Technology
FACT: Mitigating Inconsistent Hallucinations in LLMs via Fact-Driven Alternating Code-Text Training
Inconsistent hallucinations remain a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), undermining the accuracy and reliability of fact-based reasoning in real-world applications. Existing approaches often rely on task-specific training or adaptation, such as hand-crafted synthetic datasets for domain tasks or solutions mainly focused on numerical reasoning, thereby limiting generalizability to broader, unseen NLP tasks. Inspired by the structural rigor and logical consistency of programming languages, we observe that fact-based texts can be mapped to programming structures due to their inherent patterns. We further propose FACT, a novel Fact-driven Alternating Code-text Training framework that alternates between text-to-code and code-to-text prediction. FACT is the first task-agnostic paradigm that embeds code and natural language in a shared semantic space, thereby transferring the logical consistency of code to LLM outputs in NLP tasks. Experiments show that with only a small subset of Wiki-40B-en for training, FACT reduces inconsistent hallucinations by 2.7%-8.0%
Differentiable Constraint-Based Causal Discovery
Causal discovery from observational data is a fundamental task in artificial intelligence, with far-reaching implications for decision-making, predictions, and interventions. Despite significant advances, existing methods can be broadly categorized as constraint-based or score-based approaches. Constraint-based methods offer rigorous causal discovery but are often hindered by small sample sizes, while score-based methods provide flexible optimization but typically forgo explicit conditional independence testing. This work explores a third avenue: developing differentiable $d$-separation scores, obtained through a percolation theory using soft logic. This enables the implementation of a new type of causal discovery method: gradient-based optimization of conditional independence constraints. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the robust performance of our approach in low-sample regimes, surpassing traditional constraint-based and score-based baselines on a real-world dataset.
VGGT-SLAM: Dense RGB SLAM Optimized on the SL(4) Manifold
We present VGGT-SLAM, a dense RGB SLAM system constructed by incrementally and globally aligning submaps created from the feed-forward scene reconstruction approach VGGT using only uncalibrated monocular cameras. While related works align submaps using similarity transforms (i.e., translation, rotation, and scale), we show that such approaches are inadequate in the case of uncalibrated cameras. In particular, we revisit the idea of reconstruction ambiguity, where given a set of uncalibrated cameras with no assumption on the camera motion or scene structure, the scene can only be reconstructed up to a 15-degrees-of-freedom projective transformation of the true geometry. This inspires us to recover a consistent scene reconstruction across submaps by optimizing over the SL(4) manifold, thus estimating 15-degrees-of-freedom homography transforms between sequential submaps while accounting for potential loop closure constraints. As verified by extensive experiments, we demonstrate that VGGT-SLAM achieves improved map quality using long video sequences that are infeasible for VGGT due to its high GPU requirements.
AutoToM: Scaling Model-based Mental Inference via Automated Agent Modeling
Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people's minds based on their behavior, is key to developing socially intelligent agents. Current approaches to ToM reasoning either rely on prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), which are prone to systematic errors, or use handcrafted, rigid agent models for model-based inference, which are more robust but fail to generalize across domains. In this work, we introduce, an automated agent modeling method for scalable, robust, and interpretable mental inference. Given a ToM problem, first proposes an initial agent model and then performs automated Bayesian inverse planning based on this model, leveraging an LLM backend.
Silencer: From Discovery to Mitigation of Self-Bias in LLM-as-Benchmark-Generator
LLM-as-Benchmark-Generator methods have been widely studied as a supplement to human annotators for scalable evaluation, while the potential biases within this paradigm remain underexplored. In this work, we systematically define and validate the phenomenon of inflated performance in models evaluated on their self-generated benchmarks, referred to as self-bias, and attribute it to sub-biases arising from question domain, language style, and wrong labels. On this basis, we propose Silencer, a general framework that leverages the heterogeneity between multiple generators at both the sample and benchmark levels to neutralize bias and generate high-quality, self-bias-silenced benchmark. Experimental results across various settings demonstrate that Silencer can suppress self-bias to near zero, significantly improve evaluation effectiveness of the generated benchmark (with an average improvement from 0.655 to 0.833 in Pearson correlation with high-quality human-annotated benchmark), while also exhibiting strong generalizability.
Learning to Watermark: A Selective Watermarking Framework for Large Language Models via Multi-Objective Optimization
The rapid development of LLMs has raised concerns about their potential misuse, leading to various watermarking schemes that typically offer high detectability. However, existing watermarking techniques often face trade-off between watermark detectability and generated text quality. In this paper, we introduce Learning to Watermark (LTW), a novel selective watermarking framework that leverages multi-objective optimization to effectively balance these competing goals. LTW features a lightweight network that adaptively decides when to apply the watermark by analyzing sentence embeddings, token entropy, and current watermarking ratio. Training of the network involves two specifically constructed loss functions that guide the model toward Pareto-optimal solutions, thereby harmonizing watermark detectability and text quality. By integrating LTW with two baseline watermarking methods, our experimental evaluations demonstrate that LTW significantly enhances text quality without compromising detectability. Our selective watermarking approach offers a new perspective for designing watermarks for LLMs and a way to preserve high text quality for watermarks.
Rethinking Multimodal Learning from the Perspective of Mitigating Classification Ability Disproportion
Multimodal learning (MML) is significantly constrained by modality imbalance, leading to suboptimal performance in practice. While existing approaches primarily focus on balancing the learning of different modalities to address this issue, they fundamentally overlook the inherent disproportion in model classification ability, which serves as the primary cause of this phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal learning approach to dynamically balance the classification ability of weak and strong modalities by incorporating the principle of boosting. Concretely, we first propose a sustained boosting algorithm in multimodal learning by simultaneously optimizing the classification and residual errors. Subsequently, we introduce an adaptive classifier assignment strategy to dynamically facilitate the classification performance of the weak modality. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the convergence property of the cross-modal gap function, ensuring the effectiveness of the proposed boosting scheme. To this end, the classification ability of strong and weak modalities is expected to be balanced, thereby mitigating the imbalance issue. Empirical experiments on widely used datasets reveal the superiority of our method through comparison with various state-of-the-art (SOTA) multimodal learning baselines.
Bridging the Gap Between Cross-Domain Theory and Practical Application: A Case Study on Molecular Dissolution
Artificial intelligence (AI) has played a transformative role in chemical research, greatly facilitating the prediction of small molecule properties, simulation of catalytic processes, and material design. These advances are driven by increases in computing power, open source machine learning frameworks, and extensive chemical datasets. However, a persistent challenge is the limited amount of high-quality real-world data, while models calculated based on large amounts of theoretical data are often costly and difficult to deploy, which hinders the applicability of AI models in real-world scenarios. In this study, we enhance the prediction of solute-solvent properties by proposing a novel sample selection method: the iterative core subset extraction (CSIE) framework. CSIE iteratively updates the core sample subset based on information gain to remove redundant features in theoretical data and optimize the performance of the model on real chemical datasets. Furthermore, we introduce an asymmetric molecular interaction graph neural network (AMGNN) that combines positional information and bidirectional edge connections to simulate real-world chemical reaction scenarios to better capture solute-solvent interactions. Experimental results show that our method can accurately extract the core subset and improve the prediction accuracy.
UMA: A Family of Universal Models for Atoms
The ability to quickly and accurately compute properties from atomic simulations is critical for advancing a large number of applications in chemistry and materials science including drug discovery, energy storage, and semiconductor manufacturing. To address this need, we present a family of Universal Models for Atoms (UMA), designed to push the frontier of speed, accuracy, and generalization. UMA models are trained on half a billion unique 3D atomic structures (the largest training runs to date) by compiling data across multiple chemical domains, e.g.