Large Language Model
InstructRAG: Leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Instruction Graphs for LLM-Based Task Planning
Wang, Zheng, Teo, Shu Xian, Chew, Jun Jie, Shi, Wei
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their use as agents for planning complex tasks. Existing methods typically rely on a thought-action-observation (TAO) process to enhance LLM performance, but these approaches are often constrained by the LLMs' limited knowledge of complex tasks. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers new opportunities by leveraging external databases to ground generation in retrieved information. In this paper, we identify two key challenges (enlargability and transferability) in applying RAG to task planning. We propose InstructRAG, a novel solution within a multi-agent meta-reinforcement learning framework, to address these challenges. InstructRAG includes a graph to organize past instruction paths (sequences of correct actions), an RL-Agent with Reinforcement Learning to expand graph coverage for enlargability, and an ML-Agent with Meta-Learning to improve task generalization for transferability. The two agents are trained end-to-end to optimize overall planning performance. Our experiments on four widely used task planning datasets demonstrate that InstructRAG significantly enhances performance and adapts efficiently to new tasks, achieving up to a 19.2% improvement over the best existing approach.
ChatEXAONEPath: An Expert-level Multimodal Large Language Model for Histopathology Using Whole Slide Images
Kim, Sangwook, Lee, Soonyoung, Jang, Jongseong
Recent studies have made significant progress in developing large language models (LLMs) in the medical domain, which can answer expert-level questions and demonstrate the potential to assist clinicians in real-world clinical scenarios. Studies have also witnessed the importance of integrating various modalities with the existing LLMs for a better understanding of complex clinical contexts, which are innately multi-faceted by nature. Although studies have demonstrated the ability of multimodal LLMs in histopathology to answer questions from given images, they lack in understanding of thorough clinical context due to the patch-level data with limited information from public datasets. Thus, developing WSI-level MLLMs is significant in terms of the scalability and applicability of MLLMs in histopathology. In this study, we introduce an expert-level MLLM for histopathology using WSIs, dubbed as ChatEXAONEPath. We present a retrieval-based data generation pipeline using 10,094 pairs of WSIs and histopathology reports from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We also showcase an AI-based evaluation protocol for a comprehensive understanding of the medical context from given multimodal information and evaluate generated answers compared to the original histopathology reports. We demonstrate the ability of diagnosing the given histopathology images using ChatEXAONEPath with the acceptance rate of 62.9% from 1,134 pairs of WSIs and reports. Our proposed model can understand pan-cancer WSIs and clinical context from various cancer types. We argue that our proposed model has the potential to assist clinicians by comprehensively understanding complex morphology of WSIs for cancer diagnosis through the integration of multiple modalities.
SHA256 at SemEval-2025 Task 4: Selective Amnesia -- Constrained Unlearning for Large Language Models via Knowledge Isolation
Agrawal, Saransh, Huang, Kuan-Hao
Large language models (LLMs) frequently memorize sensitive information during training, posing risks when deploying publicly accessible models. Current machine unlearning methods struggle to selectively remove specific data associations without degrading overall model capabilities. This paper presents our solution to SemEval-2025 Task 4 on targeted unlearning, which introduces a two-stage methodology that combines causal mediation analysis with layer-specific optimization. Through systematic causal tracing experiments on OLMo architectures (1B and 7B parameters), we identify the critical role of the first few transformer layers (layers 0-5) in storing subject-attribute associations within MLP modules. Building on this insight, we develop a constrained optimization approach that freezes upper layers while applying a novel joint loss function to lower layers-simultaneously maximizing forget set loss via output token cross-entropy penalties and minimizing retain set deviation through adaptive regularization. Our method achieves 2nd place in the 1B model track, demonstrating strong task performance while maintaining 88% of baseline MMLU accuracy. These results establish causal-informed layer optimization as a promising paradigm for efficient, precise unlearning in LLMs, offering a significant step forward in addressing data privacy concerns in AI systems.
Sparks of Science: Hypothesis Generation Using Structured Paper Data
O'Neill, Charles, Ghosal, Tirthankar, Rฤileanu, Roberta, Walmsley, Mike, Bui, Thang, Schawinski, Kevin, Ciucฤ, Ioana
Generating novel and creative scientific hypotheses is a cornerstone in achieving Artificial General Intelligence. Large language and reasoning models have the potential to aid in the systematic creation, selection, and validation of scientifically informed hypotheses. However, current foundation models often struggle to produce scientific ideas that are both novel and feasible. One reason is the lack of a dedicated dataset that frames Scientific Hypothesis Generation (SHG) as a Natural Language Generation (NLG) task. In this paper, we introduce HypoGen, the first dataset of approximately 5500 structured problem-hypothesis pairs extracted from top-tier computer science conferences structured with a Bit-Flip-Spark schema, where the Bit is the conventional assumption, the Spark is the key insight or conceptual leap, and the Flip is the resulting counterproposal. HypoGen uniquely integrates an explicit Chain-of-Reasoning component that reflects the intellectual process from Bit to Flip. We demonstrate that framing hypothesis generation as conditional language modelling, with the model fine-tuned on Bit-Flip-Spark and the Chain-of-Reasoning (and where, at inference, we only provide the Bit), leads to improvements in the overall quality of the hypotheses. Our evaluation employs automated metrics and LLM judge rankings for overall quality assessment. We show that by fine-tuning on our HypoGen dataset we improve the novelty, feasibility, and overall quality of the generated hypotheses. The HypoGen dataset is publicly available at huggingface.co/datasets/UniverseTBD/hypogen-dr1.
Estimating Optimal Context Length for Hybrid Retrieval-augmented Multi-document Summarization
Pratapa, Adithya, Mitamura, Teruko
Recent advances in long-context reasoning abilities of language models led to interesting applications in large-scale multi-document summarization. However, prior work has shown that these long-context models are not effective at their claimed context windows. To this end, retrieval-augmented systems provide an efficient and effective alternative. However, their performance can be highly sensitive to the choice of retrieval context length. In this work, we present a hybrid method that combines retrieval-augmented systems with long-context windows supported by recent language models. Our method first estimates the optimal retrieval length as a function of the retriever, summarizer, and dataset. On a randomly sampled subset of the dataset, we use a panel of LLMs to generate a pool of silver references. We use these silver references to estimate the optimal context length for a given RAG system configuration. Our results on the multi-document summarization task showcase the effectiveness of our method across model classes and sizes. We compare against length estimates from strong long-context benchmarks such as RULER and HELMET. Our analysis also highlights the effectiveness of our estimation method for very long-context LMs and its generalization to new classes of LMs.
Are Retrials All You Need? Enhancing Large Language Model Reasoning Without Verbalized Feedback
Potamitis, Nearchos, Arora, Akhil
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed the development of general-purpose autonomous agents, demonstrating remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks across various domains. This surge has spurred the evolution of a plethora of prompt-based reasoning frameworks. A recent focus has been on iterative reasoning strategies that refine outputs through self-evaluation and verbalized feedback. However, these strategies require additional computational complexity to enable models to recognize and correct their mistakes, leading to a significant increase in their cost. In this work, we introduce the concept of ``retrials without feedback'', an embarrassingly simple yet powerful mechanism for enhancing reasoning frameworks by allowing LLMs to retry problem-solving attempts upon identifying incorrect answers. Unlike conventional iterative refinement methods, our method does not require explicit self-reflection or verbalized feedback, simplifying the refinement process. Our findings indicate that simpler retrial-based approaches often outperform more sophisticated reasoning frameworks, suggesting that the benefits of complex methods may not always justify their computational costs. By challenging the prevailing assumption that more intricate reasoning strategies inherently lead to better performance, our work offers new insights into how simpler, more efficient approaches can achieve optimal results. So, are retrials all you need?
Can LLMs reason over extended multilingual contexts? Towards long-context evaluation beyond retrieval and haystacks
Hengle, Amey, Bajpai, Prasoon, Dan, Soham, Chakraborty, Tanmoy
Existing multilingual long-context benchmarks, often based on the popular needle-in-a-haystack test, primarily evaluate a model's ability to locate specific information buried within irrelevant texts. However, such a retrieval-centric approach is myopic and inherently limited, as successful recall alone does not indicate a model's capacity to reason over extended contexts. Moreover, these benchmarks are susceptible to data leakage, short-circuiting, and risk making the evaluation a priori identifiable. To address these limitations, we introduce MLRBench, a new synthetic benchmark for multilingual long-context reasoning. Unlike existing benchmarks, MLRBench goes beyond surface-level retrieval by including tasks that assess multi-hop inference, aggregation, and epistemic reasoning. Spanning seven languages, MLRBench is designed to be parallel, resistant to leakage, and scalable to arbitrary context lengths. Our extensive experiments with an open-weight large language model (LLM) reveal a pronounced gap between high- and low-resource languages, particularly for tasks requiring the model to aggregate multiple facts or predict the absence of information. We also find that, in multilingual settings, LLMs effectively utilize less than 30% of their claimed context length. Although off-the-shelf Retrieval Augmented Generation helps alleviate this to a certain extent, it does not solve the long-context problem. We open-source MLRBench to enable future research in improved evaluation and training of multilingual LLMs.
Set You Straight: Auto-Steering Denoising Trajectories to Sidestep Unwanted Concepts
Li, Leyang, Lu, Shilin, Ren, Yan, Kong, Adams Wai-Kin
Ensuring the ethical deployment of text-to-image models requires effective techniques to prevent the generation of harmful or inappropriate content. While concept erasure methods offer a promising solution, existing finetuning-based approaches suffer from notable limitations. Anchor-free methods risk disrupting sampling trajectories, leading to visual artifacts, while anchor-based methods rely on the heuristic selection of anchor concepts. T o overcome these shortcomings, we introduce a finetuning framework, dubbed ANT, which Automatically guides de N oising Trajectories to avoid unwanted concepts. ANT is built on a key insight: reversing the condition direction of classifier-free guidance during mid-to-late denoising stages enables precise content modification without sacrificing early-stage structural integrity. This inspires a trajectory-aware objective that preserves the integrity of the early-stage score function field--which steers samples toward the natural image manifold--without relying on heuristic anchor concept selection. F or single-concept erasure, we propose an augmentation-enhanced weight saliency map to precisely identify the critical parameters that most significantly contribute to the unwanted concept, enabling more thorough and efficient erasure. F or multi-concept erasure, our objective function offers a versatile plug-and-play solution that significantly boosts performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ANT achieves state-of-the-art results in both single and multi-concept erasure, delivering high-quality, safe outputs without compromising the generative fidelity.
Enhancing the Geometric Problem-Solving Ability of Multimodal LLMs via Symbolic-Neural Integration
Pan, Yicheng, Zhang, Zhenrong, Hu, Pengfei, Ma, Jiefeng, Du, Jun, Zhang, Jianshu, Liu, Quan, Gao, Jianqing, Ma, Feng
Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in general domains and demonstrated promise in multimodal mathematical reasoning. However, applying MLLMs to geometry problem solving (GPS) remains challenging due to lack of accurate step-by-step solution data and severe hallucinations during reasoning. In this paper, we propose GeoGen, a pipeline that can automatically generates step-wise reasoning paths for geometry diagrams. By leveraging the precise symbolic reasoning, \textbf{GeoGen} produces large-scale, high-quality question-answer pairs. To further enhance the logical reasoning ability of MLLMs, we train \textbf{GeoLogic}, a Large Language Model (LLM) using synthetic data generated by GeoGen. Serving as a bridge between natural language and symbolic systems, GeoLogic enables symbolic tools to help verifying MLLM outputs, making the reasoning process more rigorous and alleviating hallucinations. Experimental results show that our approach consistently improves the performance of MLLMs, achieving remarkable results on benchmarks for geometric reasoning tasks. This improvement stems from our integration of the strengths of LLMs and symbolic systems, which enables a more reliable and interpretable approach for the GPS task. Codes are available at https://github.com/ycpNotFound/GeoGen.
Out of Sight Out of Mind, Out of Sight Out of Mind: Measuring Bias in Language Models Against Overlooked Marginalized Groups in Regional Contexts
Elsafoury, Fatma, Hartmann, David
We know that language models (LMs) form biases and stereotypes of minorities, leading to unfair treatments of members of these groups, thanks to research mainly in the US and the broader English-speaking world. As the negative behavior of these models has severe consequences for society and individuals, industry and academia are actively developing methods to reduce the bias in LMs. However, there are many under-represented groups and languages that have been overlooked so far. This includes marginalized groups that are specific to individual countries and regions in the English speaking and Western world, but crucially also almost all marginalized groups in the rest of the world. The UN estimates, that between 600 million to 1.2 billion people worldwide are members of marginalized groups and in need for special protection. If we want to develop inclusive LMs that work for everyone, we have to broaden our understanding to include overlooked marginalized groups and low-resource languages and dialects. In this work, we contribute to this effort with the first study investigating offensive stereotyping bias in 23 LMs for 270 marginalized groups from Egypt, the remaining 21 Arab countries, Germany, the UK, and the US. Additionally, we investigate the impact of low-resource languages and dialects on the study of bias in LMs, demonstrating the limitations of current bias metrics, as we measure significantly higher bias when using the Egyptian Arabic dialect versus Modern Standard Arabic. Our results show, LMs indeed show higher bias against many marginalized groups in comparison to dominant groups. However, this is not the case for Arabic LMs, where the bias is high against both marginalized and dominant groups in relation to religion and ethnicity. Our results also show higher intersectional bias against Non-binary, LGBTQIA+ and Black women.