We study the reasoning behavior of large language models (LLMs) under limited computation budgets. In such settings, producing useful partial solutions quickly is often more practical than exhaustive reasoning, which incurs high inference costs. Many real-world tasks, such as trip planning, require models to deliver the best possible output within a fixed reasoning budget. We introduce an anytime reasoning framework and the Anytime Index, a metric that quantifies how effectively solution quality improves as reasoning tokens increase. To further enhance efficiency, we propose an inference-time self-improvement method using LLM-synthesized preference data, where models learn from their own reasoning comparisons to produce better intermediate solutions. Experiments on NaturalPlan (Trip), AIME, and GPQA datasets show consistent gains across Grok-3, GPT-oss, GPT-4.1/4o, and LLaMA models, improving both reasoning quality and efficiency under budget constraints.
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EmoRes: Toward Adaptive Psychological Support via User-Agnostic Benchmark and Topic-Mining Agent
PDF ↗Large language models exhibit significant potential for psychological support, yet they often generate fragmented and emotionally inconsistent dialogues that lack the therapeutic structure necessary for reliable assessment.To address these issues, we introduce **VeilEval**, a clinically grounded and privacy-preserving benchmark equipped with interpretable metrics for evaluating multi-turn psychological dialogues.Furthermore, we propose Emotion-Resonance (**EmoRes**), a multi-agent framework that boosts psychological reasoning via a Topic-Mining Emotional Agent and a multi-perspective Self-Reflection Agent, thereby jointly improving topic continuity, emotional coherence, and clinical interpretability.Experiments demonstrate that EmoRes achieves up to \sim 3\times improvement over strong baselines on VeilEval, with its effectiveness further validated by ablation studies and human evaluations.
A line of work in planning uses LLM not to generate a plan, but to generate a formal representation in some planning language, which can be input into a symbolic solver to deterministically find a plan. While showing improved trust and promising performance, dozens of recent publications have proposed scattered methods on a variety of benchmarks under different experimental settings. We attempt to unify the inference-time LLM-as-formalizer methodology for classical planning by proposing a unifying organizational framework based on intermediate representations. We thus systematically evaluate more than a dozen pipelines that subsume most existing work, while proposing novel ones that involve syntactically similar but high-resource intermediate languages (such as a Python wrapper of PDDL). We provide recipes for planning language generation pipelines, draw a series of conclusions showing the efficacy of their various components, and evidence their robustness against problem complexity.
Masking or Mitigating? Deconstructing the Impact of Query Rewriting on Retriever Biases in RAG
PDF ↗Dense retrievers in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems exhibit systematic biases—including brevity, position, literal matching, and repetition biases—that can compromise retrieval quality. Query rewriting techniques are now standard in RAG pipelines, yet their impact on these biases remains unexplored. We present the first systematic study of how query enhancement techniques affect dense retrieval biases, evaluating five methods across six retrievers. Our findings reveal that simple LLM-based rewriting achieves the strongest aggregate bias reduction (54%), yet fails under adversarial conditions where multiple biases combine. Mechanistic analysis uncovers two distinct mechanisms: simple rewriting reduces bias through increased score variance, while pseudo-document methods achieve reduction through genuine decorrelation from bias-inducing features. However, no technique uniformly addresses all biases, and effects vary substantially across retrievers. Our results provide practical guidance for selecting query enhancement strategies based on specific bias vulnerabilities. More broadly, we establish a taxonomy distinguishing query-document interaction biases from document encoding biases, clarifying the limits of query-side interventions for debiasing RAG systems.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming healthcare, enabling the fast development of tools such as stress monitors, wellness trackers, and mental health chatbots. However, this rapid and low-barrier development can also introduce risks, including bias, privacy violations, and unequal access, especially when systems overlook real-world contexts, diverse user needs, and cultural settings. Many recent approaches use AI to identify such risks automatically, but this can reduce human engagement in understanding how harms arise, who they affect, and which stakeholder needs remain unspoken. We present a human-centered ethical foresight framework that generates speculative user stories and supports multi-agent discussions to help people reflect on potential benefits and harms of healthcare AI before deployment. In a user study, participants who engaged with stories identified a broader range of harms, distributing their responses more evenly across all 17 harm types, whereas those who did not engage with stories focused primarily on privacy and well-being (79.1%). Overall, our findings suggest that storytelling helps people anticipate potential risks and benefits and reflect more broadly on how AI systems may affect different users, contexts, and often unspoken needs.
Large language models are increasingly deployed in multi-turn settings such as tutoring, support, and counseling, where reliability depends on preserving consistent roles, personas, and goals across long horizons. This requirement becomes critical when LLMs are used to generate synthetic dialogues for training and evaluation, since LLM–LLM conversations can accumulate identity-related failures such as persona drift, role confusion, and “echoing”, where one agent gradually mirrors its partner. We introduce SPASM (Stable Persona-driven Agent Simulation for Multi-turn dialogue generation), a modular, stability-first framework that decomposes simulation into (i) persona creation via schema sampling, plausibility validation, and natural-language persona crafting, (ii) Client–Responder dialogue generation, and (iii) termination detection for coherent stopping. To improve long-horizon stability without changing model weights, we propose Egocentric Context Projection (ECP): dialogue history is stored in a perspective-agnostic representation and deterministically projected into each agent’s egocentric view before generation. Across three LLM backbones (GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen-Plus) and nine Client–Responder pairings, we construct a dataset of 4,500 personas and 45,000 conversations (500 personas × 10 conversations per pairing). Ablations show ECP substantially reduces persona drift and, under human validation, eliminates echoing; embedding analyses recover persona structure and reveal strong responder-driven interaction geometry. Our code is available at https://github.com/lhannnn/SPASM.
Mock trial has long served as an important platform for professional legal training and education. Traditional mock trials are difficult to access by the public because they rely on professional tutors and human participants. Fortunately, the rise of large language models (LLMs) provides new opportunities for creating more accessible and scalable court simulations. While promising, existing research ignored the systematic design and procedure evaluation of court simulations, which are critical to the credibility and usage of court simulation in practice. To this end, we propose a novel court simulation paradigm, i.e. SimCourt, based on the real-world procedure structure of Chinese courts, and design a comprehensive evaluation framework focusing on both legal judgment prediction and court procedure analysis. Experiments show that our framework can generate simulated trials that better guide the system in predicting the imprisonment, probation, and fine of each case. Further procedure evaluations show that agents’ responses under our simulation framework even outperform judges and lawyers from the real trials in many aspects. These demonstrate the potential of LLM-based court simulation.
What happens when a storyteller forgets its own story? Large Language Models (LLMs) can now generate narratives spanning tens of thousands of words, but they often fail to maintain consistency throughout. When generating long-form narratives, these models can contradict their own established facts, character traits, and world rules. Existing story generation benchmarks focus mainly on plot quality and fluency, leaving consistency errors largely unexplored. To address this gap, we present ConStory-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate narrative consistency in long-form story generation. It contains 2,000 prompts across four task scenarios and defines a taxonomy of five error categories with 19 fine-grained subtypes. We also develop ConStory-Checker, an automated pipeline that detects contradictions and grounds each judgment in explicit textual evidence. Evaluating a range of LLMs through five research questions, we find that consistency errors show clear tendencies: they are most common in factual and temporal dimensions, tend to appear around the middle of narratives, occur in text segments with higher token-level entropy, and certain error types tend to co-occur. These findings can inform future efforts to improve consistency in long-form narrative generation.
Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VRAG) enhances Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by incorporating external visual documents to address a given query. Existing VRAG frameworks usually depend on rigid, pre-defined external tools to extend the perceptual capabilities of VLMs, typically by explicitly separating visual perception from subsequent reasoning processes. However, this decoupled design can lead to unnecessary loss of visual information, particularly when image-based operations such as cropping are applied. In this paper, we propose Lang2Act, which enables fine-grained visual perception and reasoning through self-emergent linguistic toolchains. Rather than invoking fixed external engines, Lang2Act collects self-emergent actions as linguistic tools and leverages them to enhance the visual perception capabilities of VLMs. To support this mechanism, we design a two-stage Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based training framework. Specifically, the first stage optimizes VLMs to self-explore high-quality actions for constructing a reusable linguistic toolbox, and the second stage further optimizes VLMs to exploit these linguistic tools for downstream reasoning effectively. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of Lang2Act in substantially enhancing the visual perception capabilities of VLMs, achieving performance improvements of over 4%. All code and data are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/Lang2Act.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are challenged by generating hallucinations and factually incorrect responses, particularly in complex and specialized medical question answering (QA). Integrating knowledge graphs (KGs) through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods has emerged as a promising direction. However, existing graph-based RAG methods heuristically retrieve and refine question-relevant subgraphs, potentially introducing redundant and noisy factual information that is difficult for LLMs to process, ultimately limiting reasoning capability. To incorporate a concise yet informative evidence subgraph, we propose an iterative medical QA framework. It optimizes graph-based RAG methods by selectively retrieving focused knowledge from KGs to construct a precise evidence subgraph and progressively pruning it utilizing structured feature representations. The targeted KG integration maintains coherent and reliable inference. Experiments on three medical QA benchmark datasets demonstrate that the framework achieves state-of-the-art performance against representative baseline competitors, highlighting the importance of efficient KG integration.
Large language models (LLMs) are expected to be trained to act as agents in various real-world environments, but this process relies on rich and varied tool-interaction sandboxes. However, access to real systems is often restricted; LLM-simulated environments are prone to hallucinations and inconsistencies; and manually built sandboxes are hard to scale. In this paper, we propose EnvScaler, an automated framework for scalable tool-interaction environments via programmatic synthesis. EnvScaler comprises two components. First, SkelBuilder constructs diverse environment skeletons through topic mining, logic modeling, and quality evaluation. Then, ScenGenerator generates multiple task scenarios and rule-based trajectory validation functions for each environment. With EnvScaler, we synthesize 191 environments and about 7K scenarios, and apply them to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Qwen3 series models. Results on three benchmarks show that EnvScaler significantly improves LLMs’ ability to solve tasks in complex environments involving multi-turn, multi-tool interactions.
Hate, derogatory, and offensive speech remains a persistent challenge in online platforms and public discourse. While automated detection systems are widely used, most focus on censorship or removal, raising concerns for transparency and freedom of expression, and limiting opportunities to explain why content is harmful. To address these issues, explanatory approaches have emerged as a promising solution, aiming to make hate speech detection more transparent, accountable, and informative. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with three newly created and curated vocabularies to detect and explain hate speech in English, French, and Greek. Our system captures both inherently derogatory expressions tied to identity characteristics and direct group-targeted content through two complementary pipelines: one that detects and disambiguates problematic terms using the curated vocabularies, and one that leverages LLMs as context-aware evaluators of group-targeting content. The outputs are fused into grounded explanations that clarify why content is flagged. Human evaluation shows that our hybrid approach is accurate, with high-quality explanations, outperforming LLM-only baselines.
Training large language models for domain adaptation poses a significant challenge in balancing the acquisition of domain knowledge with the retention of general abilities, often leading to catastrophic forgetting. While curriculum learning offers a promising direction, conventional methods typically rely on a single dimension of knowledge or task, which is insufficient to navigate the trade-off between knowledge breadth and task depth. In this paper, we propose a two-dimensional curriculum learning framework that coordinates model training along two orthogonal axes: the knowledge dimension and the task dimension. We first reconstruct the dataset by clustering instances according to their semantic similarity to general-domain data, and subsequently annotate them with a task hierarchy. Then, we design an integrated curriculum that develops from general to domain-specific knowledge clusters, and within each cluster, from lower- to higher-order cognitive tasks. Compared with the second-best method, our method improves accuracy on medical evaluations by 2.49% and on financial evaluations by 1.2%. Ablation and cross-domain experiments further demonstrate our method as a scalable and effective framework for structured domain adaptation in large language model fine-tuning. We have released the code in an anonymous repository at https://github.com/Melo-1017/Balancing-Knowledge-Breadth-and-Task-Depth.
Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This paper investigates the attention behaviors in MDMs, revealing the phenomenon of Attention Floating. Unlike ARMs, where attention converges to a fixed sink, MDMs exhibit dynamic, dispersed attention anchors that shift across denoising steps and layers. Further analysis reveals its Shallow Structure-Aware, Deep Content-Focused attention mechanism: shallow layers utilize floating tokens to build a global structural framework, while deeper layers allocate more capability toward capturing semantic content. Empirically, this distinctive attention pattern provides a mechanistic explanation for the strong in-context learning capabilities of MDMs, allowing them to double the performance compared to ARMs in knowledge-intensive tasks. All codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/Attention-Floating.
Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a promising approach for improving LLM reasoning capabilities by providing process supervision over reasoning traces. However, existing approaches for constructing PRM training data remain costly and noisy, as they typically rely on human annotation or sampling-based labeling methods that require repeated LLM calls. In this work, we propose FoVer, a framework that synthesizes PRM training data from formal reasoning tasks by annotating step-level error labels using formal verification tools such as Z3 and Isabelle. By leveraging formal verification, FoVer enables efficient and accurate PRM data construction without requiring human annotation or additional LLM calls. Using FoVer, we create PRM training data from formal logic and theorem proving tasks. Experiments on 12 reasoning benchmarks show that fine-tuning on our training data improves PRMs not only on math and logic reasoning tasks, which are informal variants of the training tasks, but also on NLI and BBH benchmarks, which differ substantially from the tasks used to construct the training data. These results demonstrate the practical effectiveness of FoVer, showing that PRM training data created using formal verification improves PRMs on informal reasoning tasks written in natural language. The datasets, models, and code are provided at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/FoVer.
Understanding and reasoning about entire soft-ware repositories is an essential capability for intelligent software engineering tools. While existing benchmarks such as CoSQA and CodeQA have advanced the field, they predominantly focus on small, self-contained code snippets. These setups fail to capture the complexity of real-world repositories, where effective understanding and reasoning often require navigating multiple files, understanding software architecture, and grounding answers in long-range code dependencies. In this paper, we present SWE-QA, a repository-level code question answering (QA) benchmark designed to facilitate research on automated QA systems in realistic code environments. SWE-QA involves 720 high-quality question-answer pairs spanning diverse categories, including intention understanding, cross-file reasoning, and multi-hop dependency analysis. To construct SWE-QA, we first crawled 77,100 GitHub issues from 12 popular repositories. Based on an analysis of naturally occurring developer questions extracted from these issues, we developed a two-level taxonomy of repository-level questions and constructed a set of seed questions for each category. For each category, we manually curated and validated questions and collected their corresponding answers. We evaluate six advanced LLMs on SWE-QA under various context augmentation strategies. Experimental results highlight the promise of LLMs.
Anonymizing textual documents is a highly context-sensitive problem: the appropriate balance between privacy protection and utility preservation varies with the data domain, privacy objectives, and downstream application. However, existing anonymization methods rely on static, manually designed strategies that lack the flexibility to adjust to diverse requirements and often fail to generalize across domains. We introduce adaptive text anonymization, a new task formulation in which anonymization strategies are automatically adapted to specific privacy–utility requirements. We propose a framework for task-specific prompt optimization that automatically constructs anonymization instructions for language models, enabling adaptation to different privacy goals, domains, and downstream usage patterns. To evaluate our approach, we present a benchmark spanning five datasets with diverse domains, privacy constraints, and utility objectives. Across all evaluated settings, our framework consistently achieves a better privacy–utility trade-off than existing baselines, while remaining computationally efficient and effective on open-source language models, with performance comparable to larger closed-source models. Additionally, we show that our method can discover novel anonymization strategies that explore different points along the privacy–utility trade-off frontier.
The shift toward intent-driven software engineering (often termed "Vibe Coding") exposes a critical Context-Fidelity Trade-off: vague user intents overwhelm linear reasoning chains, leading to architectural collapse in complex repo-level generation. We propose Contract-Coding, a structured symbolic paradigm that bridges unstructured intent and executable code via Autonomous Symbolic Grounding. By projecting ambiguous intents into a formal Language Contract, our framework serves as a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) that enforces topological independence, effectively inter-module implementation details, decreasing a topological execution depth and unlocking Architectural Parallelism. Empirically, while state-of-the-art agents suffer from different hallucinations on the Greenfield-5 benchmark, Contract-Coding achieves 47% functional success while maintaining near-perfect structural integrity. Our work marks a critical step towards repository-scale autonomous engineering: transitioning from strict "specification-following" to robust, intent-driven architecture synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/imliinyi/Contract-Coding
LIBERTy: A Causal Framework for Benchmarking Concept-Based Explanations of LLMs with Structural Counterfactuals
PDF ↗Concept-based explanations quantify how high-level concepts (e.g., gender or experience) influence model behavior, which is crucial for decision-makers in high-stakes domains. Recent work evaluates the faithfulness of such explanations by comparing them to reference causal effects estimated from counterfactuals. In practice, existing benchmarks rely on costly human-written counterfactuals that serves as imperfect proxy. To address this, we introduce a framework for constructing datasets containing structural counterfactual pairs: LIBERTy (LLM-based Interventional Benchmark for Explainability with Reference Targets). LIBERTy is grounded in explicitly defined Structured Causal Models (SCMs) of the text generation, interventions on a concept propagate through the SCM until an LLM generates the counterfactual. We introduce three datasets (disease detection, CV screening, and workplace violence prediction) together with a new evaluation metric, order-faithfulness. Using them, we evaluate a wide range of methods across five models and identify substantial headroom for improving concept-based explanations. LIBERTy also enables systematic analysis of model sensitivity to interventions: we find that proprietary LLMs show markedly reduced sensitivity to demographic concepts, likely due to post-training mitigation. Overall, LIBERTy provides a much-needed benchmark for developing faithful explainability methods.
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external knowledge to mitigate hallucinations, yet retrieving precise multi-hop evidence for knowledge-augmented reasoning remains difficult. Existing Knowledge Graph (KG)-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems insufficiently model the interaction between query semantics and relation types, resulting in imprecise subgraph retrieval and unstable reasoning. We propose Query-aware Subgraph Retrieval Augmented Generation (QSRAG), a retrieval framework built upon a Query-Relational Graph Attention Network (QR-GAT) that integrates query semantics and relation embeddings directly into the attention mechanism, enabling fine-grained triple scoring and scalable subgraph construction. This query–relation conditioning improves relevance estimation and suppresses noisy edges, producing faithful reasoning subgraphs. Experiments on WebQSP and CWQ establish new state-of-the-art results in both Triple Recall and Answer Recall, and significantly enhance LLMs reasoning accuracy without fine-tuning. These findings underscore the effectiveness of modeling query–relation interactions for reliable knowledge-augmented reasoning.