Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a core technique for improving the factuality and reasoning ability of large language models. Recent efforts extend RAG with graph-structured knowledge, enhancing retrieval to capture relational context beyond isolated text chunks. However, many graph-based RAG systems rely on a two-stage pipeline: (i) classical approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search to identify top-k entities in the embedding space, (ii) heuristic neighbor expansion which augments the retrieved set by traversing immediate neighbors. This design underutilizes graph topology during retrieval and often introduces noisy or high-degree neighbors, leading to suboptimal evidence selection. In this paper, we propose TopoRAG, a retrieval framework that directly integrates structural constraints into ANN search via a diameter-constrained formulation. By selecting entities whose induced subgraph satisfies a diameter bound, TopoRAG enables topology-aware and noise-controlled graph retrieval. Experiments show that our approach consistently improves precision and significantly reduces context redundancy compared to existing methods.
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Investigating Links between Illicit Massage Businesses through Natural Language Processing and Graph Machine Learning
PDF ↗Human trafficking exploits vulnerable individuals through forced sex or labor. Illicit massage businesses offer a clandestine front to illicit activities by disguising themselves as legitimate businesses. This makes it challenging for law enforcement agencies and anti-trafficking organizations to detect these enterprises and their associated entities, disrupt the network, and save victims. We adopt a multi-stream data integration approach primarily focusing on consumer-generated business reviews on Yelp.com, enriched with features from contextual data sources, such as the U.S. Census and business license records. We propose a novel decision support framework that extends the traditional link prediction methods by defining a higher-order neighborhood to detect links between pairs of massage businesses and the exposure of businesses to illicit activities related to human trafficking. We achieve this by introducing a bespoke subgraph extraction strategy in GNNs where the node features are derived using NLP techniques. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the competitive performance of our approach over the baseline methods.
Before Forgetting, Learn to Remember: Revisiting Foundational Learning Failures in LVLM Unlearning Benchmarks
PDF ↗While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) offer powerful capabilities, they pose privacy risks by unintentionally memorizing sensitive personal information. Current unlearning benchmarks attempt to mitigate this using fictitious identities but overlook a critical stage 1 failure: models fail to effectively memorize target information initially, rendering subsequent unlearning evaluations unreliable. Diagnosing under-memorization and the multi-hop curse as root causes, we introduce ReMem, a Reliable Multi-hop and Multi-image Memorization Benchmark. ReMem ensures robust foundational learning through principled data scaling, reasoning-aware QA pairs, and diverse visual contexts. Additionally, we propose a novel Exposure metric to quantify the depth of information erasure from the model’s internal probability distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReMem provides a rigorous and trustworthy framework for diagnosing both learning and unlearning behaviors in LVLMs.
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual understanding, yet they struggle with knowledge-intensive queries involving long-tail entities or evolving information due to static parametric knowledge. Recent search-augmented approaches attempt to address this limitation, but existing methods rely on indiscriminate whole-image retrieval that introduces substantial visual redundancy and noise, and lack deep iterative reflection, limiting their effectiveness on complex visual queries. To overcome these challenges, we propose Glance-or-Gaze (GoG), a fully autonomous framework that shifts from passive perception to active visual planning. GoG introduces a Selective Gaze mechanism that dynamically chooses whether to glance at global context or gaze into high-value regions, filtering irrelevant information before retrieval. We design a dual-stage training strategy: Reflective GoG Behavior Alignment via supervised fine-tuning instills the fundamental GoG paradigm, while Complexity-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning further enhances the model’s capability to handle complex queries through iterative reasoning. Experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies confirm that both Selective Gaze and complexity-aware RL are essential for effective visual search. We will release our data and models for further exploration soon.
Scientific rigour tends to be sidelined in favour of bold statements, leading authors to overstate claims beyond what their results support. We present RIGOURATE, a two-stage multimodal framework that retrieves supporting evidence from a paper’s body and assigns each claim an overstatement score. The framework consists of a dataset of over 10K claim–evidence sets from ICLR and NeurIPS papers, annotated using eight LLMs, with overstatement scores calibrated using peer-review comments and validated through human evaluation. It employes a fine-tuned reranker for evidence retrieval and a fine-tuned model to predict overstatement scores with justification. Compared to strong baselines, RIGOURATE enables improved evidence retrieval and overstatement detection. Overall, our work operationalises evidential proportionality and supports clearer, more transparent scientific communication.
When 20 Agents Fail to Sort: The Distributed Sorting Benchmark for Scalable Multi-Agent Systems
PDF ↗Current LLM-based multi-agent systems remain fragile under scaling, even on algorithmically trivial tasks. We introduce MAS-BENCH, a distributed-sorting benchmark that isolates coordination under explicit communication constraints: each agent observes only a local segment and must collectively produce a globally consistent order via broadcasting, peer-to-peer messaging, or a shared key-value store. Across LLM-based agents, success drops sharply as the number of agents grows, exposing persistent failures in shared state, convention alignment, and consistent termination. To mitigate these breakdowns, we propose CAMOC, a lightweight, drop-in proof-of-concept built on collaboration-aware information sharing, early global metadata exchange, and single-commit verification. CAMOC substantially improves coordination success and efficiency across backends, with the largest gains under shared-state interaction. Overall, MAS-BENCH provides a diagnostic benchmark and CAMOC offers a practical step toward more reliable large-scale LLM collaboration, highlighting a gap between individual reasoning and collective correctness.
Is Grokking Worthwhile? Functional Analysis and Transferability of Generalization Circuits in Transformers
PDF ↗While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at factual retrieval, they often struggle with the "curse of two-hop reasoning" in compositional tasks. Recent research suggests that parameter-sharing transformers can bridge this gap by forming a "Generalization Circuit" during a prolonged "grokking" phase. A fundamental question arises: Is a grokked model truly superior to its non-grokked counterparts? Furthermore, is the extensive computational cost of waiting for the grokking phase worthwhile? In this work, we conduct a mechanistic study to evaluate the Generalization Circuit’s role in knowledge assimilation and transfer. We demonstrate that: (i) The inference paths established by non-grokked and grokked models for in-distribution compositional queries are identical. This suggests that the "Generalization Circuit" does not represent the sudden acquisition of a new reasoning paradigm. Instead, we argue that grokking is the process of integrating memorized atomic facts into an easy-acquire, naturally established reasoning path. (ii) Achieving high accuracy on unseen cases after prolonged training and the formation of a certain reasoning path are not bound; they can occur independently under specific data regimes. (iii) Even a mature circuit exhibits limited transferability when integrating new knowledge, suggesting that "grokked" Transformers do not achieve a full mastery of compositional logic.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used across the scientific workflow, including to draft peer-review reports. However, many AI-generated reviews are superficial and insufficiently actionable, leaving authors without concrete, implementable guidance and motivating the gap this work addresses. We propose RbtAct, which targets actionable review feedback generation and places existing peer review rebuttal at the center of learning. Rebuttals show which reviewer comments led to concrete revisions or specific plans, and which were only defended. Building on this insight, we leverage rebuttal as implicit supervision to directly optimize a feedback generator for actionability. To support this objective, we propose a new task called perspective-conditioned segment-level review feedback generation, in which the model is required to produce a single focused comment based on the complete paper and a specified perspective such as experiments and writing. We also build a large dataset named RMR-75K that maps review segments to the rebuttal segments that address them, with perspective labels and impact categories that order author uptake. We then train the Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct model with supervised fine-tuning on review segments followed by preference optimization using rebuttal derived pairs. Experiments with human experts and LLM-as-a-judge show consistent gains in actionability and specificity over strong baselines while maintaining grounding and relevance.
RoleConflictBench: A Benchmark of Role Conflict Scenarios for Evaluating LLMs’ Contextual Sensitivity
PDF ↗People often encounter role conflicts—social dilemmas where the expectations of multiple roles clash and cannot be simultaneously fulfilled. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly navigate these social dynamics, a critical research question emerges. When faced with such dilemmas, do LLMs prioritize dynamic contextual cues or the learned preferences? To address this, we introduce RoleConflictBench, a novel benchmark designed to measure the contextual sensitivity of LLMs in role conflict scenarios. To enable objective evaluation within this subjective domain, we employ situational urgency as a constraint for decision-making. We construct the dataset through a three-stage pipeline that generates over 13,000 realistic scenarios across 65 roles in five social domains by systematically varying the urgency of competing situations. This controlled setup enables us to quantitatively measure contextual sensitivity, determining whether model decisions align with the situational contexts or are overridden by the learned role preferences. Our analysis of 10 LLMs reveals that models substantially deviate from this objective baseline. Instead of responding to dynamic contextual cues, their decisions are predominantly governed by the preferences toward specific social roles.
Multi-agent debate (MAD) is widely used to improve large language model (LLM) performance through test-time scaling, yet recent work shows that vanilla MAD often underperforms simple majority vote despite higher computational cost. Studies show that, under homogeneous agents and uniform belief updates, debate preserves expected correctness and therefore cannot reliably improve outcomes. Drawing on findings from human deliberation and collective decision-making, we identify two key mechanisms missing from vanilla MAD: (i) diversity of initial viewpoints and (ii) explicit, calibrated confidence communication. We propose two lightweight interventions. First, a diversity-aware initialisation that selects a more diverse pool of candidate answers, increasing the likelihood that a correct hypothesis is present at the start of debate. Second, a confidence-modulated debate protocol in which agents express calibrated confidence and condition their updates on others’ confidence. We show theoretically that diversity-aware initialisation improves the prior probability of MAD success without changing the underlying update dynamics, while confidence-modulated updates enable debate to systematically drift to the correct hypothesis. Empirically, across six reasoning-oriented QA benchmarks, our methods consistently outperform vanilla MAD and majority vote. Our results connect human deliberation with LLM-based debate and demonstrate that simple, principled modifications can substantially enhance debate effectiveness.
DPLoRA: A Dual-Pruning Framework based on ILP Optimization and Progressive Pruning for Parameter-Efficient LoRA Fine-Tuning
PDF ↗We propose DPLoRA (Dual-Pruning Low-Rank Adaptation), a framework that optimizes rank allocation via two stages: (1) an initial pruning stage (OPLoRA; Optimal Pruning LoRA) that uses Integer Linear Programming (ILP) to determine optimal layer-wise ranks without manual tuning; and (2) a progressive pruning stage that further reduces ranks adaptively during training using importance scores smoothed by Exponential Moving Average (EMA). Experiments demonstrate that OPLoRA consistently outperforms existing PEFT baselines on GLUE and instruction-following tasks, while the full DPLoRA framework establishes a new state-of-the-art among compared PEFT baselines on GLUE at high-performance settings (p=0.4). At efficiency-focused settings (p=0.8), our method reduces trainable parameters by over 80% and training time by 46% compared to standard LoRA, offering a highly efficient solution for deploying large-scale models in resource-constrained environments.
Adaptive Prompt Optimization for Open-Ended Tasks: Uncertainty Preference as a Secondary Signal
PDF ↗Prompt optimizers are widely used to create high-quality prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs), but their effectiveness remains unstable in practice. This instability is caused by the misalignment between conservative needs (e.g., safety compliance) and open-ended goals (e.g., creative writing). To address this, we propose a semantic-entropy-based method, using task uncertainty to guide prompt optimization. Specifically, we measure the task’s uncertainty level with pre-defined templates, then use this measure to direct prompt optimization: selecting high-entropy prompt candidates for creative tasks and low-entropy candidates for conservative ones. Extensive experiments across various model families demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baselines by effectively adjusting entropy levels. Our approach requires no training, works with black-box models, and integrates easily into existing prompt optimizers.
Self-Guided Plan Extraction for Instruction-Following Tasks with Goal-Conditional Reinforcement Learning
PDF ↗We introduce SuperIgor, a framework for instruction-following tasks. Unlike prior methods that rely on predefined subtasks, SuperIgor enables a language model to generate and refine high-level plans through a self-learning mechanism, reducing the need for manual dataset annotation. Our approach involves iterative co-training: an RL agent is trained to follow the generated plans, while the language model adapts and modifies these plans based on RL feedback and preferences. This creates a feedback loop where both the agent and the planner improve jointly. We validate our framework in environments with rich dynamics and stochasticity. Results show that SuperIgor agents adhere to instructions more strictly than baseline methods, while also demonstrating strong generalization to previously unseen instructions.
Long-term conversational large language model (LLM) agents require memory systems that can recover relevant evidence from historical interactions without overwhelming the answer stage with irrelevant context. However, existing memory systems, including hierarchical ones, still often rely solely on vector similarity for retrieval. It tends to produce bloated evidence sets: adding many superficially similar dialogue turns yields little additional recall, but lowers retrieval precision, increases answer-stage context cost, and makes retrieved memories harder to inspect and manage. To address this, we propose HiGMem (Hierarchical and LLM-Guided Memory System), a two-level event-turn memory system that allows LLMs to use event summaries as semantic anchors to predict which related turns are worth reading. This allows the model to inspect high-level event summaries first and then focus on a smaller set of potentially useful turns, providing a concise and reliable evidence set through reasoning, while avoiding the retrieval overhead that would be excessively high compared to vector retrieval.On the LoCoMo10 benchmark, HiGMem achieves the best F1 on four of five question categories and improves adversarial F1 from 0.54 to 0.78 over A-Mem, while retrieving an order of magnitude fewer turns. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZeroLoss-Lab/HiGMem.
Existing approaches to bias evaluation in large language models (LLMs) trade ecological validity for statistical control, relying on artificial prompts that poorly reflect real-world use, or on naturalistic tasks that lack scale and rigor. We introduce a scalable bias-auditing framework using named entities as probes to measure structural disparities in model behavior. We show that synthetic data reliably reproduces bias patterns observed in natural text, enabling large-scale analysis. Using this approach, we conduct the largest bias audit to date, comprising 1.9 billion data points across multiple entity types, tasks, languages, models, and prompting strategies. Our results reveal systematic biases: models penalize right-wing politicians, favor left-wing politicians, prefer Western and wealthy nations over the Global South, favor Western companies, and penalize firms in the defense and pharmaceutical sectors. While instruction tuning reduces bias, increasing model scale amplifies it, and prompting in Chinese or Russian does not attenuate Western-aligned preferences. These results indicate that LLMs should undergo rigorous auditing before deployment in high-stakes applications.
The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) towards autonomous agents has catalyzed progress in Deep Research. While retrieval capabilities are well-benchmarked, the post-retrieval synthesis stage—where agents must digest massive amounts of context and consolidate fragmented evidence into coherent, long-form reports—remains under-evaluated due to the subjectivity of open-ended writing.To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepSynth-Eval, a benchmark designed to objectively evaluate information consolidation capabilities. We leverage high-quality survey papers as gold standards, reverse-engineer research requests, and construct Oracle Contexts from their bibliographies to isolate synthesis from retrieval noise. We propose a fine-grained evaluation protocol using General Checklists (for factual coverage) and Constraint Checklists (for structural organization), transforming subjective judgment into verifiable metrics. Experiments across 96 tasks reveal that synthesizing information from hundreds of references remains a significant challenge. Our results demonstrate that agentic "plan-then-write" workflows significantly outperform single-turn generation, effectively reducing hallucinations and improving adherence to complex structural constraints.
In complex domains like interior design, user requests are often ambiguous and multimodal. Professional designers address this by asking strategic clarification questions based on hierarchical priorities, a capability lacking in current Vision-Language Models (VLMs). When fine-tuned on dialogue data, existing models often exhibit modality forgetting, overfitting to textual patterns while neglecting visual cues and thus producing hallucinated or visually irrelevant questions. To bridge this gap, we introduce VIDA (Visual Intent-driven Design Assistant), an assistant designed to generate proactive, visually grounded, and strategically prioritized clarification questions. Instead of standard fine-tuning, we propose a strategy-aware alignment framework that evolves from imitation learning to value-driven reinforcement. We utilize Group Sequence Policy Optimization to strictly enforce expert protocols, ensuring the model not only mimics fluent speech but also adheres to optimal inquiry strategies. Crucially, we design a novel hierarchical reward mechanism with Dynamic Intent Binding to align the assistant with professional prioritization standards. To facilitate this research, we construct and release InteriorClarify, a multimodal benchmark dataset comprising 1,016 real-world consultation cases annotated with this three-tier intent hierarchy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VIDA sets a new state-of-the-art, improving the Strategic Alignment Score (SAS) by 20.59% over SFT baselines and effectively restoring visual grounding capabilities lost during standard fine-tuning.
Large language models (LLMs) enable simulating individual responses from persona information, supporting applications such as opinion elicitation and virtual character creation. However, existing approaches typically assume rich persona profiles, which are often unavailable in practice. In this work, motivated by recent findings that LLMs can identify query-relevant persona dimensions (e.g., whether a user is price-sensitive), we study query-focused individual simulation under cold-start settings, where relevant persona information is identified and requested on demand for each query. To solve this task while minimizing the number of persona requests, we explore a progressive method that iteratively predicts the most critical relevant persona dimension and uses self-reported confidence as a stopping signal to determine when sufficient information has been collected. Experiments on two dialogue datasets show that this query-driven paradigm achieves simulation performance comparable to approaches that rely on rich persona information extracted from dialogue history, using only a few persona dimensions (up to five per query), and this number is further reduced by our progressive method while maintaining or improving simulation quality.
Reward models trained through Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) methods frequently suffer from limited generalizability, which hinders the alignment performance of policy models. This challenge stems from various issues, including distribution shift, preference label noise, and mismatch of overly challenging samples with model capacity. In this paper, we aim to enhance the generalizability of reward models through a data-centric approach, driven by the insight that these issues are inherently intertwined from a uniform perspective of data difficulty. Accordingly, we propose a novel framework, Curriculum-RLAIF, which constructs preference pairs with varying difficulty levels and then produces a specific curriculum for reward model training. Comprehensive experimental results suggest that reward models trained with Curriculum-RLAIF achieve improved generalizability, boosting the alignment performance of policy models by a significant margin without incurring additional inference costs compared to various existing non-curriculum baselines. Further analysis and comparison with alternative strategies highlight the superiority of Curriculum-RLAIF in simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness.
Knowledge distillation has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for transferring the superior reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) to efficient student models. However, the raw Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories are often verbose and redundant, which dilutes the underlying logic and hinders effective knowledge distillation for student models. Although recent work has focused on pruning CoT to streamline these reasoning paths, existing local heuristic methods often fail to capture global causal logic due to rigid rules and limited search spaces, while global heuristic approaches incur substantial computational costs. To address these issues, we propose Pru-CoT (Pruning Chain-of-Thought), a framework that aims to extract the essential logical structure from reasoning chains. Pru-CoT implements a step-level importance assessment via global optimization on a frozen student large language model (LLM), quantifying the gradient-based causal contribution of each component. Guided by these important signals, the framework performs fidelity-constrained pruning, utilizing an LLM-driven process to synthesize concise, logically coherent narratives. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that models trained with Pru-CoT not only achieve superior accuracy but also generate significantly more compact reasoning paths compared to those trained on raw verbose data.