arXiv subjects

Priyanka Kargupta

Publications and source records attributed to Priyanka Kargupta.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Grounding Agent Memory in Contextual Intent

Deploying large language models in long-horizon, goal-oriented interactions remains challenging because similar entities and facts recur under different latent goals and constraints, causing memory systems to retrieve context-mismatched evidence. We propose STITCH (Structured Intent Tracking in Contextual History), an agentic memory system that indexes each trajectory step with a structured retrieval cue, contextual intent, and retrieves history by matching the current step's intent. Contextual intent provides compact signals that disambiguate repeated mentions and reduce interference: (1) the current latent goal defining a thematic segment, (2) the action type, and (3) the salient entity types anchoring which attributes matter. During inference, STITCH filters and prioritizes memory snippets by intent compatibility, suppressing semantically similar but context-incompatible history. For evaluation, we introduce CAME-Bench, a benchmark for context-aware retrieval in realistic, dynamic, goal-oriented trajectories. Across CAME-Bench and LongMemEval, STITCH achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the strongest baseline by 35.6%, with the largest gains as trajectory length increases. Our analysis shows that intent indexing substantially reduces retrieval noise, supporting intent-aware memory for robust long-horizon reasoning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

MultiSessionCollab: Learning User Preferences with Memory to Improve Long-Term Collaboration

As conversational agents accumulate experience collaborating with users, adapting to user preferences is essential for fostering long-term relationships and improving collaboration quality over time. We introduce MultiSessionCollab, a benchmark that evaluates how well agents can learn user preferences and leverage them to improve collaboration quality throughout multiple sessions. To develop agents that succeed in this setting, we present long-term collaborative agents equipped with a memory that is specifically designed to learn user preferences across sessions and improve interactions. Moreover, we demonstrate that learning signals can be derived from user simulator behavior in MultiSessionCollab to train agents to generate more comprehensive reflections and update their memory more effectively. Extensive experiments show that equipping agents with our memory improves collaboration over time, yielding higher task success rates, more efficient interactions, and reduced user effort. Finally, we conduct a human user study that demonstrates that memory helps improve user experience in real-world settings.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Sparking Scientific Creativity via LLM-Driven Interdisciplinary Inspiration

Despite interdisciplinary research leading to larger and longer-term impact, most work remains confined to single-domain academic silos. Recent AI-based approaches to scientific discovery show promise for interdisciplinary research, but many prioritize rapidly designing experiments and solutions, bypassing the exploratory, collaborative reasoning processes that drive creative interdisciplinary breakthroughs. As a result, prior efforts largely prioritize automating scientific discovery rather than augmenting the reasoning processes that underlie scientific disruption. We present Idea-Catalyst, a novel framework that systematically identifies interdisciplinary insights to support creative reasoning in both humans and large language models. Starting from an abstract research goal, Idea-Catalyst is designed to assist the brainstorming stage, explicitly avoiding premature anchoring on specific solutions. The framework embodies key metacognitive features of interdisciplinary reasoning: (a) defining and assessing research goals, (b) awareness of a domain's opportunities and unresolved challenges, and (c) strategic exploration of interdisciplinary ideas based on impact potential. Concretely, Idea-Catalyst decomposes an abstract goal (e.g., improving human-AI collaboration) into core target-domain research questions that guide the analysis of progress and open challenges within that domain. These challenges are reformulated as domain-agnostic conceptual problems, enabling retrieval from external disciplines (e.g., Psychology, Sociology) that address analogous issues. By synthesizing and recontextualizing insights from these domains back into the target domain, Idea-Catalyst ranks source domains by their interdisciplinary potential. Empirically, this targeted integration improves average novelty by 21% and insightfulness by 16%, while remaining grounded in the original research problem.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Instructor-Aligned Knowledge Graphs for Personalized Learning

Mastering educational concepts requires understanding both their prerequisites (e.g., recursion before merge sort) and sub-concepts (e.g., merge sort as part of sorting algorithms). Capturing these dependencies is critical for identifying students' knowledge gaps and enabling targeted intervention for personalized learning. This is especially challenging in large-scale courses, where instructors cannot feasibly diagnose individual misunderstanding or determine which concepts need reinforcement. While knowledge graphs offer a natural representation for capturing these conceptual relationships at scale, existing approaches are either surface-level (focusing on course-level concepts like "Algorithms" or logistical relationships such as course enrollment), or disregard the rich pedagogical signals embedded in instructional materials. We propose InstructKG, a framework for automatically constructing instructor-aligned knowledge graphs that capture a course's intended learning progression. Given a course's lecture materials (slides, notes, etc.), InstructKG extracts significant concepts as nodes and infers learning dependencies as directed edges (e.g., "part-of" or "depends-on" relationships). The framework synergizes the rich temporal and semantic signals unique to educational materials (e.g., "recursion" is taught before "mergesort"; "recursion" is mentioned in the definition of "merge sort") with the generalizability of large language models. Through experiments on real-world, diverse lecture materials across multiple courses and human-based evaluation, we demonstrate that InstructKG captures rich, instructor-aligned learning progressions.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

NLP for Social Good: A Survey and Outlook of Challenges, Opportunities, and Responsible Deployment

Natural language processing (NLP) now shapes many aspects of our world, yet its potential for positive social impact is underexplored. This paper surveys work in ``NLP for Social Good" (NLP4SG) across nine domains relevant to global development and risk agendas, summarizing principal tasks and challenges. We analyze ACL Anthology trends, finding that inclusion and AI harms attract the most research, while domains such as poverty, peacebuilding, and environmental protection remain underexplored. Guided by our review, we outline opportunities for responsible and equitable NLP and conclude with a call for cross-disciplinary partnerships and human-centered approaches to ensure that future NLP technologies advance the public good.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Cognitive Foundations for Reasoning and Their Manifestation in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) solve complex problems yet fail on simpler variants, suggesting they achieve correct outputs through mechanisms fundamentally different from human reasoning. To understand this gap, we synthesize cognitive science research into a taxonomy of 28 cognitive elements spanning reasoning invariants, meta-cognitive controls, representations for organizing reasoning & knowledge, and transformation operations. We introduce a fine-grained evaluation framework and conduct the first large-scale empirical analysis of 192K traces from 18 models across text, vision, and audio, complemented by 54 human think-aloud traces, which we make publicly available. We find that models under-utilize cognitive elements correlated with success, narrowing to rigid sequential processing on ill-structured problems where diverse representations and meta-cognitive monitoring are critical. Human traces show more abstraction and conceptual processing, while models default to surface-level enumeration. Meta-analysis of 1.6K LLM reasoning papers reveals the research community concentrates on easily quantifiable elements (sequential organization: 55%, decomposition: 60%) but neglecting meta-cognitive controls (self-awareness: 16%) that correlate with success. Models possess behavioral repertoires associated with success but fail to deploy them spontaneously. Leveraging these patterns, we develop test-time reasoning guidance that automatically scaffold successful structures, improving performance by up to 66.7% on complex problems. By establishing a shared vocabulary between cognitive science and LLM research, our framework enables systematic diagnosis of reasoning failures and principled development of models that reason through robust cognitive mechanisms rather than spurious shortcuts, while providing tools to test theories of human cognition at scale.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Beyond True or False: Retrieval-Augmented Hierarchical Analysis of Nuanced Claims

Claims made by individuals or entities are oftentimes nuanced and cannot be clearly labeled as entirely "true" or "false" -- as is frequently the case with scientific and political claims. However, a claim (e.g., "vaccine A is better than vaccine B") can be dissected into its integral aspects and sub-aspects (e.g., efficacy, safety, distribution), which are individually easier to validate. This enables a more comprehensive, structured response that provides a well-rounded perspective on a given problem while also allowing the reader to prioritize specific angles of interest within the claim (e.g., safety towards children). Thus, we propose ClaimSpect, a retrieval-augmented generation-based framework for automatically constructing a hierarchy of aspects typically considered when addressing a claim and enriching them with corpus-specific perspectives. This structure hierarchically partitions an input corpus to retrieve relevant segments, which assist in discovering new sub-aspects. Moreover, these segments enable the discovery of varying perspectives towards an aspect of the claim (e.g., support, neutral, or oppose) and their respective prevalence (e.g., "how many biomedical papers believe vaccine A is more transportable than B?"). We apply ClaimSpect to a wide variety of real-world scientific and political claims featured in our constructed dataset, showcasing its robustness and accuracy in deconstructing a nuanced claim and representing perspectives within a corpus. Through real-world case studies and human evaluation, we validate its effectiveness over multiple baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

TaxoAdapt: Aligning LLM-Based Multidimensional Taxonomy Construction to Evolving Research Corpora

The rapid evolution of scientific fields introduces challenges in organizing and retrieving scientific literature. While expert-curated taxonomies have traditionally addressed this need, the process is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, recent automatic taxonomy construction methods either (1) over-rely on a specific corpus, sacrificing generalizability, or (2) depend heavily on the general knowledge of large language models (LLMs) contained within their pre-training datasets, often overlooking the dynamic nature of evolving scientific domains. Additionally, these approaches fail to account for the multi-faceted nature of scientific literature, where a single research paper may contribute to multiple dimensions (e.g., methodology, new tasks, evaluation metrics, benchmarks). To address these gaps, we propose TaxoAdapt, a framework that dynamically adapts an LLM-generated taxonomy to a given corpus across multiple dimensions. TaxoAdapt performs iterative hierarchical classification, expanding both the taxonomy width and depth based on corpus' topical distribution. We demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of computer science conferences over the years to showcase its ability to structure and capture the evolution of scientific fields. As a multidimensional method, TaxoAdapt generates taxonomies that are 26.51% more granularity-preserving and 50.41% more coherent than the most competitive baselines judged by LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Tree-of-Debate: Multi-Persona Debate Trees Elicit Critical Thinking for Scientific Comparative Analysis

With the exponential growth of research facilitated by modern technology and improved accessibility, scientific discoveries have become increasingly fragmented within and across fields. This makes it challenging to assess the significance, novelty, incremental findings, and equivalent ideas between related works, particularly those from different research communities. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong quantitative and qualitative reasoning abilities, and multi-agent LLM debates have shown promise in handling complex reasoning tasks by exploring diverse perspectives and reasoning paths. Inspired by this, we introduce Tree-of-Debate (ToD), a framework which converts scientific papers into LLM personas that debate their respective novelties. To emphasize structured, critical reasoning rather than focusing solely on outcomes, ToD dynamically constructs a debate tree, enabling fine-grained analysis of independent novelty arguments within scholarly articles. Through experiments on scientific literature across various domains, evaluated by expert researchers, we demonstrate that ToD generates informative arguments, effectively contrasts papers, and supports researchers in their literature review.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Synergizing Unsupervised Episode Detection with LLMs for Large-Scale News Events

State-of-the-art automatic event detection struggles with interpretability and adaptability to evolving large-scale key events -- unlike episodic structures, which excel in these areas. Often overlooked, episodes represent cohesive clusters of core entities performing actions at a specific time and location; a partially ordered sequence of episodes can represent a key event. This paper introduces a novel task, episode detection, which identifies episodes within a news corpus of key event articles. Detecting episodes poses unique challenges, as they lack explicit temporal or locational markers and cannot be merged using semantic similarity alone. While large language models (LLMs) can aid with these reasoning difficulties, they suffer with long contexts typical of news corpora. To address these challenges, we introduce EpiMine, an unsupervised framework that identifies a key event's candidate episodes by leveraging natural episodic partitions in articles, estimated through shifts in discriminative term combinations. These candidate episodes are more cohesive and representative of true episodes, synergizing with LLMs to better interpret and refine them into final episodes. We apply EpiMine to our three diverse, real-world event datasets annotated at the episode level, where it achieves a 59.2% average gain across all metrics compared to baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

An Empirical Study on Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Search Interleaved LLM Agents

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based search agents that adeptly combine reasoning with search engine use. While the use of RL for training search agents is promising, the optimal design of such agents remains not fully understood. In particular, key factors -- such as (1) reward formulation, (2) the choice and characteristics of the underlying LLM, and (3) the role of the search engine in the RL process -- require further investigation. In this work, we conduct comprehensive empirical studies to systematically investigate these and offer actionable insights. We highlight several key findings: format rewards are effective in improving final performance, whereas intermediate retrieval rewards have limited impact; the scale and initialization of the LLM (general-purpose vs. reasoning-specialized) significantly influence RL outcomes; and the choice of search engine plays a critical role in shaping RL training dynamics and the robustness of the trained agent during inference. These establish important guidelines for successfully building and deploying LLM-based search agents in real-world applications. Code is available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Search-R1.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Instruct, Not Assist: LLM-based Multi-Turn Planning and Hierarchical Questioning for Socratic Code Debugging

Socratic questioning is an effective teaching strategy, encouraging critical thinking and problem-solving. The conversational capabilities of large language models (LLMs) show great potential for providing scalable, real-time student guidance. However, current LLMs often give away solutions directly, making them ineffective instructors. We tackle this issue in the code debugging domain with TreeInstruct, an Instructor agent guided by a novel state space-based planning algorithm. TreeInstruct asks probing questions to help students independently identify and resolve errors. It estimates a student's conceptual and syntactical knowledge to dynamically construct a question tree based on their responses and current knowledge state, effectively addressing both independent and dependent mistakes concurrently in a multi-turn interaction setting. In addition to using an existing single-bug debugging benchmark, we construct a more challenging multi-bug dataset of 150 coding problems, incorrect solutions, and bug fixes -- all carefully constructed and annotated by experts. Extensive evaluation shows TreeInstruct's state-of-the-art performance on both datasets, proving it to be a more effective instructor than baselines. Furthermore, a real-world case study with five students of varying skill levels further demonstrates TreeInstruct's ability to guide students to debug their code efficiently with minimal turns and highly Socratic questioning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

MEGClass: Extremely Weakly Supervised Text Classification via Mutually-Enhancing Text Granularities

Text classification is essential for organizing unstructured text. Traditional methods rely on human annotations or, more recently, a set of class seed words for supervision, which can be costly, particularly for specialized or emerging domains. To address this, using class surface names alone as extremely weak supervision has been proposed. However, existing approaches treat different levels of text granularity (documents, sentences, or words) independently, disregarding inter-granularity class disagreements and the context identifiable exclusively through joint extraction. In order to tackle these issues, we introduce MEGClass, an extremely weakly-supervised text classification method that leverages Mutually-Enhancing Text Granularities. MEGClass utilizes coarse- and fine-grained context signals obtained by jointly considering a document's most class-indicative words and sentences. This approach enables the learning of a contextualized document representation that captures the most discriminative class indicators. By preserving the heterogeneity of potential classes, MEGClass can select the most informative class-indicative documents as iterative feedback to enhance the initial word-based class representations and ultimately fine-tune a pre-trained text classifier. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that MEGClass outperforms other weakly and extremely weakly supervised methods.

cs.CL↗