Large Language Model
Reasoning Beyond Language: A Comprehensive Survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Chen, Xinghao, Zhao, Anhao, Xia, Heming, Lu, Xuan, Wang, Hanlin, Chen, Yanjun, Zhang, Wei, Wang, Jian, Li, Wenjie, Shen, Xiaoyu
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, conventional CoT relies on explicitly verbalized intermediate steps, which constrains its broader applicability, particularly in abstract reasoning tasks beyond language. To address this, there has been growing research interest in \textit{latent CoT reasoning}, where the reasoning process is embedded within latent spaces. By decoupling reasoning from explicit language generation, latent CoT offers the promise of richer cognitive representations and facilitates more flexible, faster inference. This paper aims to present a comprehensive overview of this emerging paradigm and establish a systematic taxonomy. We analyze recent advances in methods, categorizing them from token-wise horizontal approaches to layer-wise vertical strategies. We then provide in-depth discussions of these methods, highlighting their design principles, applications, and remaining challenges. We hope that our survey provides a structured foundation for advancing this promising direction in LLM reasoning. The relevant papers will be regularly updated at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Awesome-Latent-CoT.
Beyond Empathy: Integrating Diagnostic and Therapeutic Reasoning with Large Language Models for Mental Health Counseling
Hu, He, Zhou, Yucheng, Si, Juzheng, Wang, Qianning, Zhang, Hengheng, Ren, Fuji, Ma, Fei, Cui, Laizhong, Tian, Qi
Large language models (LLMs) hold significant potential for mental health support, capable of generating empathetic responses and simulating therapeutic conversations. However, existing LLM-based approaches often lack the clinical grounding necessary for real-world psychological counseling, particularly in explicit diagnostic reasoning aligned with standards like the DSM/ICD and incorporating diverse therapeutic modalities beyond basic empathy or single strategies. To address these critical limitations, we propose PsyLLM, the first large language model designed to systematically integrate both diagnostic and therapeutic reasoning for mental health counseling. To develop PsyLLM, we design a novel automated data synthesis pipeline that processes real-world mental health posts collected from Reddit, where users frequently share psychological distress and seek community support. This pipeline processes real-world mental health posts, generates multi-turn dialogue structures, and leverages LLMs guided by international diagnostic standards (e.g., DSM/ICD) and multiple therapeutic frameworks (e.g., CBT, ACT, psychodynamic) to simulate detailed clinical reasoning processes. Rigorous multi-dimensional filtering ensures the generation of high-quality, clinically aligned dialogue data. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark and evaluation protocol, assessing counseling quality across four key dimensions. Our experiments demonstrate that PsyLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models on this benchmark. The model weights and dataset have been publicly released at https://github.com/Emo-gml/PsyLLM.
From Grounding to Manipulation: Case Studies of Foundation Model Integration in Embodied Robotic Systems
Sui, Xiuchao, Tian, Daiying, Sun, Qi, Chen, Ruirui, Choi, Dongkyu, Kwok, Kenneth, Poria, Soujanya
Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly used to bridge language and action in embodied agents, yet the operational characteristics of different FM integration strategies remain under-explored -- particularly for complex instruction following and versatile action generation in changing environments. This paper examines three paradigms for building robotic systems: end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) models that implicitly integrate perception and planning, and modular pipelines incorporating either vision-language models (VLMs) or multimodal large language models (LLMs). We evaluate these paradigms through two focused case studies: a complex instruction grounding task assessing fine-grained instruction understanding and cross-modal disambiguation, and an object manipulation task targeting skill transfer via VLA finetuning. Our experiments in zero-shot and few-shot settings reveal trade-offs in generalization and data efficiency. By exploring performance limits, we distill design implications for developing language-driven physical agents and outline emerging challenges and opportunities for FM-powered robotics in real-world conditions.
Editing Across Languages: A Survey of Multilingual Knowledge Editing
Durrani, Nadir, Mousi, Basel, Dalvi, Fahim
While Knowledge Editing has been extensively studied in monolingual settings, it remains underexplored in multilingual contexts. This survey systematizes recent research on Multilingual Knowledge Editing (MKE), a growing subdomain of model editing focused on ensuring factual edits generalize reliably across languages. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of MKE methods, covering parameter-based, memory-based, fine-tuning, and hypernetwork approaches. We survey available benchmarks,summarize key findings on method effectiveness and transfer patterns, identify challenges in cross-lingual propagation, and highlight open problems related to language anisotropy, evaluation coverage, and edit scalability. Our analysis consolidates a rapidly evolving area and lays the groundwork for future progress in editable language-aware LLMs.
Reasoning by Superposition: A Theoretical Perspective on Chain of Continuous Thought
Zhu, Hanlin, Hao, Shibo, Hu, Zhiting, Jiao, Jiantao, Russell, Stuart, Tian, Yuandong
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in many applications, including challenging reasoning problems via chain-of-thoughts (CoTs) techniques that generate ``thinking tokens'' before answering the questions. While existing theoretical works demonstrate that CoTs with discrete tokens boost the capability of LLMs, recent work on continuous CoTs lacks a theoretical understanding of why it outperforms discrete counterparts in various reasoning tasks such as directed graph reachability, a fundamental graph reasoning problem that includes many practical domain applications as special cases. In this paper, we prove that a two-layer transformer with $D$ steps of continuous CoTs can solve the directed graph reachability problem, where $D$ is the diameter of the graph, while the best known result of constant-depth transformers with discrete CoTs requires $O(n^2)$ decoding steps where $n$ is the number of vertices ($D
S-DAT: A Multilingual, GenAI-Driven Framework for Automated Divergent Thinking Assessment
Haase, Jennifer, Hanel, Paul H. P., Pokutta, Sebastian
This paper introduces S-DAT (Synthetic-Divergent Association Task), a scalable, multilingual framework for automated assessment of divergent thinking (DT) -a core component of human creativity. Traditional creativity assessments are often labor-intensive, language-specific, and reliant on subjective human ratings, limiting their scalability and cross-cultural applicability. In contrast, S-DAT leverages large language models and advanced multilingual embeddings to compute semantic distance -- a language-agnostic proxy for DT. We evaluate S-DAT across eleven diverse languages, including English, Spanish, German, Russian, Hindi, and Japanese (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana), demonstrating robust and consistent scoring across linguistic contexts. Unlike prior DAT approaches, the S-DAT shows convergent validity with other DT measures and correct discriminant validity with convergent thinking. This cross-linguistic flexibility allows for more inclusive, global-scale creativity research, addressing key limitations of earlier approaches. S-DAT provides a powerful tool for fairer, more comprehensive evaluation of cognitive flexibility in diverse populations and can be freely assessed online: https://sdat.iol.zib.de/.
JobHop: A Large-Scale Dataset of Career Trajectories
Johary, Iman, Romero, Raphael, Mara, Alexandru C., De Bie, Tijl
Understanding labor market dynamics is essential for policymakers, employers, and job seekers. However, comprehensive datasets that capture real-world career trajectories are scarce. In this paper, we introduce JobHop, a large-scale public dataset derived from anonymized resumes provided by VDAB, the public employment service in Flanders, Belgium. Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs), we process unstructured resume data to extract structured career information, which is then normalized to standardized ESCO occupation codes using a multi-label classification model. This results in a rich dataset of over 1.67 million work experiences, extracted from and grouped into more than 361,000 user resumes and mapped to standardized ESCO occupation codes, offering valuable insights into real-world occupational transitions. This dataset enables diverse applications, such as analyzing labor market mobility, job stability, and the effects of career breaks on occupational transitions. It also supports career path prediction and other data-driven decision-making processes. To illustrate its potential, we explore key dataset characteristics, including job distributions, career breaks, and job transitions, demonstrating its value for advancing labor market research.
UniVLA: Learning to Act Anywhere with Task-centric Latent Actions
Bu, Qingwen, Yang, Yanting, Cai, Jisong, Gao, Shenyuan, Ren, Guanghui, Yao, Maoqing, Luo, Ping, Li, Hongyang
A generalist robot should perform effectively across various environments. However, most existing approaches heavily rely on scaling action-annotated data to enhance their capabilities. Consequently, they are often limited to single physical specification and struggle to learn transferable knowledge across different embodiments and environments. To confront these limitations, we propose UniVLA, a new framework for learning cross-embodiment vision-language-action (VLA) policies. Our key innovation is to derive task-centric action representations from videos with a latent action model. This enables us to exploit extensive data across a wide spectrum of embodiments and perspectives. To mitigate the effect of task-irrelevant dynamics, we incorporate language instructions and establish a latent action model within the DINO feature space. Learned from internet-scale videos, the generalist policy can be deployed to various robots through efficient latent action decoding. We obtain state-of-the-art results across multiple manipulation and navigation benchmarks, as well as real-robot deployments. UniVLA achieves superior performance over OpenVLA with less than 1/20 of pretraining compute and 1/10 of downstream data. Continuous performance improvements are observed as heterogeneous data, even including human videos, are incorporated into the training pipeline. The results underscore UniVLA's potential to facilitate scalable and efficient robot policy learning.
Memory Assisted LLM for Personalized Recommendation System
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in solving recommendation tasks. With proven capabilities in understanding user preferences, LLM personalization has emerged as a critical area for providing tailored responses to individuals. Current studies explore personalization through prompt design and fine-tuning, paving the way for further research in personalized LLMs. However, existing approaches are either costly and inefficient in capturing diverse user preferences or fail to account for timely updates to user history. To address these gaps, we propose the Memory-Assisted Personalized LLM (MAP). Through user interactions, we first create a history profile for each user, capturing their preferences, such as ratings for historical items. During recommendation, we extract relevant memory based on similarity, which is then incorporated into the prompts to enhance personalized recommendations. In our experiments, we define a new task that enables testing with varying memory size under two scenarios: single domain where memory and tasks are from the same category and cross-domain (e.g. memory from movies and recommendation tasks in books). The results show that MAP outperforms regular LLM-based recommenders that integrate user history directly through prompt design. Moreover, as user history grows, MAP's advantage increases in both scenarios, making it more suitable for addressing successive personalized user requests.
Vision-Language Model-Based Semantic-Guided Imaging Biomarker for Lung Nodule Malignancy Prediction
Zhuang, Luoting, Tabatabaei, Seyed Mohammad Hossein, Salehi-Rad, Ramin, Tran, Linh M., Aberle, Denise R., Prosper, Ashley E., Hsu, William
Machine learning models have utilized semantic features, deep features, or both to assess lung nodule malignancy. However, their reliance on manual annotation during inference, limited interpretability, and sensitivity to imaging variations hinder their application in real-world clinical settings. Thus, this research aims to integrate semantic features derived from radiologists' assessments of nodules, guiding the model to learn clinically relevant, robust, and explainable imaging features for predicting lung cancer. We obtained 938 low-dose CT scans from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) with 1,261 nodules and semantic features. Additionally, the Lung Image Database Consortium dataset contains 1,018 CT scans, with 2,625 lesions annotated for nodule characteristics. Three external datasets were obtained from UCLA Health, the LUNGx Challenge, and the Duke Lung Cancer Screening. We fine-tuned a pretrained Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model with a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach to align imaging and semantic text features and predict the one-year lung cancer diagnosis. Our model outperformed state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in the NLST test set with an AUROC of 0.901 and AUPRC of 0.776. It also showed robust results in external datasets. Using CLIP, we also obtained predictions on semantic features through zero-shot inference, such as nodule margin (AUROC: 0.807), nodule consistency (0.812), and pleural attachment (0.840). Our approach surpasses the SOTA models in predicting lung cancer across datasets collected from diverse clinical settings, providing explainable outputs, aiding clinicians in comprehending the underlying meaning of model predictions. This approach also prevents the model from learning shortcuts and generalizes across clinical settings. The code is available at https://github.com/luotingzhuang/CLIP_nodule.