
A Unified Approach to Routing and Cascading for LLMs The availability of a wide range of large language models (LLMs) embedded in various agentic systems has significantly increased the potential of model selection strategies to improve the cost-performance tradeoff. Existing strategies involve either routing, where a single model is chosen per query, or cascading, which sequentially runs increasingly larger models until a satisfactory answer is found. However, current approaches face three key limitations: they (1) lack formal proofs of optimality, (2) fail to identify the conditions under which these strategies are most effective to improve the cost-performance tradeoff, and (3) are unable to combine both paradigms for further improvements. To address these issues, we first derive a novel optimal strategy for cascading and prove the optimality of an existing routing strategy. Further, we propose cascade routing, a unified framework that integrates routing and cascading into a theoretically optimal strategy. Through our analysis, we identify good quality estimators as the critical factor for the success of model selection paradigms. Finally, in our experiments, we show that cascade routing consistently outperforms the individual approaches by a large margin and we analyze quality estimators to determine when routing and/or cascading are useful paradigms for model selection.	2025-02-14
Bag of Tricks for Inference-time Computation of LLM Reasoning With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), solving complex reasoning tasks has gained increasing attention. Inference-time computation methods (e.g., Best-of-N, beam search, et al.) are particularly valuable as they can enhance reasoning performance without modifying model parameters or requiring additional training. However, these techniques come with implementation challenges, and most existing methods remain at the proof-of-concept stage with limited practical adoption due to their computational complexity and varying effectiveness across different tasks. In this paper, we investigate and benchmark diverse inference-time computation strategies across reasoning tasks of varying complexity. Since most current methods rely on a proposer-verifier pipeline that first generates candidate solutions (e.g., reasoning solutions) and then selects the best one based on reward signals (e.g., RLHF rewards, process rewards), our research focuses on optimizing both candidate solution generation (e.g., instructing prompts, hyperparameters such as temperature and top-p) and reward mechanisms (e.g., self-evaluation, reward types). Through extensive experiments (more than 20,000 A100-80G GPU hours with over 1,000 experiments) across a variety of models (e.g., Llama, Qwen, and Mistral families) of various sizes, our ablation studies reveal that previously overlooked strategies can significantly enhance performance (e.g., tuning temperature can improve reasoning task performance by up to 5%). Furthermore, we establish a standardized benchmark for inference-time computation by systematically evaluating six representative methods across eight reasoning tasks. These findings provide a stronger foundation for future research. The code is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/benchmark_inference_time_computation_LL	2025-02-14
Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can generate and revise text with human-level performance. These models come with clear limitations: they can produce inaccurate information, reinforce existing biases, and be easily misused. Yet, many scientists use them for their scholarly writing. But how wide-spread is such LLM usage in the academic literature? To answer this question for the field of biomedical research, we present an unbiased, large-scale approach: we study vocabulary changes in over 15 million biomedical abstracts from 2010–2024 indexed by PubMed, and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs. This lower bound differed across disciplines, countries, and journals, reaching 40% for some subcorpora. We show that LLMs have had an unprecedented impact on scientific writing in biomedical research, surpassing the effect of major world events such as the Covid pandemic.	2025-02-14	v3: Updating the manuscript to include all PubMed abstracts until the end of 2024
A Survey on LLM-powered Agents for Recommender Systems Recommender systems are essential components of many online platforms, yet traditional approaches still struggle with understanding complex user preferences and providing explainable recommendations. The emergence of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents offers a promising approach by enabling natural language interactions and interpretable reasoning, potentially transforming research in recommender systems. This survey provides a systematic review of the emerging applications of LLM-powered agents in recommender systems. We identify and analyze three key paradigms in current research: (1) Recommender-oriented approaches, which leverage intelligent agents to enhance the fundamental recommendation mechanisms; (2) Interaction-oriented approaches, which facilitate dynamic user engagement through natural dialogue and interpretable suggestions; and (3) Simulation-oriented approaches, which employ multi-agent frameworks to model complex user-item interactions and system dynamics. Beyond paradigm categorization, we analyze the architectural foundations of LLM-powered recommendation agents, examining their essential components: profile construction, memory management, strategic planning, and action execution. Our investigation extends to a comprehensive analysis of benchmark datasets and evaluation frameworks in this domain. This systematic examination not only illuminates the current state of LLM-powered agent recommender systems but also charts critical challenges and promising research directions in this transformative field.	2025-02-14
POI-Enhancer: An LLM-based Semantic Enhancement Framework for POI Representation Learning POI representation learning plays a crucial role in handling tasks related to user mobility data. Recent studies have shown that enriching POI representations with multimodal information can significantly enhance their task performance. Previously, the textual information incorporated into POI representations typically involved only POI categories or check-in content, leading to relatively weak textual features in existing methods. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) trained on extensive text data have been found to possess rich textual knowledge. However leveraging such knowledge to enhance POI representation learning presents two key challenges: first, how to extract POI-related knowledge from LLMs effectively, and second, how to integrate the extracted information to enhance POI representations. To address these challenges, we propose POI-Enhancer, a portable framework that leverages LLMs to improve POI representations produced by classic POI learning models. We first design three specialized prompts to extract semantic information from LLMs efficiently. Then, the Dual Feature Alignment module enhances the quality of the extracted information, while the Semantic Feature Fusion module preserves its integrity. The Cross Attention Fusion module then fully adaptively integrates such high-quality information into POI representations and Multi-View Contrastive Learning further injects human-understandable semantic information into these representations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, showing significant improvements across all baseline representations.	2025-02-14
RareAgents: Advancing Rare Disease Care through LLM-Empowered Multi-disciplinary Team Rare diseases, despite their low individual incidence, collectively impact around 300 million people worldwide due to the vast number of diseases. The involvement of multiple organs and systems, and the shortage of specialized doctors with relevant experience make diagnosing and treating rare diseases more challenging than common diseases. Recently, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable applications across various domains. In the medical field, some agent methods have outperformed direct prompts in question-answering tasks from medical examinations. However, current agent frameworks are not well-adapted to real-world clinical scenarios, especially those involving the complex demands of rare diseases. To bridge this gap, we introduce RareAgents, the first LLM-driven multi-disciplinary team framework designed specifically for the complex clinical context of rare diseases. RareAgents integrates advanced Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) coordination, memory mechanisms, and medical tools utilization, leveraging Llama-3.1-8B/70B as the base model. Experimental results show that RareAgents outperforms state-of-the-art domain-specific models, GPT-4o, and current agent frameworks in differential diagnosis and medication recommendation for rare diseases. Furthermore, we contribute a novel rare disease dataset, MIMIC-IV-Ext-Rare, to support further advancements in this field.	2025-02-14
X-Boundary: Establishing Exact Safety Boundary to Shield LLMs from Multi-Turn Jailbreaks without Compromising Usability Despite the rapid development of safety alignment techniques for LLMs, defending against multi-turn jailbreaks is still a challenging task. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive comparison, revealing that some existing defense methods can improve the robustness of LLMs against multi-turn jailbreaks but compromise usability, i.e., reducing general capabilities or causing the over-refusal problem. From the perspective of mechanism interpretability of LLMs, we discover that these methods fail to establish a boundary that exactly distinguishes safe and harmful feature representations. Therefore, boundary-safe representations close to harmful representations are inevitably disrupted, leading to a decline in usability. To address this issue, we propose X-Boundary to push harmful representations away from boundary-safe representations and obtain an exact distinction boundary. In this way, harmful representations can be precisely erased without disrupting safe ones. Experimental results show that X-Boundary achieves state-of-the-art defense performance against multi-turn jailbreaks, while reducing the over-refusal rate by about 20% and maintaining nearly complete general capability. Furthermore, we theoretically prove and empirically verify that X-Boundary can accelerate the convergence process during training. Please see our code at: https://github.com/AI45Lab/X-Boundary.	2025-02-14
LaRA: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Long-Context LLMs - No Silver Bullet for LC or RAG Routing Effectively incorporating external knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for enhancing their capabilities and addressing real-world needs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective method for achieving this by retrieving the most relevant fragments into LLMs. However, the advancements in context window size for LLMs offer an alternative approach, raising the question of whether RAG remains necessary for effectively handling external knowledge. Several existing studies provide inconclusive comparisons between RAG and long-context (LC) LLMs, largely due to limitations in the benchmark designs. In this paper, we present LaRA, a novel benchmark specifically designed to rigorously compare RAG and LC LLMs. LaRA encompasses 2,326 test cases across four practical QA task categories and three types of naturally occurring long texts. Through systematic evaluation of seven open-source and four proprietary LLMs, we find that the optimal choice between RAG and LC depends on a complex interplay of factors, including the model’s parameter size, long-text capabilities, context length, task type, and the characteristics of the retrieved chunks. Our findings provide actionable guidelines for practitioners to effectively leverage both RAG and LC approaches in developing and deploying LLM applications. Our code and dataset is provided at: \href{https://github.com/likuanppd/LaRA}{\textbf{https://github.com/likuanppd/LaRA}}.	2025-02-14	22 pag
Reward-Guided Speculative Decoding for Efficient LLM Reasoning We introduce Reward-Guided Speculative Decoding (RSD), a novel framework aimed at improving the efficiency of inference in large language models (LLMs). RSD synergistically combines a lightweight draft model with a more powerful target model, incorporating a controlled bias to prioritize high-reward outputs, in contrast to existing speculative decoding methods that enforce strict unbiasedness. RSD employs a process reward model to evaluate intermediate decoding steps and dynamically decide whether to invoke the target model, optimizing the trade-off between computational cost and output quality. We theoretically demonstrate that a threshold-based mixture strategy achieves an optimal balance between resource utilization and performance. Extensive evaluations on challenging reasoning benchmarks, including Olympiad-level tasks, show that RSD delivers significant efficiency gains against decoding with the target model only (up to 4.4x fewer FLOPs), while achieving significant better accuracy than parallel decoding method on average (up to +3.5). These results highlight RSD as a robust and cost-effective approach for deploying LLMs in resource-intensive scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/RSD.	2025-02-14	17 pag
MIR-Bench: Benchmarking LLM’s Long-Context Intelligence via Many-Shot In-Context Inductive Reasoning Inductive Reasoning (IR), the ability to summarize rules from examples and apply on new ones, has long been viewed as a primal ability for general intelligence and widely studied by cognitive science and AI researchers. Many benchmarks have been proposed to measure such ability for Large Language Models (LLMs); however, they focus on few-shot (usually $<$10) setting and lack evaluation for aggregating many pieces of information from long contexts. On the other hand, the ever-growing context length of LLMs have brought forth the novel paradigm of many-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), which addresses new tasks with hundreds to thousands of examples without expensive and inefficient fine-tuning. However, many-shot evaluations are mostly focused on classification (a very limited aspect of IR), and popular long-context LLM tasks such as Needle-In-A-Haystack (NIAH) seldom require complicated intelligence for integrating many pieces of information. To fix the issues from both worlds, we propose MIR-Bench, the first many-shot in-context inductive reasoning benchmark that asks LLM to induce output via input-output examples from underlying functions with diverse data format. Based on MIR-Bench, we study many novel problems for inductive reasoning and many-shot ICL, including robustness against erroneous shots and the effect of Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and acquired insightful findings.	2025-02-14	32 pages, 11 figur

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