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Xinyu Li, Kexi Chen, Jiajie Shen, Ying Zheng, Hong Lu, Jin Zhao, Xin Wang

In multivariate long-term time series forecasting, it is widely believed that the effectiveness of self-attention arises from its attention matrix. We challenge this assumption with a counterintuitive finding: our experiments, conducted on three classic and three latest Transformer models, show that dot-product attention can be replaced by element-wise operations without token interaction, such as the addition and Hadamard product, while maintaining or even improving accuracy. This leads to our central hypothesis: the effectiveness of self-attention in this task stems not from the dynamic attention matrix, but from the multi-branch feature extraction inherent in the parallel projections to Query, Key, and Value matrices and their fusion. To validate this, we construct a simple multi-branch MLP that isolates the ‘multi-branch mapping with element-wise operation’ structure from the Transformer and show that it achieves competitive performance. Our results indicate that the source of performance in self-attention has been misattributed, suggesting that the true benefit lies in the architectural principle of multi-branch mapping and fusion, not in the attention matrix.

Zixuan Weng, Jinghuai Zhang, Kunlin Cai, Ying Li, Peiran Wang, Yuan Tian

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit undesirable behaviors, such as safety violations and hallucinations. Although inference-time steering offers a cost-effective way to adjust model behavior without updating its parameters, existing methods often fail to be simultaneously effective, utility-preserving, and training-efficient due to their rigid, one-size-fits-all designs and limited adaptability. In this work, we present FineSteer, a novel steering framework that decomposes inference-time steering into two complementary stages—conditional steering and fine-grained vector synthesis—allowing fine-grained control over when and how to steer internal representations. In the first stage, we introduce a Subspace-guided Conditional Steering (SCS) mechanism that preserves model utility by avoiding unnecessary steering. In the second stage, we propose a Mixture-of-Steering-Experts (MoSE) mechanism that captures the multimodal nature of desired steering behaviors and generates query-specific steering vectors for improved effectiveness. Through tailored designs in both SCS and MoSE, FineSteer maintains robust performance on general queries while adaptively optimizing steering vectors for targeted inputs in a training-efficient manner. Extensive experiments on safety and truthfulness benchmarks show that FineSteer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in overall performance (e.g., a 7.6% improvement on TruthfulQA over Llama-3), achieving stronger steering performance with minimal utility loss. The code is available at https://github.com/YukinoAsuna/FineSteer

Chengyan Wu, Bolei Ma, Ningyuan Deng, He Yanqing, Yun Xue, Liu Xiaoyong

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) garnered growing research interest in multilingual contexts in the past. However, the majority of the studies lack more robust feature alignment and finer aspect-level alignment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, MSMO: Multi-Scale and Multi-Objective optimization for cross-lingual ABSA. During multi-scale alignment, we achieve cross-lingual sentence-level and aspect-level alignment, aligning features of aspect terms in different contextual environments. Specifically, we introduce code-switched bilingual sentences into the language discriminator and consistency training modules to enhance the model’s robustness. During multi-objective optimization, we design two optimization objectives: supervised training and consistency training, aiming to enhance cross-lingual semantic alignment. To further improve model performance, we incorporate distilled knowledge of the target language into the model. Results show that MSMO significantly enhances cross-lingual ABSA by achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple languages and models.

Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Yibin Wang, Jianwen Sun, Yukang Feng, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Mingzhu Sun, Yifei Huang, Kaipeng Zhang

Recent advancements have expanded the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in board games from playing agents to creative co-designers. However, a critical gap remains: current systems lack the capacity to offer constructive critique grounded in the emergent user experience. Bridging this gap is fundamental for harmonizing Human-AI collaboration, as it empowers designers to refine their creations via external perspectives while steering models away from biased or unpredictable outcomes. Automating this evaluation presents two challenges: inferring the latent dynamics connecting static rules to gameplay without an explicit engine, and modeling the subjective heterogeneity of diverse player groups. To address these, we curate a comprehensive dataset of 1,727 structurally corrected rulebooks and 150K reviews selected via rigorous quality scoring and facet-aware sampling. We augment this data with Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) reasoning to explicitly bridge the causal gap between written rules and player experience. We further distill distinct player personas and introduce MeepleLM, a specialized model that internalizes persona-specific reasoning patterns to accurately simulate the subjective feedback of diverse player archetypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MeepleLM significantly outperforms latest commercial models (e.g., GPT-5.1, Gemini3-Pro) in community alignment and critique quality, achieving a 70% preference rate in user studies assessing practical utility. MeepleLM serves as a reliable virtual playtester that provides experience-grounded feedback, offering a practical step towards audience-aligned Human-AI collaboration.

Zhanyu Wu, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie

Dense retrieval represents queries and documents as high-dimensional embeddings, but these representations can be redundant at the query level: for a given information need, only a subset of dimensions is consistently helpful for ranking. Prior work addresses this via pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) based dimension importance estimation, which can produce query-aware masks without labeled data but often relies on noisy pseudo signals and heuristic test-time procedures. In contrast, supervised adapter methods leverage relevance labels to improve embedding quality, yet they learn global transformations shared across queries and do not explicitly model query-aware dimension importance. We propose a Query-Aware Adaptive Dimension Selection framework that learns to predict per-dimension importance directly from query embedding. We first construct oracle dimension importance distributions over embedding dimensions using supervised relevance labels, and then train a predictor to map a query embedding to these label-distilled importance scores. At inference, the predictor selects a query-aware subset of dimensions for similarity computation based solely on the query embedding, without pseudo-relevance feedback. Experiments across multiple dense retrievers and benchmarks show that our learned dimension selector improves retrieval effectiveness over the full-dimensional baseline as well as PRF-based masking and supervised adapter baselines.

Xichen Zhang, Ziyi He, Yinghao Zhu, Sitong Wu, Shaozuo Yu, Meng Chu, Wenhu Zhang, Haoru Tan, Jiaya Jia

Search agents have emerged as a pivotal paradigm for solving open-ended, knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks. However, training these agents via Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces a critical dilemma: interacting with live commercial Web APIs is prohibitively expensive, while relying on static data snapshots often introduces noise due to data misalignment. This misalignment generates corrupted reward signals that destabilize training by penalizing correct reasoning or rewarding hallucination. To address this, we propose SearchGym, a simulation environment designed to bootstrap robust search agents. SearchGym employs a rigorous generative pipeline to construct a verifiable knowledge graph and an aligned document corpus, ensuring that every reasoning task is factually grounded and strictly solvable. Building on this controllable environment, we introduce SearchGym-RL, a curriculum learning methodology that progressively optimizes agent policies through purified feedback, evolving from basic interactions to complex, long-horizon planning. Extensive experiments across the Llama and Qwen families demonstrate strong Sim-to-Real generalization. Notably, our Qwen2.5-7B-Base model trained within SearchGym surpasses the web-enhanced ASearcher baseline across nine diverse benchmarks by an average relative margin of 10.6%. Our results validate that high-fidelity simulation serves as a scalable and highly cost-effective methodology for developing capable search agents.

Wu Li, Yigeng Zhou, Zesheng Shi, Yequan Wang, Min Zhang, Jing Li

While recent self-training approaches have reduced reliance on human-labeled data for aligning LLMs, they still face critical limitations: (i) sensitivity to synthetic data quality, leading to instability and bias amplification in iterative training; (ii) ineffective optimization due to a diminishing gap between positive and negative responses over successive training iterations. In this paper, we propose Team-based self-Play with dual Adaptive Weighting (TPAW), a novel self-play algorithm designed to improve alignment in a fully self-supervised setting. TPAW adopts a team-based framework in which the current policy model both collaborates with and competes against historical checkpoints, promoting more stable and efficient optimization. To further enhance learning, we design two adaptive weighting mechanisms: (i) a response reweighting scheme that adjusts the importance of target responses, and (ii) a player weighting strategy that dynamically modulates each team member’s contribution during training. Initialized from a SFT model, TPAW iteratively refines alignment without requiring additional human supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that TPAW consistently outperforms existing baselines across various base models and LLM benchmarks.

Yuhan Chen, Zizhuo Shen, Miaomiao Cheng, Xu Han, Jiefu Gong, Shijin Wang, Wei Song

Simulating student writing behavior offers a promising pathway to scalable feedback evaluation and teacher training. However, existing LLM-based approaches tend to model overly capable learners who readily understand and over-apply feedback, resulting in pedagogically implausible behavior. In this work, we introduce pedagogical realism as a guiding principle for student writing simulation, emphasizing bounded cognition, selective feedback comprehension, and developmentally plausible learning processes. To operationalize this idea, we propose CPT-Agent, a cognitively grounded framework that decouples cognitive ability from writing proficiency and models their interaction during writing and revision. CPT-Agent combines probabilistic modeling of cognitive development, proficiency-controlled text generation, and structured memory for skill accumulation. Experiments show that it (1) produces clearly distinguishable proficiency levels, (2) generates cognitively plausible revisions consistent with instructional theories, and (3) achieves strong agreement with expert judgments in evaluating feedback quality. These results highlight the importance of modeling cognitive constraints in LLM-based student simulation and demonstrate the potential of pedagogically realistic agents for automated feedback assessment and teacher development.

Sangwon Ryu, Heejin Do, Yunsu Kim, Gary Lee, Jungseul Ok

Controllable summarization moves beyond generic outputs toward human-aligned summaries guided by specified attributes. In practice, the interdependence among attributes makes it challenging for language models to satisfy correlated constraints consistently. Moreover, previous approaches often require per-attribute fine-tuning, limiting flexibility across diverse summary attributes. In this paper, we propose adaptive planning for multi-attribute controllable summarization (PACO), a training-free framework that reframes the task as planning the order of sequential attribute control with a customized Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). In PACO, nodes represent summaries, and actions correspond to single-attribute adjustments, enabling progressive refinement of only the attributes requiring further control. This strategy adaptively discovers optimal control orders, ultimately producing summaries that effectively meet all constraints. Extensive experiments across diverse domains and models demonstrate that PACO achieves robust multi-attribute controllability, surpassing both LLM-based self-planning models and fine-tuned baselines. Remarkably, PACO with Llama-3.2-1B rivals the controllability of the much larger Llama-3.3-70B baselines. With larger models, PACO achieves superior control performance, outperforming all competitors.

Youliang Yuan, Qiuyang Mang, Jingbang Chen, Hong Wan, Xiaoyuan Liu, Junjielong Xu, Jen-tse Huang, Wenxuan Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Pinjia He

In this paper, we observe that current models are susceptible to reward hacking, leading to a substantial overestimation of a model’s reasoning ability. This is evidenced by a high incidence of “false positives”—solutions that reach the correct answer through an unsound process.Through a systematic analysis with human verification, we establish a taxonomy of these failure modes, identifying patterns like Miracle Steps—abrupt jumps to a correct output without a valid preceding derivation. Probing experiments suggest that these Miracle Steps are linked to answer-recall shortcuts, including memorization from pretraining, where the model accesses the correct answer independently of its reasoning chain.To mitigate this systemic issue, we introduce the Rubric Reward Model (RRM), a process-oriented reward function that evaluates the entire reasoning trajectory against problem-specific rubrics.The RRM explicitly penalizes logical flaws and encourages rigorous deduction.When integrated into an RL pipeline, RRM-based training consistently outperforms outcome-only supervision across four math benchmarks.Notably, it boosts Verified Pass@1024 on AIME2024 from 26.7% to 62.6% and reduces the incidence of Miracle Steps by 71%.Our work demonstrates that rewarding the solution process is crucial for building accurate and reliable models.

Rachneet Kaur, Nishan Srishankar, Zhen Zeng, Sumitra Ganesh

Recent multimodal LLMs have shown promise in chart-based visual question answering, but their performance declines sharply on unannotated charts—those requiring precise visual interpretation rather than relying on textual shortcuts. To address this, we introduce ChartAgent, a novel agentic framework that explicitly performs visual reasoning directly within the chart’s spatial domain. Unlike textual chain-of-thought reasoning, ChartAgent iteratively decomposes queries into visual subtasks and actively manipulates and interacts with chart images through specialized actions such as drawing annotations, cropping regions (e.g., segmenting pie slices, isolating bars), and localizing axes, using a library of chart-specific vision tools to fulfill each subtask. This iterative reasoning process closely mirrors human cognitive strategies for chart comprehension. ChartAgent achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the ChartBench and ChartX benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by up to 16.07% absolute gain overall and 17.31% on unannotated, numerically intensive queries. Furthermore, our analyses show that ChartAgent is (a) effective across diverse chart types, (b) achieves the highest scores across varying visual and reasoning complexity levels, and (c) serves as a plug-and-play framework that boosts performance across diverse underlying LLMs. Our work is among the first to demonstrate visually grounded reasoning for chart understanding using tool-augmented multimodal agents.

Yitong Wang, Xue Han, WenChun Gao, Qian Hu, Jiahui Wang, Ziqing Wang, Lijun Mei, Junlan Feng

When large language models are used in real-world scenarios, continual learning (CL) becomes a non-trivial problem. In particular, continual learning with modern LLMs is challenged both by the substantial computational costs induced by their massive parameter scale, and by the limitations of current CL methods, which are mainly designed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting while neglecting knowledge sharing across tasks. We further observe that models with stronger performance exhibit stronger inter-task connections. In light of the above challenges and findings, we propose Attribution Scores-based Soft Orthogonality Low-Rank Adaptation (ASO-LoRA), an effective and efficient framework that simultaneously facilitates knowledge transfer while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, ASO-LoRA initially assigns task-specific parameter subspaces for new tasks utilizing multi-LoRA modules, enabling for efficient training and inference without relying on task labels. Then, ASO-LoRA leverages attribution scores to evaluate task similarity and employs soft orthogonality between task-specific subspaces, guiding gradient updates in directions that promote parameter isolation, achieving a balance between knowledge transfer and preservation. Experiments are carried out on both the T5-large and the LLaMA2-7B, showing ASO-LoRA’s superior performance and suitability as a plug-in CL solution for general Transformer-based LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/736619821/ASO-LORA.

Yulong Wang, Siyu Zhao

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) must balance effectiveness and efficiency: low-rank methods can be costly, while global representation edits often underfit token-level contexts. We propose **Token-Aware Representation Editing (TARE)**, a PEFT method that performs fine-grained, token-specific edits with a small additional inference overhead and minimal tuning.After each FFN block in a transformer-like model, we adopt a lightweight selector that scores a small pool of hidden representation editors for each token, activates only the top-k editors, and mixes their element-wise scaling/bias updates. This design achieves superior performance while maintaining computational efficiency, yielding a more favorable Pareto frontier compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.Across LLaMA-3-8B (eight knowledge reasoning and seven mathematical reasoning tasks) and RoBERTa-base/large (GLUE), TARE outperforms SOTAs (LoRA, DoRA, MiLoRA, LoReFT, and RED), achieving 86.7% (knowledge reasoning), 76.7% (mathematical reasoning), and 88.3% (GLUE) while tuning only 0.0392% of parameters using about 20 GiB peak GPU memory during training.An implementation is available at: <https://github.com/PatriciaPulec/tare>.

Lin Mu, Haiyang Wang, Li Ni, Lei Sang, Zhize Wu, Peiquan Jin, Yiwen Zhang

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables parameter-efficient fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs), and recent Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) extensions further enhance flexibility by dynamically combining multiple LoRA experts. However, existing MoE-augmented LoRA methods assume that experts operate independently, often leading to unstable routing, expert dominance. In this paper, we propose TalkLoRA, a communication-aware MoELoRA framework that relaxes this independence assumption by introducing expert-level communication prior to routing. TalkLoRA equips low-rank experts with a lightweight Talking Module that enables controlled information exchange across expert subspaces, producing a more robust global signal for routing. Theoretically, we show that expert communication smooths routing dynamics by mitigating perturbation amplification while strictly generalizing existing MoELoRA architectures. Empirically, TalkLoRA consistently outperforms vanilla LoRA and MoELoRA across diverse language understanding and generation tasks, achieving higher parameter efficiency and more balanced expert routing under comparable parameter budgets. These results highlight structured expert communication as a principled and effective enhancement for MoE-based parameter-efficient adaptation.

Yebo Wu, Jingguang Li, Chunlin Tian, KaHou Tam, Zhijiang Guo, Li Li

Federated fine-tuning enables privacy-preserving LLM adaptation but faces a critical bottleneck: the disparity between LLMs’ high memory demands and edge devices’ limited capacity. To break the memory barrier, we propose Chain Federated Fine-tuning (ChainFed), an innovative paradigm that forgoes end-to-end updates in favor of a sequential, layer-by-layer manner. It first trains the initial adapter to convergence, freezes its weights, and then proceeds to the next. This iterative train-and-freeze process forms an optimization chain, gradually enhancing the model’s task-specific proficiency. ChainFed further integrates three core techniques: 1) Dynamic Layer Co-Tuning to bridge semantic gaps between sequentially tuned layers and facilitate information flow; 2) Globally Perceptive Optimization to endow each adapter with foresight beyond its local objective; 3) Function-Oriented Adaptive Tuning to automatically identify the optimal fine-tuning starting point. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ChainFed over existing methods, boosting average accuracy by up to 46.46%.

Shiqi He, Yue Cui, Xinyu Ma, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Mosharaf Chowdhury

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Branch_and_Browse/.

Daojun Chen, Xi Wang, Shenyuan Ren, Qingzhi Ma, Pengpeng Zhao, An Liu

While Large Language Models have significantly advanced Text2SQL generation, a critical semantic gap persists: syntactically valid queries can still misinterpret user intent. To mitigate this challenge, we propose GBV-SQL, a multi-agent framework that introduces Guided Generation with SQL2Text Back-translation Validation. In particular, a dedicated validator translates generated SQL back into natural language and checks whether its logic is aligned with the original question. Beyond the method itself, we also conduct a systematic audit of benchmark quality and introduce a typology of “Gold Errors” in Text2SQL datasets. Our analysis shows that benchmark issues can coexist with strong execution accuracy and can substantially affect evaluation outcomes. On the challenging BIRD benchmark, GBV-SQL achieves 63.23% execution accuracy, a 5.8% absolute improvement over the Deepseek-v3-based MAC-SQL setting. Under manually audited benchmark corrections, GBV-SQL reaches 96.5% (dev) and 97.6% (test) on Spider, and 90.42% on repaired BIRD dev, providing a diagnostic view of model behavior under improved gold quality. Our work contributes both a practical framework for semantic validation and an empirical analysis of benchmark integrity in Text2SQL evaluation.

Ziqi Wang, Xingzhou Lou, Meiqi Wu, Zhengqi Wen, Junge Zhang

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) enhances LLM reasoning but often induces overconfidence, where incorrect responses yield lower perplexity than correct ones, degrading relative calibration as described by the Area Under the Curve (AUC). Existing approaches either yield limited improvements in calibration or sacrifice gains in reasoning accuracy. We first prove that this degradation in GRPO-style algorithms stems from their uncertainty-agnostic advantage estimation, which inevitably misaligns optimization gradients with calibration. This leads to improved accuracy at the expense of degraded calibration. We then propose Calibration-Aware Policy Optimization (CAPO). It adopts a logistic AUC surrogate loss that is theoretically consistent and admits regret bound, enabling uncertainty-aware advantage estimation. By further incorporating a noise masking mechanism, CAPO achieves stable learning dynamics that jointly optimize calibration and accuracy. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that CAPO-1.5B significantly improves calibration by up to 15% while achieving accuracy comparable to or better than GRPO, and further boosts accuracy on downstream inference-time scaling tasks by up to 5%. Moreover, when allowed to abstain under low-confidence conditions, CAPO achieves a Pareto-optimal precision–coverage trade-off, highlighting its practical value for hallucination mitigation.

Yunyao Zhang, Xinglang Zhang, Junxi Sheng, Wenbing Li, Junqing Yu, Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen, Wei Yang, Zikai Song

Logical reasoning is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs). However, existing studies largely overlook the interplay between logical complexity and semantic complexity, limiting their robustness under abstract propositions, ambiguous contexts, and conflicting stances, which are central to human reasoning. We propose **LogicAgent**, a semiotic-square–guided framework that jointly addresses these two axes of difficulty. The semiotic square provides a principled structure for multi-perspective semantic analysis, and LogicAgent integrates automated deduction with reflective verification to manage logical complexity across deeper reasoning chains. To evaluate reasoning under coupled semantic and logical complexity, we introduce **RepublicQA**, a benchmark that contains abstract propositions with systematically constructed contrary and contradictory forms, providing a semantically rich setting for assessing logical reasoning in LLMs. Experiments show that LogicAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance on RepublicQA with a 6.25% average gain, and generalizes well to four mainstream logical reasoning benchmarks with an additional 7.05% improvement, highlighting the effectiveness of our semiotic-grounded multi-perspective reasoning in boosting LLMs’ logical performance.

Jiali Chen, DingBa Fu, Xusen Hei, Yuhang Liu, Yiyang Chen, Jiayuan Xie, Wenqi Fan, Yi Cai

Computer-aided design (CAD) is crucial in prototyping complex 3D objects through precise geometric modeling. In practical design workflows, designers manually define assembly sequences for individual CAD parts, a process that is both time-consuming and expertise-intensive. To address this challenge, we formulate CAD assembly as a parametric action prediction task: given a reference design image and disassembled parts, the model predicts 6-DoF transformations (, actions) to progressively assemble each part. This paradigm enables multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to solve the task through autoregressive action generation. While recent MLLMs demonstrate promising spatial reasoning, they struggle with fine-grained geometric structure understanding and physical collision avoidance during assembly. In this paper, we propose CADMate, an MLLM-based framework for sequential CAD assembly action generation. Our training strategy comprises three stages: (i) CAD domain adaptation for spatial geometry and position understanding, (ii) supervised fine-tuning with geometric chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning for action generation, and (iii) reinforcement learning with spatial-physical rewards jointly optimize spatial accuracy and collision avoidance. Additionally, we also construct CADBuilder dataset, comprising over 45K CAD assemblies with annotated action sequences. Our experiments demonstrate that CADMate significantly outperforms existing prominent MLLMs (, GPT-5), showing great potential in design applications.