GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Hybrid Routing for a Mixture of LoRA Experts
Authors: Yitong Huang; Ziqi Yang; Zihui Wang; Jianzhong Qi; Rongshan Yu; Xiaoliang Fan; Cheng Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Combining Mixture of Experts (MoE) with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has shown promising efficiency in multi-task instruction tuning for Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing routing schemes for such MoE systems employ auxiliary functions to ensure both expert selection certainty and workload balance among experts, they are hindered by two critical challenges: 
(1) Existing methods overlook the evolving cross-expert relationships across layers, leading to inefficient expert utilization.
(2) The auxiliary functions fail to incorporate cross-task semantic characteristics during expert assignment, leading to suboptimal task adaptation. 
To address these challenges, we propose Hybrid routing for a Mixture of LoRA Experts (HotMoE), a novel multi-task instruction tuning framework that adapts hierarchical routing to the distinct characteristics of different LLM layers. 
First, we design a hybrid routing module. In lower layers, expert-expert attention facilitates cross-task collaboration and generalization.
In higher layers, token-expert attention enables precise alignment between task semantics and specialized experts.  
Second, we introduce a similarity-guided auxiliary loss module to regularize routing decisions by exploiting hidden state similarities. This loss synergistically reinforces expert specialization without sacrificing certainty of expert selection by promoting cohesive activation patterns among semantically related tasks while sharpening distinctions between conflicting ones. Experiments across two multi-task instruction tuning scenarios covering seven NLP benchmarks demonstrate that HotMoE consistently outperforms all baselines, improving Mean Relative Difference by up to 1.68% with only 3.1% of trainable parameters.
SPA: Achieving Consensus in LLM Alignment via Self-Priority Optimization
Authors: Yue Huang; Xiangqi Wang; Xiangliang Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: In high-stakes scenarios—such as self-harm, legal, or medical queries—LLMs must be both trustworthy and helpful. However, these goals often conflict. We propose priority alignment, a new alignment paradigm that enforces a strict “trustworthy-before-helpful” ordering: optimization of helpfulness is conditioned on first meeting trustworthy thresholds (e.g., harmlessness or honesty). To realize this, we introduce Self-Priority Alignment (SPA)—a fully unsupervised framework that generates diverse responses, self-evaluates them and refines them by the model itself, and applies dual-criterion denoising to remove inconsistency and control variance. From this, SPA constructs lexicographically ordered preference pairs and fine-tunes the model using an uncertainty-weighted alignment loss that emphasizes high-confidence, high-gap decisions. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that SPA improves helpfulness without compromising safety, outperforming strong baselines while preserving general capabilities. Our results demonstrate that SPA provides a scalable and interpretable alignment strategy for critical LLM applications.
Mem-PAL: Towards Memory-based Personalized Dialogue Assistants for Long-term User-Agent Interaction
Authors: Zhaopei Huang; Qifeng Dai; Guozheng Wu; Xiaopeng Wu; Xubin Li; Tiezheng Ge; Wenxuan Wang; Qin Jin
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: With the rise of smart personal devices, service-oriented human-agent interactions have become increasingly prevalent. This trend highlights the need for personalized dialogue assistants that can understand user-specific traits to accurately interpret requirements and tailor responses to individual preferences. However, existing approaches often overlook the complexities of long-term interactions and fail to capture users’ subjective characteristics. To address these gaps, we present PAL-Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the personalization capabilities of service-oriented assistants in long-term user-agent interactions. In the absence of available real-world data, we develop a multi-step LLM-based synthesis pipeline, which is further verified and refined by human annotators. This process yields PAL-Set, the first Chinese dataset comprising multi-session user logs and dialogue histories, which serves as the foundation for PAL-Bench. Furthermore, to improve personalized service-oriented interactions, we propose H2Memory, a hierarchical and heterogeneous memory framework that incorporates retrieval-augmented generation to improve personalized response generation. Comprehensive experiments on both our PAL-Bench and an external dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed memory framework.
BiCycle: Group-wise Recursive Transformer Based on ASR Mechanism
Authors: Min Ho Jang; Eun Seo Seo; Jin Young Kim; Hyeongsoo Lim; Ji Won Yoon
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recursive transformer (RT) is a promising parameter-sharing technique for reducing computational burden of large-scale model. While RT has been successfully applied to large language models (LLMs), its effectiveness in automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains limited, despite the parallel trend of model scaling in the speech domain. In this paper, we reveal that conventional RT designs for LLMs are suboptimal for speech recognition, primarily because they do not fully consider the layer-wise specialization inherent in the ASR architecture, where lower layers focus on phonetic features and upper layers capture linguistic localization. To address this, we propose BiCycle, a novel RT scheme tailored for ASR. In particular, we firstly analyze attention patterns in a pre-trained ASR model to divide its layers into phonetic and linguistic groups. BiCycle then constructs an efficient RT model by transferring the pre-trained model’s weights in a step-wise manner and applies recursion separately to the phonetic and linguistic groups, preventing conflicts between their roles. Extensive experimental results confirm that the proposed method not only preserves the original ASR mechanism but also outperforms conventional RT approaches.
Do Language Models Associate Sound with Meaning? A Multimodal Study of Sound Symbolism
Authors: Jinhong Jeong; Sunghyun Lee; Jaeyoung Lee; Seonah Han; Youngjae Yu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Sound symbolism is a linguistic concept that refers to non-arbitrary associations between phonetic forms and their meanings. We suggest that this can be a compelling probe into how Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) interpret auditory information in human languages. We investigate MLLMs' performance on phonetic iconicity across textual (orthographic and IPA) and auditory forms of inputs with up to 25 semantic dimensions (e.g., sharp vs. round), observing models' layer-wise information processing by measuring phoneme-level attention fraction scores. To this end, we present LEX-ICON, an extensive mimetic word dataset consisting of 8,052 words from four natural languages (English, French, Japanese, and Korean) and 2,930 systematically constructed pseudo-words, annotated with semantic features applied across both text and audio modalities. Our key findings demonstrate (1) MLLMs' phonetic intuitions that align with existing linguistic research across multiple semantic dimensions and (2) phonosemantic attention patterns that highlight models' focus on iconic phonemes. These results bridge domains of artificial intelligence and cognitive linguistics, providing the first large-scale, quantitative analyses of phonetic iconicity in terms of MLLMs' interpretability.
Bootstrapping LLMs via Preference-Based Policy Optimization
Authors: Chen Jia
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Bootstrapping large language models (LLMs) via preference-based policy optimization enables aligning model behavior with human preferences while reducing reliance on extensive manual annotations. We propose a novel preference-based policy optimization (PbPO) framework that formulates learning as a min-max game between the LLM policy and a reward model (RM). The RM is constrained within a confidence set derived from collected preferences to ensure reliable exploitation, while simultaneously promoting robust exploration. Our iterative online algorithm actively collects new preference data from the evolving policy, enabling continual self-improvement of both the policy and the RM. We provide theoretical guarantees, establishing high-probability regret bounds for both sequence-level and token-level RMs. Extensive experiments across five benchmark datasets demonstrate that PbPO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art preference optimization methods.
AutoTool: Efficient Tool Selection for Large Language Model Agents
Authors: Jingyi Jia; Qinbin Li
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have emerged as powerful tools for automating complex tasks by leveraging the reasoning and decision-making abilities of LLMs. However, a major bottleneck in current agent frameworks lies in the high inference cost of tool selection, especially in approaches like ReAct that repeatedly invoke the LLM to determine which tool to use at each step. In this work, we propose AutoTool, a novel graph-based framework that bypasses repeated LLM inference by exploiting a key empirical observation: tool usage inertia—the tendency of tool invocations to follow predictable sequential patterns. AutoTool constructs a directed graph from historical agent trajectories, where nodes represent tools and edges capture transition probabilities, effectively modeling the inertia in tool selection. It further integrates parameter-level information to refine tool input generation. By traversing this structured representation, AutoTool efficiently selects tools and their parameters with minimal reliance on LLM inference. Extensive experiments across diverse agent tasks demonstrate that AutoTool reduces inference costs by up to 30% while maintaining competitive task completion rates, offering a practical and scalable enhancement for inference-heavy frameworks. Our work highlights the promise of integrating statistical structure into LLM agent design for greater efficiency without sacrificing performance.
LiteLong: Resource-Efficient Long-Context Data Synthesis for LLMs
Authors: Junlong Jia; Xing Wu; Chaochen Gao; Ziyang Chen; Zijia Lin; Zhongzhi Li; Weinong Wang; Haotian Xu; Donghui Jin; Debing Zhang; Binghui Guo
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: High-quality long-context data is essential for training large language models (LLMs) capable of processing extensive documents, yet existing synthesis approaches using relevance-based aggregation face challenges of computational efficiency. We present LiteLong, a resource-efficient method for synthesizing long-context data through structured topic organization and multi-agent debate. Our approach leverages the BISAC book classification system to provide a comprehensive hierarchical topic organization, and then employs a debate mechanism with multiple LLMs to generate diverse, high-quality topics within this structure. For each topic, we use lightweight BM25 retrieval to obtain relevant documents and concatenate them into 128K-token training samples. Experiments on HELMET and Ruler benchmarks demonstrate that LiteLong achieves competitive long-context performance and can seamlessly integrate with other long-dependency enhancement methods. LiteLong makes high-quality long-context data synthesis more accessible by reducing both computational and data engineering costs, facilitating further research in long-context language training.
MEML-GRPO: Heterogeneous Multi-Expert Mutual Learning for RLVR Advancement
Authors: Weitao Jia; Jinghui Lu; Haiyang Yu; Siqi Wang; Guozhi Tang; An-Lan Wang; Weijie Yin; Dingkang Yang; Yuxiang Nie; Bin Shan; Hao Feng; Irene Li; Kun Yang; Han Wang; Jingqun Tang; Teng Fu; Changhong Jin; Chao Feng; Xiaohui Lv; Can Huang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances demonstrate that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, standard RLVR faces challenges with reward sparsity, where zero rewards from consistently incorrect candidate answers provide no learning signal, particularly in challenging tasks. To address this,we propose Multi-Expert Mutual Learning GRPO (MEML-GRPO), an innovative framework that utilizes diverse expert prompts as system prompts to generate a broader range of responses, substantially increasing the likelihood of identifying correct solutions. Additionally, we introduce an inter-expert mutual learning mechanism that facilitates knowledge sharing and transfer among experts, further boosting the model’s performance through RLVR. Extensive experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that MEML-GRPO delivers significant improvements, achieving an average performance gain of 4.89% with Qwen and 11.33% with Llama, effectively overcoming the core limitations of traditional RLVR methods.
MDF: A Modality-Aware Disentanglement and Fusion Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Zhongquan Jian; Wenhan Lv; Yanhao Chen; Guanran Luo; Wentao Qiu; Shaopan Wang; Bingbing Hu; Qingqiang Wu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: The homogeneity and heterogeneity across modalities are critical factors that influence multimodal fusion. In Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), the inherent textual information within the audio modality induces cross-modality homogeneity with the text modality. Conversely, the mutual independence between text and vision modalities results in their cross-modal heterogeneity. Although existing disentangle-based methods achieve notable performance gains by separating modality features into distinct subspaces, they overlook the characteristics of cross-modality heterogeneity and homogeneity among different modalities. To this end, we propose a novel Modality-aware Disentangle and Fusion (MDF) framework to investigate the role of core modality features. Specifically, we first use text as the anchor to disentangle the audio modality and extract its unique modality-specific features, thereby establishing cross-modal heterogeneity among text, audio, and vision. We then introduce a Cross-Modality Heterogeneity Enhancement (CHE) module to refine these features, further reinforcing their heterogeneous characteristics. Finally, a Modality Adaptive Weighting (MAW) module is employed to dynamically assign weights to the text, sound, and vision modalities based on their potential contributions to sentiment prediction, achieving a more effective multimodal representation for MSA. Experimental evaluations on different benchmarks demonstrate MDF's superiority, with extensive ablation studies confirming its effectiveness.
A Principle-Driven Adaptive Policy for Group Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue for Elderly with Cognitive Impairment
Authors: Jiyue Jiang; Yanyu Chen; Pengan Chen; Kai Liu; Jingqi Zhou; Zheyong Zhu; He Hu; Fei Ma; Qi Tian; Chuan Wu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Cognitive impairment is becoming a major public health challenge. Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) is an effective intervention for cognitive impairment, but traditional methods are difficult to scale, and existing digital systems struggle with group dialogues and cognitive stimulation principles. While Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful, their application in this context faces key challenges: cognitive stimulation dialogue paradigms, a lack of therapeutic reasoning, and static-only user modeling. To address these issues, we propose a principle-driven adaptive policy actualized through a Group Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue (GCSD) system. We first construct a dataset with over 500 hours of real-world CST conversations and 10,000+ simulated dialogues generated via our Principle-Guided Scenario Simulation strategy. Our GCSD system then integrates four core modules to overcome LLM limitations: (i) a multi-speaker context controller to resolve role confusion; (ii) dynamic participant cognitive state modeling for personalized interaction; (iii) a cognitive stimulation-focused attention loss to instill cognitive stimulation reasoning; and (iv) a multi-dimensional reward strategy to enhance response value. Experimental results demonstrate that GCSD significantly outperforms baseline models across various evaluation metrics. Future work will focus on long-term clinical validation to bridge the gap between computational performance and clinical efficacy.
Consensus-Aligned Neuron Efficient Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Multi-Domain Machine Translation
Authors: Shuting Jiang; Ran Song; Yuxin Huang; Yan Xiang; Yantuan Xian; Shengxiang Gao; Zhengtao Yu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-domain machine translation (MDMT) aims to build a unified model capable of translating content across diverse domains. Despite the impressive machine translation capabilities demonstrated by large language models (LLMs), domain adaptation still remains a challenge for LLMs. Existing MDMT methods such as in-context learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning often suffer from domain shift, parameter interference and limited generalization. In this work, we propose a neuron-efficient fine-tuning framework for MDMT that identifies and updates consensus-aligned neurons within LLMs. These neurons are selected by maximizing the mutual information between neuron behavior and domain features, enabling LLMs to capture both generalizable translation patterns and domain-specific nuances. Our method then fine-tunes LLMs guided by these neurons, effectively mitigating parameter interference and domain-specific overfitting. Comprehensive experiments on three LLMs across ten German-English and Chinese-English translation domains evidence that our method consistently outperforms strong PEFT baselines on both seen and unseen domains, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
MedS³: Towards Medical Slow Thinking with Self-Evolved Soft Dual-sided Process Supervision
Authors: Shuyang Jiang; Yusheng Liao; Zhe Chen; Ya Zhang; Yanfeng Wang; Yu Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Medical language models face critical barriers to real-world clinical reasoning applications. 
However, mainstream efforts, which fall short in task coverage, lack fine-grained supervision for intermediate reasoning steps, and rely on proprietary systems, are still far from a versatile, credible and efficient language model for clinical reasoning usage.
To this end, we propose MedS3, a self-evolving framework that imparts robust reasoning capabilities to small, deployable models. 
Starting with 8,000 curated instances sampled via a curriculum strategy across five medical domains and 16 datasets, we use a small base policy model to conduct Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for constructing rule-verifiable reasoning trajectories. 
Self-explored reasoning trajectories ranked by node values are used to bootstrap the policy model via reinforcement fine-tuning and preference learning. 
Moreover, we introduce a soft dual process reward model that incorporates value dynamics: steps that degrade node value are penalized, enabling fine-grained identification of reasoning errors even when the final answer is correct.
Experiments on eleven benchmarks show that MedS3 outperforms the previous state-of-the-art medical model by +6.45 accuracy points and surpasses 32B-scale general-purpose reasoning models by +8.57 points.
Additional empirical analysis further demonstrates that MedS3 achieves robust and faithful reasoning behavior.
Importance-Aware Data Selection for Efficient LLM Instruction Tuning
Authors: Tingyu Jiang; Shen Li; Yiyao Song; Lan Zhang; Hualei Zhu; Yuan Zhao; Xiaohang Xu; Kenjiro Taura; Hao Henry Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Instruction tuning plays a critical role in enhancing the performance and efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs). Its success depends not only on the quality of the instruction data but also on the inherent capabilities of the LLM itself. Some studies suggest that even a small amount of high-quality data can achieve instruction fine-tuning results that are on par with, or even exceed, those from using a full-scale dataset. However, rather than focusing solely on calculating data quality scores to evaluate instruction data, there is a growing need to select high-quality data that maximally enhances the performance of instruction tuning for a given LLM. In this paper, we propose the Model Instruction Weakness Value (MIWV) as a novel metric to quantify the importance of instruction data in enhancing model's capabilities. The MIWV metric is derived from the discrepancies in the model’s responses when using In-Context Learning (ICL), helping identify the most beneficial data for enhancing instruction tuning performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that selecting only the top 1% of data based on MIWV can outperform training on the full dataset. Furthermore, this approach extends beyond existing research that focuses on data quality scoring for data selection, offering strong empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of our proposed method.
From Chaos to Clarity: A Knowledge Graph-Driven Audit Dataset Generation Framework for LLM Unlearning
Authors: Weipeng Jiang; Juan Zhai; Shiqing Ma; Ziyan Lei; Xiaofei Xie; Yige Wang; Chao Shen
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Recently LLMs have faced increasing demands to selectively remove specific information through Machine Unlearning. While evaluating unlearning effectiveness is crucial, existing benchmarks suffer from fundamental limitations in audit dataset generation from unstructured corpora. We identify two critical challenges: ensuring audit adequacy and handling knowledge redundancy between forget and retain datasets. Current approaches rely on ad-hoc question generation from unstructured text, leading to unpredictable coverage gaps and evaluation blind spots. Knowledge redundancy between forget and retain corpora further obscures evaluation, making it difficult to distinguish genuine unlearning failures from legitimately retained knowledge. To bring clarity to this challenge, we propose LUCID, an automated framework that leverages knowledge graphs to achieve comprehensive audit dataset generation with fine-grained coverage and systematic redundancy elimination. By converting unstructured corpora into structured knowledge representations, it transforms the ad-hoc audit dataset generation process into a transparent and automated generation pipeline that ensures both adequacy and non-redundancy. Applying LUCID to the MUSE benchmark, we generated over 69,000 and 111,000 audit cases for News and Books datasets respectively, identifying thousands of previously undetected knowledge memorization instances. Our analysis reveals that knowledge redundancy significantly skews metrics, artificially inflating ROUGE from 19.7% to 26.1% and Entailment Scores from 32.4% to 35.2%, highlighting the necessity of deduplication for accurate assessment.