Temporal knowledge graph forecasting(TKGF) asks a model to rank the mostplausible future entity for a query such as(s, r, ?, t) from historical events. Recenttraining-free methods use large languagemodels (LLMs) for this task, but their accuracydepends heavily on which past events areshown in the prompt under a tight contextbudget. We present LANTERN, a training-freeprompting framework that addresses thisbottleneck by combining two complementaryviews of history: a long-window strengthscore for stable interaction patterns anda short-window novelty score for suddenchanges. LANTERN first filters unhelpfulevents, then selects a compact evidence setwith Pareto-greedy selection, and finally addsone structure-aware analogical demonstration.Across ICEWS14, ICEWS05-15, ICEWS18,and GDELT, LANTERN consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art training-free baselineAnRe under the same backbone and 2-hopcandidate protocol, improving Hits@1 by upto 2.5 points and MRR by up to 1.2 points.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has become a standard method for improving reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) by eliciting step-by-step thinking, but its effectiveness in multimodal tasks remains unclear. In this paper, we aim to systematically investigate the key question: What can multimodal Chain-of-Thought reasoning do, and where and why does it fall short? To this end, we evaluate 12 multimodal tasks across perception and reasoning categories using both 14 non-reasoning models and 8 reasoning models. Our analysis reveals several important findings: (1) CoT is not a free lunch and should be used selectively depending on the specific requirements of each task. For perception tasks, CoT can lead to undesirable side effects, such as reduced performance in visual grounding and object counting. In contrast, it proves effective for reasoning tasks involving mathematical, scientific, and multi-image reasoning; (2) Compared to original models, existing open-source multimodal reasoning models often yield only marginal overall improvements, possibly due to an overemphasis on mathematical reasoning at the expense of broader capabilities; (3) Visual reasoning remains a key bottleneck for current multimodal CoT, as models exhibit a Look Light, Think Heavy” pattern where verbal reflection rises and falls during reasoning, whereas visual reflection consistently diminishes. These findings suggest that while multimodal CoT handles verbal reflection relatively well, it lacks the ability to maintain deep visual introspection throughout the reasoning process.

Explainable diagnosis requires that authoritative medical knowledge provide the rationales linking a patient’s clinical manifestations to the diagnostic conclusion. Although large language models (LLMs) hold great potential to facilitate explainable diagnosis, their effectiveness is often constrained by insufficient diagnostic expertise. To address this limitation, we propose Self-learned Explainable Knowledge Augmented Diagnosis (SEKAD), a unified LLM-based framework for faithful and explainable diagnosis. Our approach builds a high-quality diagnostic knowledge base through a record-driven explanation learning paradigm, as well as applies this knowledge via an explanation-based diagnostic process that ensures faithful inference. Experiments on the DiReCT and JAMA benchmarks show that SEKAD consistently outperforms strong baselines across the metrics. In particular, on the DiReCT benchmark, SEKAD improves the explanation completeness metric from 64.5% to 76.9% over the best existing methods, highlighting its effectiveness in enhancing diagnostic explainability and showing that our text mining approach produces knowledge that is both reliable in quality and large in quantity.

Multimodal web agents can assist humans in operating repetitive GUI tasks, where effective task planning is essential for decomposing complex tasks into executable actions. While small open-source MLLMs are cost-efficient and privacy-preserving compared with commercial large models, they suffer from weak planning and limited cross-website generalization. To address these limitations, we introduce the planning experience exploration and utilization (PEEU) method, which autonomously explores environments to discover experiences and utilizes hindsight experience to synthesize strictly aligned, high-level training data. To quantitatively analyze the generalization behaviors driving this performance, we propose the task decomposition hierarchical analysis framework (TDHAF) to systematically study compositional generalization across three task granularities: low, middle and high levels. Our analysis reveals that mastering low-level atomic skills does not guarantee high-level planning competence, while high-level task training yields stronger OOD generalization. Experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate PEEU’s superior effectiveness: our 7B model achieves 30.6% accuracy, outperforming the much larger Qwen2.5-VL-32B model. These demonstrate constructing hindsight high-level tasks and leveraging experiences is crucial for OOD planning abilities of small MLLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success but still tend to generate factually erroneous responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination. A recent trend is to use preference learning to fine-tune models to align with factuality. However, existing work primarily evaluates fine-tuned models on in-domain (ID) datasets and the factuality on out-of-domain (OOD) datasets remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the factuality of different models tuned by various preference learning algorithms and demonstrate that their performance on OOD datasets either increases minimally or decreases. Subsequently, we reveal that the main cause of model’s failure to uphold factuality under a distribution shift is under-alignment, rather than over-alignment, by analyzing the token distribution shift of the models before and after tuning. Finally, we propose APEFT (Atomic Preference Enhanced Factuality Tuning), a framework that enhances model’s awareness of factuality at the granularity of individual facts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APEFT improves model performance by an average of on both ID and OOD datasets, which is highly effective.

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for accelerating academic ideation but face critical challenges in grounding ideas and mitigating confirmation bias during refinement. To address these limitations, we propose MotivGraph-SoIQ, a novel framework that enhances LLM ideation by integrating a Motivational Knowledge Graph (MotivGraph), which provides essential grounding from research literature, with a Q-Driven Socratic Ideator. The Ideator, a dual-agent system utilizing Socratic questioning, facilitates a rigorous refinement process that mitigates confirmation bias and significantly improves idea quality across dimensions of novelty, experimental feasibility, and motivation. Our experimental results demonstrate MotivGraph-SoIQ’s effectiveness. Comparative studies show significant quantitative improvements over SOTA methods across LLM-based scoring, ELO ranking, and human evaluation. Ablation studies further validate the crucial contributions of both the MotivGraph for enhancing idea novelty and practicality, and the Socratic dialogue with the teacher agent for substantial quality improvement. This work underscores the potential of combining structured knowledge with interactive, critique-based refinement for robust LLM ideation.

While hallucinations of large language models could be alleviated through retrieval-augmented generation and citation generation, how the model utilizes internal knowledge is still opaque, and the trustworthiness of its generated answers remains questionable. In this work, we introduce Context-Prior Augmented Citation Generation task, requiring models to generate citations considering both external and internal knowledge while providing trustworthy references, with 5 evaluation metrics focusing on 3 aspects: answer helpfulness, citation faithfulness, and trustworthiness. We introduce RAEL, the paradigm for our task, and also design INTRALIGN, an integrated method containing customary data generation and an alignment algorithm. Our experimental results show that our method achieves a better cross-scenario performance with regard to other baselines. Our extended experiments further reveal that retrieval quality, question types, and model knowledge have considerable influence on the trustworthiness in citation generation.

Despite the significant progress made by existing retrieval augmented language models (RALMs) in providing trustworthy responses and grounding in reliable sources, they often overlook effective alignment with human preferences. In the alignment process, reward models (RMs) act as a crucial proxy for human values to guide optimization. However, it remains unclear how to evaluate and select a reliable RM for preference alignment in RALMs. To this end, we propose RAG-RewardBench, the first benchmark for evaluating RMs in RAG settings. First, we design four crucial and challenging RAG-specific scenarios to assess RMs, including multi-hop reasoning, fine-grained citation, appropriate abstain, and conflict robustness. Then, we incorporate 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase the diversity of data sources. Finally, we adopt an LLM-as-a-judge approach to improve preference annotation efficiency and effectiveness, exhibiting a strong correlation with human annotations. Based on the RAG-RewardBench, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 45 RMs and uncover their limitations in RAG scenarios. Additionally, we also reveal that existing trained RALMs show almost no improvement in preference alignment, highlighting the need for a shift towards preference-aligned training.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks.Previous work attempts to evaluate it but falls short in providing an in-depth analysis of patterns that influence the CoT. In this paper, we study the CoT performance from the perspective of effectiveness and faithfulness. For the former, we identify key factors that influence CoT effectiveness on performance improvement, including problem difficulty, information gain, and information flow. For the latter, we interpret the unfaithful CoT issue by conducting a joint analysis of the information interaction among the question, CoT, and answer. The result demonstrates that, when the LLM predicts answers, it can recall correct information missing in the CoT from the question, leading to the problem. Finally, we propose a novel algorithm to mitigate this issue, in which we recall extra information from the question to enhance the CoT generation and evaluate CoTs based on their information gain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances both the faithfulness and effectiveness of CoT.

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.

Knowledge editing, which aims to update the knowledge encoded in language models, can be deceptive. Despite the fact that many existing knowledge editing algorithms achieve near-perfect performance on conventional metrics, the models edited by them are still prone to generating original knowledge. This paper introduces the concept of "superficial editing” to describe this phenomenon. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that this issue presents a significant challenge to existing algorithms. Through systematic investigation, we identify and validate two key factors contributing to this issue: (1) the residual stream at the last subject position in earlier layers and (2) specific attention modules in later layers. Notably, certain attention heads in later layers, along with specific left singular vectors in their output matrices, encapsulate the original knowledge and exhibit a causal relationship with superficial editing. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to the task of superficial unlearning, where we observe consistent patterns in the behavior of specific attention heads and their corresponding left singular vectors, thereby demonstrating the robustness and broader applicability of our methodology and conclusions. Our code is available at https://github.com/jiakuan929/superficial-editing.

With the development of large language models, they are widely used as agents in various fields. A key component of agents is memory, which stores vital information but is susceptible to jailbreak attacks. Existing research mainly focuses on single-agent attacks and shared memory attacks. However, real-world scenarios often involve independent memory. In this paper, we propose the Troublemaker Makes Chaos in Honest Town (TMCHT) task, a large-scale, multi-agent, multi-topology text-based attack evaluation framework. TMCHT involves one attacker agent attempting to mislead an entire society of agents. We identify two major challenges in multi-agent attacks: (1) Non-complete graph structure, (2) Large-scale systems. We attribute these challenges to a phenomenon we term toxicity disappearing. To address these issues, we propose an Adversarial Replication Contagious Jailbreak (ARCJ) method, which optimizes the retrieval suffix to make poisoned samples more easily retrieved and optimizes the replication suffix to make poisoned samples have contagious ability. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach in TMCHT, with 23.51%, 18.95%, and 52.93% improvements in line, star topologies, and 100-agent settings. It reveals potential contagion risks in widely used multi-agent architectures.

As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) advance, multimodal agents show promise in real-world tasks like web navigation and embodied intelligence. However, due to limitations in a lack of external feedback, these agents struggle with self-correction and generalization. A promising approach is to use reward models as external feedback, but there is no clear on how to select reward models for agents. Thus, there is an urgent need to build a reward bench targeted at agents. To address these challenges, we propose Agent-RewardBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate reward modeling ability in MLLMs. The benchmark is characterized by three key features: (1) Multiple dimensions and real-world agent scenarios evaluation. It covers perception, planning, and safety with 7 scenarios; (2) Step-level reward evaluation. It allows for the assessment of agent capabilities at the individual steps of a task, providing a more granular view of performance during the planning process; and (3) Appropriately difficulty and high-quality. We carefully sample from 10 diverse models, difficulty control to maintain task challenges, and manual verification to ensure the integrity of the data. Experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art multimodal models show limited performance, highlighting the need for specialized training in agent reward modeling. Code is available at github.

Knowledge neuron theory provides a key approach to understanding the mechanisms of factual knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs), which suggests that facts are stored within multi-layer perceptron neurons. This paper further explores Degenerate Knowledge Neurons (DKNs), where distinct sets of neurons can store identical facts, but unlike simple redundancy, they also participate in storing other different facts. Despite the novelty and unique properties of this concept, it has not been rigorously defined and systematically studied. Our contributions are: (1) We pioneer the study of structures in knowledge neurons by analyzing weight connection patterns, providing a comprehensive definition of DKNs from both functional and structural aspects. (2) Based on this definition, we develop the Neuronal Topology Clustering method, leading to a more accurate DKN identification. (3) We demonstrate the practical applications of DKNs in two aspects: guiding LLMs to learn new knowledge and relating to LLMs’ robustness against input errors.

Personalized tool utilization is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user preference in interaction scenarios with various tools. However, most of the current benchmarks primarily focus on either personalization of text generation or direct tool-utilizing, without considering both. In this work, we introduce a novel benchmark ETAPP for evaluating personalized tool invocation, establishing a sandbox environment, and a comprehensive dataset of 800 testing cases covering diverse user profiles. To improve the accuracy of our evaluation, we propose a key-point-based LLM evaluation method, mitigating biases in the LLM-as-a-judge system by manually annotating key points for each test case and providing them to LLM as the reference. Additionally, we evaluate the excellent LLMs and provide an in-depth analysis. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of different tool-invoking strategies on LLMs’ personalization performance and the effects of fine-tuning in our task. The effectiveness of our preference-setting and key-point-based evaluation method is also validated. Our findings offer insights into improving personalized LLM agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/hypasd-art/ETAPP.

The emerging paradigm of enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate citations in Question-Answering (QA) tasks is lacking in a unified framework to standardize and fairly compare different citation generation methods, leading to difficulties in reproduction and innovation. Therefore, we introduce Citeflow, an open-source and modular framework fostering reproduction and the implementation of new designs. Citeflow is highly extensible, allowing users to utilize four main modules and 14 components to construct a pipeline, evaluate an existing method, and understand the attributing LLM-generated contents. The framework is also paired with a visual interface, Citefix, facilitating case study and modification of existing citation generation methods. Users can use this interface to conduct LLM-powered case studies according to different scenarios. Citeflow and Citefix are highly integrated into the toolkit CiteLab, and we use an authentic process of multiple rounds of improvement through the Human-LLM interaction interface to demonstrate the efficiency of our toolkit on implementing and modifying citation generation pipelines. Citelab is released at https://github.com/SjJ1017/Citelab

With the development of deep learning, natural language processing technology has effectively improved the efficiency of various aspects of the traditional judicial industry. However, most current efforts focus on tasks within individual judicial stages, making it difficult to handle complex tasks that span multiple stages. As the autonomous agents powered by large language models are becoming increasingly smart and able to make complex decisions in real-world settings, offering new insights for judicial intelligence. In this paper, (1) we propose a novel multi-agent framework, AgentsCourt, for judicial decision-making. Our framework follows the classic court trial process, consisting of court debate simulation, legal resources retrieval and decision-making refinement to simulate the decision-making of judge. (2) we introduce SimuCourt, a judicial benchmark that encompasses 420 Chinese judgment documents, spanning the three most common types of judicial cases. Furthermore, to support this task, we construct a large-scale legal knowledge base, Legal-KB, with multi-resource legal knowledge. (3) Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms the existing advanced methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles, where our model achieves significant improvements of 8.6% and 9.1% F1 score in the first and second instance settings, respectively.

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes demonstrate poor performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, commonsense reasoning is one of them. Researchers typically address these issues by retrieving related knowledge from knowledge graphs or employing self-enhancement methods to elicit knowledge in LLMs. However, noisy knowledge and invalid reasoning issues hamper their ability to answer questions accurately. To this end, we propose a novel method named eliciting, filtering and integrating knowledge in large language model (LINKED). In it, we design a reward model to filter out the noisy knowledge and take the marginal consistent reasoning module to reduce invalid reasoning. With our comprehensive experiments on two complex commonsense reasoning benchmarks, our method outperforms SOTA baselines (up to 9.0% improvement of accuracy). Besides, to measure the positive and negative impact of the injected knowledge, we propose a new metric called effectiveness-preservation score for the knowledge enhancement works. Finally, through extensive experiments, we conduct an in-depth analysis and find many meaningful conclusions about LLMs in commonsense reasoning tasks.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models have transformed ML/AI development, necessitating a reevaluation of AutoML principles for the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. To address the challenges of hyper-parameter optimization and online adaptation in RAG, we propose the AutoRAG-HP framework, which formulates the hyper-parameter tuning as an online multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem and introduces a novel two-level Hierarchical MAB (Hier-MAB) method for efficient exploration of large search spaces. We conduct extensive experiments on tuning hyper-parameters, such as top-k retrieved documents, prompt compression ratio, and embedding methods, using the ALCE-ASQA and Natural Questions datasets. Our evaluation from jointly optimization all three hyper-parameters demonstrate that MAB-based online learning methods can achieve Recall@5 ≈ 0.8 for scenarios with prominent gradients in search space, using only ~20% of the LLM API calls required by the Grid Search approach. Additionally, the proposed Hier-MAB approach outperforms other baselines in more challenging optimization scenarios. The code will be made available at https://aka.ms/autorag.

Recently, retrieval augmentation and tool augmentation have demonstrated a remarkable capability to expand the internal memory boundaries of language models (LMs) by providing external context. However, internal memory and external context inevitably clash, leading to knowledge conflicts within LMs. In this paper, we aim to interpret the mechanism of knowledge conflicts through the lens of information flow, and then mitigate conflicts by precise interventions at the pivotal point. We find there are some attention heads with opposite effects in the later layers, where memory heads can recall knowledge from internal memory, and context heads can retrieve knowledge from external context. Moreover, we reveal that the pivotal point at which knowledge conflicts emerge in LMs is the integration of inconsistent information flows by memory heads and context heads. Inspired by the insights, we propose a novel method called Pruning Head via PatH PatcHing (PH3), which can efficiently mitigate knowledge conflicts by pruning conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. PH3 can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory (↑ 44.0%) or external context (↑ 38.5%). Moreover, PH3 can also improve the performance of LMs on open-domain QA tasks. We also conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the cross-model, cross-relation, and cross-format generalization of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jinzhuoran/MConflict/.

Knowledge editing aims to rectify inaccuracies in large language models (LLMs) without costly retraining for outdated or erroneous knowledge. However, current knowledge editing methods primarily focus on single editing, failing to meet the requirements for lifelong editing. This study reveals a performance degradation encountered by knowledge editing in lifelong editing, characterized by toxicity buildup and toxicity flash, with the primary cause identified as pattern unmatch. We introduce a knowledge editing approach named Wise-Layer Knowledge Editor (WilKE), which selects editing layer based on the pattern matching degree of editing knowledge across different layers in language models. Experimental results demonstrate that, in lifelong editing, WilKE exhibits an average improvement of 46.2% and 67.8% on editing GPT2-XL and GPT-J relative to state-of-the-art knowledge editing methods.

Planning, as the core module of agents, is crucial in various fields such as embodied agents, web navigation, and tool using. With the development of large language models (LLMs), some researchers treat large language models as intelligent agents to stimulate and evaluate their planning capabilities. However, the planning mechanism is still unclear. In this work, we focus on exploring the look-ahead planning mechanism in large language models from the perspectives of information flow and internal representations. First, we study how planning is done internally by analyzing the multi-layer perception (MLP) and multi-head self-attention (MHSA) components at the last token. We find that the output of MHSA in the middle layers at the last token can directly decode the decision to some extent. Based on this discovery, we further trace the source of MHSA by information flow, and we reveal that MHSA extracts information from spans of the goal states and recent steps. According to information flow, we continue to study what information is encoded within it. Specifically, we explore whether future decisions have been considered in advance in the representation of flow. We demonstrate that the middle and upper layers encode a few short-term future decisions. Overall, our research analyzes the look-ahead planning mechanisms of LLMs, facilitating future research on LLMs performing planning tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities but still suffer from the issue of hallucinations. A significant type of this issue is the false premise hallucination, which we define as the phenomenon when LLMs generate hallucinated text when confronted with false premise questions. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the false premise hallucination and elucidate its internal working mechanism: a small subset of attention heads (which we designate as false premise heads) disturb the knowledge extraction process, leading to the occurrence of false premise hallucination. Based on our analysis, we propose FAITH (False premise Attention head constraIining for miTigating Hallucinations), a novel and effective method to mitigate false premise hallucinations. It constrains the false premise attention heads during the model inference process. Impressively, extensive experiments demonstrate that constraining only approximately 1% of the attention heads in the model yields a notable increase of nearly 20% of model performance.

Large language models have become integral to question-answering applications despite their propensity for generating hallucinations and factually inaccurate content. Querying knowledge graphs to reduce hallucinations in LLM meets the challenge of incomplete knowledge coverage in knowledge graphs. On the other hand, updating knowledge graphs by information extraction and knowledge graph completion faces the knowledge update misalignment issue. In this work, we introduce a collaborative augmentation framework, CogMG, leveraging knowledge graphs to address the limitations of LLMs in QA scenarios, explicitly targeting the problems of incomplete knowledge coverage and knowledge update misalignment. The LLMs identify and decompose required knowledge triples that are not present in the KG, enriching them and aligning updates with real-world demands. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach through a supervised fine-tuned LLM within an agent framework, showing significant improvements in reducing hallucinations and enhancing factual accuracy in QA responses. Our code and video are publicly available.

This paper describes our approach to develop a complex named entity recognition system in SemEval 2022 Task 11: MultiCoNER Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition,Track 9 - Chinese. In this task, we need to identify the entity boundaries and categorylabels for the six identified categories of CW,LOC, PER, GRP, CORP, and PORD.The task focuses on detecting semantically ambiguous and complex entities in short and low-context settings. We constructed a hybrid system based on Roberta-large model with three training mechanisms and a series of data gugmentation.Three training mechanisms include adversarial training, Child-Tuning training, and continued pre-training. The core idea of the hybrid system is to improve the performance of the model in complex environments by introducing more domain knowledge through data augmentation and continuing pre-training domain adaptation of the model. Our proposed method in this paper achieves a macro-F1 of 0.797 on the final test set, ranking second.