Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a promising approach for improving LLM reasoning capabilities by providing process supervision over reasoning traces. However, existing approaches for constructing PRM training data remain costly and noisy, as they typically rely on human annotation or sampling-based labeling methods that require repeated LLM calls. In this work, we propose FoVer, a framework that synthesizes PRM training data from formal reasoning tasks by annotating step-level error labels using formal verification tools such as Z3 and Isabelle. By leveraging formal verification, FoVer enables efficient and accurate PRM data construction without requiring human annotation or additional LLM calls. Using FoVer, we create PRM training data from formal logic and theorem proving tasks. Experiments on 12 reasoning benchmarks show that fine-tuning on our training data improves PRMs not only on math and logic reasoning tasks, which are informal variants of the training tasks, but also on NLI and BBH benchmarks, which differ substantially from the tasks used to construct the training data. These results demonstrate the practical effectiveness of FoVer, showing that PRM training data created using formal verification improves PRMs on informal reasoning tasks written in natural language. The datasets, models, and code are provided at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/FoVer.
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Understanding and reasoning about entire soft-ware repositories is an essential capability for intelligent software engineering tools. While existing benchmarks such as CoSQA and CodeQA have advanced the field, they predominantly focus on small, self-contained code snippets. These setups fail to capture the complexity of real-world repositories, where effective understanding and reasoning often require navigating multiple files, understanding software architecture, and grounding answers in long-range code dependencies. In this paper, we present SWE-QA, a repository-level code question answering (QA) benchmark designed to facilitate research on automated QA systems in realistic code environments. SWE-QA involves 720 high-quality question-answer pairs spanning diverse categories, including intention understanding, cross-file reasoning, and multi-hop dependency analysis. To construct SWE-QA, we first crawled 77,100 GitHub issues from 12 popular repositories. Based on an analysis of naturally occurring developer questions extracted from these issues, we developed a two-level taxonomy of repository-level questions and constructed a set of seed questions for each category. For each category, we manually curated and validated questions and collected their corresponding answers. We evaluate six advanced LLMs on SWE-QA under various context augmentation strategies. Experimental results highlight the promise of LLMs.
Anonymizing textual documents is a highly context-sensitive problem: the appropriate balance between privacy protection and utility preservation varies with the data domain, privacy objectives, and downstream application. However, existing anonymization methods rely on static, manually designed strategies that lack the flexibility to adjust to diverse requirements and often fail to generalize across domains. We introduce adaptive text anonymization, a new task formulation in which anonymization strategies are automatically adapted to specific privacy–utility requirements. We propose a framework for task-specific prompt optimization that automatically constructs anonymization instructions for language models, enabling adaptation to different privacy goals, domains, and downstream usage patterns. To evaluate our approach, we present a benchmark spanning five datasets with diverse domains, privacy constraints, and utility objectives. Across all evaluated settings, our framework consistently achieves a better privacy–utility trade-off than existing baselines, while remaining computationally efficient and effective on open-source language models, with performance comparable to larger closed-source models. Additionally, we show that our method can discover novel anonymization strategies that explore different points along the privacy–utility trade-off frontier.
The shift toward intent-driven software engineering (often termed "Vibe Coding") exposes a critical Context-Fidelity Trade-off: vague user intents overwhelm linear reasoning chains, leading to architectural collapse in complex repo-level generation. We propose Contract-Coding, a structured symbolic paradigm that bridges unstructured intent and executable code via Autonomous Symbolic Grounding. By projecting ambiguous intents into a formal Language Contract, our framework serves as a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) that enforces topological independence, effectively inter-module implementation details, decreasing a topological execution depth and unlocking Architectural Parallelism. Empirically, while state-of-the-art agents suffer from different hallucinations on the Greenfield-5 benchmark, Contract-Coding achieves 47% functional success while maintaining near-perfect structural integrity. Our work marks a critical step towards repository-scale autonomous engineering: transitioning from strict "specification-following" to robust, intent-driven architecture synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/imliinyi/Contract-Coding
LIBERTy: A Causal Framework for Benchmarking Concept-Based Explanations of LLMs with Structural Counterfactuals
PDF ↗Concept-based explanations quantify how high-level concepts (e.g., gender or experience) influence model behavior, which is crucial for decision-makers in high-stakes domains. Recent work evaluates the faithfulness of such explanations by comparing them to reference causal effects estimated from counterfactuals. In practice, existing benchmarks rely on costly human-written counterfactuals that serves as imperfect proxy. To address this, we introduce a framework for constructing datasets containing structural counterfactual pairs: LIBERTy (LLM-based Interventional Benchmark for Explainability with Reference Targets). LIBERTy is grounded in explicitly defined Structured Causal Models (SCMs) of the text generation, interventions on a concept propagate through the SCM until an LLM generates the counterfactual. We introduce three datasets (disease detection, CV screening, and workplace violence prediction) together with a new evaluation metric, order-faithfulness. Using them, we evaluate a wide range of methods across five models and identify substantial headroom for improving concept-based explanations. LIBERTy also enables systematic analysis of model sensitivity to interventions: we find that proprietary LLMs show markedly reduced sensitivity to demographic concepts, likely due to post-training mitigation. Overall, LIBERTy provides a much-needed benchmark for developing faithful explainability methods.
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external knowledge to mitigate hallucinations, yet retrieving precise multi-hop evidence for knowledge-augmented reasoning remains difficult. Existing Knowledge Graph (KG)-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems insufficiently model the interaction between query semantics and relation types, resulting in imprecise subgraph retrieval and unstable reasoning. We propose Query-aware Subgraph Retrieval Augmented Generation (QSRAG), a retrieval framework built upon a Query-Relational Graph Attention Network (QR-GAT) that integrates query semantics and relation embeddings directly into the attention mechanism, enabling fine-grained triple scoring and scalable subgraph construction. This query–relation conditioning improves relevance estimation and suppresses noisy edges, producing faithful reasoning subgraphs. Experiments on WebQSP and CWQ establish new state-of-the-art results in both Triple Recall and Answer Recall, and significantly enhance LLMs reasoning accuracy without fine-tuning. These findings underscore the effectiveness of modeling query–relation interactions for reliable knowledge-augmented reasoning.
MT-Video-Bench: A Holistic Video Understanding Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal LLMs in Multi-Turn Dialogues
PDF ↗The recent development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has significantly advanced AI’s ability to understand visual modalities. However, existing evaluation benchmarks remain limited to single-turn question answering, overlooking the complexity of multi-turn dialogues in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{MT-Video-Bench}, a holistic video understanding benchmark for evaluating MLLMs in multi-turn dialogues. Specifically, our MT-Video-Bench mainly assesses six core competencies that focus on perceptivity and interactivity, encompassing 1,000 meticulously curated multi-turn dialogues from diverse domains. These capabilities are rigorously aligned with real-world applications, such as interactive sports analysis and multi-turn video-based intelligent tutoring. With MT-Video-Bench, we extensively evaluate various state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source MLLMs, revealing their significant performance discrepancies and limitations in handling multi-turn video dialogues. The benchmark will be publicly available to foster future research.
Since real-world legal experiments are often costly or infeasible, simulating legal societies with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems provides an effective alternative for testing and advancing legal theory, as well as supporting legal administration. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their world knowledge and role-playing capabilities, are strong candidates to serve as the foundation for legal society simulation. However, the application of LLMs to simulate legal systems remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce **Law in Silico**, a unified LLM-based agent framework for simulating legal scenarios that incorporate individual decision-making and institutional mechanisms, such as legislation, adjudication, and enforcement. We calibrate agent behaviors against real-world crime data, demonstrating that LLM-based agents can capture realistic sociological correlations. Building on this foundation, we structure our simulation through a ”Micro-to-Macro” process: we conduct micro-level simulations in representative conflict-driven scenarios, allowing legal rules to evolve through agent-institution interactions naturally. These evolved laws are then deployed back into macro-scale populations to evaluate their effectiveness in regulating behaviors. Through comprehensive experiments, our results reveal that a well-functioning, transparent, and adaptive legal system can mitigate "cat-and-mouse" regulatory dynamics and offer better protection for vulnerable individuals.
When Personalization Misleads: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Personalized LLMs
PDF ↗Personalized large language models (LLMs) adapt model behavior to individual users to enhance user satisfaction, yet personalization can inadvertently distort factual reasoning. We show that when personalized LLMs face factual queries, there exists a phenomenon where the model generates answers aligned with a user’s prior history rather than the objective truth, resulting in **personalization-induced hallucinations** that degrade factual reliability and may propagate incorrect beliefs, due to representational entanglement between personalization and factual representations. To address this issue, we propose **Factuality-Preserving Personalized Steering (FPPS)**, a lightweight inference-time approach that mitigates personalization-induced factual distortions while preserving personalized behavior. We further introduce **PFQABench**, the first benchmark designed to jointly evaluate factual and personalized question answering under personalization. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and personalization methods show that FPPS substantially improves factual accuracy while maintaining personalized performance.
PaperScope: A Multi-Modal Multi-Document Benchmark for Agentic Deep Research Across Massive Scientific Papers
PDF ↗Leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to accelerate frontier scientific research is promising, yet how to rigorously evaluate such systems remains unclear. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on single-document understanding, whereas real scientific workflows require integrating evidence from multiple papers, including their text, tables, and figures. As a result, multi-modal, multi-document scientific reasoning remains underexplored and lacks systematic evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce PaperScope, a multi-modal multi-document benchmark designed for agentic deep research. PaperScope presents three advantages: (1) Structured scientific grounding. It is built on a knowledge graph of over 2,000 AI papers spanning three years, providing a structured foundation for research-oriented queries. (2) Semantically dense evidence construction. It integrates semantically related key information nodes and employs optimized random-walk article selector to sample thematically coherent paper sets, thereby ensuring adequate semantic density and task complexity. (3) Multi-task evaluation of scientific reasoning. It contains over 2,000 QA pairs across reasoning, retrieval, summarization, and problem solving, enabling evaluation of multi-step scientific reasoning. Experimental results show that even advanced systems such as OpenAI Deep Research and Tongyi Deep Research achieve limited scores on PaperScope, highlighting the difficulty of long-context retrieval and deep multi-source reasoning. PaperScope thus provides a rigorous benchmark alongside a scalable pipeline for constructing large-scale multi-modal, multi-source deep research datasets.
Asymmetric Relational-Geometry Driven Universal Adversarial Perturbations for Vision-Language Models
PDF ↗Although vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models have achieved remarkable success across multimodal tasks, they remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations.Existing universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) methods in multimodal settings—whether generator-based or optimization-based—often suffer from limited cross-model transferability, especially in black-box scenarios.We attribute this limitation to the prevalent use of symmetric or distribution-level objectives that overlook the asymmetric roles of image and text modalities and the relational nature of vision-language representations.To address this issue, we propose ARG-Attack, an optimization-based framework that learns universal perturbations under an asymmetric relational-geometry driven objective.Our method integrates three complementary components: a cosine-based loss that induces directional semantic drift in visual features, a center shift loss that geometrically regularizes adversarial embeddings toward a shared semantic center, and a relational polarity loss that explicitly disrupts image–text matching relationships.Together, these objectives enable effective cross-modal interaction without relying on model-specific training losses or probabilistic distribution matching.In addition, we adopt an adaptive gradient update strategy inspired by Adam optimization to stabilize training and accelerate convergence.Extensive experiments across multiple vision-language models and tasks demonstrate that ARG-Attack achieves competitive white-box performance and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in black-box transfer settings.
Reasoning capabilities have significantly improved the performance of vision-language models (VLMs) in domains such as mathematical problem-solving, coding, and visual question-answering. However, their impact on real-world applications remains unclear. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study on the effectiveness of reasoning-enabled VLMs in mobile GUI agents. We evaluate six pairs of VLMs, including both commercial and open-source lightweight models, by comparing their base and reasoning-enhanced versions across static and interactive benchmarks. Our findings show that reasoning-enabled VLMs generally provide only marginal improvements over their non-reasoning counterparts and can even degrade performance in certain agent configurations. Notably, reasoning and non-reasoning VLMs fail on different sets of tasks, suggesting that reasoning does have an impact, but its benefits and drawbacks counterbalance each other. We attribute these inconsistencies to the limitations of benchmarks and VLMs. Based on the findings, we provide insights for further enhancing mobile GUI agents in terms of benchmarks, VLMs, and their adaptability in dynamically invoking reasoning VLMs.
Recent advances in multimodal recommenders excel at feature fusion but remain opaque and inefficient decision-makers, lacking explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty. To address this, we introduce ReasonRec, a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline: Observe, via a pretrained Vision-Language Model (VLM) encoder; Deliberate, by formulating recommendation as chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning tasks and explicitly quantifying prediction uncertainty through an evidence-horizon-aware curriculum; and Act, through dynamic delegation of uncertain or challenging queries to lightweight classical recommendation models. Specifically, we propose a reasoning-aware visual instruction tuning strategy that systematically transforms diverse recommendation tasks into unified CoT prompts, enabling the VLM to explicitly articulate intermediate decision steps. Additionally, our evidence-horizon curriculum progressively enhances the reasoning complexity to better handle cold-start and long-tail user scenarios, significantly boosting model generalization. Furthermore, the uncertainty-guided delegation mechanism empowers the agent to assess its own confidence, strategically allocating computational resources to optimize both recommendation accuracy and inference efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on four standard recommendation tasks (sequential recommendation, direct recommendation, CTR prediction, and explanation generation) across five real-world datasets demonstrate that ReasonRec achieves over 30% relative improvement in key ranking metrics (e.g., HR@5, NDCG@5) compared to state-of-the-art multimodal recommenders. Crucially, ReasonRec substantially reduces inference latency by dynamically delegating up to 35% of queries to efficient sub-models without compromising accuracy. Extensive ablation studies further confirm that each proposed reasoning and planning mechanism individually contributes substantially to ReasonRec’s overall effectiveness. Collectively, our results illustrate a clear pathway towards interpretable, adaptive, and efficient multimodal recommendation through explicit reasoning and agentic design.
Large language models (LLMs) have made impressive strides in mathematical reasoning, often fine-tuned using rejection sampling, which retains only correct reasoning trajectories. While effective, this paradigm treats supervision as a binary filter that systematically excludes teacher-generated errors, leaving a gap in how reasoning failures are modeled during training. In this paper, we propose TrajFusion, a fine-tuning strategy that reframes rejection sampling as a structured supervision construction process. Specifically, TrajFusion forms fused trajectories that explicitly model trial-and-error reasoning by interleaving selected incorrect trajectories with reflection prompts and correct trajectories. The length of the fused sample is adaptively controlled based on the frequency and diversity of teacher errors, providing richer supervision for challenging problems while safely reducing to vanilla rejection sampling fine-tuning (RFT) when error signals are uninformative. TrajFusion requires no changes to the architecture or training objective. Extensive experiments across multiple math benchmarks demonstrate that TrajFusion consistently outperforms RFT, particularly on challenging and long-form reasoning problems.
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising candidates for graph tasks. Many studies leverage natural language to describe graphs and apply LLMs for reasoning, yet most focus narrowly on performance benchmarks without fully comparing LLMs to graph learning models or exploring their broader potential. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of LLMs on graph learning tasks, evaluating both off-the-shelf and instruction-tuned models across a variety of scenarios. Beyond accuracy, we discuss data leakage concerns and computational overhead, and assess their performance under few-shot/zero-shot settings, domain transfer, structural understanding, and robustness. Our findings show that LLMs, particularly those with instruction tuning, greatly outperform traditional graph learning models in few-shot settings, exhibit strong domain transferability, and demonstrate excellent generalization and robustness. Our study highlights the broader capabilities of LLMs in graph learning and provides a foundation for future research.
Robust Uncertainty Quantification for Self-Evolving Large Language Models via Continual Domain Pretraining
PDF ↗Continual Learning (CL) is essential for enabling self-evolving large language models (LLMs) to adapt and remain effective amid rapid knowledge growth. Yet, despite its importance, little attention has been given to establishing statistical reliability guarantees for LLMs under CL, particularly in the setting of continual domain pretraining (CDP). Conformal Prediction (CP) has shown promise in offering correctness guarantees for LLMs, but it faces major challenges in CDP: testing data often stems from unknown or shifting domain distributions, under which CP may no longer provide valid guarantees. Moreover, when high coverage is required, CP can yield excessively large prediction sets for unanswerable queries, reducing informativeness. To address these challenges, we introduce an adaptive rejection and non-exchangeable CP framework. Our method first estimates the distribution of questions across domains in the test set using transformer-based clustering, then reweights or resamples the calibration data accordingly. Building on this, adaptive rejection CP allows the LLM to selectively abstain from answering when its confidence or competence shifts significantly. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework enhances both the effectiveness and reliability of CP under CDP scenarios. Our code is available at: https://github.com/AlearZhou/CPCL
Large language models (LLMs) are strong reasoners but still hallucinate and make unreliable decisions on knowledge-intensive questions. Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide explicit, auditable facts, motivating KGQA agents that interact with KGs via tool calls to reduce hallucinations. However, LLM agents often struggle to reliably manipulate KG-specific symbols (entity IDs and relation names), leading to invalid or hallucinated tool-call arguments, and high-quality step-by-step supervision for such tool use is scarce. Meanwhile, large datasets of expert SPARQL programs exist for Freebase KGQA, but naively converting them into action supervision is brittle: SPARQL assumes a global view of the KG, while an agent acts from a truncated, local prompt, so expert steps can reference KG IDs (entity/relation/attribute symbols) that are not visible at decision time. We present Graph Explorer, a fully automatic data synthesis pipeline that turns expert SPARQL into executable, visibility-grounded (actions may use only IDs shown in the prompt) tool supervision without manual trace labeling. Graph Explorer compiles SPARQL into tool-call plans, executes them under the same context-control policy used at inference, and retains only tool-interaction traces whose tool-call arguments are visible at decision time, yielding clean (context, next-action) pairs for action-centric fine-tuning. We evaluate with a strict finish-or-fail protocol (success only if the agent issues a valid Finish within budget). Under this protocol, our fine-tuned Qwen3-8B reaches 74.0/80.2 Hit@1 on CWQ/WebQSP, improving over a reproduced prompting baseline by +22.5/+16.2 points, indicating more faithful multi-step graph exploration from visible evidence.
PersonaForge: Psychology-Grounded Dual-Process Architecture for Personality-Consistent Role-Playing Agents
PDF ↗Large Language Models excel at role-playing but struggle to maintain consistent personalities across extended multi-turn interactions. We propose PersonaForge, combining (1) a three-layer personality architecture grounded in psychological theory and (2) a dual-process generation mechanism inspired by cognitive science. We test two falsifiable claims: Claim 1 (Orthogonality): Psychology-grounded dimensions (Big Five + Defense Mechanisms) provide more orthogonal constraints than natural language descriptions, reducing long-dialogue drift. Claim 2 (Integration Necessity): High-dimensional personality constraints create "production interference" requiring a cognitive workspace (Inner Monologue) to resolve—removing it degrades performance below simpler baselines. Experiments on 88 characters demonstrate: (1) +19.4% personality consistency (PC) with human correlation r=0.82, (2) reduced drift over 50-turn conversations (6.3% vs. 24.8% baseline), and (3) +64.7% defense mechanism manifestation. External validation on RoleBench confirms generalization (73.2% win-rate, drift 8.4% vs. 20.4%). Selective dual-process activation achieves 96% of full-system performance with only 13.4% token overhead. Human evaluation confirms more authentic and psychologically coherent character behaviors. Code and data: https://github.com/fQwQf/PersonaForge.
FinMaster: A Holistic Benchmark for Full-Pipeline Financial Management with Large Language Models
PDF ↗Financial management is high-stakes, where small errors can propagate into reporting deviations and costly downstream decisions, yet real-world workflows remain labor-intensive and fragmented, and existing automation supports only isolated steps rather than complete workflows. Large language models (LLMs) show promise in automating financial workflows, but current benchmarks lack domain-specific data, realistic workflow-level task design, and standardized workflow-level evaluation. To address these gaps, we present **FinMaster**, a benchmark for evaluating large language models on full financial management workflows spanning financial literacy, accounting, auditing, and consulting. **FinMaster** comprises three modules: *FinSim* generates synthetic datasets compliant with real-world accounting standards for diverse company types, enabling realistic evaluation without relying on proprietary financial records. *FinSuite* offers 183 tasks across core financial domains. *FinEval* provides a unified evaluation framework. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models including GPT-4o-mini, Claude-3.7-Sonnet, and DeepSeek-V3 reveal critical capability gaps in financial reasoning, with accuracy dropping from over 90% on basic tasks to 40% on complex scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning. This degradation reflects error propagation, where accuracy reaches 58% for single-metric calculations but decreases to 37% in multi-metric settings. **FinMaster** provides scalable and reproducible benchmarking for realistic end-to-end financial workflows, helping advance reliable deployment of LLMs in financial practice.
PsyScore: A Psychometrically-Aware Framework for Trait-Adaptive Essay Scoring and ZPD-Scaffolded Feedback
PDF ↗Effective Automated Essay Scoring (AES) are expected to support both reliable assessment and actionable instructional feedback. However, existing approaches often treat scoring and feedback as separate components: neural scoring models provide limited interpretability, while Large Language Model (LLM)-based feedback is typically insensitive to learners’ proficiency levels. To address this fragmentation, this work proposes PsyScore, a psychometrically-aware framework that integrates diagnostic assessment with instructional scaffolding through a shared latent ability representation. PsyScore comprises three key modules: a Trait-Adaptive Neural IRT Scorer that incorporates the Graded Partial Credit Model (GPCM) into a neural architecture, enabling the precise estimation of student ability while maintaining psychometric interpretability, a ZPD-Scaffolded Feedback Generator, which conditions multi-agent feedback strategies on the diagnosed ability parameter to adapt instructional focus across different proficiency levels, and a Multi-Perspective Feedback Evaluation Strategy that assesses feedback quality via pairwise preference judgments and student revision simulations. Experiments on the ASAP++ dataset demonstrate that PsyScore achieves competitive scoring performance while providing more pedagogically aligned feedback.