Time series data is ubiquitous across various domains, including manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. High-quality annotations are essential for effectively understanding time series and facilitating downstream tasks. However, obtaining such annotations is challenging, particularly in mission-critical domains. In this paper, we propose TESSA, a multi-agent system designed to automatically generate both general and domain-specific annotations for time series data. TESSA introduces two agents: a general annotation agent and a domain-specific annotation agent. The general agent captures common patterns and knowledge across multiple source domains, leveraging both time-series-wise and text-wise features to generate general annotations. Meanwhile, the domain-specific agent utilizes limited annotations from the target domain to learn domain-specific terminology and generate targeted annotations. Extensive experiments on multiple synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that TESSA effectively generates high-quality annotations, outperforming existing methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many reasoning tasks but struggle with knowledge-intensive queries due to their inability to dynamically access up-to-date or domain-specific information. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution, enabling LLMs to ground their responses in external sources. However, existing RAG methods lack fine-grained control over both the query and source sides, often resulting in noisy retrieval and shallow reasoning. In this work, we introduce DeepSieve, an agentic RAG framework that incorporates information sieving via LLM-as-a-knowledge-router. DeepSieve decomposes complex queries into structured sub-questions and recursively routes each to the most suitable knowledge source, filtering irrelevant information through a multi-stage distillation process. Our design emphasizes modularity, transparency, and adaptability, leveraging recent advances in agentic system design. Experiments on multi-hop QA tasks across heterogeneous sources demonstrate improved reasoning depth, retrieval precision, and interpretability over conventional RAG approaches.

Automatically extracting workflows as procedural graphs from natural language is a promising yet underexplored task that requires ensuring both structural validity and logical alignment. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show potential for graph extraction, but often yield ill-formed structures or misinterpret logical constructs such as gateways. We introduce , a multi-agent framework that treats procedural graph extraction as a multi-round reasoning process with structural and logical refinement agents. The framework operates in three iterative stages: (1) an LLM-based graph extraction phase, (2) a structural feedback phase where a simulation agent diagnoses and explains structural issues, and (3) a logical feedback phase where a semantic agent aligns semantics between flow logic and linguistic cues in the source text. Important feedback is prioritized and expressed in natural language, which is injected into the next-round prompt, enabling interpretable and controllable refinement. This modular design allows agents to target distinct error types without supervision or parameter updates. Experiments demonstrate that achieves substantial improvements in both structural correctness and logical consistency over strong baselines.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning ability when given additional compute at inference time. However, existing inference-time scaling methods are fundamentally limited by their design. On the one hand, goal-oriented approaches, such as Line or Tree Search, refine candidate solutions using previous feedback but are vulnerable to sequential dependence, often collapsing into suboptimal reasoning trajectories. On the other hand, process-oriented approaches such as Best-of-N sampling encourage diversity through random exploration but lack feedback mechanisms, leading to inefficient computation allocation and unguided search. In this work, we propose EvoMo, a novel inference-time scaling approach that unifies both paradigms by embedding a globally evolving strategy pool into MCTS, where each node expansion selects reasoning strategies under an -soft policy. To further avoid stagnation in familiar strategies, we introduce a momentum-based optimization mechanism that monitors similarity among generated solutions and encourages the exploration of underutilized strategies. We also present a theoretical analysis of the effectiveness of the proposed momentum mechanism by modeling it as a self-evolving pool of actions. Across benchmarks, EvoMo reveals significant performance gains over SOTA inference scaling methods. We observe competitive performance, like in APPS and CodeContests, with up to a 4.5% and 3.63% relative gain in Pass@K compared to the leading baseline within 40 search-budget, highlighting the potential of hybrid evolutionary search as a general paradigm for test-time scaling.

Time series forecasting (TSF) is evolving toward multimodal and agentic settings, yet using foundation models remains uneconomical in resource-constrained scenarios, where compact, specialized forecasters are more desirable. However, lightweight forecasters typically require substantial training data, limiting their use in domains with scarce, slowly accumulated, or privacy-sensitive time series. To address this dilemma, we investigate the challenging problem of few-shot learning for lightweight forecasters. We propose MetaCaster, a meta-harness-optimized multi-agent framework that uses agentic data generation to automatically train specialized lightweight forecasters from only a few examples and textual contexts. Our work highlights a new TSF paradigm in which agents act not as forecasters but as intermediary engineers that prepare efficient, task-specific forecasters for deployment. Experiments on 18 datasets, 23 state-of-the-art lightweight forecasters, and 14 baselines demonstrate that MetaCaster achieves both data efficiency and computational efficiency while maintaining high-quality TSF performance.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in culturally sensitive real-world tasks. However, existing cultural alignment approaches fail to align LLMs’ broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks and suffer from cross-culture interference. We propose CultureManager, a novel pipeline for task-specific cultural alignment. CultureManager synthesizes task-aware cultural data in line with target task formats, grounded in culturally relevant web search results. To prevent conflicts between cultural norms, it manages multi-culture knowledge learned in separate adapters with a culture router that selects the appropriate one to apply. Experiments across five national cultures and ten culture-sensitive tasks show consistent improvements over prompt-based and fine-tuning baselines. Our results demonstrate the necessity of task adaptation and modular culture management for effective cultural alignment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing by encoding extensive knowledge, but their utility relies on timely updates as human knowledge keeps evolving. In this paper, we investigate the problem of LLM knowledge updates, which requires simultaneously unlearning unwanted information and learning new knowledge. Existing approaches that tackle unlearning and learning separately encounter task conflicts and knowledge management issues when applied to comprehensive knowledge updates.In this paper, we validate our findings with theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, and propose LOKA, a conflict-aware framework for Large language mOdel Knowledge updAtes. During training, LOKA introduces an adaptive knowledge memory approach in which updated knowledge is allocated across multiple memory units. During inference, LOKA retrieves the most relevant memory unit from the knowledge memory and integrates it with the original LLM to apply updated knowledge, while a learning-based router controls the activation of the knowledge memory to improve knowledge utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of LOKA in achieving accurate, flexible, and conflict-aware knowledge updates.

Large language models (LLMs) often produce incorrect or outdated content. Updating their knowledge efficiently and accurately without costly retraining is a major challenge. This problem is particularly challenging for complex, unstructured knowledge in lifelong settings, where many edits must coexist without interference. We introduce RILKE (Representation Intervention for Lifelong KnowledgE Control), a robust and scalable method that treats knowledge control as interventions within the model’s representation space. Leveraging representation-space expressiveness, we identify two key properties enabling RILKE to achieve fine-grained control over complex, unstructured knowledge while maintaining general utility with frozen base weights. During training, RILKE learns paraphrase-robust and edit-localized modules that limit each update to a low-dimensional subspace to minimize cross-edit interference. In inference, a query-adaptive router selects the appropriate module to guide the model’s generation. Across LLaMA and Qwen models, RILKE scales effectively to large-scale benchmarks, demonstrating high edit success and strong paraphrase generalization while preserving general utility with modest memory overhead. These results show RILKE is an effective and scalable solution for lifelong knowledge control in LLMs.

Automatically solving optimization problems from natural language descriptions with both efficiency and reliability is highly desirable but remains challenging. Language model hallucinations and the limited availability of labeled datasets often result in misaligned formulations, code errors, and feasibility failures We propose UMCTS, an Uncertainty-aware Monte Carlo Tree Search framework that combines the language understanding capability of large language models with the reliability of well-established solvers. UMCTS structures the solution process into four stages: global instruction, assumptions, mathematical formulation, and solver code generation. It employs Monte Carlo Tree Search with semantic-equivalence pruning, prior-guided exploration, and solver-based feasibility checks. An LLM judge provides numerical reward signals, qualitative error information, and uncertainty estimates. These signals are backpropagated to guide the search and flag unreliable outputs. Across six public benchmarks, UMCTS achieves state-of-the-art solution accuracy, improves efficiency by reducing token usage.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has driven recent gains of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks by externalizing intermediate steps. However, excessive or redundant reasoning — so-called overthinking — can increase inference costs and lead LLMs toward incorrect conclusions. In this paper, we present REFRAIN ( ̲REFlective- ̲Redundancy for  ̲Adaptive  ̲INference), a training-free framework that adaptively determines when to stop reasoning to mitigate overthinking. REFRAIN integrates a two-stage stop discriminator to identify reflective yet redundant reasoning and a sliding-window Upper Confidence Bound (SW-UCB) multi-armed bandit controller to dynamically adjust stopping thresholds according to problem difficulty without supervision or fine-tuning. Across four representative benchmarks and two model families, REFRAIN reduces token usage by 20-55% while maintaining or improving accuracy compared to standard CoT prompting. Extensive ablation and robustness analyses demonstrate its stability across models, scorers, and prompt variations. In summary, our findings highlight when-to-stop as a new and practical axis of test-time scaling — enabling models to reason not just more, but just enough.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potential artificial generic intelligence recently, however, their usage is costly with high response latency. Given mixed LLMs with their own strengths and weaknesses, LLM routing aims to identify the most suitable model for each query in the stream to maximize response quality and minimize cost and latency. However, the challenges involve: (1) dynamic trade-offs among quality, cost, and latency; (2) enabling continual learning in deployed systems; and (3) navigating a varying (e.g., new LLM addition or old LLM removal) set of LLM candidates over time. To bridge these gaps, we develop MixLLM, a dynamic contextual-bandit-based routing system for query-LLM assignment. Specifically, we first leverage query tags to enhance query embeddings for the routing task. Next, we design lightweight prediction models to estimate the response qualities and costs of queries over LLMs. We then devise a meta-decision maker to choose the query-LLM assignments to best tradeoff response quality, cost, and latency. Finally, the system benefits from continual training, allowing it to adapt to evolving queries and user feedback over time. Our extensive experiments show that MixLLM achieves the best trade-offs in response quality, cost, and latency (97.25% of GPT-4’s quality at 24.18% of the cost under the time constraint).

Prompt tuning is highly effective in efficiently extracting knowledge from foundation models, encompassing both language, vision, and vision-language models. However, the efficacy of employing fixed soft prompts with a predetermined position for concatenation with inputs for all instances, irrespective of their inherent disparities, remains uncertain. Variables such as the position, length, and representations of prompts across diverse instances and tasks can substantially influence the performance of prompt tuning. We first provide a theoretical analysis, revealing that optimizing the position of the prompt to encompass the input can capture additional semantic information that traditional prefix or postfix prompt tuning methods fail to capture. Then, we present a holistic parametric prompt tuning strategy that dynamically determines different factors of prompts based on specific tasks or instances. Experimental results underscore the significant performance improvement achieved by dynamic prompt tuning across a wide range of tasks, including NLP, vision recognition, and vision-language tasks. Furthermore, we establish the universal applicability of our approach under full-data, few-shot, and multitask settings.

Causal discovery is an imperative foundation for decision-making across domains, such as smart health, AI for drug discovery and AIOps. Traditional statistical causal discovery methods, while well-established, predominantly rely on observational data and often overlook the semantic cues inherent in cause-and-effect relationships. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered in an affordable way of leveraging the semantic cues for knowledge-driven causal discovery, but the development of LLMs for causal discovery lags behind other areas, particularly in the exploration of multi-modal data. To bridge the gap, we introduce MatMCD, a multi-agent system powered by tool-augmented LLMs. MatMCD has two key agents: a Data Augmentation agent that retrieves and processes modality-augmented data, and a Causal Constraint agent that integrates multi-modal data for knowledge-driven reasoning. The proposed design of the inner-workings ensures successful cooperation of the agents. Our empirical study across seven datasets suggests the significant potential of multi-modality enhanced causal discovery.

Large language models (LLMs) integrated into multi-step agent systems enable complex decision-making processes across various applications. However, their outputs often lack reliability, making uncertainty estimation crucial. Existing uncertainty estimation methods primarily focus on final-step outputs, which fail to account for cumulative uncertainty over the multi-step decision-making process and the dynamic interactions between agents and their environments. To address these limitations, we propose SAUP (Situation Awareness Uncertainty Propagation), a novel framework that propagates uncertainty through each step of an LLM-based agent’s reasoning process. SAUP incorporates situational awareness by assigning situational weights to each step’s uncertainty during the propagation. Our method, compatible with various one-step uncertainty estimation techniques, provides a comprehensive and accurate uncertainty measure. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAUP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 20% improvement in AUROC.

The burgeoning capabilities of advanced large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have led to an increase in synthetic content generation with implications across a variety of sectors, including media, cybersecurity, public discourse, and education. As such, the ability to detect LLMs-generated content has become of paramount importance. We aim to provide a detailed overview of existing detection strategies and benchmarks, scrutinizing their differences and identifying key challenges and prospects in the field, advocating for more adaptable and robust models to enhance detection accuracy. We also posit the necessity for a multi-faceted approach to defend against various attacks to counter the rapidly advancing capabilities of LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first comprehensive survey on the detection in the era of LLMs. We hope it will provide a broad understanding of the current landscape of LLMs-generated content detection, and we have maintained a website to consistently update the latest research as a guiding reference for researchers and practitioners.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved exceptional capabilities in open generation across various domains, yet they encounter difficulties with tasks that require intensive knowledge. To address these challenges, methods for integrating knowledge have been developed, which augment LLMs with domain-specific knowledge graphs through external modules. These approaches, however, face data inefficiency issues as they necessitate the processing of both known and unknown knowledge for fine-tuning. Thus, our research focuses on a novel problem: efficiently integrating unknown knowledge into LLMs without unnecessary overlap of known knowledge. A risk of introducing new knowledge is the potential forgetting of existing knowledge. To mitigate this risk, we propose the innovative InfuserKI framework. This framework employs transformer internal states to determine when to enrich LLM outputs with additional information, effectively preventing knowledge forgetting. Performance evaluations using the UMLS-2.5k and MetaQA domain knowledge graphs reveal that InfuserKI not only successfully integrates new knowledge but also outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing knowledge forgetting by 9% and 6%, respectively.

Joint entity and relation extraction is a process that identifies entity pairs and their relations using a single model. We focus on the problem of joint extraction in distantly-labeled data, whose labels are generated by aligning entity mentions with the corresponding entity and relation tags using a knowledge base (KB). One key challenge is the presence of noisy labels arising from both incorrect entity and relation annotations, which significantly impairs the quality of supervised learning. Existing approaches, either considering only one source of noise or making decisions using external knowledge, cannot well-utilize significant information in the training data. We propose DENRL, a generalizable framework that 1) incorporates a lightweight transformer backbone into a sequence labeling scheme for joint tagging, and 2) employs a noise-robust framework that regularizes the tagging model with significant relation patterns and entity-relation dependencies, then iteratively self-adapts to instances with less noise from both sources. Surprisingly, experiments on two benchmark datasets show that DENRL, using merely its own parametric distribution and simple data-driven heuristics, outperforms strong baselines by a large margin with better interpretability.

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven considerable interest in fine-tuning them with domain-specific data to create specialized language models. Nevertheless, such domain-specific fine-tuning data often contains contextually sensitive personally identifiable information (PII). Direct fine-tuning LLMs on this data without privacy protection poses a risk of data leakage of sensitive PII during inference time. To address this challenge, we introduce Contextual Privacy Protection Language Models (CPPLM), a novel paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs that effectively injects domain-specific knowledge while safeguarding inference-time data privacy. Our work offers a theoretical analysis for model design and delves into various techniques such as corpus curation, penalty-based unlikelihood in training loss, and instruction-based tuning, etc. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. In particular, instruction tuning with both positive and negative examples, stands out as a promising method, effectively protecting private data while enhancing the model’s knowledge. Our work underscores the potential for Large Language Models as robust contextual privacy protection learners. The complete code and data for the work can be found at https://github.com/Yijia-Xiao/PPLM.