Cultural Intelligence (CQ) refers to the ability to understand unfamiliar cultural contexts-a crucial skill for large language models (LLMs) to effectively engage with globally diverse users. While existing research often focuses on explicitly stated cultural norms, such approaches fail to capture the subtle, implicit values that underlie real-world conversations. To address this gap, we introduce CQ-Bench, a benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs' capability to infer implicit cultural values from natural conversational contexts. We generate a multi-character conversation-based stories dataset using values from the World Value Survey and GlobalOpinions datasets, with topics including ethical, religious, social, and political. Our dataset construction pipeline includes rigorous validation procedures-incorporation, consistency, and implicitness checks-using GPT-4o, with 98.2% human-model agreement in the final validation. Our benchmark consists of three tasks of increasing complexity: attitude detection, value selection, and value extraction. We find that while o1 and Deepseek-R1 models reach human-level performance in value selection (0.809 and 0.814), they still fall short in nuanced attitude detection, with F1 scores of 0.622 and 0.635, respectively. In the value extraction task, GPT-4o-mini and o3-mini score 0.602 and 0.598, highlighting the difficulty of open-ended cultural reasoning. Notably, fine-tuning smaller models (e.g., LLaMA-3.2-3B) on only 500 culturally rich examples improves performance by over 10%, even outperforming stronger baselines (o3-mini) in some cases. Using CQ-Bench, we provide insights into the current challenges in LLMs' CQ research and suggest practical pathways for enhancing LLMs' cross-cultural reasoning abilities.

In this work, we undertake the challenge of augmenting the existing generative capabilities of pre-trained text-only large language models (LLMs) with multi-modal generation capability while satisfying two core constraints: C1 preserving the preservation of original language generative capabilities with negligible performance degradation, and C2 adhering to a small parameter budget to learn the new modality, ensuring scalability and efficiency. In contrast to current approaches that add dedicated modules, thereby significantly increasing the parameter count, we propose a method that leverages the underutilized capacity inherent in deep models. Specifically, we exploit the parameter redundancy within Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) as a source of additional capacity for learning a new modality, enabling better parameter efficiency (C1). Moreover, we preserve the original language generation capabilities by applying low-rank adaptation exclusively to the tokens of the new modality (C2). Furthermore, we introduce a novel parameter initialization scheme based on the Gromov-Wasserstein distance to improve convergence and training stability. Through an extensive analysis of the routing mechanism, we uncover the emergence of modality-specific pathways and decreased redundancy within the experts that can efficiently unlock multi-modal generative capabilities. Overall, our method can be seamlessly applied to a wide range of contemporary LLMs, providing a new pathway for transitioning from uni-modal to multi-modal architectures.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve enhanced complex problem-solving through test-time computing scaling, yet this often entails longer contexts and numerous reasoning token costs. In this paper, we propose an efficient test-time scaling method that trains LLMs on code-related reasoning trajectories, facilitating their reduction of excess thinking tokens while maintaining performance. First, we create Z1-Code-Reasoning-107K, a curated dataset of simple and complex coding problems paired with their short and long solution trajectories. Second, we present a novel Shifted Thinking Window to mitigate overthinking overhead by removing context-delimiting tags (e.g., . . . ) and capping reasoning tokens. Trained with long and short trajectory data and equipped with Shifted Thinking Window, our model, Z1-7B, demonstrates the ability to adjust its reasoning level as the complexity of problems and exhibits efficient test-time scaling across different reasoning tasks that matches R1-Distill-Qwen-7B performance with about 30% of its average thinking tokens. Notably, fine-tuned with only code trajectories, Z1-7B demonstrates generalization to broader reasoning tasks (47.5% on GPQA Diamond). Our analysis of efficient reasoning elicitation also provides valuable insights for future research.

Retrieval-Augmented Language Models boost task performance, owing to the retriever that provides external knowledge. Although crucial, the retriever primarily focuses on semantics relevance, which may not always be effective for generation. Thus, utility-based retrieval has emerged as a promising topic, prioritizing passages that provides valid benefits for downstream tasks. However, due to insufficient understanding, capturing passage utility accurately remains unexplored. This work proposes SCARLet, a framework for training utility-based retrievers in RALMs, which incorporates two key factors, multi-task generalization and inter-passage interaction. First, SCARLet constructs shared context on which training data for various tasks is synthesized. This mitigates semantic bias from context differences, allowing retrievers to focus on learning task-specific utility for better task generalization. Next, SCARLet uses a perturbation-based attribution method to estimate passage-level utility for shared context, which reflects interactions between passages and provides more accurate feedback. We evaluate our approach on ten datasets across various tasks, both in-domain and out-of-domain, showing that retrievers trained by SCARLet consistently improve the overall performance of RALMs.

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a key strategy for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly in tasks like mathematical problem-solving. A traditional approach, Self-Consistency (SC), generates multiple solutions to a problem and selects the most common answer via majority voting. Another common method involves scoring each solution with a reward model (verifier) and choosing the best one. Recent advancements in Generative Reward Models (GenRM) reframe verification as a next-token prediction task, enabling inference-time scaling along a new axis. Specifically, GenRM generates multiple verification chains-of-thought to score each solution. Under a limited inference budget, this introduces a fundamental trade-off: should you spend the budget on scaling solutions via SC or generate fewer solutions and allocate compute to verification via GenRM? To address this, we evaluate GenRM against SC under a fixed inference budget. Interestingly, we find that SC is more compute-efficient than GenRM for most practical inference budgets across diverse models and datasets. For instance, GenRM first matches SC after consuming up to 8x the inference compute and requires significantly more compute to outperform it. Furthermore, we derive inference scaling laws for the GenRM paradigm, revealing that compute-optimal inference favors scaling solution generation more aggressively than scaling the number of verifications. Our work provides practical guidance on optimizing test-time scaling by balancing solution generation and verification. The code is available at https://github.com/nishadsinghi/sc-genrm-scaling.

As large language models (LLMs) advance, efficient knowledge evaluation becomes crucial to verifying their capabilities. Traditional methods, relying on benchmarks, face limitations such as high resource costs and information loss. We propose the Large-scale Reference-based Efficient Knowledge Evaluation for Large Language Model (RECKON), which directly uses reference data to evaluate models. RECKON organizes unstructured data into manageable units and generates targeted questions for each cluster, improving evaluation accuracy and efficiency. Experimental results show that RECKON reduces resource consumption by 56.5% compared to traditional methods while achieving over 97% accuracy across various domains, including world knowledge, code, legal, and biomedical datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/MikeGu721/reckon

The era of foundation models has revolutionized AI research, yet Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) remain constrained by the scarcity of large-scale graph corpora. Traditional graph data synthesis techniques primarily focus on simplistic structural operations, lacking the capacity to generate semantically rich nodes with meaningful textual attributes: a critical limitation for real-world applications. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional text generation capabilities, their direct application to graph synthesis is impeded by context window limitations, hallucination phenomena, and structural consistency challenges. To address these issues, we introduce GraphMaster, the first multi-agent framework specifically designed for graph data synthesis in data-limited environments. GraphMaster orchestrates four specialized LLM agents (Manager, Perception, Enhancement, and Evaluation) that collaboratively optimize the synthesis process through iterative refinement, ensuring both semantic coherence and structural integrity. To rigorously evaluate our approach, we create new data-limited "Sub" variants of six standard graph benchmarks, specifically designed to test synthesis capabilities under realistic constraints. Additionally, we develop a novel interpretability assessment framework that combines human evaluation with a principled Grassmannian manifold-based analysis, providing both qualitative and quantitative measures of semantic coherence. Experimental results demonstrate that GraphMaster significantly outperforms traditional synthesis methods across multiple datasets, establishing a strong foundation for advancing GFMs in data-scarce environments.

Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is a critical task in Natural Language Processing, addressing the growing demand for automated writing assistance in both second-language (L2) and native (L1) Chinese writing. While L2 learners struggle with mastering complex grammatical structures, L1 users also benefit from CGEC in academic, professional, and formal contexts where writing precision is essential. This survey provides a comprehensive review of CGEC research, covering datasets, annotation schemes, evaluation methodologies, and system advancements. We examine widely used CGEC datasets, highlighting their characteristics, limitations, and the need for improved standardization. We also analyze error annotation frameworks, discussing challenges such as word segmentation ambiguity and the classification of Chinese-specific error types. Furthermore, we review evaluation metrics, focusing on their adaptation from English GEC to Chinese, including character-level scoring and the use of multiple references. In terms of system development, we trace the evolution from rule-based and statistical approaches to neural architectures, including Transformer-based models and the integration of large pre-trained language models. By consolidating existing research and identifying key challenges, this survey provides insights into the current state of CGEC and outlines future directions, including refining annotation standards to address segmentation challenges, and leveraging multilingual approaches to enhance CGEC.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to optimize the analysis and synthesis of legal documents, enabling the automation of tasks such as summarization, classification, and retrieval of legal information. This study aims to conduct a systematic literature review to identify the state of the art in prompt engineering applied to LLMs in the legal context. The results indicate that models such as GPT-4, BERT, Llama 2, and Legal-Pegasus are widely employed in the legal field, and techniques such as Few-shot Learning, Zero-shot Learning, and Chain-of-Thought prompting have proven effective in improving the interpretation of legal texts. However, challenges such as biases in models and hallucinations still hinder their large-scale implementation. It is concluded that, despite the great potential of LLMs for the legal field, there is a need to improve prompt engineering strategies to ensure greater accuracy and reliability in the generated results.

News articles are more than collections of facts; they reflect journalists' framing, shaping how events are presented to the audience. One key aspect of framing is the choice to write in (or quote verbatim) morally charged language as opposed to using neutral terms. This moral framing carries implicit judgments that automated news summarizers should recognize and preserve to maintain the original intent of the writer. In this work, we perform the first study on the preservation of moral framing in AI-generated news summaries. We propose an approach that leverages the intuition that journalists intentionally use or report specific moral-laden words, which should be retained in summaries. Through automated, crowd-sourced, and expert evaluations, we demonstrate that our approach enhances the preservation of moral framing while maintaining overall summary quality.