Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can enhance large language models (LLMs) by providing external knowledge and helping reduce hallucinations. In multimodal RAG, however, retrieval remains challenging because a single retriever may fail to capture fine-grained multimodal semantics, and visually or semantically similar entities may still contain misleading information for answer generation. We propose a progressive multimodal re-ranking framework with curriculum learning to improve CLIP-based visual coarse-grained retrieval. Our framework progressively refines retrieval results through two stages: fine-grained section-level re-ranking and multimodal section reassessment. To better align re-ranking with multimodal queries, we introduce a curriculum-learning strategy that trains the model with hard negatives that are visually or semantically similar but contain misleading information. Experiments on InfoSeek and Enc-VQA show that our method achieves state-of-the-art answer accuracy and competitive retrieval performance.

Model Editing, also known as knowledge editing, is receiving increasing attention in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing model editing approaches predominantly focus on knowledge-level or static visual domains, overlooking dynamic semantics. This paper exploratively applies six representative model editing methods (FT, IKE, MEND, SERAC, MEMIT and AlphaEdit) to Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs) and introduces the first benchmark specifically designed for Vid-LLMs editing—VMEB (Vid-LLMs Model Editing Benchmark)—systematically extending model editing research from static modalities to dynamic video scenarios. We position this work as a forward-looking benchmark and a foundational diagnostic study: in the video paradigm, our evaluation dimensions encompass traditional metrics including Reliability, Locality, and Generality, while also introducing a video-specific metric: Robustness. Based on experimental results, we analyze the strengths and limitations of existing model editing approaches, and identify new challenges and research directions for the future development of the model editing field within the context of multimodal and video paradigms. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/Sakabamrisa/VMEB.

Deductive and inductive reasoning are fundamental components of human cognition, and in daily life, people often apply these types of reasoning unconsciously. While previous studies have extensively examined the deductive and inductive reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in rule-based and math-related tasks, little attention has been given to their role in procedural planning——an area that holds considerable relevance for real-world applications. To fill this gap, we present DIRPP (Deductive and Inductive Reasoning in Procedural Planning) in this paper, a benchmark designed to assess the deductive and inductive reasoning abilities of various LLMs within the context of procedural planning. Based on the benchmark, we initially observe that LLMs demonstrate excellent deductive reasoning capabilities in procedural planning but show suboptimal performance in inductive reasoning. To enhance their inductive reasoning abilities, we further propose a novel and effective method called IMSE (Induction through Multiple Similar Examples), which enables LLMs to generate multiple similar procedural plans and then perform inductive reasoning based on these examples. Through various experiments, we find that the proposed method can significantly improve the inductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

Knowledge Editing (KE) has gained increasing attention, yet current KE tasks remain relatively simple. Under current evaluation frameworks, many editing methods achieve exceptionally high scores, sometimes nearing perfection. However, few studies integrate KE into real-world application scenarios (e.g., recent interest in LLM-as-agent). To support our analysis, we introduce a novel script-based benchmark – ScEdit (Script-based Knowledge Editing Benchmark) – which encompasses both counterfactual and temporal edits. We integrate token-level and text-level evaluation methods, comprehensively analyzing existing KE techniques. The benchmark extends traditional fact-based (“What”-type question) evaluation to action-based (“How”-type question) evaluation. We observe that all KE methods exhibit a drop in performance on established metrics and face challenges on text-level metrics, indicating a challenging task. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/asdfo123/ScEdit.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated excellent performance in text embedding tasks. Previous work usually use LoRA to fine-tune existing LLMs, which are limited by the data and training gap between LLMs and embedding models. In this work, we introduce Conan-embedding-v2, a new 1.4B-parameter LLM trained from scratch and fine-tuned as a text embedder. First, we add news data and multilingual pairs for LLM pretraining to bridge the data gap. Based on this, we propose a cross-lingual retrieval dataset that enables the LLM to better integrate embeddings across different languages. Second, whereas LLMs use a causal mask with token-level loss, embedding models use a bidirectional mask with sentence-level loss. This training gap makes full fine-tuning less effective than LoRA. We introduce a soft-masking mechanism to gradually transition between these two types of masks, enabling the model to learn more comprehensive representations. Based on this, we propose a dynamic hard negative mining method that exposes the model to more difficult negative examples throughout the training process. Being intuitive and effective, with only approximately 1.4B parameters, Conan-embedding-v2 achieves SOTA performance on both the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) and Chinese MTEB (May 19, 2025).

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) has shown strong performance in text-based Large Language Models (LLMs), but extending it to video remains a challenge due to the intricate spatiotemporal structure of video frames. Existing adaptations, such as RoPE-3D, attempt to encode spatial and temporal dimensions separately but suffer from two major limitations: positional bias in attention distribution and disruptions in video-text transitions. To overcome these issues, we propose Video Rotary Position Embedding (VRoPE), a novel positional encoding method tailored for Video-LLMs. Specifically, we introduce a more balanced encoding strategy that mitigates attention biases, ensuring a more uniform distribution of spatial focus. Additionally, our approach restructures positional indices to ensure a smooth transition between video and text tokens. Extensive experiments on different models demonstrate that VRoPE consistently outperforms previous RoPE variants, achieving significant improvements in video understanding, temporal reasoning, and retrieval tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/johncaged/VRoPE.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) method across various domains. The study of token importance has attracted widespread attention in DPO. Researchers have found that token importance is crucial for improving the effectiveness of DPO. It is observed that identical or semantically similar content (defined as ambiguous content) frequently appears within the preference pairs. We hypothesize that the presence of ambiguous content during DPO training may introduce ambiguity, thereby limiting further improvements in alignment. Through mathematical analysis and proof-of-concept experiments, we reveal that ambiguous content may potentially introduce ambiguities, thereby degrading performance. To address this issue, we introduce Ambiguity Awareness Optimization (AAO), a simple yet effective approach that automatically re-weights ambiguous content to reduce ambiguities by calculating semantic similarity from preference pairs. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that AAO consistently and significantly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches in performance, without markedly increasing response length, across multiple model scales and widely adopted benchmark datasets, including AlpacaEval 2, MT-Bench, and Arena-Hard. Specifically, AAO outperforms DPO by up to 8.9 points on AlpacaEval 2 and achieves an improvement of by up to 15.0 points on Arena-Hard.

Multimodal knowledge editing is an important method for modifying outdated or incorrect knowledge in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing datasets for multimodal knowledge editing lack multi-granularity knowledge. In this paper, we present a more realistic dataset called M2Edit, which includes three distinct types of knowledge: entity, relation, and action. Additionally, existing knowledge editing methods for MLLMs lack the ability to handle multi-granularity knowledge and generalize to multimodal data. To address these limitations, we propose the multimodal knowledge editing method MLE. This approach identifies key knowledge layers within different components and collaboratively edits the various components of MLLMs. As a result, we observe significant improvements in visual generality performance, ranging from 4.8 to 10.8, and achieve the best overall performance on knowledge data of different granularities.

Recently, there has been significant interest in replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants. These approaches commonly use a binary cross-entropy mechanism on pairwise samples, i.e., minimizing and maximizing the loss based on preferred or dis-preferred responses, respectively. However, while this training strategy omits the reward model, it also overlooks the varying preference degrees within different responses. We hypothesize that this is a key factor hindering LLMs from sufficiently understanding human preferences. To address this problem, we propose a novel Self-supervised Preference Optimization (SPO) framework, which constructs a self-supervised preference degree loss combined with the alignment loss, thereby helping LLMs improve their ability to understand the degree of preference. Extensive experiments are conducted on two widely used datasets of different tasks. The results demonstrate that SPO can be seamlessly integrated with existing preference optimization methods and significantly boost their performance to achieve state-of-the-art performance. We also conduct detailed analyses to offer comprehensive insights into SPO, which verifies its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/lijian16/SPO.

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on extensive corpora inevitably retain sensitive data, such as personal privacy information and copyrighted material. Recent advancements in knowledge unlearning involve updating LLM parameters to erase specific knowledge. However, current unlearning paradigms are mired in vague forgetting boundaries, often erasing knowledge indiscriminately. In this work, we introduce KnowUnDo, a benchmark containing copyrighted content and user privacy domains to evaluate if the unlearning process inadvertently erases essential knowledge. Our findings indicate that existing unlearning methods often suffer from excessive unlearning. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, MemFlex, which utilizes gradient information to precisely target and unlearn sensitive parameters. Experimental results show that MemFlex is superior to existing methods in both precise knowledge unlearning and general knowledge retaining of LLMs.

While large language models (LLMs) excel in many domains, their complexity and scale challenge deployment in resource-limited environments. Current compression techniques, such as parameter pruning, often fail to effectively utilize the knowledge from pruned parameters. To address these challenges, we propose Manifold-Based Knowledge Alignment and Layer Merging Compression (MKA), a novel approach that uses manifold learning and the Information Bottleneck (IB) measure to merge similar layers, reducing model size while preserving essential performance. We evaluate MKA on multiple benchmark datasets and various LLMs. Our findings show that MKA not only preserves model performance but also achieves substantial compression ratios, outperforming traditional pruning methods. Moreover, when coupled with quantization, MKA delivers even greater compression. Specifically, on the MMLU dataset using the Llama3-8B model, MKA achieves a compression ratio of 43.75% with a minimal performance decrease of only 2.82%. The proposed MKA method offers a resource-efficient and performance-preserving model compression technique for LLMs. We make our code available at https://github.com/SempraETY/Pruning-via-Merging