Education
A Comprehensive Survey on Long Context Language Modeling
Liu, Jiaheng, Zhu, Dawei, Bai, Zhiqi, He, Yancheng, Liao, Huanxuan, Que, Haoran, Wang, Zekun, Zhang, Chenchen, Zhang, Ge, Zhang, Jiebin, Zhang, Yuanxing, Chen, Zhuo, Guo, Hangyu, Li, Shilong, Liu, Ziqiang, Shan, Yong, Song, Yifan, Tian, Jiayi, Wu, Wenhao, Zhou, Zhejian, Zhu, Ruijie, Feng, Junlan, Gao, Yang, He, Shizhu, Li, Zhoujun, Liu, Tianyu, Meng, Fanyu, Su, Wenbo, Tan, Yingshui, Wang, Zili, Yang, Jian, Ye, Wei, Zheng, Bo, Zhou, Wangchunshu, Huang, Wenhao, Li, Sujian, Zhang, Zhaoxiang
Efficient processing of long contexts has been a persistent pursuit in Natural Language Processing. With the growing number of long documents, dialogues, and other textual data, it is important to develop Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) that can process and analyze extensive inputs in an effective and efficient way. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in long-context modeling for large language models. Our survey is structured around three key aspects: how to obtain effective and efficient LCLMs, how to train and deploy LCLMs efficiently, and how to evaluate and analyze LCLMs comprehensively. For the first aspect, we discuss data strategies, architectural designs, and workflow approaches oriented with long context processing. For the second aspect, we provide a detailed examination of the infrastructure required for LCLM training and inference. For the third aspect, we present evaluation paradigms for long-context comprehension and long-form generation, as well as behavioral analysis and mechanism interpretability of LCLMs. Beyond these three key aspects, we thoroughly explore the diverse application scenarios where existing LCLMs have been deployed and outline promising future development directions. This survey provides an up-to-date review of the literature on long-context LLMs, which we wish to serve as a valuable resource for both researchers and engineers. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: \href{https://github.com/LCLM-Horizon/A-Comprehensive-Survey-For-Long-Context-Language-Modeling}{\color[RGB]{175,36,67}{LCLM-Horizon}}.
Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agents
Yehudai, Asaf, Eden, Lilach, Li, Alan, Uziel, Guy, Zhao, Yilun, Bar-Haim, Roy, Cohan, Arman, Shmueli-Scheuer, Michal
The emergence of LLM-based agents represents a paradigm shift in AI, enabling autonomous systems to plan, reason, use tools, and maintain memory while interacting with dynamic environments. This paper provides the first comprehensive survey of evaluation methodologies for these increasingly capable agents. We systematically analyze evaluation benchmarks and frameworks across four critical dimensions: (1) fundamental agent capabilities, including planning, tool use, self-reflection, and memory; (2) application-specific benchmarks for web, software engineering, scientific, and conversational agents; (3) benchmarks for generalist agents; and (4) frameworks for evaluating agents. Our analysis reveals emerging trends, including a shift toward more realistic, challenging evaluations with continuously updated benchmarks. We also identify critical gaps that future research must address-particularly in assessing cost-efficiency, safety, and robustness, and in developing fine-grained, and scalable evaluation methods. This survey maps the rapidly evolving landscape of agent evaluation, reveals the emerging trends in the field, identifies current limitations, and proposes directions for future research.
WritingBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Generative Writing
Wu, Yuning, Mei, Jiahao, Yan, Ming, Li, Chenliang, Lai, Shaopeng, Ren, Yuran, Wang, Zijia, Zhang, Ji, Wu, Mengyue, Jin, Qin, Huang, Fei
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced text generation capabilities, yet evaluating their performance in generative writing remains a challenge. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on generic text generation or limited in writing tasks, failing to capture the diverse requirements of high-quality written contents across various domains. To bridge this gap, we present WritingBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across 6 core writing domains and 100 subdomains, encompassing creative, persuasive, informative, and technical writing. We further propose a query-dependent evaluation framework that empowers LLMs to dynamically generate instance-specific assessment criteria. This framework is complemented by a fine-tuned critic model for criteria-aware scoring, enabling evaluations in style, format and length. The framework's validity is further demonstrated by its data curation capability, which enables 7B-parameter models to approach state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. We open-source the benchmark, along with evaluation tools and modular framework components, to advance the development of LLMs in writing.
Distributed Learning over Arbitrary Topology: Linear Speed-Up with Polynomial Transient Time
We study a distributed learning problem in which $n$ agents, each with potentially heterogeneous local data, collaboratively minimize the sum of their local cost functions via peer-to-peer communication. We propose a novel algorithm, Spanning Tree Push-Pull (STPP), which employs two spanning trees extracted from a general communication graph to distribute both model parameters and stochastic gradients. Unlike prior approaches that rely heavily on spectral gap properties, STPP leverages a more flexible topological characterization, enabling robust information flow and efficient updates. Theoretically, we prove that STPP achieves linear speedup and polynomial transient iteration complexity, up to $O(n^7)$ for smooth nonconvex objectives and $\tilde{O}(n^3)$ for smooth strongly convex objectives, under arbitrary network topologies. Moreover, compared with the existing methods, STPP achieves faster convergence rates on sparse and non-regular topologies (e.g., directed ring) and reduces communication overhead on dense networks (e.g., static exponential graph). These results significantly advance the state of the art, especially when $n$ is large. Numerical experiments further demonstrate the strong performance of STPP and confirm the practical relevance of its theoretical convergence rates across various common graph architectures. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SpanningTreePushPull-5D3E.
GC-Fed: Gradient Centralized Federated Learning with Partial Client Participation
Seo, Jungwon, Catak, Ferhat Ozgur, Rong, Chunming, Hong, Kibeom, Kim, Minhoe
Federated Learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving multi-source information fusion (MSIF) but is challenged by client drift in highly heterogeneous data settings. Many existing drift-mitigation strategies rely on reference-based techniques--such as gradient adjustments or proximal loss--that use historical snapshots (e.g., past gradients or previous global models) as reference points. When only a subset of clients participates in each training round, these historical references may not accurately capture the overall data distribution, leading to unstable training. In contrast, our proposed Gradient Centralized Federated Learning (GC-Fed) employs a hyperplane as a historically independent reference point to guide local training and enhance inter-client alignment. GC-Fed comprises two complementary components: Local GC, which centralizes gradients during local training, and Global GC, which centralizes updates during server aggregation. In our hybrid design, Local GC is applied to feature-extraction layers to harmonize client contributions, while Global GC refines classifier layers to stabilize round-wise performance. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on benchmark FL tasks demonstrate that GC-Fed effectively mitigates client drift and achieves up to a 20% improvement in accuracy under heterogeneous and partial participation conditions.
SePer: Measure Retrieval Utility Through The Lens Of Semantic Perplexity Reduction
Dai, Lu, Xu, Yijie, Ye, Jinhui, Liu, Hao, Xiong, Hui
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated improved generation performance by incorporating externally retrieved knowledge, a process known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Despite the potential of this approach, existing studies evaluate RAG effectiveness by 1) assessing retrieval and generation components jointly, which obscures retrieval's distinct contribution, or 2) examining retrievers using traditional metrics such as NDCG, which creates a gap in understanding retrieval's true utility in the overall generation process. To address the above limitations, in this work, we introduce an automatic evaluation method that measures retrieval quality through the lens of information gain within the RAG framework. Specifically, we propose Semantic Perplexity (SePer), a metric that captures the LLM's internal belief about the correctness of the retrieved information. We quantify the utility of retrieval by the extent to which it reduces semantic perplexity post-retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SePer not only aligns closely with human preferences but also offers a more precise and efficient evaluation of retrieval utility across diverse RAG scenarios.
Unifying 2D and 3D Vision-Language Understanding
Jain, Ayush, Swerdlow, Alexander, Wang, Yuzhou, Arnaud, Sergio, Martin, Ada, Sax, Alexander, Meier, Franziska, Fragkiadaki, Katerina
Progress in 3D vision-language learning has been hindered by the scarcity of large-scale 3D datasets. We introduce UniVLG, a unified architecture for 2D and 3D vision-language understanding that bridges the gap between existing 2D-centric models and the rich 3D sensory data available in embodied systems. Our approach initializes most model weights from pre-trained 2D models and trains on both 2D and 3D vision-language data. We propose a novel language-conditioned mask decoder shared across 2D and 3D modalities to ground objects effectively in both RGB and RGB-D images, outperforming box-based approaches. To further reduce the domain gap between 2D and 3D, we incorporate 2D-to-3D lifting strategies, enabling UniVLG to utilize 2D data to enhance 3D performance. With these innovations, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple 3D vision-language grounding tasks, demonstrating the potential of transferring advances from 2D vision-language learning to the data-constrained 3D domain. Furthermore, co-training on both 2D and 3D data enhances performance across modalities without sacrificing 2D capabilities. By removing the reliance on 3D mesh reconstruction and ground-truth object proposals, UniVLG sets a new standard for realistic, embodied-aligned evaluation. Code and additional visualizations are available at https://univlg.github.io .
F\`ux\`i: A Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models on Ancient Chinese Text Understanding and Generation
Zhao, Shangqing, Zhou, Yuhao, Ren, Yupei, Chen, Zhe, Jia, Chenghao, Zhe, Fang, Long, Zhaogaung, Liu, Shu, Lan, Man
Ancient Chinese text processing presents unique challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to its distinct linguistic features, complex structural constraints, and rich cultural context. While existing benchmarks have primarily focused on evaluating comprehension through multiple-choice questions, there remains a critical gap in assessing models' generative capabilities in classical Chinese. We introduce F\`ux\`i, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates both understanding and generation capabilities across 21 diverse tasks. Our benchmark distinguishes itself through three key contributions: (1) balanced coverage of both comprehension and generation tasks, including novel tasks like poetry composition and couplet completion, (2) specialized evaluation metrics designed specifically for classical Chinese text generation, combining rule-based verification with fine-tuned LLM evaluators, and (3) a systematic assessment framework that considers both linguistic accuracy and cultural authenticity. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, we reveal significant performance gaps between understanding and generation tasks, with models achieving promising results in comprehension but struggling considerably in generation tasks, particularly those requiring deep cultural knowledge and adherence to classical formats. Our findings highlight the current limitations in ancient Chinese text processing and provide insights for future model development. The benchmark, evaluation toolkit, and baseline results are publicly available to facilitate research in this domain.
SuperARC: A Test for General and Super Intelligence Based on First Principles of Recursion Theory and Algorithmic Probability
Hernรกndez-Espinosa, Alberto, Ozelim, Luan, Abrahรฃo, Felipe S., Zenil, Hector
We introduce an open-ended test grounded in algorithmic probability that can avoid benchmark contamination in the quantitative evaluation of frontier models in the context of their Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Superintelligence (ASI) claims. Unlike other tests, this test does not rely on statistical compression methods (such as GZIP or LZW), which are more closely related to Shannon entropy than to Kolmogorov complexity. The test challenges aspects related to features of intelligence of fundamental nature such as synthesis and model creation in the context of inverse problems (generating new knowledge from observation). We argue that metrics based on model abstraction and optimal Bayesian inference for planning can provide a robust framework for testing intelligence, including natural intelligence (human and animal), narrow AI, AGI, and ASI. Our results show no clear evidence of LLM convergence towards a defined level of intelligence, particularly AGI or ASI. We found that LLM model versions tend to be fragile and incremental, as new versions may perform worse than older ones, with progress largely driven by the size of training data. The results were compared with a hybrid neurosymbolic approach that theoretically guarantees model convergence from optimal inference based on the principles of algorithmic probability and Kolmogorov complexity. The method outperforms LLMs in a proof-of-concept on short binary sequences. Our findings confirm suspicions regarding the fundamental limitations of LLMs, exposing them as systems optimised for the perception of mastery over human language. Progress among different LLM versions from the same developers was found to be inconsistent and limited, particularly in the absence of a solid symbolic counterpart.
Speeding up design and making to reduce time-to-project and time-to-market: an AI-Enhanced approach in engineering education
Adorni, Giovanni, Grosso, Daniele
This paper explores the integration of AI tools, such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, in the Software Architecture for Embedded Systems course. AI-supported workflows enabled students to rapidly prototype complex projects, emphasizing real-world applications like SLAM robotics. Results demon-started enhanced problem-solving, faster development, and more sophisticated outcomes, with AI augmenting but not replacing human decision-making.