When using Large Language Models (LLMs) to support Knowledge Graph Engineering (KGE), one of the first indications when searching for an appropriate model is its size. According to the scaling laws, larger models typically show higher capabilities. However, in practice, resource costs are also an important factor and thus it makes sense to consider the ratio between model performance and costs. The LLM-KG-Bench framework enables the comparison of LLMs in the context of KGE tasks and assesses their capabilities of understanding and producing KGs and KG queries. Based on a dataset created in an LLM-KG-Bench run covering 26 open state-of-the-art LLMs, we explore the model size scaling laws specific to KGE tasks. In our analyses, we assess how benchmark scores evolve between different model size categories. Additionally, we inspect how the general score development of single models and families of models correlates to their size. Our analyses revealed that, with a few exceptions, the model size scaling laws generally also apply to the selected KGE tasks. However, in some cases, plateau or ceiling effects occurred, i.e., the task performance did not change much between a model and the next larger model. In these cases, smaller models could be considered to achieve high cost-effectiveness. Regarding models of the same family, sometimes larger models performed worse than smaller models of the same family. These effects occurred only locally. Hence it is advisable to additionally test the next smallest and largest model of the same family.

Most learning-based lossless compressors are designed for a single modality, requiring separate models for multi-modal data and lacking flexibility. However, different modalities vary significantly in format and statistical properties, making it ineffective to use compressors that lack modality-specific adaptations. While multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) offer a potential solution for modality-unified compression, their excessive complexity hinders practical deployment. To address these challenges, we focus on the two most common modalities, image and text, and propose DualComp, the first unified and lightweight learning-based dual-modality lossless compressor. Built on a lightweight backbone, DualComp incorporates three key structural enhancements to handle modality heterogeneity: modality-unified tokenization, modality-switching contextual learning, and modality-routing mixture-of-experts. A reparameterization training strategy is also used to boost compression performance. DualComp integrates both modality-specific and shared parameters for efficient parameter utilization, enabling near real-time inference (200KB/s) on desktop CPUs. With much fewer parameters, DualComp achieves compression performance on par with the SOTA LLM-based methods for both text and image datasets. Its simplified single-modality variant surpasses the previous best image compressor on the Kodak dataset by about 9% using just 1.2% of the model size.

The advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled various multimodal tasks to be addressed under a zero-shot paradigm. This paradigm sidesteps the cost of model fine-tuning, emerging as a dominant trend in practical application. Nevertheless, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), a pivotal challenge in the quest for general artificial intelligence, fails to accommodate this convenience. The zero-shot paradigm exhibits undesirable performance on MSA, casting doubt on whether MLLMs can perceive sentiments as competent as supervised models. By extending the zero-shot paradigm to In-Context Learning (ICL) and conducting an in-depth study on configuring demonstrations, we validate that MLLMs indeed possess such capability. Specifically, three key factors that cover demonstrations' retrieval, presentation, and distribution are comprehensively investigated and optimized. A sentimental predictive bias inherent in MLLMs is also discovered and later effectively counteracted. By complementing each other, the devised strategies for three factors result in average accuracy improvements of 15.9% on six MSA datasets against the zero-shot paradigm and 11.2% against the random ICL baseline.

Insertion task is highly challenging that requires robots to operate with exceptional precision in cluttered environments. Existing methods often have poor generalization capabilities. They typically function in restricted and structured environments, and frequently fail when the plug and socket are far apart, when the scene is densely cluttered, or when handling novel objects. They also rely on strong assumptions such as access to CAD models or a digital twin in simulation. To address this, we propose EasyInsert, a framework which leverages the human intuition that relative pose (delta pose) between plug and socket is sufficient for successful insertion, and employs efficient and automated real-world data collection with minimal human labor to train a generalizable model for relative pose prediction. During execution, EasyInsert follows a coarse-to-fine execution procedure based on predicted delta pose, and successfully performs various insertion tasks. EasyInsert demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization capability for unseen objects in cluttered environments, handling cases with significant initial pose deviations while maintaining high sample efficiency and requiring little human effort. In real-world experiments, with just 5 hours of training data, EasyInsert achieves over 90% success in zero-shot insertion for 13 out of 15 unseen novel objects, including challenging objects like Type-C cables, HDMI cables, and Ethernet cables. Furthermore, with only one human demonstration and 4 minutes of automatically collected data for fine-tuning, it reaches over 90% success rate for all 15 objects.

Fact recall, the ability of language models (LMs) to retrieve specific factual knowledge, remains a challenging task despite their impressive general capabilities. Common training strategies often struggle to promote robust recall behavior with two-stage training, which first trains a model with fact-storing examples (e.g., factual statements) and then with fact-recalling examples (question-answer pairs), tending to encourage rote memorization rather than generalizable fact retrieval. In contrast, mixed training, which jointly uses both types of examples, has been empirically shown to improve the ability to recall facts, but the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. In this work, we investigate how these training strategies affect how model parameters are shaped during training and how these differences relate to their ability to recall facts. We introduce cross-task gradient trace to identify shared parameters, those strongly influenced by both fact-storing and fact-recalling examples. Our analysis on synthetic fact recall datasets with the Llama-3.2B and Pythia-2.8B models reveals that mixed training encouraging a larger and more centralized set of shared parameters. These findings suggest that the emergence of parameters may play a key role in enabling LMs to generalize factual knowledge across task formulations.

In the realm of data selection for reasoning tasks, existing approaches predominantly rely on externally predefined static metrics such as difficulty and diversity, which are often designed for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and lack adaptability to continuous training processes. A critical limitation of these methods is their inability to dynamically align with the evolving capabilities of models during online training, a gap that becomes increasingly pronounced with the rise of dynamic training paradigms and online reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks (e.g., R1 models). To address this, we introduce SAI-DPO, an algorithm that dynamically selects training data by continuously assessing a model's stage-specific reasoning abilities across different training phases. By integrating real-time model performance feedback, SAI-DPO adaptively adapts data selection to the evolving strengths and weaknesses of the model, thus enhancing both data utilization efficiency and final task performance. Extensive experiments on three state-of-the-art models and eight mathematical reasoning benchmarks, including challenging competition-level datasets (e.g., AIME24 and AMC23), demonstrate that SAI-DPO achieves an average performance boost of up to 21.3 percentage points, with particularly notable improvements of 10 and 15 points on AIME24 and AMC23, respectively. These results highlight the superiority of dynamic, model-adaptive data selection over static, externally defined strategies in advancing reasoning.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as substitutes for human participants in cognitive tasks, but their ability to simulate human behavioral variability remains unclear. This study examines whether LLMs can approximate individual differences in the phonemic fluency task, where participants generate words beginning with a target letter. We evaluated 34 model configurations, varying prompt specificity, sampling temperature, and model type, and compared outputs to responses from 106 human participants. While some configurations, especially Claude 3.7 Sonnet, matched human averages and lexical preferences, none reproduced the scope of human variability. LLM outputs were consistently less diverse and structurally rigid, and LLM ensembles failed to increase diversity. Network analyses further revealed fundamental differences in retrieval structure between humans and models. These results highlight key limitations in using LLMs to simulate human cognition and behavior.

Existing reasoning benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) frequently fail to capture authentic creativity, often rewarding memorization of previously observed patterns. We address this shortcoming with Sudoku-Bench, a curated benchmark of challenging and unconventional Sudoku variants specifically selected to evaluate creative, multi-step logical reasoning. Sudoku variants form an unusually effective domain for reasoning research: each puzzle introduces unique or subtly interacting constraints, making memorization infeasible and requiring solvers to identify novel logical breakthroughs (``break-ins''). Despite their diversity, Sudoku variants maintain a common and compact structure, enabling clear and consistent evaluation. Sudoku-Bench includes a carefully chosen puzzle set, a standardized text-based puzzle representation, and flexible tools compatible with thousands of publicly available puzzles -- making it easy to extend into a general research environment. Baseline experiments show that state-of-the-art LLMs solve fewer than 15\% of puzzles unaided, highlighting significant opportunities to advance long-horizon, strategic reasoning capabilities.

Recent studies have applied large language models (LLMs) to machine translation quality estimation (MTQE) by prompting models to assign numeric scores. Nonetheless, these direct scoring methods tend to show low segment-level correlation with human judgments. In this paper, we propose a generation-based evaluation paradigm that leverages decoder-only LLMs to produce high-quality references, followed by semantic similarity scoring using sentence embeddings. We conduct the most extensive evaluation to date in MTQE, covering 8 LLMs and 8 language pairs. Empirical results show that our method outperforms both intra-LLM direct scoring baselines and external non-LLM reference-free metrics from MTME. These findings demonstrate the strength of generation-based evaluation and support a shift toward hybrid approaches that combine fluent generation with accurate semantic assessment.

We introduce KoBALT (Korean Benchmark for Advanced Linguistic Tasks), a comprehensive linguistically-motivated benchmark comprising 700 multiple-choice questions spanning 24 phenomena across five linguistic domains: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonetics/phonology, and morphology. KoBALT is designed to advance the evaluation of large language models (LLMs) in Korean, a morphologically rich language, by addressing the limitations of conventional benchmarks that often lack linguistic depth and typological grounding. It introduces a suite of expert-curated, linguistically motivated questions with minimal n-gram overlap with standard Korean corpora, substantially mitigating the risk of data contamination and allowing a more robust assessment of true language understanding. Our evaluation of 20 contemporary LLMs reveals significant performance disparities, with the highest-performing model achieving 61\% general accuracy but showing substantial variation across linguistic domains - from stronger performance in semantics (66\%) to considerable weaknesses in phonology (31\%) and morphology (36\%). Through human preference evaluation with 95 annotators, we demonstrate a strong correlation between KoBALT scores and human judgments, validating our benchmark's effectiveness as a discriminative measure of Korean language understanding. KoBALT addresses critical gaps in linguistic evaluation for typologically diverse languages and provides a robust framework for assessing genuine linguistic competence in Korean language models.