Large vision-language models (VLMs) face challenges in achieving robust, transferable reasoning abilities due to reliance on labor-intensive manual instruction datasets or computationally expensive self-supervised methods. To address these issues, we introduce MindGYM, a framework that enhances VLMs through synthetic self-challenging questions, consisting of three stages: (1) Seed Single-Hop Question Synthesis, generating cognitive questions across textual (e.g., logical deduction) and multimodal contexts (e.g., diagram-based queries) spanning eight semantic areas like ethical analysis; (2) Challenging Multi-Hop Question Synthesis, combining seed questions via diverse principles like bridging, visual-textual alignment, to create multi-step problems demanding deeper reasoning; and (3) Thinking-Induced Curriculum Fine-Tuning, a structured pipeline that progressively trains the model from scaffolded reasoning to standalone inference. By leveraging the model's self-synthesis capability, MindGYM achieves high data efficiency (e.g., +16% gains on MathVision-Mini with only 400 samples), computational efficiency (reducing both training and inference costs), and robust generalization across tasks. Extensive evaluations on seven benchmarks demonstrate superior performance over strong baselines, with notable improvements (+15.77% win rates) in reasoning depth and breadth validated via GPT-based scoring. MindGYM underscores the viability of self-challenging for refining VLM capabilities while minimizing human intervention and resource demands. Code and data are released to advance multimodal reasoning research.

Large language models (LLMs), due to their advanced natural language capabilities, have seen significant success in applications where the user interface is usually a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) agent and engages the user through multi-round conversations. However, many scenarios require the agents to exhibit stronger social and conversational intelligence and demonstrate more human-like (anthropomorphic) reactions. This is an aspect that foundational LLMs have yet to fully address such that a single call of foundational models might be insufficient. To bridge this gap, we propose a two-stage solution. In this work, we focus on the first stage, introducing a multi-module framework designed to replicate the key aspects of human intelligence involved in conversations. This framework comprises thinking modules for reasoning, resource modules for managing knowledge and external information, and response modules for generating contextually appropriate interactions. With all the modules cooperating, the framework would empower the agents to provide a better human-like conversation experience. In the second stage of our approach, these conversational data, after filtering and labeling, can serve as training and testing data for reinforcement learning, enabling AI to better capture human preferences. This stage is left for future work. In our experiments, volunteers engaged in over 3000 rounds of conversation with the same AI character powered by a standalone LLM and our framework which integrates the same LLM. A separate group of evaluators rated the conversation samples, revealing that our framework significantly enhanced the social and conversational intelligence, even without fine-tuning the LLM.

Visual instruction tuning has become the predominant technology in eliciting the multimodal task-solving capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Despite the success, as visual instructions require images as the input, it would leave the gap in inheriting the task-solving capabilities from the backbone LLMs, and make it costly to collect a large-scale dataset. To address it, we propose ViFT, a visual instruction-free fine-tuning framework for LVLMs. In ViFT, we only require the text-only instructions and image caption data during training, to separately learn the task-solving and visual perception abilities. During inference, we extract and combine the representations of the text and image inputs, for fusing the two abilities to fulfill multimodal tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that ViFT can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several visual reasoning and visual instruction following benchmarks, with rather less training data. Our code and data will be publicly released.

Large language models (LLMs) have had a profound impact on various aspects of people's lives, particularly as the foundational technology behind conversational applications such as chatbots. These models have become indispensable as virtual assistants, offering powerful capabilities for various tasks, including addressing common-sense queries, generating summaries for academic papers [16], and solving programming challenges and tasks [11]. Despite their impressive functionality, LLMs are of some limitations. Issues such as hallucinations and the inability to provide the most up-to-date information or private knowledge hinder their reliability in directly serving for knowledge-intensive applications. These shortcomings can be mitigated by integrating LLMs with external information in the input context [20, 28]. One notable approach is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques [1, 10], which enhances LLMs by equipping them with retrieval capabilities, allows LLMs to address questions that exceed the scope of their pre-trained internal knowledge. RAG has proven highly effective in improving performance on question-answering (QA) tasks emphasizing faithfulness to truths, showcasing its potential to bridge the gap between static pre-trained knowledge and dynamic, context-specific information. While many real-world applications have adopted RAG techniques [13, 22], open-source frameworks have also emerged to facilitate the adaptation of RAG to a wide range of tasks [14, 18] for the public to hold RAG application services themselves with local data. While these open-source RAG frameworks provide convenient starting points for building RAG-based applications, there remain significant opportunities for improvement, especially in more practical and complicated scenarios, e.g., efficient multi-source knowledge retrieval, which provides primary motivations for this paper.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising technology for addressing hallucination issues in the responses generated by large language models (LLMs). Existing studies on RAG primarily focus on applying semantic-based approaches to retrieve isolated relevant chunks, which ignore their intrinsic relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge Graph-Guided Retrieval Augmented Generation (KG$^2$RAG) framework that utilizes knowledge graphs (KGs) to provide fact-level relationships between chunks, improving the diversity and coherence of the retrieved results. Specifically, after performing a semantic-based retrieval to provide seed chunks, KG$^2$RAG employs a KG-guided chunk expansion process and a KG-based chunk organization process to deliver relevant and important knowledge in well-organized paragraphs. Extensive experiments conducted on the HotpotQA dataset and its variants demonstrate the advantages of KG$^2$RAG compared to existing RAG-based approaches, in terms of both response quality and retrieval quality.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using diverse datasets is crucial for enhancing their overall performance across various domains. In practical scenarios, existing methods based on modeling the mixture proportions of data composition often struggle with data whose domain labels are missing, imprecise or non-normalized, while methods based on data selection usually encounter difficulties in balancing multi-domain performance. To address these challenges, in this paper, we study the role of data diversity in enhancing the overall abilities of LLMs by empirically constructing contrastive data pools and theoretically deriving explanations for both inter- and intra-diversity. Building upon the insights gained, we propose a new method that gives the LLM a dual identity: an output model to cognitively probe and select data based on diversity reward, as well as an input model to be tuned with the selected data. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method notably boosts performance across domain-undetermined data and a series of foundational downstream tasks when applied to various advanced LLMs. We release our code and hope this study can shed light on the understanding of data diversity and advance feedback-driven data-model co-development for LLMs.

Leveraging large language models (LLMs), an agent can utilize retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to integrate external knowledge and increase the reliability of its responses. Current RAG-based agents integrate single, domain-specific knowledge sources, limiting their ability and leading to hallucinated or inaccurate responses when addressing cross-domain queries. Integrating multiple knowledge bases into a unified RAG-based agent raises significant challenges, including increased retrieval overhead and data sovereignty when sensitive data is involved. In this work, we propose RopMura, a novel multi-agent system that addresses these limitations by incorporating highly efficient routing and planning mechanisms. RopMura features two key components: a router that intelligently selects the most relevant agents based on knowledge boundaries and a planner that decomposes complex multi-hop queries into manageable steps, allowing for coordinating cross-domain responses. Experimental results demonstrate that RopMura effectively handles both single-hop and multi-hop queries, with the routing mechanism enabling precise answers for single-hop queries and the combined routing and planning mechanisms achieving accurate, multi-step resolutions for complex queries.

The structural properties of naturally arising social graphs are extensively studied to understand their evolution. Prior approaches for modeling network dynamics typically rely on rule-based models, which lack realism and generalizability, or deep learning-based models, which require large-scale training datasets. Social graphs, as abstract graph representations of entity-wise interactions, present an opportunity to explore network evolution mechanisms through realistic simulations of human-item interactions. Leveraging the pre-trained social consensus knowledge embedded in large language models (LLMs), we present GraphAgent-Generator (GAG), a novel simulation-based framework for dynamic, text-attributed social graph generation. GAG simulates the temporal node and edge generation processes for zero-shot social graph generation. The resulting graphs exhibit adherence to seven key macroscopic network properties, achieving an 11% improvement in microscopic graph structure metrics. Through the node classification benchmarking task, we validate GAG effectively captures the intricate text-structure correlations in graph generation. Furthermore, GAG supports generating graphs with up to nearly 100,000 nodes or 10 million edges through large-scale LLM-based agent simulation with parallel acceleration, achieving a minimum speed-up of 90.4%. The source code is available at https://github.com/Ji-Cather/GraphAgent.

In the domain of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), achieving human-centric video understanding remains a formidable challenge. Existing benchmarks primarily emphasize object and action recognition, often neglecting the intricate nuances of human emotions, behaviors, and speech visual alignment within video content. We present HumanVBench, an innovative benchmark meticulously crafted to bridge these gaps in the evaluation of video MLLMs. HumanVBench comprises 17 carefully designed tasks that explore two primary dimensions: inner emotion and outer manifestations, spanning static and dynamic, basic and complex, as well as single-modal and cross-modal aspects. With two advanced automated pipelines for video annotation and distractor-included QA generation, HumanVBench utilizes diverse state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques to streamline benchmark data synthesis and quality assessment, minimizing human annotation dependency tailored to human-centric multimodal attributes. A comprehensive evaluation across 16 SOTA video MLLMs reveals notable limitations in current performance, especially in cross-modal and temporal alignment, underscoring the necessity for further refinement toward achieving more human-like understanding. HumanVBench is open-sourced to facilitate future advancements and real-world applications in video MLLMs.

The burgeoning field of foundation models necessitates advanced data processing mechanisms capable of harnessing vast valuable data with varied types utilized by these models. Nevertheless, the current landscape presents unique challenges that traditional data processing frameworks cannot handle effectively, especially with multimodal intricacies. In response, we present Data-Juicer 2.0, a new system offering fruitful data processing capabilities backed by over a hundred operators spanning various modalities like text, image, audio, and video. With seamless compatibility and dedicated optimization to popular dataset hubs like Hugging Face and computing engines like Ray, Data-Juicer 2.0 enhances its predecessor in both usability, efficiency, and programmability. It features an easily accessible user interface layer that supports decoupled Python interactions, RESTful APIs, and conversational commands. Alongside this, it contains a core runtime layer optimized for adaptive execution and management across different dataset scales, processing demands, and computational environments, while shielding unnecessary system details. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate Data-Juicer 2.0's remarkable performance and scalability, highlighting its capability to efficiently process tens of billions of data samples with tens of thousands of CPU cores. The system is publicly available, actively maintained, and broadly adopted in diverse research endeavors, practical applications, and real-world products such as Alibaba Cloud PAI.