Large Language Model
SurveyForge: On the Outline Heuristics, Memory-Driven Generation, and Multi-dimensional Evaluation for Automated Survey Writing
Yan, Xiangchao, Feng, Shiyang, Yuan, Jiakang, Xia, Renqiu, Wang, Bin, Zhang, Bo, Bai, Lei
Survey paper plays a crucial role in scientific research, especially given the rapid growth of research publications. Recently, researchers have begun using LLMs to automate survey generation for better efficiency. However, the quality gap between LLM-generated surveys and those written by human remains significant, particularly in terms of outline quality and citation accuracy. To close these gaps, we introduce SurveyForge, which first generates the outline by analyzing the logical structure of human-written outlines and referring to the retrieved domain-related articles. Subsequently, leveraging high-quality papers retrieved from memory by our scholar navigation agent, SurveyForge can automatically generate and refine the content of the generated article. Moreover, to achieve a comprehensive evaluation, we construct SurveyBench, which includes 100 human-written survey papers for win-rate comparison and assesses AI-generated survey papers across three dimensions: reference, outline, and content quality. Experiments demonstrate that SurveyForge can outperform previous works such as AutoSurvey.
SynGraph: A Dynamic Graph-LLM Synthesis Framework for Sparse Streaming User Sentiment Modeling
Zhang, Xin, Wei, Qiyu, Zhu, Yingjie, Zhang, Linhai, Zhou, Deyu, Ananiadou, Sophia
User reviews on e-commerce platforms exhibit dynamic sentiment patterns driven by temporal and contextual factors. Traditional sentiment analysis methods focus on static reviews, failing to capture the evolving temporal relationship between user sentiment rating and textual content. Sentiment analysis on streaming reviews addresses this limitation by modeling and predicting the temporal evolution of user sentiments. However, it suffers from data sparsity, manifesting in temporal, spatial, and combined forms. In this paper, we introduce SynGraph, a novel framework designed to address data sparsity in sentiment analysis on streaming reviews. SynGraph alleviates data sparsity by categorizing users into mid-tail, long-tail, and extreme scenarios and incorporating LLM-augmented enhancements within a dynamic graph-based structure. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate its effectiveness in addressing sparsity and improving sentiment modeling in streaming reviews.
Better Process Supervision with Bi-directional Rewarding Signals
Chen, Wenxiang, He, Wei, Xi, Zhiheng, Guo, Honglin, Hong, Boyang, Zhang, Jiazheng, Zheng, Rui, Li, Nijun, Gui, Tao, Li, Yun, Zhang, Qi, Huang, Xuanjing
Process supervision, i.e., evaluating each step, is critical for complex large language model (LLM) reasoning and test-time searching with increased inference compute. Existing approaches, represented by process reward models (PRMs), primarily focus on rewarding signals up to the current step, exhibiting a one-directional nature and lacking a mechanism to model the distance to the final target. To address this problem, we draw inspiration from the A* algorithm, which states that an effective supervisory signal should simultaneously consider the incurred cost and the estimated cost for reaching the target. Building on this key insight, we introduce BiRM, a novel process supervision model that not only evaluates the correctness of previous steps but also models the probability of future success. We conduct extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks and demonstrate that BiRM provides more precise evaluations of LLM reasoning steps, achieving an improvement of 3.1% on Gaokao2023 over PRM under the Best-of-N sampling method. Besides, in search-based strategies, BiRM provides more comprehensive guidance and outperforms ORM by 5.0% and PRM by 3.8% respectively on MATH-500.
HalluCounter: Reference-free LLM Hallucination Detection in the Wild!
Urlana, Ashok, Kanumolu, Gopichand, Kumar, Charaka Vinayak, Garlapati, Bala Mallikarjunarao, Mishra, Rahul
Response consistency-based, reference-free hallucination detection (RFHD) methods do not depend on internal model states, such as generation probabilities or gradients, which Grey-box models typically rely on but are inaccessible in closed-source LLMs. However, their inability to capture query-response alignment patterns often results in lower detection accuracy. Additionally, the lack of large-scale benchmark datasets spanning diverse domains remains a challenge, as most existing datasets are limited in size and scope. To this end, we propose HalluCounter, a novel reference-free hallucination detection method that utilizes both response-response and query-response consistency and alignment patterns. This enables the training of a classifier that detects hallucinations and provides a confidence score and an optimal response for user queries. Furthermore, we introduce HalluCounterEval, a benchmark dataset comprising both synthetically generated and human-curated samples across multiple domains. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin, achieving over 90\% average confidence in hallucination detection across datasets.
Towards Data-Efficient Language Models: A Child-Inspired Approach to Language Learning
Ghanizadeh, Mohammad Amin, Dousti, Mohammad Javad
In this work, we explain our approach employed in the BabyLM Challenge, which uses various methods of training language models (LMs) with significantly less data compared to traditional large language models (LLMs) and are inspired by how human children learn. While a human child is exposed to far less linguistic input than an LLM, they still achieve remarkable language understanding and generation abilities. To this end, we develop a model trained on a curated dataset consisting of 10 million words, primarily sourced from child-directed transcripts. The 2024 BabyLM Challenge initial dataset of 10M words is filtered to 8.5M. Next, it is supplemented with a randomly selected subset of TVR dataset consisting of 1.5M words of television dialogues. The latter dataset ensures that similar to children, the model is also exposed to language through media. Furthermore, we reduce the vocabulary size to 32,000 tokens, aligning it with the limited vocabulary of children in the early stages of language acquisition. We use curriculum learning and is able to match the baseline on certain benchmarks while surpassing the baseline on others. Additionally, incorporating common LLM training datasets, such as MADLAD-400, degrades performance. These findings underscore the importance of dataset selection, vocabulary scaling, and curriculum learning in creating more data-efficient language models that better mimic human learning processes.
HybridNorm: Towards Stable and Efficient Transformer Training via Hybrid Normalization
Zhuo, Zhijian, Zeng, Yutao, Wang, Ya, Zhang, Sijun, Yang, Jian, Li, Xiaoqing, Zhou, Xun, Ma, Jinwen
Transformers have become the de facto architecture for a wide range of machine learning tasks, particularly in large language models (LLMs). Despite their remarkable performance, challenges remain in training deep transformer networks, especially regarding the location of layer normalization. While Pre-Norm structures facilitate easier training due to their more prominent identity path, they often yield suboptimal performance compared to Post-Norm. In this paper, we propose $\textbf{HybridNorm}$, a straightforward yet effective hybrid normalization strategy that integrates the advantages of both Pre-Norm and Post-Norm approaches. Specifically, HybridNorm employs QKV normalization within the attention mechanism and Post-Norm in the feed-forward network (FFN) of each transformer block. This design not only stabilizes training but also enhances performance, particularly in the context of LLMs. Comprehensive experiments in both dense and sparse architectures show that HybridNorm consistently outperforms both Pre-Norm and Post-Norm approaches, achieving state-of-the-art results across various benchmarks. These findings highlight the potential of HybridNorm as a more stable and effective technique for improving the training and performance of deep transformer models. %Code will be made publicly available. Code is available at https://github.com/BryceZhuo/HybridNorm.
The Next Frontier of LLM Applications: Open Ecosystems and Hardware Synergy
Hou, Xinyi, Zhao, Yanjie, Wang, Haoyu
The second paradigm involves LLM agents developed using frameworks like LangChain [16], AutoGPT [11], Langroid [18], AutoGen [23], and LlamaIndex [22], which offer greater programmability and modularity, allowing developers to build sophisticated, multi-agent systems that integrate external tools and dynamic workflows [20]. Despite their advantages, both paradigms remain architecturally fragmented and lack standardized interoperability, leading to redundant development efforts and constrained scalability. From a software engineering (SE) perspective, current LLM application paradigms resemble traditional platform-centric software ecosystems, where applications are tightly coupled to proprietary APIs and execution environments. LLM app stores, while lowering the barrier to entry, impose constraints on extensibility and cross-platform interoperability, leading to vendor lock-in and duplicated development efforts across different ecosystems. In contrast, agent-based LLM frameworks provide modularity but lack standardized mechanisms for component reuse and integration, making it challenging to compose LLM applications that seamlessly operate across heterogeneous environments. This fragmentation mirrors historical challenges in SE, where monolithic architectures have given way to service-oriented and microservices-based designs to improve reusability, scalability, and maintainability. Another key limitation of existing LLM applications is inefficient hardware utilization.
Learning Generalizable Language-Conditioned Cloth Manipulation from Long Demonstrations
Zhao, Hanyi, Zhu, Jinxuan, Yan, Zihao, Li, Yichen, Deng, Yuhong, Wang, Xueqian
Multi-step cloth manipulation is a challenging problem for robots due to the high-dimensional state spaces and the dynamics of cloth. Despite recent significant advances in end-to-end imitation learning for multi-step cloth manipulation skills, these methods fail to generalize to unseen tasks. Our insight in tackling the challenge of generalizable multi-step cloth manipulation is decomposition. We propose a novel pipeline that autonomously learns basic skills from long demonstrations and composes learned basic skills to generalize to unseen tasks. Specifically, our method first discovers and learns basic skills from the existing long demonstration benchmark with the commonsense knowledge of a large language model (LLM). Then, leveraging a high-level LLM-based task planner, these basic skills can be composed to complete unseen tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline methods in learning multi-step cloth manipulation skills for both seen and unseen tasks.
Compositional Translation: A Novel LLM-based Approach for Low-resource Machine Translation
Zebaze, Armel, Sagot, Benoît, Bawden, Rachel
The ability of generative large language models (LLMs) to perform in-context learning has given rise to a large body of research into how best to prompt models for various natural language processing tasks. Machine Translation (MT) has been shown to benefit from in-context examples, in particular when they are semantically similar to the sentence to translate. In this paper, we propose a new LLM-based translation paradigm, compositional translation, to replace naive few-shot MT with similarity-based demonstrations. An LLM is used to decompose a sentence into simpler phrases, and then to translate each phrase with the help of retrieved demonstrations. Finally, the LLM is prompted to translate the initial sentence with the help of the self-generated phrase-translation pairs. Our intuition is that this approach should improve translation because these shorter phrases should be intrinsically easier to translate and easier to match with relevant examples. This is especially beneficial in low-resource scenarios, and more generally whenever the selection pool is small or out of domain. We show that compositional translation boosts LLM translation performance on a wide range of popular MT benchmarks, including FLORES 200, NTREX 128 and TICO-19. Code and outputs are available at https://github.com/ArmelRandy/compositional-translation
Benchmarking Reasoning Robustness in Large Language Models
Yu, Tong, Jing, Yongcheng, Zhang, Xikun, Jiang, Wentao, Wu, Wenjie, Wang, Yingjie, Hu, Wenbin, Du, Bo, Tao, Dacheng
Despite the recent success of large language models (LLMs) in reasoning such as DeepSeek, we for the first time identify a key dilemma in reasoning robustness and generalization: significant performance degradation on novel or incomplete data, suggesting a reliance on memorized patterns rather than systematic reasoning. Our closer examination reveals four key unique limitations underlying this issue:(1) Positional bias--models favor earlier queries in multi-query inputs but answering the wrong one in the latter (e.g., GPT-4o's accuracy drops from 75.8 percent to 72.8 percent); (2) Instruction sensitivity--performance declines by 5.0 to 7.5 percent in the Qwen2.5 Series and by 5.0 percent in DeepSeek-V3 with auxiliary guidance; (3) Numerical fragility--value substitution sharply reduces accuracy (e.g., GPT-4o drops from 97.5 percent to 82.5 percent, GPT-o1-mini drops from 97.5 percent to 92.5 percent); and (4) Memory dependence--models resort to guesswork when missing critical data. These findings further highlight the reliance on heuristic recall over rigorous logical inference, demonstrating challenges in reasoning robustness. To comprehensively investigate these robustness challenges, this paper introduces a novel benchmark, termed as Math-RoB, that exploits hallucinations triggered by missing information to expose reasoning gaps. This is achieved by an instruction-based approach to generate diverse datasets that closely resemble training distributions, facilitating a holistic robustness assessment and advancing the development of more robust reasoning frameworks. Bad character(s) in field Abstract.