Recent progress in large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent collaboration highlights the power of structured communication in enabling collective intelligence. However, existing methods largely rely on static or graph-based inter-agent topologies, lacking the potential adaptability and flexibility in communication. In this work, we propose a new framework that rethinks multi-agent coordination through a sequential structure rather than a graph structure, offering a significantly larger topology space for multi-agent communication. Our method focuses on two key directions: (1) Next-Agent Prediction, which selects the most suitable agent role at each step, and (2) Next-Context Selection (NCS), which enables each agent to selectively access relevant information from any previous step. Together, these components construct task-adaptive communication pipelines that support both role flexibility and global information flow. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance while substantially reducing communication overhead.
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Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly surpassing human knowledge in many domains. While improving these models traditionally relies on costly human data, recent self-rewarding mechanisms have shown that LLMs can improve by judging their own responses instead of relying on human labelers. However, existing methods have primarily focused on improving model responses rather than judgment capabilities, resulting in rapid saturation during iterative training. To address this issue, we introduce a novel Meta-Rewarding step to the self-improvement process, where the model judges its own judgements and uses that feedback to refine its judgment skills. Surprisingly, this unsupervised approach improves the model’s ability to judge and follow instructions, as demonstrated by a win rate improvement of Llama-3-8B-Instruct from 22.9% to 39.4% on AlpacaEval 2, and 20.6% to 29.1% on Arena-Hard. These results strongly suggest the potential for self-improving models without human supervision.
Instruction tuning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generally involves cooperative learning between a backbone LLM and a feature encoder of non-text input modalities. The major challenge is how to efficiently find the synergy between the two modules so that LLMs can adapt their reasoning abilities to downstream tasks while feature encoders can adjust to provide more task-specific information about its modality. In this paper, we analyze the MLLM instruction tuning from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, where we find the unbalanced learning between the feature encoder and the LLM can cause problems of oscillation and biased learning that lead to sub-optimal convergence. Inspired by our findings, we propose a Multimodal Balance Coefficient that enables quantitative measurement of the balance of learning. Based on this, we further design a dynamic learning scheduler that better coordinates the learning between the LLM and feature encoder, alleviating the problems of oscillation and biased learning. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary regularization on the gradient to promote updating with larger step sizes, which potentially allows for a more accurate estimation of the proposed MultiModal Balance Coefficient and further improves the training sufficiency. Our proposed approach is agnostic to the architecture of LLM and feature encoder, so it can be generically integrated with various MLLMs. We conduct experiments on multiple downstream tasks with various MLLMs, demonstrating that the proposed method is more effective than the baselines in MLLM instruction tuning.
Knowledge Editing is a technique that updates large language models (LLMs) with new information to maintain their world knowledge. This approach avoids the need to rebuild the model from scratch, thereby addressing the high costs associated with frequent retraining. Among these, the in-context editing paradigm stands out for its effectiveness in integrating new knowledge while preserving the model’s original capabilities. Despite its potential, existing in-context knowledge editing methods are often task-specific, focusing primarily on multi-hop QA tasks using structured knowledge triples. Moreover, their reliance on few-shot prompting for task decomposition makes them unstable and less effective in generalizing across diverse tasks. In response to these limitations, we propose EditCoT, a novel knowledge editing framework that flexibly and efficiently updates LLMs across various tasks without retraining. EditCoT works by generating a chain-of-thought (CoT) for a given input and then iteratively refining this CoT process using a CoT editor based on updated knowledge. We evaluate EditCoT across a diverse range of benchmarks, covering multiple languages and tasks. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering superior generalization, effectiveness, and stability compared to existing methods, marking a significant advancement in the field of knowledge updating.
Our ability to efficiently and accurately evaluate the quality of machine translation systems has been outrun by the effectiveness of current language models—which limits the potential for further improving these models on more challenging tasks like long-form and literary translation. We propose an unsupervised method to generate training data for translation evaluation over different document lengths and application domains by repeated rounds of translation between source and target languages. We evaluate evaluation systems trained on texts mechanically generated using both model rotation and language translation approaches, demonstrating improved performance over a popular translation evaluation system (xCOMET) on two different tasks: (i) scoring the quality of a given translation against a human reference and (ii) selecting which of two translations is generationally closer to an original source document.
Layered Insights: Generalizable Analysis of Human Authorial Style by Leveraging All Transformer Layers
PDF ↗We propose a new approach for the authorship attribution task that leverages the various linguistic representations learned at different layers of pre-trained transformer-based models. We evaluate our approach on two popular authorship attribution models and three evaluation datasets, in in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. We found that utilizing various transformer layers improves the robustness of authorship attribution models when tested on out-of-domain data, resulting in a much stronger performance. Our analysis gives further insights into how our model’s different layers get specialized in representing certain linguistic aspects that we believe benefit the model when tested out of the domain.
Long-range tasks demand reasoning over long inputs. However, existing solutions are limited, e.g., long-context models require large compute budgets, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) needs training data, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) entails complex task-specific designs. Though in-context approaches overcome many of these issues, methods with short-context LLMs are inefficient, trading context for processing more tokens. We introduce **PRISM**, a highly token-efficient in-context method based on structured schemas that outperforms baselines on diverse tasks with **4x shorter contexts**. This approach produces concise outputs and efficiently leverages key-value (KV) caches to **reduce costs by up to 54%**. PRISM scales down to tiny contexts without increasing costs or sacrificing quality, and generalizes to new tasks with minimal effort by generating schemas from task descriptions.
This work addresses a fundamental barrier in recommender systems: the inability to generalize across domains without extensive retraining. Traditional ID-based approaches fail entirely in cold-start and cross-domain scenarios where new users or items lack sufficient interaction history. Inspired by foundation models’ cross-domain success, we develop a foundation model for sequential recommendation that achieves genuine zero-shot generalization capabilities. Our approach fundamentally departs from existing ID-based methods by deriving item representations exclusively from textual features. This enables immediate embedding of any new item without model retraining. We introduce unified item tokenization with Finite Scalar Quantization that transforms heterogeneous textual descriptions into standardized discrete tokens. This eliminates domain barriers that plague existing systems. Additionally, the framework features hybrid bidirectional-causal attention that captures both intra-item token coherence and inter-item sequential dependencies. An efficient catalog-aware beam search decoder enables real-time token-to-item mapping. Unlike conventional approaches confined to their training domains, RecGPT naturally bridges diverse recommendation contexts through its domain-invariant tokenization mechanism. Comprehensive evaluations across six datasets and industrial scenarios demonstrate consistent performance advantages.
Towards Transferable Personality Representation Learning based on Triplet Comparisons and Its Applications
PDF ↗Personality is an important concept in psychology that reflects individual differences in thinking and behavior, and has significant applications across various fields. Most existing personality analysis methods address this issue at the bag level, treating the entire corpus gathered from one individual as a single unit for classification. However, this paradigm presents several challenges. From the data perspective, collecting a large corpus for each individual and performing comprehensive annotations pose significant difficulties in both data collection and labeling. On the application side, concentrating on classifying the entire corpus limits its applicability in more common single-instance scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a new task paradigm in text-based personality representation learning. Specifically, we construct a triplet personality trend comparison dataset to learn single-sentence personality embeddings with desirable metric properties. This approach removes the traditional constraints on data sources, facilitating dataset expansion, and can leverage the transfer capabilities of embeddings to easily adapt to various downstream tasks. Our experiments show that the learned embeddings significantly boost performance by a relative 10% across various applications, including personality detection, personality retrieval, and emotion translation prediction. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zjutangk/PTCD.
MusKGC: A Flexible Multi-source Knowledge Enhancement Framework for Open-World Knowledge Graph Completion
PDF ↗Open-world knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer novel facts by enriching existing graphs with external knowledge sources while maintaining semantic consistency under the open-world assumption (OWA). Generation-based KGC methods leverage the inherent strengths of large language models (LLMs) in language understanding and creative problem-solving, making them promising approaches. However, they face limitations: (1) The unreliable external knowledge from LLMs can lead to hallucinations and undermine KGC reliability. (2) The lack of an automated and rational evaluation strategy for new facts under OWA results in the exclusion of some new but correct entities. In the paper, we propose MusKGC, a novel multi-source knowledge enhancement framework based on an LLM for KGC under OWA. We induce relation templates with entity type constraints to link structured knowledge with natural language, improving the comprehension of the LLM. Next, we combine intrinsic KG facts with reliable external knowledge to guide the LLM in accurately generating missing entities with supporting evidence. Lastly, we introduce a new evaluation strategy for factuality and consistency to validate accurate inferences of new facts, including unknown entities. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model achieves SOTA performance across benchmarks, and our evaluation strategy effectively assesses new facts under OWA.
Integrating external tools with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising paradigm for accomplishing complex tasks. Since LLMs still struggle to effectively manage large tool collections, researchers have begun exploring retrieval-based methods to pre-select the most relevant options, addressing input length and latency constraints. However, existing retrievers are often misaligned with tool-calling LLMs due to their separate training processes. This paper presents PORTS, a novel odds ratio preference optimization method for training retrievers aimed at tool selection. Using a perplexity-inspired preference signal from a frozen LLM, our approach fine-tunes a retriever to find helpful tools by optimizing the correlation between the selection probabilities and the downstream performances while jointly enforcing a contrastive semantic loss between documentation strings. The versatility of PORTS and its ability to significantly improve tool selection accuracy are demonstrated through extensive experiments on six datasets, two encoder models, and three LLMs with diverse prior knowledge. With low computational demands, our alignment process facilitates generalization to new queries and tools, proving valuable for practical applications with evolving toolsets.
Large language models (LLMs) excel in diverse applications but face dual challenges: generating harmful content under jailbreak attacks and over-refusing benign queries due to rigid safety mechanisms. These issues severely affect the application of LLMs, especially in the medical and education fields. Existing approaches can be divided into three types: contrastive decoding, activation manipulation, and prompting strategies. However, all these approaches face challenges like inefficiency, fragility, or architectural constraints,ultimately failing to strike a balance between safety and usability. These problems are more obvious in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially in terms of heightened over-refusal in cross-modal tasks and new security risks arising from expanded attack surfaces. We propose Magic Image, an optimization-driven visual prompt framework that enhances security and reduces over-refusal at the same time. The Magic Image is optimized using gradients derived from harmful/benign training samples. Using the magic image can modify the model’s original safety alignment, maintaining robust safety while reducing unnecessary denials. Experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in preserving model performance and improving safety-responsiveness balance across datasets, including unseen data, offering a practical solution for reliable MLLM deployment.
Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new avenues for solving complex optimization problems, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS). However, existing LLM-driven NAS approaches rely heavily on prompt engineering and domain-specific tuning, limiting their practicality and scalability across diverse tasks. In this work, we propose LM-Searcher, a novel framework that leverages LLMs for cross-domain neural architecture optimization without the need for extensive domain-specific adaptation. Central to our approach is NCode, a universal numerical string representation for neural architectures, which enables cross-domain architecture encoding and search. We also reformulate the NAS problem as a ranking task, training LLMs to select high-performing architectures from candidate pools using instruction-tuning samples derived from a novel pruning-based subspace sampling strategy. Our curated dataset, encompassing a wide range of architecture-performance pairs, encourages robust and transferable learning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LM-Searcher achieves competitive performance in both in-domain (e.g., CNNs for image classification) and out-of-domain (e.g., LoRA configurations for segmentation and generation) tasks, establishing a new paradigm for flexible and generalizable LLM-based architecture search.
The rapid growth of video platforms has transformed information dissemination and led to an explosion of multimedia content. However, this widespread reach also introduces risks, as some users exploit these platforms to spread hate speech, which is often concealed through complex rhetoric, making hateful video detection a critical challenge. Existing detection methods rely heavily on unimodal analysis or simple feature fusion, struggling to capture cross-modal interactions and reason through implicit hate in sarcasm and metaphor. To address these limitations, we propose HVGuard, the first reasoning-based hateful video detection framework with multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Our approach integrates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enhance multimodal interaction modeling and implicit hate interpretation. Additionally, we design a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) network for efficient multimodal fusion and final decision-making. The framework is modular and extensible, allowing flexible integration of different MLLMs and encoders. Experimental results demonstrate that HVGuard outperforms all existing advanced detection tools, achieving an improvement of 6.88% to 13.13% in accuracy and 9.21% to 34.37% in M-F1 on two public datasets covering both English and Chinese.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) generate discourse-level, multi-sentence visual descriptions, challenging text scene graph parsers built for single-sentence caption-to-graph mapping. Current approaches typically merge sentence-level parsing outputs for discourse input, often missing phenomena like cross-sentence coreference, resulting in fragmented graphs and degraded downstream VLM task performance. We introduce a new task, Discourse-level text Scene Graph parsing (DiscoSG), and release DiscoSG-DS, a dataset of 400 expert-annotated and 8,430 synthesised multi-sentence caption-graph pairs. Each caption averages 9 sentences, and each graph contains at least 3\times more triples than those in existing datasets. Fine-tuning GPT-4o on DiscoSG-DS yields over 40% higher SPICE than the strongest sentence-merging baseline. However, its high inference cost and licensing restrict open-source use, and smaller fine-tuned open-source models (e.g., Flan-T5) perform poorly on dense graph generation. To bridge this gap, we propose DiscoSG-Refiner, which drafts a base graph using a seed parser and iteratively refines it with a second model, improving robustness for complex graph generation. Using two small fine-tuned Flan-T5-Base models, DiscoSG-Refiner improves SPICE by ~30% over the baseline while achieving 86{\times} faster inference than GPT-4o. It also delivers consistent gains on downstream VLM tasks, including discourse-level caption evaluation and hallucination detection, outperforming alternative parsers. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ShaoqLin/DiscoSG .
SQLWOZ: A Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset with SQL-Based Dialogue State Representation for Complex User Requirements
PDF ↗High-quality datasets are essential for building effective task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. The existing TOD datasets often present overly simplified interactions, where users incrementally express straightforward requests that can be managed with basic slot-value style dialogue states, such as “hotel-area = east.” However, this approach does not reflect real-life scenarios in which users may express complex constraints and preferences. To address this gap, in this paper, we propose SQLWOZ, a novel TOD dataset designed to capture complex, real-world user requirements. The user requirements in SQLWOZ include the four categories: 1) multiple values for a slot, 2) excluded values within a slot, 3) preferred or prioritized values, and 4) conditional values based on other conditions. We utilize SQL statements as a formalized and expressive representation of dialogue states within SQLWOZ. To evaluate the dataset, we adapt large language models as dialogue agents and conduct extensive experiments on the SQL-based dialogue state tracking, dialogue response generation and end-to-end TOD tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the complexity and quality of SQLWOZ, establishing it as a new benchmark for advancing TOD research.
Middo: Model-Informed Dynamic Data Optimization for Enhanced LLM Fine-Tuning via Closed-Loop Learning
PDF ↗Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) Large Language Models (LLM) fundamentally rely on high-quality training data. While data selection and data synthesis are two common strategies to improve data quality, existing approaches often face limitations in static dataset curation that fail to adapt to evolving model capabilities. In this paper, we introduce Middo, a self-evolving Model-informed dynamic data optimization framework that uses model-aware data selection and context-preserving data refinement. Unlike conventional one-off filtering/synthesis methods, our framework establishes a closed-loop optimization system: (1) A self-referential diagnostic module proactively identifies suboptimal samples through tri-axial model signals - loss patterns (complexity), embedding cluster dynamics (diversity), and self-alignment scores (quality); (2) An adaptive optimization engine then transforms suboptimal samples into pedagogically valuable training points while preserving semantic integrity; (3) This optimization process continuously evolves with model capability through dynamic learning principles. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our consistently enhances the quality of seed data and boosts LLM’s performance with improving accuracy by 7.15% on average while maintaining the original dataset scale. This work establishes a new paradigm for sustainable LLM training through dynamic human-AI co-evolution of data and models.
We present Branch-Train-Stitch (BTS), an efficient and flexible training algorithm for combining independently trained large language model (LLM) experts into a single, capable generalist model. Following Li et al., we start with a single seed language model which is branched into domain-specific (e.g., coding or math) experts with continual pretraining. BTS combines experts into a generalist model using lightweight stitch layers, which are inserted between frozen experts and the seed LLM, and trained on a small datamix of the expert domains. Stitch layers enable the seed LLM to integrate representations from any number of experts during the forward pass, allowing it to generalize to new domains, despite remaining frozen. Because BTS does not alter the constituent LLMs, BTS provides a modular and flexible approach: experts can be easily removed and new experts can be added with only a small amount of training. Compared to alternative model merging approaches, BTS yields the best generalist performance on a variety of downstream tasks, retaining the specialized capabilities of each of the experts.
Think in Safety: Unveiling and Mitigating Safety Alignment Collapse in Multimodal Large Reasoning Model
PDF ↗The rapid development of Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) has demonstrated broad application potential, yet their safety and reliability remain critical concerns that require systematic exploration. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic safety evaluation of 13 MLRMs across 5 benchmarks and unveil prevalent safety degradation phenomena in most advanced models. Moreover, our analysis reveals distinct safety patterns across different benchmarks: significant safety degradation is observed across jailbreak robustness benchmarks, whereas safety-awareness benchmarks demonstrate less pronounced degradation. In particular, the long thought process in some scenarios even enhances safety performance. Therefore, it is a potential approach to address safety issues in MLRMs by leveraging the intrinsic reasoning capabilities of the model to detect unsafe intent. To operationalize this insight, we construct a multimodal tuning dataset that incorporates a safety-oriented thought process. Experimental results from fine-tuning existing MLRMs with this dataset effectively enhance the safety on both jailbreak robustness and safety-awareness benchmarks. This study provides a new perspective for developing safe MLRMs.
pFedGPT: Hierarchically Optimizing LoRA Aggregation Weights for Personalized Federated GPT Models
PDF ↗Federated finetuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers computational efficiency and preserves data privacy. However, applying LoRA in federated settings faces significant challenges: standard approaches struggle with data heterogeneity, and existing personalization techniques fail to precisely adapt shared global knowledge to individual client needs. To address these issues, we propose pFedGPT, a framework that leverages Hierarchical Bayesian Optimization (HBO) for fine-grained, personalized LoRA aggregation. pFedGPT intelligently partitions LoRA parameters based on model structure and client information, then employs HBO to hierarchically search for optimal, module-specific weights. This enables a nuanced integration of the downloaded global LoRA state with each client’s local model, precisely capturing client-specific requirements. To manage the optimization cost inherent in HBO, pFedGPT incorporates efficient multi-fidelity evaluations and a curriculum learning strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that pFedGPT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on personalized FL benchmarks, showcasing robustness and scalability while introducing only minimal (approx. 4%) additional optimization overhead. Our results also underscore the limitations of traditional FL methods for LoRA-based LLM personalization, highlighting the need for tailored approaches like pFedGPT.