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Xanh Ho, Yun-Ang Wu, Sunisth Kumar, Florian Boudin, Atsuhiro Takasu, Akiko Aizawa

With the growing number of submitted scientific papers, there is an increasing demand for systems that can assist reviewers in evaluating research claims. Experimental results are a core component of scientific work, often presented in varying formats such as tables or charts. Understanding how robust current multimodal large language models (multimodal LLMs) are at verifying scientific claims across different evidence formats remains an important and underexplored challenge. In this paper, we design and conduct a series of experiments to assess the ability of multimodal LLMs to verify scientific claims using both tables and charts as evidence. To enable this evaluation, we adapt two existing datasets of scientific papers by incorporating annotations and structures necessary for a multimodal claim verification task. Using this adapted dataset, we evaluate 12 multimodal LLMs and find that current models perform better with table-based evidence while struggling with chart-based evidence. We further conduct human evaluations and observe that humans maintain strong performance across both formats, unlike the models. Our analysis also reveals that smaller multimodal LLMs (under 8B) show weak correlation in performance between table-based and chart-based tasks, indicating limited cross-modal generalization. These findings highlight a critical gap in current models' multimodal reasoning capabilities. We suggest that future multimodal LLMs should place greater emphasis on improving chart understanding to better support scientific claim verification.

Nameer Hirschkind, Joseph Liu, Xiao Yu, Mahesh Kumar Nandwana

Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) systems stream in audio while simultaneously emitting translated text or speech. Such systems face the significant challenge of balancing translation quality and latency. We introduce a strategy to optimize this tradeoff: wait for more input only if you gain information by doing so. Based on this strategy, we present Regularized Entropy INformation Adaptation (REINA), a novel loss to train an adaptive policy using an existing non-streaming translation model. We derive REINA from information theory principles and show that REINA helps push the reported Pareto frontier of the latency/quality tradeoff over prior works. Utilizing REINA, we train a SimulST model on French, Spanish and German, both from and into English. Training on only open source or synthetically generated data, we achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) streaming results for models of comparable size. We also introduce a metric for streaming efficiency, quantitatively showing REINA improves the latency/quality trade-off by as much as 21 percent compared to prior approaches, normalized against non-streaming baseline BLEU scores.

Zhiyuan He

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across many tasks, yet face significant challenges when dealing with recursive reasoning problems—those requiring the resolution of nested hierarchical structures. While prior research has extensively studied length generalization (a model’s ability to handle longer sequences than seen during training), we investigate a distinct and underexplored limitation: depth generalization. Here, depth refers to the number of nested levels in a hierarchical problem, such as the layers of parentheses in a mathematical expression or the nesting of logical clauses in a Boolean formula. Our work reveals that standard transformer architectures struggle with problems involving deeper recursion than encountered during training, even when they perform well on longer but non-nested sequences. This limitation stems from their inability to maintain stack-like behavior—the capacity to track and resolve multiple levels of nested dependencies. Through systematic analysis, we demonstrate how this architectural constraint leads to rapid performance decay as the depth of recursion increases. To address this challenge, we develop a novel looped locate-and-replace pipeline that decomposes recursive problems into manageable subcomponents. The approach employs two specialized models: a locator that identifies solvable subexpressions and a replacer that evaluates these components while preserving the overall structure. We evaluate this method in three carefully designed domains—Boolean algebra, recursive arithmetic, and propositional logic—each with a controllable depth of recursion. Our results show that the proposed method effectively alleviates performance decay when tested on out-of-distribution recursion depth.

Yi He, Ping Wang, Shiqiang Xiong, Chao Chen, Haixiang Hu

Many existing financial math reasoning benchmarks suffer from data contamination and high manual construction costs. To address this, we propose a novel formula-driven approach to dynamically construct math reasoning benchmarks in finance. Our two-stage approach: (1) generates single-formula questions by LLMs using a "Mask-for-Solve" paradigm for ground truth answers, and (2) synthesizes multi-formula questions through hierarchical tree-based DAGs. Our approach ensures novelty (via LLMs' creativity) and controllability of difficulty (via DAG structure). Based on a self-constructed financial formula bank, we utilize the proposed method to build FinMathBench, the first formula-driven and fully LLM-generated benchmark aimed at assessing LLMs' math reasoning abilities in finance, containing 946 questions across 4 complexity levels. Evaluation results on 40 LLMs demonstrate significant accuracy drops in multi-formula questions, e.g., 72.9% (1-Formula) to 14.0% (4-Formula) for GPT-4o under Chain-of-Thought prompting. Three critical flaws of LLMs are also observed: poor direct calculation performance, bias toward frequently solved variables in formulas, and erroneous "correction" of valid but extreme financial values. These findings highlight gaps in current LLMs' domain-specific reasoning and underscore FinMathBench's value for advancing robust financial LLMs.

Ye He, Shangzhan Li, Yuxin Zhou, Qi Shi

Task-specific data selection, which aims to identify the most relevant training instances from a large corpus to optimize performance on a target task, is a critical challenge in modern AI. Prevailing methods typically rely on either representation clustering or gradient-based influence estimation. However, these approaches have notable limitations. Representation-based methods rely on static features; they measure semantic proximity but are agnostic to the process of learning. Conversely, influence-based methods, while capturing optimization directions, often focus narrowly on aligning with the validation loss, which may not fully correlate with the desired capabilities. To address these issues, we propose TRACE, a novel algorithm that simultaneously considers data consistency in the optimization direction and representation space, and performs TRajectory-based Activation Change Estimation to select instruction. Specifically, TRACE first performs a targeted weight update using the validation set. It then captures the optimization trajectory by calculating the change in neuron activations for each before and after this update. By selecting data whose activation change are most similar to those of the validation set, TRACE ensures alignment in both the representational and optimization domains. Our experiments demonstrate that TRACE outperforms baseline methods across various tasks, particularly in complex, data-scarce scenarios.

Xingwei He, Qianru Zhang, Pengfei Chen, Guanhua Chen, Linlin Yu, Yuan Yuan, Siu-Ming Yiu

Instruction-following is a critical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing works primarily focus on assessing how well LLMs adhere to user instructions, they often overlook scenarios where instructions contain conflicting constraints—a common occurrence in complex prompts. The behavior of LLMs under such conditions remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce ConInstruct, a benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs' ability to detect and resolve conflicts within user instructions. Using this dataset, we evaluate LLMs' conflict detection performance and analyze their conflict resolution behavior. Our experiments reveal two key findings: (1) Most proprietary LLMs exhibit strong conflict detection capabilities, whereas among open-source models, only DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates similarly strong performance. DeepSeek-R1 and Claude-4.5-Sonnet achieve the highest average F1-scores at 91.5% and 87.3%, respectively, ranking first and second overall. (2) Despite their strong conflict detection abilities, LLMs rarely explicitly notify users about the conflicts or request clarification when faced with conflicting constraints. These results underscore a critical shortcoming in current LLMs and highlight an important area for future improvement when designing instruction-following LLMs.

Kang He, Boyu Chen, Yuzhe Ding, Fei Li, Chong Teng, Donghong Ji

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) seeks to understand human emotions by integrating textual, acoustic, and visual signals. Although multimodal fusion is designed to leverage cross-modal complementarity, real-world scenarios often exhibit modality competition: dominant modalities tend to overshadow weaker ones, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose PaSE, a novel Prototype-aligned Calibration and Shapley-optimized Equilibrium framework, which enhances collaboration while explicitly mitigating modality competition. PaSE first applies Prototype-guided Calibration Learning (PCL) to refine unimodal representations and align them through an Entropic Optimal Transport mechanism that ensures semantic consistency. To further stabilize optimization, we introduce a Dual-Phase Optimization strategy. A prototype-gated fusion module is first used to extract shared representations, followed by Shapley-based Gradient Modulation (SGM), which adaptively adjusts gradients according to the contribution of each modality. Extensive experiments on IEMOCAP, MOSI, and MOSEI confirm that PaSE achieves the superior performance and effectively alleviates modality competition.

Jinwei He, Feng Lu

The global shortage of psychiatrists has become a critical issue, and the advent of large language models (LLMs) presents new opportunities to address this challenge. However, existing approaches continue to underperform in multi-turn mental health counseling, particularly in the arrangement of counseling strategies. To overcome these limitations, we propose MentalGuide, a state-aware and strategy-driven conversation framework designed for multi-turn mental health support. Our method integrates expert-derived prior probabilities of counseling strategies tailored to the target client's state with the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. This enables effective strategy formulation and strategy-driven response generation, without the need for additional training. Experimental results show that MentalGuide surpasses baselines in automated and human expert evaluations, demonstrating the closest alignment with real-world multi-turn counseling dynamics.

Haorui He, Yupeng Li, Bin Benjamin Zhu, Dacheng Wen, Reynold Cheng, Francis C. M. Lau

State-of-the-art (SOTA) fact-checking systems combat misinformation by employing autonomous LLM-based agents to decompose complex claims into smaller sub-claims, verify each sub-claim individually, and aggregate the partial results to produce verdicts with justifications (explanations for the verdicts). The security of these systems is crucial, as compromised fact-checkers can amplify misinformation, but remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, this work introduces a novel threat model against such fact-checking systems and presents Fact2Fiction, the first poisoning attack framework targeting SOTA agentic fact-checking systems. Fact2Fiction employs LLMs to mimic the decomposition strategy and exploit system-generated justifications to craft tailored malicious evidences that compromise sub-claim verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Fact2Fiction achieves 8.9%-21.2% higher attack success rates than SOTA attacks across various poisoning budgets and exposes security weaknesses in existing fact-checking systems, highlighting the need for defensive countermeasures.

XiaoQi Han, Ru Li, Ran Yi, Hongye Tan, Zhuomin Liang, Victor Gutierrez Basulto, Jeff Z. Pan

Multimodal Model Editing (MMED) aims to correct erroneous knowledge in multimodal models. Existing evaluation methods, adapted from textual model editing, overstate success by relying on low-similarity or random inputs, obscure overfitting. We propose a comprehensive locality evaluation framework, covering three key dimensions: random-image locality, no-image locality, and consistent-image locality, operationalized through seven distinct data types, enabling a detailed and structured analysis of multimodal edits. We introduce De-VQA, a dynamic evaluation for visual question answering, uncovering a phenomenon we term transient blindness, overfitting to edit-similar text while ignoring visuals. Token analysis shows edits disproportionately affect textual tokens. We propose locality-aware adversarial losses to balance cross-modal representations. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, reducing transient blindness and improving locality by 17% on average.

Jiuzhou Han, Wray Buntine, Ehsan Shareghi

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex mathematical reasoning tasks, but they inevitably generate errors throughout multi-step solutions. Process-level Reward Models (PRMs) have shown great promise by providing supervision and evaluation at each intermediate step, thereby effectively improving the models’ reasoning abilities. However, training effective PRMs requires high-quality process reward data, yet existing methods for constructing such data are often labour-intensive or inefficient. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-driven framework for automated process reward data construction, encompassing both data generation and annotation processes for PRMs. Additionally, we identify the limitations of both majority vote and PRMs, and introduce two generic uncertainty-aware output aggregation methods: Hybrid Majority Reward Vote and Weighted Reward Frequency Vote, which combine the strengths of majority vote with PRMs. Extensive experiments on ProcessBench, MATH, and GSMPlus show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed PRM data construction framework, and demonstrate that the two output aggregation methods further improve the mathematical reasoning abilities across diverse PRMs.

Hong Han, Hao-Chen Pei, Zhao-Zheng Nie, Xin Luo, Xin-Shun Xu

Automatic pronunciation assessment plays a crucial role in computer-assisted pronunciation training systems. Due to the ability to perform multiple pronunciation tasks simultaneously, multi-aspect multi-granularity pronunciation assessment methods are gradually receiving more attention and achieving better performance than single-level modeling tasks. However, existing methods only consider unidirectional dependencies between adjacent granularity levels, lacking bidirectional interaction among phoneme, word, and utterance levels and thus insufficiently capturing the acoustic structural correlations. To address this issue, we propose a novel residual hierarchical interactive method, HIA for short, that enables bidirectional modeling across granularities. As the core of HIA, the Interactive Attention Module leverages an attention mechanism to achieve dynamic bidirectional interaction, effectively capturing linguistic features at each granularity while integrating correlations between different granularity levels. We also propose a residual hierarchical structure to alleviate the feature forgetting problem when modeling acoustic hierarchies. In addition, we use 1-D convolutional layers to enhance the extraction of local contextual cues at each granularity. Extensive experiments on the speechocean762 dataset show that our model is comprehensively ahead of the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Feijiang Han, Zelong Wang, Bowen Wang, Xinxin Liu, Skyler Cheung, Delip Rao, Chris Callison-Burch, Lyle Ungar

General-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly integral to modern AI systems for document understanding, yet their ability to perform fine-grained layout analysis remains severely underdeveloped. Overcoming this limitation requires large-scale, high-fidelity training datasets. However, current annotation methods that rely on parsing rendered PDFs are costly, error-prone, and difficult to scale. We propose a different paradigm: extracting ground-truth layout directly from the LaTeX compilation process rather than the final PDF. We present LaTeX2Layout, a generalizable procedural pipeline that recovers pixel-accurate bounding boxes and reading order from compiler traces. This enables the generation of a 140K-page dataset, including 120K programmatically generated synthetic variants that more than double the layout diversity of real-world data. Using this dataset, we fine-tune an efficient 3B-parameter VLM with an easy-to-hard curriculum that accelerates convergence. Our model achieves Kendall's tau=0.95 for reading order and mAP@50=0.91 for element grounding, delivering nearly 200% relative improvement over strong zero-shot baselines such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.7.

Andrea Gurioli, Federico Pennino, Joao Monteiro, Maurizio Gabbrielli

Deploying language models often requires navigating accuracy vs. performance trade-offs to meet latency constraints while preserving utility. Traditional model distillation reduces size but incurs substantial costs through training separate models. We introduce ModularStarEncoder (MoSE), a 1-billion-parameter multi-exit encoder for code retrieval and classification that employs a novel Self-Distillation mechanism. This approach significantly enhances lower-layer representations, enabling flexible deployment of different model portions with favorable performance trade-offs. Our architecture improves text-to-code and code-to-code search by targeting specific encoder layers as exit heads, where higher layers guide earlier ones during training, thereby improving intermediate representations at minimal additional cost. We further enhance MoSE with a repository-level contextual loss that maximizes training context window utilization. Additionally, we release a new dataset created through code translation that extends text-to code benchmarks with cross-language code-to-code pairs. Evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of Self-Distillation as a principled approach to trading inference cost for accuracy across various code understanding tasks.

Zikang Guo, Benfeng Xu, Chiwei Zhu, Wentao Hong, Xiaorui Wang, Zhendong Mao

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is rapidly emerging as a pivotal open standard, designed to enhance agent-tool integration and interoperability, and is positioned to unlock a new era of powerful, interconnected, and genuinely utilitarian agentic AI. However, despite MCP's growing adoption, existing benchmarks often fail to capture real-world agent performance within this new paradigm, leading to a distorted perception of their true operational value and an inability to reliably differentiate proficiencies. To bridge this critical evaluation gap, we introduce MCP-AgentBench—a comprehensive benchmark specifically engineered to rigorously assess language agent capabilities in MCP-mediated tool interactions. Core contributions of MCP-AgentBench include: the establishment of a robust MCP testbed comprising 33 operational servers with 188 distinct tools; the development of a benchmark featuring 600 systematically designed queries distributed across 6 distinct categories of varying interaction complexity; and the introduction of MCP-Eval, a novel outcome-oriented evaluation methodology prioritizing real-world task success. Through extensive empirical evaluation of leading language agents, we provide foundational insights. MCP-AgentBench aims to equip the research community with a standardized and reliable framework to build, validate, and advance agents capable of fully leveraging MCP's transformative benefits, thereby accelerating progress toward truly capable and interoperable AI systems.

Quanjiang Guo, Sijie Wang, Jinchuan Zhang, Ben Zhang, Zhao Kang, Ling Tian, Ke Yan

Zero-shot event extraction (ZSEE) remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the need for complex reasoning and domain-specific understanding. Direct prompting often yields incomplete or structurally invalid outputs—such as misclassified triggers, missing arguments, and schema violations. To address these limitations, we present Agent-Event-Coder (AEC), a novel multi-agent framework that treats event extraction like software engineering: as a structured, iterative code-generation process. AEC decomposes ZSEE into specialized subtasks—retrieval, planning, coding, and verification—each handled by a dedicated LLM agent. Event schemas are represented as executable class definitions, enabling deterministic validation and precise feedback via a verification agent. This programming-inspired approach allows for systematic disambiguation and schema enforcement through iterative refinement. By leveraging collaborative agent workflows, AEC enables LLMs to produce precise, complete, and schema-consistent extractions in zero-shot settings. Experiments across five diverse domains and six LLMs demonstrate that AEC consistently outperforms prior zero-shot baselines, showcasing the power of treating event extraction like code generation.

Pinxue Guo, Chongruo Wu, Xinyu Zhou, Lingyi Hong, Zhaoyu Chen, Jinglun Li, Kaixun Jiang, Sen-Ching Samson Cheung, Wei Zhang, Wenqiang Zhang

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have unlocked powerful cross-modal capabilities, but still significantly suffer from hallucinations. As such, accurate detection of hallucinations in MLLMs is imperative for ensuring their reliability in practical applications. To this end, guided by the principle of “Seeing is Believing”, we introduce VBackChecker, a novel reference-free hallucination detection framework that verifies the consistency of MLLM-generated responses with visual inputs, by leveraging a pixel-level Grounding LLM equipped with reasoning and referring segmentation capabilities. This referencefree framework not only effectively handles rich-context scenarios, but also offers interpretability. To facilitate this, an innovative pipeline is accordingly designed for generating instruction-tuning data (R-Instruct), featuring richcontext descriptions, grounding masks, and hard negative samples. We further establish R 2 -HalBench, a new hallucination benchmark for MLLMs, which, unlike previous benchmarks, encompasses real-world, rich-context descriptions from 18 MLLMs with high-quality annotations, spanning diverse object-, attribute-, and relationship-level details. VBackChecker outperforms prior complex frameworks and achieves state-of-the-art performance on R^2 -HalBench, even rivaling GPT-4o’s capabilities in hallucination detection. It also surpasses prior methods in the pixel-level grounding task, achieving over a 10% improvement.

Jiaxin Guo, Hao Sun, Wenhao Zhang, Xuanbo Fan, Yan Zhang

Knowledge editing (KE) has emerged as an effective approach for updating factual information in large language models (LLMs) without the need for full retraining. Most of the existing methods for addressing the "ripple effect" in KE adopt a chain-structured reasoning process, making them vulnerable to error accumulation from early incorrect steps. Moreover, their conflict detection mechanisms are often susceptible to the LLM's inherent confirmation bias, further undermining the reliability of the editing process. To overcome these challenges, we propose Tree of Editing (ToE), a tree-structured, retrieval-enhanced knowledge editing framework designed to support robust reasoning under factual updates. ToE expands reasoning paths using a breadth-first strategy combined with score-guided beam search, enabling diverse and error-tolerant inference. Besides, we introduce an observer to objectively update knowledge, avoiding the bias caused by LLMs' over-confidence. Experimental results on two benchmarks, namely MQuAKE-CF (targeting ripple-aware editing) and DUNE (free-form editing), demonstrate that ToE framework significantly outperforms existing methods.

Feng Guo, Yuntao Wen, Shen Gao, Junshuo Zhang, Shuo Shang

Machine unlearning, which selectively removes harmful knowledge from a pre-trained model without retraining from scratch, is crucial for addressing privacy, regulatory compliance, and ethical concerns in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing unlearning methods often struggle to thoroughly remove harmful knowledge, leaving residual harmful knowledge that can be easily recovered. To address these limitations, we propose Knowledge Density-Guided Unlearning via Blocks Reinsertion (KUnBR), a novel approach that first identifies layers with rich harmful knowledge and then thoroughly eliminates the harmful knowledge via re-insertion strategy. Our method introduces knowledge density estimation to quantify and locate layers containing the most harmful knowledge, enabling precise unlearning. Additionally, we design a layer re-insertion strategy that extracts and re-inserts harmful knowledge-rich layers into the original LLM, bypassing gradient obstruction caused by cover layers and ensuring effective gradient propagation during unlearning. Extensive experiments conducted on several unlearning and general capability benchmarks demonstrate that KUnBR achieves state-of-the-art forgetting performance while maintaining model utility.

Jiannan Guan, Qiguang Chen, Libo Qin, Dengyun Peng, Jinhao Liu, Liangyu Huo, Jian Xie, Wanxiang Che

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning tasks requiring a single correct answer, but they perform poorly in multi-solution tasks that require generating comprehensive and diverse answers. We attribute this limitation to reasoning overconfidence: a tendency to express undue certainty in an incomplete solution set. To examine the effect, we introduce MuSoBench, a benchmark of multi-solution problems. Experiments show that the conventional short chain-of-thought (Short-CoT) prompting paradigm exhibits pronounced overconfidence, whereas the emerging long chain-of-thought (Long-CoT) approach mitigates it through iterative exploration and self-reflection. We further characterise observable behaviours and influential factors. To probe the underlying cause, we propose the cognitive-rigidity hypothesis, which posits that overconfidence arises when the reasoning process prematurely converges on a narrow set of thought paths. An attention-entropy analysis offers preliminary support for this view. These findings provide tools for assessing the completeness of LLM reasoning and highlight the need to move evaluation beyond single-answer accuracy toward comprehensive exploration.