Large language/multimodal models (LLMs/LMMs) store extensive pre-trained knowledge but struggle to maintain consistency with real-world updates, making it difficult to avoid catastrophic forgetting while acquiring evolving knowledge. Previous work focused on constructing textual knowledge datasets and exploring knowledge injection in LLMs, lacking exploration of multimodal evolving knowledge injection in LMMs. To address this, we propose the EVOKE benchmark to evaluate LMMs' ability to inject multimodal evolving knowledge in real-world scenarios. Meanwhile, a comprehensive evaluation of multimodal evolving knowledge injection revealed two challenges: (1) Existing knowledge injection methods perform terribly on evolving knowledge. (2) Supervised fine-tuning causes catastrophic forgetting, particularly instruction following ability is severely compromised. Additionally, we provide pathways and find that: (1) Text knowledge augmentation during the training phase improves performance, while image augmentation cannot achieve it. (2) Continual learning methods, especially Replay and MoELoRA, effectively mitigate forgetting. Our findings indicate that current knowledge injection methods have many limitations on evolving knowledge, which motivates further research on more efficient and stable knowledge injection methods.
Large language models and vision-language models (which we jointly call LMs) have transformed NLP and CV, demonstrating remarkable potential across various fields. However, their capabilities in affective analysis (i.e. sentiment analysis and emotion detection) remain underexplored. This gap is largely due to the absence of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, and the inherent complexity of affective analysis tasks. In this paper, we introduce MMAFFBen, the first extensive open-source benchmark for multilingual multimodal affective analysis. MMAFFBen encompasses text, image, and video modalities across 35 languages, covering four key affective analysis tasks: sentiment polarity, sentiment intensity, emotion classification, and emotion intensity. Moreover, we construct the MMAFFIn dataset for fine-tuning LMs on affective analysis tasks, and further develop MMAFFLM-3b and MMAFFLM-7b based on it. We evaluate various representative LMs, including GPT-4o-mini, providing a systematic comparison of their affective understanding capabilities. This project is available at https://github.com/lzw108/MMAFFBen.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) augments Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge to improve factuality. However, existing RAG systems frequently underutilize the retrieved documents, failing to extract and integrate the key clues needed to support faithful and interpretable reasoning, especially in cases where relevant evidence is implicit, scattered, or obscured by noise. To address this issue, we propose ClueAnchor, a novel framework for enhancing RAG via clue-anchored reasoning exploration and optimization. ClueAnchor extracts key clues from retrieved content and generates multiple reasoning paths based on different knowledge configurations, optimizing the model by selecting the most effective one through reward-based preference optimization. Experiments show that ClueAnchor significantly outperforms prior RAG baselines in reasoning completeness and robustness. Further analysis confirms its strong resilience to noisy or partially relevant retrieved content, as well as its capability to identify supporting evidence even in the absence of explicit clue supervision during inference.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enhanced natural-language reasoning. However, their limited parametric memory and susceptibility to hallucination present persistent challenges for tasks requiring accurate, context-based inference. To overcome these limitations, an increasing number of studies have proposed leveraging external knowledge to enhance LLMs. This study offers a systematic exploration of strategies for using external knowledge to enhance LLMs, beginning with a taxonomy that categorizes external knowledge into unstructured and structured data. We then focus on structured knowledge, presenting distinct taxonomies for tables and knowledge graphs (KGs), detailing their integration paradigms with LLMs, and reviewing representative methods. Our comparative analysis further highlights the trade-offs among interpretability, scalability, and performance, providing insights for developing trustworthy and generalizable knowledge-enhanced LLMs.
We investigate whether the success of a zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process can be predicted before completion. We discover that a probing classifier, based on LLM representations, performs well \emph{even before a single token is generated}, suggesting that crucial information about the reasoning process is already present in the initial steps representations. In contrast, a strong BERT-based baseline, which relies solely on the generated tokens, performs worse, likely because it depends on shallow linguistic cues rather than deeper reasoning dynamics. Surprisingly, using later reasoning steps does not always improve classification. When additional context is unhelpful, earlier representations resemble later ones more, suggesting LLMs encode key information early. This implies reasoning can often stop early without loss. To test this, we conduct early stopping experiments, showing that truncating CoT reasoning still improves performance over not using CoT at all, though a gap remains compared to full reasoning. However, approaches like supervised learning or reinforcement learning designed to shorten CoT chains could leverage our classifier's guidance to identify when early stopping is effective. Our findings provide insights that may support such methods, helping to optimize CoT's efficiency while preserving its benefits.
Sign Language Translation (SLT) aims to convert sign language (SL) videos into spoken language text, thereby bridging the communication gap between the sign and the spoken community. While most existing works focus on translating a single sign language into a single spoken language (one-to-one SLT), leveraging multilingual resources could mitigate low-resource issues and enhance accessibility. However, multilingual SLT (MLSLT) remains unexplored due to language conflicts and alignment difficulties across SLs and spoken languages. To address these challenges, we propose a multilingual gloss-free model with dual CTC objectives for token-level SL identification and spoken text generation. Our model supports 10 SLs and handles one-to-one, many-to-one, and many-to-many SLT tasks, achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on three widely adopted benchmarks: multilingual SP-10, PHOENIX14T, and CSL-Daily.
Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and executing complex tasks. However, developing robust agents presents significant challenges: substantial engineering overhead, lack of standardized components, and insufficient evaluation frameworks for fair comparison. We introduce Agent Graph-based Orchestration for Reasoning and Assessment (AGORA), a flexible and extensible framework that addresses these challenges through three key contributions: (1) a modular architecture with a graph-based workflow engine, efficient memory management, and clean component abstraction; (2) a comprehensive suite of reusable agent algorithms implementing state-of-the-art reasoning approaches; and (3) a rigorous evaluation framework enabling systematic comparison across multiple dimensions. Through extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning and multimodal tasks, we evaluate various agent algorithms across different LLMs, revealing important insights about their relative strengths and applicability. Our results demonstrate that while sophisticated reasoning approaches can enhance agent capabilities, simpler methods like Chain-of-Thought often exhibit robust performance with significantly lower computational overhead. AGORA not only simplifies language agent development but also establishes a foundation for reproducible agent research through standardized evaluation protocols.
User sentiment on social media reveals the underlying social trends, crises, and needs. Researchers have analyzed users' past messages to trace the evolution of sentiments and reconstruct sentiment dynamics. However, predicting the imminent sentiment of an ongoing event is rarely studied. In this paper, we address the problem of \textbf{sentiment forecasting} on social media to predict the user's future sentiment in response to the development of the event. We extract sentiment-related features to enhance the modeling skill and propose a multi-perspective role-playing framework to simulate the process of human response. Our preliminary results show significant improvement in sentiment forecasting on both microscopic and macroscopic levels.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support scientific research, but their knowledge of scientific advancements can quickly become outdated. We introduce ScienceMeter, a new framework for evaluating scientific knowledge update methods over scientific knowledge spanning the past, present, and future. ScienceMeter defines three metrics: knowledge preservation, the extent to which models' understanding of previously learned papers are preserved; knowledge acquisition, how well scientific claims from newly introduced papers are acquired; and knowledge projection, the ability of the updated model to anticipate or generalize to related scientific claims that may emerge in the future. Using ScienceMeter, we examine the scientific knowledge of LLMs on claim judgment and generation tasks across a curated dataset of 15,444 scientific papers and 30,888 scientific claims from ten domains including medicine, biology, materials science, and computer science. We evaluate five representative knowledge update approaches including training- and inference-time methods. With extensive experiments, we find that the best-performing knowledge update methods can preserve only 85.9% of existing knowledge, acquire 71.7% of new knowledge, and project 37.7% of future knowledge. Inference-based methods work for larger models, whereas smaller models require training to achieve comparable performance. Cross-domain analysis reveals that performance on these objectives is correlated. Even when applying on specialized scientific LLMs, existing knowledge update methods fail to achieve these objectives collectively, underscoring that developing robust scientific knowledge update mechanisms is both crucial and challenging.
The performance of large language models (LLMs) continues to improve, as reflected in rising scores on standard benchmarks. However, the lack of transparency around training data raises concerns about potential overlap with evaluation sets and the fairness of reported results. Although prior work has proposed methods for detecting data leakage, these approaches primarily focus on identifying outliers and have not been evaluated under controlled simulated leakage conditions. In this work, we compare existing leakage detection techniques, namely permutation and n-gram-based methods, under a continual pretraining setup that simulates real-world leakage scenarios, and additionally explore a lightweight method we call semi-half question. Although semi-half offers a low-cost alternative, our analysis shows that the n-gram method consistently achieves the highest F1-score. We also refine these techniques to support instance-level detection and reduce computational overhead. Leveraging the best-performing method, we create cleaned versions of MMLU and HellaSwag, and re-evaluate several LLMs. Our findings present a practical path toward more reliable and transparent evaluations, and we recommend contamination checks as a standard step before releasing benchmark results.
Unsupervised keyphrase prediction has gained growing interest in recent years. However, existing methods typically rely on heuristically defined importance scores, which may lead to inaccurate informativeness estimation. In addition, they lack consideration for time efficiency. To solve these problems, we propose ERU-KG, an unsupervised keyphrase generation (UKG) model that consists of an informativeness and a phraseness module. The former estimates the relevance of keyphrase candidates, while the latter generate those candidates. The informativeness module innovates by learning to model informativeness through references (e.g., queries, citation contexts, and titles) and at the term-level, thereby 1) capturing how the key concepts of documents are perceived in different contexts and 2) estimating informativeness of phrases more efficiently by aggregating term informativeness, removing the need for explicit modeling of the candidates. ERU-KG demonstrates its effectiveness on keyphrase generation benchmarks by outperforming unsupervised baselines and achieving on average 89\% of the performance of a supervised model for top 10 predictions. Additionally, to highlight its practical utility, we evaluate the model on text retrieval tasks and show that keyphrases generated by ERU-KG are effective when employed as query and document expansions. Furthermore, inference speed tests reveal that ERU-KG is the fastest among baselines of similar model sizes. Finally, our proposed model can switch between keyphrase generation and extraction by adjusting hyperparameters, catering to diverse application requirements.
Any-to-any generative models aim to enable seamless interpretation and generation across multiple modalities within a unified framework, yet their ability to preserve relationships across modalities remains uncertain. Do unified models truly achieve cross-modal coherence, or is this coherence merely perceived? To explore this, we introduce ACON, a dataset of 1,000 images (500 newly contributed) paired with captions, editing instructions, and Q&A pairs to evaluate cross-modal transfers rigorously. Using three consistency criteria-cyclic consistency, forward equivariance, and conjugated equivariance-our experiments reveal that any-to-any models do not consistently demonstrate greater cross-modal consistency than specialized models in pointwise evaluations such as cyclic consistency. However, equivariance evaluations uncover weak but observable consistency through structured analyses of the intermediate latent space enabled by multiple editing operations. We release our code and data at https://github.com/JiwanChung/ACON.
Evol-Instruct has made significant improvements as a data synthesis method in several areas. Existing methods typically rely on a fixed set of strategies to evolve, which require manual design and are monolithic in form. In addition, iterative evolution also makes the acquisition of hard samples expensive. In view of this, we propose the Tag-Evol framework, a more diverse and efficient instruction evolving method. Specifically, Tag-Evol uses diverse and specific knowledge tags as strategies to achieve controlled evolution by injecting different combinations of tags into the original instructions. Experiments with multiple backbones in diverse domain benchmarks show that the proposed method generates significantly better evolved data than other methods. Furthermore, we conduct a thorough analysis of the evolved data, demonstrating that Tag-Evol is not only efficient but also generates more diverse and challenging data.
Recent works on large language models (LLMs) have successfully demonstrated the emergence of reasoning capabilities via reinforcement learning (RL). Although recent efforts leverage group relative policy optimization (GRPO) for MLLMs post-training, they constantly explore one specific aspect, such as grounding tasks, math problems, or chart analysis. There are no works that can leverage multi-source MLLM tasks for stable reinforcement learning. In this work, we present a unified perspective to solve this problem. We present Mixed-R1, a unified yet straightforward framework that contains a mixed reward function design (Mixed-Reward) and a mixed post-training dataset (Mixed-45K). We first design a data engine to select high-quality examples to build the Mixed-45K post-training dataset. Then, we present a Mixed-Reward design, which contains various reward functions for various MLLM tasks. In particular, it has four different reward functions: matching reward for binary answer or multiple-choice problems, chart reward for chart-aware datasets, IoU reward for grounding problems, and open-ended reward for long-form text responses such as caption datasets. To handle the various long-form text content, we propose a new open-ended reward named Bidirectional Max-Average Similarity (BMAS) by leveraging tokenizer embedding matching between the generated response and the ground truth. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed method on various MLLMs, including Qwen2.5-VL and Intern-VL on various sizes. Our dataset and model are available at https://github.com/xushilin1/mixed-r1.
Training language models with rationales augmentation has been shown to be beneficial in many existing works. In this paper, we identify that such a prevailing view does not hold consistently. We conduct comprehensive investigations to thoroughly inspect the impact of rationales on model performance as well as a novel perspective of model reliability. The results lead to several key findings that add new insights upon existing understandings: 1) Rationales can, at times, deteriorate model performance; 2) Rationales can, at times, improve model reliability, even outperforming their untrained counterparts; 3) A linear correspondence exists in between the performance and reliability improvements, while both are driven by the intrinsic difficulty of the task. These findings provide informative regulations on the broad utilization of rationales and raise critical implications on the procedure of explicitly aligning language models with implicit human thoughts. Codes can be found at https://github.com/Ignoramus0817/rationales.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled remarkable progress in natural language processing, yet their high computational and memory demands pose challenges for deployment in resource-constrained environments. Although recent low-rank decomposition methods offer a promising path for structural compression, they often suffer from accuracy degradation, expensive calibration procedures, and result in inefficient model architectures that hinder real-world inference speedups. In this paper, we propose FLAT-LLM, a fast and accurate, training-free structural compression method based on fine-grained low-rank transformations in the activation space. Specifically, we reduce the hidden dimension by transforming the weights using truncated eigenvectors computed via head-wise Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and employ an importance-based metric to adaptively allocate ranks across decoders. FLAT-LLM achieves efficient and effective weight compression without recovery fine-tuning, which could complete the calibration within a few minutes. Evaluated across 4 models and 11 datasets, FLAT-LLM outperforms structural pruning baselines in generalization and downstream performance, while delivering inference speedups over decomposition-based methods.
Causality detection and mining are important tasks in information retrieval due to their enormous use in information extraction, and knowledge graph construction. To solve these tasks, in existing literature there exist several solutions -- both unsupervised and supervised. However, the unsupervised methods suffer from poor performance and they often require significant human intervention for causal rule selection, leading to poor generalization across different domains. On the other hand, supervised methods suffer from the lack of large training datasets. Recently, large language models (LLMs) with effective prompt engineering are found to be effective to overcome the issue of unavailability of large training dataset. Yet, in existing literature, there does not exist comprehensive works on causality detection and mining using LLM prompting. In this paper, we present several retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based dynamic prompting schemes to enhance LLM performance in causality detection and extraction tasks. Extensive experiments over three datasets and five LLMs validate the superiority of our proposed RAG-based dynamic prompting over other static prompting schemes.
Although long-video understanding demands that models capture hierarchical temporal information -- from clip (seconds) and shot (tens of seconds) to event (minutes) and story (hours) -- existing benchmarks either neglect this multi-scale design or scatter scale-specific questions across different videos, preventing direct comparison of model performance across timescales on the same content. To address this, we introduce ScaleLong, the first benchmark to disentangle these factors by embedding questions targeting four hierarchical timescales -- clip (seconds), shot (tens of seconds), event (minutes), and story (hours) -- all within the same video content. This within-content multi-timescale questioning design enables direct comparison of model performance across timescales on identical videos. ScaleLong features 269 long videos (avg.\ 86\,min) from 5 main categories and 36 sub-categories, with 4--8 carefully designed questions, including at least one question for each timescale. Evaluating 23 MLLMs reveals a U-shaped performance curve, with higher accuracy at the shortest and longest timescales and a dip at intermediate levels. Furthermore, ablation studies show that increased visual token capacity consistently enhances reasoning across all timescales. ScaleLong offers a fine-grained, multi-timescale benchmark for advancing MLLM capabilities in long-video understanding. The code and dataset are available https://github.com/multimodal-art-projection/ScaleLong.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable promise but remain challenging to continually improve through traditional finetuning, particularly when integrating capabilities from other specialized LLMs. Popular methods like ensemble and weight merging require substantial memory and struggle to adapt to changing data environments. Recent efforts have transferred knowledge from multiple LLMs into a single target model; however, they suffer from interference and degraded performance among tasks, largely due to limited flexibility in candidate selection and training pipelines. To address these issues, we propose a framework that adaptively selects and aggregates knowledge from diverse LLMs to build a single, stronger model, avoiding the high memory overhead of ensemble and inflexible weight merging. Specifically, we design an adaptive selection network that identifies the most relevant source LLMs based on their scores, thereby reducing knowledge interference. We further propose a dynamic weighted fusion strategy that accounts for the inherent strengths of candidate LLMs, along with a feedback-driven loss function that prevents the selector from converging on a single subset of sources. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can enable a more stable and scalable knowledge aggregation process while reducing knowledge interference by up to 50% compared to existing approaches. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/ZLKong/LLM_Integration
Large Language Models (LLMs) are expected to provide helpful and harmless responses, yet they often exhibit sycophancy--conforming to user beliefs regardless of factual accuracy or ethical soundness. Prior research on sycophancy has primarily focused on single-turn factual correctness, overlooking the dynamics of real-world interactions. In this work, we introduce SYCON Bench, a novel benchmark for evaluating sycophantic behavior in multi-turn, free-form conversational settings. Our benchmark measures how quickly a model conforms to the user (Turn of Flip) and how frequently it shifts its stance under sustained user pressure (Number of Flip). Applying SYCON Bench to 17 LLMs across three real-world scenarios, we find that sycophancy remains a prevalent failure mode. Our analysis shows that alignment tuning amplifies sycophantic behavior, whereas model scaling and reasoning optimization strengthen the model's ability to resist undesirable user views. Reasoning models generally outperform instruction-tuned models but often fail when they over-index on logical exposition instead of directly addressing the user's underlying beliefs. Finally, we evaluate four additional prompting strategies and demonstrate that adopting a third-person perspective reduces sycophancy by up to 63.8% in debate scenario. We release our code and data at https://github.com/JiseungHong/SYCON-Bench.