Education
Language Model Personalization via Reward Factorization
Shenfeld, Idan, Faltings, Felix, Agrawal, Pulkit, Pacchiano, Aldo
Modern large language models (LLMs) are optimized for human-aligned responses using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, existing RLHF approaches assume a universal preference model and fail to account for individual user preferences, limiting their effectiveness in personalized applications. We introduce a framework that extends RLHF to enable user personalization by leveraging the assumption that user preferences lie in a low-dimensional space. Instead of training a separate model per user, we represent user-specific rewards as a linear combination of base reward functions. Using only 10 user responses, our method can infer user-specific rewards and align LLM outputs accordingly. We validate our approach through experiments with both synthetic and real users, demonstrating significant personalization achieved by our method. In human evaluations, our method achieves a 67% win rate over default GPT-4o responses. Code and demo are available at https://idanshen.github.io/PReF/.
KnowLogic: A Benchmark for Commonsense Reasoning via Knowledge-Driven Data Synthesis
Zhan, Weidong, Wang, Yue, Hu, Nan, Xiao, Liming, Ma, Jingyuan, Qin, Yuhang, Li, Zheng, Yang, Yixin, Deng, Sirui, Ding, Jinkun, Ma, Wenhan, Li, Rui, Luo, Weilin, Liu, Qun, Sui, Zhifang
Current evaluations of commonsense reasoning in LLMs are hindered by the scarcity of natural language corpora with structured annotations for reasoning tasks. To address this, we introduce KnowLogic, a benchmark generated through a knowledge-driven synthetic data strategy. KnowLogic integrates diverse commonsense knowledge, plausible scenarios, and various types of logical reasoning. One of the key advantages of KnowLogic is its adjustable difficulty levels, allowing for flexible control over question complexity. It also includes fine-grained labels for in-depth evaluation of LLMs' reasoning abilities across multiple dimensions. Our benchmark consists of 3,000 bilingual (Chinese and English) questions across various domains, and presents significant challenges for current LLMs, with the highest-performing model achieving only 69.57\%. Our analysis highlights common errors, such as misunderstandings of low-frequency commonsense, logical inconsistencies, and overthinking. This approach, along with our benchmark, provides a valuable tool for assessing and enhancing LLMs' commonsense reasoning capabilities and can be applied to a wide range of knowledge domains.
CUPCase: Clinically Uncommon Patient Cases and Diagnoses Dataset
Perets, Oriel, Shoham, Ofir Ben, Grinberg, Nir, Rappoport, Nadav
Medical benchmark datasets significantly contribute to developing Large Language Models (LLMs) for medical knowledge extraction, diagnosis, summarization, and other uses. Yet, current benchmarks are mainly derived from exam questions given to medical students or cases described in the medical literature, lacking the complexity of real-world patient cases that deviate from classic textbook abstractions. These include rare diseases, uncommon presentations of common diseases, and unexpected treatment responses. Here, we construct Clinically Uncommon Patient Cases and Diagnosis Dataset (CUPCase) based on 3,562 real-world case reports from BMC, including diagnoses in open-ended textual format and as multiple-choice options with distractors. Using this dataset, we evaluate the ability of state-of-the-art LLMs, including both general-purpose and Clinical LLMs, to identify and correctly diagnose a patient case, and test models' performance when only partial information about cases is available. Our findings show that general-purpose GPT-4o attains the best performance in both the multiple-choice task (average accuracy of 87.9%) and the open-ended task (BERTScore F1 of 0.764), outperforming several LLMs with a focus on the medical domain such as Meditron-70B and MedLM-Large. Moreover, GPT-4o was able to maintain 87% and 88% of its performance with only the first 20% of tokens of the case presentation in multiple-choice and free text, respectively, highlighting the potential of LLMs to aid in early diagnosis in real-world cases. CUPCase expands our ability to evaluate LLMs for clinical decision support in an open and reproducible manner.
Human-AI Experience in Integrated Development Environments: A Systematic Literature Review
Sergeyuk, Agnia, Zakharov, Ilya, Koshchenko, Ekaterina, Izadi, Maliheh
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) is reshaping software development, fundamentally altering how developers interact with their tools. This shift marks the emergence of Human-AI Experience in Integrated Development Environment (in-IDE HAX), a field that explores the evolving dynamics of Human-Computer Interaction in AI-assisted coding environments. Despite rapid adoption, research on in-IDE HAX remains fragmented which highlights the need for a unified overview of current practices, challenges, and opportunities. To provide a structured overview of existing research, we conduct a systematic literature review of 89 studies, summarizing current findings and outlining areas for further investigation. Our findings reveal that AI-assisted coding enhances developer productivity but also introduces challenges, such as verification overhead, automation bias, and over-reliance, particularly among novice developers. Furthermore, concerns about code correctness, security, and maintainability highlight the urgent need for explainability, verification mechanisms, and adaptive user control. Although recent advances have driven the field forward, significant research gaps remain, including a lack of longitudinal studies, personalization strategies, and AI governance frameworks. This review provides a foundation for advancing in-IDE HAX research and offers guidance for responsibly integrating AI into software development.
A Survey on Post-training of Large Language Models
Tie, Guiyao, Zhao, Zeli, Song, Dingjie, Wei, Fuyang, Zhou, Rong, Dai, Yurou, Yin, Wen, Yang, Zhejian, Yan, Jiangyue, Su, Yao, Dai, Zhenhan, Xie, Yifeng, Cao, Yihan, Sun, Lichao, Zhou, Pan, He, Lifang, Chen, Hechang, Zhang, Yu, Wen, Qingsong, Liu, Tianming, Gong, Neil Zhenqiang, Tang, Jiliang, Xiong, Caiming, Ji, Heng, Yu, Philip S., Gao, Jianfeng
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally transformed natural language processing, making them indispensable across domains ranging from conversational systems to scientific exploration. However, their pre-trained architectures often reveal limitations in specialized contexts, including restricted reasoning capacities, ethical uncertainties, and suboptimal domain-specific performance. These challenges necessitate advanced post-training language models (PoLMs) to address these shortcomings, such as OpenAI-o1/o3 and DeepSeek-R1 (collectively known as Large Reasoning Models, or LRMs). This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of PoLMs, systematically tracing their evolution across five core paradigms: Fine-tuning, which enhances task-specific accuracy; Alignment, which ensures alignment with human preferences; Reasoning, which advances multi-step inference despite challenges in reward design; Efficiency, which optimizes resource utilization amidst increasing complexity; and Integration and Adaptation, which extend capabilities across diverse modalities while addressing coherence issues. Charting progress from ChatGPT's foundational alignment strategies to DeepSeek-R1's innovative reasoning advancements, we illustrate how PoLMs leverage datasets to mitigate biases, deepen reasoning capabilities, and enhance domain adaptability. Our contributions include a pioneering synthesis of PoLM evolution, a structured taxonomy categorizing techniques and datasets, and a strategic agenda emphasizing the role of LRMs in improving reasoning proficiency and domain flexibility. As the first survey of its scope, this work consolidates recent PoLM advancements and establishes a rigorous intellectual framework for future research, fostering the development of LLMs that excel in precision, ethical robustness, and versatility across scientific and societal applications.
STAR: A Foundation Model-driven Framework for Robust Task Planning and Failure Recovery in Robotic Systems
Modern robotic systems, deployed across domains from industrial automation to domestic assistance, face a critical challenge: executing tasks with precision and adaptability in dynamic, unpredictable environments. To address this, we propose STAR (Smart Task Adaptation and Recovery), a novel framework that synergizes Foundation Models (FMs) with dynamically expanding Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to enable resilient task planning and autonomous failure recovery. While FMs offer remarkable generalization and contextual reasoning, their limitations, including computational inefficiency, hallucinations, and output inconsistencies hinder reliable deployment. STAR mitigates these issues by embedding learned knowledge into structured, reusable KGs, which streamline information retrieval, reduce redundant FM computations, and provide precise, scenario-specific insights. The framework leverages FM-driven reasoning to diagnose failures, generate context-aware recovery strategies, and execute corrective actions without human intervention or system restarts. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on rigid protocols, STAR dynamically expands its KG with experiential knowledge, ensuring continuous adaptation to novel scenarios. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we developed a comprehensive dataset that includes various robotic tasks and failure scenarios. Through extensive experimentation, STAR demonstrated an 86% task planning accuracy and 78% recovery success rate, showing significant improvements over baseline methods. The framework's ability to continuously learn from experience while maintaining structured knowledge representation makes it particularly suitable for long-term deployment in real-world applications.
M2-omni: Advancing Omni-MLLM for Comprehensive Modality Support with Competitive Performance
Guo, Qingpei, Song, Kaiyou, Feng, Zipeng, Ma, Ziping, Zhang, Qinglong, Gao, Sirui, Yu, Xuzheng, Sun, Yunxiao, Chang, Tai-Wei, Chen, Jingdong, Yang, Ming, Zhou, Jun
We present M2-omni, a cutting-edge, open-source omni-MLLM that achieves competitive performance to GPT-4o. M2-omni employs a unified multimodal sequence modeling framework, which empowers Large Language Models(LLMs) to acquire comprehensive cross-modal understanding and generation capabilities. Specifically, M2-omni can process arbitrary combinations of audio, video, image, and text modalities as input, generating multimodal sequences interleaving with audio, image, or text outputs, thereby enabling an advanced and interactive real-time experience. The training of such an omni-MLLM is challenged by significant disparities in data quantity and convergence rates across modalities. To address these challenges, we propose a step balance strategy during pre-training to handle the quantity disparities in modality-specific data. Additionally, a dynamically adaptive balance strategy is introduced during the instruction tuning stage to synchronize the modality-wise training progress, ensuring optimal convergence. Notably, we prioritize preserving strong performance on pure text tasks to maintain the robustness of M2-omni's language understanding capability throughout the training process. To our best knowledge, M2-omni is currently a very competitive open-source model to GPT-4o, characterized by its comprehensive modality and task support, as well as its exceptional performance. We expect M2-omni will advance the development of omni-MLLMs, thus facilitating future research in this domain.
Applicability of the Minimal Dominating Set for Influence Maximisation in Multilayer Networks
Czuba, Michał, Jia, Mingshan, Bródka, Piotr, Musial, Katarzyna
The minimal dominating set (MDS) is a well-established concept in network controllability and has been successfully applied in various domains, including sensor placement, network resilience, and epidemic containment. In this study, we adapt the local-improvement MDS routine and explore its potential for enhancing seed selection for influence maximisation in multilayer networks (MLN). We employ the Linear Threshold Model (LTM), which offers an intuitive representation of influence spread or opinion dynamics by accounting for peer influence accumulation. To ensure interpretability, we utilise rank-refining seed selection methods, with the results further filtered with MDS. Our findings reveal that incorporating MDS into the seed selection process improves spread only within a specific range of situations. Notably, the improvement is observed for larger seed set budgets, lower activation thresholds, and when an "AND" strategy is used to aggregate influence across network layers. This scenario reflects situations where an individual does not require the majority of their acquaintances to hold a target opinion, but must be influenced across all social circles.
BARK: A Fully Bayesian Tree Kernel for Black-box Optimization
Boyne, Toby, Folch, Jose Pablo, Lee, Robert M, Shafei, Behrang, Misener, Ruth
We perform Bayesian optimization using a Gaussian process perspective on Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART). Our BART Kernel (BARK) uses tree agreement to define a posterior over piecewise-constant functions, and we explore the space of tree kernels using a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. Where BART only samples functions, the resulting BARK model obtains samples of Gaussian processes defining distributions over functions, which allow us to build acquisition functions for Bayesian optimization. Our tree-based approach enables global optimization over the surrogate, even for mixed-feature spaces. Moreover, where many previous tree-based kernels provide uncertainty quantification over function values, our sampling scheme captures uncertainty over the tree structure itself. Our experiments show the strong performance of BARK on both synthetic and applied benchmarks, due to the combination of our fully Bayesian surrogate and the optimization procedure.
Learning LLM Preference over Intra-Dialogue Pairs: A Framework for Utterance-level Understandings
Liu, Xuanqing, Kong, Luyang, Niu, Wei, Khashei, Afshin, Zeng, Belinda, Johnson, Steve, Jay, Jon, Golac, Davor, Pope, Matt
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex dialogue tasks without requiring use case-specific fine-tuning. However, analyzing live dialogues in real-time necessitates low-latency processing systems, making it impractical to deploy models with billions of parameters due to latency constraints. As a result, practitioners often prefer smaller models with millions of parameters, trained on high-quality, human-annotated datasets. Yet, curating such datasets is both time-consuming and costly. Consequently, there is a growing need to combine the scalability of LLM-generated labels with the precision of human annotations, enabling fine-tuned smaller models to achieve both higher speed and accuracy comparable to larger models. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective framework to address this challenge. Our approach is specifically designed for per-utterance classification problems, which encompass tasks such as intent detection, dialogue state tracking, and more. To mitigate the impact of labeling errors from LLMs -- the primary source of inaccuracies in student models -- we propose a noise-reduced preference learning loss. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves accuracy across utterance-level dialogue tasks, including sentiment detection (over $2\%$), dialogue act classification (over $1.5\%$), etc.