United States

Understanding and reasoning with abstractive information from the visual modality presents significant challenges for current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). Among the various forms of abstractive information, Multi-Modal Relational Knowledge (MMRK), which represents abstract relational structures between multi-modal entities using node-edge formats, remains largely under-explored. In particular, STructured and Abstractive Reasoning (STAR) on such data has received little attention from the research community. To bridge the dual gaps in large-scale high-quality data and capability enhancement methodologies, this paper makes the following key contributions: (i). An automatic STAR data engine to synthesize images with MMRK to build multi-modal instructions with reliable chain-of-thought thinking for various STAR tasks and (ii). A comprehsive two-stage training framework, accompanied by knowledge-informed GRPO and a suite of evaluation protocols tailored to different STAR tasks. Based upon these contributions, we introduce STAR-64K, a dataset comprising 64K high-quality multi-modal instruction samples, and conduct experiments across 8 open-source MLLMs. Experimental results show that our two-stage enhancement framework enables smaller 3B/7B models to significantly outperform GPT-4o in STAR. Additionally, we provide in-depth analysis regarding the effectiveness of various designs, data transferability, and scalability.

ACL 2026

Structured and Abstractive Reasoning on Multi-modal Relational Knowledge Images

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Previous LLMs-based RL studies typically follow either supervised learning with high annotation costs, or unsupervised paradigms using voting or entropy-based rewards. However, their performance remains far from satisfactory due to the substantial annotation cost and issues such as model collapse or reward hacking. To address these issues, we introduce a new perspective inspired by cognitive learning theory and propose a novel approach called EasyRL. The core of EasyRL is to simulate the human cognitive acquisition curve by integrating reliable knowledge transfer from easy labeled data with a progressive divide-and-conquer strategy that tackles increasingly difficult unlabeled data. Specifically, we initialize a warm-up model using supervised RL with few-shot labeled data. This is followed by a divide-and-conquer pseudo-labeling strategy on difficult unlabeled data, combining consistency-based selection for low-uncertainty cases and reflection-based resolution for medium-uncertainty cases. Finally, difficulty-progressive self-training with iterative pseudo-labeling and RL further strengthens the model’s reasoning capability. EasyRL provides a unified self-evolving framework that facilitates data-efficient post-training of LLMs. Experimental results on mathematical and scientific benchmarks demonstrate that EasyRL, using only 10% of easy labeled data, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Easy Samples Are All You Need: Self-Evolving LLMs via Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in autonomous agent settings, small language models (SLMs) remain fragile, often collapsing after encountering errors. Traditional knowledge distillation focuses on imitating successful trajectories, while existing "learning from mistakes" methods treat errors as auxiliary signals rather than states requiring recoverable policies, leaving the dynamics of failure and recovery in agent settings largely unexplored. Inspired by Donald Schön’s theory of reflective practice, we propose P-BRIDGE (Pedagogical Bridge for Reflective Insight and Distillation of Guiding Errors). P-BRIDGE combines reflection-in-action with reflection-on-action, enabling agents to diagnose and correct critical errors during execution while abstracting transferable strategies from contrastive student–teacher trajectories. Experiments across eight benchmarks demonstrate that P-BRIDGE significantly elevates SLM performance—e.g., raising the 2WikiMultiHopQA accuracy of a 0.6B model from 6.2% to 34.2%.

Failures are Treasures: Constructing a Pedagogical Bridge for Agentic Strategy Distillation

Multi-modal Event Argument Extraction task (MEAE) aims to extract all arguments related to a specific event from multiple modalities and identify their corresponding roles. Existing methods focus on weakly alignment of uni-modal representations and generatively data augmentation techniques. However, these methods ignore the potential impact of event role information on MEAE. To address this problem, we propose a Cross-modal Variational Role Hypergraph Network via Semantic Enhancement (CVRH). Unlike previous approaches, CVRH centers on event role information and designs a variational role hyperedge via semantic enhancement, which constructs a role hypergraph for event arguments within multi-modal documents. It explicitly modeling the high-order role correlations among cross-modal arguments in a document. Furthermore, CVRH introduces a modal shared encoder based on differential transformer, which effectively learns shared semantic representations across modalities and enhances the independence of argument representations. On the M2E2 benchmark, experimental results show that CVRH achieves a 6.9% improvement in F1-score on the MEAE compared to current state-of-the-art methods.

CVRH: Cross-modal Variational Role Hypergraph Network via Semantic Enhancement for Multi-modal Event Argument Extraction

Quantization is widely adopted to reduce the computational cost of large language models (LLMs); however, its implications for fairness and safety, particularly in dynamic quantization and multilingual contexts, remain underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of how static and dynamic quantization methods impact fairness and safety across benchmarks measuring intrinsic and extrinsic bias and safety alignment. For fairness, we evaluate English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Turkish; for safety, we focus on English, Korean, and Arabic. Our findings reveal that quantization consistently degrades fairness and safety, with dynamic methods demonstrating greater stability than static ones. Moreover, fairness degradation varies across languages, while safety deterioration is especially pronounced in non-English settings. To address these risks, we introduce Critical Weight Protection, a novel technique that identifies and preserves fairness- and safety-critical weights during quantization. This approach mitigates bias and safety deterioration without costly retraining or alignment, maintaining trustworthiness while retaining efficiency.

Preserving Fairness and Safety in Quantized LLMs Through Critical Weight Protection

Understanding where transformer language models encode psychologically meaningful aspects of meaning is essential for both theory and practice. We conduct a systematic layer-wise probing study of 58 psycholinguistic features across 10 transformer models, spanning encoder-only and decoder-only architectures, and compare three embedding extraction methods. We find that apparent localization of meaning is strongly method-dependent: contextualized embeddings yield higher feature-specific selectivity and different layer-wise profiles than isolated embeddings. Across models and methods, final-layer representations are rarely optimal for recovering psycholinguistic information with linear probes. Despite these differences, models exhibit a shared depth ordering of meaning dimensions, with lexical properties peaking earlier and experiential and affective dimensions peaking later. Together, these results show that where meaning “lives” in transformer models reflects an interaction between methodological choices and architectural constraints.

Where meaning lives: Layer-wise accessibility of psycholinguistic features in encoder and decoder language models

Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise for business applications, yet business analysis remains inherently complex, demanding rigorous reasoning and the integration of diverse knowledge sources. Existing benchmarks typically target narrow tasks and thus leave a fundamental question unanswered: how can LLMs be reliably applied in business, and how are these applications grounded in underlying theoretical capabilities? To address this gap, we introduce BizCompass, a benchmark explicitly designed to connect theoretical foundations with practical business knowledge and applications. At the knowledge level, BizCompass covers four core domains—finance, economics, statistics, and operations management. At the application level, it structures tasks around three representative roles: the analyst, the trader, and the consultant. This dual-axis design not only exposes performance differences across realistic scenarios but also diagnoses which foundational capabilities enable or constrain success. We systematically evaluate both open-source and commercial LLMs, revealing how theoretical knowledge translates into practical performance in business. The results provide actionable insights for model selection and training optimization in real-world business contexts. All datasets and evaluation code are publicly released to support reproducibility and future research: https://bizcompass.dev.ypemc.com.

BizCompass: Benchmarking the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in Business Knowledge and Applications

Recent advances in Deep Research Agents (DRAs) are transforming automated knowledge discovery and problem-solving.
While the majority of existing efforts focus on enhancing policy capabilities via post-training, we propose an alternative paradigm: test-time self-evolving the agent's ability by iteratively verifying the policy model's outputs, guided by meticulously crafted rubrics. This approach gives rise to an inference-time scaling of verification, wherein an agent self-improves at test time by evaluating its generated answers to produce iterative feedback and refinements without any additional training. We derive the rubrics based on an automatically constructed DRA Failure Taxonomy, which systematically classifies agent failures into five major categories and thirteen sub-categories. We present DeepVerifier, a rubrics-based outcome reward verifier that leverages the asymmetry of verification and outperforms vanilla agent-as-judge and LLM judge baselines by 12%--48% in meta-evaluation F1 score. To enable practical test-time self-evolution, DeepVerifier integrates as a plug-and-play module during test-time inference. The verifier produces detailed rubric-based feedback, which is fed back to the agent for iterative bootstrapping---refining responses without additional training. This test-time scaling delivers 8%--11% accuracy gains on challenging subsets of GAIA and XBench-DeepResearch when powered by capable closed-source LLMs. Finally, to support open-source advancement, we release DeepVerifier-4K, a curated supervised fine-tuning dataset of 4,646 high-quality agent steps focused on DRA verification. These examples emphasize reflection and self-critique, enabling open models to develop robust verification capabilities.

Inference-Time Scaling of Verification: Self-Evolving Deep Research Agents via Test-Time Rubric-Guided Verification

The behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) as artificial social actors are largely underexplored, particularly in unverifiable scenarios where conventional benchmarking has little to help improve their abilities. Thus, examining their behaviors in such scenarios can help understand and improve LLMs' capabilities of simulating real-world social actors in many tasks such as LLM-empowered social agents. We draw a typical unverifiable scenario--a simplified pull request scenario on \textsc{GitHub} focusing on decision-making based on Activity Overview signal--to investigate how human and LLMs behave. We introduce a systematic method to collect, compare, and reason about human and LLMs' decisions. Our results reveal that there are both similarities and differences between human and LLMs' decisions, and proprietary LLMs generally behave more like human than open-source LLMs do. We further find that human and LLMs may rely on different information and reasoning mechanisms in decision-making. Our study thus urges more future work on human and LLMs decision-making in unverifiable environments.

Investigating Human and LLMs' Decisions in Unverifiable Environments: A Case Study with GitHub Activity Overview

Large language models often display undesirable behaviors embedded in their internal representations, undermining fairness, inconsistency drift, amplification of harmful content, and the propagation of unwanted patterns during extended dialogue and conversations. Although training-time or data-centric methods attempt to reduce these effects, they are computationally expensive, irreversible once deployed, and slow to adapt to new conversational contexts. Pruning-based methods provide a flexible and transparent way to reduce bias by adjusting the neurons responsible for certain behaviors. However, most existing approaches are static; once a neuron is removed, the model loses the ability to adapt when the conversation or context changes. To address this, we propose a dynamic, reversible, pruning-based framework that detects context-aware neuron activations and applies adaptive masking to modulate their influence during generation. Our inference-time solution provides fine-grained, memory-aware mitigation with knowledge-preserved, more coherent behavior across multilingual single- and multi-turn dialogues, enabling dynamic fairness control in real-world conversational AI.

Fairness Evaluation and Inference Level Mitigation in LLMs

Hallucination detection is crucial for large language models (LLMs), as hallucinated content creates significant barriers in applications requiring factual accuracy. Current detection methods mainly depend on internal signals like uncertainty and self-consistency checks, using the model's pre-trained knowledge to identify unreliable outputs. However, pre-trained knowledge may become outdated and has coverage limitations, especially for specialized or recent information. To address these limitations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution by retrieving relevant evidence at inference time, grounding outputs beyond the model’s parametric knowledge. In this paper, we target a critical and practical learning problem RAG-based hallucination detection (RHD), where RAG is employed to enhance hallucination detection by addressing information updating challenges. To address RHD, we propose a novel method Evidence-Aligned Entity Verification (EAEV), which detects entity-level hallucinations by leveraging RAG to align generated entities with retrieved evidence contexts. Specifically, EAEV evaluates entity-evidence alignment through three complementary dimensions and introduces counterfactual stability analysis to ensure robust alignments under evidence perturbations. Experiments across multiple RAG benchmarks demonstrate that EAEV achieves consistent improvements over existing methods with strong generalization capabilities.

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