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Do LVLMs Know What They Know? A Systematic Study of Knowledge Boundary Perception in LVLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) demonstrate strong visual question answering (VQA) capabilities but are shown to hallucinate. A reliable model should perceive its knowledge boundaries-knowing what it knows and what it does not. This paper investigates LVLMs' perception of their knowledge boundaries by evaluating three types of confidence signals: probabilistic confidence, answer consistency-based confidence, and verbalized confidence. Experiments on three LVLMs across three VQA datasets show that, although LVLMs possess a reasonable perception level, there is substantial room for improvement. Among the three confidences, probabilistic and consistency-based signals are more reliable indicators, while verbalized confidence often leads to overconfidence. To enhance LVLMs' perception, we adapt several established confidence calibration methods from Large Language Models (LLMs) and propose three effective methods. Additionally, we compare LVLMs with their LLM counterparts, finding that jointly processing visual and textual inputs decreases question-answering performance but reduces confidence, resulting in an improved perception level compared to LLMs.


Reasoning LLMs in the Medical Domain: A Literature Survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--The emergence of advanced reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) marks a transformative development in healthcare applications. Beyond merely expanding functional capabilities, these reasoning mechanisms enhance decision transparency and explainability-critical requirements in medical contexts. This survey examines the transformation of medical LLMs from basic information retrieval tools to sophisticated clinical reasoning systems capable of supporting complex healthcare decisions. We provide a thorough analysis of the enabling technological foundations, with a particular focus on specialized prompting techniques like Chain-of-Thought and recent breakthroughs in Reinforcement Learning exemplified by DeepSeek-R1. Our investigation evaluates purpose-built medical frameworks while also examining emerging paradigms such as multi-agent collaborative systems and innovative prompting architectures. The survey critically assesses current evaluation methodologies for medical validation and addresses persistent challenges in field interpretation limitations, bias mitigation strategies, patient safety frameworks, and integration of mul-timodal clinical data. Through this survey, we seek to establish a roadmap for developing reliable LLMs that can serve as effective partners in clinical practice and medical research. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into healthcare has promised to revolutionize medical practice, from diagnostics to personalized medicine [1]. Among AI's most dynamic subfields, Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding, generating, and manipulating human language, leading to their exploration in numerous specialized domains [2].


Trustworthy Agents for Electronic Health Records through Confidence Estimation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) show promise for extracting information from Electronic Health Records (EHR) and supporting clinical decisions. However, deployment in clinical settings faces challenges due to hallucination risks. We propose Hallucination Controlled Accuracy at k% (HCAcc@k%), a novel metric quantifying the accuracy-reliability trade-off at varying confidence thresholds. We introduce TrustEHRAgent, a confidence-aware agent incorporating stepwise confidence estimation for clinical question answering. Experiments on MIMIC-III and eICU datasets show TrustEHRAgent outperforms baselines under strict reliability constraints, achieving improvements of 44.23%p and 25.34%p at HCAcc@70% while baseline methods fail at these thresholds. These results highlight limitations of traditional accuracy metrics in evaluating healthcare AI agents. Our work contributes to developing trustworthy clinical agents that deliver accurate information or transparently express uncertainty when confidence is low.


Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Natural Language Art Provenance Searches in the Getty Provenance Index

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This research presents a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework for art provenance studies, focusing on the Getty Provenance Index. Provenance research establishes the ownership history of artworks, which is essential for verifying authenticity, supporting restitution and legal claims, and understanding the cultural and historical context of art objects. The process is complicated by fragmented, multilingual archival data that hinders efficient retrieval. Current search portals require precise metadata, limiting exploratory searches. Our method enables natural-language and multilingual searches through semantic retrieval and contextual summarization, reducing dependence on metadata structures. We assess RAG's capability to retrieve and summarize auction records using a 10,000-record sample from the Getty Provenance Index - German Sales. The results show this approach provides a scalable solution for navigating art market archives, offering a practical tool for historians and cultural heritage professionals conducting historically sensitive research.


It's All About In-Context Learning! Teaching Extremely Low-Resource Languages to LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Extremely low-resource languages, especially those written in rare scripts, as shown in Figure 1, remain largely unsupported by large language models (LLMs). This is due in part to compounding factors such as the lack of training data. This paper delivers the first comprehensive analysis of whether LLMs can acquire such languages purely via in-context learning (ICL), with or without auxiliary alignment signals, and how these methods compare to parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We systematically evaluate 20 under-represented languages across three state-of-the-art multilingual LLMs. Our findings highlight the limitation of PEFT when both language and its script are extremely under-represented by the LLM. In contrast, zero-shot ICL with language alignment is impressively effective on extremely low-resource languages, while few-shot ICL or PEFT is more beneficial for languages relatively better represented by LLMs. For LLM practitioners working on extremely low-resource languages, we summarise guidelines grounded by our results on adapting LLMs to low-resource languages, e.g., avoiding fine-tuning a multilingual model on languages of unseen scripts.


"Where does it hurt?" -- Dataset and Study on Physician Intent Trajectories in Doctor Patient Dialogues

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In a doctor-patient dialogue, the primary objective of physicians is to diagnose patients and propose a treatment plan. Medical doctors guide these conversations through targeted questioning to efficiently gather the information required to provide the best possible outcomes for patients. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that studies physician intent trajectories in doctor-patient dialogues. We use the `Ambient Clinical Intelligence Benchmark' (Aci-bench) dataset for our study. We collaborate with medical professionals to develop a fine-grained taxonomy of physician intents based on the SOAP framework (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan). We then conduct a large-scale annotation effort to label over 5000 doctor-patient turns with the help of a large number of medical experts recruited using Prolific, a popular crowd-sourcing platform. This large labeled dataset is an important resource contribution that we use for benchmarking the state-of-the-art generative and encoder models for medical intent classification tasks. Our findings show that our models understand the general structure of medical dialogues with high accuracy, but often fail to identify transitions between SOAP categories. We also report for the first time common trajectories in medical dialogue structures that provide valuable insights for designing `differential diagnosis' systems. Finally, we extensively study the impact of intent filtering for medical dialogue summarization and observe a significant boost in performance. We make the codes and data, including annotation guidelines, publicly available at https://github.com/DATEXIS/medical-intent-classification.


HiPlan: Hierarchical Planning for LLM-Based Agents with Adaptive Global-Local Guidance

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in decision-making tasks, but struggle significantly with complex, long-horizon planning scenarios. This arises from their lack of macroscopic guidance, causing disorientation and failures in complex tasks, as well as insufficient continuous oversight during execution, rendering them unresponsive to environmental changes and prone to deviations. To tackle these challenges, we introduce HiPlan, a hierarchical planning framework that provides adaptive global-local guidance to boost LLM-based agents'decision-making. HiPlan decomposes complex tasks into milestone action guides for general direction and step-wise hints for detailed actions. During the offline phase, we construct a milestone library from expert demonstrations, enabling structured experience reuse by retrieving semantically similar tasks and milestones. In the execution phase, trajectory segments from past milestones are dynamically adapted to generate step-wise hints that align current observations with the milestone objectives, bridging gaps and correcting deviations. Extensive experiments across two challenging benchmarks demonstrate that HiPlan substantially outperforms strong baselines, and ablation studies validate the complementary benefits of its hierarchical components.


An LLM-powered Natural-to-Robotic Language Translation Framework with Correctness Guarantees

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--The Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly being deployed in robotics to generate robot control programs for specific user tasks, enabling embodied intelligence. Existing methods primarily focus on LLM training and prompt design that utilize LLMs to generate executable programs directly from user tasks in natural language. However, due to the inconsistency of the LLMs and the high complexity of the tasks, such best-effort approaches often lead to tremendous programming errors in the generated code, which significantly undermines the effectiveness especially when the light-weight LLMs are applied. This paper introduces a natural-robotic language translation framework that (i) provides correctness verification for generated control programs and (ii) enhances the performance of LLMs in program generation via feedback-based fine-tuning for the programs. T o achieve this, a Robot Skill Language (RSL) is proposed to abstract away from the intricate details of the control programs, bridging the natural language tasks with the underlying robot skills. Then, the RSL compiler and debugger are constructed to verify RSL programs generated by the LLM and provide error feedback to the LLM for refining the outputs until being verified by the compiler . This provides correctness guarantees for the LLM-generated programs before being offloaded to the robots for execution, significantly enhancing the effectiveness of LLMpowered robotic applications. Experiments demonstrate NRTrans outperforms the existing method under a range of LLMs and tasks, and achieves a high success rate for light-weight LLMs. To bridge this gap, LLMs ( e.g., OpenAI's GPT [4], Meta's Llama [5], and Google's Gemma [6]) are deployed in robotics, leveraging their semantic comprehension and contextual reasoning to generate robotic control programs that fulfill the given tasks. Most of the existing LLM-powered control program generation methods for robotics can be broadly categorized into the following three fundamental paradigms [7]-[9], as shown in Figure 1.


Can Structured Templates Facilitate LLMs in Tackling Harder Tasks? : An Exploration of Scaling Laws by Difficulty

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Structured, procedural reasoning is essential for Large Language Models (LLMs), especially in mathematics. While post-training methods have improved LLM performance, they still fall short in capturing deep procedural logic on complex tasks. To tackle the issue, in this paper, we first investigate this limitation and uncover a novel finding: a Scaling Law by Difficulty, which reveals that model performance follows a U-shaped curve with respect to training data complexity -- excessive low-difficulty data impedes abstraction, while high-difficulty data significantly enhances reasoning ability. Motivated by this, we propose the Structured Solution Template (SST) framework, which uses solution templates and a curriculum of varied difficulty to explicitly teach procedural reasoning. Specifically, SST comprises (1) fine-tuning with structured solution-template chains and dynamically weighted loss to prioritize procedural logic, (2) prompt-time injection of solution templates as cognitive scaffolds to guide inference, and (3) integrated curriculum fine-tuning that explicitly teaches the model to self-plan - execute - self-correct. Experiments on GSM8K, AIME24, and new Dynamic En benchmark show that SST significantly improves both accuracy and efficiency, especially on harder problems.


The Double-edged Sword of LLM-based Data Reconstruction: Understanding and Mitigating Contextual Vulnerability in Word-level Differential Privacy Text Sanitization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Differentially private text sanitization refers to the process of privatizing texts under the framework of Differential Privacy (DP), providing provable privacy guarantees while also empirically defending against adversaries seeking to harm privacy. Despite their simplicity, DP text sanitization methods operating at the word level exhibit a number of shortcomings, among them the tendency to leave contextual clues from the original texts due to randomization during sanitization $\unicode{x2013}$ this we refer to as $\textit{contextual vulnerability}$. Given the powerful contextual understanding and inference capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we explore to what extent LLMs can be leveraged to exploit the contextual vulnerability of DP-sanitized texts. We expand on previous work not only in the use of advanced LLMs, but also in testing a broader range of sanitization mechanisms at various privacy levels. Our experiments uncover a double-edged sword effect of LLM-based data reconstruction attacks on privacy and utility: while LLMs can indeed infer original semantics and sometimes degrade empirical privacy protections, they can also be used for good, to improve the quality and privacy of DP-sanitized texts. Based on our findings, we propose recommendations for using LLM data reconstruction as a post-processing step, serving to increase privacy protection by thinking adversarially.