Real-world Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) are characterized by a variety of practical constraints, making manual solver design both knowledge-intensive and time-consuming. Although there is increasing interest in automating the design of routing algorithms, existing research has explored only a limited array of VRP variants and fails to adequately address the complex and prevalent constraints encountered in real-world situations. To fill this gap, this paper introduces RoutBench, a benchmark of 1,000 VRP variants derived from 24 attributes, for evaluating the effectiveness of automatic routing solvers in addressing complex constraints. Along with RoutBench, we present the Automatic Routing Solver (ARS), which employs Large Language Model (LLM) agents to enhance a backbone algorithm framework by automatically generating constraint-aware heuristic code, based on problem descriptions and several representative constraints selected from a database. Our experiments show that ARS outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based methods and commonly used solvers, automatically solving 91.67% of common VRPs and achieving at least a 30% improvement across all benchmarks.
To utilize visual information, Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) relies on the perception process of its vision encoder. The completeness and accuracy of visual perception significantly influence the precision of spatial reasoning, fine-grained understanding, and other tasks. However, MLLM still lacks the autonomous capability to control its own visual perception processes, for example, selectively reviewing specific regions of an image or focusing on information related to specific object categories. In this work, we propose the concept of Visual Perception Token, aiming to empower MLLM with a mechanism to control its visual perception processes. We design two types of Visual Perception Tokens, termed the Region Selection Token and the Vision Re-Encoding Token. MLLMs autonomously generate these tokens, just as they generate text, and use them to trigger additional visual perception actions. The Region Selection Token explicitly identifies specific regions in an image that require further perception, while the Vision Re-Encoding Token uses its hidden states as control signals to guide additional visual perception processes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of these tokens in handling spatial reasoning, improving fine-grained understanding, and other tasks. On average, the introduction of Visual Perception Tokens improves the performance of a 2B model by 23.6\%, increasing its score from 0.572 to 0.708, and even outperforms a 7B parameter model by 13.4\% (from 0.624). Please check out our repo https://github.com/yu-rp/VisualPerceptionToken
We introduce Baichuan-Audio, an end-to-end audio large language model that seamlessly integrates audio understanding and generation. It features a text-guided aligned speech generation mechanism, enabling real-time speech interaction with both comprehension and generation capabilities. Baichuan-Audio leverages a pre-trained ASR model, followed by multi-codebook discretization of speech at a frame rate of 12.5 Hz. This multi-codebook setup ensures that speech tokens retain both semantic and acoustic information. To further enhance modeling, an independent audio head is employed to process audio tokens, effectively capturing their unique characteristics. To mitigate the loss of intelligence during pre-training and preserve the original capabilities of the LLM, we propose a two-stage pre-training strategy that maintains language understanding while enhancing audio modeling. Following alignment, the model excels in real-time speech-based conversation and exhibits outstanding question-answering capabilities, demonstrating its versatility and efficiency. The proposed model demonstrates superior performance in real-time spoken dialogue and exhibits strong question-answering abilities. Our code, model and training data are available at https://github.com/baichuan-inc/Baichuan-Audio
Large language models (LLMs) present novel opportunities in public opinion research by predicting survey responses in advance during the early stages of survey design. Prior methods steer LLMs via descriptions of subpopulations as LLMs' input prompt, yet such prompt engineering approaches have struggled to faithfully predict the distribution of survey responses from human subjects. In this work, we propose directly fine-tuning LLMs to predict response distributions by leveraging unique structural characteristics of survey data. To enable fine-tuning, we curate SubPOP, a significantly scaled dataset of 3,362 questions and 70K subpopulation-response pairs from well-established public opinion surveys. We show that fine-tuning on SubPOP greatly improves the match between LLM predictions and human responses across various subpopulations, reducing the LLM-human gap by up to 46% compared to baselines, and achieves strong generalization to unseen surveys and subpopulations. Our findings highlight the potential of survey-based fine-tuning to improve opinion prediction for diverse, real-world subpopulations and therefore enable more efficient survey designs. Our code is available at https://github.com/JosephJeesungSuh/subpop.
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the primary method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. While it enables LLMs to achieve human-level alignment, it often incurs significant computational and financial costs due to its reliance on training external reward models or human-labeled preferences. In this work, we propose \textbf{Implicit Preference Optimization (IPO)}, an alternative approach that leverages generative LLMs as preference classifiers, thereby reducing the dependence on external human feedback or reward models to obtain preferences. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation on the preference classification ability of LLMs using RewardBench, assessing models across different sizes, architectures, and training levels to validate our hypothesis. Furthermore, we investigate the self-improvement capabilities of LLMs by generating multiple responses for a given instruction and employing the model itself as a preference classifier for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)-based training. Our findings demonstrate that models trained through IPO achieve performance comparable to those utilizing state-of-the-art reward models for obtaining preferences.
How can we verify whether copyrighted content was used to train a large vision-language model (VLM) without direct access to its training data? Motivated by the hypothesis that a VLM is able to recognize images from its training corpus, we propose DIS-CO, a novel approach to infer the inclusion of copyrighted content during the model's development. By repeatedly querying a VLM with specific frames from targeted copyrighted material, DIS-CO extracts the content's identity through free-form text completions. To assess its effectiveness, we introduce MovieTection, a benchmark comprising 14,000 frames paired with detailed captions, drawn from films released both before and after a model's training cutoff. Our results show that DIS-CO significantly improves detection performance, nearly doubling the average AUC of the best prior method on models with logits available. Our findings also highlight a broader concern: all tested models appear to have been exposed to some extent to copyrighted content. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/avduarte333/DIS-CO
This paper introduces an enhanced RWKV architecture with adaptive temporal gating mechanisms for improved long-context language modeling. We propose two principal innovations: (1) a position-aware convolutional shift operator that captures local syntactic patterns while preserving global coherence, and (2) a neurally-gated information routing mechanism that dynamically regulates inter-token information flow. Through comprehensive experiments on text generation tasks, our enhanced model demonstrates superior performance compared to the baseline RWKV, achieving 96.5 relative improvement in ROUGE-L scores with only 2.95 increased inference latency. Ablation studies validate the individual contributions of each component, while linguistic analysis reveals the model's adaptive attention to syntactic boundaries and entity coherence. The proposed modifications maintain RWKV's linear computational complexity while significantly enhancing its contextual modeling capabilities, establishing new state-of-the-art performance for recurrent-style architectures in long-form text generation.
Teaching literature under interdisciplinary contexts (e.g., science, art) that connect reading materials has become popular in elementary schools. However, constructing such contexts is challenging as it requires teachers to explore substantial amounts of interdisciplinary content and link it to the reading materials. In this paper, we develop LitLinker via an iterative design process involving 13 teachers to facilitate the ideation of interdisciplinary contexts for teaching literature. Powered by a large language model (LLM), LitLinker can recommend interdisciplinary topics and contextualize them with the literary elements (e.g., paragraphs, viewpoints) in the reading materials. A within-subjects study (N=16) shows that compared to an LLM chatbot, LitLinker can improve the integration depth of different subjects and reduce workload in this ideation task. Expert interviews (N=9) also demonstrate LitLinker's usefulness for supporting the ideation of interdisciplinary contexts for teaching literature. We conclude with concerns and design considerations for supporting interdisciplinary teaching with LLMs.
We present a novel approach to formalise and solve search-based problems using large language models, which significantly improves upon previous state-of-the-art results. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach on the logic puzzles benchmark ZebraLogicBench. Instead of letting the LLM attempt to directly solve the puzzles, our method prompts the model to formalise the problem in a logic-focused domain-specific language (DSL) called Logic.py. This formalised representation is then solved using a constraint solver, leveraging the strengths of both the language model and the solver. Our approach achieves a remarkable 65% absolute improvement over the baseline performance of Llama 3.1 70B on ZebraLogicBench, setting a new state-of-the-art with an accuracy of over 90%. This significant advancement demonstrates the potential of combining language models with domain-specific languages and auxiliary tools on traditionally challenging tasks for LLMs.
We introduce Slam, a recipe for training high-quality Speech Language Models (SLMs) on a single academic GPU in 24 hours. We do so through empirical analysis of model initialisation and architecture, synthetic training data, preference optimisation with synthetic data and tweaking all other components. We empirically demonstrate that this training recipe also scales well with more compute getting results on par with leading SLMs in a fraction of the compute cost. We hope these insights will make SLM training and research more accessible. In the context of SLM scaling laws, our results far outperform predicted compute optimal performance, giving an optimistic view to SLM feasibility. See code, data, models, samples at - https://pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/slamming .
We present ESPnet-SpeechLM, an open toolkit designed to democratize the development of speech language models (SpeechLMs) and voice-driven agentic applications. The toolkit standardizes speech processing tasks by framing them as universal sequential modeling problems, encompassing a cohesive workflow of data preprocessing, pre-training, inference, and task evaluation. With ESPnet-SpeechLM, users can easily define task templates and configure key settings, enabling seamless and streamlined SpeechLM development. The toolkit ensures flexibility, efficiency, and scalability by offering highly configurable modules for every stage of the workflow. To illustrate its capabilities, we provide multiple use cases demonstrating how competitive SpeechLMs can be constructed with ESPnet-SpeechLM, including a 1.7B-parameter model pre-trained on both text and speech tasks, across diverse benchmarks. The toolkit and its recipes are fully transparent and reproducible at: https://github.com/espnet/espnet/tree/speechlm.
Due to the sensitive nature of personally identifiable information (PII), its owners may have the authority to control its inclusion or request its removal from large-language model (LLM) training. Beyond this, PII may be added or removed from training datasets due to evolving dataset curation techniques, because they were newly scraped for retraining, or because they were included in a new downstream fine-tuning stage. We find that the amount and ease of PII memorization is a dynamic property of a model that evolves throughout training pipelines and depends on commonly altered design choices. We characterize three such novel phenomena: (1) similar-appearing PII seen later in training can elicit memorization of earlier-seen sequences in what we call assisted memorization, and this is a significant factor (in our settings, up to 1/3); (2) adding PII can increase memorization of other PII significantly (in our settings, as much as $\approx\!7.5\times$); and (3) removing PII can lead to other PII being memorized. Model creators should consider these first- and second-order privacy risks when training models to avoid the risk of new PII regurgitation.
A significant and growing number of published scientific articles is found to involve fraudulent practices, posing a serious threat to the credibility and safety of research in fields such as medicine. We propose Pub-Guard-LLM, the first large language model-based system tailored to fraud detection of biomedical scientific articles. We provide three application modes for deploying Pub-Guard-LLM: vanilla reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation, and multi-agent debate. Each mode allows for textual explanations of predictions. To assess the performance of our system, we introduce an open-source benchmark, PubMed Retraction, comprising over 11K real-world biomedical articles, including metadata and retraction labels. We show that, across all modes, Pub-Guard-LLM consistently surpasses the performance of various baselines and provides more reliable explanations, namely explanations which are deemed more relevant and coherent than those generated by the baselines when evaluated by multiple assessment methods. By enhancing both detection performance and explainability in scientific fraud detection, Pub-Guard-LLM contributes to safeguarding research integrity with a novel, effective, open-source tool.
Which large language model (LLM) is better? Every evaluation tells a story, but what do users really think about current LLMs? This paper presents CLUE, an LLM-powered interviewer that conducts in-the-moment user experience interviews, right after users interact with LLMs, and automatically gathers insights about user opinions from massive interview logs. We conduct a study with thousands of users to understand user opinions on mainstream LLMs, recruiting users to first chat with a target LLM and then be interviewed by CLUE. Our experiments demonstrate that CLUE captures interesting user opinions, e.g., the bipolar views on the displayed reasoning process of DeepSeek-R1 and demands for information freshness and multi-modality. Our code and data are at https://github.com/cxcscmu/LLM-Interviewer.
Financial Sentiment Analysis (FSA) traditionally relies on human-annotated sentiment labels to infer investor sentiment and forecast market movements. However, inferring the potential market impact of words based on their human-perceived intentions is inherently challenging. We hypothesize that the historical market reactions to words, offer a more reliable indicator of their potential impact on markets than subjective sentiment interpretations by human annotators. To test this hypothesis, a market-derived labeling approach is proposed to assign tweet labels based on ensuing short-term price trends, enabling the language model to capture the relationship between textual signals and market dynamics directly. A domain-specific language model was fine-tuned on these labels, achieving up to an 11% improvement in short-term trend prediction accuracy over traditional sentiment-based benchmarks. Moreover, by incorporating market and temporal context through prompt-tuning, the proposed context-aware language model demonstrated an accuracy of 89.6% on a curated dataset of 227 impactful Bitcoin-related news events with significant market impacts. Aggregating daily tweet predictions into trading signals, our method outperformed traditional fusion models (which combine sentiment-based and price-based predictions). It challenged the assumption that sentiment-based signals are inferior to price-based predictions in forecasting market movements. Backtesting these signals across three distinct market regimes yielded robust Sharpe ratios of up to 5.07 in trending markets and 3.73 in neutral markets. Our findings demonstrate that language models can serve as effective short-term market predictors. This paradigm shift underscores the untapped capabilities of language models in financial decision-making and opens new avenues for market prediction applications.
Homans' Social Exchange Theory (SET) is widely recognized as a basic framework for understanding the formation and emergence of human civilizations and social structures. In social science, this theory is typically studied based on simple simulation experiments or real-world human studies, both of which either lack realism or are too expensive to control. In artificial intelligence, recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in simulating human behaviors. Inspired by these insights, we adopt an interdisciplinary research perspective and propose using LLM-based agents to study Homans' SET. Specifically, we construct a virtual society composed of three LLM agents and have them engage in a social exchange game to observe their behaviors. Through extensive experiments, we found that Homans' SET is well validated in our agent society, demonstrating the consistency between the agent and human behaviors. Building on this foundation, we intentionally alter the settings of the agent society to extend the traditional Homans' SET, making it more comprehensive and detailed. To the best of our knowledge, this paper marks the first step in studying Homans' SET with LLM-based agents. More importantly, it introduces a novel and feasible research paradigm that bridges the fields of social science and computer science through LLM-based agents. Code is available at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/SET.
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to provide personalized recommendations via interactive dialogues with users. While large language models (LLMs) enhance CRS with their superior understanding of context-aware user preferences, they typically struggle to leverage behavioral data, which have proven to be important for classical collaborative filtering (CF)-based approaches. For this reason, we propose CRAG, Collaborative Retrieval Augmented Generation for LLM-based CRS. To the best of our knowledge, CRAG is the first approach that combines state-of-the-art LLMs with CF for conversational recommendations. Our experiments on two publicly available movie conversational recommendation datasets, i.e., a refined Reddit dataset (which we name Reddit-v2) as well as the Redial dataset, demonstrate the superior item coverage and recommendation performance of CRAG, compared to several CRS baselines. Moreover, we observe that the improvements are mainly due to better recommendation accuracy on recently released movies. The code and data are available at https://github.com/yaochenzhu/CRAG.
Large language model (LLM) evaluations typically rely on aggregated metrics like accuracy or human preference, averaging across users and prompts. This averaging obscures user- and prompt-specific variations in model performance. To address this, we propose Prompt-to-Leaderboard (P2L), a method that produces leaderboards specific to a prompt. The core idea is to train an LLM taking natural language prompts as input to output a vector of Bradley-Terry coefficients which are then used to predict the human preference vote. The resulting prompt-dependent leaderboards allow for unsupervised task-specific evaluation, optimal routing of queries to models, personalization, and automated evaluation of model strengths and weaknesses. Data from Chatbot Arena suggest that P2L better captures the nuanced landscape of language model performance than the averaged leaderboard. Furthermore, our findings suggest that P2L's ability to produce prompt-specific evaluations follows a power law scaling similar to that observed in LLMs themselves. In January 2025, the router we trained based on this methodology achieved the \#1 spot in the Chatbot Arena leaderboard. Our code is available at this GitHub link: https://github.com/lmarena/p2l.
Triton, a high-level Python-like language designed for building efficient GPU kernels, is widely adopted in deep learning frameworks due to its portability, flexibility, and accessibility. However, programming and parallel optimization still require considerable trial and error from Triton developers. Despite advances in large language models (LLMs) for conventional code generation, these models struggle to generate accurate, performance-optimized Triton code, as they lack awareness of its specifications and the complexities of GPU programming. More critically, there is an urgent need for systematic evaluations tailored to Triton. In this work, we introduce TritonBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for Triton operator generation. TritonBench features two evaluation channels: a curated set of 184 real-world operators from GitHub and a collection of operators aligned with PyTorch interfaces. Unlike conventional code benchmarks prioritizing functional correctness, TritonBench also profiles efficiency performance on widely deployed GPUs aligned with industry applications. Our study reveals that current state-of-the-art code LLMs struggle to generate efficient Triton operators, highlighting a significant gap in high-performance code generation. TritonBench will be available at https://github.com/thunlp/TritonBench.
We propose a new framework for zero-shot generation of synthetic tabular data. Using the large language model (LLM) GPT-4o and plain-language prompting, we demonstrate the ability to generate high-fidelity tabular data without task-specific fine-tuning or access to real-world data (RWD) for pre-training. To benchmark GPT-4o, we compared the fidelity and privacy of LLM-generated synthetic data against data generated with the conditional tabular generative adversarial network (CTGAN), across three open-access datasets: Iris, Fish Measurements, and Real Estate Valuation. Despite the zero-shot approach, GPT-4o outperformed CTGAN in preserving means, 95% confidence intervals, bivariate correlations, and data privacy of RWD, even at amplified sample sizes. Notably, correlations between parameters were consistently preserved with appropriate direction and strength. However, refinement is necessary to better retain distributional characteristics. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs in tabular data synthesis, offering an accessible alternative to generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoders.