Empowered by Large Language Models (LLMs), deep research systems integrate online information into research reports through multi-step web searching and information synthesis. Evaluating these reports presents a significant challenge due to their long context, high information density, and domain specificity, necessitating the use of AI evaluation as a substitute for prohibitively expensive human assessment. However, few studies have examined the effectiveness of existing reward models or LLMs in understanding and evaluating such research reports. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepResearch RewardBench, the first benchmark dedicated to evaluating reward modeling for research reports. We collect diverse report candidates from multiple agents or tool-augmented LLMs. These candidates are scored using query-specific rubrics and judged LLMs, and we ensure data quality and difficulty through a combination of multi-round filtering and human verification. Our benchmark comprises preference datasets formatted as pairs, triplets, and quadruplets to test ranking capabilities across varying levels of difficulty. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while current reward models handle general coherence effectively, their performance significantly degrades when evaluating research reports. In contrast, generative LLMs acting as judges demonstrate comprehensive superiority in this domain, with comparative evaluation proving more effective than direct scoring methods. We anticipate that this benchmark will serve as a vital testbed for the evaluation and advancement of research agents.

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.

Existing Supervised Fine-Tuning paradigms, particularly Full Parameter Fine-Tuning are often plagued by parameter redundancy, inconsistent data quality, and catastrophic forgetting, which current methods typically address in isolation and lack a unified optimization signal to bridge data selection, parameter updates, and knowledge preservation. To address this, we propose Neuron-Guided Fine-Tuning (NGFT), a holistic framework that leverages neuron activation patterns as a universal proxy to unify the fine-tuning lifecycle. NGFT operates via three synergistic mechanisms: (1) Adaptive Task-Specific Neuron Selection, which identifies essential neurons in a single forward pass to concentrate updates and reduce redundancy; (2) Activation-Based Data Selection, which prioritizes information-dense samples that maximize contribution to key neurons; and (3) Neuron Activation Alignment, a novel loss function that anchors activations to pre-trained states, deepening representation learning and preserving general knowledge. Experimental results across three models across both domain-specific and general benchmarks demonstrate that NGFT significantly outperforms existing mainstream fine-tuning methods in both efficiency and performance, while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

Recently, the role of LLM-as-judge in evaluating large language models has gained prominence, emerging as an important method to partially replace costly human assessment. However, current judge models suffer from narrow specialization and limited robustness, undermining their capacity for comprehensive evaluations. In this work, we decompose the ability of a generalist and generative judge model into three levels: objective verification, subjective evaluation, and rubric refinement. We present CompassJudger-2, a novel generalist judge model that overcomes these limitations via a task-driven, multi-scenarios data curation strategy. We conducted large-scale data collection for each type of task and designed tailored rejection sampling strategies to filter the data, ensuring data diversity, accuracy, and effectiveness. Empirically, CompassJudger-2 achieves superior results across multiple judge and reward benchmarks, demostrating its excellent robustness and generalization ability. These contributions advance robust, scalable LLM judgment and establish new performance and evaluation standards.

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results on standard image-text tasks, yet their potential for visual procedure question answering (VP-QA) remains largely unexplored. VP-QA presents unique challenges where users query next-step actions by uploading images for intermediate states of complex procedures. To systematically evaluate VLMs on this practical task, we propose ProcedureVQA, a novel multimodal benchmark specifically designed for visual procedural reasoning. Through comprehensive analysis, we identify two critical limitations in current VLMs: inadequate cross-modal retrieval of structured procedures given visual states, and misalignment between image sequence granularity and textual step decomposition. To address these issues, we present Chain-of-Procedure (CoP), a hierarchical reasoning framework that first retrieves relevant instructions using visual cues, then performs step refinement through semantic decomposition, and finally generates the next step. Experiments across six VLMs demonstrate CoP’s effectiveness, achieving up to 13% absolute improvement over standard baselines.

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems retrieve evidence at coarse granularities (entire images or scenes), creating a mismatch with fine-grained user queries and making failures unverifiable. We introduce GranuVistaVQA, a multimodal benchmark featuring real-world landmarks with element-level annotations across multiple viewpoints, capturing the partial observation challenge where individual images contain only subsets of entities. We further propose GranuRAG, a multi-granularity framework that treats visual elements as first-class retrieval units through three stages: element-level detection and classification, multi-granularity cross-modal alignment for evidence retrieval, and attribution-constrained generation. By grounding retrieval at the element level rather than relying on implicit attention, our approach enables transparent error diagnosis. Experiments demonstrate that GranuRAG achieves up to 29.2% improvement over six strong baselines for this task.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, the need for unified evaluation platform becomes critical. However, current evaluation pipelines remain highly fragmented and tightly coupled, hindering reproducibility and causing redundant engineering. To address this, we introduce AgentCompass, an open-source, lightweight, and extensible platform for evaluating LLM-based agents. AgentCompass organizes the evaluation process around three independent components, namely Benchmark, Harness, and Environment, thereby enabling flexible configurations without requiring the reimplementation of complex execution logic. Furthermore, it features a fault-tolerant asynchronous runtime and comprehensive trajectory analysis tools to transparently diagnose nuanced failure modes like reward-hacking. Natively supporting over 20 benchmarks across five capability dimensions, AgentCompass provides the community with a scalable and reproducible infrastructure for advancing agent research.

Answer verification is crucial not only for evaluating large language models (LLMs) by matching their unstructured outputs against standard answers, but also serves as the reward model to guide LLM optimization. Most evaluation frameworks rely on regularized matching or employ general LLMs for answer verification, which demands extensive, repetitive customization for regex rules or evaluation prompts. Two fundamental limitations persist in current methodologies: 1) the absence of comprehensive benchmarks that systematically evaluate verification capabilities across different LLMs; and 2) the nascent stage of verifier development, where existing approaches lack both the robustness to handle complex edge cases and the generalizability across different domains. In this work, we develop CompassVerifier, an accurate and robust lightweight verifier model for evaluation and outcome reward. It demonstrates multi-domain competency spanning math, knowledge, and diverse reasoning tasks, with the capability to process various answer types including multi-subproblems, formulas, and sequence answers, while effectively identifying abnormal/invalid responses. We introduce VerifierBench benchmark comprising model outputs collected from multiple data sources, augmented through manual analysis of meta error patterns to enhance CompassVerifier. We anticipate that CompassVerifier and VerifierBench will facilitate evaluation protocols and reinforcement learning research.

kNN-MT has utilized neighborhood knowledge for auxiliary decoding, significantly improving translation performance. Subsequently, kNN-KD transitions the use of neighborhood knowledge from the decoding phase to the training phase, to address the temporal and spatial inefficiencies inherent in kNN-MT. However, kNN-KD transfers all the kNN knowledge arbitrarily, which has the potential to restrict the learning of student models. In this paper, we propose a novel domain-aware kNN-KD method, which filters out domain-relevant neighborhood knowledge for learning in the distillation process. Notably, this entire process exclusively utilizes the neighborhood knowledge of the original model, eliminating the need for establishing any additional datastores. Experiments on four domain translation tasks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, realizing an average gain of 1.55 COMET and 1.42 BLEU scores, by further enhancing the translation of rare words. Source code can be accessed at https://github.com/wangzx1219/Dk-KD.

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit excessive, random, and uninformative uncertainty, rendering them unsuitable for decision-making in human-computer interactions. In this paper, we aim to instigate a heightened awareness of self-uncertainty in LLMs, enabling them to express uncertainty more effectively. To accomplish this, we propose an uncertainty-aware instruction tuning (UaIT) method, aligning LLMs’ perception with the probabilistic uncertainty of the generation. We conducted experiments using LLaMA2 and Mistral on multiple free-form QA tasks. Experimental results revealed a surprising 45.2% improvement in the effectiveness of uncertainty expression by LLMs, accompanied by reasonably good out-of-domain generalization capabilities. Moreover, this uncertainty expression can serve as a valuable real-time basis for human decision-making, e.g., retrieving external documents and incorporating stronger LLMs.

Recent pre-trained language models (PLMs) achieve promising results in existing abstractive summarization datasets. However, existing summarization benchmarks overlap in time with the standard pre-training corpora and finetuning datasets. Hence, the strong performance of PLMs may rely on the parametric knowledge that is memorized during pre-training and fine-tuning. Moreover, the knowledge memorized by PLMs may quickly become outdated, which affects the generalization performance of PLMs on future data. In this work, we propose TempoSum, a novel benchmark that contains data samples from 2010 to 2022, to understand the temporal generalization ability of abstractive summarization models. Through extensive human evaluation, we show that parametric knowledge stored in summarization models significantly affects the faithfulness of the generated summaries on future data. Moreover, existing faithfulness enhancement methods cannot reliably improve the faithfulness of summarization models on future data. Finally, we discuss several recommendations to the research community on how to evaluate and improve the temporal generalization capability of text summarization models.

Transfer learning has been shown to be an effective technique for enhancing the performance of low-resource neural machine translation (NMT). This is typically achieved through either fine-tuning a child model with a pre-trained parent model, or by utilizing the out- put of the parent model during the training of the child model. However, these methods do not make use of the parent knowledge during the child inference, which may limit the translation performance. In this paper, we propose a k-Nearest-Neighbor Transfer Learning (kNN-TL) approach for low-resource NMT, which leverages the parent knowledge throughout the entire developing process of the child model. Our approach includes a parent-child representation alignment method, which ensures consistency in the output representations between the two models, and a child-aware datastore construction method that improves inference efficiency by selectively distilling the parent datastore based on relevance to the child model. Experimental results on four low-resource translation tasks show that kNN-TL outperforms strong baselines. Extensive analyses further demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Code and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/kNN-TL.

意图识别和槽信息填充的联合模型将口语理解技术(Spoken language understandingSLU)提升到了一个新的水平,但是目前研究进展的模型通过话语上下文信息判断位置信息,缺少对槽信息标签之间位置信息的考虑,导致模型在槽位提取过程中容易发生边界错误,进而影响最终槽位提取表现。而且在槽信息提取任务中,槽指称项(Slot mentions)可能与正常表述话语并没有区别,特别是电影名字、歌曲名字等,模型容易受到槽指称项话语的干扰,因而无法在槽位提取中正确识别槽位边界。本文提出了一种面向口语理解的结合边界预测和动态模板的槽填充(Boundary-predictionand Dynamic-template Slot Filling BDSF)模型。该模型提供了一种联合预测边界信息的辅助任务,将位置信息引入到槽信息填充中,同时利用动态模版机制对话语句式建模,能够让模型聚焦于话语中的非槽指称项部分,避免了模型被槽指称项干扰,增强模型区分槽位边界的能力。在公共基准语料库CAIS和SMP-ECDT上的实验结果表明,我们的模型优于比较模型,特别是能够为槽标签预测模型提供准确的位置信息。

意图识别和槽信息填充的联合模型将口语理解技术(Spoken Language Understanding)提升到了一个新的水平,但由于存在出现频率低或未见过的槽指称项(0 shot slot mentions),模型的序列标注性能受限,而且这些联合模型往往没有利用输入序列存在的语法知识信息。已有研究表明序列标注任务可以通过引入依赖树结构,辅助推断序列标注中槽的存在。在中文口语对话理解中,由于中文话语是一串字序列组成,输入话语的字和槽信息是一一对应的,因而槽信息填充模型往往是字特征模型。基于词的依赖树结构无法直接应用于基于字特征的槽填充模型。为了解决字词之间的矛盾,本文提出了一种基于字模型的依赖引导槽填充模型(dependency guided character-based slot filling model,DCSF),提供了一种简洁的方法解决将词级依赖树结构引入中文字特征模型的冲突,同时通过对话语中词汇内部关系进行建模,保留了词级上下文信息和分词信息。在公共基准语料库当SMP-ECDT和CrossWOZ上的实验结果表明,我们的模型优于比较模型,特别是在未见过的槽指称项和低资源情况下有很大的改进。