论文检索

Xia Jiang, Jing Chen, Cong Zhang, Jie Gao, Chengpeng Hu, Chenhao Zhang, Yaoxin Wu, Yingqian Zhang

While large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in math and logic reasoning, their ability to handle combinatorial optimization (CO)—searching high-dimensional solution spaces under hard constraints—remains underexplored. To bridge the gap, we introduce NLCO, a **N**atural **L**anguage **C**ombinatorial **O**ptimization benchmark that evaluates LLMs on end-to-end CO reasoning: given a language-described decision-making scenario, the model must output a discrete solution without writing code or calling external solvers. NLCO covers 43 CO problems and is organized using a four-layer taxonomy of variable types, constraint families, global patterns, and objective classes, enabling fine-grained evaluation. We provide solver-annotated solutions and comprehensively evaluate LLMs by feasibility, solution optimality, and reasoning efficiency. Experiments across a wide range of modern LLMs show that high-performing models achieve strong feasibility and solution quality on small instances, but both degrade as instance size grows, even if more tokens are used for reasoning. We also observe systematic effects across the taxonomy: set-based tasks are relatively easy, whereas graph-structured problems and bottleneck objectives lead to more frequent failures. The benchmark dataset and code for data generation and evaluation are publicly available.

Micky C. Nnamdi, Benoit Louis Marteau, Yishan Zhong, J. Ben Tamo, May Dongmei Wang

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance in high-stakes domains like healthcare, yet their reasoning remains opaque. Attention- and saliency-based methods often fail to faithfully represent the model’s decision process, particularly when integrating heterogeneous modalities. We introduce Tree-of-Evidence (ToE), an inference-time search algorithm that frames interpretability as a discrete optimization problem. Rather than relying on soft attention weights, ToE employs lightweight Evidence Bottlenecks that score coarse units of data (e.g., vital-sign windows, report chunks) and performs a beam search to identify the compact evidence set required to reproduce the model’s prediction. We evaluate ToE across six tasks spanning three datasets and two domains, including clinical prediction on MIMIC-IV, cross-center validation on eICU, and non-clinical fault detection on LEMMA-RCA. ToE retains over 98% of full-model AUROC with as few as five evidence units, achieves higher decision agreement and lower fidelity error than LIME, SHAP, saliency, and concept-bottleneck baselines under sparse budgets, and outperforms LLMs up to 70B parameters. ToE therefore provides a practical mechanism for auditing multimodal models.

Jing Wang, Yaomin Wu, Yinglin Wang, Yitong Yang

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.

Ho-Lam Chung, Yiming Chen, Hung-yi Lee

Neural audio codecs are widely used as tokenizers for spoken language models, but they are optimized for waveform reconstruction rather than autoregressive prediction.This mismatch injects acoustically driven uncertainty into the discrete token space and increases language-model perplexity.We propose , which augments codec training with language-model-facing objectives while keeping both codec and LLM architectures unchanged.introduces (i) future token prediction with Medusa-style multi-step heads to encourage multi-step predictability, and (ii) semantic alignment that matches audio and text representations via a memory-bank contrastive loss.A differentiable Gumbel bridge enables end-to-end gradients from these objectives to the codec encoder.On SALMon speech coherence, token LMs trained on reach 61.6% accuracy (+12.1 points over AUV) while reducing perplexity 35\times.On Codec-SUPERB-tiny, improves speech Mel distance by 5.0% over AUV while simultaneously achieving the learnability gains, demonstrating that reconstruction fidelity and token predictability can be improved together.

Lingyi Kong, Zhuo Liu, Zhanghao Hu, Qilong Qiu, Yutao Yang, Jingjing Xue, Zheng Wang, Lin Gui, Feiping Nie

Adversarial attacks have attracted growing attention across domains, including natural language processing (NLP). Character-level adversarial attacks preserve semantics, but they have received less attention because the discrete operations they use are costly and inefficient. Challenging these beliefs, we introduce two adaptively learnable matrices that transform discrete choices into continuous representations, enabling automatic one-shot multi-position, multi-character insertion. To optimize the two learnable matrices, we propose OSCR-Attack, an end-to-end framework based on gradient-based optimization, with a conflict resolution strategy that maps the optimized continuous distributions back into discrete insertion operations. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks with three open-source large language models (LLMs) show that OSCR-Attack improves attack success rate (ASR) by up to 21.45% points and accelerates the attack by up to 3.66 times compared to recent baselines.

Tian Xueyun, Wei Li, Bingbing Xu, Heng Dong, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen

Recent Omni-multimodal Large Language Models show promise in unified audio, vision, and text modeling. However, streaming audio-video understanding remains challenging, as existing approaches suffer from disjointed capabilities: they typically exhibit incomplete modality support or lack autonomous proactive monitoring. To address this, we present ROMA, **a real-time omni-multimodal assistant for unified reactive and proactive interaction**. ROMA processes continuous inputs as synchronized multimodal units, aligning dense audio with discrete video frames to handle granularity mismatches. For online decision-making, we introduce a lightweight *speak head* that decouples response initiation from generation to ensure precise triggering without task conflict. We train ROMA with a curated streaming dataset and a two-stage curriculum that progressively optimizes for streaming format adaptation and proactive responsiveness. To standardize the fragmented evaluation landscape, we reorganize diverse benchmarks into a unified suite covering both proactive (alert, narration) and reactive (QA) settings. Extensive experiments across 12 benchmarks demonstrate ROMA achieves state-of-the-art performance on proactive tasks while competitive in reactive settings, validating its robustness in unified real-time omni-multimodal understanding. Code and benchmark are available [here](https://eureka-maggie.github.io/ROMA_show/).

Junzhe Zhou, Fulin Lin, Tairan Cheng, Shaowen Chen, Hongwei Wang

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) yet suffers from a mismatch between coarse retrieval granularity and fine-grained generation needs. Specifically, coarse-grained passages inherently conflate valid context with intra-passage noise that semantic retrieval often fails to filter. Existing alignment strategies, typically relying on discrete reranking, struggle to address this granularity mismatch or effectively balance external evidence with internal knowledge. To bridge this gap, we propose **AED-RAG**, a framework that synergizes discrete retrieval with continuous **A**daptive **E**nsemble **D**ecoding. Specifically, we fine-tune a utility predictor using contrastive perplexity to discern the information density differences between unstructured narrative passages and structured knowledge triplets. During inference, this predictor projects passages, triplets, and the model’s parametric memory into a unified probability space, enabling a soft, token-level fusion that dynamically optimizes information gain. Extensive experiments on four open-domain QA benchmarks demonstrate that AED-RAG significantly outperforms competitive baselines, underscoring the effectiveness of integrating multi-granular contexts.

Meng Zhang, Jinzhong Ning, Xiaolong Wu, Hongfei Lin, Yijia Zhang

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) aims to jointly identify named entity mentions in text, predict their semantic types, and ground each entity to a corresponding visual region in an associated image. Existing approaches predominantly adopt pipeline-based architectures that decouple textual entity recognition and visual grounding, leading to error accumulation and suboptimal joint optimization. In this paper, we propose E2E-GMNER, a fully end-to-end generative framework that unifies entity recognition, semantic typing, visual grounding, and implicit knowledge reasoning within a single multimodal large language model. We formulate GMNER as an instruction-tuned conditional generation task and incorporate chain-of-thought reasoning to enable the model to adaptively determine when visual evidence or background knowledge is informative, reducing reliance on noisy cues. To further address the instability of generative bounding box prediction, we introduce Gaussian Risk-Aware Box Perturbation (GRBP), which replaces hard box supervision with probabilistically perturbed soft targets to improve robustness against annotation noise and discretization errors. Extensive experiments on the Twitter-GMNER and Twitter-FMNERG benchmarks demonstrate that E2E-GMNER achieves highly competitive performance compared with state of the art methods, validating the effectiveness of unified end-to-end optimization and noise-aware grounding supervision.

Shuang Cheng, Yihan Bian, Dawei Liu, Yuhua Jiang, Yihao Liu, Linfeng Zhang, Qian Yao, Zhongbo Tian, Wenhai Wang, Qipeng Guo 等

Autoregressive (AR) language modeling remains the dominant paradigm due to its dense supervision signal and highly optimized serving infrastructure, but its strictly causal, token-by-token decoding limits parallelism and non-causal modeling. While masked diffusion offers a promising path toward parallel generation, it faces two critical bottlenecks: training inefficiency stemming from sparse masked objectives, and high latency caused by iterative whole-sequence denoising. We present a systematic study of blockwise discrete diffusion, a pragmatic middle ground that preserves AR-compatible serving while enabling parallel intra-block generation. Our study proceeds in four steps: (i) a controlled, compute- and scale-matched comparison revealing that AR is a more effective backbone for blockwise hybrids than masked diffusion objectives; (ii) a scalable conversion recipe, SDAR, validating that AR models spanning 1.7B to 30B parameters can be adapted into block diffusion models with minimal compute while preserving backbone capabilities; and (iii) a systematic characterization of decoding dynamics, which reveals a virtuous cycle where larger models enable more aggressive parallel decoding, achieving theoretical speedups over 5\times and wall-clock speedups of 2.3\times on H200 GPUs in latency-critical regimes; and (iv) an investigation of local non-causal modeling capabilities, showing that SDAR’s local bidirectional attention overcomes causal bottlenecks in scientific domains (e.g., chemistry) and enables robust test-time scaling. We release the full model suite, the training framework, and our inference engines for further innovation in non-autoregressive generative paradigms.

Ganghao Liu, Qin Zhou, Zhe Wang, Xuehan Lu, Haihua Huang, Yunfei Tong, Heng Tian

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) enables low-cost adaptation of large language models but often suffers from limited representational flexibility. To address this, we incorporate a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design and propose Efficient and Expressive split-path experts that enhance specialization while maintaining low resource overhead. Split-Path Adaptive Representation Mixture-of-Experts (SparMoE) replaces discrete hard routing with a soft routing and fully-activated mixture, enabling stable optimization. Each expert is parameterized as a split-path modulation module, consisting of a scaling path that promotes expert specialization and a bias path that preserves expert-specific signals. This design significantly enhances expressive capacity while maintaining strict parameter efficiency and architectural compatibility with PEFT. Extensive evaluations on GLUE, GSM8K, MBPP, and a text rewriting task from SmolTalk show that our approach consistently outperforms or matches state-of-the-art PEFT methods under comparable parameter budgets, achieving a favorable trade-off between adaptability and efficiency.

Sihao Liu, YuFan Xiong, Zhonghua Jiang, Zhaode Wang, Chengfei lv, Shengyu Zhang

Multimodal Large Language Models face severe challenges in computational efficiency and memory consumption due to the substantial expansion of the visual KV cache when processing long visual contexts. Existing KV cache compression methods typically rely on the "persistence of importance" hypothesis to prune tokens. However, this approach proves fragile in multimodal settings due to two key issues: 1) Visual tokens display "deferred importance," initially exhibiting low salience but becoming pivotal during later decoding, which can lead to premature eviction. 2) Discrete pruning disrupts the inherent spatial continuity of visual cues. To address these challenges, we propose RetentiveKV, an entropy-driven KV cache optimization method that reformulates KV eviction from "discrete context truncation" to "continuous memory evolution" based on State Space Models. Our method leverages information entropy to quantify the information potential of low-attention tokens and integrates tokens scheduled for eviction into a continuous state space through entropy-guided state transitions, enabling their dynamic reactivation when semantic relevance arises during subsequent decoding. Extensive experiments on multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that RetentiveKV achieves 5.0 × KV cache compression and 1.5 × decoding acceleration.

Changhai Zhou, Shiyang Zhang, Yuhua Zhou, Jun Gao, Qian Qiao, Shichao Weng, Weizhong Zhang, Cheng Jin

Deploying and fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on resource-constrained edge devices requires navigating a strict trade-off between memory footprint and task performance. Existing quantization-aware fine-tuning methods typically decouple weight precision and adapter capacity, overlooking that a layer’s ability to adapt is constrained by the information preserved in its frozen weights. Layers that are highly sensitive to quantization—whether due to representational specialization or accumulated error propagation—can become bottlenecks that adapter rank alone cannot recover. To address this issue, we introduce QR-Adaptor, a unified framework that jointly optimizes per-layer quantization bit-width and LoRA rank. We formulate resource allocation as a multi-objective discrete search guided by empirical layer-wise sensitivity, and implement it with a three-stage pipeline comprising KL-based sensitivity profiling, evolutionary exploration, and Bayesian refinement. Extensive experiments across LLaMA and Qwen models, including modern instruction tuning on OpenOrca and comparisons with strong PEFT baselines such as QDoRA, show that QR-Adaptor establishes a strong Pareto frontier: under a strict 4-bit memory budget, it matches or approaches 16-bit baselines while using substantially less memory.

Yuyan Zhou, Jiarui Yu, Hande Dong, Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Jianqing Zhang, Qiang Lin

Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space.However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference, failing to discover diverse reasoning paths.To bridge the gap, we inject controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs’ exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL).Building on this, we propose **L**atent R**e**asoning **P**olicy **O**ptimization (**LEPO**), a novel framework that applies RL directly to continuous latent representations.Specifically, in rollout stage, LEPO maintains stochasticity to enable diverse trajectory sampling, while in optimization stage, LEPO constructs a unified gradient estimation for both latent representations and discrete tokens.

Juntuo Wang, Yuming Qiao, Yifan Yang, Lunxi Yuan, Liang Luo, Dan Meng

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly adopted as judges for subjective assessment, yet absolute scoring remains brittle due to inconsistent scales and inherent preference biases. To bridge this gap, we propose \text{S}^2\text{AD} (**Semantic-Anchored Scale-Agnostic Distillation**), a novel easy-to-hard framework that operationalizes subjective assessment as comparative analysis, conceptualizing the judge’s evolution from mimesis to metamorphosis. In Stage 1 (Mimesis), we introduce Dynamic Soft Positioning (DSP) to train the judge to compare a query against retrieved reference images, establishing a relative evaluation space that ensures consistent ordering under heterogeneous scales. In Stage 2 (Metamorphosis), this comparative capability is internalized via Language Buttons—discrete semantic levels serving as a retrieval-free internal reference. Optimized with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), \text{S}^2\text{AD} achieves efficient, scale-steerable inference that adapts to diverse grading standards. Our framework reaches state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of internalized comparative priors for robust, rank-invariant, and scale-steerable evaluation. The code is available at: https://github.com/SpatialVision-Research/SSAD_ACL2026_Findings.

Yu Huo, Kun Zeng, Siyu Zhang, Yuquan LU, Cheng Yang, Yifu Guo, Xiaoying Tang

Repository-level code completion benefits from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, controlling cross-file evidence is difficult because chunk utility is often interaction-dependent: some snippets help only when paired with complementary context, while others harm decoding when they conflict. We propose RepoShapley, a coalition-aware context filtering framework supervised by Shapley-style marginal contributions. Our offline labeling module, ChunkShapley, estimates signed per-chunk effects via teacher-forced probing, feeds them into a lightweight surrogate game that captures saturation and interference, computes exact Shapley values for small retrieval sets, and selects a decoding-optimal coalition through bounded post-verification with the frozen generator. The verified <KEEP> / <DROP> decisions and retrieval triggers are then distilled into a single model via discrete control tokens. Experiments across benchmarks and backbones show that RepoShapley improves completion quality while reducing harmful context and unnecessary retrieval.

Haitao Li, Chunxiang Jin, Chenglin Li, Wenhao Guan, Zhengxing Huang, Xie Chen

Zero-shot text-to-speech models can clone a speaker’s timbre from a short reference audio, but they also strongly inherit the speaking style present in the reference. As a result, synthesizing speech with a desired style often requires carefully selecting reference audio, which is impractical when only limited or mismatched references are available. While recent controllable TTS methods attempt to address this issue, they typically rely on absolute style targets and discrete textual prompts, and therefore do not support continuous and reference-relative style control. We propose ReStyle-TTS, a framework that enables continuous and reference-relative style control in zero-shot TTS. Our key insight is that effective style control requires first reducing the model’s implicit dependence on reference style before introducing explicit control mechanisms. To this end, we introduce Decoupled Classifier-Free Guidance (DCFG), which independently controls text and reference guidance, reducing reliance on reference style while preserving text fidelity. On top of this, we apply style-specific LoRAs together with Orthogonal LoRA Fusion to enable continuous and disentangled multi-attribute control, and introduce a Timbre Consistency Optimization module to mitigate timbre drift caused by weakened reference guidance. Experiments show that ReStyle-TTS enables user-friendly, continuous, and relative control over pitch, energy, and multiple emotions while maintaining intelligibility and speaker timbre, and performs robustly in challenging mismatched reference–target style scenarios. Code and data are available in supplementary materials.

Jiacheng Shi, Hongfei Du, Xinyuan Song, Y. Alicia Hong, Yanfu Zhang, Ashley Gao

Neural speech codecs provide discrete representations for speech language models, but emotional cues are often degraded during quantization. Existing codecs mainly optimize acoustic reconstruction, leaving emotion expressiveness insufficiently modeled at the representation level. We propose an emotion-guided neural speech codec that explicitly preserves emotional information while maintaining semantic fidelity and prosodic naturalness. Our framework combines emotion–semantic guided latent modulation, relation-preserving emotional–semantic distillation, and emotion-weighted semantic alignment to retain emotionally salient cues under compression. Extensive evaluations across speech reconstruction, emotion recognition, and downstream text to speech generation demonstrate improved emotion consistency and perceptual quality without sacrificing content accuracy.

Yanting Li, Zhuoyang Jiang, Enyan Dai, Lei Wang, Wen-Cai Ye, Li Liu

Goal-directed molecular generation requires satisfying heterogeneous constraints such as protein–ligand compatibility and multi-objective drug-like properties, yet existing methods often optimize these constraints in isolation, failing to reconcile conflicting objectives (e.g., affinity vs. safety), and struggle to navigate the non-differentiable chemical space without compromising structural validity. To address these challenges, we propose CAGenMol, a condition-aware discrete diffusion framework over molecular sequences that formulates molecular design as conditional denoising guided by heterogeneous structural and property signals. By coupling discrete diffusion with reinforcement learning, the model aligns the generation trajectory with non-differentiable objectives while preserving chemical validity and diversity. The non-autoregressive nature of diffusion language model further enables iterative refinement of molecular fragments at inference time. Experiments on structure-conditioned, property-conditioned, and dual-conditioned benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods in binding affinity, drug-likeness, and success rate, highlighting the effectiveness of our framework. The code is available at https://github.com/Lee612-1/CAGenMol.

Mohammad Mahdi Salmani-Zarchi, Zahra Rahimi, Heshaam Faili, Mohammad Javad Dousti

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is ideal for multi-constraint instruction following, yet standard group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) becomes unstable under discrete, low-dispersion rewards, where within-group reward distributions are frequently homogeneous. We identify and formalize three pathologies of z-score group normalization in this regime: low-variance amplification, mean-centering blindness, and zero-variance collapse. To address them, we propose MDP-GRPO, which stabilizes learning through (1) multi-temperature sampling to increase reward dispersion, (2) dual-anchor advantages to restore gradients in homogeneous groups, (3) prospect-theoretic shaping to bound updates and penalize violations based on Kahneman Tversky’s theory, and (4) asymmetric KL regularization. Evaluated on FollowBench, IFEval, and a curated multi-constraint dataset, MDP-GRPO outperforms standard GRPO, improving strict constraint satisfaction by up to 5.0% on Llama-3.2-3B. Our method also enables stable convergence with small group sizes while preserving general capabilities on MMLU and ARC.

Girish, Mohd Mujtaba Akhtar, Muskaan Singh

In this work, we introduce a paralinguistic supervision paradigm for low-resource multilingual speech emotion recognition (LRM-SER) that leverages non-verbal vocalizations to exploit prosody-centric emotion cues. Unlike conventional SER systems that rely heavily on labeled verbal speech and suffer from poor cross-lingual transfer, our approach reformulates LRM-SER as non-verbal-to-verbal transfer, where supervision from a labelled non-verbal source domain is adapted to unlabeled verbal speech across multiple target languages. To this end, we propose NOVA-ARC, a geometry-aware framework that models affective structure in the Poincaré ball, discretizes paralinguistic patterns via a hyperbolic vector-quantized prosody codebook, and captures emotion intensity through a hyperbolic emotion lens. For unsupervised adaptation, NOVA-ARC performs optimal-transport-based prototype alignment between source emotion prototypes and target utterances, inducing soft supervision for unlabeled speech while being stabilized through consistency regularization. Experiments show that NOVA-ARC delivers the strongest performance under both non-verbal-to-verbal adaptation and the complementary verbal-to-verbal transfer setting, consistently outperforming Euclidean counter parts and strong SSL baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to move beyond verbal-speech–centric supervision by introducing a non-verbal–to–verbal transfer paradigm for SER.