Large Language Model
Vocabulary Customization for Efficient Domain-Specific LLM Deployment
Herold, Christian, Kozielski, Michael, Santavas, Nicholas, Versley, Yannick, Khadivi, Shahram
When using an LLM to process text outside the training domain(s), an often overlooked factor is vocabulary mismatch, where the general-domain tokenizer fails to capture frequent domain-specific terms, leading to higher token fertility and thus a decrease in processing speed due to suboptimal sub-word splits. We address this limitation by augmenting the pretrained vocabulary with a set of domain-specific tokens. To this end, we design an algorithm that extends an existing tokenizer while guaranteeing it never decreases tokenization efficiency: every input sequence is segmented into at most the same number of tokens as before. Evaluated on real-world e-Commerce use-cases, the augmented tokenizer significantly shortens input sequences by up to 20% and reduces inference latency on downstream tasks while preserving predictive quality. We further analyze secondary effects, such as the impact on forward pass speed and the rate at which the model adopts the newly introduced tokens, to illustrate the broader benefits of vocabulary adaptation.
Clip-Low Increases Entropy and Clip-High Decreases Entropy in Reinforcement Learning of Large Language Models
Park, Jaesung R., Kim, Junsu, Kim, Gyeongman, Jo, Jinyoung, Choi, Sean, Cho, Jaewoong, Ryu, Ernest K.
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as the leading approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, RLVR is prone to entropy collapse, where the LLM quickly converges to a near-deterministic form, hindering exploration and progress during prolonged RL training. In this work, we reveal that the clipping mechanism in PPO and GRPO induces biases on entropy. Through theoretical and empirical analyses, we show that clip-low increases entropy, while clip-high decreases it. Further, under standard clipping parameters, the effect of clip-high dominates, resulting in an overall entropy reduction even when purely random rewards are provided to the RL algorithm. Our findings highlight an overlooked confounding factor in RLVR: independent of the reward signal, the clipping mechanism influences entropy, which in turn affects the reasoning behavior. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that clipping can be deliberately used to control entropy. Specifically, with a more aggressive clip-low value, one can increase entropy, promote exploration, and ultimately prevent entropy collapse in RLVR training.
SafeEvalAgent: Toward Agentic and Self-Evolving Safety Evaluation of LLMs
Wang, Yixu, Wang, Xin, Yao, Yang, Li, Xinyuan, Teng, Yan, Ma, Xingjun, Wang, Yingchun
The rapid integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into high-stakes domains necessitates reliable safety and compliance evaluation. However, existing static benchmarks are ill-equipped to address the dynamic nature of AI risks and evolving regulations, creating a critical safety gap. This paper introduces a new paradigm of agentic safety evaluation, reframing evaluation as a continuous and self-evolving process rather than a one-time audit. We then propose a novel multi-agent framework SafeEvalAgent, which autonomously ingests unstructured policy documents to generate and perpetually evolve a comprehensive safety benchmark. SafeEvalAgent leverages a synergistic pipeline of specialized agents and incorporates a Self-evolving Evaluation loop, where the system learns from evaluation results to craft progressively more sophisticated and targeted test cases. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SafeEvalAgent, showing a consistent decline in model safety as the evaluation hardens. For instance, GPT-5's safety rate on the EU AI Act drops from 72.50% to 36.36% over successive iterations. These findings reveal the limitations of static assessments and highlight our framework's ability to uncover deep vulnerabilities missed by traditional methods, underscoring the urgent need for dynamic evaluation ecosystems to ensure the safe and responsible deployment of advanced AI.
DyFlow: Dynamic Workflow Framework for Agentic Reasoning
Wang, Yanbo, Xu, Zixiang, Huang, Yue, Wang, Xiangqi, Song, Zirui, Gao, Lang, Wang, Chenxi, Tang, Xiangru, Zhao, Yue, Cohan, Arman, Zhang, Xiangliang, Chen, Xiuying
Agent systems based on large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in complex reasoning tasks, but building efficient and generalizable workflows remains a major challenge. Most existing approaches rely on manually designed processes, which limits their adaptability across different tasks. While a few methods attempt automated workflow generation, they are often tied to specific datasets or query types and make limited use of intermediate feedback, reducing system robustness and reasoning depth. Moreover, their operations are typically predefined and inflexible. To address these limitations, we propose DyFlow, a dynamic workflow generation framework that adaptively constructs and adjusts reasoning procedures based on task requirements and real-time intermediate feedback, thereby enhancing cross-task generalization. DyFlow consists of two core components: a designer and an executor. The designer decomposes complex problems into a sequence of sub-goals defined by high-level objectives and dynamically plans the next steps based on intermediate outputs and feedback. These plans are then carried out by the executor, which executes each operation using dynamic operators with context-aware parameterization, enabling flexible and semantically grounded reasoning. We systematically evaluate DyFlow across diverse domains, including social reasoning, biomedical tasks, mathematical problem solving, and code generation. Results demonstrate that DyFlow significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving substantial Pass@k improvements and exhibiting robust generalization across diverse domains. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/wyf23187/DyFlow.
CEAID: Benchmark of Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection Methods for Central European Languages
Machine-generated text detection, as an important task, is predominantly focused on English in research. This makes the existing detectors almost unusable for non-English languages, relying purely on cross-lingual transferability. There exist only a few works focused on any of Central European languages, leaving the transferability towards these languages rather unexplored. We fill this gap by providing the first benchmark of detection methods focused on this region, while also providing comparison of train-languages combinations to identify the best performing ones. We focus on multi-domain, multi-generator, and multilingual evaluation, pinpointing the differences of individual aspects, as well as adversarial robustness of detection methods. Supervised finetuned detectors in the Central European languages are found the most performant in these languages as well as the most resistant against obfuscation.
Scaling Up Temporal Domain Generalization via Temporal Experts Averaging
Liu, Aoming, Miller, Kevin, Saligrama, Venkatesh, Saenko, Kate, Gong, Boqing, Lim, Ser-Nam, Plummer, Bryan A.
Temporal Domain Generalization (TDG) aims to generalize across temporal distribution shifts, e.g., lexical change over time. Prior work often addresses this by predicting future model weights. However, full model prediction is prohibitively expensive for even reasonably sized models. Thus, recent methods only predict the classifier layer, limiting generalization by failing to adjust other model components. To address this, we propose Temporal Experts Averaging (TEA), a novel and scalable TDG framework that updates the entire model using weight averaging to maximize generalization potential while minimizing computational costs. Our theoretical analysis guides us to two steps that enhance generalization to future domains. First, we create expert models with functional diversity yet parameter similarity by fine-tuning a domain-agnostic base model on individual temporal domains while constraining weight changes. Second, we optimize the bias-variance tradeoff through adaptive averaging coefficients derived from modeling temporal weight trajectories in a principal component subspace. Expert's contributions are based on their projected proximity to future domains. Extensive experiments across 7 TDG benchmarks, 5 models, and 2 TDG settings shows TEA outperforms prior TDG methods by up to 69% while being up to 60x more efficient.
CoLLM-NAS: Collaborative Large Language Models for Efficient Knowledge-Guided Neural Architecture Search
Li, Zhe, Lin, Zhiwei, Wang, Yongtao
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has introduced new possibilities for automating the design of neural architectures. However, most existing methods face critical limitations, including architectural invalidity, computational inefficiency, and inferior performance compared to traditional NAS. In this work, we present Collaborative LLM-based NAS (CoLLM-NAS), a two-stage NAS framework with knowledge-guided search driven by two complementary LLMs. Specifically, we propose a Navigator LLM to guide search direction and a Generator LLM to synthesize high-quality candidates, with a dedicated Coordinator module to manage their interaction. CoLLM-NAS efficiently guides the search process by combining LLMs' inherent knowledge of structured neural architectures with progressive knowledge from iterative feedback and historical trajectory. Experimental results on ImageNet and NAS-Bench-201 show that CoLLM-NAS surpasses existing NAS methods and conventional search algorithms, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, CoLLM-NAS consistently enhances the performance and efficiency of various two-stage NAS methods (e.g., OFA, SPOS, and AutoFormer) across diverse search spaces (e.g., MobileNet, ShuffleNet, and AutoFormer), demonstrating its excellent generalization.
RAGferee: Building Contextual Reward Models for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Coman, Andrei C., Sorodoc, Ionut-Teodor, Ribeiro, Leonardo F. R., Byrne, Bill, Henderson, James, de Gispert, Adriร
Existing Reward Models (RMs), typically trained on general preference data, struggle in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) settings, which require judging responses for faithfulness to retrieved context, relevance to the user query, appropriate refusals when context is insufficient, completeness and conciseness of information. To address the lack of publicly available RAG-centric preference datasets and specialised RMs, we introduce RAGferee, a methodology that repurposes question-answering (QA) datasets into preference pairs that prioritise groundedness over stylistic features, enabling the training of contextual RMs better suited to judging RAG responses. Using RAGferee, we curate a small preference dataset of 4K samples and fine-tune RMs ranging from 7B to 24B parameters. Our RAG-centric RMs achieve state-of-the-art performance on ContextualJudgeBench, surpassing existing 70B+ RMs trained on much larger (up to 2.4M samples) general corpora, with an absolute improvement of +15.5%.
CAST: Continuous and Differentiable Semi-Structured Sparsity-Aware Training for Large Language Models
Huang, Weiyu, Hu, Yuezhou, Zhu, Jun, Chen, Jianfei
Sparsity-aware training is an effective approach for transforming large language models (LLMs) into hardware-friendly sparse patterns, thereby reducing latency and memory consumption during inference. In this paper, we propose Continuous Adaptive Sparse Trainer (CAST), a fully continuous and differentiable sparsity-aware training framework for semi-structured (or "N:M") sparse models. Unlike previous approaches that optimize sparsity patterns and weights separately, CAST enables seamless joint optimization during training, while progressively transforming the model into the desired sparsity format. Specifically, CAST introduces three key components: 1) AdamS, a sparsity-aware optimizer that leverages adaptive L1 decay to promote uniform sparsification across all parameters; 2) Weight Scaling, a module designed to mitigate the magnitude reduction caused by decay while preserving desired sparsity patterns; 3) Knowledge Distillation, which employs the dense model as a self-teacher to enhance training efficiency. We evaluate CAST under 2:4 sparsity patterns across multiple model families, ranging from 125M to 13B parameters. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods in both perplexity and zero-shot accuracy with minimal training resources. Notably, on LLaMA2-7B, our 2:4 sparse model achieves a negligible perplexity increase of 0.09 and a 0.36% gain in zero-shot accuracy compared to the dense model using only 2% of the original pretraining tokens. Additionally, we establish an accurate and robust empirical scaling law to predict sparse model performance given adequate training resources. Finally, we demonstrate the practical applicability of our sparse models by evaluating them under quantization and fine-tuning scenarios.
OpenID Connect for Agents (OIDC-A) 1.0: A Standard Extension for LLM-Based Agent Identity and Authorization
Nagabhushanaradhya, Subramanya
OpenID Connect for Agents (OIDC-A) 1.0 is an extension to OpenID Connect Core 1.0 that provides a comprehensive framework for representing, authenticating, and authorizing LLM-based agents within the OAuth 2.0 ecosystem. As autonomous AI agents become increasingly prevalent in digital systems, there is a critical need for standardized protocols to establish agent identity, verify agent attestation, represent delegation chains, and enable fine-grained authorization based on agent attributes. This specification defines standard claims, endpoints, and protocols that address these requirements while maintaining compatibility with existing OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect infrastructure. The proposed framework introduces mechanisms for agent identity representation, delegation chain validation, attestation verification, and capability-based authorization, providing a foundation for secure and trustworthy agent-to-service interactions in modern distributed systems.