Large Language Model
Faithful and Robust LLM-Driven Theorem Proving for NLI Explanations
Quan, Xin, Valentino, Marco, Dennis, Louise A., Freitas, André
Natural language explanations play a fundamental role in Natural Language Inference (NLI) by revealing how premises logically entail hypotheses. Recent work has shown that the interaction of large language models (LLMs) with theorem provers (TPs) can help verify and improve the validity of NLI explanations. However, TPs require translating natural language into machine-verifiable formal representations, a process that introduces the risk of semantic information loss and unfaithful interpretation, an issue compounded by LLMs' challenges in capturing critical logical structures with sufficient precision. Moreover, LLMs are still limited in their capacity for rigorous and robust proof construction within formal verification frameworks. To mitigate issues related to faithfulness and robustness, this paper investigates strategies to (1) alleviate semantic loss during autoformalisation, (2) efficiently identify and correct syntactic errors in logical representations, (3) explicitly use logical expressions to guide LLMs in generating structured proof sketches, and (4) increase LLMs' capacity of interpreting TP's feedback for iterative refinement. Our empirical results on e-SNLI, QASC and WorldTree using different LLMs demonstrate that the proposed strategies yield significant improvements in autoformalisation (+18.46%, +34.2%, +39.77%) and explanation refinement (+29.5%, +51.5%, +41.25%) over the state-of-the-art model. Moreover, we show that specific interventions on the hybrid LLM-TP architecture can substantially improve efficiency, drastically reducing the number of iterations required for successful verification.
On Fairness of Task Arithmetic: The Role of Task Vectors
Naganuma, Hiroki, Yoshida, Kotaro, Gonzalez, Laura Gomezjurado, Horie, Takafumi, Naraki, Yuji, Shimizu, Ryotaro
Model editing techniques, particularly task arithmetic using task vectors, have shown promise in efficiently modifying pre-trained models through arithmetic operations like task addition and negation. Despite computational advantages, these methods may inadvertently affect model fairness, creating risks in sensitive applications like hate speech detection. However, the fairness implications of task arithmetic remain largely unexplored, presenting a critical gap in the existing literature. We systematically examine how manipulating task vectors affects fairness metrics, including Demographic Parity and Equalized Odds. To rigorously assess these effects, we benchmark task arithmetic against full fine-tuning, a costly but widely used baseline, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a prevalent parameter-efficient fine-tuning method. Additionally, we explore merging task vectors from models fine-tuned on demographic subgroups vulnerable to hate speech, investigating whether fairness outcomes can be controlled by adjusting task vector coefficients, potentially enabling tailored model behavior. Our results offer novel insights into the fairness implications of model editing and establish a foundation for fairness-aware and responsible model editing practices.
A Reward-driven Automated Webshell Malicious-code Generator for Red-teaming
Frequent cyber-attacks have elevated WebShell exploitation and defense to a critical research focus within network security. However, there remains a significant shortage of publicly available, well-categorized malicious-code datasets organized by obfuscation method. Existing malicious-code generation methods, which primarily rely on prompt engineering, often suffer from limited diversity and high redundancy in the payloads they produce. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{RAWG}, a \textbf{R}eward-driven \textbf{A}utomated \textbf{W}ebshell Malicious-code \textbf{G}enerator designed for red-teaming applications. Our approach begins by categorizing webshell samples from common datasets into seven distinct types of obfuscation. We then employ a large language model (LLM) to extract and normalize key tokens from each sample, creating a standardized, high-quality corpus. Using this curated dataset, we perform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on an open-source large model to enable the generation of diverse, highly obfuscated webshell malicious payloads. To further enhance generation quality, we apply Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), treating malicious-code samples as "chosen" data and benign code as "rejected" data during reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAWG significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in both payload diversity and escape effectiveness.
Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search
Li, Xiaoyu, Li, Xiao, Gao, Li, Liu, Yiding, Wang, Xiaoyang, Wang, Shuaiqiang, Wang, Junfeng, Yin, Dawei
The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly advanced multi-turn conversation systems, emphasizing the need for proactive guidance to enhance users' interactions. However, these systems face challenges in dynamically adapting to shifts in users' goals and maintaining low latency for real-time interactions. In the Baidu Search AI assistant, an industrial-scale multi-turn search system, we propose a novel two-phase framework to provide proactive guidance. The first phase, Goal-adaptive Supervised Fine-Tuning (G-SFT), employs a goal adaptation agent that dynamically adapts to user goal shifts and provides goal-relevant contextual information. G-SFT also incorporates scalable knowledge transfer to distill insights from LLMs into a lightweight model for real-time interaction. The second phase, Click-oriented Reinforcement Learning (C-RL), adopts a generate-rank paradigm, systematically constructs preference pairs from user click signals, and proactively improves click-through rates through more engaging guidance. This dual-phase architecture achieves complementary objectives: G-SFT ensures accurate goal tracking, while C-RL optimizes interaction quality through click signal-driven reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves 86.10% accuracy in offline evaluation (+23.95% over baseline) and 25.28% CTR in online deployment (149.06% relative improvement), while reducing inference latency by 69.55% through scalable knowledge distillation.
Mamba Knockout for Unraveling Factual Information Flow
Endy, Nir, Grosbard, Idan Daniel, Ran-Milo, Yuval, Slutzky, Yonatan, Tshuva, Itay, Giryes, Raja
This paper investigates the flow of factual information in Mamba State-Space Model (SSM)-based language models. We rely on theoretical and empirical connections to Transformer-based architectures and their attention mechanisms. Exploiting this relationship, we adapt attentional interpretability techniques originally developed for Transformers--specifically, the Attention Knockout methodology--to both Mamba-1 and Mamba-2. Using them we trace how information is transmitted and localized across tokens and layers, revealing patterns of subject-token information emergence and layer-wise dynamics. Notably, some phenomena vary between mamba models and Transformer based models, while others appear universally across all models inspected--hinting that these may be inherent to LLMs in general. By further leveraging Mamba's structured factorization, we disentangle how distinct "features" either enable token-to-token information exchange or enrich individual tokens, thus offering a unified lens to understand Mamba internal operations.
Advantageous Parameter Expansion Training Makes Better Large Language Models
Gu, Naibin, Chen, Yilong, Zhang, Zhenyu, Fu, Peng, Lin, Zheng, Wang, Shuohuan, Sun, Yu, Wu, Hua, Wang, Weiping, Wang, Haifeng
Although scaling up the number of trainable parameters in both pre-training and fine-tuning can effectively improve the performance of large language models, it also leads to increased computational overhead. When delving into the parameter difference, we find that a subset of parameters, termed advantageous parameters, plays a crucial role in determining model performance. Further analysis reveals that stronger models tend to possess more such parameters. In this paper, we propose Advantageous Parameter EXpansion Training (APEX), a method that progressively expands advantageous parameters into the space of disadvantageous ones, thereby increasing their proportion and enhancing training effectiveness. Further theoretical analysis from the perspective of matrix effective rank explains the performance gains of APEX. Extensive experiments on both instruction tuning and continued pre-training demonstrate that, in instruction tuning, APEX outperforms full-parameter tuning while using only 52% of the trainable parameters. In continued pre-training, APEX achieves the same perplexity level as conventional training with just 33% of the training data, and yields significant improvements on downstream tasks.
An Adversary-Resistant Multi-Agent LLM System via Credibility Scoring
Ebrahimi, Sana, Dehghankar, Mohsen, Asudeh, Abolfazl
While multi-agent LLM systems show strong capabilities in various domains, they are highly vulnerable to adversarial and low-performing agents. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we introduce a general and adversary-resistant multi-agent LLM framework based on credibility scoring. We model the collaborative query-answering process as an iterative game, where the agents communicate and contribute to a final system output. Our system associates a credibility score that is used when aggregating the team outputs. The credibility scores are learned gradually based on the past contributions of each agent in query answering. Our experiments across multiple tasks and settings demonstrate our system's effectiveness in mitigating adversarial influence and enhancing the resilience of multi-agent cooperation, even in the adversary-majority settings.
From Hallucinations to Jailbreaks: Rethinking the Vulnerability of Large Foundation Models
Jin, Haibo, Zhang, Peiyan, Wang, Peiran, Luo, Man, Wang, Haohan
Large foundation models (LFMs) are susceptible to two distinct vulnerabilities: hallucinations and jailbreak attacks. While typically studied in isolation, we observe that defenses targeting one often affect the other, hinting at a deeper connection. We propose a unified theoretical framework that models jailbreaks as token-level optimization and hallucinations as attention-level optimization. Within this framework, we establish two key propositions: (1) \textit{Similar Loss Convergence} - the loss functions for both vulnerabilities converge similarly when optimizing for target-specific outputs; and (2) \textit{Gradient Consistency in Attention Redistribution} - both exhibit consistent gradient behavior driven by shared attention dynamics. We validate these propositions empirically on LLaVA-1.5 and MiniGPT-4, showing consistent optimization trends and aligned gradients. Leveraging this connection, we demonstrate that mitigation techniques for hallucinations can reduce jailbreak success rates, and vice versa. Our findings reveal a shared failure mode in LFMs and suggest that robustness strategies should jointly address both vulnerabilities.
ProofNet++: A Neuro-Symbolic System for Formal Proof Verification with Self-Correction
Table I presents the quantitative evaluation of ProofNet++ across three distinct datasets. The FPSR (Final Proof Success Rate) metric shows that the system performs best on the mathlib-extract dataset with a 74.9% success rate, followed by miniF2F at 68.4%, and the HOL Light Testbed trailing at 63.5%. Similarly, the PPC (Proof Production Correctness) values align with this trend, indicating higher intermediate proof accuracy on mathlib-extract (88.0%) compared to the other datasets. The EDPT (Edit Distance to Proof Target) metric reveals that mathlib-extract proofs require fewer correction steps (2.4) than miniF2F (3.2) and HOL Light (4.0), suggesting that the system is more efficient in approximating correct proofs in that domain. Latency measurements reflect verifier runtime, with mathlib-extract exhibiting the fastest average verification time (176 ms), whereas HOL Light has the highest latency (214 ms). Lastly, the average proof length varies notably, with HOL Light proofs being the longest (14.3 steps), potentially contributing to its higher latency and lower success metrics. These results indicate that while ProofNet++ demonstrates strong performance on established libraries like mathlib-extract, there is room for improvement on datasets with more complex or longer proofs, such as HOL Light. Enhancements could focus on optimizing proof search strategies and reducing verifier latency, particularly for longer proofs, to improve overall efficiency and success rates. E. Benchmark Pipeline Overview Figure 1 illustrates the full evaluation pipeline used to benchmark ProofNet++, from the initial input prompt to the final corrected proof output.
Reasoning Can Hurt the Inductive Abilities of Large Language Models
Jin, Haibo, Zhang, Peiyan, Luo, Man, Wang, Haohan
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress across domains, yet their ability to perform inductive reasoning - inferring latent rules from sparse examples - remains limited. It is often assumed that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, as used in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), enhances such reasoning. We investigate this assumption with creating four controlled, diagnostic game-based tasks - chess, Texas Hold'em, dice games, and blackjack - with hidden human-defined rules. We find that CoT reasoning can degrade inductive performance, with LRMs often underperforming their non-reasoning counterparts. To explain this, we present a theoretical framework that reveals how reasoning steps can amplify error through three failure modes: incorrect sub-task decomposition, incorrect sub-task solving, and incorrect final answer summarization. Based on our theoretical and empirical analysis, we introduce structured interventions that adapt CoT generation according to our identified failure types. These interventions improve inductive accuracy without retraining. Our findings suggest that effective (CoT) reasoning depends not only on taking more steps but also on ensuring those steps are well-structured.