The recent explosion of large language models (LLMs), each with its own general or specialized strengths, makes scalable, reliable benchmarking more urgent than ever. Standard practices nowadays face fundamental trade-offs: closed-ended question-based benchmarks (MMLU) struggle with saturation as newer models emerge, while crowd-sourced leaderboards (Chatbot Arena) rely on costly and slow human judges. Recently, automated methods (LLM-as-a-judge) shed light on the scalability, but risk bias by relying on one or a few “authority” models. To tackle these issues, we propose Decentralized Arena (), a fully automated framework leveraging collective intelligence from all LLMs to evaluate each other. It mitigates single-model judge bias by democratic, pairwise evaluation, and remains efficient at scale through two key components: (1) a coarse-to-fine ranking algorithm for fast incremental insertion of new models with sub-quadratic complexity, and (2) an automatic question selection strategy for the construction of new evaluation dimensions. Across extensive experiments across 66 LLMs, attains up to 97% correlation with human judgements, while significantly reducing the cost.
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SMART: Evaluating LLMs’ Mathematical Reasoning via a Human Cognitive Process-Inspired Benchmark
PDF ↗Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of mathematical benchmarks. However, concerns remain as to whether these successes reflect genuine reasoning or superficial pattern recognition. Existing evaluation methods, which typically focus either on the final answer or on the intermediate reasoning steps, reduce mathematical reasoning to a shallow input–output mapping, overlooking its inherently multi-stage and multi-dimensional cognitive nature. Inspired by P’olya’s problem-solving theory, we propose SMART, a benchmark that decomposes mathematical problem-solving into four cognitive dimensions: **S**emantic Understanding, **M**athematical Reasoning, **A**rithmetic Computation, and **R**eflection Refinemen**T**, and introduces dimension-specific tasks to measure the corresponding cognitive processes of LLMs. We apply SMART to 22 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source LLMs and uncover substantial discrepancies in their capabilities across dimensions. Our findings reveal genuine weaknesses in current models and motivate a new metric, the All-Pass Score, designed to better capture true problem-solving capability.
ARF-RLHF: Adaptive Reward-Following for RLHF through Emotion-Driven Self-Supervision and Trace-Biased Dynamic Optimization
PDF ↗Current RLHF methods such as PPO and DPO typically reduce human preferences to binary labels, which are costly to obtain and too coarse to reflect individual variation. We observe that expressions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction follow stable linguistic patterns across users, indicating that more informative supervisory signals can be extracted from free-form feedback. Building on this insight, we introduce Adaptive Reward-Following (ARF), which converts natural feedback into continuous preference trajectories and optimizes them using the novel TraceBias algorithm. Across diverse LLMs and preference domains, ARF consistently outperforms PPO and DPO, improving alignment by up to 7.6%. Our results demonstrate that continuous reward modeling provides a scalable path toward personalized and theoretically grounded RLHF.
Despite the potential of multi-turn self-reflection to improve LLM reasoning, its effectiveness in practice is severely constrained by a failure mode we term the Echo Trap.Specifically, this phenomenon gives rise to two coupled problems: (1) the model becomes limited by its inherent capabilities and tends to repeat earlier reflections to preserve reward signals; (2) once such “copy” behavior is reinforced, the model ceases to try new strategies, leading to exploration collapse.We attribute this issue to imprecise credit assignment during training, as standard GRPO assigns rewards at the trajectory level, making it difficult to distinguish which reflection steps contribute to improved outcomes.To address this limitation, we propose a tree-structured extension of GRPO for multi-turn self-reflection, which enables more accurate advantage estimation.Through extensive experiments, we analyze the Echo Trap and demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates behavior collapse and improves performance across multiple benchmarks.
A defence opinion is an essential step in criminal proceedings, yet it has not been systematically formulated or evaluated as a specific LegalAI task. Grounded in legal principles and practice, we formulate this task as generating a structured defence opinion conditioned jointly on an indictment and the defendant’s stated opinion, which often present conflicting claims. We formalize this setting as a dual-perspective generation problem and introduce DefGen-Bench, a benchmark comprising several Chinese criminal cases with expert-reviewed reference defence opinions. We evaluate eight large language models (LLMs) on this task and observe that existing models tend to mirror the defendant’s opinion, thereby overlooking more appropriate defence strategies. To address this challenge, we propose Knowledge-Enhanced Highlighted Indictment (KHI), a legal knowledge–guided input enhancement method applicable to both open- and closed-source LLMs. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across all evaluated LLMs, validating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
LCMA-SRT: Language-Conditional Mixture-of-Experts Adapters for Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation
PDF ↗Neural transducers offer an alignment-free framework for speech-to-text modeling, and hierarchical transducer architectures further improve multilingual joint automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST) by stacking a translation-focused encoder on top of an ASR encoder. However, extending hierarchical transducers to multilingual many-to-many settings remains challenging: fully shared models often suffer from negative transfer and unstable target-language generation, while training separate models for each direction is computationally prohibitive. We propose LCMA-SRT (Language-Conditional Mixture-of-Experts Adapters for Speech Recognition and Translation), which augments a hierarchical transducer with language-conditional Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) adapters. A source-conditioned MoE adapter (SRC-MoE) uses source-language embeddings to reduce cross-language interference and improve multilingual ASR. A target-conditioned MoE adapter (TGT-MoE) uses the desired target language to reduce cross-target interference and stabilize target-language generation in many-to-many ST. Experiments on Europarl-ST (9 languages, 72 directions) show that LCMA-SRT improves both ASR and ST within a single joint model, reducing average WER and improving BLEU and COMET over strong hierarchical transducer baselines. We release our code and models at https://github.com/linanjie0820/LCMA-SRT.
Spatial language understanding is fundamental to tasks from robot navigation to document analysis, yet current work exhibits biases toward English and prepositional marking. We present a multilingual framework and benchmark decomposing spatial relations into surface elements (figure, ground, predicate, markers) and semantic components (dynamicity, stasis). Evaluating frontier LLMs on Spanish, Basque, and Chinese with text-only input, we find high accuracy on figure and ground identification but persistent gaps in two areas: semantic classification of topological and projective relations, and surface identification of morphological spatial markers—Basque case affixes proving most challenging at as low as 15.3%. These results suggest that surface parsing does not entail spatial understanding, and that evaluation must include typologically diverse spatial marking strategies.
Editing large language models is challenging as incorporating new knowledge often requires sequential parameter updates while maintaining model capability. In this work, we experimentally observe that sequential knowledge updating under the locate-then-edit framework can introduce safety risks, regardless of whether the knowledge being edited is benign or malicious. We propose a novel model editing approach that estimates safety transforms and identifies corresponding safety direction in the neural activation space, and then aligns neural activation updates and network parameter updates under the safety constraints, resulting in a safety-aware model editing approach. We evaluate our approach on open-source LLMs, Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Qwen3-4B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct, using the benchmark datasets ZsRE and COUNTERFACT, as well as the malicious dataset Mal-KSet. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively reduces unsafe responses to malicious queries while preserving the effectiveness of model editing.
Octopus: Gated Selective Attention for Memory-Bounded Long-Context Inference in Large Language Models
PDF ↗Transformer inference becomes increasingly memory-bound as the Key–Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length. While subquadratic architectures offer constant-memory inference, they rely on aggressive state compression that degrades performance on complex reasoning tasks. We propose Octopus, a framework that confers fixed-memory inference onto pretrained Transformers without the information loss of linearization. Octopus retrofits attention layers with Gated Selective Attention, a learnable module that enforces an adaptive sparsity policy over the context history. By dynamically scoring and retaining only high-utility KV states, this mechanism transforms the unbounded cache into a compact, evolving memory budget that filters out uninformative noise. Empirically, on the GSM8K benchmark, it outperforms state-of-the-art linearized baselines by over 36 points under identical memory constraints. Remarkably, Octopus also surpasses its own full-cache teacher, demonstrating that learned sparse retention serves as an effective regularizer for long-horizon reasoning.
DiningBench: A Hierarchical Multi-view Benchmark for Perception and Reasoning in the Dietary Domain
PDF ↗Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have revolutionized general visual understanding. However, their application in the food domain remains constrained by benchmarks that rely on coarse-grained categories, single-view imagery, and inaccurate metadata. To bridge this gap, we introduce DiningBench, a hierarchical, multi-view benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs across three levels of cognitive complexity: Fine-Grained Classification, Nutrition Estimation, and Visual Question Answering. Unlike previous datasets, DiningBench comprises 3,021 distinct dishes with an average of 5.27 images per entry, incorporating fine-grained "hard" negatives from identical menus and rigorous, verification-based nutritional data. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 29 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models. Our experiments reveal that while current VLMs excel at general reasoning, they struggle significantly with fine-grained visual discrimination and precise nutritional reasoning. Furthermore, we systematically investigate the impact of multi-view inputs and Chain-of-Thought reasoning, identifying five primary failure modes. DiningBench serves as a challenging testbed to drive the next generation of food-centric VLM research. All codes are released in https://github.com/meituan/DiningBench.
Decoder-only large language models achieve strong broad performance but are brittle to minor grammatical perturbations, undermining reliability for downstream reasoning. However, directly injecting explicit syntactic structure into an existing checkpoint can interfere with its pretrained competence. We introduce a checkpoint-compatible gated tree cross-attention (GTCA) branch that reads precomputed constituency chunk memory while leaving backbone architecture unchanged. Our design uses a token update mask and staged training to control the scope and timing of structural updates. Across benchmarks and transformer backbones, GTCA strengthens syntactic robustness beyond continued-training baselines without compromising Multiple-Choice QA performance or commonsense reasoning, providing a practical checkpoint-compatible route to more syntax-robust decoder-only LLMs.
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is an effective approach to enhancing their performance on specialized downstream tasks. Among the various techniques, low-rank adaptation has garnered significant attention due to its ability to maintain the full performance of fine-tuning while enhancing computational efficiency. However, existing approaches often rely on manually specified and fixed hyperparameters to identify the trainable components within weight matrices, resulting in suboptimal performance and low parameter efficiency. This paper presents a novel Learnable Low-Rank Adaptation (LeLoRA) framework that utilizes dynamically learned fine-tuning strategies to facilitate the effective adaptation of LLMs. Our framework integrates an LLM with a policy network that automatically and adaptively generates matrix-specific adaptation strategies to identify the trainable components of each weight matrix, taking into account their unique characteristics, such as singular values and matrix norms. A reinforcement learning-based optimization algorithm is then employed to iteratively update the LLM and the policy network, ensuring that the generated strategies adapt in real time to the evolving states of the LLM. Extensive experiments have been conducted across various natural language processing and multimodal tasks. The results across ten different LLMs, ranging from 125M to 70B parameters, provide compelling evidence that LeLoRA consistently outperforms existing baselines in adapting LLMs. Moreover, analytical experiments provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the generated strategies.
Long-term memory is essential for conversational agents to maintain coherence, track persistent tasks, and provide personalized interactions across extended dialogues. However, existing approaches as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and graph-based memory mostly rely on pairwise relations, which can hardly capture high-order associations, i.e., joint dependencies among multiple elements, causing fragmented retrieval. To this end, we propose HyperMem, a hypergraph-based hierarchical memory architecture that explicitly models such associations using hyperedges. Particularly, HyperMem structures memory into three levels: topics, episodes, and facts, and groups related episodes and their facts via hyperedges, unifying scattered content into coherent units. Leveraging this structure, we design a hybrid lexical-semantic index and a coarse-to-fine retrieval strategy, supporting accurate and efficient retrieval of high-order associations. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark show that HyperMem achieves state-of-the-art performance with 92.73% LLM-as-a-judge accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of HyperMem for long-term conversations.
Specializing Large Models for Oracle Bone Script Interpretation via Component-Grounded Multimodal Knowledge Augmentation
PDF ↗Deciphering ancient Chinese Oracle Bone Script (OBS) is a challenging task that offers insights into the beliefs, systems, and culture of the ancient era. Existing approaches treat decipherment as a closed-set image recognition problem, which fails to bridge the “interpretation gap”: while individual characters are often unique and rare, they are composed of a limited set of recurring, pictographic components that carry transferable semantic meanings. To leverage this structural logic, we propose an agent-driven Vision-Language Model (VLM) framework that integrates a VLM for precise visual grounding with an LLM-based agent to automate a reasoning chain of component identification, graph-based knowledge retrieval, and relationship inference for linguistically accurate interpretation. To support this, we also introduce OB-Radix, an expert-annotated dataset providing structural and semantic data absent from prior corpora, comprising 1,022 character images (934 unique characters) and 1,853 fine-grained component images across 478 distinct components with verified explanations. By evaluating our system across three benchmarks of different tasks, we demonstrate that our framework yields more detailed and precise decipherments compared to baseline methods.
Extracting structured procedural knowledge from unstructured business documents is a critical yet unresolved bottleneck in process automation. While prior work has focused on extracting linear action flows from instructional texts (e.g., recipes), it has insufficiently addressed the complex logical structures—such as conditional branching and parallel execution—that are pervasive in real-world regulatory and administrative documents. Furthermore, existing benchmarks are limited by simplistic schemas and shallow logical dependencies, restricting progress toward logic-aware large language models (LLMs). To bridge this “Logic Gap”, we introduce \textbf{BREX}, a carefully curated benchmark comprising 409 real-world business documents and 2,855 expert-annotated rules. Unlike prior datasets centered on narrow service scenarios, BREX spans over 30 vertical domains, covering scientific, industrial, administrative, and financial regulations.We further propose \textbf{ExIde}, a structure-aware reasoning framework that investigates five distinct prompting strategies, ranging from implicit semantic alignment to executable grounding via pseudo-code generation, enabling explicit modeling of rule dependencies and providing an out-of-the-box framework for different business customers without finetuning their own LLMs. We benchmark ExIde using 13 state-of-the-art LLMs. Our extensive evaluation reveals that: (1) Executable grounding serves as a superior inductive bias, significantly outperforming standard prompts in rule extraction; and (2) Reasoning-optimized models demonstrate a distinct advantage in tracing long-range dependencies and non-linear rule dependencies compared to standard instruction-tuned models.
Agentic reinforcement learning enables large language models to solve long-horizon tasks by interacting with the environment and internalizing tool-use behavior into their reasoning. Prior work assigns supervision primarily based on outcome rewards or external reward models, but largely ignores environment observations, a critical source of learning. Consequently, agents may identify successful actions without understanding how the environment responds, producing suboptimal policies. To address this, we propose SOAR (Supervision from Observation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning), which assigns positive advantages to observation tokens proportional to the negative entropy of preceding actions. This encourages the agent to learn from outcomes of confident actions, grounding policy updates in environment dynamics and improving anticipation of tool-call consequences. Empirical results across three domains and 14 benchmarks show that SOAR improves performance, yielding gains of up to 7.0% on general reasoning tasks and 16.9% on deep research tasks, while reducing erroneous and inefficient tool usage.
As social media grows, harmful information spreads rapidly across platforms and evolves over time, showing cross-platform and cross-temporal variations. Existing methods rely on fixed model parameters during training, which fail to handle substantial semantic discrepancies, leading to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) problems. While test-time tuning enables dynamic parameter adjustment, it may lead to excessive adaptation to individual samples. The key challenge is how to adapt to semantic variations during testing while preventing overfitting from continuous tuning. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes RLAT, a reinforcement learning (RL)–guided adaptive tuning method for harmful text detection. First, a tuning joint optimization module is designed to update parameters and adapt to semantic variations during testing. It tunes the model by optimizing consistency loss and applying word-level attention constraints to reduce over-reliance on local words and learn a more robust global representation. Then, to mitigate overfitting caused by continuous tuning, a RL–guided adaptive decision model is introduced to direct the tuning process. It reduces the influence of local samples by selecting data and controlling parameter updates, thereby improving overall test performance. Experimental results show that the RLAT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in cross-platform and cross-temporal scenarios across multiple public datasets.
KG-ViP: Bridging Knowledge Grounding and Visual Perception in Multi-modal LLMs for Visual Question Answering
PDF ↗Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for Visual Question Answering (VQA) often suffer from dual limitations: knowledge hallucination and insufficient fine-grained visual perception. Crucially, we identify that commonsense graphs and scene graphs provide precisely complementary solutions to these respective deficiencies by providing rich external knowledge and capturing fine-grained visual details. However, prior works typically treat them in isolation, overlooking their synergistic potential. To bridge this gap, we propose KG-ViP, a unified framework that empowers MLLMs by fusing scene graphs and commonsense graphs. The core of the KG-ViP framework is a novel retrieval-and-fusion pipeline that utilizes the query as a semantic bridge to progressively integrate both graphs, synthesizing a unified structured context that facilitates reliable multi-modal reasoning. Extensive experiments on FVQA 2.0+ and MVQA benchmarks demonstrate that KG-ViP significantly outperforms existing VQA methods.
Large language models (LLMs) used for multiple-choice and pairwise evaluation tasks often exhibit selection bias due to non-semantic factors like option positions and label symbols. Existing inference-time debiasing is costly and may harm reasoning, while pointwise training ignores that the same question should yield consistent answers across permutations. To address this issue, we propose Permutation-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (PA-GRPO), which mitigates selection bias by enforcing permutation-consistent semantic reasoning. PA-GRPO constructs a permutation group for each instance by generating multiple candidate permutations, and optimizes the model using two complementary mechanisms: (1) cross-permutation advantage, which computes advantages relative to the mean reward over all permutations of the same instance, and (2) consistency-aware reward, which encourages the model to produce consistent decisions across different permutations. Experimental results demonstrate that PA-GRPO outperforms strong baselines across seven benchmarks, substantially reducing selection bias while maintaining high overall performance. The code is available on github (https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/PA-GRPO).
Visual evidence selection is a critical component of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), yet existing methods typically rely on semantic relevance or surface-level similarity, which are often misaligned with the actual utility of visual evidence for downstream reasoning. We reformulate multimodal evidence selection from an information-theoretic perspective by defining evidence utility as the information gain induced on a model’s output distribution. To overcome the intractability of answer-space optimization, we introduce a latent notion of evidence helpfulness and theoretically show that, under mild assumptions, ranking evidence by information gain on this latent variable is equivalent to answer-space utility. We further propose a training-free, surrogate-accelerated framework that efficiently estimates evidence utility using lightweight multimodal models. Experiments on MRAG-Bench and Visual-RAG across multiple model families demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art RAG baselines while achieving substantial reductions in computational cost. We release our code at https://github.com/Hcnaeg/utility-mrag.