CDS: Data Synthesis Method Guided by Cognitive Diagnosis Theory

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding capabilities across various domains, but the increasing complexity of new challenges demands enhanced performance and adaptability. Traditional benchmarks, although comprehensive, often lack the granularity needed for detailed capability analysis. This study introduces the Cognitive Diagnostic Synthesis (CDS) method, which employs Cognitive Diagnosis Theory (CDT) for precise evaluation and targeted enhancement of LLMs. By decomposing complex tasks into discrete knowledge points, CDS accurately identifies and synthesizes data targeting model weaknesses, thereby enhancing the model's performance. This framework proposes a comprehensive pipeline driven by knowledge point evaluation, synthesis, data augmentation, and filtering, which significantly improves the model's mathematical and coding capabilities, achieving up to an 11.12% improvement in optimal scenarios.

Step-by-Step Mastery: Enhancing Soft Constraint Following Ability of Large Language Models

It is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions that involve multiple constraints. However, soft constraints are semantically related and difficult to verify through automated methods. These constraints remain a significant challenge for LLMs. To enhance the ability of LLMs to follow soft constraints, we initially design a pipeline to obtain high-quality outputs automatically. Additionally, to fully utilize the acquired data, we introduce a training paradigm based on curriculum learning. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of our methods in improving LLMs' soft constraint following ability and analyze the factors driving the improvements. The datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Rainier-rq/FollowSoftConstraints.

MultiLingPoT: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning with Multilingual Program Fine-tuning

Program-of-Thought (PoT), which aims to use programming language instead of natural language as an intermediate step in reasoning, is an important way for LLMs to solve mathematical problems. Since different programming languages excel in different areas, it is natural to use the most suitable language for solving specific problems. However, current PoT research only focuses on single language PoT, ignoring the differences between different programming languages. Therefore, this paper proposes an multilingual program reasoning method, MultiLingPoT. This method allows the model to answer questions using multiple programming languages by fine-tuning on multilingual data. Additionally, prior and posterior hybrid methods are used to help the model select the most suitable language for each problem. Our experimental results show that the training of MultiLingPoT improves each program's mathematical reasoning by about 2.5\%. Moreover, with proper mixing, the performance of MultiLingPoT can be further improved, achieving a 6\% increase compared to the single-language PoT with the data augmentation.Resources of this paper can be found at https://github.com/Nianqi-Li/MultiLingPoT.

Fast and Robust Contextual Node Representation Learning over Dynamic Graphs

Real-world graphs grow rapidly with edge and vertex insertions over time, motivating the problem of efficiently maintaining robust node representation over evolving graphs. Recent efficient GNNs are designed to decouple recursive message passing from the learning process, and favor Personalized PageRank (PPR) as the underlying feature propagation mechanism. However, most PPR-based GNNs are designed for static graphs, and efficient PPR maintenance remains as an open problem. Further, there is surprisingly little theoretical justification for the choice of PPR, despite its impressive empirical performance. In this paper, we are inspired by the recent PPR formulation as an explicit $\ell_1$-regularized optimization problem and propose a unified dynamic graph learning framework based on sparse node-wise attention. We also present a set of desired properties to justify the choice of PPR in STOA GNNs, and serves as the guideline for future node attention designs. Meanwhile, we take advantage of the PPR-equivalent optimization formulation and employ the proximal gradient method (ISTA) to improve the efficiency of PPR-based GNNs upto 6 times. Finally, we instantiate a simple-yet-effective model (\textsc{GoPPE}) with robust positional encodings by maximizing PPR previously used as attention. The model performs comparably to or better than the STOA baselines and greatly outperforms when the initial node attributes are noisy during graph evolution, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of \textsc{GoPPE}.

QUILL: Quotation Generation Enhancement of Large Language Models

While Large language models (LLMs) have become excellent writing assistants, they still struggle with quotation generation. This is because they either hallucinate when providing factual quotations or fail to provide quotes that exceed human expectations. To bridge the gap, we systematically study how to evaluate and improve LLMs' performance in quotation generation tasks. We first establish a holistic and automatic evaluation system for quotation generation task, which consists of five criteria each with corresponding automatic metric. To improve the LLMs' quotation generation abilities, we construct a bilingual knowledge base that is broad in scope and rich in dimensions, containing up to 32,022 quotes. Moreover, guided by our critiria, we further design a quotation-specific metric to rerank the retrieved quotations from the knowledge base. Extensive experiments show that our metrics strongly correlate with human preferences. Existing LLMs struggle to generate desired quotes, but our quotation knowledge base and reranking metric help narrow this gap. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/GraceXiaoo/QUILL.

Faster Local Solvers for Graph Diffusion Equations

Efficient computation of graph diffusion equations (GDEs), such as Personalized PageRank, Katz centrality, and the Heat kernel, is crucial for clustering, training neural networks, and many other graph-related problems. Standard iterative methods require accessing the whole graph per iteration, making them time-consuming for large-scale graphs. While existing local solvers approximate diffusion vectors through heuristic local updates, they often operate sequentially and are typically designed for specific diffusion types, limiting their applicability. Given that diffusion vectors are highly localizable, as measured by the participation ratio, this paper introduces a novel framework for approximately solving GDEs using a local diffusion process. This framework reveals the suboptimality of existing local solvers. Furthermore, our approach effectively localizes standard iterative solvers by designing simple and provably sublinear time algorithms. These new local solvers are highly parallelizable, making them well-suited for implementation on GPUs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in quickly obtaining approximate diffusion vectors, achieving up to a hundred-fold speed improvement, and its applicability to large-scale dynamic graphs. Our framework could also facilitate more efficient local message-passing mechanisms for GNNs.

Iterative Methods via Locally Evolving Set Process

Given the damping factor $\alpha$ and precision tolerance $\epsilon$, \citet{andersen2006local} introduced Approximate Personalized PageRank (APPR), the \textit{de facto local method} for approximating the PPR vector, with runtime bounded by $\Theta(1/(\alpha\epsilon))$ independent of the graph size. Recently, \citet{fountoulakis2022open} asked whether faster local algorithms could be developed using $\tilde{O}(1/(\sqrt{\alpha}\epsilon))$ operations. By noticing that APPR is a local variant of Gauss-Seidel, this paper explores the question of \textit{whether standard iterative solvers can be effectively localized}. We propose to use the \textit{locally evolving set process}, a novel framework to characterize the algorithm locality, and demonstrate that many standard solvers can be effectively localized. Let $\overline{\operatorname{vol}}{ (S_t)}$ and $\overline{\gamma}_{t}$ be the running average of volume and the residual ratio of active nodes $\textstyle S_{t}$ during the process. We show $\overline{\operatorname{vol}}{ (S_t)}/\overline{\gamma}_{t} \leq 1/\epsilon$ and prove APPR admits a new runtime bound $\tilde{O}(\overline{\operatorname{vol}}(S_t)/(\alpha\overline{\gamma}_{t}))$ mirroring the actual performance. Furthermore, when the geometric mean of residual reduction is $\Theta(\sqrt{\alpha})$, then there exists $c \in (0,2)$ such that the local Chebyshev method has runtime $\tilde{O}(\overline{\operatorname{vol}}(S_{t})/(\sqrt{\alpha}(2-c)))$ without the monotonicity assumption. Numerical results confirm the efficiency of this novel framework and show up to a hundredfold speedup over corresponding standard solvers on real-world graphs.

Think Thrice Before You Act: Progressive Thought Refinement in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that progressive refinement, rather than providing a single answer, results in more accurate and thoughtful outputs. However, existing methods often rely heavily on supervision signals to evaluate previous responses, making it difficult to assess output quality in more open-ended scenarios effectively. Additionally, these methods are typically designed for specific tasks, which limits their generalization to new domains. To address these limitations, we propose Progressive Thought Refinement (PTR), a framework that enables LLMs to refine their responses progressively. PTR operates in two phases: (1) Thought data construction stage: We propose a weak and strong model collaborative selection strategy to build a high-quality progressive refinement dataset to ensure logical consistency from thought to answers, and the answers are gradually refined in each round. (2) Thought-Mask Fine-Tuning Phase: We design a training structure to mask the "thought" and adjust loss weights to encourage LLMs to refine prior thought, teaching them to implicitly understand "how to improve" rather than "what is correct." Experimental results show that PTR significantly enhances LLM performance across ten diverse tasks (avg. from 49.6% to 53.5%) without task-specific fine-tuning. Notably, in more open-ended tasks, LLMs also demonstrate substantial improvements in the quality of responses beyond mere accuracy, suggesting that PTR truly teaches LLMs to self-improve over time.

Revealing the Barriers of Language Agents in Planning

Autonomous planning has been an ongoing pursuit since the inception of artificial intelligence. Based on curated problem solvers, early planning agents could deliver precise solutions for specific tasks but lacked generalization. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) and their powerful reasoning capabilities has reignited interest in autonomous planning by automatically generating reasonable solutions for given tasks. However, prior research and our experiments show that current language agents still lack human-level planning abilities. Even the state-of-the-art reasoning model, OpenAI o1, achieves only 15.6% on one of the complex real-world planning benchmarks. This highlights a critical question: What hinders language agents from achieving human-level planning? Although existing studies have highlighted weak performance in agent planning, the deeper underlying issues and the mechanisms and limitations of the strategies proposed to address them remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we apply the feature attribution study and identify two key factors that hinder agent planning: the limited role of constraints and the diminishing influence of questions. We also find that although current strategies help mitigate these challenges, they do not fully resolve them, indicating that agents still have a long way to go before reaching human-level intelligence.

Evaluating Semantic Variation in Text-to-Image Synthesis: A Causal Perspective

Accurate interpretation and visualization of human instructions are crucial for text-to-image (T2I) synthesis. However, current models struggle to capture semantic variations from word order changes, and existing evaluations, relying on indirect metrics like text-image similarity, fail to reliably assess these challenges. This often obscures poor performance on complex or uncommon linguistic patterns by the focus on frequent word combinations. To address these deficiencies, we propose a novel metric called SemVarEffect and a benchmark named SemVarBench, designed to evaluate the causality between semantic variations in inputs and outputs in T2I synthesis. Semantic variations are achieved through two types of linguistic permutations, while avoiding easily predictable literal variations. Experiments reveal that the CogView-3-Plus and Ideogram 2 performed the best, achieving a score of 0.2/1. Semantic variations in object relations are less understood than attributes, scoring 0.07/1 compared to 0.17-0.19/1. We found that cross-modal alignment in UNet or Transformers plays a crucial role in handling semantic variations, a factor previously overlooked by a focus on textual encoders. Our work establishes an effective evaluation framework that advances the T2I synthesis community's exploration of human instruction understanding.