As medical LLMs transition to clinical deployment, assessing their ethical reasoning capability becomes critical. While achieving high accuracy on knowledge benchmarks, LLMs lack validated assessment for navigating ethical trade-offs in clinical decision-making where multiple valid solutions exist. Existing benchmarks lack systematic approaches to incorporate recognized philosophical frameworks and expert validation for ethical reasoning assessment. We introduce PrinciplismQA, a philosophy-grounded approach to assessing LLM clinical medical ethics alignment. Grounded in Principlism, our approach provides a systematic methodology for incorporating clinical ethics philosophy into LLM assessment design. PrinciplismQA comprises 3,648 expert-validated questions spanning knowledge assessment and clinical reasoning. Our expert-calibrated pipeline enables reproducible evaluation and models ethical biases. Evaluating recent models reveals significant ethical reasoning gaps despite high knowledge accuracy, demonstrating that knowledge-oriented training does not ensure clinical ethical alignment. PrinciplismQA provides a validated tool for assessing clinical AI deployment readiness.

This paper introduces the UCFE: User-Centric Financial Expertise benchmark, an innovative framework designed to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to handle complex real-world financial tasks. UCFE benchmark adopts a hybrid approach that combines human expert evaluations with dynamic, task-specific interactions to simulate the complexities of evolving financial scenarios. Firstly, we conducted a user study involving 804 participants, collecting their feedback on financial tasks. Secondly, based on this feedback, we created our dataset that encompasses a wide range of user intents and interactions. This dataset serves as the foundation for benchmarking 11 LLMs services using the LLM-as-Judge methodology. Our results show a significant alignment between benchmark scores and human preferences, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.78, confirming the effectiveness of the UCFE dataset and our evaluation approach. UCFE benchmark not only reveals the potential of LLMs in the financial domain but also provides a robust framework for assessing their performance and user satisfaction.

In the current landscape of large language models (LLMs), many evaluation metrics have been developed and used as rewards during training to improve specific metrics. However, balancing these metrics and dynamically adjusting reward weights remains challenging, as current approaches often fail to enhance weaker metrics. To address this, we empirically propose a Dynamic Reward Balancing Optimization framework DRBO to mitigate the “bottleneck effect” by measuring performance, adjusting reward weights to prioritize weaker metrics, and optimizing the model via reinforcement learning. We apply DRBO to both single-task and multi-type task scenarios, validating its effectiveness in generation with citations and online shopping conversation tasks. The results demonstrate improved overall performance and balanced optimization across multiple metrics, effectively overcoming the diversity and complexity inherent in LLMs. Our codes are available at https://github.com/NuoJohnChen/DRBO.

Materials characterization is fundamental to acquiring materials information, revealing the processing-microstructure-property relationships that guide material design and optimization. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently shown promise in generative and predictive tasks within materials science, their capacity to understand real-world characterization imaging data remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present MatCha, the first benchmark for materials characterization image understanding, comprising 1,500 questions that demand expert-level domain expertise. MatCha encompasses four key stages of materials research comprising 21 distinct tasks, each designed to reflect authentic challenges faced by materials scientists. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs on MatCha reveals a significant performance gap compared to human experts. These models exhibit degradation when addressing questions requiring higher-level expertise and sophisticated visual perception. Simple few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting struggle to alleviate these limitations. These findings highlight that existing MLLMs still exhibit limited adaptability to real-world materials characterization scenarios. We hope MatCha will facilitate future research in areas such as new material discovery and autonomous scientific agents. MatCha is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/MatCha.

Large language models (LLMs) store vast amounts of information, making them powerful yet raising privacy and safety concerns when selective knowledge removal is required. Existing unlearning strategies, ranging from gradient-based fine-tuning and model editing to sparse autoencoder (SAE) steering, either lack interpretability or fail to provide a robust defense against adversarial prompts. We propose SAE–Guided Subspace Projection Unlearning (SSPU), a novel framework that leverages SAE features to drive targeted updates in the model’s parameter space, enabling precise, interpretable, and robust unlearning. SSPU’s three-stage pipeline performs data-driven layer and feature selection, subspace construction via QR decomposition, and constrained optimization that controls activations into an “irrelevant” subspace while preserving retained knowledge. Overall, we use SAE features to construct a subspace that supervises unlearning, refining the loss and adding a regularization term to guide interpretable parameter updates. In experiments on the WMDP–Cyber forget set and three utility benchmarks (MMLU, TruthfulQA, GSM8K), SSPU reduces harmful knowledge accuracy by 3.22% compared to the strongest baseline. It also improves adversarial robustness, lowering malicious accuracy under jailbreak prompts compared to baselines. Our findings expose the limitations of prior unlearning methods and demonstrate how interpretable subspace-guided optimization can achieve robust, controllable model behavior.