arXiv subjects

Qiming Bao

Publications and source records attributed to Qiming Bao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Benchmark Radar: A Living Database and Search Engine for AI Benchmarks and Evaluation

Benchmark researchers and developers of large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems need to find relevant evaluations, locate their benchmark datasets and code, and understand the settings behind reported scores. We present Benchmark Radar, a living database and search engine for retrieval and discovery of AI benchmarks, covering LLM evaluation, agentic and tool-use benchmarks, coding, reasoning, safety, and domain-specific evaluations. The system combines daily discovery of benchmark papers, repositories, datasets, and releases with a searchable benchmark catalog, mentions in model cards and technical reports, and score histories. It retains source identities and citations so readers can inspect candidate benchmarks and their evaluation evidence. Daily discovery draws on 37 sources: 13 direct connectors and 24 first-party research and engineering feeds. The catalog contains 1,283 source records drawn from 4 benchmark catalogs and 12,916 numeric observations on 790 records. We describe collection and retrieval, audit the full catalog, and examine benchmark saturation, adoption trends, and the limits of score comparisons. A worked example walks through a complete prior-art search, showing how to query the catalog and inspect benchmark evidence when designing a new evaluation. We release the web dashboard with a benchmark leaderboard, a Pareto frontier view of score against measured use, saturation and trend views, daily feeds, downloadable evidence, a command-line interface (CLI) for offline queries, and reproducible analysis.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

End-to-end Particle Reconstruction with Transformers in High-Granularity Calorimeters

The High-Luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) will drastically increase the number of simultaneously interacting particles, posing a severe challenge to current particle reconstruction methods. While next-generation highly granular calorimeters offer unprecedented 3D measurement capabilities, reconstructing particles from heavily overlapping energy showers remains computationally difficult. This study investigates how raw detector hits can be accurately reconstructed using end-to-end transformer based methods on a simulated calorimeter dataset. We evaluate and compare three distinct machine learning frameworks, focusing on two generative architectures: diffusion and flow matching as well as query-based set prediction. Our results demonstrate that these advanced methods provide highly effective and scalable alternatives for resolving complex overlapping particle showers in conditions encountered in future calorimeters.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2026

Surrogate Substitution Preserves PHI Detectability: A Multi-Detector Equivalence Study

Structure-preserving de-identification replaces each detected identifier with a realistic same-type surrogate ("Anna S." -> "Maria S.") rather than a tag such as [NAME]. If downstream PHI detectors no longer recognise surrogates, hiding-in-plain-sight protection and second-pass safety nets weaken. We ask: on the spans a de-identifier actually replaced, do detectors find the surrogate as often as the original value? We call this detectability preservation and treat it as a proxy, not a full measure of utility. Our paired protocol (i) scores detectability only on replaced spans, separately from coverage; (ii) runs an identical heterogeneous detector panel on original and transformed text; and (iii) bounds the paired change with document-level cluster-bootstrap equivalence testing and posterior probabilities instead of significance tests. For one commercial transform on 7 clinical and general-PII benchmarks in 7 languages (1,750 documents, 5,333 replaced spans, 11 detectors), masked-span recall moves from 75.8% to 74.6% (90% CI of the change [-1.62, -0.82] points; posterior probability > 0.99 of lying within +/-2 points). The change reaches 2-3 points on dense Spanish and Dutch text, and replaced spans are easier to detect than unreplaced ones (+16.6 points), so the result describes the replaced population only. Coverage is a separate, weaker axis (48% of gold PHI on MEDDOCAN). On financial, legal and enterprise text (750 documents, 10 detectors) the pooled result replicates (72.4% -> 72.8%), but rule-based and fine-tuned detectors lose 2-4 points on finance, and the transform edits substantial non-PII text. Redaction and Faker baselines give reference points. We release per-span predictions and analysis code.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Not What You Meant: Can LLMs Follow a Specified Negation Semantics?

Negation does not carry a uniform interpretation across domains. In legal, regulatory, and medical reasoning, the intended interpretation depends on the reading in force -- open- versus closed-world, two- versus three-valued, and credulous versus skeptical. We study which reading of negation large language models adopt by default and whether they can override that preference when a different reading is explicitly specified. To this end, we introduce NAFBench, a procedural generator of solver-certified instances spanning four semantic viewpoints: SLDNF, well-founded semantics (WFS), and credulous and skeptical reasoning under stable-model semantics. The generator emits ground normal logic programs with controlled depth, width, and cycle structure. Each program is solved under all four viewpoints using SWI-Prolog, a well-founded semantics solver, and clingo, yielding up to four divergent labels. The programs are then verbalized into natural language under multiple framings and rule orderings that leave the answer invariant. The results expose a consistent gap. Across open-source models, following a specified negation semantics remains unsolved: the strongest models score 59--74% across the four semantic viewpoints, while the weakest score 31--67%. All models are order-sensitive on more than half of logically identical rule shufflings, while the two weaker models frequently overcommit on well-founded "undefined." Two frontier models reach 100% on the main fixed-complexity evaluation set, and a third, o4-mini, is near-perfect, falling only to 81% on well-founded "undefined." Delegating reasoning to a solver, fine-tuning on certified traces, or forcing an explicit three-valued verdict each partly closes the gap.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SciTrue: Reliable Scientific Claim Validation with Frontier and Open Language Models at the NTCIR SciClaimEval Task

We describe the SciTrue team's participation in both subtasks of the NTCIR-19 SciClaimEval task~\cite{sciclaimeval}, which asks systems to verify scientific claims against the tables and figures of a paper. Rather than tuning a single model, we benchmark eleven frontier and open multimodal models under one honest, per-sample protocol and combine them with light, transparent post-processing. On the official, blind test leaderboard (Section~\ref{sec:results}), SciTrue placed first by a clear margin in three of the four evidence-category/subtask combinations, and tied for first on the primary metric in the fourth. Three findings explain the result. First, strong instruction-tuned models are already competitive: Claude Opus~4.8 and Gemma-4-31B each exceed the strongest public baseline (o4-mini), and GPT-5.5 and Claude Fable~5 lead both subtasks (97.7 on Subtask~2). Second, the task's pairing structure is the largest lever: a \emph{leak-free pair prior} that recovers the Supported/Refuted pairing from the claim text alone (a visible field) and assigns Supported to the higher-confidence evidence raises Subtask-1 pair-accuracy from 72.2 to 93.5, far more than any model swap or ensemble weighting. Third, a case-by-case audit finds that most residual errors are visually-undetectable label-mapping swaps or dataset label noise, so measured accuracy understates the true ability and the fixable-by-modeling headroom is small. Controlled fine-tuning, distillation, and agentic consistency-checking support the same conclusions, and we document throughout a measurement leak---label information reaching a system through the packaging of the data rather than its content---in which the released file ordering encodes the label, including one instance that briefly misled our own pipeline.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Conflict-Aware Fusion: Mitigating Logic Inertia in Large Language Models via Structured Cognitive Priors

Large language models (LLMs) achieve high accuracy on many reasoning benchmarks but remain brittle under structural perturbations of rule-based systems. We introduce a diagnostic framework with four stress tests -- redundant vs. essential rule deletion, contradictory-rule injection, logic-preserving rewrites, and multi-law stacking -- and use it to expose Logic Inertia: the tendency of generative LLMs (Qwen2/3, TinyLlama, GPT-4o, Gemma-3-4B-IT) and the encoder-only BERT baseline to persist along learned deductive trajectories under inconsistent premises. The collapse is sharp: untreated baselines fall from accuracy 1.00 on the base task to 0.00 on contradiction injection (instance-level exact match), and GPT-4o resolves only 56.0% of contradiction cases. We propose Conflict-Aware Fusion, a four-stage training pipeline that enforces verification-before-deduction as a learned structural prior: (i) SFT establishes the verification preamble; (ii) DPO sharpens the halt-on-contradiction decision boundary; (iii) Logical Invariance REgularisation (LIRE) penalises divergence between logically equivalent rule formulations via symmetric KL; (iv) Reinforcement Learning from Verification Feedback (RLVF) uses a symbolic forward-chaining engine as a deterministic oracle reward, jointly optimising invariance and sensitivity. The pipeline saturates all four primary stress tests for both 1.5B and 8B backbones. We further validate a Phase 2 extension that replaces the propositional oracle with a Lean 4 kernel, attaining 99.0% kernel agreement on the 105 classically-derivable (T) questions within a stratified 187-question Lean-translated sample (overall 71.7% across both polarities), providing a sound upgrade path to formally verified RL training. Code and benchmark: https://github.com/14H034160212/lemo

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

RLearner-LLM: Balancing Logical Grounding and Fluency in Large Language Models via Hybrid Direct Preference Optimization

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), the efficient alternative to PPO-based RLHF, falls short on knowledge-intensive generation: standard preference signals from human annotators or LLM judges exhibit a systematic verbosity bias that rewards fluency over logical correctness. This blindspot leaves a logical alignment gap -- SFT models reach NLI entailment of only 0.05-0.22 despite producing fluent text. We propose RLearner-LLM with Hybrid-DPO: an automated preference pipeline that fuses a DeBERTa-v3 NLI signal with a verifier LLM score, removing human annotation while overcoming the "alignment tax" of single-signal optimization. Evaluated across five academic domains (Biology, Medicine, Law) with three base architectures (LLaMA-2-13B, Qwen3-8B, Gemma 4 E4B-it), RLearner-LLM yields up to 6x NLI improvement over SFT, with NLI gains in 11 of 15 cells and consistent answer-coverage gains. On Gemma 4 E4B-it (4.5B effective params), Hybrid-DPO lifts NLI in four of five domains (+11.9% to +2.4x) with faster inference across all five, scaling down to compact base models without losing the alignment-tax mitigation. Our Qwen3-8B RLearner-LLM wins 95% of pairwise comparisons against its own SFT baseline; GPT-4o-mini in turn wins 95% against our concise output -- alongside the 69% win the same judge gives a verbose SFT over our DPO model, this replicates verbosity bias on a frontier comparator and motivates logic-aware metrics (NLI, ACR) over LLM-as-a-judge for knowledge-intensive generation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Multi-Step Deductive Reasoning Over Natural Language: An Empirical Study on Out-of-Distribution Generalisation

Combining deep learning with symbolic logic reasoning aims to capitalize on the success of both fields and is drawing increasing attention. Inspired by DeepLogic, an end-to-end model trained to perform inference on logic programs, we introduce IMA-GloVe-GA, an iterative neural inference network for multi-step reasoning expressed in natural language. In our model, reasoning is performed using an iterative memory neural network based on RNN with a gated attention mechanism. We evaluate IMA-GloVe-GA on three datasets: PARARULES, CONCEPTRULES V1 and CONCEPTRULES V2. Experimental results show DeepLogic with gated attention can achieve higher test accuracy than DeepLogic and other RNN baseline models. Our model achieves better out-of-distribution generalisation than RoBERTa-Large when the rules have been shuffled. Furthermore, to address the issue of unbalanced distribution of reasoning depths in the current multi-step reasoning datasets, we develop PARARULE-Plus, a large dataset with more examples that require deeper reasoning steps. Experimental results show that the addition of PARARULE-Plus can increase the model's performance on examples requiring deeper reasoning depths. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/Strong-AI-Lab/Multi-Step-Deductive-Reasoning-Over-Natural-Language.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Abstract Meaning Representation-Based Logic-Driven Data Augmentation for Logical Reasoning

Combining large language models with logical reasoning enhances their capacity to address problems in a robust and reliable manner. Nevertheless, the intricate nature of logical reasoning poses challenges when gathering reliable data from the web to build comprehensive training datasets, subsequently affecting performance on downstream tasks. To address this, we introduce a novel logic-driven data augmentation approach, AMR-LDA. AMR-LDA converts the original text into an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph, a structured semantic representation that encapsulates the logical structure of the sentence, upon which operations are performed to generate logically modified AMR graphs. The modified AMR graphs are subsequently converted back into text to create augmented data. Notably, our methodology is architecture-agnostic and enhances both generative large language models, such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, through prompt augmentation, and discriminative large language models through contrastive learning with logic-driven data augmentation. Empirical evidence underscores the efficacy of our proposed method with improvement in performance across seven downstream tasks, such as reading comprehension requiring logical reasoning, textual entailment, and natural language inference. Furthermore, our method leads on the ReClor leaderboard at https://eval.ai/web/challenges/challenge-page/503/leaderboard/1347. The source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Strong-AI-Lab/Logical-Equivalence-driven-AMR-Data-Augmentation-for-Representation-Learning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Exploring Iterative Enhancement for Improving Learnersourced Multiple-Choice Question Explanations with Large Language Models

Large language models exhibit superior capabilities in processing and understanding language, yet their applications in educational contexts remain underexplored. Learnersourcing enhances learning by engaging students in creating their own educational content. When learnersourcing multiple-choice questions, creating explanations for the solution of a question is a crucial step; it helps other students understand the solution and promotes a deeper understanding of related concepts. However, it is often difficult for students to craft effective solution explanations, due to limited subject understanding. To help scaffold the task of automated explanation generation, we present and evaluate a framework called "ILearner-LLM", that iteratively enhances the generated explanations for the given questions with large language models. Comprising an explanation generation model and an explanation evaluation model, the framework generates high-quality student-aligned explanations by iteratively feeding the quality rating score from the evaluation model back into the instruction prompt of the explanation generation model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our ILearner-LLM on LLaMA2-13B and GPT-4 to generate higher quality explanations that are closer to those written by students on five PeerWise datasets. Our findings represent a promising path to enrich the learnersourcing experience for students and to enhance the capabilities of large language models for educational applications.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Assessing and Enhancing the Robustness of Large Language Models with Task Structure Variations for Logical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs), such as LLaMA, Alpaca, Vicuna, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, have advanced the performance of AI systems on various natural language processing tasks to human-like levels. However, their generalisation and robustness when performing logical reasoning has not been sufficiently assessed. To comprehensively evaluate this ability, we develop three new logical reasoning datasets named "ReClor-plus", "LogiQA-plus" and "LogiQAv2-plus" that extend standard logical reasoning datasets to evaluate the robustness of the LLM's reasoning. For each, we create three subsets: the first with randomly shuffled options, the second with the correct choices replaced by "none of the other options is correct", and the third with a combination of shuffling and substitution. Experiments on these datasets show that these simple augmentations greatly hinder the models' performance. Despite their high performance on the original publicly available datasets, we find that all models perform poorly on these newly constructed datasets. We also demonstrate that introducing task variations into the training set can markedly improve the model's performance on both the original and our developed datasets. Finally, we show that applying logic-driven data augmentation for fine-tuning and prompting can enhance generalisation in both discriminative and generative models, offering a path to improving their robustness for tasks involving logical reasoning. Source code and data are made publicly available at https://github.com/Strong-AI-Lab/Logical-and-abstract-reasoning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

CoRA: Optimizing Low-Rank Adaptation with Common Subspace of Large Language Models

In fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), conserving computational resources while maintaining effectiveness and improving outcomes within the same computational constraints is crucial. The Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) strategy balances efficiency and performance in fine-tuning large models by reducing the number of trainable parameters and computational costs. However, current advancements in LoRA might be focused on its fine-tuning methodologies, with not as much exploration as might be expected into further compression of LoRA. Since most of LoRA's parameters might still be superfluous, this may lead to unnecessary wastage of computational resources. In this paper, we propose \textbf{CoRA}: leveraging shared knowledge to optimize LoRA training by substituting its matrix $B$ with a common subspace from large models. Our two-fold method includes (1) Freezing the substitute matrix $B$ to halve parameters while training matrix $A$ for specific tasks and (2) Using the substitute matrix $B$ as an enhanced initial state for the original matrix $B$, achieving improved results with the same parameters. Our experiments show that the first approach achieves the same efficacy as the original LoRA fine-tuning while being more efficient than halving parameters. At the same time, the second approach has some improvements compared to LoRA's original fine-tuning performance. They generally attest to the effectiveness of our work.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

ChatLogic: Integrating Logic Programming with Large Language Models for Multi-Step Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various generative tasks. However, their performance is often hampered by limitations in accessing and leveraging long-term memory, leading to specific vulnerabilities and biases, especially during long interactions. This paper introduces ChatLogic, an innovative framework specifically targeted at LLM reasoning tasks that can enhance the performance of LLMs in multi-step deductive reasoning tasks by integrating logic programming. In ChatLogic, the language model plays a central role, acting as a controller and participating in every system operation stage. We propose a novel method of converting logic problems into symbolic integration with an inference engine. This approach leverages large language models' situational understanding and imitation skills and uses symbolic memory to enhance multi-step deductive reasoning capabilities. Our results show that the ChatLogic framework significantly improves the multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs. The source code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/Strong-AI-Lab/ChatLogic}

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Large Language Models Are Not Strong Abstract Reasoners

Large Language Models have shown tremendous performance on a large variety of natural language processing tasks, ranging from text comprehension to common sense reasoning. However, the mechanisms responsible for this success remain opaque, and it is unclear whether LLMs can achieve human-like cognitive capabilities or whether these models are still fundamentally circumscribed. Abstract reasoning is a fundamental task for cognition, consisting of finding and applying a general pattern from few data. Evaluating deep neural architectures on this task could give insight into their potential limitations regarding reasoning and their broad generalisation abilities, yet this is currently an under-explored area. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark for evaluating language models beyond memorization on abstract reasoning tasks. We perform extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art LLMs, showing that they currently achieve very limited performance in contrast with other natural language tasks, even when applying techniques that have been shown to improve performance on other NLP tasks. We argue that guiding LLM generation to follow causal paths could help improve the generalisation and reasoning abilities of LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Input-length-shortening and text generation via attention values

Identifying words that impact a task's performance more than others is a challenge in natural language processing. Transformers models have recently addressed this issue by incorporating an attention mechanism that assigns greater attention (i.e., relevance) scores to some words than others. Because of the attention mechanism's high computational cost, transformer models usually have an input-length limitation caused by hardware constraints. This limitation applies to many transformers, including the well-known bidirectional encoder representations of the transformer (BERT) model. In this paper, we examined BERT's attention assignment mechanism, focusing on two questions: (1) How can attention be employed to reduce input length? (2) How can attention be used as a control mechanism for conditional text generation? We investigated these questions in the context of a text classification task. We discovered that BERT's early layers assign more critical attention scores for text classification tasks compared to later layers. We demonstrated that the first layer's attention sums could be used to filter tokens in a given sequence, considerably decreasing the input length while maintaining good test accuracy. We also applied filtering, which uses a compute-efficient semantic similarities algorithm, and discovered that retaining approximately 6\% of the original sequence is sufficient to obtain 86.5\% accuracy. Finally, we showed that we could generate data in a stable manner and indistinguishable from the original one by only using a small percentage (10\%) of the tokens with high attention scores according to BERT's first layer.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

AbductionRules: Training Transformers to Explain Unexpected Inputs

Transformers have recently been shown to be capable of reliably performing logical reasoning over facts and rules expressed in natural language, but abductive reasoning - inference to the best explanation of an unexpected observation - has been underexplored despite significant applications to scientific discovery, common-sense reasoning, and model interpretability. We present AbductionRules, a group of natural language datasets designed to train and test generalisable abduction over natural-language knowledge bases. We use these datasets to finetune pretrained Transformers and discuss their performance, finding that our models learned generalisable abductive techniques but also learned to exploit the structure of our data. Finally, we discuss the viability of this approach to abductive reasoning and ways in which it may be improved in future work.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Relating Blindsight and AI: A Review

Processes occurring in brains, a.k.a. biological neural networks, can and have been modeled within artificial neural network architectures. Due to this, we have conducted a review of research on the phenomenon of blindsight in an attempt to generate ideas for artificial intelligence models. Blindsight can be considered as a diminished form of visual experience. If we assume that artificial networks have no form of visual experience, then deficits caused by blindsight give us insights into the processes occurring within visual experience that we can incorporate into artificial neural networks. This article has been structured into three parts. Section 2 is a review of blindsight research, looking specifically at the errors occurring during this condition compared to normal vision. Section 3 identifies overall patterns from Section 2 to generate insights for computational models of vision. Section 4 demonstrates the utility of examining biological research to inform artificial intelligence research by examining computation models of visual attention relevant to one of the insights generated in Section 3. The research covered in Section 4 shows that incorporating one of our insights into computational vision does benefit those models. Future research will be required to determine whether our other insights are as valuable.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2021

DeepQR: Neural-based Quality Ratings for Learnersourced Multiple-Choice Questions

Automated question quality rating (AQQR) aims to evaluate question quality through computational means, thereby addressing emerging challenges in online learnersourced question repositories. Existing methods for AQQR rely solely on explicitly-defined criteria such as readability and word count, while not fully utilising the power of state-of-the-art deep-learning techniques. We propose DeepQR, a novel neural-network model for AQQR that is trained using multiple-choice-question (MCQ) datasets collected from PeerWise, a widely-used learnersourcing platform. Along with designing DeepQR, we investigate models based on explicitly-defined features, or semantic features, or both. We also introduce a self-attention mechanism to capture semantic correlations between MCQ components, and a contrastive-learning approach to acquire question representations using quality ratings. Extensive experiments on datasets collected from eight university-level courses illustrate that DeepQR has superior performance over six comparative models.

cs.CL↗