Temporal reasoning is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to understand event concurrency and complex temporal interactions in natural language. Recent approaches rely on the LLM to infer temporal relations between events and largely overlook the inherent structural nature of temporal relationships. In this work, we propose ODL-TempLLM (Ontology-Guided and Description Logic–Constrained Temporal Reasoning with LLMs), a novel paradigm for temporal reasoning with LLMs that shifts focus from internal inference to the explicit modeling of temporal structure. ODL-TempLLM leverages ontology learning to explicitly construct structured temporal knowledge, employs a symbolic reasoner to deductively reason about temporal relations and uses logic-constrained retrieval augmentation to obtain relevant facts.Experiments results evaluated across there datasets via various LLM backbones show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.07–31.83 F1 points and 1.00–30.73 EM points, exhibiting strong generalization and highlighting the potential of explicit temporal reasoning.
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Effective code generation requires both model capability and a problem representation that carefully structures how models reason and plan. Existing approaches augment reasoning steps or inject specific structure into how models think, but leave scattered problem conditions unchanged. Inspired by the way humans organize fragmented information into coherent explanations, we propose StoryCoder, a narrative reformulation framework that transforms code generation questions into coherent natural language narratives, providing richer contextual structure than simple rephrasings. Each narrative consists of three components: a task overview, constraints, and example test cases, guided by the selected algorithm and genre. Experiments across 11 models on HumanEval, LiveCodeBench, and CodeForces demonstrate consistent improvements, with an average gain of 18.7% in zero-shot pass@10. Beyond accuracy, our analyses reveal that narrative reformulation guides models toward correct algorithmic strategies, reduces implementation errors, and induces a more modular code structure. The analyses further show that these benefits depend on narrative coherence and genre alignment, suggesting that structured problem representation is important for code generation regardless of model scale or architecture. Our code is available at https://github.com/gu-ni/StoryCoder.
Suggest-Verify-Revise: A Three-Stage Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Narrative Consistency
PDF ↗Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify causal relations among multiple events within unstructured text. Existing methods predominantly rely on local semantic similarity for independent event-pair discrimination, thereby overlooking the influence of the overall narrative backbone in the propagation of causal dependencies and the role differentiation of events within multi-cause/multi-effect structures. Therefore, we propose a suggest-verify-revise approach for document-level Event Causality Identification with narrative consistency (SVRECI). In the suggest stage, we integrate multi-dimensional heuristic causal suggestions generated by an LLM with structural suggestions derived from hypergraph modeling to provide multi-source initial support for candidate event pairs. In the verify stage, we introduce a Topological Hawkes process to perform constrained verification of narrative propagation consistency among events. In the revise stage, we construct a dynamically evolving document-level causal graph and incorporate a structure-aware dual-level contrastive learning mechanism at both the event and event-pair levels, iteratively reducing noisy edges over multiple iterations. Experimental results on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous methods.
Large language models produce powerful text embeddings, but their causal attention mechanism restricts the flow of information from later to earlier tokens, degrading representation quality. While recent methods attempt to solve this by prepending a single summary token, they over-compress information, hence harming performance on long documents. We propose Hierarchical Token Prepending (HTP), a method that resolves two critical bottlenecks. To mitigate attention-level compression, HTP partitions the input into blocks and prepends block-level summary tokens to subsequent blocks, creating multiple pathways for backward information flow. To address readout-level over-squashing, we replace last-token pooling with mean-pooling, a choice supported by theoretical analysis. HTP achieves consistent performance gains across 11 retrieval datasets and 30 general embedding benchmarks, especially in long-context settings. As a simple, architecture-agnostic method, HTP effectively enhances both zero-shot and fine-tuned models, offering a scalable route to superior long-document embeddings.
TLSA: LLM-Guided Text-Label Space Alignment with Contrastive Learning for Generalized Category Discovery
PDF ↗Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify data from partially labeled datasets by jointly recognizing known categories and discovering novel ones.Despite recent advances, existing methods still suffer from weak text–label alignment, inconsistent objectives across known and novel categories, and poor discrimination of semantically similar clusters. To mitigate these issues, we propose TLSA, a unified framework that enforces contrastive alignment between text and label representations within a shared semantic space. Specifically, we first design a label-semantic aware dual-encoder equipped with a symmetric contrastive objective to achieve text-label alignment. Then, we leverage LLM-based label induction to generate explicit and semantically meaningful names for previously unseen categories, followed by a graph-based refinement strategy that disambiguates semantically overlapping clusters through forced renaming. Finally, a confidence-aware sampling strategy ensures balanced learning across both easy and hard instances. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that TLSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GCD methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Wenxi-Xu/TLSA.
Reading order detection is the foundation of document understanding.Most existing methods rely on uniform supervision, implicitly assuming a constant difficulty distribution across layout regions. In this work, we challenge this assumption by revealing a critical flaw: Positional Disparity, a phenomenon where models demonstrate mastery over the deterministic start and end regions but suffer a performance collapse in the complex intermediate sections.This degradation arises because standard training allows the massive volume of easy patterns to drown out the learning signals from difficult layouts.To address this, we propose FocalOrder, a framework driven by Focal Preference Optimization (FPO).Specifically, FocalOrder employs adaptive difficulty discovery with exponential moving average mechanism to dynamically pinpoint hard-to-learn transitions, while introducing a difficulty-calibrated pairwise ranking objective to enforce global logical consistency.Extensive experiments demonstrate that FocalOrder establishes new state-of-the-art results on OmniDocBench v1.0 and Comp-HRDoc.Our compact model not only outperforms competitive specialized baselines but also significantly surpasses large-scale general VLMs.These results demonstrate that aligning the optimization with intrinsic structural ambiguity of documents is critical for mastering complex document structures.
Know the Known and the Unknown: Reasonable Answer Generation with Knowledge-Informed Citations
PDF ↗Question answering (QA) with reference texts is a classic application scenario for large language models (LLMs), where high standards for the credibility and traceability of generated answers are crucial. Many existing approaches focus on generating multi-level citations linked to specific references within the answer, making it verifiable and trustworthy. However, they often overlook key challenges such as citation granularity, the awareness of unknown information, and the adoption of effective training strategies. In this paper, we introduce Knowledge-informed Citation (KFC), which addresses these issues through a novel data construction pipeline, a new benchmark, and an innovative training strategy. With approximately 42K samples spanning 19 distinct domains, KFC includes both traditional citations referencing known entity-level information and specialized citations referring to unknown knowledge in the given question. This structure provides a more granular approach to citations, guiding the model to recognize and explicitly indicate unknown information, thus enhancing the quality and credibility of the response. Additionally, we propose a self-correction paradigm, Self-KFC, designed to fine-tune LLMs by refining poorly cited answers into more accurate ones, making it particularly suitable for citation-dependent scenarios. We present comprehensive experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of Self-KFC on the KFC benchmark.
SEE: Signal Embedding Energy for Quantifying Noise Interference in Large Audio Language Models
PDF ↗Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have been widely applied in real-time scenarios, such as in-car assistants and online meeting comprehension. In practice, audio inputs are often corrupted by device and environmental noise, leading to performance degradation. However, existing LALM studies on noise lack quantitative analysis and rely mainly on intuition and empirical observation, thus failing to understand practical robustness. To address this issue, we introduce Signal Embedding Energy (SEE), a method for quantifying the impact of noise intensity on LALM inputs, enabling the differentiation of LALM robustness in real-world deployments. SEE introduces a perspective based on structured activation subspaces derived from the model’s internal representations, which more accurately captures its perception of noise than raw audio features. Across experiments, SEE exhibits a strong correlation with LALM performance, achieving a correlation of 0.98. Surprisingly, traditional audio denoising methods are only marginally effective for LALMs, and, in some cases, even increase SEE and impair performance. This suggests a mismatch between speech-centric denoising objectives and the noise sensitivity of modern LALMs. Therefore, we propose a mitigation strategy derived from SEE to denoise LALM inputs, outperforming existing denoising methods. This paper introduces a novel metric for noise quantification in LALMs, providing guidance for robustness improvements in real-world deployments.
Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Target Language Adaptation of LLMs via Source-Shielded Updates
PDF ↗Expanding the linguistic diversity of instruct large language models (LLMs) is crucial for global accessibility but is often hindered by the reliance on costly specialized target language labeled data and catastrophic forgetting during adaptation. We tackle this challenge under a realistic, low-resource constraint: adapting instruct LLMs using only unlabeled target language data. We introduce Source-Shielded Updates (SSU), a selective parameter update strategy that proactively preserves source knowledge. Using a small set of source data and a parameter importance scoring method, SSU identifies parameters critical to maintaining source abilities. It then applies a column-wise freezing strategy to protect these parameters before adaptation. Experiments across five typologically diverse languages and 7B and 13B models demonstrate that SSU successfully mitigates catastrophic forgetting. It reduces performance degradation on monolingual source tasks to just 3.4% (7B) and 2.8% (13B) on average, a stark contrast to the 20.3% and 22.3% from full fine-tuning. SSU also achieves target-language performance highly competitive with full fine-tuning, outperforming it on all benchmarks for 7B models and the majority for 13B models.
Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training of large language models (LLMs), yet they typically rely on large-scale human-annotated preference pairs. With the widespread deployment of LLMs, in-the-wild interactions have emerged as a rich source of implicit reward signals. This raises the question: Can we develop reward models directly from in-the-wild interactions? In this work, we explore this possibility by adopting WildChat as an interaction source and proposing a pipeline to extract reliable human feedback, yielding 186k high-quality instances for training WildReward via ordinal regression directly on user feedback without preference pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WildReward achieves comparable or even superior performance compared to conventional reward models, with improved calibration and cross-sample consistency. We also observe that WildReward benefits directly from user diversity, where more users yield stronger reward models. Finally, we apply WildReward to online DPO training and observe significant improvements across various downstream tasks. We will release our code, data, and models to facilitate future research.
Codec-based language models (LMs) have revolutionized text-to-speech (TTS). However, standard codecs entangle timbre and prosody, which hinders independent control in continuation-based LMs. To tackle this challenge, we propose DisCo-Speech, a zero-shot controllable TTS framework featuring a disentangled speech codec (DisCodec) and an LM-based generator. The core component DisCodec employs a two-stage design: 1) tri-factor disentanglement to separate speech into content, prosody, and timbre subspaces via parallel encoders and hybrid losses; and 2) fusion and reconstruction that merges content and prosody into unified content-prosody tokens suitable for LM prediction, while jointly optimizing reconstruction to address the disentanglement-reconstruction trade-off. This allows the LM to perform prosodic continuation from a style prompt while the decoder injects target timbre, enabling flexible zero-shot control. Experiments demonstrate that DisCo-Speech achieves competitive voice cloning and superior zero-shot prosody control. By resolving the core entanglement at the codec level, DisCo-Speech provides a robust foundation for controllable speech synthesis. Audio samples are available at: https://disco-speech.github.io/DisCo-demo/. Code and weights will be released at: https://github.com/disco-speech/DisCo-Speech upon acceptance.
Taming System Complexity: Demystifying Software Engineering Agents in Diagnosing Linux Kernel Faults
PDF ↗The Linux kernel is a critical system, serving as the foundation for numerous systems. Bugs in the Linux kernel can cause serious consequences, affecting billions of users. Fault localization (FL), which aims at identifying the buggy code elements in software, plays an essential role in software quality assurance. While recent LLM agents have achieved promising accuracy in FL on recent benchmarks like SWE-bench, it remains unclear how well these methods perform in the Linux kernel, where FL is much more challenging due to the large-scale code base, limited observability, and diverse impact factors. In this paper, we introduce LinuxFLBench, a FL benchmark constructed from real-world Linux kernel bugs. We conduct an empirical study to assess the performance of state-of-the-art LLM agents on the Linux kernel. Our initial results reveal that existing agents struggle with this task, achieving a best top-1 accuracy of only 41.6% at file level. To address this challenge, we propose LinuxFL+, an enhancement framework designed to improve FL effectiveness of LLM agents for the Linux kernel. LinuxFL+ substantially improves the FL accuracy of all studied agents (e.g., 7.2% - 11.2% accuracy increase) with minimal costs.
Multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (MASR) aims to predict ”who spoke when and what” from multi-speaker speech, a key technology for multi-party dialogue understanding. However, most existing approaches decouple temporal modeling and speaker modeling when addressing ”when” and ”who”: some inject speaker cues before encoding (e.g., speaker masking), which can cause irreversible information loss; others fuse identity by mixing speaker posteriors after encoding, which may entangle acoustic content with speaker identity. This separation is brittle under rapid turn-taking and overlapping speech, often leading to degraded performance. To address these limitations, we propose TellWhisper, a unified framework that jointly models speaker identity and temporal within the speech encoder. Specifically, we design TS\text{-}RoPE, a time-speaker rotary positional encoding: time coordinates are derived from frame indices, while speaker coordinates are derived from speaker activity and pause cues. By applying region-specific rotation angles, the model explicitly captures per-speaker continuity, speaker-turn transitions, and state dynamics, enabling the attention mechanism to simultaneously attend to ”when” and ”who”. Moreover, to estimate frame-level speaker activity, we develop Hyper\text{-}SD, which casts speaker classification in hyperbolic space to enhance inter-class separation and refine speaker-activity estimates. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The project webpage is available at https://walker-hyf.github.io/TellWhisper.
Empathy relies on the cognitive capacity to relate to similar past experiences. Consequently, retrieval-based approaches utilize analogous exemplars to guide empathetic dialogue generation. However, existing methods prioritize semantic similarity over emotion characteristics, often leading to unempathetic responses. To address this, we propose REG, a framework that integrates four Emotion Attributes into the retrieval process to ensure explicit emotional alignment. Furthermore, to mitigate the noise and limited diversity caused by coarse-grained sentence-level attributes, we incorporate Token-level Retrieval for finer granularity and a Retrieval Candidate Augmentation strategy to enhance diversity. Empirical results on the EmpatheticDialogues dataset demonstrate that REG significantly outperforms baselines, offering a robust solution for empathetic generation.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly enhances LLMs but faces high prefill latency during long-context processing. While KV cache reuse can mitigate this, current methods relying on shallow features or static heuristics often fail to identify critical tokens for recomputation, resulting in generation quality degradation.We have an insight that KV deviations are more pronounced in deep layers.However, directly extracting deep-layer features from the target model is computationally prohibitive. Crucially, we find that the deep-layer features of a lightweight speculative model exhibit strong consistency with the target model in the selection of critical tokens for recomputation.In light of these insights, we propose SpecCache, which employs deep-layer hidden-state norms from a speculative model as a proxy to guide the critical token selection for target large model.Experiments demonstrate that SpecCache outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. Compared to full KV recomputation, it reduces time-to-first-token (TTFT) by 2.17-3.95\times and increases inference throughput by 2.7-5.2\times, with negligible degradation in generation quality relative to full recomputation.
Symbolic logical reasoning is a critical yet underexplored capability of large language models (LLMs), providing reliable and verifiable decision-making in high-stakes domains such as mathematical reasoning and legal judgment. In this study, we present a systematic analysis of logical reasoning under controlled increases in logical complexity, and reveal a previously unrecognized phenomenon, which we term **Logical Phase Transitions**: rather than degrading smoothly, logical reasoning performance remains stable within a regime but collapses abruptly beyond a critical logical depth, mirroring physical phase transitions such as water freezing beyond a critical temperature threshold. Building on this insight, we propose **Neuro-Symbolic Curriculum Tuning**, a principled framework that adaptively aligns natural language with logical symbols to establish a shared representation, and reshapes training dynamics around phase-transition boundaries to progressively strengthen reasoning at increasing logical depths. Experiments on five benchmarks show that our approach effectively mitigates logical reasoning collapse at high complexity, yielding average accuracy gains of +1.26 in naive prompting and +3.95 in CoT, while improving generalization to unseen logical compositions.
Although Speech Large Language Models have achieved notable progress, a substantial modality reasoning gap remains: their reasoning performance on speech inputs is markedly weaker than on text. This gap could be associated with representational drift across Transformer layers and behavior deviations in long-chain reasoning. To address this issue, we introduce TARS, a reinforcement-learning framework that aligns text-conditioned and speech-conditioned trajectories through an asymmetric reward design. The framework employs two dense and complementary signals: representation alignment, which measures layer-wise hidden-state similarity between speech- and text-conditioned trajectories, and behavior alignment, which evaluates semantic consistency between generated outputs and reference text completions. Experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks, including MMSU and OBQA, show that our approach significantly narrows the modality reasoning gap and achieves state-of-the-art performance among 7B-scale Speech LLMs.
Web agents, which couple language models with browsing and tool-use capabilities, show promise as open web assistants. Yet progress is increasingly limited by the lack of scalable, process-level supervision. Existing benchmarks are largely manually constructed, providing only coarse start–goal annotations without intermediate trajectories, while recent automatic generation efforts remain expensive, biased, and shallow. These limitations prevent reliable training and evaluation of agents that must generalize to realistic, multi-hop, cross-page tasks. We introduce a scalable framework GTA that integrates crawling, retrieval-based seeding, in-context generation, and automated quality control to produce realistic tasks paired with executable trajectories. This design decouples crawling from generation for greater efficiency, grounds tasks in the site graph to enforce compositionality, and ensures dense supervision through deterministic replays and systematic validation. We instantiate the pipeline on over 50 websites covering e-commerce, government, forums, and news, with multilingual and multi-hop coverage. The resulting benchmark reveals a significant human–agent performance gap and enables detailed diagnostics. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) formalizing multi-hop web-agent task generation, (ii) proposing an efficient and validated pipeline for automatic data creation, and (iii) releasing a dynamic benchmark with reproducible evaluation.
Large language models (LLMs) excel at function calling, but inference scaling has been explored mainly for unstructured generation. We propose an inference-scaling framework for structured outputs that combines fine-grained beam search with ToolPRM, a process reward model scoring each intra-call decision (function name and argument filling). We build the first fine-grained intra-call supervision dataset via function masking, rollout collection, and step-level annotation. ToolPRM outperforms outcome and coarse-grained reward models in predictive accuracy and yields consistent test-time gains on multiple function-calling benchmarks. We further show that structured generation follows “explore more but retain less”, since early JSON errors are unrecoverable.
Multiple-choice cloze questions are commonly used to assess linguistic proficiency and comprehension. However, generating high-quality distractors remains challenging, as existing methods often lack adaptability and control over difficulty levels, and the absence of difficulty-annotated datasets further hinders progress. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for generating distractors with controllable difficulty by leveraging both data augmentation and a multitask learning strategy. First, to create a high-quality, difficulty-annotated dataset, we introduce a two-way distractor generation process to produce diverse and plausible distractors. These candidates are filtered and then categorized by difficulty using an ensemble QA system. Second, this newly created dataset is used to train a difficulty-controllable generation model via multitask learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates high-quality distractors across difficulty levels and substantially outperforms GPT-4o in aligning distractor difficulty with human perception.