Diffusion language models (DLMs) have shown strong potential for general natural language tasks with in-context examples. Existing In-Context Learning (ICL) approaches largely inherit the practice of autoregressive language models (ARLMs), incorporating all examples into a fixed prompt. However, applying this rigid, static-prompt paradigm to DLMs incurs substantial computational overhead, as the model must evaluate the maximum context length at every step. We address this inefficiency with a key discovery: the block-wise KV-cache mechanism inherent to DLM inference enables the low-cost dynamic adjustment of the context. Following this intuition, our core idea is to start generation with a minimal prompt and progressively insert additional examples on the fly only when the generated tokens are of low confidence. Through rigorous empirical evaluations, we observe that average verified token confidence correlates strongly with generation accuracy, making it a reliable and computationally efficient signal of token quality. Formally, we propose Dynamic In-Context Planner (DIP), a context-optimization algorithm based on average verified confidence that dynamically ranks and inserts in-context examples during generation, rather than providing all examples up front. Experimental results on math and coding benchmarks with LLaDA-1.5 and LLaDA-8B-Instruct show that DIP achieves up to 1.59× and 1.36× speedups, respectively, while largely preserving the generation quality of the fixed-prompt baseline. Code: https://github.com/wmd3i/DIP

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced human-AI interaction but struggle with cultural understanding, often misinterpreting symbols, gestures, and artifacts due to biases in predominantly Western-centric training data. In this paper, we construct CultureVerse, a large-scale multimodal benchmark covering 19,682 cultural concepts, 188 countries/regions, 15 cultural topics, and 3 question types, with the aim of characterizing and improving VLMs’ multicultural understanding capabilities. Then, we propose CultureVLM, a series of VLMs fine-tuned on our dataset to achieve significant performance improvement in cultural understanding. Our evaluation of 16 models reveals significant disparities, with a stronger performance in Western concepts and weaker results in African and Asian contexts. Fine-tuning on our CultureVerse training set enhances cultural perception, demonstrating cross-cultural, cross-continent, and cross-dataset generalization without sacrificing performance on models’ general VLM benchmarks. We further present insights on cultural generalization and forgetting. We hope that this work could lay the foundation for more equitable and culturally aware multimodal AI systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but limited by static parametric knowledge that becomes outdated once pretraining ends. Knowledge editing addresses this problem by updating model behavior on target facts without full retraining. In particular, in-context knowledge editing has gained attention because it is training-free and readily applicable to black-box LLMs. Recent reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches improve over fixed retrieval strategies by adapting prompt construction to the quantity-quality trade-off. Despite initial success, they fail to model the prompt as a structured entity under the distinct and often competing objectives of reliability, generality, and specificity. Previous methods largely optimize a single objective and make decisions over only part of the prompt construction process, thereby overlooking both the balance of different objectives and the global organization of demonstrations. We propose Multi-Objective In-context Knowledge Editing (MO-IKE), a multi-objective RL algorithm that formulates prompt construction for in-context knowledge editing as a Constrained Markov Decision Process. MO-IKE trains a dynamic retriever to optimize competing objectives in knowledge editing, enabling more balanced and globally coherent prompt construction. On Llama-3.2, MO-IKE improves edit success (reliability) from 85.0% to 92.0%, paraphrase consistency (generality) from 77% to 79%, while increasing retention rate (specificity) by 23.0% compared to prior RL-based methods.

Although large language models (LLMs) excel at factual recall, they can still propagate stale or incorrect knowledge, making in-context knowledge editing a gradient-free remedy suitable for black-box APIs. These knowledge editors that use in-context learning typically rely on a single retriever and surface-similarity heuristics to build prompts. However, a key observation in this study is that retrievers can be complementary: semantic rankers may recover paraphrased evidence, while lexical or feature-based retrievers may preserve precise entities and cues. This creates two gaps in single-retriever editors: they (i) miss complementary evidence that different retrievers surface and (ii) cannot adapt when one retriever is clearly more reliable for a query. We introduce a Feature-Weighted Ensemble for In-context Knowledge Editing (FWE-IKE) that calibrates three heterogeneous rankers (LLM-, BERT-, and MLP-based), extracts simple confidence features from each ranker, predicts per-query mixture weights, and applies a conservative margin-based routing gate that selects a single expert when confident; otherwise we mix calibrated distributions with learned per-query weights. On the CounterFact benchmark, FWE-IKE attains 88.33% Edit-Success Rate, a +3.0 point gain over the best single retriever and approaching the oracle upper bound (91%). Case studies, an ablation study, and analyses show the method systematically recovers complementary wins (e.g., BERT-only, LLM-only, MLP-only slices). FWE-IKE improves edit accuracy without touching model weights and provides a practical path to more robust, confidence-aware retrieval for IKE.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at factual recall yet still propagate stale or incorrect knowledge. In‐context knowledge editing offers a gradient-free remedy suitable for black-box APIs, but current editors rely on static demonstration sets chosen by surface-level similarity, leading to two persistent obstacles: (i) a quantity–quality trade-off, and (ii) lack of adaptivity to task difficulty. We address these issues by dynamically selecting supporting demonstrations according to their utility for the edit. We propose Dynamic Retriever for In-Context Knowledge Editing (DR-IKE), a lightweight framework that (1) trains a BERT retriever with REINFORCE to rank demonstrations by editing reward, and (2) employs a learnable threshold σ to prune low-value examples, shortening the prompt when the edit is easy and expanding it when the task is hard. DR-IKE performs editing without modifying model weights, relying solely on forward passes for compatibility with black-box LLMs. On the CounterFact benchmark, it improves edit success by up to 17.1%, reduces latency by 41.6%, and preserves accuracy on unrelated queries—demonstrating scalable and adaptive knowledge editing.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional performance in zero-shot learning and reasoning tasks. However, integrating these models with external tools - a crucial need for real-world applications - remains a significant challenge. We propose RESTful-Llama, a novel framework designed to enable Llama 3.1 to transform natural language instructions into effective RESTful API calls. To enhance the fine-tuning process, we introduce DOC_Mine, a method to generate fine-tuning datasets from public API documentation. RESTful-Llama distinguishes itself by enabling open-source LLMs to efficiently interact with and adapt to any REST API system. Experiments demonstrate a 31.9% improvement in robustness and a 2.33x increase in efficiency compared to existing methods.

Different representations of the same concept could often be seen in scientific reports and publications. Entity normalization (or entity linking) is the task to match the different representations to their standard concepts. In this paper, we present a two-step ensemble CNN method that normalizes microbiology-related entities in free text to concepts in standard dictionaries. The method is capable of linking entities when only a small microbiology-related biomedical corpus is available for training, and achieved reasonable performance in the online test of the BioNLP-OST19 shared task Bacteria Biotope.