Steerable pluralistic alignment aims to enable large language models (LLMs) to reliably adhere to diverse and potentially conflicting human values, particularly when target objectives involve multi-dimensional, compositional values. Current methods largely rely on prompt engineering or reasoning-time guidance, which often results in fragile and non-persistent control once prompts are perturbed or omitted. In this work, we study value-controllable alignment through discrete condition vectors and propose Verifiable-reward-Routed LoRA—a parameter-efficient mixture-of-experts LoRA framework enhanced with conditioned gating. This gating mechanism dynamically directs the flow among multiple LoRA experts based on an input value or moral vector. To ensure that such routing leads to semantically compliant outputs, we formulate post-training as a reinforcement learning problem with verifiable rewards. We further introduce a conditional consistency reward, computed by an external model-based verifier implemented as a lightweight discriminator, and optimize the adapter parameters using GRPO. Experiments on the Touché23-valueEval (value alignment) and MIC (moral alignment) benchmarks, using two 8-billion-parameter backbones, show that our method consistently outperforms prompt-based steering and multi-task PEFT baselines. It attains the highest overall controllability across micro-F1, macro-F1, and Jaccard metrics—a conclusion further reinforced by human pairwise evaluations.
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Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has emerged as an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods — most notably majority voting and heuristic token-level scoring — treat reasoning traces or tokens equally, thereby being susceptible to substantial variations in trajectory quality and localized logical failures. In this work, we introduce **Chronos**, a lightweight and plug-and-play chronological reasoning scorer that models each trajectory as a time series. Specifically, Chronos learns to capture trajectory features of token probabilities, assigns quality scores accordingly, and employs a weighted voting mechanism. Extensive evaluations on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate that Chronos consistently delivers substantial gains across a variety of models, with negligible computational overhead. Notably, Chronos@128 achieves relative improvements of 34.21% over Pass@1 and 22.70% over Maj@128 on HMMT25 using Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507, highlighting its effectiveness.
PlotGen-Bench: Evaluating VLMs on Generating Visualization Code from Diverse Plots across Multiple Libraries
PDF ↗Recent advances in vision–language models (VLMs) have expanded their multimodal code generation capabilities, yet their ability to generate executable visualization code from plots, especially for complex 3D, animated, plot-to-plot transformations, or multi-library scenarios, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce PlotGen-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating plot-to-code generation under realistic and complex visualization scenarios. The benchmark spans 9 major categories, 30 subcategories, and 3 core tasks—plot replication, plot transformation, and multi-library generation, covering both 2D, 3D and animated plots across 5 widely used visualization libraries. Through systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art open- and closed-source VLMs, we find that open-source models still lag considerably behind in visual fidelity and semantic consistency, despite achieving comparable code executability. Moreover, all models exhibit substantial degradation on reasoning-intensive tasks such as chart type conversion and animation generation. PlotGen-Bench establishes a rigorous foundation for advancing research toward more capable and reliable VLMs for visualization authoring and code synthesis, with all data and code available at https://plotgen.github.io.
Investigating Human and LLMs’ Decisions in Unverifiable Environments: A Case Study with GitHub Activity Overview
PDF ↗The behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) as artificial social actors are largely underexplored, particularly in unverifiable scenarios where conventional benchmarking has little to help improve their abilities. Thus, examining their behaviors in such scenarios can help understand and improve LLMs’ capabilities of simulating real-world social actors in many tasks such as LLM-empowered social agents. We draw a typical unverifiable scenario–a simplified pull request scenario on GitHub focusing on decision-making based on Activity Overview signal–to investigate how human and LLMs behave. We introduce a systematic method to collect, compare, and reason about human and LLMs’ decisions. Our results reveal that there are both similarities and differences between human and LLMs’ decisions, and proprietary LLMs generally behave more like human than open-source LLMs do. We further find that human and LLMs may rely on different information and reasoning mechanisms in decision-making. Our study thus urges more future work on human and LLMs decision-making in unverifiable environments.
As Generative Engines revolutionize information retrieval by synthesizing direct answers from retrieved sources, ensuring source visibility becomes a significant challenge. Improving it through targeted content revisions is a practical strategy termed Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). However, optimizing a document for diverse queries presents a constrained optimization challenge where heterogeneous queries often impose conflicting and competing revision requirements under a limited content budget. To address this challenge, we propose IF-GEO, a "diverge-then-converge" framework comprising two phases: (i) mining distinct optimization preferences from representative latent queries; (ii) synthesizing a Global Revision Blueprint for guided editing by coordinating preferences via conflict-aware instruction fusion. To explicitly quantify IF-GEO’s objective of cross-query stability, we introduce risk-aware stability metrics. Experiments on multi-query benchmarks demonstrate that IF-GEO achieves substantial performance gains while maintaining robustness across diverse retrieval scenarios.
Interactive medical consultation requires an agent to proactively elicit missing clinical evidence under uncertainty. Yet existing evaluations largely remain static or outcome-centric, neglecting the evidence-gathering process. In this work, we propose an interactive evaluation framework that explicitly models the consultation process using a simulated patient and a measurement module grounded in atomic evidences. Based on this representation, we introduce Information Coverage Rate (ICR) to quantify how completely an agent uncovers necessary evidence during interaction. To support systematic study, we build EviMed, an evidence-based benchmark spanning diverse conditions from common complaints to rare diseases, and evaluate 10 models with varying reasoning abilities. We find that strong diagnostic reasoning does not guarantee effective information collection, and this insufficiency acts as a primary bottleneck limiting performance in interactive settings. To address this, we propose REFINE, a strategy that leverages diagnostic verification to guide the agent in proactively resolving uncertainties. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REFINE consistently outperforms baseline methods across diverse models and datasets, achieving superior information coverage and diagnostic accuracy.
CAPA: Contribution-Aware Pruning and FFN Approximation for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models
PDF ↗Efficient inference in Large Vision-Language Models is constrained by the high cost of processing thousands of visual tokens, yet it remains unclear which tokens and computations can be safely removed. While attention scores are commonly used to estimate visual token importance, they are an imperfect proxy for actual contribution. We show that Attention Contribution, which weights attention probabilities by value vector magnitude, provides a more accurate criterion for visual token selection. Our empirical analysis reveals that visual attention sinks are functionally heterogeneous, comprising Probability Dumps with low contribution that can be safely pruned, and Structural Anchors with high contribution essential for maintaining model performance. Further, we identify substantial redundancy in Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) associated with visual tokens, particularly in intermediate layers where image tokens exhibit linear behavior. Based on our findings, we introduce CAPA (Contribution-Aware Pruning and FFN Approximation), a dual-strategy framework that prunes visual tokens using attention contribution at critical functional transitions and reduces FFN computation through efficient linear approximations. Experiments on various benchmarks across baselines show that CAPA achieves competent efficiency–performance trade-offs with improved robustness.
Recent work has aimed to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language models, but these methods are often limited to domains with objectively verifiable answers. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Reasoning-Guided Exploration for Online DPO (RGE-DPO), a novel self-play framework designed to improve reasoning on general-domain data. RGE-DPO employs a dual-reward mechanism to evaluate responses by assessing: (1) reasoning quality using a self-rewarding rubric that provides structured evaluation of logical coherence, reasoning depth, and verification behaviors; and (2) response quality using an established reward model trained for aspects like helpfulness and correctness. These two orthogonal evaluation signals enable a comprehensive assessment of different response dimensions without conflating reasoning processes with response content. We then integrate these two evaluation signals based on a weighted ranking mechanism to construct the preference pairs, which ensures that responses with superior reasoning processes are preferred when response quality is comparable. Experiments demonstrate that RGE-DPO achieves substantial improvements in instruction-following benchmark while maintaining competitive performance on verifiable academic benchmarks.
Affectron: Emotional Speech Synthesis with Affective and Contextually Aligned Nonverbal Vocalizations
PDF ↗Nonverbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter and sighs, are central to the expression of affective cues in emotional speech synthesis. However, learning diverse and contextually aligned NVs remains challenging in open settings due to limited NV data and the lack of explicit supervision. Motivated by this challenge, we propose Affectron as a framework for affective and contextually aligned NV generation. Built on a small-scale open and decoupled corpus, Affectron introduces an NV-augmented training strategy that expands the distribution of NV types and insertion locations. We further incorporate NV structural masking into a speech backbone pre-trained on purely verbal speech to enable diverse and natural NV synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that Affectron produces more expressive and diverse NVs than baseline systems while preserving the naturalness of the verbal speech stream.
A prevalent approach to interpretable representation learning involves creating a mask that weights the significance of each input feature, followed by deriving a masked representation by applying this mask to the input representation. However, the identifiability of these learned masked representations is often uncertain, making the origin of these representations ambiguous or unreliable. Furthermore, the approaches to interpreting Transformer based on attention weights have been criticized for their faithfulness. To address these limitations, we propose a novel causal framework that directly learns identifiable and explainable representations from attention weights, rather than relying on importance masks. Our framework leverages identifiability theory and causal representation learning to extract explainable representations within a subspace of input representations, effectively transforming frozen representation learning methods into self-explaining systems. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that, compared to well-established state-of-the-art methods, our approach provides identifiable and more trustworthy explanations while guaranteeing faithfulness.
VLURes: Benchmarking Long-Text Grounding and Cross-Lingual Robustness in Vision Language Models
PDF ↗We introduce ***VLURes***, a multilingual benchmark for evaluating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) under *long-text grounding*: selecting and reasoning over the image-relevant subset of article-length text that contains distractors and ungrounded claims. *VLURes* contains **4,000** web-curated *image + long-text* pairs across **English (En), Japanese (Ja), Swahili (Sw), and Urdu (Ur)** and **10** topical categories, and defines **eight** tasks spanning image-only perception (OR, SU, RU, SS, IC) and image+text grounding (ITM, *Unrelatedness*, VQA). To construct web-realistic pairs, we apply language-adapted CLIP alignment to select representative images and filter weakly grounded pages. Across **10** proprietary and open VLMs evaluated under zero-shot and one-shot prompting, with and without rationales, the best model (GPT-4o) reaches **90.8%** overall accuracy but remains **6.7** points below human performance (**97.5%**) on Object Recognition, and cross-lingual sensitivity persists, while open models are substantially weaker and often lack reliable multilingual VL support. *VLURes* provides a practical testbed for long-text grounding and multilingual robustness in web-realistic agent settings.
A Framework of Reflective Agents with Adaptive Collaboration for Attributed Summary Generation
PDF ↗Despite progress in LLM summarization, factual hallucinations persist, motivating Attributed Summary Generation (ASG), which requires sentence-level citations. However, existing prompt-based approaches face severe challenges such as positional preference, poor citation quality and sensitivity to uninformative documents. In view of these limitations, we propose \mathbf{RAAC}, a framework of \mathbf{R}eflective \mathbf{A}gents with \mathbf{A}daptive \mathbf{C}ollaboration for attributed summarization. RAAC performs iterative summarization via reflective agents’ collaboration, where a post reflection module evaluates the consistency between the summary and the input documents, based on which it critiques the summary and uses the resulting feedback to recalibrate the inputs to the next adaptive iteration. The agents’ collaboration involves two components: \mathsf{TextAgent} and \mathsf{CitationAgent}. Experimental results on the ALCE benchmark demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing baselines in both factual correctness and citation quality.
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often suffer from the “over-thinking” problem, generating unnecessarily long reasoning on simple tasks. Some strategies have been proposed to mitigate this issue, such as length penalties or routing mechanisms, but they are typically heuristic and task-specific, lacking a general framework for adaptive reasoning. In this paper, we present ARM2, a unified model that adaptively balances reasoning performance and efficiency across multiple formats through a reinforcement learning framework augmented with length-aware optimization. Beyond conventional natural language inference, ARM2 integrates vision understanding, extending its applicability to multimodal. Moreover, ARM2 integrates executable code into reasoning, enabling substantial reductions in token cost while preserving task performance compared to long CoT. Experiments demonstrate that ARM2 achieves performance on par with traditional reasoning models trained with GRPO, while reducing token usage by over 70% on average. We further conduct extensive analyses to validate the effectiveness of ARM2 and the soundness of its design.
Tables present unique challenges for language models due to their structured row-column interactions, necessitating specialized approaches for effective comprehension. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in table reasoning through prompting and techniques like chain-of-thought (CoT) and program-of-thought (PoT), optimizing their performance for table question answering remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce region-based Table-R1, a novel reinforcement learning approach that enhances LLM table understanding by integrating region evidence into reasoning steps. Our method employs Region-Enhanced Supervised Fine-Tuning (RE-SFT) to guide models in identifying relevant table regions before generating answers, incorporating textual, symbolic, and program-based reasoning. Additionally, Table-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (TARPO) introduces a mixed reward system to dynamically balance region accuracy and answer correctness, with decaying region rewards and consistency penalties to align reasoning steps. Experiments show that Table-R1 achieves an average performance improvement of 14.36 points across multiple base models on three benchmark datasets, even outperforming baseline models with ten times the number of parameters, while TARPO significantly reduces the reasoning token consumption by 67.5% compared to GRPO, significantly advancing LLM capabilities in efficient tabular reasoning.
Multi-party dialogue discourse parsing aims to identify dependency structures and relation types between utterances in conversations. Previous studies are mostly limited to textual modality or two-party dialogue, failing to meet the multimodal and multi-party settings. In this paper, we construct the first publicly available English multimodal dataset DraDDP for multi-party dialogue discourse parsing, based on American TV dramas. DraDDP contains 495 dialogue segments with 6,374 utterances and 9.1 hours of parallel video content, covering rich multi-party interaction scenarios. Moreover, we establish comprehensive benchmarks by evaluating this task on DraDDP and conducting in-depth analysis on the impact of different modalities. Experimental results demonstrate the value of multimodal information in capturing dialogue structures and relation types. We will publicly release the dataset, annotation guidelines, and code to promote future research in multimodal dialogue understanding.
The transition to end-to-end Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has positioned these architectures as active social evaluators in high-stakes domains. However, it remains unclear whether these models maintain objective auditory perception or succumb to the "Hearing with Eyes" phenomenon, where visual racial cues distort linguistic proficiency evaluations. We investigate this cross-modal bias by constructing a controlled counterfactual dataset utilizing a Visual Matched-Guise Paradigm. By pairing identical native audio with diverse visual personas across English and Korean contexts, we reveal a distinct Cultural Asymmetry in model behavior. In Anglophone settings, most closed models exhibit Reverse Linguistic Stereotyping, hallucinating non-native accents for Asian speakers despite standard native audio. Conversely, in Korean settings, the same models assign baseline-relative competence premiums across all visual personas, with the largest gains for out-group (White/Black) speakers, consistent with Expectancy Violation Theory. Our findings demonstrate that MLLMs do not merely process sensory inputs but actively reproduce context-dependent sociolinguistic ideologies.
We introduce a constraint-selection-based experiment design for measuring narrative preferences of Large Language Models (LLMs). This design offers an interpretable lens on LLMs’ narrative selection behavior. We developed a library of 200 narratology-grounded constraints and prompted selections from six LLMs under three different instruction types: basic, quality-focused, and creativity-focused. Findings demonstrate that models consistently prioritize Style over narrative content elements like Event, Character, and Setting. Style preferences remain stable across models and instruction types, whereas content elements show cross-model divergence and instructional sensitivity. These results suggest that LLMs have latent narrative preferences, which should inform how the NLP community evaluates and deploys models in creative domains.
Dynamic Graph Navigation via Triplet Chains for Structure-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation
PDF ↗Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) was proposed to address the hallucination question of large language models (LLMs). However, the traditional RAG framework has certain limitations: for simple questions, the search results often introduce a large amount of irrelevant information; while for complex questions, the lengthy reference knowledge provided by the retrieval lacks structural information. Therefore, we proposed a structure-aware RAG, which achieves noise removal in retrieval through multi-chain graph navigation reasoning(Trig-Nav). This method constructs question triple reasoning chains and reference knowledge graphs with text attributes, allowing the system to retrieve three types of knowledge along different paths based on the requirements of LLM. It provides LLM with multi-angle and structured information input and significantly reduces noise. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of Trig-Nav, comparing it with baseline methods across multiple datasets.Compared to traditional RAG, there is an average improvement of 6% in effectiveness. The results showed that Trig-Nav significantly enhances the model’s performance, validating the effectiveness of this approach.
Research in cross-lingual modeling for historical and extremely low-resource languages is hindered by the absence of standardized evaluation benchmarks. To address this, we present ManCC—the first task-anchored benchmark for Manchu–Classical Chinese translation. ManCC consists of a high-quality parallel corpus of 16,627 sentence pairs, derived from the Qing-dynasty historical text Manwen Laodang-Taizong, and a reproducible evaluation protocol that combines automatic metrics (BLEU and chrF) with a three-dimensional human assessment (fidelity, fluency, linguistic normativity). Through systematic evaluation across three model families (non-pretrained, multilingual pretrained, and large language models), we find that linguistic differences significantly influence performance, broader language coverage in multilingual pretraining facilitates low-resource transfer, and automatic metrics often fail to capture essential errors in historical translation—underscoring the necessity of human evaluation. ManCC not only provides foundational resources for Manchu–Classical Chinese translation but also establishes a diagnosable, reproducible platform for cross-lingual modeling of historical low-resource languages.
Large Language Models (LLMs) used in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can amplify demographic bias: retrievers may surface skewed context and generators can propagate that skew into decisions. Prior work typically treats fairness in retrieval or generation in isolation, leaving end-to-end fairness in RAG underexplored. We propose a post-hoc pipeline that jointly controls both stages: (i) a Fair Greedy Reranker (FGR) that builds prefix-balanced slates toward a target group mix; (ii) a Residual Slate Bias Estimator (RSBE) using signed, prefix-sensitive NDKL to quantify remaining skew; and (iii) Confidence-Gated Logit Calibration (CGLC) that converts the residual signal into small and margin-focused logit corrections without retraining. On an occupation classification task, our approach reduces retriever-side skew (lowest NDKL among baselines for both dense and sparse retrievers) and achieves the lowest generator-side disparity (e.g., Risk Difference) while largely preserving utility. The same calibration can be tuned to alternative fairness criteria (e.g., Equal Opportunity) with minimal utility loss.