Conditional acceptability refers to how plausible a conditional statement is perceived to be. It plays an important role in communication and reasoning, as it influences how individuals interpret implications, assess arguments, and make decisions based on hypothetical scenarios. When humans evaluate how acceptable a conditional "If A, then B" is, their judgments are influenced by two main factors: the $\textit{conditional probability}$ of $B$ given $A$, and the $\textit{semantic relevance}$ of the antecedent $A$ given the consequent $B$ (i.e., whether $A$ meaningfully supports $B$). While prior work has examined how large language models (LLMs) draw inferences about conditional statements, it remains unclear how these models judge the $\textit{acceptability}$ of such statements. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive study of LLMs' conditional acceptability judgments across different model families, sizes, and prompting strategies. Using linear mixed-effects models and ANOVA tests, we find that models are sensitive to both conditional probability and semantic relevance-though to varying degrees depending on architecture and prompting style. A comparison with human data reveals that while LLMs incorporate probabilistic and semantic cues, they do so less consistently than humans. Notably, larger models do not necessarily align more closely with human judgments.

Historical map legends are critical for interpreting cartographic symbols. However, their inconsistent layouts and unstructured formats make automatic extraction challenging. Prior work focuses primarily on segmentation or general optical character recognition (OCR), with few methods effectively matching legend symbols to their corresponding descriptions in a structured manner. We present a method that combines LayoutLMv3 for layout detection with GPT-4o using in-context learning to detect and link legend items and their descriptions via bounding box predictions. Our experiments show that GPT-4 with structured JSON prompts outperforms the baseline, achieving 88% F-1 and 85% IoU, and reveal how prompt design, example counts, and layout alignment affect performance. This approach supports scalable, layout-aware legend parsing and improves the indexing and searchability of historical maps across various visual styles.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but are limited by their static parametric knowledge, especially in knowledge-intensive task. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates this by integrating external information. However, (1) traditional RAG struggles with complex query understanding, and (2) even search agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL), despite their promise, still face generalization and deployment challenges. To address these limitations, we propose QAgent, a unified agentic RAG framework that employs a search agent for adaptive retrieval. This agent optimizes its understanding of the query through interactive reasoning and retrieval. To facilitate real-world application, we focus on modular search agent for query understanding that are plug-and-play in complex systems. Secifically, the agent follows a multi-step decision process trained with RL to maximize retrieval quality and support accurate downstream answers. We further analyze the strengths and weaknesses of end-to-end RL and propose a strategy that focuses on effective retrieval, thereby enhancing generalization in LLM applications. Experiments show QAgent excels at QA and serves as a plug-and-play module for real-world deployment.

In-context learning (ICL) is the ability of a large language model (LLM) to learn a new task from a few demonstrations presented as part of the context. Past studies have attributed a large portion of the success of ICL to the way these in-context demonstrations are represented, particularly to how labels are represented in classification tasks. On the other hand, observations of the learning capacity of ICL (i.e., the extent to which more in-context demonstrations can lead to higher performance) have been mixed, and ICL is often thought to occur only under specific conditions. The interaction between these two aspects in ICL, representation and learning, has not been studied in depth until now. We hypothesize that they are largely independent of one another, such that the representation of demonstrations determines the baseline accuracy of ICL, while learning from additional demonstrations improves only on top of this baseline. We validate this hypothesis by developing an optimization algorithm that can enumerate a spectrum of possible label sets (representations) varying in semantic relevance. We then perform ICL with varying numbers of in-context demonstrations for each of these label sets. We observed that learning happens regardless of the quality of the label set itself, although its efficiency, measured by the slope of improvement over in-context demonstrations, is conditioned on both the label set quality and the parameter count of the underlying language model. Despite the emergence of learning, the relative quality (accuracy) of the choice of a label set (representation) is largely maintained throughout learning, confirming our hypothesis and implying their orthogonality. Our work reveals a previously underexplored aspect of ICL: the independent effects of learning from demonstrations and their representations on ICL performance.

The performance of pre-trained masked diffusion models is often constrained by their sampling procedure, which makes decisions irreversible and struggles in low-step generation regimes. We introduce a novel sampling algorithm that works with pre-trained models and, after a lightweight fine-tuning of a single layer, significantly improves sample quality and efficiency. Our method reformulates the generation process using a star-shaped paradigm, which inherently allows for error correction. To make this process effective, we augment it with a learnable re-masking scheduler that intelligently identifies and revises likely errors. This approach yields a substantial quality boost, particularly when using a small number of sampling steps. We extensively ablate key components of our approach and show its usability in different scenarios. In comprehensive experiments on text, and code generation, our sampling algorithm outperforms or matches existing methods. Diffusion probabilistic models have demonstrated remarkable success in generating high-fidelity data, particularly in continuous domains such as image and video synthesis (Sohl-Dickstein et al., 2015; Song & Ermon, 2019; Ho et al., 2020; Sahoo et al., 2024b). A key reason for their effectiveness is the principle of iterative refinement. This allows for a robust error correction mechanism; a mistake made early in the trajectory can be gradually amended in subsequent steps, leading to state-of-the-art results. This elegant property, however, is largely absent in the discrete domain. While discrete diffusion models are making significant strides in areas like natural language processing (Lou et al., 2024; Sahoo et al., 2024a; Schiff et al., 2024), the most successful variants, based on token masking, are built on a foundation that precludes iterative refinement. In a masked diffusion setup, the generation of each token is a one-way street: once a [MASK] is replaced with a concrete token, the model commits to that decision. The token is then frozen and cannot be revisited or updated, even if later steps reveal it to be suboptimal in the broader context.

Suicide rates have risen worldwide in recent years, underscoring the urgent need for proactive prevention strategies. Social media provides valuable signals, as many at-risk individuals - who often avoid formal help due to stigma - choose instead to share their distress online. Yet detecting implicit suicidal ideation, conveyed indirectly through metaphor, sarcasm, or subtle emotional cues, remains highly challenging. Lightweight models like BERT handle explicit signals but fail on subtle implicit ones, while large language models (LLMs) capture nuance at prohibitive computational cost. To address this gap, we propose a two-stage voting architecture that balances efficiency and robustness. In Stage 1, a lightweight BERT classifier rapidly resolves high-confidence explicit cases. In Stage 2, ambiguous inputs are escalated to either (i) a multi-perspective LLM voting framework to maximize recall on implicit ideation, or (ii) a feature-based ML ensemble guided by psychologically grounded indicators extracted via prompt-engineered LLMs for efficiency and interpretability. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first works to operationalize LLM-extracted psychological features as structured vectors for suicide risk detection. On two complementary datasets - explicit-dominant Reddit and implicit-only DeepSuiMind - our framework outperforms single-model baselines, achieving 98.0% F1 on explicit cases, 99.7% on implicit ones, and reducing the cross-domain gap below 2%, while significantly lowering LLM cost.

The safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for the development of trustworthy AI applications. Existing red teaming methods often rely on seed instructions, which limits the semantic diversity of the synthesized adversarial prompts. We propose AutoRed, a free-form adversarial prompt generation framework that removes the need for seed instructions. AutoRed operates in two stages: (1) persona-guided adversarial instruction generation, and (2) a reflection loop to iteratively refine low-quality prompts. To improve efficiency, we introduce a verifier to assess prompt harmfulness without querying the target models. Using AutoRed, we build two red teaming datasets -- AutoRed-Medium and AutoRed-Hard -- and evaluate eight state-of-the-art LLMs. AutoRed achieves higher attack success rates and better generalization than existing baselines. Our results highlight the limitations of seed-based approaches and demonstrate the potential of free-form red teaming for LLM safety evaluation. We will open source our datasets in the near future.

Symbolic regression (SR), the automated discovery of mathematical expressions from data, is a cornerstone of scientific inquiry. However, it is often hindered by the combinatorial explosion of the search space and a tendency to overfit. Popular methods, rooted in genetic programming, explore this space syntactically, often yielding overly complex, uninterpretable models. This paper introduces IdeaSearchFitter, a framework that employs Large Language Models (LLMs) as semantic operators within an evolutionary search. By generating candidate expressions guided by natural-language rationales, our method biases discovery towards models that are not only accurate but also conceptually coherent and interpretable. We demonstrate IdeaSearchFitter's efficacy across diverse challenges: it achieves competitive, noise-robust performance on the Feynman Symbolic Regression Database (FSReD), outperforming several strong baselines; discovers mechanistically aligned models with good accuracy-complexity trade-offs on real-world data; and derives compact, physically-motivated parametrizations for Parton Distribution Functions in a frontier high-energy physics application. IdeaSearchFitter is a specialized module within our broader iterated agent framework, IdeaSearch, which is publicly available at https://www.ideasearch.cn/.

Large language models have recently demonstrated significant gains in reasoning ability, often attributed to their capacity to generate longer chains of thought and engage in reflective reasoning. However, the contribution of reflections to performance improvement remains unclear. In this paper, we systematically analyze the rollouts of eight reasoning models on five mathematical datasets. We focus on reflective behaviours where the model has already produced an answer but continues reflecting before finalizing its output. Our analysis reveals that reflections are predominantly confirmatory and rarely alter the model's initial answer, a pattern consistent across models and datasets. To understand the role of reflections in training, we construct supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets with varying amounts of reflection steps. We observe that training models on rollouts with more reflection steps primarily enhances first-answer correctness rather than the ability to correct initially wrong answers through reflections. This motivates us to propose a question-aware early-stopping method that enhances inference-time token efficiency by stopping the reasoning process once a few plausible candidate answers are generated, thereby reducing unnecessary reflection steps. Motivated by this, we further propose to dynamically truncate the reflections after a candidate answer has appeared during generation, which reduces reasoning tokens by 24.5% across five mathematical datasets, within a 2.9% drop in accuracy.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed worldwide, ensuring their fair and comprehensive cultural understanding is important. However, LLMs exhibit cultural bias and limited awareness of underrepresented cultures, while the mechanisms underlying their cultural understanding remain underexplored. To fill this gap, we conduct a neuron-level analysis to identify neurons that drive cultural behavior, introducing a gradient-based scoring method with additional filtering for precise refinement. We identify both culture-general neurons contributing to cultural understanding regardless of cultures, and culture-specific neurons tied to an individual culture. These neurons account for less than 1% of all neurons and are concentrated in shallow to middle MLP layers. We validate their role by showing that suppressing them substantially degrades performance on cultural benchmarks (by up to 30%), while performance on general natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks remains largely unaffected. Moreover, we show that culture-specific neurons support knowledge of not only the target culture, but also related cultures. Finally, we demonstrate that training on NLU benchmarks can diminish models' cultural understanding when we update modules containing many culture-general neurons. These findings provide insights into the internal mechanisms of LLMs and offer practical guidance for model training and engineering. Our code is available at https://github.com/ynklab/CULNIG LLMs are rapidly spreading throughout the world with their ability to solve various tasks. Our world is culturally diverse, and our knowledge, commonsense, and values are not always universal. LLMs must possess cultural understanding to be deployed fairly and prevent cultural inequity. However, several studies have pointed out that LLMs, which are mainly trained on English-dominant corpora, often exhibit culture-related biases, generating outputs skewed toward certain highly represented cultures (Naous et al., 2024; Myung et al., 2024; Sukiennik et al., 2025). In order to evaluate the cultural understanding of LLMs, a number of benchmarks have been constructed (Myung et al., 2024; Chiu et al., 2025; Rao et al., 2025; Zhao et al., 2024, inter alia). Additionally, some methods have been proposed to enhance cultural awareness of LLMs (Li et al., 2024a;b; Liu et al., 2025).