MemCast: Memory-Driven Time Series Forecasting with Experience-Conditioned Reasoning

Time series forecasting (TSF) plays a critical role in decision-making for many real-world applications. Recently, LLM-based forecasters have made promising advancements. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods often lack explicit experience accumulation and continual evolution. In this work, we propose MemCast, a learning-to-memory framework that reformulates TSF as an experience-conditioned reasoning task. Specifically, we learn experience from the training set and organize it into a hierarchical memory. This is achieved by summarizing prediction results into historical patterns, distilling inference trajectories into reasoning wisdom, and inducing extracted temporal features into general laws. Furthermore, during inference, we leverage historical patterns to guide the reasoning process and utilize reasoning wisdom to select better trajectories, while general laws serve as criteria for reflective iteration. Additionally, to enable continual evolution, we design a dynamic confidence adaptation strategy that updates the confidence of individual entries without leaking the test set distribution. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that MemCast consistently outperforms previous methods, validating the effectiveness of our approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/MemCast-TS.

Latent Shadows: The Gaussian-Discrete Duality in Masked Diffusion

Masked discrete diffusion is a dominant paradigm for high-quality language modeling where tokens are iteratively corrupted to a mask state, yet its inference efficiency is bottlenecked by the lack of deterministic sampling tools. While diffusion duality enables deterministic distillation for uniform models, these approaches generally underperform masked models and rely on complex integral operators. Conversely, in the masked domain, prior methods typically assume the absence of deterministic trajectories, forcing a reliance on stochastic distillation. To bridge this gap, we establish explicit Masked Diffusion Duality, proving that the masked process arises as the projection of a continuous Gaussian process via a novel maximum-value index preservation mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce Masked Consistency Distillation (MCD), a principled framework that leverages this duality to analytically construct the deterministic coupled trajectories required for consistency distillation, bypassing numerical ODE solvers. This result strictly improves upon prior stochastic distillation methods, achieving a 16$\times$ inference speedup without compromising generation quality. Our findings not only provide a solid theoretical foundation connecting masked and continuous diffusion, but also unlock the full potential of consistency distillation for high-performance discrete generation. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MCD-70FD.

CE-GOCD: Central Entity-Guided Graph Optimization for Community Detection to Augment LLM Scientific Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for question answering over scientific research papers. Existing retrieval augmentation methods often rely on isolated text chunks or concepts, but overlook deeper semantic connections between papers. This impairs the LLM's comprehension of scientific literature, hindering the comprehensiveness and specificity of its responses. To address this, we propose Central Entity-Guided Graph Optimization for Community Detection (CE-GOCD), a method that augments LLMs' scientific question answering by explicitly modeling and leveraging semantic substructures within academic knowledge graphs. Our approach operates by: (1) leveraging paper titles as central entities for targeted subgraph retrieval, (2) enhancing implicit semantic discovery via subgraph pruning and completion, and (3) applying community detection to distill coherent paper groups with shared themes. We evaluated the proposed method on three NLP literature-based question-answering datasets, and the results demonstrate its superiority over other retrieval-augmented baseline approaches, confirming the effectiveness of our framework.

Graph Reasoning Paradigm: Structured and Symbolic Reasoning with Topology-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models

Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT), achieved by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, reasoning in current LLMs is primarily generated as plain text, where performing semantic evaluation on such unstructured data creates a computational bottleneck during training. Despite RLVR-based optimization, existing methods still suffer from coarse-grained supervision, reward hacking, high training costs, and poor generalization. To address these issues, we propose the Graph Reasoning Paradigm (GRP), which realizes structured and symbolic reasoning, implemented via graph-structured representations with step-level cognitive labels. Building upon GRP, we further design Process-Aware Stratified Clipping Group Relative Policy Optimization (PASC-GRPO), which leverages structured evaluation to replace semantic evaluation, achieves process-aware verification through graph-structured outcome rewards, and mitigates reward hacking via stratified clipping advantage estimation. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements across mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks. Data, models, and code will be released later.

BLADE: A Behavior-Level Data Augmentation Framework with Dual Fusion Modeling for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation

Multi-behavior sequential recommendation aims to capture users' dynamic interests by modeling diverse types of user interactions over time. Although several studies have explored this setting, the recommendation performance remains suboptimal, mainly due to two fundamental challenges: the heterogeneity of user behaviors and data sparsity. To address these challenges, we propose BLADE, a framework that enhances multi-behavior modeling while mitigating data sparsity. Specifically, to handle behavior heterogeneity, we introduce a dual item-behavior fusion architecture that incorporates behavior information at both the input and intermediate levels, enabling preference modeling from multiple perspectives. To mitigate data sparsity, we design three behavior-level data augmentation methods that operate directly on behavior sequences rather than core item sequences. These methods generate diverse augmented views while preserving the semantic consistency of item sequences. These augmented views further enhance representation learning and generalization via contrastive learning. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

CARE-Bench: A Benchmark of Diverse Client Simulations Guided by Expert Principles for Evaluating LLMs in Psychological Counseling

The mismatch between the growing demand for psychological counseling and the limited availability of services has motivated research into the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in this domain. Consequently, there is a need for a robust and unified benchmark to assess the counseling competence of various LLMs. Existing works, however, are limited by unprofessional client simulation, static question-and-answer evaluation formats, and unidimensional metrics. These limitations hinder their effectiveness in assessing a model's comprehensive ability to handle diverse and complex clients. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{CARE-Bench}, a dynamic and interactive automated benchmark. It is built upon diverse client profiles derived from real-world counseling cases and simulated according to expert guidelines. CARE-Bench provides a multidimensional performance evaluation grounded in established psychological scales. Using CARE-Bench, we evaluate several general-purpose LLMs and specialized counseling models, revealing their current limitations. In collaboration with psychologists, we conduct a detailed analysis of the reasons for LLMs' failures when interacting with clients of different types, which provides directions for developing more comprehensive, universal, and effective counseling models.

Evaluating LLMs Across Multi-Cognitive Levels: From Medical Knowledge Mastery to Scenario-Based Problem Solving

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on various medical benchmarks, but their capabilities across different cognitive levels remain underexplored. Inspired by Bloom's Taxonomy, we propose a multi-cognitive-level evaluation framework for assessing LLMs in the medical domain in this study. The framework integrates existing medical datasets and introduces tasks targeting three cognitive levels: preliminary knowledge grasp, comprehensive knowledge application, and scenario-based problem solving. Using this framework, we systematically evaluate state-of-the-art general and medical LLMs from six prominent families: Llama, Qwen, Gemma, Phi, GPT, and DeepSeek. Our findings reveal a significant performance decline as cognitive complexity increases across evaluated models, with model size playing a more critical role in performance at higher cognitive levels. Our study highlights the need to enhance LLMs' medical capabilities at higher cognitive levels and provides insights for developing LLMs suited to real-world medical applications.

CogMath: Assessing LLMs' Authentic Mathematical Ability from a Human Cognitive Perspective

Although large language models (LLMs) show promise in solving complex mathematical tasks, existing evaluation paradigms rely solely on a coarse measure of overall answer accuracy, which are insufficient for assessing their authentic capabilities. In this paper, we propose \textbf{CogMath}, which comprehensively assesses LLMs' mathematical abilities through the lens of human cognition. Specifically, inspired by psychological theories, CogMath formalizes human reasoning process into 3 stages: \emph{problem comprehension}, \emph{problem solving}, and \emph{solution summarization}. Within these stages, we investigate perspectives such as numerical calculation, knowledge, and counterfactuals, and design a total of 9 fine-grained evaluation dimensions. In each dimension, we develop an ``\emph{Inquiry}-\emph{Judge}-\emph{Reference}'' multi-agent system to generate inquiries that assess LLMs' mastery from this dimension. An LLM is considered to truly master a problem only when excelling in all inquiries from the 9 dimensions. By applying CogMath on three benchmarks, we reveal that the mathematical capabilities of 7 mainstream LLMs are overestimated by 30\%-40\%. Moreover, we locate their strengths and weaknesses across specific stages/dimensions, offering in-depth insights to further enhance their reasoning abilities.

MMATH: A Multilingual Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning

The advent of large reasoning models, such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1, has significantly advanced complex reasoning tasks. However, their capabilities in multilingual complex reasoning remain underexplored, with existing efforts largely focused on simpler tasks like MGSM. To address this gap, we introduce MMATH, a benchmark for multilingual complex reasoning spanning 374 high-quality math problems across 10 typologically diverse languages. Using MMATH, we observe that even advanced models like DeepSeek R1 exhibit substantial performance disparities across languages and suffer from a critical off-target issue-generating responses in unintended languages. To address this, we explore strategies including prompting and training, demonstrating that reasoning in English and answering in target languages can simultaneously enhance performance and preserve target-language consistency. Our findings offer new insights and practical strategies for advancing the multilingual reasoning capabilities of large language models. Our code and data could be found at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/MMATH.

How Does Sequence Modeling Architecture Influence Base Capabilities of Pre-trained Language Models? Exploring Key Architecture Design Principles to Avoid Base Capabilities Degradation

Pre-trained language models represented by the Transformer have been proven to possess strong base capabilities, and the representative self-attention mechanism in the Transformer has become a classic in sequence modeling architectures. Different from the work of proposing sequence modeling architecture to improve the efficiency of attention mechanism, this work focuses on the impact of sequence modeling architectures on base capabilities. Specifically, our concern is: How exactly do sequence modeling architectures affect the base capabilities of pre-trained language models? In this work, we first point out that the mixed domain pre-training setting commonly adopted in existing architecture design works fails to adequately reveal the differences in base capabilities among various architectures. To address this, we propose a limited domain pre-training setting with out-of-distribution testing, which successfully uncovers significant differences in base capabilities among architectures at an early stage. Next, we analyze the base capabilities of stateful sequence modeling architectures, and find that they exhibit significant degradation in base capabilities compared to the Transformer. Then, through a series of architecture component analysis, we summarize a key architecture design principle: A sequence modeling architecture need possess full-sequence arbitrary selection capability to avoid degradation in base capabilities. Finally, we empirically validate this principle using an extremely simple Top-1 element selection architecture and further generalize it to a more practical Top-1 chunk selection architecture. Experimental results demonstrate our proposed sequence modeling architecture design principle and suggest that our work can serve as a valuable reference for future architecture improvements and novel designs.