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Fengyu Zhang, Bin Liu, Jianhua Tao, Zhuofan Wen, Shun Chen, Hailiang Yao, Zhengqi Wen

Multimodal emotion reasoning requires both accurate identification and logical rationales to explain emotional triggers. However, current methods often suffer from causal degeneracy, where models produce linguistically fluent but superficial explanations that lack authentic logical derivation. To resolve this, we propose CAIR (Causal Adaptive Information-based Reinforcement Learning), a reinforcement learning framework that treats rationales as causal mediators between raw perceptual signals and emotional semantics. Our core contribution is the Causal Mediation Reward (CMR), which quantifies a rationale’s interventional utility by measuring its marginal contribution to resolving predictive uncertainty. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive optimization mechanism based on the information bottleneck to balance perception and reasoning across varying cognitive loads. CAIR achieves state-of-the-art performance on MTMEUR with 73.80% accuracy and competitive results on the SCEA subset of EmoBench-M (68.5%), outperforming specialized SFT baselines by up to 14.4% while enhancing rationale faithfulness. Our findings underscore that principled reward design, rather than mere model scaling, is essential for building systems with authentic, human-like emotional understanding.

Zhiyi Duan, Lei Gao, Jiangshan Guan, Qi Wang, Rui Liu

Current benchmarks for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) primarily rely on answer correctness, failing to assess the structural coherence and cognitive soundness of the reasoning process itself. To address this gap, we introduce Cognitive Hierarchy Trace (CHT), a novel evaluation framework grounded in Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy (BCT). CHT provides a structured, step-wise mapping of a model’s reasoning trajectory onto hierarchical cognitive levels, enabling the detection of structural anomalies such as hierarchy jumps, breaks, and overthinking. Based on CHT, we present BloomEval, the first large-scale benchmark designed for fine-grained cognitive capability assessment. It comprises 94,602 math problems, each annotated with Bloom’s cognitive levels, CHT trajectories, a three-tier knowledge hierarchy, and problem difficulty. To ensure scalable yet reliable annotation, we develop an Expert-LLM collaborative pipeline with a three-stage reconciliation mechanism. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a critical finding: models often arrive at correct answers through cognitively flawed or opaque reasoning paths. The CHT-based analysis uncovers prevalent structural inconsistencies that are invisible to outcome-only metrics, demonstrating that answer accuracy is an insufficient proxy for reasoning quality.

Rishikesh Devanathan, Varun Nathan, Ayush Kumar

Synthetic data is increasingly critical for contact centers, where privacy constraints and data scarcity limit the availability of real conversations. However, generating synthetic dialogues that are realistic and useful for downstream applications remains challenging. In this work, we benchmark multiple generation strategies guided by structured supervision on call attributes (Intent Summaries, Topic Flows, and Quality Assurance (QA) Forms) across multiple languages. To test downstream utility, we evaluate synthetic transcripts on an automated quality assurance (AutoQA) task, finding that prompts optimized on real transcripts consistently outperform those optimized on synthetic transcripts. These results suggest that current synthetic transcripts fall short in capturing the full realism of real agent–customer interactions. To highlight these downstream gaps, we introduce a diagnostic evaluation framework comprising 17 metrics across four dimensions: (1) Emotional and Sentiment Arcs, (2) Linguistic Complexity, (3) Interaction Style, and (4) Conversational Properties. Our analysis shows that even with structured supervision, current generation strategies exhibit measurable deficiencies in sentiment fidelity, disfluency modeling, behavioral variation, and conversational realism. Together, these results highlight the importance of diagnostic, metric-driven evaluation for synthetic conversation generation intended for downstream applications.

Meixiu Long, Duolin Sun, Dan Yang, Yihan Jiao, Lei Liu, Jiahai Wang, Binbin Hu, Yue Shen, Jie Feng, Zhehao Tan 等

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for passage reranking in information retrieval, leveraging their superior reasoning capabilities to address the limitations of conventional models on complex queries. However, current LLM-based reranking paradigms are fundamentally constrained by an efficiency-accuracy trade-off: (1) pointwise methods are efficient but ignore inter-document comparison, yielding suboptimal accuracy; (2) listwise methods capture global context but suffer from context-window constraints and prohibitive inference latency. To address these issues, we propose GroupRank, a novel paradigm that balances flexibility and context awareness. To unlock the full potential of groupwise reranking, we propose an answer-free data synthesis pipeline that fuses local pointwise signals with global listwise rankings. These samples facilitate supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, with the latter guided by a specialized group-ranking reward comprising ranking-utility and group-alignment. These complementary components synergistically optimize document ordering and score calibration to reflect intrinsic query-document relevance.Experimental results show GroupRank achieves a state-of-the-art 65.2 NDCG@10 on BRIGHT and surpasses baselines by 2.1 points on R2MED, while delivering a 6.4\times inference speedup. The code is available at https://github.com/AQ-MedAI/Diver/tree/main/Reranker/GroupRank.

Argyrios Papoudakis, Mirella Lapata, Frank Keller

Character description generation is an important capability for narrative-focused applications such as summarization, story analysis, and character-driven simulations. However, generating accurate character descriptions from long-form narratives (e.g., novels) is challenging: models must track evolving attributes (e.g., relationships and events), integrate evidence scattered across the text, and infer implicit details. Despite the success of reasoning-enabled LLMs on many benchmarks, we find that for character description generation their performance improves when built-in reasoning is disabled (i.e., an empty reasoning trace). Motivated by this, we propose a training framework that decouples reasoning from generation. Our approach, which can be applied on top of long-context LLMs or chunk-based methods, consists of a reasoning model that produces a structured QA reasoning trace and a generation model that conditions on this trace to produce the final character description. Experiments on two datasets (BookWorm and CroSS) show that QA-guided reasoning improves faithfulness, informativeness, and grounding over strong long-context baselines.

Heng Zhang, Yihao Zhong, Lubin Gan, Zhihe Chen, Jiajun Wu, Yuling Shi, Xiaodong Gu, Hao Zhang, Haochen You, Jin Huang

Multi-agent systems powered by large language models have achieved strong performance on complex tasks, yet naive collaboration topologies often cause high communication costs and redundant context. Existing methods usually use a fixed communication graph and manage collaboration structure and shared memory in separate modules. Our log analysis of several representative systems shows that this separation leads to multiple copies of the same key facts in dialogue, memory and model inputs. We address this issue with EvoHyper, a framework based on an evolving hypergraph topology for multi-agent collaboration. In EvoHyper, a single hypergraph represents agents and shared memory, and each hyperedge serves as a collaboration unit that binds a group of agents to that shared memory. During execution a controller edits the hypergraph through a small set of predefined evolution operations, so collaboration units can spawn, update and merge as tasks unfold. Experiments on four benchmarks covering mathematical reasoning and code generation show that EvoHyper is (I) high-performing, achieving 3.2% to 7.8% accuracy gains over state-of-the-art methods, (II) efficient, reducing token consumption by up to 23.5%, and (III) adaptive, adjusting topology complexity according to task requirements.

Wuyang Zhang, Shichao Pei

Tool-use large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed to support sensitive workflows, relying on tool calls for retrieval, external API access, and session memory management. While prior research has examined various threats, the risk of systematic data exfiltration by backdoored agents remains underexplored. In this work, we present a backdoor attack framework that embeds semantic triggers into fine-tuned LLM agents. When triggered, the backdoored agent invokes memory-access tool calls to retrieve stored user context and exfiltrates it via disguised retrieval tool calls. We further demonstrate that multi-turn interaction amplifies the impact of data exfiltration, as attacker-controlled retrieval responses can subtly steer subsequent agent behavior and user interactions, enabling sustained and cumulative information leakage over time. Our experimental results expose a critical vulnerability in LLM agents with tool access and highlight the need for defenses against exfiltration-oriented backdoors.

Karun Sharma, Vidushee Vats, Shengzhi LI, Yuxiang Wang, Zhongtian Sun, Prayag Tiwari

Peer review relies on substantive, evidence-based questions, yet current LLMs generate surface-level queries that perform worse than human reviewer questions in expert evaluation. To address this gap, we curate a high-quality dataset of reviewer questions from OpenReview and conduct a human preference study where expert annotators evaluate question-paper pairs across three dimensions: effort, evidence, and grounding. From these annotations, we train IntelliReward, a reward model built from a frozen autoregressive LLM with trainable multi-head transformers. Validated against expert judgments, IntelliReward predicts reviewer-question quality better than API-based SFT baselines and provides scalable evaluation. We apply Decoupled Clip and Dynamic Sampling Policy Optimization (DAPO) with IntelliReward to train IntelliAsk, a question-generation model aligned with human standards of effortful, evidence-based critique. Human evaluations show IntelliAsk generates more grounded, substantive and effortful questions than strong baselines and reduces reliance on first-page content. We also find improvements on reasoning and writing benchmarks, suggesting reviewer-question quality correlates with broader capabilities. Compared to Qwen3-32B, IntelliAsk improves MuSR (68.3 vs 64.7 Acc) and WritingBench (8.31 vs 8.07). We release our code, filtered review dataset, expert annotations, IntelliAsk and IntelliReward to support automatic evaluation of grounding, effort, and evidence in LLM-generated review questions.

Yuyang Dai, Yan Lin, Zhuohan Xie, Yuxia Wang

Reliable financial reasoning requires knowing not only how to answer, but also when an answer cannot be justified. In real financial practice, problems often rely on implicit assumptions that are taken for granted rather than stated explicitly, causing problems to appear solvable while lacking enough information for a definite answer. We introduce RealFin, a bilingual benchmark that evaluates financial reasoning by systematically removing essential premises from exam-style questions while keeping them linguistically plausible. Based on this, we evaluate models under three formulations that test answering, recognizing missing information, and rejecting unjustified options, and find consistent performance drops when key conditions are absent. General-purpose models tend to over-commit and guess, while most finance-specialized models fail to clearly identify missing premises. These results highlight a critical gap in current evaluations and show that reliable financial models must know when a question should not be answered. The dataset and code are available athttps://github.com/insait-institute/RealFin.

Hongwang Xiao, Wenjun Lin, Xi Chen, Hui Wang, Kai Chen, Jiashan Li, Yuancheng Sun, Sicheng Dai, Boya Wu, Qiwei Ye

Understanding the intricate interplay among sequence, structure, and function remains a fundamental challenge in proteomics. The sequence-structure-function paradigm posits that biological roles are governed by the tertiary geometric conformations encoded within primary sequences; consequently, integrating these multi-modal descriptors is imperative for accurate functional annotation. While protein language models (pLMs) have achieved significant progress via representation learning on massive sequence data, they often lack the capacity to incorporate high-resolution structural information and the rich textual context that characterizes protein roles. In this work, we present STELLA, a multimodal LLM that synergistically aligns bimodal (sequence-structure) representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. By leveraging ESM3 for unified bimodal encoding and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct for natural language modeling, STELLA achieves state-of-the-art performance in two critical tasks: Functional Description Prediction and Enzyme-catalyzed Reaction Prediction. This study demonstrates that multimodal LLMs represent a paradigm shift beyond pure pLMs, offering a new frontier for protein biology and biomedical discovery. The codes can be accessed via https://github.com/ocx-lab/STELLA.

Kejia Chen, Junjun Zheng, Jiawen Zhang, Manxi Lin, Xiao Pan, Jiacong Hu, Jian Lou, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often prioritize linguistic fluency over visual fidelity, leading to hallucinations where generated text contradicts the image. Countering this bias typically requires resource-heavy fine-tuning or high-latency verification methods that provide feedback only after the full response is generated. To overcome these limitations, we present a framework for Token-level Inference-Time Alignment (TITA) that steers the decoding process without updating the base model parameters. By training a lightweight reward model to capture visual preferences, TITA extracts implicit guidance through log-probability ratios. This approach functions as an inference-time adaptation of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), injecting dense feedback to correct the output distribution at every generation step. Across diverse architectures including LLaVA-1.5, Qwen3-VL, and InternVL3.5, TITA consistently improves performance on 13 benchmarks. For example, TITA boosts LLaVA-1.5-7B by 8.6% on MMVet and achieves a 74.0 MMStar score with Qwen3-VL-8B. Specifically, these gains incur negligible overhead (~0.2s per query), offering a superior trade-off between alignment effectiveness and efficiency. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Thecommonirin/TITA.

Xinhao Zhang, Xi Chen, François Portet, Maxime Peyrard

Recent work has demonstrated the promise of orchestrating large language models (LLMs) within evolutionary and agentic optimization systems. However, the mechanisms driving these optimization gains remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a large-scale study of LLM-guided evolutionary search, collecting optimization trajectories for 15 LLMs across 8 tasks. Although zero-shot problem-solving ability correlates with final optimization outcomes, it explains only part of the variance: models with similar initial capability often induce dramatically different search trajectories and outcomes. By analyzing these trajectories, we find that strong LLM optimizers behave as local refiners, producing frequent incremental improvements while progressively localizing the search in semantic space. Conversely, weaker optimizers exhibit large semantic drift, with sporadic breakthroughs followed by stagnation. Notably, various measures of solution novelty do not predict final performance; novelty is beneficial only when the search remains sufficiently localized around high-performing regions of the solution space. Our results highlight the importance of trajectory analysis for understanding and improving LLM-based optimization systems and provide actionable insights for their design and training.

Hanyun Jiang, Peisen Yao, Kaiyue Li, Tingting Lin, Chengpeng Wang, Kui Ren

Code optimization remains a core objective in software development, yet modern compilers struggle to navigate the enormous optimization spaces. While recent research has looked into employing large language models (LLMs) to optimize source code directly, these techniques can introduce semantic errors and miss fine-grained compiler-level optimization opportunities. We present HintPilot, which bridges LLM-based reasoning with traditional compiler infrastructures via synthesizing compiler hints—annotations that steer compiler behavior. HintPilot employs retrieval-augmented synthesis over compiler documentation and applies profiling-guided iterative refinement to synthesize semantics-preserving and effective hints. Upon PolyBench and HumanEval-CPP benchmarks, HintPilot achieves up to 6.88x geometric mean speedup over -Ofast while preserving program correctness.

Yuxin Liu, Jinxuan Zhang, Yuezhang Peng, Hefeng Zhou, Xiangfeng Wang, Jiong Lou, Chentao Wu, Jie LI, Jingjing Qu, Chaochao Lu

Agentic workflows, composed of multiple collaborating Large Language Models (LLMs), have become a key paradigm for complex problem-solving. However, their effectiveness is often hindered by three critical challenges: high manual design costs, inefficient agentic search, and poor dynamic adaptability to new tasks and human preferences. To address these limitations, we propose HFlow, an evolutionary framework for generating agentic workflows through human-agent collaboration. HFlow employs an evolutionary algorithm to automate the search for optimal workflows by mutating and crossing over their structures, prompts, and LLM backbones. This process is guided by human preferences to ensure rapid convergence, while a hierarchical experience memory enables the generalization of learned strategies. Extensive experiments on math and code generation benchmarks show HFlow surpasses other automated baselines by up to 27.34%, while achieving comparable performance to o1-preview at only one-fourth of the cost. Our work introduces a new paradigm for workflow design that produces cost-effective and adaptive solutions, better aligning automated agentic systems with dynamic human needs.

Yunxiang Zhang, Muhammad Khalifa, Lechen Zhang, Xin Liu, Ayoung Lee, Xinliang Frederick Zhang, Farima Fatahi Bayat, Lu Wang

Large reasoning models exhibit long chain-of-thought reasoning with complex strategies such as backtracking and self-verification. Yet, these capabilities typically require resource-intensive post-training. We investigate whether such behaviors can be elicited in large models without any gradient updates. To this end, we propose a decoding-time approach, ThinkLogit, which utilizes logit arithmetic to transfer these capabilities from a substantially smaller reasoning guider to a large non-reasoning target. We further show that we can boost performance by training the guider to correct the target’s errors using preference optimization over mixed model outputs, a setup we refer to as ThinkLogit-DPO. We evaluate these methods across six reasoning benchmarks spanning math, science, and coding domains using the Qwen2.5-32B guided by R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, a model 21x smaller. Our experiments demonstrate that ThinkLogit and ThinkLogit-DPO achieve a relative improvement of 21.5% and 24.2%, respectively, over the target model. Moreover, ThinkLogit remains effective even when the guider and target come from different model families.Crucially, our method requires zero training for the large model and would incur minimal inference overhead when logits are computed in parallel, presenting a practical solution for enabling long reasoning at scale.

Yingyao Ma, Yuanyuan Zhou, Congyu Zhang, Yi Yuan, Jiasong Wu, Lotfi Senhadji, Huazhong Shu

Recent advances in Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) exploit textual and visual information to disambiguate mentions and align them with entities in a knowledge base. Existing methods typically design separate and complex network modules for each type of interaction among multi-granular and multimodal features, while lacking explicit modeling of the joint dependencies among these features. Moreover, most approaches rely on unidirectional retrieval-based matching and lack knowledge-driven verification, leading to unreliable disambiguation in weak-context scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage MEL framework termed ThinkLinker. First, we introduce a low-rank fusion mechanism to model the joint dependencies among multi-granular and multimodal features, enabling comprehensive and explicit interactions while learning task-relevant discriminative information for candidate ranking in a lower-dimensional space. Subsequently, we develop a bidirectional retrieval-verification paradigm, where the ranked candidate entities guide an LLM-based multi-turn, dialogue-style verification process to generate mention-specific contextual augmentation. The augmented context is then adaptively fused with the original representation to further refine the linking model. Experimental results on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed ThinkLinker outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhouyuanyu/ThinkLinker.

Yibo Yan, Mingdong Ou, Yi Cao, Xin Zou, Jiahao Huo, Shuliang Liu, James Kwok, Xuming Hu

Visual Document Retrieval (VDR), which aims to retrieve relevant pages within vast corpora of visually-rich documents, is of significance in current multimodal retrieval applications. The state-of-the-art multi-vector paradigm excels in performance but suffers from prohibitive overhead, a problem that current efficiency methods like pruning and merging address imperfectly, creating a difficult trade-off between compression rate and feature fidelity. To overcome this dilemma, we introduce **Prune-then-Merge**, a novel two-stage framework that synergizes these complementary approaches. Our method first employs an adaptive pruning stage to filter out low-information patches, creating a refined, high-signal set of embeddings. Subsequently, a hierarchical merging stage compresses this pre-filtered set, effectively summarizing semantic content without the noise-induced feature dilution seen in single-stage methods. **Extensive experiments on 29 VDR datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms existing methods, significantly extending the near-lossless compression range and providing robust performance at high compression ratios.**

Lynda Tamine, Ahmed Rayane Kebir, Merveille Dona Codjo, Enzo Pasquies, Jose G Moreno

Cross-task generalization mimics human intelligence through the ability to perform tasks by recalling foundational skills acquired previously. In this paper, we argue that argument generation and argument retrieval are complex tasks that could leverage cross-tasking atomic argument mining and argument quality assessment tasks, even if there is no supervision. We empirically demonstrate the rationale behind our claim through the \textit{ArgLLM} framework, including a total of 18.9K instruction data using a multi-choice question-answering format, scaling up through multi-tasking and model merging, six natural language argumentation atomic tasks to four complex argument generation and argument retrieval tasks. Our results and analysis, using the backbone Mistral and Llama models, show that cross-tasking in zero-shot settings outperforms base models and is robust to varying strategies, tasks, and model sizes, offering a valuable trade-off between computational cost and task performance.

Aastha Sharma, Guangjing Wang

High-fidelity audio generation techniques, such as voice conversion and singing voice synthesis, have significantly increased the risk of audio deepfakes. Although existing methods perform well on conversational speech deepfake detection, they fail severely under the speech-to-singing domain shift. To address this limitation, we propose GenuVoice, a unified deepfake detector based on a multi-branch mixture-of-experts architecture that integrates three complementary feature views: Wav2Vec 2.0 representations, log-mel spectrograms, and mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). Each expert is trained to remain independently discriminative, while a learned gating network dynamically weights expert contributions. A speech-retentive multi-domain fine-tuning strategy enables adaptation to singing without degrading speech performance. GenuVoice achieves 1.82% Equal Error Rate (EER) on CtrSVDD, compared to 37–62% for existing speech-trained detectors, while preserving strong speech performance (0.38% EER on ASVspoof 2019) and generalizing to unseen generators (8.89% EER on held-out ASVspoof 2021). Extensive ablations confirm the importance of multi-expert fusion and speech retention, establishing GenuVoice as an effective unified detector for speech and singing deepfakes. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/aastha-sharma/genuvoice

Yixi Zhou, Fan Zhang, YU Chen, Haipeng Zhang, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie

Financial question answering (QA) over long corporate filings requires evidence to satisfy strict constraints on entities, financial metrics, fiscal periods, and numeric values. However, existing LLM-based rerankers primarily optimize semantic relevance, leading to unstable rankings and opaque decisions on long documents. We propose FINCARDS, a structured reranking framework that reframes financial evidence selection as constraint satisfaction under a finance-aware schema. FINCARDS represents filing chunks and questions using aligned schema fields (entities, metrics, periods, and numeric spans), enabling deterministic field-level matching. Evidence is selected via a multi-stage tournament reranking with stability-aware aggregation, producing auditable decision traces. Across two corporate filing QA benchmarks, FINCARDS substantially improves early-rank retrieval over both lexical and LLM-based reranking baselines, while reducing ranking variance, without requiring model fine-tuning or unpredictable inference budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/XanderZhou2022/FINCARDS.