We investigate a critical yet under-explored question in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs): Do LVLMs genuinely comprehend interleaved image-text in the document? Existing document understanding benchmarks often assess LVLMs using question-answer formats, which are information-sparse and difficult to guarantee the coverage of long-range dependencies. To address this issue, we introduce a novel and challenging Multimodal Document Summarization Benchmark (M-DocSum-Bench), which comprises 500 high-quality arXiv papers, along with interleaved multimodal summaries aligned with human preferences. M-DocSum-Bench is a reference-based generation task and necessitates the generation of interleaved image-text summaries using provided reference images, thereby simultaneously evaluating capabilities in understanding, reasoning, localization, and summarization within complex multimodal document scenarios. To facilitate this benchmark, we develop an automated framework to construct summaries and propose a fine-grained evaluation method called M-DocEval. Moreover, we further develop a robust summarization baseline, i.e., M-DocSum-7B, by progressive two-stage training with diverse instruction and preference data. The extensive results on our M-DocSum-Bench reveal that the leading LVLMs struggle to maintain coherence and accurately integrate information within long and interleaved contexts, often exhibiting confusion between similar images and a lack of robustness. Notably, M-DocSum-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to larger and closed-source models (including GPT-4o, Gemini Pro, Claude-3.5-Sonnet and Qwen2.5-VL-72B, etc.), demonstrating the potential of LVLMs for improved interleaved image-text understanding. The code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/M-DocSum-Bench.

Advancements in retrieving accessible information have evolved faster in the last few years compared to the decades since the internet's creation. Search engines, like Google, have been the number one way to find relevant data. They have always relied on the user's abilities to find the best information in its billions of links and sources at everybody's fingertips. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has completely transformed the field of information retrieval. The LLMs excel not only at retrieving relevant knowledge but also at summarizing it effectively, making information more accessible and consumable for users. On top of it, the rise of AI Agents has introduced another aspect to information retrieval i.e. dynamic information retrieval which enables the integration of real-time data such as weather forecasts, and financial data with the knowledge base to curate context-aware knowledge. However, despite these advancements the agents remain susceptible to issues of bias and fairness, challenges deeply rooted within the knowledge base and training of LLMs. This study introduces a novel approach to bias-aware knowledge retrieval by leveraging agentic framework and the innovative use of bias detectors as tools to identify and highlight inherent biases in the retrieved content. By empowering users with transparency and awareness, this approach aims to foster more equitable information systems and promote the development of responsible AI.

We propose a novel approach to leveraging pre-trained language models (LMs) for early forecasting of academic trajectories in STEM students using high-dimensional longitudinal experiential data. This data, which captures students' study-related activities, behaviors, and psychological states, offers valuable insights for forecasting-based interventions. Key challenges in handling such data include high rates of missing values, limited dataset size due to costly data collection, and complex temporal variability across modalities. Our approach addresses these issues through a comprehensive data enrichment process, integrating strategies for managing missing values, augmenting data, and embedding task-specific instructions and contextual cues to enhance the models' capacity for learning temporal patterns. Through extensive experiments on a curated student learning dataset, we evaluate both encoder-decoder and decoder-only LMs. While our findings show that LMs effectively integrate data across modalities and exhibit resilience to missing data, they primarily rely on high-level statistical patterns rather than demonstrating a deeper understanding of temporal dynamics. Furthermore, their ability to interpret explicit temporal information remains limited. This work advances educational data science by highlighting both the potential and limitations of LMs in modeling student trajectories for early intervention based on longitudinal experiential data.

Euphemism identification deciphers the true meaning of euphemisms, such as linking "weed" (euphemism) to "marijuana" (target keyword) in illicit texts, aiding content moderation and combating underground markets. While existing methods are primarily text-based, the rise of social media highlights the need for multimodal analysis, incorporating text, images, and audio. However, the lack of multimodal datasets for euphemisms limits further research. To address this, we regard euphemisms and their corresponding target keywords as keywords and first introduce a keyword-oriented multimodal corpus of euphemisms (KOM-Euph), involving three datasets (Drug, Weapon, and Sexuality), including text, images, and speech. We further propose a keyword-oriented multimodal euphemism identification method (KOM-EI), which uses cross-modal feature alignment and dynamic fusion modules to explicitly utilize the visual and audio features of the keywords for efficient euphemism identification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KOM-EI outperforms state-of-the-art models and large language models, and show the importance of our multimodal datasets.

A core part of scientific peer review involves providing expert critiques that directly assess the scientific claims a paper makes. While it is now possible to automatically generate plausible (if generic) reviews, ensuring that these reviews are sound and grounded in the papers' claims remains challenging. To facilitate LLM benchmarking on these challenges, we introduce CLAIMCHECK, an annotated dataset of NeurIPS 2023 and 2024 submissions and reviews mined from OpenReview. CLAIMCHECK is richly annotated by ML experts for weakness statements in the reviews and the paper claims that they dispute, as well as fine-grained labels of the validity, objectivity, and type of the identified weaknesses. We benchmark several LLMs on three claim-centric tasks supported by CLAIMCHECK, requiring models to (1) associate weaknesses with the claims they dispute, (2) predict fine-grained labels for weaknesses and rewrite the weaknesses to enhance their specificity, and (3) verify a paper's claims with grounded reasoning. Our experiments reveal that cutting-edge LLMs, while capable of predicting weakness labels in (2), continue to underperform relative to human experts on all other tasks.

While standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based on chunks, GraphRAG structures knowledge as graphs to leverage the relations among entities. However, previous GraphRAG methods are limited by binary relations: one edge in the graph only connects two entities, which cannot well model the n-ary relations among more than two entities that widely exist in reality. To address this limitation, we propose HyperGraphRAG, a novel hypergraph-based RAG method that represents n-ary relational facts via hyperedges, modeling the complicated n-ary relations in the real world. To retrieve and generate over hypergraphs, we introduce a complete pipeline with a hypergraph construction method, a hypergraph retrieval strategy, and a hypergraph-guided generation mechanism. Experiments across medicine, agriculture, computer science, and law demonstrate that HyperGraphRAG outperforms standard RAG and GraphRAG in accuracy and generation quality.

Object-centric representation learning aims to decompose visual scenes into fixed-size vectors called "slots" or "object files", where each slot captures a distinct object. Current state-of-the-art object-centric models have shown remarkable success in object discovery in diverse domains, including complex real-world scenes. However, these models suffer from a key limitation: they lack controllability. Specifically, current object-centric models learn representations based on their preconceived understanding of objects, without allowing user input to guide which objects are represented. Introducing controllability into object-centric models could unlock a range of useful capabilities, such as the ability to extract instance-specific representations from a scene. In this work, we propose a novel approach for user-directed control over slot representations by conditioning slots on language descriptions. The proposed ConTRoLlable Object-centric representation learning approach, which we term CTRL-O, achieves targeted object-language binding in complex real-world scenes without requiring mask supervision. Next, we apply these controllable slot representations on two downstream vision language tasks: text-to-image generation and visual question answering. The proposed approach enables instance-specific text-to-image generation and also achieves strong performance on visual question answering.

In recent years, the rapid development of large reasoning models has resulted in the saturation of existing benchmarks for evaluating mathematical reasoning, highlighting the urgent need for more challenging and rigorous evaluation frameworks. To address this gap, we introduce OlymMATH, a novel Olympiad-level mathematical benchmark, designed to rigorously test the complex reasoning capabilities of LLMs. OlymMATH features 200 meticulously curated problems, each manually verified and available in parallel English and Chinese versions. The problems are systematically organized into two distinct difficulty tiers: (1) AIME-level problems (easy) that establish a baseline for mathematical reasoning assessment, and (2) significantly more challenging problems (hard) designed to push the boundaries of current state-of-the-art models. In our benchmark, these problems span four core mathematical fields, each including a verifiable numerical solution to enable objective, rule-based evaluation. Empirical results underscore the significant challenge presented by OlymMATH, with state-of-the-art models including DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI's o3-mini demonstrating notably limited accuracy on the hard subset. Furthermore, the benchmark facilitates comprehensive bilingual assessment of mathematical reasoning abilities-a critical dimension that remains largely unaddressed in mainstream mathematical reasoning benchmarks. We release the OlymMATH benchmark at the STILL project: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Slow_Thinking_with_LLMs.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become an essential approach for adapting large-scale pre-trained models while reducing computational costs. Among PEFT methods, LoRA significantly reduces trainable parameters by decomposing weight updates into low-rank matrices. However, traditional LoRA applies a fixed rank across all layers, failing to account for the varying complexity of hierarchical information, which leads to inefficient adaptation and redundancy. To address this, we propose MSPLoRA (Multi-Scale Pyramid LoRA), which introduces Global Shared LoRA, Mid-Level Shared LoRA, and Layer-Specific LoRA to capture global patterns, mid-level features, and fine-grained information, respectively. This hierarchical structure reduces inter-layer redundancy while maintaining strong adaptation capability. Experiments on various NLP tasks demonstrate that MSPLoRA achieves more efficient adaptation and better performance while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters. Furthermore, additional analyses based on Singular Value Decomposition validate its information decoupling ability, highlighting MSPLoRA as a scalable and effective optimization strategy for parameter-efficient fine-tuning in large language models.

Advances in hardware and language model architecture have spurred a revolution in natural language generation. However, autoregressive models compute probability distributions over next-token choices, and sampling from these distributions, known as decoding, has received significantly less attention than other design choices. Existing decoding strategies are largely based on heuristics, resulting in methods that are hard to apply or improve in a principled manner. We develop the theory of decoding strategies for language models by expressing popular decoding algorithms as equilibrium states in the language of ergodic theory and stating the functions they optimize. Using this, we analyze the effect of the local normalization step of top-k, nucleus, and temperature sampling, used to make probabilities sum to one. We argue that local normalization distortion is a fundamental defect of decoding strategies and quantify the size of this distortion and its effect on mathematical proxies for the quality and diversity of generated text. Contrary to the prevailing explanation, we argue that the major cause of the under-performance of top-k sampling relative to nucleus sampling is local normalization distortion. This yields conclusions for the future design of decoding algorithms and the detection of machine-generated text.