Equipping large language models with explicit skills has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling autonomous agents to solve complex tasks. Agent skills can be inherently divided into general skills for broad cognitive transfer and task-specific skills for dynamic execution. However, existing skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods typically force a rigid choice between full externalization, which incurs prohibitive context overhead, and full internalization, which risks overfitting and knowledge conflicts. To address this dilemma, we propose Skill0.5, a novel agentic RL framework that explicitly differentiates skill treatments by combining general skill internalization with task-specific skill utilization. Driven by a dynamic, difficulty-aware router, Skill0.5 streams tasks into distinct mastery tiers to apply tailored optimization strategies: it internalizes general skills via privileged distillation to build a cognitive foundation for hard tasks, while using diagnostic probing on easy tasks to penalize shortcuts and enforce specific skill utilization. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop demonstrate that Skill0.5 outperforms both memory-based and skill-based RL baselines, yielding performance improvements across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. The code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Skill0_5-1234/.

Reinforcement learning has recently shown promise in improving large language models for Text-to-SQL generation, yet existing methods typically optimize one-shot rewards defined over a single SQL state. Such rewards provide limited guidance for iterative SQL correction and are insufficient to capture the improvement of multi-turn SQL refinement. In this paper, we propose Progress-SQL, a multi-turn reinforcement learning framework with progressive rewards for Text-to-SQL. Our approach introduces an Oracle-guided Diagnostic Tree (ODT), which abstracts SQL queries into clause-level structural profiles and produces diagnostic feedback for next-turn refinement. To provide dense and robust reward signals, we combine ODT-based structural alignment with lexical alignment and define a progressive reward that measures the improvement from the initial SQL to the final SQL. We further incorporate a progression latency reward that favors earlier correctness and an execution status reward that encourages recovery from the invalid SQL. Experiments on BIRD, Spider, and Spider robustness variants demonstrate that our method consistently improves Text-to-SQL performance across both primary and robustness evaluations.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation enhances language models by retrieving external knowledge to support informed and grounded responses. However, traditional RAG methods rely on fragment-level retrieval, limiting their ability to address query-focused summarization queries. GraphRAG introduces a graph-based paradigm for global knowledge reasoning, yet suffers from inefficiencies in information extraction, costly resource consumption, and poor adaptability to incremental updates. To overcome these limitations, we propose TagRAG, a tag-guided hierarchical knowledge graph RAG framework designed for efficient global reasoning and scalable graph maintenance. TagRAG introduces two key components: (1) Tag Knowledge Graph Construction, which extracts object tags and their relationships from documents and organizes them into hierarchical domain tag chains for structured knowledge representation, and (2) Tag-Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation, which retrieves domain-centric tag chains to localize and synthesize relevant knowledge during inference. This design significantly adapts to smaller language models, improves retrieval granularity, and supports efficient knowledge increment. Extensive experiments on UltraDomain datasets spanning Agriculture, Computer Science, Law, and cross-domain settings demonstrate that TagRAG achieves an average win rate of 78.36% against baselines while maintaining about 14.6x construction and 1.9x retrieval efficiency compared with GraphRAG.

Generative AI enables scalable production of educational videos, but current systems largely focus on producing visually coherent content rather than supporting learning. As a result, generated videos often lack explicit pedagogical structure, reliable quality control, and mechanisms for assessing learner understanding or addressing misconceptions. In this work, we introduce PIVOT (Pedagogy-guided Instructional VideO Tutoring), a generative video tutoring framework for STEM learning via learning-centered instructional support. Inspired by conventional teaching workflows, our framework integrates pedagogy into the full generation pipeline: it first uses instructional principles to guide storyboard generation, then produces verified multimodal videos through code-centric generation and a pedagogical verification harness, and finally connects videos with assessment and misconception-aware remediation. Experiments and expert evaluations across four STEM domains show that our framework produces educational videos with pedagogically aligned content, clear and engaging presentation, coherent instructional flow, and perceived effectiveness for learning. These findings suggest a human-centered perspective on educational content generation: generative systems should be evaluated and designed not only by what they produce, but also by how they support teaching practices, learner understanding, and corrective feedback.

As online language education increasingly shifts toward personalized and immersive learning, scenario-based learning (SBL) offers a promising way to connect language knowledge with authentic communicative contexts. However, creating or generating immersive scenario-oriented learning materials remains challenging, since systems must interpret complex real-world situations, organize them into pedagogically coherent learning paths, adapt linguistic difficulty to learners’ proficiency levels, and support interactive learning beyond static content delivery. In this work, we develop ImmersiveCFL, a multi-agent framework that generates scenario-oriented learning paths for enhancing immersive experiences during learning Chinese as Foreign Language (CFL). Given learner-customized scenarios, ImmersiveCFL schedules a pedagogically coherent learning path with knowledge retrieved from a Chinese Education Knowledge Graph, generates multimodal scenario dialogues, and creates task-based interactive simulations with multi-skill exercises. Experimental results show that ImmersiveCFL improves difficulty control, curriculum coherence, and personalization over general LLM-based baselines. An online prototype[http://smartlearn.shuishan.net.cn:8089] further demonstrates its potential for goal-driven and interactive CFL learning.

Despite recent progress in LLMs for text style transfer, most existing methods rely on costly task-specific training and offer limited control over separating stylistic modification from content preservation. We propose Diff4TST, a diffusion-based language model that formulates text style transfer as an explicit copy-and-edit process. Built upon masked diffusion language models, Diff4TST introduces a style-aware noise schedule that selectively perturbs stylistic tokens while preserving content-bearing tokens during supervised fine-tuning.At inference time, we further introduce a generate-then-refine strategy that iteratively improves style compliance via gradient-based token re-masking, without reinforcement learning or external reward models. Extensive experiments on both fine-grained and polarity-based benchmarks show that Diff4TST achieves substantially improved style accuracy and controllability while maintaining strong content preservation and fluency. These results suggest diffusion-based language models as a principled and effective alternative to autoregressive pipelines for text style transfer.

As the insight of knowledge storage in language models deepens, the ability to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on language models becomes increasingly indispensable for satisfying the demands of managing rapidly updating knowledge. Considering the high cost of fine-tuning language models, model editing methods with low cost are usually required to manipulate models’ knowledge. The evidence suggests that modules carrying knowledge in a Transformer module are primarily the MLP blocks, thus we propose iReVa, a method that explicitly initializes and retrofits key-value pairs into MLP blocks to construct a new mapping of a piece of knowledge without damaging the irrelevant knowledge. In comparison to existing methods, iReVa reveals better interpretability and a stronger capacity for carrying traceable edits. Experiment results on a series of GPT series models show our prominent performance on edit success and generalization without influencing specificity. We also made the first attempt to conduct a knowledge withdrawal test of iReVa. Our codes are available at https://github.com/timberflow/iReVa.

Grammatical Error Correction is an important research direction in NLP field. Although many models of different architectures and datasets across different languages have been developed to support the research, there is a lack of a comprehensive evaluation on these models, and different architectures make it hard for developers to implement these models on their own. To address this limitation, we present UnifiedGEC, the first open-source GEC-oriented toolkit, which consists of several core components and reusable modules. In UnifiedGEC, we integrate 5 widely-used GEC models and compare their performance on 7 datasets in different languages. Additionally, GEC-related modules such as data augmentation, prompt engineering are also deployed in it. Developers are allowed to implement new models, run and evaluate on existing benchmarks through our framework in a simple way. Code, documents and detailed results of UnifiedGEC are available at https://github.com/AnKate/UnifiedGEC.

Recently, Contrastive Visual-Language Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated remarkable capability in various Visual Language Understanding (VLU) tasks. Yet, most CLIP-based methods require tasks-specific designs and sufficient training data. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet efficient paradigm for low-resource VLU named XtremeCLIP, which involves very few trainable parameters to improve the generalization ability of the trained models. In our XtremeCLIP framework, we reformulate a series of VLU tasks as a unified open-book affinity-matching problem. Furthermore, to handle the insufficient supervised signals in small datasets, we adopt contrastive learning to utilize the implicit sorting information of ground-truth labels to provide more supervised cues. Extensive experiments over multiple datasets on visual entailment, visual question answering, and image classification show that XtremeCLIP consistently outperforms existing baselines in low-resource settings.

Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models (KEPLMs) improve the performance of various downstream NLP tasks by injecting knowledge facts from large-scale Knowledge Graphs (KGs). However, existing methods for pre-training KEPLMs with relational triples are difficult to be adapted to close domains due to the lack of sufficient domain graph semantics. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-enhanced language representation learning framework for various closed domains (KANGAROO) via capturing the implicit graph structure among the entities. Specifically, since the entity coverage rates of closed-domain KGs can be relatively low and may exhibit the global sparsity phenomenon for knowledge injection, we consider not only the shallow relational representations of triples but also the hyperbolic embeddings of deep hierarchical entity-class structures for effective knowledge fusion. Moreover, as two closed-domain entities under the same entity-class often havel locally dense neighbor subgraphs counted by max point biconnected component, we further propose a data augmentation strategy based on contrastive learning over subgraphs to construct hard negative samples of higher quality. It makes the underlying KELPMs better distinguish the semantics of these neighboring entities to further complement the global semantic sparsity. In the experiments, we evaluate KANGAROO over various knowledge-aware and general NLP tasks in both full and few-shot learning settings, outperforming various KEPLM training paradigms performance in closed-domains significantly.

The task of Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (KBQG) aims to convert a logical form into a natural language question. For the sake of expensive cost of large-scale question annotation, the methods of KBQG under low-resource scenarios urgently need to be developed. However, current methods heavily rely on annotated data for fine-tuning, which is not well-suited for few-shot question generation. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown their impressive generalization ability in few-shot tasks. Inspired by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which is an in-context learning strategy for reasoning, we formulate KBQG task as a reasoning problem, where the generation of a complete question is splitted into a series of sub-question generation. Our proposed prompting method KQG-CoT first retrieves supportive logical forms from the unlabeled data pool taking account of the characteristics of the logical form. Then, we write a prompt to explicit the reasoning chain of generating complicated questions based on the selected demonstrations. To further ensure prompt quality, we extend KQG-CoT into KQG-CoT+ via sorting the logical forms by their complexity. We conduct extensive experiments over three public KBQG datasets. The results demonstrate that our prompting method consistently outperforms other prompting baselines on the evaluated datasets. Remarkably, our KQG-CoT+ method could surpass existing few-shot SoTA results of the PathQuestions dataset by 18.25, 10.72, and 10.18 absolute points on BLEU-4, METEOR, and ROUGE-L, respectively.