PowerAttention: Exponentially Scaling of Receptive Fields for Effective Sparse Attention

Large Language Models (LLMs) face efficiency bottlenecks due to the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism when processing long contexts. Sparse attention methods offer a promising solution, but existing approaches often suffer from incomplete effective context and/or require complex implementation of pipeline. We present a comprehensive analysis of sparse attention for autoregressive LLMs from the respective of receptive field, recognize the suboptimal nature of existing methods for expanding the receptive field, and introduce PowerAttention, a novel sparse attention design that facilitates effective and complete context extension through the theoretical analysis. PowerAttention achieves exponential receptive field growth in $d$-layer LLMs, allowing each output token to attend to $2^d$ tokens, ensuring completeness and continuity of the receptive field. Experiments demonstrate that PowerAttention outperforms existing static sparse attention methods by $5\sim 40\%$, especially on tasks demanding long-range dependencies like Passkey Retrieval and RULER, while maintaining a comparable time complexity to sliding window attention. Efficiency evaluations further highlight PowerAttention's superior speedup in both prefilling and decoding phases compared with dynamic sparse attentions and full attention ($3.0\times$ faster on 128K context), making it a highly effective and user-friendly solution for processing long sequences in LLMs.

MCiteBench: A Benchmark for Multimodal Citation Text Generation in MLLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced in integrating diverse modalities but frequently suffer from hallucination. A promising solution to mitigate this issue is to generate text with citations, providing a transparent chain for verification. However, existing work primarily focuses on generating citations for text-only content, overlooking the challenges and opportunities of multimodal contexts. To address this gap, we introduce MCiteBench, the first benchmark designed to evaluate and analyze the multimodal citation text generation ability of MLLMs. Our benchmark comprises data derived from academic papers and review-rebuttal interactions, featuring diverse information sources and multimodal content. We comprehensively evaluate models from multiple dimensions, including citation quality, source reliability, and answer accuracy. Through extensive experiments, we observe that MLLMs struggle with multimodal citation text generation. We also conduct deep analyses of models' performance, revealing that the bottleneck lies in attributing the correct sources rather than understanding the multimodal content.

Order Doesn't Matter, But Reasoning Does: Training LLMs with Order-Centric Augmentation

Logical reasoning is essential for large language models (LLMs) to ensure accurate and coherent inference. However, LLMs struggle with reasoning order variations and fail to generalize across logically equivalent transformations. LLMs often rely on fixed sequential patterns rather than true logical understanding. To address this issue, we introduce an order-centric data augmentation framework based on commutativity in logical reasoning. We first randomly shuffle independent premises to introduce condition order augmentation. For reasoning steps, we construct a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to model dependencies between steps, which allows us to identify valid reorderings of steps while preserving logical correctness. By leveraging order-centric augmentations, models can develop a more flexible and generalized reasoning process. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments across multiple logical reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating that our method significantly enhances LLMs' reasoning performance and adaptability to diverse logical structures. We release our codes and augmented data in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Order-Centric-Data-Augmentation-822C/.

Reward Shaping to Mitigate Reward Hacking in RLHF

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF is susceptible to reward hacking, where the agent exploits flaws in the reward function rather than learning the intended behavior, thus degrading alignment. While reward shaping helps stabilize RLHF and partially mitigate reward hacking, a systematic investigation into shaping techniques and their underlying principles remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive study of the prevalent reward shaping methods. Our analysis suggests three key design principles: (1) RL reward is ideally bounded, (2) RL benefits from rapid initial growth followed by gradual convergence, and (3) RL reward is best formulated as a function of centered reward. Guided by these insights, we propose Preference As Reward (PAR), a novel approach that leverages the latent preferences embedded within the reward model itself as the signal for reinforcement learning. We evaluated PAR on two base models, Gemma2-2B and Llama3-8B, using two datasets, Ultrafeedback-Binarized and HH-RLHF. Experimental results demonstrate PAR's superior performance over other reward shaping methods. On the AlpacaEval 2.0 benchmark, PAR achieves a win rate at least 5 percentage points higher than competing approaches. Furthermore, PAR exhibits remarkable data efficiency, requiring only a single reference reward for optimal performance, and maintains robustness against reward hacking even after two full epochs of training. Code is available at https://github.com/PorUna-byte/PAR.

Order Matters: Investigate the Position Bias in Multi-constraint Instruction Following

Real-world instructions with multiple constraints pose a significant challenge to existing large language models (LLMs). An observation is that the LLMs exhibit dramatic performance fluctuation when disturbing the order of the incorporated constraints. Yet, none of the existing works has systematically investigated this position bias problem in the field of multi-constraint instruction following. To bridge this gap, we design a probing task where we quantitatively measure the difficulty distribution of the constraints by a novel Difficulty Distribution Index (CDDI). Through the experimental results, we find that LLMs are more performant when presented with the constraints in a ``hard-to-easy'' order. This preference can be generalized to LLMs with different architecture or different sizes of parameters. Additionally, we conduct an explanation study, providing an intuitive insight into the correlation between the LLM's attention and constraint orders. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/meowpass/PBIF.

CoSER: Coordinating LLM-Based Persona Simulation of Established Roles

Role-playing language agents (RPLAs) have emerged as promising applications of large language models (LLMs). However, simulating established characters presents a challenging task for RPLAs, due to the lack of authentic character datasets and nuanced evaluation methods using such data. In this paper, we present CoSER, a collection of a high-quality dataset, open models, and an evaluation protocol towards effective RPLAs of established characters. The CoSER dataset covers 17,966 characters from 771 renowned books. It provides authentic dialogues with real-world intricacies, as well as diverse data types such as conversation setups, character experiences and internal thoughts. Drawing from acting methodology, we introduce given-circumstance acting for training and evaluating role-playing LLMs, where LLMs sequentially portray multiple characters in book scenes. Using our dataset, we develop CoSER 8B and CoSER 70B, i.e., advanced open role-playing LLMs built on LLaMA-3.1 models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the value of the CoSER dataset for RPLA training, evaluation and retrieval. Moreover, CoSER 70B exhibits state-of-the-art performance surpassing or matching GPT-4o on our evaluation and three existing benchmarks, i.e., achieving 75.80% and 93.47% accuracy on the InCharacter and LifeChoice benchmarks respectively.

AdaptiveLog: An Adaptive Log Analysis Framework with the Collaboration of Large and Small Language Model

Automated log analysis is crucial to ensure high availability and reliability of complex systems. The advent of LLMs in NLP has ushered in a new era of language model-driven automated log analysis, garnering significant interest. Within this field, two primary paradigms based on language models for log analysis have become prominent. Small Language Models (SLMs) follow the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, focusing on the specific log analysis task through fine-tuning on supervised datasets. On the other hand, LLMs following the in-context learning paradigm, analyze logs by providing a few examples in prompt contexts without updating parameters. Despite their respective strengths, we notice that SLMs are more cost-effective but less powerful, whereas LLMs with large parameters are highly powerful but expensive and inefficient. To trade-off between the performance and inference costs of both models in automated log analysis, this paper introduces an adaptive log analysis framework known as AdaptiveLog, which effectively reduces the costs associated with LLM while ensuring superior results. This framework collaborates an LLM and a small language model, strategically allocating the LLM to tackle complex logs while delegating simpler logs to the SLM. Specifically, to efficiently query the LLM, we propose an adaptive selection strategy based on the uncertainty estimation of the SLM, where the LLM is invoked only when the SLM is uncertain. In addition, to enhance the reasoning ability of the LLM in log analysis tasks, we propose a novel prompt strategy by retrieving similar error-prone cases as the reference, enabling the model to leverage past error experiences and learn solutions from these cases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdaptiveLog achieves state-of-the-art results across different tasks, elevating the overall accuracy of log analysis while maintaining cost efficiency.

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.