Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly enhanced the efficiency and accuracy of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models often require substantial computational resources, which remains a major drawback. Reducing the complexity of deep learning architectures, and exploring simpler yet effective approaches can lead to cost-efficient NLP solutions. This is also a step towards explainable AI, i.e., uncovering how a particular task is carried out. For this analysis, we chose the task of hate speech detection. We address hate speech detection by introducing a model that employs a weighted sum of valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) scores for classification. To determine the optimal weights and classification strategies, we analyze hate speech and non-hate speech words based on both their individual and summed VAD-values. Our experimental results demonstrate that this straightforward approach can compete with state-of-the-art neural network methods, including GPT-based models, in detecting hate speech.
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Question answering represents a core capability of large language models (LLMs). However, when individuals encounter unfamiliar knowledge in texts, they often formulate questions that the text itself cannot answer due to insufficient understanding of the underlying information. Recent studies reveal that while LLMs can detect unanswerable questions, they struggle to assist users in reformulating these questions. Even advanced models like GPT-3.5 demonstrate limited effectiveness in this regard. To address this limitation, we propose DRS: Deep Question Reformulation with Structured Output, a novel zero-shot method aimed at enhancing LLMs’ ability to assist users in reformulating questions to extract relevant information from new documents. DRS combines the strengths of LLMs with a DFS-based algorithm to iteratively explore potential entity combinations and constrain outputs using predefined entities. This structured approach significantly enhances the reformulation capabilities of LLMs. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that DRS improves the reformulation accuracy of GPT-3.5 from 23.03% to 70.42%, while also enhancing the performance of open-source models, such as Gemma2-9B, from 26.35% to 56.75%.
In-context learning (ICL) relies heavily on high-quality demonstrations drawn from large annotated corpora. Existing approaches detect noisy annotations by ranking local perplexities, presuming that noisy samples yield higher perplexities than their clean counterparts. However, this assumption breaks down when the noise ratio is high and many demonstrations are flawed.We re-examine the perplexity-based paradigm for text generation under noisy annotations, highlighting two sources of bias in perplexity: the annotation itself and the domain-specific knowledge inherent in large language models (LLMs). To overcome these biases, we introduce a dual-debiasing framework that uses synthesized neighbors to explicitly correct perplexity estimates, yielding a robust Sample Cleanliness Score. This metric uncovers absolute sample cleanliness regardless of the overall corpus noise level.Extensive experiments demonstrate our method’s superior noise-detection capabilities and show that its final ICL performance is comparable to that of a fully clean demonstration corpus. Moreover, our approach remains robust even when noise ratios are extremely high.
We perform a critical examination of the scientific methodology behind contemporary large language model (LLM) research. For this we assess over 2,000 research works released between 2020 and 2024 based on criteria typical of what is considered good research (e.g. presence of statistical tests and reproducibility), and cross-validate it with arguments that are at the centre of controversy (e.g., claims of emergent behaviour). We find multiple trends, such as declines in ethics disclaimers, a rise of LLMs as evaluators, and an increase on claims of LLM reasoning abilities without leveraging human evaluation. We note that conference checklists are effective at curtailing some of these issues, but balancing velocity and rigour in research cannot solely rely on these. We tie all these findings to findings from recent meta-reviews and extend recommendations on how to address what does, does not, and should work in LLM research.
A person’s demonstration often serves as a key reference for others learning the same task. However, RGB video, the dominant medium for representing these demonstrations, often fails to capture fine-grained contextual cues such as intent, safety-critical environmental factors, and subtle preferences embedded in human behavior. This sensory gap fundamentally limits the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to reason about why actions occur and how they should adapt to individual users. To address this, we introduce MICA (Multimodal Interactive Contextualized Assistance), a framework that improves conversational agents for task assistance by integrating eye gaze and speech cues. MICA segments demonstrations into meaningful sub-tasks and extracts keyframes and captions that capture fine-grained intent and user-specific cues, enabling richer contextual grounding for visual question answering. Evaluations on questions derived from real-time chat-assisted task replication show that multimodal cues significantly improve response quality over frame-based retrieval. Notably, gaze cues alone achieves 93% of speech performance, and their combination yields the highest accuracy. Task type determines the effectiveness of implicit (gaze) vs. explicit (speech) cues, underscoring the need for adaptable multimodal models. These results highlight the limitations of frame-based context and demonstrate the value of multimodal signals for real-world AI task assistance.
Knowing Before Saying: LLM Representations Encode Information About Chain-of-Thought Success Before Completion
PDF ↗We investigate whether the success of a zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process can be predicted before completion. Our classifier, based on LLM representations, performs well even before a single token is generated, suggesting that crucial information about the reasoning process is already present in the initial steps representations. In contrast, a strong BERT-based baseline, which relies solely on the generated tokens, performs worse—likely because it depends on shallow linguistic cues rather than deeper reasoning dynamics. Surprisingly, using later reasoning steps does not always improve classification. When additional context is unhelpful, earlier representations resemble later ones more, suggesting LLMs encode key information early. This implies reasoning can often stop early without loss. To test this, we conduct early stopping experiments, showing that truncating CoT reasoning still improves performance over not using CoT at all, though a gap remains compared to full reasoning. However, approaches like supervised learning or reinforcement learning designed to shorten CoT chains could leverage our classifier’s guidance to identify when early stopping is effective. Our findings provide insights that may support such methods, helping to optimize CoT’s efficiency while preserving its benefits.
ConFit v2: Improving Resume-Job Matching using Hypothetical Resume Embedding and Runner-Up Hard-Negative Mining
PDF ↗A reliable resume-job matching system helps a company recommend suitable candidates from a pool of resumes and helps a job seeker find relevant jobs from a list of job posts. However, since job seekers apply only to a few jobs, interaction labels in resume-job datasets are sparse. We introduce ConFit v2, an improvement over ConFit to tackle this sparsity problem. We propose two techniques to enhance the encoder’s contrastive training process: augmenting job data with hypothetical reference resume generated by a large language model; and creating high-quality hard negatives from unlabeled resume/job pairs using a novel hard-negative mining strategy. This method also simplifies the representation space of the encoder. We evaluate ConFit v2 on two real-world datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms ConFit and prior methods (including BM25 and OpenAI text-embedding-003), achieving an average absolute improvement of 13.8% in recall and 17.5% in nDCG across job-ranking and resume-ranking tasks.
Express What You See: Can Multimodal LLMs Decode Visual Ciphers with Intuitive Semiosis Comprehension?
PDF ↗Bridging the gap between visual and language remains a pivotal challenge for the multimodal community. Traditional VQA benchmarks encounter a modality gap and over-reliance on language priors, whereas human cognition excels at intuitive semiosis, associating abstract visual symbols to linguistic semantics. Inspired by this neurocognitive mechanism, we focus on emojis, the visual cipher conveying abstract textual semantics. Specifically, we propose a novel task of generating abstract linguistics from emoji sequence images, where such reasoning underpins critical applications in cryptography, thus challenging MLLMs’ reasoning of decoding complex semantics of visual ciphers. We introduce eWe-bench (Express What you SeE), assessing MLLMs’ capability of intuitive semiosis like humans. Our data construction framework ensures high visual sensitivity and data quality, which can be extended to future data enhancement. Evaluation results on advanced MLLMs highlight critical deficiencies in visual intuitive symbolic reasoning. We believe our interesting insights for advancing visual semiosis in MLLMs will pave the way for cryptographic analysis and high-level intuitive cognition intelligence of MLLMs.
Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable performance in recent years, setting a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP) research. The legal domain has received some attention from the NLP community, in part due to its textual nature. Question answering (QA) systems represent some of the tasks in this domain. This work explores the legal multiple-choice QA (MCQA) for Romanian. The contribution of this work is multi-fold. We introduce JuRO, the first openly available Romanian legal MCQA dataset, comprising 10,836 questions from three examinations. Along with this dataset, we introduce CROL, an organized corpus of laws comprising a total of 93 distinct documents with their modifications over 763 time spans, which we used for information retrieval techniques in this work. Additionally, we construct Law-RoG, the first graph of legal knowledge for the Romanian language, derived from the aforementioned corpus. Lastly, we propose a novel approach for MCQA, namely Graph Retrieval Augmented by Facts (GRAF), which achieves competitive results with generally accepted state-of-the-art methods and even exceeds them in most settings.
Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) incorporate the temporal feature to express the transience of knowledge by describing when facts occur. TKG extrapolation aims to infer possible future facts based on known history, which has garnered significant attention in recent years. Some existing methods treat TKG as a sequence of independent subgraphs to model temporal evolution patterns, demonstrating impressive reasoning performance. However, they still have limitations: 1) In modeling subgraph semantic evolution, they usually neglect the internal structural interactions between subgraphs, which are actually crucial for encoding TKGs. 2) They overlook the potential smooth features that do not lead to semantic changes, which should be distinguished from the semantic evolution process. Therefore, we propose Disentangled Multi-span Evolutionary Network (DiMNet) for TKG reasoning. Specifically, we design a multi-span evolution strategy that captures local neighbor features while perceiving historical neighbor semantic information, thus enabling internal interactions between subgraphs during the evolution process. To maximize the capture of semantic change patterns, we design a disentangle component that adaptively separates nodes’ active and stable features, used to dynamically control the influence of historical semantics on future evolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiMNet achieves substantial performance in TKG reasoning, outperforming the state-of-the-art up to 22.7% in MRR.
With a statistical analysis of arXiv paper abstracts, we report a marked drop in the frequency of several words previously identified as overused by ChatGPT, such as “delve”, starting soon after they were pointed out in early 2024. The frequency of certain other words favored by ChatGPT, such as “significant”, has instead kept increasing. These phenomena suggest that some authors of academic papers have adapted their use of large language models (LLMs), for example, by selecting outputs or applying modifications to the LLM-generated content. Such coevolution and cooperation of humans and LLMs thus introduce additional challenges to the detection of machine-generated text in real-world scenarios. Estimating the impact of LLMs on academic writing by examining word frequency remains feasible, and more attention should be paid to words that were already frequently employed, including those that have decreased in frequency due to LLMs’ disfavor. The coevolution between humans and LLMs also merits further study.
Disentangling Text and Math in Word Problems: Evidence for the Bidimensional Structure of Large Language Models’ Reasoning
PDF ↗Do LLMs process text and mathematics as a unified skill, or do these components rely on distinct underlying mechanisms? We investigate this question by disentangling the textual interpretation and mathematical solving steps in word problems drawn from Brazil’s largest college entrance exam (ENEM) and GSM8K, a popular grade school-level benchmark. Using the symbolic solver SymPy, we transform word problems into equivalent purely mathematical representations, isolating equation formulation from textual comprehension. Our extended benchmarks enable a structured analysis of LLM performance across these two dimensions. Through empirical evaluations, we find that small-scale LLMs struggle significantly more with text interpretation than with equation solving, with accuracy dropping by a factor of 2 to 7 when solving full word problems compared to their math-only counterparts. Exploratory factor analysis confirms a bidimensional structure in LLM reasoning, where models exhibit distinct proficiencies in textual and mathematical components, underscoring the need for targeted improvements in language comprehension. By analyzing the latent factors associated with each model, our findings provide a framework for researchers and practitioners to make informed choices when selecting models based on computational costs and the nature of their tasks.
Large Language Models (LLMs) require alignment with human preferences to avoid generating offensive, false, or meaningless content. Recently, low-resource methods for LLM alignment have been popular, while still facing challenges in obtaining both high-quality and aligned content. Motivated by the observation that the difficulty of generating aligned responses is concentrated at the beginning of decoding, we propose a novel framework, Weak-to-Strong Decoding (WSD), to enhance the alignment ability of base models by the guidance of a small aligned model. The small model first drafts well-aligned beginnings, followed by the large base model to continue the rest, controlled by a well-designed auto-switch mechanism. We also collect a new dataset, GenerAlign, to fine-tune a small-sized Pilot-3B as the draft model, which effectively enhances different base models under the WSD framework to outperform all baseline methods, while avoiding degradation on downstream tasks, termed as the alignment tax. Extensive experiments are further conducted to examine the impact of different settings and time efficiency, as well as analyses on the intrinsic mechanisms of WSD in depth.
Time Course MechInterp: Analyzing the Evolution of Components and Knowledge in Large Language Models
PDF ↗Understanding how large language models (LLMs) acquire and store factual knowledge is crucial for enhancing their interpretability, reliability, and efficiency. In this work, we analyze the evolution of factual knowledge representation in the OLMo-7B model by tracking the roles of its Attention Heads and Feed Forward Networks (FFNs) over training. We classify these components into four roles—general, entity, relation-answer, and fact-answer specific—and examine their stability and transitions. Our results show that LLMs initially depend on broad, general-purpose components, which later specialize as training progresses. Once the model reliably predicts answers, some components are repurposed, suggesting an adaptive learning process. Notably, answer-specific attention heads display the highest turnover, whereas FFNs remain stable, continually refining stored knowledge. These insights offer a mechanistic view of knowledge formation in LLMs and have implications for model pruning, optimization, and transparency.
Routing networks in sparsely activated mixture-of-experts (MoE) dynamically allocate input tokens to top-k experts through differentiable sparse transformations, enabling scalable model capacity while preserving computational efficiency. Traditional MoE networks impose an expert capacity constraint to ensure GPU-friendly computation. However, this leads to token dropping when capacity is saturated and results in low hardware efficiency due to padding in underutilized experts. Removing the capacity constraint, in turn, compromises load balancing and computational efficiency.To address these issues, we propose Maximum Score Routing (**MaxScore**), a novel MoE routing paradigm that models routing as a minimum-cost maximum-flow problem and integrates a SoftTopk operator. MaxScore resolves the fundamental limitations of iterative rerouting and optimal transport formulations, achieving lower training losses and higher evaluation scores at equivalent FLOPs compared to both constrained and unconstrained baselines.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution for mitigating hallucinations of large language models (LLMs) with retrieved external knowledge. Adaptive RAG enhances this approach by enabling dynamic retrieval during generation, activating retrieval only when the query exceeds LLM’s internal knowledge. Existing methods primarily focus on detecting LLM’s confidence via statistical uncertainty. Instead, we present the first attempts to solve adaptive RAG from a representation perspective and develop an inherent control-based framework, termed CtrlA. Specifically, we extract the features that represent the honesty and confidence directions of LLM and adopt them to control LLM behavior and guide retrieval timing decisions. We also design a simple yet effective query formulation strategy to support adaptive retrieval. Experiments show that CtrlA is superior to existing adaptive RAG methods on a diverse set of tasks. Honesty steering can effectively make LLMs more honest and confidence monitoring is a promising indicator of retrieval trigger.
Recommender systems play a pivotal role in providing relevant content to users. With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), researchers have begun utilizing LLMs to build more powerful recommender systems. However, existing approaches that focus on aligning LLMs with recommendation tasks do not fully leverage their sequential information processing capabilities, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel system called compressed vocabulary expansion (CoVE). In CoVE, each item is assigned a unique ID within the expanded vocabulary. Our framework effectively capitalizes on sequence understanding abilities of LLMs, significantly enhancing their performance on recommendation tasks. Additionally, we compress the embedding layer, making CoVE practical for large-scale industrial applications. The effectiveness and performance of CoVE are demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on multiple recommendation datasets and comparisons with prior works. Our code can be found at https://github.com/HaochenZhang717/CoVE-official-Repo.
The widespread use of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has raised concerns about model toxicity. However, current research mainly focuses on explicit toxicity, with less attention to some more implicit toxicity regarding prejudice and discrimination. To address this limitation, we introduce a subtler type of toxicity named dual-implicit toxicity and a novel toxicity benchmark termed MDIT-Bench: Multimodal Dual-Implicit Toxicity Benchmark. Specifically, we first create the MDIT-Dataset with dual-implicit toxicity using the proposed Multi-stage Human-in-loop In-context Generation method. Based on this dataset, we construct the MDIT-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating the sensitivity of models to dual-implicit toxicity, with 317,638 questions covering 12 categories, 23 subcategories, and 780 topics. MDIT-Bench includes three difficulty levels, and we propose a metric to measure the toxicity gap exhibited by the model across them. In the experiment, we conducted MDIT-Bench on 13 prominent LMMs, and the results show that these LMMs cannot handle dual-implicit toxicity effectively. The model’s performance drops significantly in hard level, revealing that these LMMs still contain a significant amount of hidden but activatable toxicity. The data will be released upon the paper’s acceptance.
The scaling of causal language models in size and training data enabled them to tackle increasingly complex tasks. Despite the development of sophisticated tests to reveal their new capabilities, the underlying basis of these complex skills remains unclear. We argue that complex skills might be explained using simpler ones, represented by linguistic concepts. As an initial step in exploring this hypothesis, we focus on the lexical-semantic concept of synonymy, laying the groundwork for research into its relationship with more complex skills. We develop a comprehensive test suite to assess various aspects of synonymy under different conditions, and evaluate causal open-source models ranging up to 10 billion parameters. We find that these models effectively recognize synonymy but struggle to generate synonyms when prompted with relevant context.
A Tale of Evaluating Factual Consistency: Case Study on Long Document Summarization Evaluation
PDF ↗Ensuring factual consistency in summarization remains a challenge, especially for long-document evaluation. While automated, reference-free evaluation models are essential given the impracticality of large-scale human assessment for lengthy texts, challenges persist in evaluating different systems on how to handle different summary granularities and evolving model generations. In this work, we conduct a systematic study on diverse factual-consistency evaluation systems across four long-document datasets, encompassing summaries generated by models from non-LLMs to proprietary LLMs. Our analysis reveals that fine-grained continuous scores can provide more reliable assessments of different evaluation systems’ capabilities than binary classification. We also examine the relationship between sentence-level and summary-level model performance, highlighting its dependency on dataset characteristics. Moreover, our study reveals that advanced systems can achieve higher recall in error detection for older summaries, yet struggle with false positives and fine-grained error detection. Our analysis and case studies provide further insights into designing robust factuality evaluation systems, which are becoming increasingly in demand as generative models advance rapidly.