arXiv subjects

Xuanjing Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Xuanjing Huang.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

ToolHop: A Query-Driven Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Hop Tool Use

Effective evaluation of multi-hop tool use is critical for analyzing the understanding, reasoning, and function-calling capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, progress has been hindered by a lack of reliable evaluation datasets. To address this, we present ToolHop, a dataset comprising 995 user queries and 3,912 associated tools, specifically designed for rigorous evaluation of multi-hop tool use. ToolHop ensures diverse queries, meaningful interdependencies, locally executable tools, detailed feedback, and verifiable answers through a novel query-driven data construction approach that includes tool creation, document refinement, and code generation. We evaluate 14 LLMs across five model families (i.e., LLaMA3.1, Qwen2.5, Gemini1.5, Claude3.5, and GPT), uncovering significant challenges in handling multi-hop tool-use scenarios. The leading model, GPT-4o, achieves an accuracy of 49.04%, underscoring substantial room for improvement. Further analysis reveals variations in tool-use strategies for various families, offering actionable insights to guide the development of more effective approaches. Code and data can be found in https://huggingface.co/datasets/bytedance-research/ToolHop.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

WorldPM: Scaling Human Preference Modeling

Motivated by scaling laws in language modeling that demonstrate how test loss scales as a power law with model and dataset sizes, we find that similar laws exist in preference modeling. We propose World Preference Modeling$ (WorldPM) to emphasize this scaling potential, where World Preference embodies a unified representation of human preferences. In this paper, we collect preference data from public forums covering diverse user communities, and conduct extensive training using 15M-scale data across models ranging from 1.5B to 72B parameters. We observe distinct patterns across different evaluation metrics: (1) Adversarial metrics (ability to identify deceptive features) consistently scale up with increased training data and base model size; (2) Objective metrics (objective knowledge with well-defined answers) show emergent behavior in larger language models, highlighting WorldPM's scalability potential; (3) Subjective metrics (subjective preferences from a limited number of humans or AI) do not demonstrate scaling trends. Further experiments validate the effectiveness of WorldPM as a foundation for preference fine-tuning. Through evaluations on 7 benchmarks with 20 subtasks, we find that WorldPM broadly improves the generalization performance across human preference datasets of varying sizes (7K, 100K and 800K samples), with performance gains exceeding 5% on many key subtasks. Integrating WorldPM into our internal RLHF pipeline, we observe significant improvements on both in-house and public evaluation sets, with notable gains of 4% to 8% in our in-house evaluations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

VLSBench: Unveiling Visual Leakage in Multimodal Safety

Safety concerns of Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have gradually become an important problem in various applications. Surprisingly, previous works indicate a counterintuitive phenomenon that using textual unlearning to align MLLMs achieves comparable safety performances with MLLMs aligned with image text pairs. To explain such a phenomenon, we discover a Visual Safety Information Leakage (VSIL) problem in existing multimodal safety benchmarks, i.e., the potentially risky content in the image has been revealed in the textual query. Thus, MLLMs can easily refuse these sensitive image-text pairs according to textual queries only, leading to unreliable cross-modality safety evaluation of MLLMs. We also conduct a further comparison experiment between textual alignment and multimodal alignment to highlight this drawback. To this end, we construct multimodal Visual Leakless Safety Bench (VLSBench) with 2.2k image-text pairs through an automated data pipeline. Experimental results indicate that VLSBench poses a significant challenge to both open-source and close-source MLLMs, e.g., LLaVA, Qwen2-VL and GPT-4o. Besides, we empirically compare textual and multimodal alignment methods on VLSBench and find that textual alignment is effective enough for multimodal safety scenarios with VSIL, while multimodal alignment is preferable for safety scenarios without VSIL. Code and data are released under https://github.com/AI45Lab/VLSBench

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

EcoLANG: Efficient and Effective Agent Communication Language Induction for Social Simulation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated an impressive ability to role-play humans and replicate complex social dynamics. While large-scale social simulations are gaining increasing attention, they still face significant challenges, particularly regarding high time and computation costs. Existing solutions, such as distributed mechanisms or hybrid agent-based model (ABM) integrations, either fail to address inference costs or compromise accuracy and generalizability. To this end, we propose EcoLANG: Efficient and Effective Agent Communication Language Induction for Social Simulation. EcoLANG operates in two stages: (1) language evolution, where we filter synonymous words and optimize sentence-level rules through natural selection, and (2) language utilization, where agents in social simulations communicate using the evolved language. Experimental results demonstrate that EcoLANG reduces token consumption by over 20%, enhancing efficiency without sacrificing simulation accuracy.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Toward Generalizable Evaluation in the LLM Era: A Survey Beyond Benchmarks

Large Language Models (LLMs) are advancing at an amazing speed and have become indispensable across academia, industry, and daily applications. To keep pace with the status quo, this survey probes the core challenges that the rise of LLMs poses for evaluation. We identify and analyze two pivotal transitions: (i) from task-specific to capability-based evaluation, which reorganizes benchmarks around core competencies such as knowledge, reasoning, instruction following, multi-modal understanding, and safety; and (ii) from manual to automated evaluation, encompassing dynamic dataset curation and "LLM-as-a-judge" scoring. Yet, even with these transitions, a crucial obstacle persists: the evaluation generalization issue. Bounded test sets cannot scale alongside models whose abilities grow seemingly without limit. We will dissect this issue, along with the core challenges of the above two transitions, from the perspectives of methods, datasets, evaluators, and metrics. Due to the fast evolving of this field, we will maintain a living GitHub repository (links are in each section) to crowd-source updates and corrections, and warmly invite contributors and collaborators.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Effective Length Extrapolation via Dimension-Wise Positional Embeddings Manipulation

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to process and generate coherent context when the number of input tokens exceeds the pre-trained length. Recent advancements in long-context extension have significantly expanded the context window of LLMs but require expensive overhead to train the large-scale models with longer context. In this work, we propose Dimension-Wise Positional Embeddings Manipulation (DPE), a training-free framework to extrapolate the context window of LLMs by diving into RoPE's different hidden dimensions. Instead of manipulating all dimensions equally, DPE detects the effective length for every dimension and finds the key dimensions for context extension. We reuse the original position indices with their embeddings from the pre-trained model and manipulate the key dimensions' position indices to their most effective lengths. In this way, DPE adjusts the pre-trained models with minimal modifications while ensuring that each dimension reaches its optimal state for extrapolation. DPE significantly surpasses well-known baselines such as YaRN and Self-Extend. DPE enables Llama3-8k 8B to support context windows of 128k tokens without continual training and integrates seamlessly with Flash Attention 2. In addition to its impressive extrapolation capability, DPE also dramatically improves the models' performance within training length, such as Llama3.1 70B, by over 18 points on popular long-context benchmarks RULER. When compared with commercial models, Llama 3.1 70B with DPE even achieves better performance than GPT-4-128K.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Boundaries: Learning a Universal Entity Taxonomy across Datasets and Languages for Open Named Entity Recognition

Open Named Entity Recognition (NER), which involves identifying arbitrary types of entities from arbitrary domains, remains challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies suggest that fine-tuning LLMs on extensive NER data can boost their performance. However, training directly on existing datasets neglects their inconsistent entity definitions and redundant data, limiting LLMs to dataset-specific learning and hindering out-of-domain adaptation. To address this, we present B2NERD, a compact dataset designed to guide LLMs' generalization in Open NER under a universal entity taxonomy. B2NERD is refined from 54 existing English and Chinese datasets using a two-step process. First, we detect inconsistent entity definitions across datasets and clarify them by distinguishable label names to construct a universal taxonomy of 400+ entity types. Second, we address redundancy using a data pruning strategy that selects fewer samples with greater category and semantic diversity. Comprehensive evaluation shows that B2NERD significantly enhances LLMs' Open NER capabilities. Our B2NER models, trained on B2NERD, outperform GPT-4 by 6.8-12.0 F1 points and surpass previous methods in 3 out-of-domain benchmarks across 15 datasets and 6 languages. The data, models, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/UmeanNever/B2NER.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

RMB: Comprehensively Benchmarking Reward Models in LLM Alignment

Reward models (RMs) guide the alignment of large language models (LLMs), steering them toward behaviors preferred by humans. Evaluating RMs is the key to better aligning LLMs. However, the current evaluation of RMs may not directly correspond to their alignment performance due to the limited distribution of evaluation data and evaluation methods that are not closely related to alignment objectives. To address these limitations, we propose RMB, a comprehensive RM benchmark that covers over 49 real-world scenarios and includes both pairwise and Best-of-N (BoN) evaluations to better reflect the effectiveness of RMs in guiding alignment optimization. We demonstrate a positive correlation between our benchmark and the downstream alignment task performance. Based on our benchmark, we conduct extensive analysis on the state-of-the-art RMs, revealing their generalization defects that were not discovered by previous benchmarks, and highlighting the potential of generative RMs. Furthermore, we delve into open questions in reward models, specifically examining the effectiveness of majority voting for the evaluation of reward models and analyzing the impact factors of generative RMs, including the influence of evaluation criteria and instructing methods. Our evaluation code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Zhou-Zoey/RMB-Reward-Model-Benchmark.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Activating Distributed Visual Region within LLMs for Efficient and Effective Vision-Language Training and Inference

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically learn visual capacity through visual instruction tuning, involving updates to both a projector and their LLM backbones. Inspired by the concept of a visual region in the human brain, we investigate the existence of an analogous \textit{visual region} within LLMs that functions as a cognitive core, and explore the potential of efficient training of LVLMs via selective layers tuning. Using Bunny-Llama-3-8B-V for detailed analysis and other three LVLMs for validation across diverse visual and textual tasks, we find that selectively updating 25\% of LLMs layers, when sparsely and uniformly distributed, can preserve nearly 99\% of visual performance and maintain or improve textual task results, while effectively reducing training time. Based on this targeted training approach, we further propose a novel visual region-based pruning paradigm, removing non-critical layers outside the visual region, which can achieve minimal performance loss. This study offers an effective and efficient strategy for LVLM training and inference by activating a layer-wise visual region within LLMs, which proves consistently effective across different models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks. However, the authenticity of the responses generated by MLLMs is often compromised by object hallucinations. We identify that a key cause of these hallucinations is the model's over-susceptibility to specific image frequency features in detecting objects. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Frequency Perturbations (MFP), a simple, cost-effective, and pluggable method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference, thereby mitigating hallucinations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures. Furthermore, as a training-time method, MFP can be combined with inference-time methods to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the CHAIR benchmark.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

DetectiveQA: Evaluating Long-Context Reasoning on Detective Novels

Recently, significant efforts have been devoted to enhancing the long-context capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in long-context reasoning. To facilitate this research, we propose \textbf{DetectiveQA}, a dataset specifically designed for narrative reasoning within long contexts. We leverage detective novels, averaging over 100k tokens, to create a dataset containing 1200 human-annotated questions in both Chinese and English, each paired with corresponding reference reasoning steps. Furthermore, we introduce a step-wise reasoning metric, which enhances the evaluation of LLMs' reasoning processes. We validate our approach and evaluate the mainstream LLMs, including GPT-4, Claude, and LLaMA, revealing persistent long-context reasoning challenges and demonstrating their evidence-retrieval challenges. Our findings offer valuable insights into the study of long-context reasoning and lay the base for more rigorous evaluations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

VoCoT: Unleashing Visually Grounded Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Multi-Modal Models

While large multi-modal models (LMMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, their effectiveness in handling complex tasks has been limited by the prevailing single-step reasoning paradigm. To this end, this paper proposes VoCoT, a multi-step Visually grounded object-centric Chain-of-Thought reasoning framework tailored for inference with LMMs. VoCoT is characterized by two key features: (1) object-centric reasoning paths that revolve around cross-modal shared object-level information, and (2) visually grounded representation of object concepts in a multi-modal interleaved and aligned manner, which effectively bridges the modality gap within LMMs during long-term generation. To adapt LMMs in reasoning with VoCoT, we further construct an instruction-tuning dataset. By combining VoCoT with the prevalent open-source LMM architectures, we develop a VoCoT-based model, VolCano. With only 7B parameters and limited input image resolution, VolCano demonstrates excellent performance across various scenarios. In benchmarks like CLEVR and EmbSpatial, which highly require complex reasoning capabilities, VolCano outperforms SOTA models, including powerful GPT-4V. Related code, data and models are released in https://github.com/RupertLuo/VoCoT.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Layer-Specific Scaling of Positional Encodings for Superior Long-Context Modeling

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress in handling long-context inputs, they still suffer from the ``lost-in-the-middle'' problem, where crucial information in the middle of the context is often underrepresented or lost. Our extensive experiments reveal that this issue may arise from the rapid long-term decay in Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE). To address this problem, we propose a layer-specific positional encoding scaling method that assigns distinct scaling factors to each layer, slowing down the decay rate caused by RoPE to make the model pay more attention to the middle context. A specially designed genetic algorithm is employed to efficiently select the optimal scaling factors for each layer by incorporating Bezier curves to reduce the search space. Through comprehensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our method significantly alleviates the ``lost-in-the-middle'' problem. Our approach results in an average accuracy improvement of up to 20% on the Key-Value Retrieval dataset. Furthermore, we show that layer-specific interpolation, as opposed to uniform interpolation across all layers, enhances the model's extrapolation capabilities when combined with PI and Dynamic-NTK positional encoding schemes.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Better Process Supervision with Bi-directional Rewarding Signals

Process supervision, i.e., evaluating each step, is critical for complex large language model (LLM) reasoning and test-time searching with increased inference compute. Existing approaches, represented by process reward models (PRMs), primarily focus on rewarding signals up to the current step, exhibiting a one-directional nature and lacking a mechanism to model the distance to the final target. To address this problem, we draw inspiration from the A* algorithm, which states that an effective supervisory signal should simultaneously consider the incurred cost and the estimated cost for reaching the target. Building on this key insight, we introduce BiRM, a novel process supervision model that not only evaluates the correctness of previous steps but also models the probability of future success. We conduct extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks and demonstrate that BiRM provides more precise evaluations of LLM reasoning steps, achieving an improvement of 3.1% on Gaokao2023 over PRM under the Best-of-N sampling method. Besides, in search-based strategies, BiRM provides more comprehensive guidance and outperforms ORM by 5.0% and PRM by 3.8% respectively on MATH-500.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Prior-Fitted Networks Scale to Larger Datasets When Treated as Weak Learners

Prior-Fitted Networks (PFNs) have recently been proposed to efficiently perform tabular classification tasks. Although they achieve good performance on small datasets, they encounter limitations with larger datasets. These limitations include significant memory consumption and increased computational complexity, primarily due to the impracticality of incorporating all training samples as inputs within these networks. To address these challenges, we investigate the fitting assumption for PFNs and input samples. Building on this understanding, we propose \textit{BoostPFN} designed to enhance the performance of these networks, especially for large-scale datasets. We also theoretically validate the convergence of BoostPFN and our empirical results demonstrate that the BoostPFN method can outperform standard PFNs with the same size of training samples in large datasets and achieve a significant acceleration in training times compared to other established baselines in the field, including widely-used Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs), deep learning methods and AutoML systems. High performance is maintained for up to 50x of the pre-training size of PFNs, substantially extending the limit of training samples. Through this work, we address the challenges of efficiently handling large datasets via PFN-based models, paving the way for faster and more effective tabular data classification training and prediction process. Code is available at Github.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

EliteKV: Scalable KV Cache Compression via RoPE Frequency Selection and Joint Low-Rank Projection

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) enables each attention head to capture multi-frequency information along the sequence dimension and is widely applied in foundation models. However, the nonlinearity introduced by RoPE complicates optimization of the key state in the Key-Value (KV) cache for RoPE-based attention. Existing KV cache compression methods typically store key state before rotation and apply the transformation during decoding, introducing additional computational overhead. This paper introduces EliteKV, a flexible modification framework for RoPE-based models supporting variable KV cache compression ratios. EliteKV first identifies the intrinsic frequency preference of each head using RoPElite, selectively restoring linearity to certain dimensions of key within attention computation. Building on this, joint low-rank compression of key and value enables partial cache sharing. Experimental results show that with minimal uptraining on only $0.6\%$ of the original training data, RoPE-based models achieve a $75\%$ reduction in KV cache size while preserving performance within a negligible margin. Furthermore, EliteKV consistently performs well across models of different scales within the same family.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

LongSafety: Enhance Safety for Long-Context LLMs

Recent advancements in model architectures and length extrapolation techniques have significantly extended the context length of large language models (LLMs), paving the way for their application in increasingly complex tasks. However, despite the growing capabilities of long-context LLMs, the safety issues in long-context scenarios remain underexplored. While safety alignment in short context has been widely studied, the safety concerns of long-context LLMs have not been adequately addressed. In this work, we introduce \textbf{LongSafety}, a comprehensive safety alignment dataset for long-context LLMs, containing 10 tasks and 17k samples, with an average length of 40.9k tokens. Our experiments demonstrate that training with LongSafety can enhance long-context safety performance while enhancing short-context safety and preserving general capabilities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that long-context safety does not equal long-context alignment with short-context safety data and LongSafety has generalizing capabilities in context length and long-context safety scenarios.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Detecting Essence Code Clones via Information Theoretic Analysis

Code cloning, a widespread practice in software development, involves replicating code fragments to save time but often at the expense of software maintainability and quality. In this paper, we address the specific challenge of detecting "essence clones", a complex subtype of Type-3 clones characterized by sharing critical logic despite different peripheral codes. Traditional techniques often fail to detect essence clones due to their syntactic focus. To overcome this limitation, we introduce ECScan, a novel detection tool that leverages information theory to assess the semantic importance of code lines. By assigning weights to each line based on its information content, ECScan emphasizes core logic over peripheral code differences. Our comprehensive evaluation across various real-world projects shows that ECScan significantly outperforms existing tools in detecting essence clones, achieving an average F1-score of 85%. It demonstrates robust performance across all clone types and offers exceptional scalability. This study advances clone detection by providing a practical tool for developers to enhance code quality and reduce maintenance burdens, emphasizing the semantic aspects of code through an innovative information-theoretic approach.

cs.SE↗