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Xufeng Liu, Yixuan Ding, Jingxiang Qu, Yichi Zhang, Wenhan Gao, Yi Liu

Recent success of large language models (LLMs) in diverse domains showcases their potential to revolutionize scientific fields, including drug editing. Traditional drug editing relies on iterative conversations with domain experts, refining the drug until the desired property is achieved. This interactive and iterative process mirrors the strengths of LLMs, making them well-suited for drug editing. *In existing works, LLMs edit each molecule independently without leveraging knowledge from past edits.* However, human experts develop intuition about effective modifications over time through historical experience; accumulating past knowledge is pivotal for human experts, and so it is for LLMs. *In this work, we propose RL-Guider — a reinforcement-learning agent to provide suggestions to LLMs; it uses the rich information provided from evaluating editing results made by the LLM based on the recommendations to improve itself over time.* RL-Guider is the first work that leverages both the comprehensive “world-level” knowledge of LLMs and the knowledge accumulated from historical feedback. As a result, RL-Guider mitigates several shortcomings of existing approaches and demonstrates superior performance. The code is available at [https://github.com/xufliu/RL-Guider](https://github.com/xufliu/RL-Guider).

Bradley McDanel, Sai Qian Zhang, Yunhai Hu, Zining Liu

Speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by using smaller draft models to generate candidate tokens for parallel verification. However, current approaches are limited by sequential stage dependencies that prevent full hardware utilization. We present PipeSpec, a framework that generalizes speculative decoding to use multiple models arranged in a hierarchical pipeline, enabling asynchronous execution with lightweight coordination for prediction verification and rollback. Our analytical model characterizes token generation rates across pipeline stages and proves guaranteed throughput improvements over traditional decoding for any non-zero acceptance rate. We further derive closed-form expressions for steady-state verification probabilities that explain the empirical benefits of pipeline depth. We validate PipeSpec across text summarization, mathematical reasoning, and code generation tasks using LLaMA 2 and 3 models, demonstrating that pipeline efficiency increases with model depth, providing a scalable approach to accelerating LLM inference on multi-device systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/BradMcDanel/PipeSpec.

Zhecheng Li, Yiwei Wang, Bryan Hooi, Yujun Cai, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang

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%.

Cristian-George Craciun, Răzvan-Alexandru Smădu, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Mihaela-Claudia Cercel

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.

Junhong Wu, Yang Zhao, Yangyifan Xu, Bing Liu, Chengqing Zong

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across numerous NLP tasks, and fine-tuning them for Machine Translation (MT) has improved their performance. However, vanilla fine-tuning often leads to catastrophic forgetting, compromising the broad general abilities of LLMs and introducing potential security risks. These abilities, which are developed using proprietary and unavailable training data, make simple data replay methods ineffective. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel approach called **Ra**tionale **Dis**tillation. RaDis harnesses the strong generative capabilities of LLMs to create rationales for training data, which are then “replayed” to prevent forgetting. These rationales connect prior knowledge with new tasks, acting as self-distillation targets to regulate the training process. By jointly training on reference translations and self-generated rationales, the model can learn new translation skills while preserving its general abilities across other tasks. Additionally, RaDis provides a fresh perspective on using rationales in the CL field and has the potential to serve as a general continual learning method for a variety of tasks.

Hanyin Wang, Chufan Gao, Bolun Liu, Qiping Xu, Guleid Hussein, Mohamad El Labban, Kingsley Iheasirim, Hariprasad Reddy Korsapati, Chuck Outcalt, Jimeng Sun

Proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and Gemini have demonstrated promising capabilities in clinical text summarization tasks. However, due to patient data privacy concerns and computational costs, many healthcare providers prefer using small, locally-hosted models over external generic LLMs. This study presents a comprehensive domain- and task-specific adaptation process for the open-source LLaMA-2 13 billion parameter model, enabling it to generate high-quality clinical notes from outpatient patient-doctor dialogues. Our process incorporates continued pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning from both AI and human feedback. We introduced a new approach, DistillDirect, for performing on-policy reinforcement learning with Gemini 1.0 Pro as the teacher model. Our resulting model, LLaMA-Clinic, can generate clinical notes comparable in quality to those authored by physicians. In a blinded physician reader study, the majority (92.8%) of individual evaluations rated the notes generated by LLaMA-Clinic as “acceptable” or higher across all three criteria: real-world readiness, completeness, and accuracy. In the more challenging “Assessment and Plan” section, LLaMA-Clinic received the same score as the notes authored by physicians. We highlight key considerations for future clinical note-generation tasks, emphasizing the importance of pre-defining a best-practice note format, rather than relying on LLMs to determine this for clinical practice.

Bowen Yan, Zhengsong Zhang, Liqiang Jing, Eftekhar Hossain, Xinya Du

The rapid development of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often comes with widespread hallucination issues, making cost-effective and comprehensive assessments increasingly vital. Current approaches mainly rely on costly annotations and are not comprehensive – in terms of evaluating all aspects, such as relations, attributes, and dependencies between aspects. Therefore, we introduce the FIHA (automated Fine-graIned Hallucination evAluation in LVLMs), which could access LVLMs hallucination in an LLM-free and annotation-free way and model the dependency between different types of hallucinations. FIHA can generate Q&A pairs on any image dataset at minimal cost, enabling hallucination assessment from both image and caption. Based on this approach, we introduce a benchmark called FIHA-v1, which consists of diverse questions on various images from three datasets. Furthermore, we use the Davidson Scene Graph (DSG) to organize the structure among Q&A pairs, in which we can increase the reliability of the evaluation. We evaluate representative models using FIHA-v1, highlighting their limitations and challenges. We released our code and data at https://github.com/confidentzzzs/FIHA.

Xinyi Jiang, Tianyi Hu, Yuheng Qin, Guoming Wang, Zhou Huan, Kehan Chen, Gang Huang, Rongxing Lu, Siliang Tang

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to build domain-specific conversational agents, especially for e-commerce customer service chatbots, is a growing focus. While existing methods enhance dialogue performance by extracting core patterns from dialogue data and integrating them into models, two key challenges persist: (1) heavy reliance on human experts for dialogue strategy induction, and (2) LLM-based automatic extraction often focuses on summarizing specific behaviors, neglecting the underlying thought processes behind strategy selection. In this paper, we present ChatMap, which focuses on enhancing customer service chatbots by mining thought processes using a Multi-Agent aPproach. Specifically, the process begins by extracting customer requests and solutions from a raw dialogue dataset, followed by clustering similar requests, analyzing the thought processes behind solutions, and refining service thoughts. Through a quality inspection and reflection mechanism, the final service thought dataset is generated, helping chatbots provide more appropriate responses. Offline experimental results show that ChatMap performs comparably to manually annotated thought processes and significantly outperforms other baselines, demonstrating its ability to automate human annotation and enhance dialogue capabilities through strategic understanding. Online A/B tests on Taobao, a popular e-commerce platform in China reveal that ChatMap can better improve customer satisfaction and address customer requests from a business perspective.

Yi Wang, Fenghua Weng, Sibei Yang, Zhan Qin, Minlie Huang, Wenjie Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely applied in decision making, but their deployment is threatened by jailbreak attacks, where adversarial users manipulate model behavior to bypass safety measures. Existing defense mechanisms, such as safety fine-tuning and model editing, either require extensive parameter modifications or lack precision, leading to performance degradation on general tasks, which is unsuitable to post-deployment safety alignment. To address these challenges, we propose DELMAN (**D**ynamic **E**diting for **L**L**M**s J**A**ilbreak Defe**N**se), a novel approach leveraging direct model editing for precise, dynamic protection against jailbreak attacks. DELMAN directly updates a minimal set of relevant parameters to neutralize harmful behaviors while preserving the model’s utility. To avoid triggering a safe response in benign context, we incorporate KL-divergence regularization to ensure the updated model remains consistent with the original model when processing benign queries. Experimental results demonstrate that DELMAN outperforms baseline methods in mitigating jailbreak attacks while preserving the model’s utility, and adapts seamlessly to new attack instances, providing a practical and efficient solution for post-deployment model protection.

Pratik Kayal, Pascal Mettes, Nima Dehmamy, Minsu Park

Predicting video popularity is often framed as a supervised learning task, relying heavily on meta-information and aggregated engagement data. However, video popularity is shaped by complex cultural and social factors that such approaches often overlook. We argue that Large Language Models (LLMs), with their deep contextual awareness, can better capture these nuances. To bridge the gap between pixel-based video data and token-based LLMs, we convert frame-level visuals into sequential text representations using Vision-Language Models. This enables LLMs to process multimodal content—titles, frame-based descriptions, and captions—capturing both engagement intensity (view count) and geographic spread (number of countries where a video trends). On 13,639 popular videos, a supervised neural network using content embeddings achieves 80% accuracy, while our LLM-based approach reaches 82% without fine-tuning. Combining the neural network’s predictions with the LLM further improves accuracy to 85.5%. Moreover, the LLM generates interpretable, attribute-based explanations for its predictions. Manual validations confirm the quality of these hypotheses and address concerns about hallucinations in the video-to-text conversion process. Overall, our findings suggest that LLMs, equipped with text-based multimodal representations, offer a powerful, interpretable, and data-efficient solution for tasks requiring rich contextual insight, such as video popularity prediction.

Zheng Zhang, Shaocheng Lan, Lei Song, Jiang Bian, Yexin Li, Kan Ren

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks during inference using only a few demonstrations. However, ICL performance is highly dependent on the selection of these demonstrations. Recent work explores retrieval-based methods for selecting query-specific demonstrations, but these approaches often rely on surrogate objectives such as metric learning, failing to directly optimize ICL performance. Consequently, they struggle to identify truly beneficial demonstrations. Moreover, their discriminative retrieval paradigm is ineffective when the candidate pool lacks sufficient high-quality demonstrations. To address these challenges, we propose GenICL, a novel generative preference learning framework that leverages LLM feedback to directly optimize demonstration selection for ICL. Experiments on 19 datasets across 11 task categories demonstrate that GenICL achieves superior performance than existing methods in selecting the most effective demonstrations, leading to better ICL performance.

Anna Wegmann, Dong Nguyen, David Jurgens

Variation in language is ubiquitous and often systematically linked to regional, social, and contextual factors. Tokenizers split texts into smaller units and might behave differently for less common linguistic forms. This might affect downstream LLM performance differently on two types of tasks: Tasks where the model should be robust to language variation (e.g., for semantic tasks like NLI, labels do not depend on whether a text uses British or American spelling) and tasks where the model should be sensitive to language variation (e.g., for form-based tasks like authorship verification, labels depend on whether a text uses British or American spelling). We pre-train BERT base models with the popular Byte-Pair Encoding algorithm to investigate how key tokenization design choices impact the performance of downstream models: the corpus used to train the tokenizer, the pre-tokenizer and the vocabulary size. We find that the best tokenizer varies on the two task types and that the pre-tokenizer has the biggest overall impact on performance. Further, we introduce a new approach to estimate tokenizer impact on downstream LLM performance, showing substantial improvement over metrics like Rényi efficiency. We encourage more work on language variation and its relation to tokenizers and thus LLM performance.

Liyang He, Chenglong Liu, Rui Li, Zhenya Huang, Shulan Ruan, Jun Zhou, Enhong Chen

Sentence embedding is essential for many NLP tasks, with contrastive learning methods achieving strong performance using annotated datasets like NLI. Yet, the reliance on manual labels limits scalability. Recent studies leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate sentence pairs, reducing annotation dependency. However, they overlook ranking information crucial for fine-grained semantic distinctions. To tackle this challenge, we propose a method for controlling the generation direction of LLMs in the latent space. Unlike unconstrained generation, the controlled approach ensures meaningful semantic divergence. Then, we refine exist sentence embedding model by integrating ranking information and semantic information. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves new SOTA performance with a modest cost in ranking sentence synthesis.

Osman Alperen Koraş, Rabi Bahnan, Jens Kleesiek, Amin Dada

Deploying natural language generation systems in clinical settings remains challenging despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), which continue to exhibit hallucinations and factual inconsistencies, necessitating human oversight. This paper explores automated dataset augmentation using LLMs as human proxies to condition LLMs for clinician control without increasing cognitive workload. On the BioNLP ACL’24 Discharge Me! Shared Task, we achieve new state-of-the-art results with simpler methods than prior submissions through more efficient training, yielding a 9% relative improvement without augmented training and up to 34% with dataset augmentation. Preliminary human evaluation further supports the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting the potential of augmenting clinical text generation for control to enhance relevance, accuracy, and factual consistency.

Jinming Zhang, Yunfei Long

Interactive Fiction games (IF games) are where players interact through natural language commands. While recent advances in Artificial Intelligence agents have reignited interest in IF games as a domain for studying decision-making, existing approaches prioritize task-specific performance metrics over human-like comprehension of narrative context and gameplay logic. This work presents a cognitively inspired framework that guides Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn and play IF games systematically. Our proposed **L**earning to **P**lay **L**ike **H**umans (LPLH) framework integrates three key components: (1) structured map building to capture spatial and narrative relationships, (2) action learning to identify context-appropriate commands, and (3) feedback-driven experience analysis to refine decision-making over time. By aligning LLMs-based agents’ behavior with narrative intent and commonsense constraints, LPLH moves beyond purely exploratory strategies to deliver more interpretable, human-like performance. Crucially, this approach draws on cognitive science principles to more closely simulate how human players read, interpret, and respond within narrative worlds. As a result, LPLH reframes the IF games challenge as a learning problem for LLMs-based agents, offering a new path toward robust, context-aware gameplay in complex text-based environments.

Xiangyu Zhang, Hexin Liu, Qiquan Zhang, Beena Ahmed, Julien Epps

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted for health-related tasks, yet their performance in depression detection remains limited when relying solely on text input. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) typically enhances LLM capabilities, our experiments indicate that traditional text-based RAG systems struggle to significantly improve depression detection accuracy. This challenge stems partly from the rich depression-relevant information encoded in acoustic speech patterns — information that current text-only approaches fail to capture effectively. To address this limitation, we conduct a systematic analysis of temporal speech patterns, comparing healthy individuals with those experiencing depression. Based on our findings, we introduce Speech Timing-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation, SpeechT-RAG, a novel system that leverages speech timing features for both accurate depression detection and reliable confidence estimation. This integrated approach not only outperforms traditional text-based RAG systems in detection accuracy but also enhances uncertainty quantification through a confidence scoring mechanism that naturally extends from the same temporal features. Our unified framework achieves comparable results to fine-tuned LLMs without additional training while simultaneously addressing the fundamental requirements for both accuracy and trustworthiness in mental health assessment

Xikang Yang, Biyu Zhou, Xuehai Tang, Jizhong Han, Songlin Hu

The latent knowledge of large language models (LLMs) contains harmful or unethical content, which introduces significant security risks upon their widespread deployment. Conducting jailbreak attacks on LLMs can proactively identify vulnerabilities to enhance their security measures. However, previous jailbreak attacks primarily focus on single-turn dialogue scenarios, leaving vulnerabilities in multi-turn dialogue contexts inadequately explored. This paper investigates the resilience of black-box LLMs in multi-turn jailbreak attack scenarios from a novel interrogation perspective. We propose an optimal interrogation principle to conceal the jailbreak intent and introduce a multi-turn attack chain generation strategy called CoA. By employing two effective interrogation strategies tailored for LLMs, coupled with an interrogation history record management mechanis, it achieves a significant optimization of the attack process. Our approach enables the iterative generation of attack chains, offering a powerful tool for LLM red team testing. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs exhibit insufficient resistance under multi-turn interrogation, with our method shows more advantages(ASR, 83% vs 64%). This work offers new insights into improving the safety of LLMs.

Xiaozhuang Song, Shufei Zhang, Tianshu Yu

Recent advancements in combining knowledge graphs (KGs) with large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising potential in complex KG reasoning tasks, yet existing approaches face limitations in path exploration strategies or excessive computational overhead. We propose ReKG-MCTS, a novel training-free framework that synergizes Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with LLM capabilities to enable dynamic reasoning over KGs. The framework conceptualizes KG reasoning as a decision-making process, where MCTS strategically explores paths over KG while LLMs provide semantic guidance for reasoning paths. The framework consists of four phases: (1) UCB-based node selection that balances exploration-exploitation on KG, (2) path expansion with KG structural constraints, (3) LLM-guided MC rollouts for simulation, and (4) value backpropagation. Experimental results on WebQSP and CWQ demonstrate that ReKG-MCTS outperforms existing training-free methods and achieves competitive performance compared to fine-tuned baselines. These findings suggest a new paradigm for leveraging language models in KG reasoning tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/ShawnKS/rekgmcts.

Xiaofeng Zhou, Heyan Huang, Lizi Liao

Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to set new standards in knowledge-intensive and complex reasoning tasks, yet their high computational demands limit widespread adoption. While distilling large models into smaller ones offers a sustainable solution, current techniques—such as static knowledge distillation, resource-intensive reinforcement learning from human feedback, or limited self-reflection—struggle to yield substantial and lasting performance gains. In this paper, we present a novel Debate and Reflect (D&R) framework that orchestrates multi-turn debates between smaller models and stronger teacher models, eliciting actionable feedback (e.g., error analysis, corrective strategies) to guide student models. Further, we introduce Tree-structured Direct Preference Optimization (T-DPO) to efficiently leverage these debate logs, organizing interactions into a hierarchical format for effective training. Empirical evaluations across diverse NLP benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves smaller-model accuracy, robustness, and generalization, outperforming conventional baselines by a large margin.

Tommaso Green, Félix Gaschi, Fabian David Schmidt, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Goran Glavaš

With Large Language Models (LLMs) becoming increasingly multilingual, effective knowledge editing (KE) needs to propagate edits across languages. Evaluation of the existing methods for cross-lingual knowledge editing (CKE) is limited both w.r.t. edit effectiveness: benchmarks do not account for entity aliases and use faulty entity translations; as well as robustness: existing work fails to report on downstream generation and task-solving abilities of LLMs after editing. In this work, we aim to (i) maximize the effectiveness of CKE while at the same time (ii) minimizing the extent of downstream model collapse due to the edits. To accurately measure the effectiveness of CKE methods, we introduce BabelEdits, a new CKE benchmark covering 60 languages that combines high-quality multilingual synsets from BabelNet with marker-based translation to ensure entity translation quality. Unlike existing CKE benchmarks, BabelEdits accounts for the rich variety of entity aliases within and across languages. We then propose BabelReFT, a modular CKE approach based on representation fine-tuning (ReFT) which learns entity-scope ReFT modules, applying them to all multilingual aliases at inference. Our experimental results show that not only is BabelReFT more effective in CKE than state-of-the-art methods, but, owing to its modular design, much more robust against downstream model collapse when subjected to many sequential edits.