Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks, yet they remain prone to hallucinations when reasoning with insufficient internal knowledge. While integrating LLMs with knowledge graphs (KGs) provides access to structured, verifiable information, existing approaches often generate incomplete or factually inconsistent reasoning paths. To this end, we propose Self-Reflective Planning (SRP), a framework that synergizes LLMs with KGs through iterative, reference-guided reasoning. Specifically, given a question and topic entities, SRP first searches for references to guide planning and reflection. In the planning process, it checks initial relations and generates a reasoning path. After retrieving knowledge from KGs through a reasoning path, it implements iterative reflection by judging the retrieval result and editing the reasoning path until the answer is correctly retrieved. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that SRP surpasses various strong baselines and further underscore its reliable reasoning ability.

This paper examines how large language models (LLMs) are transforming core quantitative methods in communication research in particular, and in the social sciences more broadly-namely, content analysis, survey research, and experimental studies. Rather than replacing classical approaches, LLMs introduce new possibilities for coding and interpreting text, simulating dynamic respondents, and generating personalized and interactive stimuli. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary work, the paper highlights both the potential and limitations of LLMs as research tools, including issues of validity, bias, and interpretability. To situate these developments theoretically, the paper revisits Lasswell's foundational framework -- "Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?" -- and demonstrates how LLMs reconfigure message studies, audience analysis, and effects research by enabling interpretive variation, audience trajectory modeling, and counterfactual experimentation. Revisiting the metaphor of the methodological compass, the paper argues that classical research logics remain essential as the field integrates LLMs and generative AI. By treating LLMs not only as technical instruments but also as epistemic and cultural tools, the paper calls for thoughtful, rigorous, and imaginative use of LLMs in future communication and social science research.

Understanding true influence in social media requires distinguishing correlation from causation--particularly when analyzing misinformation spread. While existing approaches focus on exposure metrics and network structures, they often fail to capture the causal mechanisms by which external temporal signals trigger engagement. We introduce a novel joint treatment-outcome framework that leverages existing sequential models to simultaneously adapt to both policy timing and engagement effects. Our approach adapts causal inference techniques from healthcare to estimate Average Treatment Effects (ATE) within the sequential nature of social media interactions, tackling challenges from external confounding signals. Through our experiments on real-world misinformation and disinformation datasets, we show that our models outperform existing benchmarks by 15--22% in predicting engagement across diverse counterfactual scenarios, including exposure adjustment, timing shifts, and varied intervention durations. Case studies on 492 social media users show our causal effect measure aligns strongly with the gold standard in influence estimation, the expert-based empirical influence.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) demonstrate their impressive reasoning capabilities. However, the reasoning confined to internal parametric space limits LLMs' access to real-time information and understanding of the physical world. To overcome this constraint, we introduce SituatedThinker, a novel framework that enables LLMs to ground their reasoning in real-world contexts through situated thinking, which adaptively combines both internal knowledge and external information with predefined interfaces. By utilizing reinforcement learning, SituatedThinker incentivizes deliberate reasoning with the real world to acquire information and feedback, allowing LLMs to surpass their knowledge boundaries and enhance reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements on multi-hop question-answering and mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, SituatedThinker demonstrates strong performance on unseen tasks, such as KBQA, TableQA, and text-based games, showcasing the generalizable real-world grounded reasoning capability. Our codes are available at https://github.com/jnanliu/SituatedThinker.

This position paper argues that token prediction is fundamentally misaligned with real creativity. While next-token models have enabled impressive advances in language generation, their architecture favours surface-level coherence over spontaneity, originality, and improvisational risk. In contrast, creative acts, particularly in live performance domains, require dynamic responsiveness and stylistic divergence, enabling humans to transcend pre-learned patterns in the moment. We use battle rap as a case study to expose the limitations of predictive systems, demonstrating that they cannot truly engage in adversarial or emotionally resonant exchanges. As a result, such models fail to support the interactive flow states where human creators "lose themselves in the moment." Rather than pursuing greater predictive accuracy, we argue that AI research should embrace dialogue as a form of co-negotiated creative agency. This shift calls for approaches that prioritize real-time interaction, rhythmic alignment, and adaptive generative control. By reframing creativity as an interactive process rather than a predictive output, we offer a vision for AI systems that are more expressive, responsive, and aligned with human creative practice.

Inconsistent political statements represent a form of misinformation. They erode public trust and pose challenges to accountability, when left unnoticed. Detecting inconsistencies automatically could support journalists in asking clarification questions, thereby helping to keep politicians accountable. We propose the Inconsistency detection task and develop a scale of inconsistency types to prompt NLP-research in this direction. To provide a resource for detecting inconsistencies in a political domain, we present a dataset of 698 human-annotated pairs of political statements with explanations of the annotators' reasoning for 237 samples. The statements mainly come from voting assistant platforms such as Wahl-O-Mat in Germany and Smartvote in Switzerland, reflecting real-world political issues. We benchmark Large Language Models (LLMs) on our dataset and show that in general, they are as good as humans at detecting inconsistencies, and might be even better than individual humans at predicting the crowd-annotated ground-truth. However, when it comes to identifying fine-grained inconsistency types, none of the model have reached the upper bound of performance (due to natural labeling variation), thus leaving room for improvement. We make our dataset and code publicly available.

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, they still face challenges in knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning. Recent work explores iterative retrieval to address complex problems. However, the lack of intermediate guidance often results in inaccurate retrieval and flawed intermediate reasoning, leading to incorrect reasoning. To address these, we propose Self-Critique Guided Iterative Reasoning (SiGIR), which uses self-critique feedback to guide the iterative reasoning process. Specifically, through end-to-end training, we enable the model to iteratively address complex problems via question decomposition. Additionally, the model is able to self-evaluate its intermediate reasoning steps. During iterative reasoning, the model engages in branching exploration and employs self-evaluation to guide the selection of promising reasoning trajectories. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop reasoning datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, surpassing the previous SOTA by $8.6\%$. Furthermore, our thorough analysis offers insights for future research. Our code, data, and models are available at Github: https://github.com/zchuz/SiGIR-MHQA.

The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has sparked growing interest in building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) within Graphical User Interface (GUI) environments. However, existing GUI agents based on LLMs or vision-language models (VLMs) often fail to generalize to novel environments and rely heavily on manually curated, diverse datasets. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ScreenExplorer, a VLM trained via Group Relative Policy Optimization(GRPO) in real, dynamic, and open-ended GUI environments. Innovatively, we introduced a world-model-based curiosity reward function to help the agent overcome the cold-start phase of exploration. Additionally, distilling experience streams further enhances the model's exploration capabilities. Our training framework enhances model exploration in open GUI environments, with trained models showing better environmental adaptation and sustained exploration compared to static deployment models. Our findings offer a scalable pathway toward AGI systems with self-improving capabilities in complex interactive settings.

We introduce the Exemplar-Based Expository Text Generation task, aiming to generate an expository text on a new topic using an exemplar on a similar topic. Current methods fall short due to their reliance on extensive exemplar data, difficulty in adapting topic-specific content, and issues with long-text coherence. To address these challenges, we propose the concept of Adaptive Imitation and present a novel Recurrent Plan-then-Adapt (RePA) framework. RePA leverages large language models (LLMs) for effective adaptive imitation through a fine-grained plan-then-adapt process. RePA also enables recurrent segment-by-segment imitation, supported by two memory structures that enhance input clarity and output coherence. We also develop task-specific evaluation metrics--imitativeness, adaptiveness, and adaptive-imitativeness--using LLMs as evaluators. Experimental results across our collected three diverse datasets demonstrate that RePA surpasses existing baselines in producing factual, consistent, and relevant texts for this task.

In PINNs [11], the governing law is known as a given partial differential equation (PDE), then the solution of the equation is modeled by a deep NN that is designed to minimize the equation loss. This idea was also adopted into image processing pipelines to enhance performance and interpretability [12, 13]. When the governing laws are unknown, NOs are an alternative method, which learns the solution operator as a mapping between infinite-dimensional function spaces [14, 15], enabling accurate and consistent predictions of continuum physical surrogates. However, vanilla NOs cannot provide interpretability of the underlying physics. Constitutive operator learning: In order to provide physical interpretability for systems with unknown governing laws, researchers propose to learn constitutive laws [16-18].