Large language models (LLMs) often hallucinate in question answering (QA) tasks due to a lack of factual knowledge. While integrating knowledge graphs (KGs) with LLMs has alleviated this issue, existing methods suffer from poor generalization or low reasoning efficiency, and critically, they overlook the learning and reuse of reasoning paths from past experiences. To address these challenges, we introduce Thought-Action Graph (TAG), a structured repository of reasoning experiences. TAG decomposes successful LLM-KG interaction trajectories into fine-grained semantic operators, which are stored in TAG constructed by the thought layer and action layer. Building upon TAG, we propose a novel KGQA paradigm — TAG-Reasoning (TAGR). TAGR first retrieves and assembles reasoning blueprints from TAG, and then guides LLM to efficiently execute on KG according to them. Through this approach, TAGR transforms the computationally expensive online exploration process of LLMs into an offline process of TAG retrieval and assembly. Experimental results on multiple KGQA benchmarks demonstrate that TAGR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across key metrics, while drastically reducing the number of LLM calls and generated tokens. This work opens new avenues for building continual learning, efficient, and faithful KGQA systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can match local semantic clues in knowledge graphs (KGs), but complex KGQA often requires satisfying the full dependency structure of a question. Existing retrieval-based methods therefore risk producing reasoning paths that look plausible at each step but violate the query’s global intent. We propose Guiding Graph, a schema-light query-structure interface that turns KGQA from open-ended semantic traversal into structure-constrained query completion. A Guiding Graph exposes the entities, placeholders, and global dependencies that KG exploration must preserve, serving as an operational interface between natural language and graph traversal. The interface is training-free by default through prompt-based construction, and can optionally be strengthened with a cold-start fine-tuned constructor trained from limited bootstrapped supervision. Given the constructed Guiding Graph, exploration is governed by target selection from the query structure, structure-guided pruning before semantic matching, and target-scoped semantic alignment under the current Guiding Graph triple. Experiments on WebQSP, CWQ, and a domain-specific agricultural KG show that explicit query-structure guidance improves accuracy, robustness, and efficiency, with especially clear benefits for multi-hop reasoning and smaller LLMs.

Safety alignment plays a vital role in ensuring the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by mitigating risks from malicious queries. To avoid the high computational costs of post-training, recent research has increasingly shifted toward inference-time alignment via continuous activation steering.

However, the geometric entanglement of harmful and benign technical representations within these continuous spaces impedes precise calibration, inevitably trapping models in a severe dilemma between jailbreak vulnerability and benign over-refusal. To address this, we propose Codebook-Orthogonal Direction Alignment (CODA), an inference-time framework that projects hidden states onto a vector-quantized codebook to serve as a discrete control interface.

Specifically, to break continuous directional entanglement, CODA estimates steering directions over discrete codebook anchors. To eliminate the geometric interference triggering over-refusals, CODA softly orthogonalizes the safety direction with respect to benign technical intent.

Finally, to prevent rigid over-correction, CODA forwards the decoupled vectors to yield dynamically adjusted steering strengths during generation via risk gating and exponential time decay. Experiments across a diverse set of open-weight LLMs demonstrate that CODA consistently yields a stronger safety–utility trade-off than continuous steering baselines, indicating that discrete representations provide a more effective mechanism for disentangling safety from utility.

We introduce RedNote-Vibe, a dataset spanning five years (pre-LLM to July 2025) sourced from lifestyle platform RedNote (Xiaohongshu), capturing the temporal dynamics of content creation and is enriched with comprehensive engagement metrics. To address the detection challenge posed by RedNote-Vibe, we propose the PsychoLinguistic AIGT Detection Framework (PLAD). Grounded in cognitive psychology, PLAD leverages deep psychological signatures for robust and interpretable detection. Our experiments demonstrate PLAD’s superior performance and reveal insights into content dynamics: (1) human content continues to outperform AI in emotionally resonant domains; (2) AI content is more homogeneous and rarely produces breaking posts, however, this human-AI gap narrows for arousing higher-investment interactions; and (3) most interestingly, a small group of users who strategically utilize AI tools can achieve higher engagement outcomes. The dataset is availiable at https://github.com/ydli-ai/RedNote-Vibe.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a widely adopted paradigm for enhancing LLMs in medical applications by incorporating expert multi-modal knowledge during generation. However, the underlying retrieval databases may naturally contain, or be intentionally injected with, adversarial knowledge, which can perturb model outputs and undermine system reliability. To investigate this risk, prior studies have explored knowledge poisoning attacks in medical RAG systems. Nevertheless, most of them rely on the strong assumption that adversaries possess prior knowledge of user queries, which is unrealistic in deployments and substantially limits their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose M³Att, a knowledge-poisoning framework designed for medical multimodal RAG systems, assuming only limited distribution knowledge of the underlying database. Our core idea is to inject covert misinformation into textual data while using paired visual data as a query-agnostic trigger to promote retrieval. We first propose a unified framework that introduces imperceptible perturbations to visual inputs to manipulate retrieval probabilities. Besides, due to the prior medical knowledge in LLMs, naively poisoned medical content with explicit factual errors can be corrected during generation. Thus, we leverage the inherent ambiguity of medical diagnosis and design a covert misinformation injection strategy that degrades diagnostic accuracy while evading model self-correction. Experiments on five LLMs and datasets demonstrate that M³Att consistently produces clinically plausible yet incorrect generations. Codes: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/M3Att.

Long-context language models (LCLMs), characterized by their extensive context window, are becoming popular. However, despite the fact that they are nearly perfect at standard long-context retrieval tasks, our evaluations demonstrate they fail in some basic cases. Later, we find they can be well addressed with a sufficient number of reasoning steps, guided by specific CoT prompts. This result emphasizes the potential necessity of solving specific long-context tasks using long-CoT methods, while previous long-context benchmarks always ignore the necessity of long reasoning for long-context tasks and treat them as direct QA tasks. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/yuyijiong/hard_retrieval_for_llm

Long-context language models (LCLMs) can process long context, but still exhibit position bias, also known as “lost in the middle”, which indicates placing key information in the middle of the context will significantly affect performance. To mitigating this, we first explore the micro-level manifestations of position bias, concluding that attention weights are a micro-level expression of position bias. Then we identify that, in addition to position embeddings, positional information in hidden states also contributes to position bias, and it manifests itself in specific channels of hidden states, called positional hidden states. Based on these, we propose a method to mitigate position bias by scaling positional hidden states. Experiments on NaturalQuestions Multi-document QA, KV retrieval and LongBench, using various models including RoPE models, context window-extended models, and Alibi models, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach. Our method can improve performance by up to 15.2% in “lost in the middle” benchmark by modifying just one channel of hidden states. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/PositionalHidden.

Recall and ranking are two critical steps in personalized news recommendation. Most existing news recommender systems conduct personalized news recall and ranking separately with different models. However, maintaining multiple models leads to high computational cost and poses great challenges to meeting the online latency requirement of news recommender systems. In order to handle this problem, in this paper we propose UniRec, a unified method for recall and ranking in news recommendation. In our method, we first infer user embedding for ranking from the historical news click behaviors of a user using a user encoder model. Then we derive the user embedding for recall from the obtained user embedding for ranking by using it as the attention query to select a set of basis user embeddings which encode different general user interests and synthesize them into a user embedding for recall. The extensive experiments on benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method can improve both efficiency and effectiveness for recall and ranking in news recommendation.

Relational triple extraction is a critical task for constructing knowledge graphs. Existing methods focused on learning text patterns from explicit relational mentions. However, they usually suffered from ignoring relational reasoning patterns, thus failed to extract the implicitly implied triples. Fortunately, the graph structure of a sentence’s relational triples can help find multi-hop reasoning paths. Moreover, the type inference logic through the paths can be captured with the sentence’s supplementary relational expressions that represent the real-world conceptual meanings of the paths’ composite relations. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to learn the relational reasoning patterns for this task. To identify multi-hop reasoning paths, we construct a relational graph from the sentence (text-to-graph generation) and apply multi-layer graph convolutions to it. To capture the relation type inference logic of the paths, we propose to understand the unlabeled conceptual expressions by reconstructing the sentence from the relational graph (graph-to-text generation) in a self-supervised manner. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Effectively finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) is critical for their success in downstream tasks. However, PLMs may have risks in overfitting the pretraining tasks and data, which usually have gap with the target downstream tasks. Such gap may be difficult for existing PLM finetuning methods to overcome and lead to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a very simple yet effective method named NoisyTune to help better finetune PLMs on downstream tasks by adding some noise to the parameters of PLMs before fine-tuning. More specifically, we propose a matrix-wise perturbing method which adds different uniform noises to different parameter matrices based on their standard deviations. In this way, the varied characteristics of different types of parameters in PLMs can be considered. Extensive experiments on both GLUE English benchmark and XTREME multilingual benchmark show NoisyTune can consistently empower the finetuning of different PLMs on different downstream tasks.