This paper explores the intersection of data visualization and Large Language Models (LLMs). Driven by the need to make a broader range of data visualization types accessible for novice users, we present a guided LLM-based pipeline designed to transform data, guided by high-level user questions (referred to as macro-queries), into a diverse set of useful visualizations. This approach leverages various prompting techniques, fine-tuning inspired by Abela's Chart Taxonomy, and integrated SQL tool usage.

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated high text generation quality. However, in real-world applications, LLMs must meet increasingly complex requirements. Beyond avoiding misleading or inappropriate content, LLMs are also expected to cater to specific user needs, such as imitating particular writing styles or generating text with poetic richness. These varied demands have driven the development of Controllable Text Generation (CTG) techniques, which ensure that outputs adhere to predefined control conditions--such as safety, sentiment, thematic consistency, and linguistic style--while maintaining high standards of helpfulness, fluency, and diversity. This paper systematically reviews the latest advancements in CTG for LLMs, offering a comprehensive definition of its core concepts and clarifying the requirements for control conditions and text quality. We categorize CTG tasks into two primary types: content control and attribute control. The key methods are discussed, including model retraining, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, prompt engineering, latent space manipulation, and decoding-time intervention. We analyze each method's characteristics, advantages, and limitations, providing nuanced insights for achieving generation control. Additionally, we review CTG evaluation methods, summarize its applications across domains, and address key challenges in current research, including reduced fluency and practicality. We also propose several appeals, such as placing greater emphasis on real-world applications in future research. This paper aims to offer valuable guidance to researchers and developers in the field. Our reference list and Chinese version are open-sourced at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/CTGSurvey.

Recently, applying neural networks to address combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) has attracted considerable research attention. The prevailing methods always train deep models independently on specific problems, lacking a unified framework for concurrently tackling various COPs. To this end, we propose a unified neural combinatorial optimization (UNCO) framework to solve different types of COPs by a single model. Specifically, we use natural language to formulate text-attributed instances for different COPs and encode them in the same embedding space by the large language model (LLM). The obtained embeddings are further advanced by an encoder-decoder model without any problem-specific modules, thereby facilitating a unified process of solution construction. We further adopt the conflict gradients erasing reinforcement learning (CGERL) algorithm to train the UNCO model, delivering better performance across different COPs than vanilla multi-objective learning. Experiments show that the UNCO model can solve multiple COPs after a single-session training, and achieves satisfactory performance that is comparable to several traditional or learning-based baselines. Instead of pursuing the best performance for each COP, we explore the synergy between tasks and few-shot generalization based on LLM to inspire future work.

Embedding models play a crucial role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by creating text embeddings used in various tasks such as information retrieval and assessing semantic text similarity. This paper focuses on research related to embedding models in the Russian language. It introduces a new Russian-focused embedding model called ru-en-RoSBERTa and the ruMTEB benchmark, the Russian version extending the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). Our benchmark includes seven categories of tasks, such as semantic textual similarity, text classification, reranking, and retrieval. The research also assesses a representative set of Russian and multilingual models on the proposed benchmark. The findings indicate that the new model achieves results that are on par with state-of-the-art models in Russian. We release the model ru-en-RoSBERTa, and the ruMTEB framework comes with open-source code, integration into the original framework and a public leaderboard.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate content with unsupported or unverifiable content, known as "hallucinations." To address this, retrieval-augmented LLMs are employed to include citations in their content, grounding the content in verifiable sources. Despite such developments, manually assessing how well a citation supports the associated statement remains a major challenge. Previous studies tackle this challenge by leveraging faithfulness metrics to estimate citation support automatically. However, they limit this citation support estimation to a binary classification scenario, neglecting fine-grained citation support in practical scenarios. To investigate the effectiveness of faithfulness metrics in fine-grained scenarios, we propose a comparative evaluation framework that assesses the metric effectiveness in distinguishing citations between three-category support levels: full, partial, and no support. Our framework employs correlation analysis, classification evaluation, and retrieval evaluation to measure the alignment between metric scores and human judgments comprehensively. Our results indicate no single metric consistently excels across all evaluations, highlighting the complexity of accurately evaluating fine-grained support levels. Particularly, we find that the best-performing metrics struggle to distinguish partial support from full or no support. Based on these findings, we provide practical recommendations for developing more effective metrics.

The field of vision-language models (VLMs), which take images and texts as inputs and output texts, is rapidly evolving and has yet to reach consensus on several key aspects of the development pipeline, including data, architecture, and training methods. This paper can be seen as a tutorial for building a VLM. We begin by providing a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each, addressing the major challenges in the field, and suggesting promising research directions for underexplored areas. We then walk through the practical steps to build Idefics3-8B, a powerful VLM that significantly outperforms its predecessor Idefics2-8B, while being trained efficiently, exclusively on open datasets, and using a straightforward pipeline. These steps include the creation of Docmatix, a dataset for improving document understanding capabilities, which is 240 times larger than previously available datasets. We release the model along with the datasets created for its training.

We present a Positional Description Scheme (PDS) tailored for digit sequences, integrating placeholder value information for each digit. Given the structural limitations of subword tokenization algorithms, language models encounter critical Text Normalization (TN) challenges when handling numerical tasks. Our schema addresses this challenge through straightforward pre-processing, preserving the model architecture while significantly simplifying number normalization, rendering the problem tractable. This simplifies the task and facilitates more compact production-ready models capable of learning from smaller datasets. Furthermore, our investigations reveal that PDS enhances the arithmetic processing capabilities of language models, resulting in a relative accuracy improvement of 23% to 51% on complex arithmetic tasks. We demonstrate that PDS effectively mitigates fatal numerical normalization errors in neural models, requiring only a modest amount of training data without rule-based Finite State Transducers (FST). We demonstrate that PDS is essential for both the Text-To-Speech and Speech Recognition text processing, enabling effective TN under production constraints.

With the development of code generation techniques, selecting the correct code solution from multiple candidate solutions has become a crucial task. This study proposes AutoTest, a novel technique that combines automated test case generation with code solution execution to optimize the selection process using an evolutionary genetic algorithm. Firstly, AutoTest utilizes large pre-trained language models such as codegen-16B, code-davinci-002, and incoder-6B to provide code solutions and their corresponding test cases. Then, by executing the code solutions and evaluating their performance on the test cases, a consensus set is formed. Fine-grained ranking is achieved through the selection, mutation, and crossover mechanisms based on the evolutionary genetic algorithm, with the adjustment of alpha and beta parameters. Finally, the best code solution is chosen. AutoTest demonstrates significant performance improvements on the HumanEval benchmark test. The HumanEval dataset consists of 164 programming problems, and AutoTest achieves approximately a 10% improvement over the baseline method in terms of pass@1 score.

Open-vocabulary Extreme Multi-label Classification (OXMC) extends traditional XMC by allowing prediction beyond an extremely large, predefined label set (typically $10^3$ to $10^{12}$ labels), addressing the dynamic nature of real-world labeling tasks. However, self-selection bias in data annotation leads to significant missing labels in both training and test data, particularly for less popular inputs. This creates two critical challenges: generation models learn to be "lazy'" by under-generating labels, and evaluation becomes unreliable due to insufficient annotation in the test set. In this work, we introduce Positive-Unlabeled Sequence Learning (PUSL), which reframes OXMC as an infinite keyphrase generation task, addressing the generation model's laziness. Additionally, we propose to adopt a suite of evaluation metrics, F1@$\mathcal{O}$ and newly proposed B@$k$, to reliably assess OXMC models with incomplete ground truths. In a highly imbalanced e-commerce dataset with substantial missing labels, PUSL generates 30% more unique labels, and 72% of its predictions align with actual user queries. On the less skewed EURLex-4.3k dataset, PUSL demonstrates superior F1 scores, especially as label counts increase from 15 to 30. Our approach effectively tackles both the modeling and evaluation challenges in OXMC with missing labels.

Traditional quantitative investment research is encountering diminishing returns alongside rising labor and time costs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the Large Investment Model (LIM), a novel research paradigm designed to enhance both performance and efficiency at scale. LIM employs end-to-end learning and universal modeling to create an upstream foundation model capable of autonomously learning comprehensive signal patterns from diverse financial data spanning multiple exchanges, instruments, and frequencies. These "global patterns" are subsequently transferred to downstream strategy modeling, optimizing performance for specific tasks. We detail the system architecture design of LIM, address the technical challenges inherent in this approach, and outline potential directions for future research. The advantages of LIM are demonstrated through a series of numerical experiments on cross-instrument prediction for commodity futures trading, leveraging insights from stock markets.