PPTAgent: Generating and Evaluating Presentations Beyond Text-to-Slides

Automatically generating presentations from documents is a challenging task that requires balancing content quality, visual design, and structural coherence. Existing methods primarily focus on improving and evaluating the content quality in isolation, often overlooking visual design and structural coherence, which limits their practical applicability. To address these limitations, we propose PPTAgent, which comprehensively improves presentation generation through a two-stage, edit-based approach inspired by human workflows. PPTAgent first analyzes reference presentations to understand their structural patterns and content schemas, then drafts outlines and generates slides through code actions to ensure consistency and alignment. To comprehensively evaluate the quality of generated presentations, we further introduce PPTEval, an evaluation framework that assesses presentations across three dimensions: Content, Design, and Coherence. Experiments show that PPTAgent significantly outperforms traditional automatic presentation generation methods across all three dimensions. The code and data are available at https://github.com/icip-cas/PPTAgent.

Auto-RT: Automatic Jailbreak Strategy Exploration for Red-Teaming Large Language Models

Automated red-teaming has become a crucial approach for uncovering vulnerabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, most existing methods focus on isolated safety flaws, limiting their ability to adapt to dynamic defenses and uncover complex vulnerabilities efficiently. To address this challenge, we propose Auto-RT, a reinforcement learning framework that automatically explores and optimizes complex attack strategies to effectively uncover security vulnerabilities through malicious queries. Specifically, we introduce two key mechanisms to reduce exploration complexity and improve strategy optimization: 1) Early-terminated Exploration, which accelerate exploration by focusing on high-potential attack strategies; and 2) Progressive Reward Tracking algorithm with intermediate downgrade models, which dynamically refine the search trajectory toward successful vulnerability exploitation. Extensive experiments across diverse LLMs demonstrate that, by significantly improving exploration efficiency and automatically optimizing attack strategies, Auto-RT detects a boarder range of vulnerabilities, achieving a faster detection speed and 16.63\% higher success rates compared to existing methods.

The Rise and Down of Babel Tower: Investigating the Evolution Process of Multilingual Code Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant multilingual capabilities. However, the mechanisms underlying the development of these capabilities during pre-training are not well understood. In this paper, we use code LLMs as an experimental platform to explore the evolution of multilingual capabilities in LLMs during the pre-training process. Based on our observations, we propose the Babel Tower Hypothesis, which describes the entire process of LLMs acquiring new language capabilities. During the learning process, multiple languages initially share a single knowledge system dominated by the primary language and gradually develop language-specific knowledge systems. We then validate the above hypothesis by tracking the internal states of the LLMs through identifying working languages and language transferring neurons. Experimental results show that the internal state changes of the LLM are consistent with our Babel Tower Hypothesis. Building on these insights, we propose a novel method to construct an optimized pre-training corpus for multilingual code LLMs, which significantly outperforms LLMs trained on the original corpus. The proposed Babel Tower Hypothesis provides new insights into designing pre-training data distributions to achieve optimal multilingual capabilities in LLMs.

CATP-LLM: Empowering Large Language Models for Cost-Aware Tool Planning

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for tool planning has emerged as a promising avenue for developing general AI systems, where LLMs automatically schedule external tools (e.g. vision models) to tackle complex tasks based on task descriptions. To push this paradigm toward practical applications, it is crucial for LLMs to consider tool execution costs (e.g. execution time) for tool planning. Unfortunately, prior studies overlook the tool execution costs, leading to the generation of expensive plans of which the costs outweigh task performance. To fill this gap, we propose the Cost-Aware Tool Planning with LLMs (CATP-LLM) framework, which for the first time provides a coherent design to empower LLMs for cost-aware tool planning. Specifically, CATP-LLM incorporates a tool planning language to enhance the LLM to generate non-sequential plans of multiple branches for efficient concurrent tool execution and cost reduction. Moreover, it further designs a cost-aware offline reinforcement learning algorithm to fine-tune the LLM to optimize the performance-cost trade-off in tool planning. In lack of public cost-related datasets, we further present OpenCATP, the first platform for cost-aware planning evaluation. Experiments on OpenCATP show that CATP-LLM outperforms GPT-4 even when using Llama2-7B as its backbone, with the average improvement of 28.2%-30.2% higher plan performance and 24.7%-45.8% lower costs even on the challenging planning tasks. The codes of CATP-LLM and OpenCATP will be publicly available.

Search, Verify and Feedback: Towards Next Generation Post-training Paradigm of Foundation Models via Verifier Engineering

The evolution of machine learning has increasingly prioritized the development of powerful models and more scalable supervision signals. However, the emergence of foundation models presents significant challenges in providing effective supervision signals necessary for further enhancing their capabilities. Consequently, there is an urgent need to explore novel supervision signals and technical approaches. In this paper, we propose verifier engineering, a novel post-training paradigm specifically designed for the era of foundation models. The core of verifier engineering involves leveraging a suite of automated verifiers to perform verification tasks and deliver meaningful feedback to foundation models. We systematically categorize the verifier engineering process into three essential stages: search, verify, and feedback, and provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art research developments within each stage. We believe that verifier engineering constitutes a fundamental pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence.

DiffLM: Controllable Synthetic Data Generation via Diffusion Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their knowledge and generative capabilities, leading to a surge of interest in leveraging LLMs for high-quality data synthesis. However, synthetic data generation via prompting LLMs remains challenging due to LLMs' limited understanding of target data distributions and the complexity of prompt engineering, especially for structured formatted data. To address these issues, we introduce DiffLM, a controllable data synthesis framework based on variational autoencoder (VAE), which further (1) leverages diffusion models to reserve more information of original distribution and format structure in the learned latent distribution and (2) decouples the learning of target distribution knowledge from the LLM's generative objectives via a plug-and-play latent feature injection module. As we observed significant discrepancies between the VAE's latent representations and the real data distribution, the latent diffusion module is introduced into our framework to learn a fully expressive latent distribution. Evaluations on seven real-world datasets with structured formatted data (i.e., Tabular, Code and Tool data) demonstrate that DiffLM generates high-quality data, with performance on downstream tasks surpassing that of real data by 2-7 percent in certain cases. The data and code will be publicly available upon completion of internal review.

Transferable Post-training via Inverse Value Learning

As post-training processes utilize increasingly large datasets and base models continue to grow in size, the computational demands and implementation challenges of existing algorithms are escalating significantly. In this paper, we propose modeling the changes at the logits level during post-training using a separate neural network (i.e., the value network). After training this network on a small base model using demonstrations, this network can be seamlessly integrated with other pre-trained models during inference, enables them to achieve similar capability enhancements. We systematically investigate the best practices for this paradigm in terms of pre-training weights and connection schemes. We demonstrate that the resulting value network has broad transferability across pre-trained models of different parameter sizes within the same family, models undergoing continuous pre-training within the same family, and models with different vocabularies across families. In certain cases, it can achieve performance comparable to full-parameter fine-tuning. Furthermore, we explore methods to enhance the transferability of the value model and prevent overfitting to the base model used during training.

Aligning Large Language Models via Self-Steering Optimization

Automated alignment develops alignment systems with minimal human intervention. The key to automated alignment lies in providing learnable and accurate preference signals for preference learning without human annotation. In this paper, we introduce Self-Steering Optimization ($SSO$), an algorithm that autonomously generates high-quality preference signals based on predefined principles during iterative training, eliminating the need for manual annotation. $SSO$ maintains the accuracy of signals by ensuring a consistent gap between chosen and rejected responses while keeping them both on-policy to suit the current policy model's learning capacity. $SSO$ can benefit the online and offline training of the policy model, as well as enhance the training of reward models. We validate the effectiveness of $SSO$ with two foundation models, Qwen2 and Llama3.1, indicating that it provides accurate, on-policy preference signals throughout iterative training. Without any manual annotation or external models, $SSO$ leads to significant performance improvements across six subjective or objective benchmarks. Besides, the preference data generated by $SSO$ significantly enhanced the performance of the reward model on Rewardbench. Our work presents a scalable approach to preference optimization, paving the way for more efficient and effective automated alignment.

A Unified View of Delta Parameter Editing in Post-Trained Large-Scale Models

Post-training has emerged as a crucial paradigm for adapting large-scale pre-trained models to various tasks, whose effects are fully reflected by delta parameters (i.e., the disparity between post-trained and pre-trained parameters). While numerous studies have explored delta parameter properties via operations like pruning, quantization, low-rank approximation, and extrapolation, a unified framework for systematically examining these characteristics has been lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective based on Riemann sum approximation of the loss function to elucidate delta parameter editing operations. Our analysis categorizes existing methods into three classes based on their post-editing performance: competitive, decreased, and improved, explaining how they are expressed by the Riemann sum approximation term and how they alter the model performance. Extensive experiments on both visual and language models, including ViT, LLaMA 3, Qwen 2, and Mistral, corroborate our theoretical findings. Furthermore, we introduce extensions to existing techniques like DARE and BitDelta, highlighting their limitations in leveraging the properties of delta parameters and reorganizing them into general expressions to enhance the applicability and effectiveness of delta parameter editing in post-trained models.

StructRAG: Boosting Knowledge Intensive Reasoning of LLMs via Inference-time Hybrid Information Structurization

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a key means to effectively enhance large language models (LLMs) in many knowledge-based tasks. However, existing RAG methods struggle with knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks, because useful information required to these tasks are badly scattered. This characteristic makes it difficult for existing RAG methods to accurately identify key information and perform global reasoning with such noisy augmentation. In this paper, motivated by the cognitive theories that humans convert raw information into various structured knowledge when tackling knowledge-intensive reasoning, we proposes a new framework, StructRAG, which can identify the optimal structure type for the task at hand, reconstruct original documents into this structured format, and infer answers based on the resulting structure. Extensive experiments across various knowledge-intensive tasks show that StructRAG achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly excelling in challenging scenarios, demonstrating its potential as an effective solution for enhancing LLMs in complex real-world applications.