Sarcasm is a form of humor where expressions convey meanings opposite to their literal interpretations. Classifying and generating sarcasm using large language models is vital for interpreting human communication. Sarcasm poses challenges for computational models, due to its nuanced nature. We introduce Sarc7, a benchmark that classifies 7 types of sarcasm: self-deprecating, brooding, deadpan, polite, obnoxious, raging, and manic by annotating entries of the MUStARD dataset. Classification was evaluated using zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), and a novel emotion-based prompting technique. We propose an emotion-based generation method developed by identifying key components of sarcasm-incongruity, shock value, and context dependency. Our classification experiments show that Gemini 2.5, using emotion-based prompting, outperforms other setups with an F1 score of 0.3664. Human evaluators preferred our emotion-based prompting, with 38.46% more successful generations than zero-shot prompting.

Understanding the prevalence of misinformation in health topics online can inform public health policies and interventions. However, measuring such misinformation at scale remains a challenge, particularly for high-stakes but understudied topics like opioid-use disorder (OUD)--a leading cause of death in the U.S. We present the first large-scale study of OUD-related myths on YouTube, a widely-used platform for health information. With clinical experts, we validate 8 pervasive myths and release an expert-labeled video dataset. To scale labeling, we introduce MythTriage, an efficient triage pipeline that uses a lightweight model for routine cases and defers harder ones to a high-performing, but costlier, large language model (LLM). MythTriage achieves up to 0.86 macro F1-score while estimated to reduce annotation time and financial cost by over 76% compared to experts and full LLM labeling. We analyze 2.9K search results and 343K recommendations, uncovering how myths persist on YouTube and offering actionable insights for public health and platform moderation.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language understanding and generation, leading to extensive benchmarking across diverse tasks. However, cryptanalysis - a critical area for data security and its connection to LLMs' generalization abilities - remains underexplored in LLM evaluations. To address this gap, we evaluate the cryptanalytic potential of state-of-the-art LLMs on ciphertexts produced by a range of cryptographic algorithms. We introduce a benchmark dataset of diverse plaintexts, spanning multiple domains, lengths, writing styles, and topics, paired with their encrypted versions. Using zero-shot and few-shot settings along with chain-of-thought prompting, we assess LLMs' decryption success rate and discuss their comprehension abilities. Our findings reveal key insights into LLMs' strengths and limitations in side-channel scenarios and raise concerns about their susceptibility to under-generalization-related attacks. This research highlights the dual-use nature of LLMs in security contexts and contributes to the ongoing discussion on AI safety and security.

While large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on text-to-SQL parsing, they sometimes exhibit unexpected failures in which they are confidently incorrect. Building trustworthy text-to-SQL systems thus requires eliciting reliable uncertainty measures from the LLM. In this paper, we study the problem of providing a calibrated confidence score that conveys the likelihood of an output query being correct. Our work is the first to establish a benchmark for post-hoc calibration of LLM-based text-to-SQL parsing. In particular, we show that Platt scaling, a canonical method for calibration, provides substantial improvements over directly using raw model output probabilities as confidence scores. Furthermore, we propose a method for text-to-SQL calibration that leverages the structured nature of SQL queries to provide more granular signals of correctness, named "sub-clause frequency" (SCF) scores. Using multivariate Platt scaling (MPS), our extension of the canonical Platt scaling technique, we combine individual SCF scores into an overall accurate and calibrated score. Empirical evaluation on two popular text-to-SQL datasets shows that our approach of combining MPS and SCF yields further improvements in calibration and the related task of error detection over traditional Platt scaling.

Rebus puzzles, visual riddles that encode language through imagery, spatial arrangement, and symbolic substitution, pose a unique challenge to current vision-language models (VLMs). Unlike traditional image captioning or question answering tasks, rebus solving requires multi-modal abstraction, symbolic reasoning, and a grasp of cultural, phonetic and linguistic puns. In this paper, we investigate the capacity of contemporary VLMs to interpret and solve rebus puzzles by constructing a hand-generated and annotated benchmark of diverse English-language rebus puzzles, ranging from simple pictographic substitutions to spatially-dependent cues ("head" over "heels"). We analyze how different VLMs perform, and our findings reveal that while VLMs exhibit some surprising capabilities in decoding simple visual clues, they struggle significantly with tasks requiring abstract reasoning, lateral thinking, and understanding visual metaphors.

Empirical methods to examine the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to use Automated Theorem Prover (ATP) reasoning strategies are studied. We evaluate the performance of State of the Art models from December 2023 and August 2024 on PRONTOQA steamroller reasoning problems. For that, we develop methods for assessing LLM response accuracy and correct answer correlation. Our results show that progress in improving LLM reasoning abilities has stalled over the nine month period. By tracking completion tokens, we show that almost all improvement in reasoning ability since GPT-4 was released can be attributed to either hidden system prompts or the training of models to automatically use generic Chain of Thought prompting strategies. Among the ATP reasoning strategies tried, we found that current frontier LLMs are best able to follow the bottom-up (also known as forward-chaining) strategy. A low positive correlation was found between an LLM response containing correct reasoning and arriving at the correct conclusion.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet they often refuse to answer legitimate queries--a phenomenon known as overrefusal. Overrefusal typically stems from over-conservative safety alignment, causing models to treat many reasonable prompts as potentially risky. To systematically understand this issue, we probe and leverage the models' safety decision boundaries to analyze and mitigate overrefusal. Our findings reveal that overrefusal is closely tied to misalignment at these boundary regions, where models struggle to distinguish subtle differences between benign and harmful content. Building on these insights, we present RASS, an automated framework for prompt generation and selection that strategically targets overrefusal prompts near the safety boundary. By harnessing steering vectors in the representation space, RASS efficiently identifies and curates boundary-aligned prompts, enabling more effective and targeted mitigation of overrefusal. This approach not only provides a more precise and interpretable view of model safety decisions but also seamlessly extends to multilingual scenarios. We have explored the safety decision boundaries of various LLMs and construct the MORBench evaluation set to facilitate robust assessment of model safety and helpfulness across multiple languages. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Master-PLC/RASS.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are catalyzing a paradigm shift in scientific discovery, evolving from task-specific automation tools into increasingly autonomous agents and fundamentally redefining research processes and human-AI collaboration. This survey systematically charts this burgeoning field, placing a central focus on the changing roles and escalating capabilities of LLMs in science. Through the lens of the scientific method, we introduce a foundational three-level taxonomy-Tool, Analyst, and Scientist-to delineate their escalating autonomy and evolving responsibilities within the research lifecycle. We further identify pivotal challenges and future research trajectories such as robotic automation, self-improvement, and ethical governance. Overall, this survey provides a conceptual architecture and strategic foresight to navigate and shape the future of AI-driven scientific discovery, fostering both rapid innovation and responsible advancement. Github Repository: https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/Awesome-LLM-Scientific-Discovery.

Large language models (LLMs) have been used in many application domains, including cyber security. The application of LLMs in the cyber security domain presents significant opportunities, such as for enhancing threat analysis and malware detection, but it can also introduce critical risks and safety concerns, including potential personal data leakage and automated generation of new malware. Building on recent findings that fine-tuning LLMs with pseudo-malicious cyber security data significantly compromises their safety, this paper presents a comprehensive validation and extension of these safety risks using a different evaluation framework. We employ the garak red teaming framework with the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications to assess four open-source LLMs: Mistral 7B, Llama 3 8B, Gemma 2 9B, and DeepSeek R1 8B. Our evaluation confirms and extends previous findings, showing that fine-tuning reduces safety resilience across all tested LLMs (e.g., the failure rate of Mistral 7B against prompt injection increases from 9.1% to 68.7%). We further propose and evaluate a novel safety alignment approach that carefully rewords instruction-response pairs to include explicit safety precautions and ethical considerations. This work validates previous safety concerns through independent evaluation and introduces new methods for mitigating these risks, contributing towards the development of secure, trustworthy, and ethically aligned LLMs. This approach demonstrates that it is possible to maintain or even improve model safety while preserving technical utility, offering a practical path towards developing safer fine-tuning methodologies.

Despite impressive progress in areas like mathematical reasoning, large language models still face significant challenges in consistently solving complex problems. Drawing inspiration from key human learning strategies, we propose two novel strategies to enhance the capability of large language models to solve these complex problems. First, Adaptive Difficulty Curriculum Learning (ADCL) is a novel curriculum learning strategy that tackles the Difficulty Shift phenomenon (i.e., a model's perception of problem difficulty dynamically changes during training) by periodically re-estimating difficulty within upcoming data batches to maintain alignment with the model's evolving capabilities. Second, Expert-Guided Self-Reformulation (EGSR) is a novel reinforcement learning strategy that bridges the gap between imitation learning and pure exploration by guiding models to reformulate expert solutions within their own conceptual framework, rather than relying on direct imitation, fostering deeper understanding and knowledge assimilation. Extensive experiments on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, using Qwen2.5-7B as the base model, demonstrate that these human-inspired strategies synergistically and significantly enhance performance. Notably, their combined application improves performance over the standard Zero-RL baseline by 10% on the AIME24 benchmark and 16.6% on AIME25.