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Friday 17 October

Computation and Language

DeceptionBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for AI Deception Behaviors in Real-world Scenarios

Despite the remarkable advances of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse cognitive tasks, the rapid enhancement of these capabilities also introduces emergent deceptive behaviors that may induce severe risks in high-stakes deployments. More critically, the characterization of deception across realistic real-world scenarios remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we establish DeceptionBench, the first benchmark that systematically evaluates how deceptive tendencies manifest across different societal domains, what their intrinsic behavioral patterns are, and how extrinsic factors affect them. Specifically, on the static count, the benchmark encompasses 150 meticulously designed scenarios in five domains, i.e., Economy, Healthcare, Education, Social Interaction, and Entertainment, with over 1,000 samples, providing sufficient empirical foundations for deception analysis. On the intrinsic dimension, we explore whether models exhibit self-interested egoistic tendencies or sycophantic behaviors that prioritize user appeasement. On the extrinsic dimension, we investigate how contextual factors modulate deceptive outputs under neutral conditions, reward-based incentivization, and coercive pressures. Moreover, we incorporate sustained multi-turn interaction loops to construct a more realistic simulation of real-world feedback dynamics. Extensive experiments across LLMs and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) reveal critical vulnerabilities, particularly amplified deception under reinforcement dynamics, demonstrating that current models lack robust resistance to manipulative contextual cues and the urgent need for advanced safeguards against various deception behaviors. Code and resources are publicly available at https://github.com/Aries-iai/DeceptionBench.
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All authors Yao Huang, Yitong Sun, Yichi Zhang, Ruochen Zhang, Yinpeng Dong, Xingxing Wei

Computation and Language

CORE: Reducing UI Exposure in Mobile Agents via Collaboration Between Cloud and Local LLMs

Mobile agents rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) to plan and execute tasks on smartphone user interfaces (UIs). While cloud-based LLMs achieve high task accuracy, they require uploading the full UI state at every step, exposing unnecessary and often irrelevant information. In contrast, local LLMs avoid UI uploads but suffer from limited capacity, resulting in lower task success rates. We propose $\textbf{CORE}$, a $\textbf{CO}$llaborative framework that combines the strengths of cloud and local LLMs to $\textbf{R}$educe UI $\textbf{E}$xposure, while maintaining task accuracy for mobile agents. CORE comprises three key components: (1) $\textbf{Layout-aware block partitioning}$, which groups semantically related UI elements based on the XML screen hierarchy; (2) $\textbf{Co-planning}$, where local and cloud LLMs collaboratively identify the current sub-task; and (3) $\textbf{Co-decision-making}$, where the local LLM ranks relevant UI blocks, and the cloud LLM selects specific UI elements within the top-ranked block. CORE further introduces a multi-round accumulation mechanism to mitigate local misjudgment or limited context. Experiments across diverse mobile apps and tasks show that CORE reduces UI exposure by up to 55.6% while maintaining task success rates slightly below cloud-only agents, effectively mitigating unnecessary privacy exposure to the cloud. The code is available at https://github.com/Entropy-Fighter/CORE.
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All authors Gucongcong Fan, Chaoyue Niu, Chengfei Lyu, Fan Wu, Guihai Chen

Computation and Language

Controllable Abstraction in Summary Generation for Large Language Models via Prompt Engineering

This study presents a controllable abstract summary generation method for large language models based on prompt engineering. To address the issues of summary quality and controllability in traditional methods, we design a multi-stage prompt generation framework. This framework generates summaries with varying levels of abstraction by performing semantic analysis, topic modeling, and noise control on the input text. The experiment uses the CNN/Daily Mail dataset and provides a detailed analysis of different prompt lengths, data noise, and text types. The experimental results show that prompt length has a significant impact on the quality of generated summaries. Both very short and very long prompt tokens result in a decrease in summary quality. Data noise also negatively affects the summary generation process. As noise levels increase, the ROUGE-L score gradually decreases. Furthermore, different text types have varying effects on the model's ability to generate summaries. The model performs best when handling news texts, while its performance is worse when processing academic articles. This research provides new insights into improving summary generation using large language models, particularly in how controlling prompt strategies and optimizing text preprocessing can enhance summary accuracy and controllability.
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All authors Xiangchen Song, Yuchen Liu, Yaxuan Luan, Jinxu Guo, Xiaofan Guo

Computation and Language

When Seeing Is not Enough: Revealing the Limits of Active Reasoning in MLLMs

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities across a broad range of benchmarks. However, most existing evaluations focus on passive inference, where models perform step-by-step reasoning under complete information. This setup is misaligned with real-world use, where seeing is not enough. This raises a fundamental question: Can MLLMs actively acquire missing evidence under incomplete information? To bridge this gap, we require the MLLMs to actively acquire missing evidence and iteratively refine decisions under incomplete information, by selecting a target image from a candidate pool without task-specific priors. To support systematic study, we propose GuessBench, a benchmark with both perception-oriented and knowledge-oriented images for evaluating active reasoning in MLLMs. We evaluate 20 superior MLLMs and find that performance on active reasoning lags far behind it on passive settings, indicating substantial room for improvement. Further analysis identifies fine-grained perception and timely decision-making as key challenges. Ablation studies show that perceptual enhancements benefit smaller models, whereas thinking-oriented methods provide consistent gains across model sizes. These results suggest promising directions for future research on multimodal active reasoning.
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All authors Hongcheng Liu, Pingjie Wang, Yuhao Wang, Siqu Ou, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang

Computation and Language

Fine-Tuning MedGemma for Clinical Captioning to Enhance Multimodal RAG over Malaysia CPGs

Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems are essential for providing fact-based guidance from Malaysian Clinical Practice Guidelines. However, their effectiveness with image-based queries is limited, as general Vision-Language Model captions often lack clinical specificity and factual grounding. This study proposes and validates a framework to specialize the MedGemma model for generating high-fidelity captions that serve as superior queries. To overcome data scarcity, we employ a knowledge distillation pipeline to create a synthetic dataset across dermatology, fundus, and chest radiography domains, and fine-tune MedGemma using the parameter-efficient QLoRA method. Performance was rigorously assessed through a dual framework measuring both classification accuracy and, via a novel application of the RAGAS framework, caption faithfulness, relevancy, and correctness. The fine-tuned model demonstrated substantial improvements in classification performance, while RAGAS evaluation confirmed significant gains in caption faithfulness and correctness, validating the models ability to produce reliable, factually grounded descriptions. This work establishes a robust pipeline for specializing medical VLMs and validates the resulting model as a high-quality query generator, laying the groundwork for enhancing multimodal RAG systems in evidence-based clinical decision support.
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Computation and Language

Large-scale User Game Lifecycle Representation Learning

The rapid expansion of video game production necessitates the development of effective advertising and recommendation systems for online game platforms. Recommending and advertising games to users hinges on capturing their interest in games. However, existing representation learning methods crafted for handling billions of items in recommendation systems are unsuitable for game advertising and recommendation. This is primarily due to game sparsity, where the mere hundreds of games fall short for large-scale user representation learning, and game imbalance, where user behaviors are overwhelmingly dominated by a handful of popular games. To address the sparsity issue, we introduce the User Game Lifecycle (UGL), designed to enrich user behaviors in games. Additionally, we propose two innovative strategies aimed at manipulating user behaviors to more effectively extract both short and long-term interests. To tackle the game imbalance challenge, we present an Inverse Probability Masking strategy for UGL representation learning. The offline and online experimental results demonstrate that the UGL representations significantly enhance model by achieving a 1.83% AUC offline increase on average and a 21.67% CVR online increase on average for game advertising and a 0.5% AUC offline increase and a 0.82% ARPU online increase for in-game item recommendation.
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All authors Yanjie Gou, Jiangming Liu, Kouying Xue, Yi Hu

Computation and Language

VocalBench-DF: A Benchmark for Evaluating Speech LLM Robustness to Disfluency

While Speech Large Language Models (Speech-LLMs) show strong performance in many applications, their robustness is critically under-tested, especially to speech disfluency. Existing evaluations often rely on idealized inputs, overlooking common disfluencies, particularly those associated with conditions like Parkinson's disease. This work investigates whether current Speech-LLMs can maintain performance when interacting with users who have speech impairments. To facilitate this inquiry, we introduce VocalBench-DF, a framework for the systematic evaluation of disfluency across a multi-dimensional taxonomy. Our evaluation of 22 mainstream Speech-LLMs reveals substantial performance degradation, indicating that their real-world readiness is limited. Further analysis identifies phoneme-level processing and long-context modeling as primary bottlenecks responsible for these failures. Strengthening recognition and reasoning capability from components and pipelines can substantially improve robustness. These findings highlight the urgent need for new methods to improve disfluency handling and build truly inclusive Speech-LLMs
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All authors Hongcheng Liu, Yixuan Hou, Heyang Liu, Yuhao Wang, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang

Computation and Language

Infinity Parser: Layout Aware Reinforcement Learning for Scanned Document Parsing

Document parsing from scanned images into structured formats remains a significant challenge due to its complexly intertwined elements such as text paragraphs, figures, formulas, and tables. Existing supervised fine-tuning methods often struggle to generalize across diverse document types, leading to poor performance, particularly on out-of-distribution data. This issue is further exacerbated by the limited availability of high-quality training data for layout-aware parsing tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce LayoutRL, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes layout understanding through composite rewards integrating normalized edit distance, paragraph count accuracy, and reading order preservation. To support this training, we construct the Infinity-Doc-400K dataset, which we use to train Infinity-Parser, a vision-language model demonstrating robust generalization across various domains. Extensive evaluations on benchmarks including OmniDocBench, olmOCR-Bench, PubTabNet, and FinTabNet show that Infinity-Parser consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across a broad range of document types, languages, and structural complexities, substantially outperforming both specialized document parsing systems and general-purpose vision-language models. We will release our code, dataset, and model to facilitate reproducible research in document parsing.
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All authors Baode Wang, Biao Wu, Weizhen Li, Meng Fang, Zuming Huang, Jun Huang, Haozhe Wang, Yanjie Liang, Ling Chen, Wei Chu, Yuan Qi

Computation and Language

When to Ensemble: Identifying Token-Level Points for Stable and Fast LLM Ensembling

Ensembling Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained attention as a promising approach to surpass the performance of individual models by leveraging their complementary strengths. In particular, aggregating models' next-token probability distributions to select the next token has been shown to be effective in various tasks. However, while successful for short-form answers, its application to long-form generation remains underexplored. In this paper, we show that using existing ensemble methods in long-form generation requires a careful choice of ensembling positions, since the standard practice of ensembling at every token often degrades performance. We identify two key factors for determining the ensembling positions: tokenization mismatch across models and consensus in their next-token probability distributions. Based on this, we propose SAFE, (Stable And Fast LLM Ensembling), a framework that selectively ensembles by jointly considering these factors. To further improve stability, we apply a probability sharpening strategy when the ensemble distribution becomes overly smooth, enabling the selection of more confident tokens during ensembling. Our experiments on diverse benchmarks, including MATH500 and BBH, demonstrate that SAFE outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and efficiency, with gains achieved even when ensembling fewer than 1% of tokens.
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All authors Heecheol Yun, Kwangmin Ki, Junghyun Lee, Eunho Yang

Computation and Language

Readability Reconsidered: A Cross-Dataset Analysis of Reference-Free Metrics

Automatic readability assessment plays a key role in ensuring effective and accessible written communication. Despite significant progress, the field is hindered by inconsistent definitions of readability and measurements that rely on surface-level text properties. In this work, we investigate the factors shaping human perceptions of readability through the analysis of 897 judgments, finding that, beyond surface-level cues, information content and topic strongly shape text comprehensibility. Furthermore, we evaluate 15 popular readability metrics across five English datasets, contrasting them with six more nuanced, model-based metrics. Our results show that four model-based metrics consistently place among the top four in rank correlations with human judgments, while the best performing traditional metric achieves an average rank of 8.6. These findings highlight a mismatch between current readability metrics and human perceptions, pointing to model-based approaches as a more promising direction.
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All authors Catarina G Belem, Parker Glenn, Alfy Samuel, Anoop Kumar, Daben Liu

Computation and Language

AutoGraph-R1: End-to-End Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Graph Construction

Building effective knowledge graphs (KGs) for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is pivotal for advancing question answering (QA) systems. However, its effectiveness is hindered by a fundamental disconnect: the knowledge graph (KG) construction process is decoupled from its downstream application, yielding suboptimal graph structures. To bridge this gap, we introduce AutoGraph-R1, the first framework to directly optimize KG construction for task performance using Reinforcement Learning (RL). AutoGraph-R1 trains an LLM constructor by framing graph generation as a policy learning problem, where the reward is derived from the graph's functional utility in a RAG pipeline. We design two novel, task-aware reward functions, one for graphs as knowledge carriers and another as knowledge indices. Across multiple QA benchmarks, AutoGraph-R1 consistently enables graph RAG methods to achieve significant performance gains over using task-agnostic baseline graphs. Our work shows it is possible to close the loop between construction and application, shifting the paradigm from building intrinsically “good” graphs to building demonstrably “useful” ones.
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All authors Hong Ting Tsang, Jiaxin Bai, Haoyu Huang, Qiao Xiao, Tianshi Zheng, Baixuan Xu, Shujie Liu, Yangqiu Song

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.DC

BeLLMan: Controlling LLM Congestion

Large language model (LLM) applications are blindfolded to the infrastructure underneath and generate tokens autoregressively, indifferent to the system load, thus risking inferencing latency inflation and poor user experience. Our first-cut controller, named beLLMan, enables the LLM infrastructure to actively and progressively signal the first-party LLM application to adjust the output length in response to changing system load. On a real testbed with H100 GPUs, beLLMan helps keep inferencing latency under control (upto 8X lower end-to-end latency) and reduces energy consumption by 25% (while serving 19% more requests) during periods of congestion for a summarization workload.
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All authors Tella Rajashekhar Reddy, Atharva Deshmukh, Karan Tandon, Rohan Gandhi, Anjaly Parayil, Debopam Bhattacherjee

Computation and Language

Capabilities and Evaluation Biases of Large Language Models in Classical Chinese Poetry Generation: A Case Study on Tang Poetry

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to creative domains, yet their performance in classical Chinese poetry generation and evaluation remains poorly understood. We propose a three-step evaluation framework that combines computational metrics, LLM-as-a-judge assessment, and human expert validation. Using this framework, we evaluate six state-of-the-art LLMs across multiple dimensions of poetic quality, including themes, emotions, imagery, form, and style, in the context of Tang poetry generation. Our analysis reveals a critical "echo chamber" effect: LLMs systematically overrate machine-generated poems that mimic statistical patterns yet fail strict prosodic rules, diverging significantly from human expert judgments. These findings underscore the limitations of using LLMs as standalone evaluators for culturally complex tasks, highlighting the necessity of hybrid human-model validation frameworks.
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Computation and Language

Accelerating Mobile Language Model via Speculative Decoding and NPU-Coordinated Execution

Performing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) directly on mobile devices is promising for data privacy and responsiveness but is hindered by the architectural constraints of mobile NPUs. Specifically, current hardware struggles with the variable workloads intrinsic to RAG: the transition between processing extensive contexts and generating tokens incurs significant overhead due to static graph constraints, while the memory-bound generation phase leaves computational resources underutilized. In this work, we propose a holistic acceleration framework sd.npu, designed to maximize NPU efficiency for on-device RAG ecosystem. To address the latency caused by NPU graph switching during phase transitions, we introduce a pipelined execution strategy. This approach masks the overhead of model reconfiguration by parallelizing the loading of decoding graphs with the computation of partitioned context chunks (chunked prefill), thereby ensuring continuous execution flow. Furthermore, to mitigate low hardware utilization during the decoding phase, we develop an NPU-centric speculative decoding mechanism. By calibrating generation distributions and extending draft sequences, our method effectively converts idle NPU cycles into valid token throughput. Experiments on commercial smartphones show that our framework significantly outperforms existing baselines, delivering 1.06$\times$–3.81$\times$ speedups and 1.07$\times$–4.71$\times$ energy savings across various RAG tasks.
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All authors Zhiyang Chen, Daliang Xu, Haiyang Shen, Chiheng Lou, Mengwei Xu, Shangguang Wang, Xin Jin, Yun Ma

Computation and Language

Automatic essay scoring: leveraging Jaccard coefficient and Cosine similaritywith n-gram variation in vector space model approach

Automated essay scoring (AES) is a vital area of research aiming to provide efficient and accurate assessment tools for evaluating written content. This study investigates the effectiveness of two popular similarity metrics, Jaccard coefficient, and Cosine similarity, within the context of vector space models(VSM)employing unigram, bigram, and trigram representations. The data used in this research was obtained from the formative essay of the citizenship education subject in a junior high school. Each essay undergoes preprocessing to extract features using n-gram models, followed by vectorization to transform text data into numerical representations. Then, similarity scores are computed between essays using both Jaccard coefficient and Cosine similarity. The performance of the system is evaluated by analyzing the root mean square error (RMSE), which measures the difference between the scores given by human graders and those generated by the system. The result shows that the Cosine similarity outperformed the Jaccard coefficient. In terms of n-gram, unigrams have lower RMSE compared to bigrams and trigrams.
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All authors Andharini Dwi Cahyani, Moh. Wildan Fathoni, Fika Hastarita Rachman, Ari Basuki, Salman Amin, Bain Khusnul Khotimah

Computation and Language

Exemplar-Guided Planing: Enhanced LLM Agent for KGQA

Large Language Models (LLMs) as interactive agents show significant promise in Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) but often struggle with the semantic gap between natural language queries and structured knowledge graph (KG) representations. This leads to suboptimal planning and inefficient exploration on KG, while training-free approaches often underutilize valuable reasoning patterns in training data. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework, Exemplar-Guided Planning (EGP), which enhances the planning capabilities of LLM agents for KGQA. EGP first preprocesses the training set questions via entity templating to normalize semantic variations. It then retrieves highly similar exemplary questions and their successful reasoning paths from this preprocessed set using semantic embeddings and an efficient FAISS index. These retrieved exemplars dynamically guide the LLM's planning process in two key phases: (1) Task Decomposition, by aligning generated sub-objectives with proven reasoning steps, and (2) Relation Exploration, by providing high-quality auxiliary information to improve relation pruning accuracy. Additionally, we introduce a Smart Lookahead mechanism during relation exploration to improve efficiency by preemptively exploring promising paths and potentially terminating exploration earlier. We apply EGP to the Plan-on-Graph (PoG) framework, termed PoG-EGP. Extensive experiments on two real-world KGQA datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, demonstrate that PoG-EGP significantly improves over the baseline PoG system and other compared methods.
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All authors Jingao Xu, Shuoyoucheng Ma, Xin Song, Rong Jiang, Hongkui Tu, Bin Zhou

Computation and Language

TACL: Threshold-Adaptive Curriculum Learning Strategy for Enhancing Medical Text Understanding

Medical texts, particularly electronic medical records (EMRs), are a cornerstone of modern healthcare, capturing critical information about patient care, diagnoses, and treatments. These texts hold immense potential for advancing clinical decision-making and healthcare analytics. However, their unstructured nature, domain-specific language, and variability across contexts make automated understanding an intricate challenge. Despite the advancements in natural language processing, existing methods often treat all data as equally challenging, ignoring the inherent differences in complexity across clinical records. This oversight limits the ability of models to effectively generalize and perform well on rare or complex cases. In this paper, we present TACL (Threshold-Adaptive Curriculum Learning), a novel framework designed to address these challenges by rethinking how models interact with medical texts during training. Inspired by the principle of progressive learning, TACL dynamically adjusts the training process based on the complexity of individual samples. By categorizing data into difficulty levels and prioritizing simpler cases early in training, the model builds a strong foundation before tackling more complex records. By applying TACL to multilingual medical data, including English and Chinese clinical records, we observe significant improvements across diverse clinical tasks, including automatic ICD coding, readmission prediction and TCM syndrome differentiation. TACL not only enhances the performance of automated systems but also demonstrates the potential to unify approaches across disparate medical domains, paving the way for more accurate, scalable, and globally applicable medical text understanding solutions.
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All authors Mucheng Ren, Yucheng Yan, He Chen, Danqing Hu, Jun Xu, Xian Zeng

Computation and Language

TraceCoder: Towards Traceable ICD Coding via Multi-Source Knowledge Integration

Automated International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding assigns standardized diagnosis and procedure codes to clinical records, playing a critical role in healthcare systems. However, existing methods face challenges such as semantic gaps between clinical text and ICD codes, poor performance on rare and long-tail codes, and limited interpretability. To address these issues, we propose TraceCoder, a novel framework integrating multi-source external knowledge to enhance traceability and explainability in ICD coding. TraceCoder dynamically incorporates diverse knowledge sources, including UMLS, Wikipedia, and large language models (LLMs), to enrich code representations, bridge semantic gaps, and handle rare and ambiguous codes. It also introduces a hybrid attention mechanism to model interactions among labels, clinical context, and knowledge, improving long-tail code recognition and making predictions interpretable by grounding them in external evidence. Experiments on MIMIC-III-ICD9, MIMIC-IV-ICD9, and MIMIC-IV-ICD10 datasets demonstrate that TraceCoder achieves state-of-the-art performance, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of its components. TraceCoder offers a scalable and robust solution for automated ICD coding, aligning with clinical needs for accuracy, interpretability, and reliability.
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All authors Mucheng Ren, He Chen, Yuchen Yan, Danqing Hu, Jun Xu, Xian Zeng

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

DRO-InstructZero: Distributionally Robust Prompt Optimization for Large Language Models

Large language models are highly sensitive to prompt wording. However, popular automatic prompt search methods, including InstructZero, often degrade under distribution shift and adversarial evaluation because they optimize expected performance under a single evaluation distribution. Consequently, prompts that work in one setting frequently fail to transfer. To address this, DRO-InstructZero formulates zero-shot prompt optimization as robust Bayesian optimization. Specifically, an f-divergence ball defines an ambiguity set around the evaluation distribution, and a robust acquisition rule maximizes worst-case expected utility while retaining the query efficiency of Bayesian search. Therefore, the search explicitly targets reliability under distribution shift rather than average behavior alone. Experiments follow the instruction-induction protocol with matched query budgets across formality rewriting, code debugging, and translation. For example, on BIG-Bench informative-to-formal rewriting, accuracy improves from 61.3 +/- 0.7% to approximately 85-90%, yielding an absolute gain of about 25-30 points. Moreover, auto-debugging shows about +25-point gains under domain shift. Meanwhile, stable tasks such as cause-and-effect remain above 96%, indicating no loss on in-distribution cases. Furthermore, improvements are consistent across divergence choices and decoding temperatures. Overall, DRO-InstructZero connects distributionally robust optimization with prompt learning, offering a plug-and-play and general approach for reliable, transferable prompt alignment under real-world uncertainty.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Multi-dimensional Data Analysis and Applications Basing on LLM Agents and Knowledge Graph Interactions

In the current era of big data, extracting deep insights from massive, heterogeneous, and complexly associated multi-dimensional data has become a significant challenge. Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well in natural language understanding and generation, but still suffer from "hallucination" issues when processing structured knowledge and are difficult to update in real-time. Although Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can explicitly store structured knowledge, their static nature limits dynamic interaction and analytical capabilities. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-dimensional data analysis method based on the interactions between LLM agents and KGs, constructing a dynamic, collaborative analytical ecosystem. This method utilizes LLM agents to automatically extract product data from unstructured data, constructs and visualizes the KG in real-time, and supports users in deep exploration and analysis of graph nodes through an interactive platform. Experimental results show that this method has significant advantages in product ecosystem analysis, relationship mining, and user-driven exploratory analysis, providing new ideas and tools for multi-dimensional data analysis.
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All authors Xi Wang, Xianyao Ling, Kun Li, Gang Yin, Liang Zhang, Jiang Wu, Jun Xu, Fu Zhang, Wenbo Lei, Annie Wang, Peng Gong

Computation and Language

Scaling Beyond Context: A Survey of Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Document Understanding

Document understanding is critical for applications from financial analysis to scientific discovery. Current approaches, whether OCR-based pipelines feeding Large Language Models (LLMs) or native Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), face key limitations: the former loses structural detail, while the latter struggles with context modeling. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps ground models in external data, but documents' multimodal nature, i.e., combining text, tables, charts, and layout, demands a more advanced paradigm: Multimodal RAG. This approach enables holistic retrieval and reasoning across all modalities, unlocking comprehensive document intelligence. Recognizing its importance, this paper presents a systematic survey of Multimodal RAG for document understanding. We propose a taxonomy based on domain, retrieval modality, and granularity, and review advances involving graph structures and agentic frameworks. We also summarize key datasets, benchmarks, applications and industry deployment, and highlight open challenges in efficiency, fine-grained representation, and robustness, providing a roadmap for future progress in document AI.
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All authors Sensen Gao, Shanshan Zhao, Xu Jiang, Lunhao Duan, Yong Xien Chng, Qing-Guo Chen, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Jia-Wang Bian, Mingming Gong

Computation and Language

Planner and Executor: Collaboration between Discrete Diffusion And Autoregressive Models in Reasoning

Current autoregressive language models (ARMs) achieve high accuracy but require long token sequences, making them costly. Discrete diffusion language models (DDLMs) enable parallel and flexible generation within a fixed number of steps and have recently emerged for their strong performance in complex reasoning and long-term planning tasks. We present a study exploring hybrid architectures that couple DDLMs with ARMs to assess whether their collaboration can yield complementary benefits. We first examine collaboration in text space, where one model plans the reasoning process and another executes the final answer based on that plan. We then extend this setup to latent-space communication, introducing a learned projector that maps DDLM latents into the ARM's embedding space, potentially bypassing some of the text-generation limitations of diffusion models. We find that shifting DDLM –> ARM communication from text space to latent space yields significant accuracy gains, for example increasing from 27.0% to 54.0% on DART-5 and from 0.0% to 14.0% on AIME24. We also find that combining a DDLM planner with an ARM executor can provide substantial computational savings with little to no impact on accuracy. For example, the latent-space pipeline, using 64 tokens for planning and roughly 5 for execution, surpasses Qwen3.1-7B on DART-5 and AIME, despite Qwen using 44 times more tokens. Overall, our study offers new insights into reasoning with DDLMs and highlights their potential in hybrid architectures.
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All authors Lina Berrayana, Ahmed Heakl, Muhammad Abdullah Sohail, Thomas Hofmann, Salman Khan, Wei Chen

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

FinTrust: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Trustworthiness Evaluation in Finance Domain

Recent LLMs have demonstrated promising ability in solving finance related problems. However, applying LLMs in real-world finance application remains challenging due to its high risk and high stakes property. This paper introduces FinTrust, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating the trustworthiness of LLMs in finance applications. Our benchmark focuses on a wide range of alignment issues based on practical context and features fine-grained tasks for each dimension of trustworthiness evaluation. We assess eleven LLMs on FinTrust and find that proprietary models like o4-mini outperforms in most tasks such as safety while open-source models like DeepSeek-V3 have advantage in specific areas like industry-level fairness. For challenging task like fiduciary alignment and disclosure, all LLMs fall short, showing a significant gap in legal awareness. We believe that FinTrust can be a valuable benchmark for LLMs' trustworthiness evaluation in finance domain.
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All authors Tiansheng Hu, Tongyan Hu, Liuyang Bai, Yilun Zhao, Arman Cohan, Chen Zhao

Computation and Language

Extending Audio Context for Long-Form Understanding in Large Audio-Language Models

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) are often constrained by short audio context windows, even when their text backbones support long contexts, limiting long-form audio understanding. Prior work has introduced context-extension methods (e.g. YaRN) on unimodal LLMs, yet their application to LALMs remains unexplored. First, building on RoPE-based context extension, we introduce Partial YaRN, a training-free, modality-decoupled extension method that modifies only audio token positions, leaving text positions intact to preserve the base LLM's text capabilities. Second, we propose Virtual Longform Audio Training (VLAT), a training strategy that extends Partial YaRN into a training-time positional augmentation. VLAT simulates diverse audio lengths during training, enabling generalization to inputs far longer than those seen in training. Our experiments on SALMONN and Qwen2-Audio confirm that Partial YaRN outperforms the original models across wide range of settings, and VLAT provides substantial performance improvement on long audio of unseen lengths.
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All authors Yuatyong Chaichana, Pittawat Taveekitworachai, Warit Sirichotedumrong, Potsawee Manakul, Kunat Pipatanakul

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Soundness-Aware Level: A Microscopic Signature that Predicts LLM Reasoning Potential

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong reasoning in large language models (LLMs), while their performance after RLVR varies dramatically across different base models. This raises a fundamental question: what microscopic property of pre-trained models leads to this variation? To investigate, we formalize reasoning as chains of Horn clauses ("if-then" rules) built from features extracted from the LLM's latent space via cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs). We estimate the transition probabilities between its features, and further categorize each rule by its semantic soundness level (e.g., strict, plausible, noisy) with an LLM. Our key discovery is that high-potential models are inherently soundness-aware: their internal probability distributions systematically shift across rules' soundness levels, becoming highly distinct for "strict" versus "noisy" rules. In contrast, weaker models are soundness-agnostic, collapsing to one distribution regardless of soundness levels. To quantify this, we introduce the Soundness-Aware Level (SAL), a microscopic metric using the Jensen-Shannon Divergence to measure the separation between these distributions. We show that SAL's predictions of post-RLVR reasoning performance follow a precise empirical law (R^2=0.87) across diverse model families (Qwen, Mistral, Llama, DeepSeek) and scales (0.5B-14B). This reveals that a model's reasoning potential is tied to its intrinsic, pre-trained ability to distinguish sound knowledge from unsound ones. These findings underscore the critical role of model pre-training in shaping reasoning and offer a practical metric grounded in the model's internal mechanisms for selecting/designing stronger base models.
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All authors Xuansheng Wu, Xiaoman Pan, Wenlin Yao, Jianshu Chen

Thursday 16 October

Computation and Language

Fusion-Augmented Large Language Models: Boosting Diagnostic Trustworthiness via Model Consensus

This study presents a novel multi-model fusion framework leveraging two state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), ChatGPT and Claude, to enhance the reliability of chest X-ray interpretation on the CheXpert dataset. From the full CheXpert corpus of 224,316 chest radiographs, we randomly selected 234 radiologist-annotated studies to evaluate unimodal performance using image-only prompts. In this setting, ChatGPT and Claude achieved diagnostic accuracies of 62.8% and 76.9%, respectively. A similarity-based consensus approach, using a 95% output similarity threshold, improved accuracy to 77.6%. To assess the impact of multimodal inputs, we then generated synthetic clinical notes following the MIMIC-CXR template and evaluated a separate subset of 50 randomly selected cases paired with both images and synthetic text. On this multimodal cohort, performance improved to 84% for ChatGPT and 76% for Claude, while consensus accuracy reached 91.3%. Across both experimental conditions, agreement-based fusion consistently outperformed individual models. These findings highlight the utility of integrating complementary modalities and using output-level consensus to improve the trustworthiness and clinical utility of AI-assisted radiological diagnosis, offering a practical path to reduce diagnostic errors with minimal computational overhead.
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All authors Md Kamrul Siam, Md Jobair Hossain Faruk, Jerry Q. Cheng, Huanying Gu

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.CR

Privacy-R1: Privacy-Aware Multi-LLM Agent Collaboration via Reinforcement Learning

When users submit queries to Large Language Models (LLMs), their prompts can often contain sensitive data, forcing a difficult choice: Send the query to a powerful proprietary LLM providers to achieving state-of-the-art performance and risk data exposure, or relying on smaller, local models guarantees data privacy but often results in a degradation of task performance. Prior approaches have relied on static pipelines that use LLM rewriting, which shatters linguistic coherence and indiscriminately removes privacy-sensitive information, including task-critical content. We reformulate this challenge (Privacy-Conscious Delegation) as a sequential decision-making problem and introduce a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework called Privacy-R1 to solve it. Our framework trains an agent to dynamically route text chunks, learning a policy that optimally balances the trade-off between privacy leakage and task performance. It implicitly distinguishes between replaceable Personally Identifiable Information (PII) (which it shields locally) and task-critical PII (which it strategically sends to the remote model for maximal utility). To validate our approach in complex scenarios, we also introduce a new medical dataset with high PII density. Our framework achieves a new state-of-the-art on the privacy-utility frontier, demonstrating the necessity of learned, adaptive policies for deploying LLMs in sensitive environments. Dataset can be found at: https://github.com/zackhuiiiii/Privacy-R1.
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All authors Zheng Hui, Yijiang River Dong, Sanhanat Sivapiromrat, Ehsan Shareghi, Nigel Collier

Computation and Language

Structure-R1: Dynamically Leveraging Structural Knowledge in LLM Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable advances in reasoning capabilities. However, their performance remains constrained by limited access to explicit and structured domain knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this by incorporating external information as context to augment reasoning. Nevertheless, traditional RAG systems typically operate over unstructured and fragmented text, resulting in low information density and suboptimal reasoning. To overcome these limitations, we propose Structure-R1, a novel framework that transforms retrieved content into structured representations optimized for reasoning. Leveraging reinforcement learning, Structure-R1 learns a content representation policy that dynamically generates and adapts structural formats based on the demands of multi-step reasoning. Unlike prior methods that rely on fixed schemas, our approach adopts a generative paradigm capable of producing task-specific structures tailored to individual queries. To ensure the quality and reliability of these representations, we introduce a self-reward structural verification mechanism that checks whether the generated structures are both correct and self-contained. Extensive experiments on seven knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that Structure-R1 consistently achieves competitive performance with a 7B-scale backbone model and matches the performance of much larger models. Additionally, our theoretical analysis demonstrates how structured representations enhance reasoning by improving information density and contextual clarity. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/jlwu002/sr1.
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All authors Junlin Wu, Xianrui Zhong, Jiashuo Sun, Bolian Li, Bowen Jin, Jiawei Han, Qingkai Zeng

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.CR

MAGPIE: A benchmark for Multi-AGent contextual PrIvacy Evaluation

A core challenge for autonomous LLM agents in collaborative settings is balancing robust privacy understanding and preservation alongside task efficacy. Existing privacy benchmarks only focus on simplistic, single-turn interactions where private information can be trivially omitted without affecting task outcomes. In this paper, we introduce MAGPIE (Multi-AGent contextual PrIvacy Evaluation), a novel benchmark of 200 high-stakes tasks designed to evaluate privacy understanding and preservation in multi-agent collaborative, non-adversarial scenarios. MAGPIE integrates private information as essential for task resolution, forcing agents to balance effective collaboration with strategic information control. Our evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art agents, including GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5-Pro, exhibit significant privacy leakage, with Gemini 2.5-Pro leaking up to 50.7% and GPT-5 up to 35.1% of the sensitive information even when explicitly instructed not to. Moreover, these agents struggle to achieve consensus or task completion and often resort to undesirable behaviors such as manipulation and power-seeking (e.g., Gemini 2.5-Pro demonstrating manipulation in 38.2% of the cases). These findings underscore that current LLM agents lack robust privacy understanding and are not yet adequately aligned to simultaneously preserve privacy and maintain effective collaboration in complex environments.
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All authors Gurusha Juneja, Jayanth Naga Sai Pasupulati, Alon Albalak, Wenyue Hua, William Yang Wang

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Train a Unified Multimodal Data Quality Classifier with Synthetic Data

The Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are continually pre-trained on a mixture of image-text caption data and interleaved document data, while the high-quality data filtering towards image-text interleaved document data is under-explored. We propose to train an efficient MLLM as a Unified Mulitmodal Data Quality Classifier to Filter both high-quality image-text caption and interleaved data (UniFilter). To address the challenge of collecting diverse labeled multimodal data, we introduce a semi-synthetic approach that leverages readily available raw images and generates corresponding text across four quality levels. This method enables efficient creation of sample-score pairs for both caption and interleaved document data to train UniFilter. We apply UniFilter to curate high-quality caption data from DataComp caption dataset and interleaved data from the OBELICS image-text interleaved dataset. MLLMs pre-trained on the filtered data demonstrate significantly enhanced capabilities compared to those trained on baseline-filtered data, achieving stronger zero-shot reasoning and in-context learning capabilities. After visual supervised fine-tuning, these UniFilter-induced MLLMs achieve stronger performance on various benchmarks, highlighting the downstream benefits of high-quality multimodal pre-training. We release the synthetic training data used for training UniFilter, the UniFilter model checkpoints, and the high-quality interleaved document subset OBELICS-HQ, curated by UniFilter, to the community for reproduction and further development.
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All authors Weizhi Wang, Rongmei Lin, Shiyang Li, Colin Lockard, Ritesh Sarkhel, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Jingbo Shang, Xifeng Yan, Nasser Zalmout, Xian Li