Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to retrieve accurate answers to natural language queries by retrieving and reasoning over large-scale structured knowledge bases (KBs). Advanced semantic parsing-based methods promoted by large language models (LLMs) demonstrate superior performance by transforming questions into structured queries, i.e., logical forms (LFs). However, LFs generated by LLMs could be non-executable due to the inherent semantic hallucination issue of LLMs and the complex graph retrieval characteristics of the KBQA task. To address this challenge, we propose a novel "generate-verify-refine" framework, termed Action-Reflection-Integrated KBQA (ARI-KBQA) for reliable LF generation. ARI-KBQA introduces a dual-module cooperative architecture: First, an action generator is trained to produce initial query paths based on a hop-by-hop reasoning strategy. Then a reflection verifier dynamically validates path feasibility by interacting with the KBs. Consequently, ARI-KBQA filters out invalid LFs and provides semantic correction feedback to the action generator for iteratively refining LFs. Evaluations on standard KBQA benchmarks show that the proposed ARI-KBQA significantly enhances model performance with a reduced search space, especially in complex multi-hop query scenarios.
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Scaling laws have enabled predictable compute allocation for pre-training and for RL in reasoning tasks. However, research on retrieval reinforcement generation (RAG) remains insufficient and there is a lack of fundamental understanding of the interaction between retrieval quality and reinforcement learning computation. We present the first systematic study of RL scaling for RAG across three knowledge-intensive benchmarks. We introduce the Retrieval Bottleneck Hypothesis and derive sigmoidal scaling laws showing that retrieval quality, not RL compute, determines the asymptotic performance ceiling. Our analysis reveals three principles: (1) retrieval quality bounds achievable performance, with improving retrieval yielding larger gains than algorithmic innovations; (2) design choices (training objectives, rewards, off-policy methods) primarily modulate compute efficiency, with secondary effects on the ceiling that are substantially smaller than retrieval quality improvements; and (3) stable configurations enable extrapolation with 3.1% error at 4x compute. We further uncover RAG-specific dynamics: optimal document count increases with training, and RL algorithm effectiveness depends critically on retrieval quality. These insights yield RAG-ScaleRL, achieving strong performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks while providing the predictable scaling long available for pre-training but previously absent in RAG-RL.
The rapid rise in AI conference submissions has driven increasing exploration of large language models (LLMs) for peer review support. However, LLM-based reviewers often generate superficial, formulaic comments lacking substantive, evidence-grounded feedback. We attribute this to the underutilization of two key components of human reviewing: explicit rubrics and contextual grounding in existing work. To address this, we introduce ReviewBench, a benchmark evaluating review text according to paper-specific rubrics derived from official guidelines, the paper’s content, and human-written reviews. We further propose ReviewGrounder, a rubric-guided, tool-integrated multi-agent framework that decomposes reviewing into drafting and grounding stages, enriching shallow drafts via targeted evidence consolidation. Experiments on ReviewBench show that ReviewGrounder, using a Phi-4-14B-based drafter and a GPT-OSS-120B-based grounding stage, consistently outperforms baselines with substantially stronger/larger backbones (e.g., GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-R1-670B) in both alignment with human judgments and rubric-based review quality across 8 dimensions. The code is available at https://github.com/EigenTom/ReviewGrounder.
Despite growing interest in NL2GQL, benchmarking progress has been constrained by the lack of resources that are simultaneously large-scale, cross-domain, and cross-dialect. To address this gap, we present **GQLBench**, a new benchmark built through an automated and scalable framework that integrates NL2SQL-to-NL2GQL conversion with graph-native data generation. GQLBench supports execution-based evaluation on both Cypher and ISO-GQL, covering hundreds of graph databases and over 20k natural language questions for each dialect. By combining converted data from mature NL2SQL resources with synthetic graph-specific queries, it captures both schema diversity from real-world relational sources and graph-native reasoning challenges, including long paths and cycles. Beyond overall performance comparison, GQLBench also enables fine-grained evaluation across dialects, graph patterns, and query complexity. Experiments on advanced LLMs show that even strong proprietary models struggle on GQLBench, with gemini-3-flash achieving only 35.40% average execution accuracy across the two dialects. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/qxssadf/GQLBench.
LLM-Generated Text May Harm Your Retrieval! A Robust Detection Strategy for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
PDF ↗Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) effectively enhances the accuracy and timeliness of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge retrieved from external sources. However, with the increasing prevalence of LLM-generated content, external corpora used by RAG systems may become contaminated with LLM-generated texts. Such contamination compromises the reliability and quality of retrieved results, ultimately leading to a degradation in RAG performance, and raises concerns about the diminishing presence of human texts and the “Spiral of Silence” effect. A natural solution is to incorporate LLM text detectors into the RAG pipeline to filter out LLM-generated texts from the retrieved results. However, their effective use in RAG remains under-explored. In this paper, we explore the usage paradigms of LLM text detectors for RAG and highlight key limitations of off-the-shelf or directly fine-tuned detectors. To this end, we propose a RAG-aware data augmentation strategy that aligns detector training with realistic contamination patterns. Our approach synthesizes training data from both LLM and human texts under diverse generation modes. Experiments show that our method mitigates performance degradation and improves the long-term stability of RAG systems.
PASs-MoE: Mitigating Misaligned Co-drift among Router and Experts via Pathway Activation Subspaces for Continual Learning
PDF ↗Continual instruction tuning (CIT) requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to adapt to a stream of tasks without forgetting prior capabilities. A common strategy is to isolate updates by routing inputs to different LoRA experts. However, existing LoRA-based Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods often jointly update the router and experts in an indiscriminate way, causing the router’s preferences to co-drift with experts’ adaptation pathways and gradually deviate from early-stage input–expert specialization. We term this as ***Misaligned Co-drift***, which blurs expert responsibilities and exacerbates forgetting. To address this, we introduce the ***pathway activation subspace (PASs)***, a LoRA-induced subspace that reflects which low-rank pathway directions an input activates in each expert, providing a capability-aligned coordinate system for routing and preservation. Based on PASs, we propose a fixed-capacity PASs-based MoE–LoRA method with two components: PAS-guided Reweighting, which calibrates routing using each expert’s pathway activation signals, and PAS-aware Rank Stabilization, which selectively stabilizes rank directions important to previous tasks. Experiments on a CIT benchmark show that our approach consistently outperforms a range of conventional continual learning baselines and MoE–LoRA variants in both accuracy and resistance to forgetting, without increasing model parameters. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/yueluoshuangtian/PASs-MoE.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in utilizing external tools. In practice, however, LLMs are often exposed to tools that are irrelevant to the user’s query, in which case the desired behavior is to refrain from invocations. In this work, we identify a widespread yet overlooked mechanistic flaw in tool refusal, which we term structural alignment bias: Even when a tool fails to serve the user’s goal, LLMs still tend to invoke it whenever query attributes can be validly assigned to tool parameters. To systematically study this bias, we introduce SABEval, a new dataset that decouples structural alignment from semantic relevance. Our analysis shows that structural alignment bias induces severe tool-invocation errors in LLMs, yet remains largely unaccounted for in existing evaluations. To investigate the internal mechanisms underlying this bias, we propose Contrastive Attention Attribution, which reveals two competing pathways for semantic checking and structural matching. The relative strength of these pathways drives LLMs’ tool invocation decisions. Based on these findings, we further introduce a rebalancing strategy that effectively mitigates structural alignment bias, as demonstrated by extensive experiments, without degrading general tool-use capabilities.
Evaluating the factual consistency of abstractive text summarization remains a significant challenge, particularly for long documents, where conventional metrics struggle with input length limitations and long-range dependencies. In this work, we systematically evaluate the reliability of six widely used reference-free factuality metrics, originally proposed for short-form summarization, in the long-document setting. We probe metric robustness through seven factuality-preserving perturbations applied to summaries, namely paraphrasing, simplification, synonym replacement, logically equivalent negations, vocabulary reduction, compression, and source text insertion, and further analyze their sensitivity to retrieval context and claim information density. Across three long-form benchmark datasets spanning science fiction, legal, and scientific domains, our results reveal that existing short-form metrics produce inconsistent scores for semantically equivalent summaries and exhibit declining reliability for information-dense claims whose content is semantically similar to many parts of the source document. While expanding the retrieval context improves stability in some domains, no metric consistently maintains factual alignment under long-context conditions. Finally, our results highlight concrete directions for improving factuality evaluation, including multi-span reasoning, context-aware calibration, and training on meaning-preserving variations to enhance robustness in long-form summarization.
Long contexts break transformers: attention scores dilute across thousands of tokens, critical information gets lost in the middle, and the model cannot adapt to novel patterns at inference time. Recent work on test-time adaptation addresses this by maintaining a form of working memory—transient parameters updated on the current context—but existing approaches employ uniform write policies that waste computation on low-value regions and suffer from high gradient variance across semantically heterogeneous contexts. In this work, we reframe test-time adaptation as a budget-constrained memory consolidation problem, asking: given limited computational budget, which parts of the context should be consolidated into working memory? We propose GDWM (\textbf{G}ated \textbf{D}ifferentiable \textbf{W}orking \textbf{M}emory), a framework that introduces a Write Controller to gate the memory consolidation process. Our controller estimates Contextual Utility—an information-theoretic measure quantifying how much each region depends on long-range context—and allocates gradient steps accordingly, subject to a coverage constraint that ensures global representation. Theoretically, we prove that our chunk-restricted sampling strategy reduces gradient variance by eliminating inter-chunk variance via the Law of Total Variance. Experiments on ZeroSCROLLS and LongBench v2 benchmarks demonstrate that GDWM achieves comparable or superior performance with 4 ×fewer gradient steps compared to uniform baselines—excelling on sparse-information tasks (+6–13% on Qasper, +5–13% on GovReport for smaller models) while revealing principled trade-offs on dense-coverage tasks, establishing a new efficiency-performance Pareto frontier for test-time adaptation.
Understanding LLM Performance Degradation in Multi-Instance Processing: The Roles of Instance Count and Context Length
PDF ↗Users often rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) for processing multiple documents or performing analysis over a number of instances. For example, analysing the overall sentiment of a number of movie reviews requires an LLM to process the sentiment of each review individually in order to provide a final aggregated answer. While LLM performance on such individual tasks is generally high, there has been little research on how LLMs perform when dealing with multi-instance inputs. In this paper, we perform acomprehensive evaluation of the multi-instance processing (MIP) ability of LLMs for tasks in which they excel individually. The results show that all LLMs follow a pattern of slight performance degradation for small numbers of instances (\approx20–100), followed by a performance collapse on larger instance counts. Crucially, our analysis shows that while context length is associated with this degradation, the number of instances has a stronger effect on the final results. This finding suggests that when optimising LLM performance for MIP, attention should be paid to both context length and, in particular, instance count.
Despite recent progress, the reasoning capabilities of large multimodal language models (MLLMs) remain fundamentally constrained by static supervision, where fixed prompts, rules, or reward models provide non-adaptive guidance throughout training. Such static signals are often sufficient to enforce output formats, but fail to shape the underlying reasoning process, leading to brittle generalization and performance saturation in complex decision-making tasks. We propose Evo-PI, a principle-centric learning framework that treats reasoning principles as explicit, language-based supervision signals that can be generated, evaluated, and iteratively evolved. Instead of relying on fixed rewards, Evo-PI enables a co-evolutionary loop in which principles guide model reasoning, while model behaviors in turn refine the principles that supervise them. This dynamic alignment mechanism allows supervision to progressively adapt to the model’s reasoning deficiencies. We instantiate Evo-PI in medical visual question answering as a high-stakes testbed requiring structured visual–textual reasoning. Across eight benchmarks and multiple model backbones, Evo-PI consistently improves reasoning accuracy, achieving gains of up to 24.6%. Our results suggest that evolving principle-guided supervision offers a scalable and general paradigm for training expert-aligned reasoning in multimodal language models.
Grounded claim factuality checking is important for large language model (LLM) applications such as retrieval-augmented generation, as it helps users assess the correctness of generated outputs. Existing metrics using entailment classifiers require dataset-specific threshold tuning, while LLM-based approaches often use direct prompting, which underutilises the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We address this by formulating grounded claim factuality checking as a true/false reading comprehension task and prompting LLMs with explicit test-taking strategies for efficient reasoning. Our method reduces token usage by over 80% compared to unguided open-ended reasoning, and achieves competitive performance to more expensive alternatives across two factuality benchmarks, setting a new state of the art on one. To further reduce inference cost, we train small language models (SLMs) to replace LLMs in the checking pipeline. Using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and a self-revision mechanism, the SLMs learn to improve their factuality judgements. Experimental results show that the resulting SLMs perform on par with strong baselines, combining low inference costs with generating supporting rationales to support interpretability. Code and datasets will be released upon acceptance.
Large language models (LLMs) excel at general-purpose tasks, yet adapting their responses to individual users remains challenging. Retrieval augmentation provides a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning by conditioning LLMs on user history records, and existing approaches typically select these records based on semantic relevance. We argue that relevance serves as an unreliable proxy for utility: a record may be semantically similar to a query yet fail to improve generation quality or even degrade it due to redundancy or conflicting information. To bridge this gap, we propose PURPLE, a contextual bandit framework that oPtimizes UseR Profiles for LLM pErsonalization. In contrast to a greedy selection of the most relevant records, PURPLE treats profile construction as an order-sensitive generation process and utilizes a Plackett-Luce ranking model to capture complex inter-record dependencies. By training with semantically rich feedback provided by the likelihood of the reference response, our method aligns retrieval directly with generation quality. Extensive experiments on nine personalization tasks demonstrate that PURPLE consistently outperforms strong heuristic and retrieval-augmented baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, establishing a principled and scalable solution for optimizing user profiles.
Spoken language models (SpeechLMs) are increasingly real-time conversational actors. Yet many culturally consequential aspects of spoken interaction are not primarily lexical. Across sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis, meaning emerges through how talk is produced and coordinated—prosody, timing, turn-taking, overlap, backchannels, and repair—within situated speech events. A transcript can be semantically correct yet interactionally inappropriate because many culture-bearing signals are audible and sequential rather than textual. This position paper argues for a speech-first view of cultural competence as interactional competence: the ability of a spoken agent to participate appropriately in event-situated interaction with locally normative conduct, while allowing plural acceptable realizations. Here, appropriate does not imply generic human-likeness; in many applications, the desired behavior may instead be constrained, neutral, predictable, or tool-like under an application-specific interaction contract. We synthesize social-science foundations into a theory-derived taxonomy of culture-bearing signals in speech, identify interactional phenomena where transcript correctness fails to predict appropriateness, and ground the agenda in today’s SpeechLM stacks and evaluation practice. We propose an evaluation framing that complements WER/MOS and broad capability suites by making speech events and interaction contracts explicit, diagnosing where modern pipelines lose interactional cues, and treating cultural appropriateness as a norm-conditioned target rather than generic “naturalness.”
Decisive: Guiding User Decisions with Optimal Preference Elicitation from Unstructured Documents
PDF ↗Decision-making is a cognitively intensive task that requires synthesizing relevant information from multiple unstructured sources, weighing competing factors, and incorporating subjective user preferences. Existing methods, including large language models and traditional decision-support systems, fall short: they often overwhelm users with information or fail to capture nuanced preferences accurately. We present Decisive, an interactive decision-making framework that combines document-grounded reasoning with Bayesian preference inference. Our approach grounds decisions in an objective option-scoring matrix extracted from source documents, while actively learning a user’s latent preference vector through targeted elicitation. Users answer pairwise tradeoff questions adaptively selected to maximize information gain over the final decision. This process converges efficiently, minimizing user effort while ensuring recommendations remain transparent and personalized. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms both general-purpose LLMs and existing decision-making frameworks achieving up to 20% improvement in decision accuracy over strong baselines across domains.
EmoMAS: Emotion-Aware Multi-Agent System for High-Stakes Edge-Deployable Negotiation with Bayesian Orchestration
PDF ↗Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used for automated negotiation, but their high computational cost and privacy risks limit deployment in privacy-sensitive, on-device settings such as mobile assistants or rescue robots. Small language models (SLMs) offer a viable alternative, yet struggle with the complex emotional dynamics of high-stakes negotiation. We introduce EmoMAS, a Bayesian multi-agent framework that transforms emotional decision-making from reactive to strategic. EmoMAS leverages a Bayesian orchestrator to coordinate three specialized agents: game-theoretic, reinforcement learning, and psychological coherence models. The system fuses their real-time insights to optimize emotional state transitions while continuously updating agent reliability based on negotiation feedback. This mixture-of-agents architecture enables online strategy learning without pre-training. We further introduce four high-stakes, edge-deployable negotiation benchmarks across debt, healthcare, emergency response, and educational domains. Through extensive agent-to-agent simulations across all benchmarks, both SLMs and LLMs equipped with EmoMAS consistently surpass all baseline models in negotiation performance while balancing ethical behavior. These results show that strategic emotional intelligence is a key driver of negotiation success. By treating emotional expression as a strategic variable within a Bayesian multi-agent optimization framework, EmoMAS establishes a new paradigm for effective, private, and adaptive negotiation AI suitable for high-stakes edge deployment. The code is available at https://github.com/Yunbo-max/EmoMAS.
Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs), including local weight fine-tuning, LoRA-based adaptation, and activation-based interventions, are often studied in isolation, obscuring their connections and making comparison difficult. In this work, we present a unified view that frames these interventions as dynamic weight updates induced by a control signal, placing them within a single conceptual framework. Building on this view, we propose a unified preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference, defined as the tendency toward a target concept, and utility, defined as coherent and task-valid generation, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. Across methods, we observe a consistent trade-off between preference and utility: stronger control increases preference while predictably reducing utility. We further explain this behavior through an activation manifold perspective, in which control shifts representations along target-concept directions to enhance preference, while utility declines primarily when interventions push representations off the model’s valid-generation manifold. Finally, we introduce a new steering approach guided by this analysis that improves preference while better preserving utility.
Enhancing LLM-based Search Agents via Contribution Weighted Group Relative Policy Optimization
PDF ↗Search agents extend Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond static parametric knowledge by enabling access to up-to-date and long-tail information unavailable during pretraining. While reinforcement learning has been widely adopted for training such agents, existing approaches face key limitations: process supervision often suffers from unstable value estimation, whereas outcome supervision struggles with credit assignment due to sparse, trajectory-level rewards. To bridge this gap, we propose Contribution-Weighted GRPO (CW-GRPO), a framework that integrates process supervision into group relative policy optimization. Instead of directly optimizing process rewards, CW-GRPO employs an LLM judge to assess the retrieval utility and reasoning correctness at each search round, producing per-round contribution weights. These weights are used to rescale outcome-based advantages along the trajectory, enabling fine-grained credit assignment without sacrificing optimization stability. Experiments on multiple knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that CW-GRPO outperforms standard GRPO by 5.0% on Qwen3-8B and 6.3% on Qwen3-1.7B, leading to more effective search behaviors. Additional analysis reveals that successful trajectories exhibit concentrated contributions in specific rounds, providing empirical insight into search agent tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/zsxmwjz/CW-GRPO.
QA-MoE: Towards a Continuous Reliability Spectrum with Quality-Aware Mixture of Experts for Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
PDF ↗Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to infer human sentiment from textual, acoustic, and visual signals. In real-world scenarios, however, multimodal inputs are often compromised by dynamic noise or modality missingness. Existing methods typically treat these imperfections as discrete cases or assume fixed corruption ratios, which limits their adaptability to continuously varying reliability conditions. To address this, we first introduce a Continuous Reliability Spectrum to unify missingness and quality degradation into a single framework. Building on this, we propose QA-MoE, a Quality-Aware Mixture-of-Experts framework that quantifies modality reliability via self-supervised aleatoric uncertainty. This mechanism explicitly guides expert routing, enabling the model to suppress error propagation from unreliable signals while preserving task-relevant information. Extensive experiments indicate that QA-MoE achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance across diverse degradation scenarios and exhibits a promising One-Checkpoint-for-All property in practice.
Piece of Table: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Selecting Subtables in Table Question Answering
PDF ↗Applying language models (LMs) to tables is challenging due to the mismatch between the two-dimensional structure of tables and the one-dimensional inputs expected by LMs. This mismatch forces linearization, making LMs particularly sensitive to irrelevant cells. Subtable selection mitigates this challenge by isolating question-relevant content prior to answer generation. However, existing approaches either rely on independent row or column selection, failing to capture cross-row and cross-column dependencies, or attempt global reasoning and face challenges similar to holistic table QA under noisy contexts. We propose *PieTa* (Piece of Table), a divide-and-conquer subtable selection framework that progressively aggregates locally selected evidence without requiring explicit global reasoning. *PieTa* uses an iterative, window-based multi-resolution process to construct compact subtables that capture global dependencies while limiting LM exposure to irrelevant content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that *PieTa* consistently outperforms prior subtable-based and holistic table QA approaches.