Large Language Model
LogiNumSynth: Synthesizing Joint Logical-Numerical Reasoning Problems for Language Models
Liu, Yiwei, Li, Yucheng, Li, Xiao, Cheng, Gong
Joint logical-numerical reasoning remains a major challenge for language models, yet existing datasets rely on fixed rule sets and offer limited control over task complexity, constraining their generalizability for evaluation and training. We present LogiNumSynth, a flexible natural language problem synthesizer that synthesizes tasks requiring proficiency in joint logical reasoning (e.g., rule-based reasoning) and numerical reasoning (e.g., arithmetic computation). LogiNumSynth supports fine-grained control over reasoning world richness, logical reasoning depth, and the complexity of numerical computations, enabling flexible data synthesis across difficulty levels. We demonstrate three key contributions: (1) Synthesizer -- synthesizing fully controllable joint reasoning tasks over natural language; (2) Evaluation & Process Analysis -- evaluating both process accuracy and answer accuracy; (3) Targeted Training -- using synthesized data to enhance LLMs' reasoning performance. Experiments with multiple LLMs highlight persistent weaknesses in logical-numerical reasoning, showing that LogiNumSynth can serve as both a diagnostic tool and a source of targeted supervision for advancing integrated reasoning skills.
Instruction-aware User Embedding via Synergistic Language and Representation Modeling
Gao, Ziyi, Xu, Yike, Yuan, Jiahao, Wang, Baokun, Wen, Jinyong, Lin, Xiaotong, Liu, Yun, Fu, Xing, Cheng, Yu, Liu, Yongchao, Wang, Weiqiang, Xie, Zhongle
User representation modeling has become increasingly crucial for personalized applications, yet existing approaches struggle with generalizability across domains and sensitivity to noisy behavioral signals. We present InstructUE, an instruction-aware user embedding foundation model that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate general and instruction-aware user representations. InstructUE introduces a multi-encoder architecture with a lightweight adapter that efficiently processes heterogeneous data from six different sources while preserving their structural characteristics. Additionally, it proposes a novel contrastive-autoregressive training framework that bridges language and representation spaces through a curated UserQA dataset. The contrastive-autoregressive training framework simultaneously leverages autoregressive learning to capture domain knowledge in language space and contrastive learning to align user-text embeddings in representation space, thereby enhancing the instruction-awareness and noise-robustness of user embeddings. Through extensive experiments on real-world applications, we demonstrate that InstructUE significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple domains including user prediction, marketing, and recommendation scenarios. Our results show that instruction-aware user modeling can effectively achieve instruction-guided denoising of user information in specific scenarios, paving the way for more generalizable and robust user representation learning.
Automating Structural Engineering Workflows with Large Language Model Agents
Liang, Haoran, Zhou, Yufa, Kalaleh, Mohammad Talebi, Mei, Qipei
We introduce $\textbf{MASSE}$, the first Multi-Agent System for Structural Engineering, effectively integrating large language model (LLM)-based agents with real-world engineering workflows. Structural engineering is a fundamental yet traditionally stagnant domain, with core workflows remaining largely unchanged for decades despite its substantial economic impact and global market size. Recent advancements in LLMs have significantly enhanced their ability to perform complex reasoning, long-horizon planning, and precise tool utilization -- capabilities well aligned with structural engineering tasks such as interpreting design codes, executing load calculations, and verifying structural capacities. We present a proof-of-concept showing that most real-world structural engineering workflows can be fully automated through a training-free LLM-based multi-agent system. MASSE enables immediate deployment in professional environments, and our comprehensive validation on real-world case studies demonstrates that it can reduce expert workload from approximately two hours to mere minutes, while enhancing both reliability and accuracy in practical engineering scenarios.
ABLEIST: Intersectional Disability Bias in LLM-Generated Hiring Scenarios
Phutane, Mahika, Jung, Hayoung, Kim, Matthew, Mitra, Tanushree, Vashistha, Aditya
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly under scrutiny for perpetuating identity-based discrimination in high-stakes domains such as hiring, particularly against people with disabilities (PwD). However, existing research remains largely Western-centric, overlooking how intersecting forms of marginalization--such as gender and caste--shape experiences of PwD in the Global South. We conduct a comprehensive audit of six LLMs across 2,820 hiring scenarios spanning diverse disability, gender, nationality, and caste profiles. To capture subtle intersectional harms and biases, we introduce ABLEIST (Ableism, Inspiration, Superhumanization, and Tokenism), a set of five ableism-specific and three intersectional harm metrics grounded in disability studies literature. Our results reveal significant increases in ABLEIST harms towards disabled candidates--harms that many state-of-the-art models failed to detect. These harms were further amplified by sharp increases in intersectional harms (e.g., Tokenism) for gender and caste-marginalized disabled candidates, highlighting critical blind spots in current safety tools and the need for intersectional safety evaluations of frontier models in high-stakes domains like hiring.
A Survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models
Yao, Huanjin, Zhang, Ruifei, Huang, Jiaxing, Zhang, Jingyi, Wang, Yibo, Fang, Bo, Zhu, Ruolin, Jing, Yongcheng, Liu, Shunyu, Li, Guanbin, Tao, Dacheng
With the recent emergence of revolutionary autonomous agentic systems, research community is witnessing a significant shift from traditional static, passive, and domain-specific AI agents toward more dynamic, proactive, and generalizable agentic AI. Motivated by the growing interest in agentic AI and its potential trajectory toward AGI, we present a comprehensive survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models (Agentic MLLMs). In this survey, we explore the emerging paradigm of agentic MLLMs, delineating their conceptual foundations and distinguishing characteristics from conventional MLLM-based agents. We establish a conceptual framework that organizes agentic MLLMs along three fundamental dimensions: (i) Agentic internal intelligence functions as the system's commander, enabling accurate long-horizon planning through reasoning, reflection, and memory; (ii) Agentic external tool invocation, whereby models proactively use various external tools to extend their problem-solving capabilities beyond their intrinsic knowledge; and (iii) Agentic environment interaction further situates models within virtual or physical environments, allowing them to take actions, adapt strategies, and sustain goal-directed behavior in dynamic real-world scenarios. To further accelerate research in this area for the community, we compile open-source training frameworks, training and evaluation datasets for developing agentic MLLMs. Finally, we review the downstream applications of agentic MLLMs and outline future research directions for this rapidly evolving field. To continuously track developments in this rapidly evolving field, we will also actively update a public repository at https://github.com/HJYao00/Awesome-Agentic-MLLMs.
Secret-Protected Evolution for Differentially Private Synthetic Text Generation
Wang, Tianze, Chen, Zhaoyu, Du, Jian, Xiao, Yingtai, Zhang, Linjun, Yan, Qiang
Text data has become extremely valuable on large language models (LLMs) and even lead to general artificial intelligence (AGI). A lot of high-quality text in the real world is private and cannot be freely used due to privacy concerns. Therefore, differentially private (DP) synthetic text generation has been proposed, aiming to produce high-utility synthetic data while protecting sensitive information. However, existing DP synthetic text generation imposes uniform guarantees that often overprotect non-sensitive content, resulting in substantial utility loss and computational overhead. Therefore, we propose Secret-Protected Evolution (SecPE), a novel framework that extends private evolution with secret-aware protection. Theoretically, we show that SecPE satisfies $(\mathrm{p}, \mathrm{r})$-secret protection, constituting a relaxation of Gaussian DP that enables tighter utility-privacy trade-offs, while also substantially reducing computational complexity relative to baseline methods. Empirically, across the OpenReview, PubMed, and Yelp benchmarks, SecPE consistently achieves lower Frรฉchet Inception Distance (FID) and higher downstream task accuracy than GDP-based Aug-PE baselines, while requiring less noise to attain the same level of protection. Our results highlight that secret-aware guarantees can unlock more practical and effective privacy-preserving synthetic text generation.
Video-STR: Reinforcing MLLMs in Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning with Relation Graph
Wang, Wentao, Zou, Heqing, Luo, Tianze, Huang, Rui, Zhao, Yutian, Wang, Zhuochen, Zhang, Hansheng, Qin, Chengwei, Wang, Yan, Zhao, Lin, Zhang, Huaijian
Recent progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has demonstrated strong semantic understanding capabilities, but struggles to perform precise spatio-temporal understanding. Existing spatio-temporal methods primarily focus on the video itself, while overlooking the physical information within the video, such as multi-object layouts and motion. Such limitations restrict the use of MLLMs in downstream applications that demand high precision, including embodied intelligence and VR. To address this issue, we present Video-STR, a novel graph-based reinforcement method for precise Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning. Building upon the capacity of Reinforcement Learning with V erifi-able Reward (RL VR) to improve model abilities, we introduce a reasoning mechanism using graph-based Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) method to guide the model in inferring the underlying spatio-temporal topology of scenarios during the thinking process. To resolve the lack of spatio-temporal training data, we construct the STV-205k dataset with 205k question-answering pairs, covering dynamic multi-object scenes in both indoor and outdoor environments, to support the model training. Experiments show that Video-STR achieves state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks, outperforming the base model by 13% on STI-Bench, and demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach and dataset. Code, model, and data will be released.
Enhancing Large Language Model Reasoning via Selective Critical Token Fine-Tuning
Ruan, Zhiwen, Li, Yixia, Zhu, He, Chen, Yun, Li, Peng, Liu, Yang, Chen, Guanhua
Large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a key method to adapt pre-trained models to domain-specific tasks such as mathematical reasoning. However, standard SFT uniformly penalizes all tokens, neglecting that only a small subset of critical tokens determines reasoning correctness. This uniform supervision often causes reduced output diversity and limited generalization. We propose Critical T oken Fine-tuning (CFT), a simple yet effective approach that updates only tokens identified as functionally indispensable via counterfactual perturbations. By focusing gradient signals on these decisive reasoning steps while preserving the diversity of non-critical tokens, CFT can enhance both generation and diversity. Extensive experiments on five models across three families (Qwen, OLMo, LLaMA) and eleven mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that CFT, despite fine-tuning on less than 12% of tokens, consistently outperforms standard SFT. Moreover, CFT enables test-time scaling through improved sampling diversity and provides a stronger initialization for reinforcement learning, sustaining performance gains in later training stages while maintaining higher entropy for better exploration. Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of complex tasks, driven by the rapid scaling of both model parameters and training data (Fedus et al., 2022; Achiam et al., 2023; AI@Meta, 2024; Team, 2024; Brown et al., 2020). To adapt these general-purpose models to specialized downstream tasks (Y u et al., 2024), the prevailing paradigm is supervised fine-tuning (SFT) (Sanh et al.; Ruan et al., 2025), which optimizes on labeled prompt-response pairs using a maximum likelihood objective (Ouyang et al., 2022). SFT can also serve as an initialization for reinforcement learning (RL), providing a strong starting point that aids further RL optimization (Chu et al., 2025; Li et al., 2025).
Judge Before Answer: Can MLLM Discern the False Premise in Question?
Li, Jidong, Fang, Lingyong, Zhao, Haodong, Duan, Sufeng, Liu, Gongshen
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have witnessed astonishing advancements in recent years. Despite these successes, MLLMs remain vulnerable to flase premise problems. However, existing benchmarks targeting this issue are limited in scope: they often lack fine-grained categorization, exhibit insufficient coverage, and thus fail to provide a rigorous evaluation of the ability of models to recognize false premises. To bridge this gap, we introduce a fully automated pipeline for constructing a comprehensive benchmark of false premise questions. Our method systematically categorizes the premises into three main types and thirteen subtypes according to the abilities required to identify the premises, resulting in the JBA dataset.Results show current MLLMs still struggle with false premise recognition. Building upon this benchmark, we further propose a recognition enhancement framework tailored to strengthen the robustness of MLLMs to detect false premises. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained with our framework achieve significant improvements in false premise recognition.
Not All Bits Are Equal: Scale-Dependent Memory Optimization Strategies for Reasoning Models
Kim, Junhyuck, Ewer, Ethan, Moon, Taehong, Park, Jongho, Papailiopoulos, Dimitris
While 4-bit quantization has emerged as a memory-optimal choice for non-reasoning models and zero-shot tasks across scales, we show that this universal prescription fails for reasoning models, where the KV cache rather than model size can dominate memory. Through systematic experiments across 1,700 inference scenarios on AIME25 and GPQA-Diamond, we find a scale-dependent trade-off: models with an effective size below 8-bit 4B parameters achieve better accuracy by allocating memory to more weights rather than longer generation, while larger models achieve better accuracy by allocating memory to longer generations. This scale threshold also determines when parallel scaling becomes memory-efficient and whether KV cache eviction outperforms KV quantization. Our findings show that memory optimization for LLMs cannot be scale-agnostic, while providing principled guidelines: for small reasoning models, prioritize model capacity over test-time compute, while for larger ones, maximize test-time compute. Our results suggest that optimizing reasoning models for deployment requires fundamentally different strategies from those established for non-reasoning models.Figure 1: Memory vs. Accuracy for serial test-time scaling on AIME25. The plot illustrates the trade-off between pass@1 accuracy and total memory (weights + KV cache) for the Qwen3 family. Model weights are quantized to 4-and 8-bit using GPTQ. Along each curve, the KV cache grows as the generation length increases via budget forcing. For models effectively smaller than an 8-bit 4B, increasing the token budget to saturation is memory-inefficient. Furthermore, for mathematical reasoning, higher weight precision (8-and 16-bit) proves more memory-efficient than 4-bit. This work was done during an internship at KRAFTON.