GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
ToC: Tree-of-Claims Search with Multi-Agent Language Models
Authors: Shuyang Yu; Jianan Liang; Hui Hu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Optimizing patent claims is a critical yet challenging task, demanding careful balance between maximizing novelty and preserving legal scope. Manual claim drafting is labor-intensive, costly, and inherently inconsistent, while conventional Large Language Models (LLMs) often lack the structured, iterative reasoning essential for precise claim refinement. To address these challenges, we introduce Tree of Claims (ToC), an innovative framework that redefines claim editing as a guided search problem. ToC synergistically integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a collaborative multi-agent system, comprising an LLM-based EditorAgent that proposes contextually grounded edits, and an ExaminerAgent that mimics patent examiner critiques through structured, chain-of-thought analyses of novelty and prior art disclosure. Driven by a carefully designed multi-objective reward function, ToC jointly optimizes novelty, scope retention, and semantic coherence. Experimental evaluation on a benchmark of 1145 claims demonstrates that ToC significantly outperforms standard LLMs in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, achieving an average composite score improvement of 8%, and up to 9% in certain cases. Extensive experiments, including detailed ablation studies, validate ToC’s efficacy in generating superior, legally robust claim revisions. Overall, ToC establishes a transparent, controllable, and interpretable methodology that effectively bridges advanced LLM reasoning capabilities with strategic MCTS planning for structured patent claim optimization.
Discovering Decoupled Functional Modules in Large Language Models
Authors: Yanke Yu; Jin Li; Ying Sun; Ping Li; Zhefeng Wang; Yi Zheng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Understanding the internal functional organization of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for improving their trustworthiness and performance.
However, how LLMs organize different functions into modules remains highly unexplored.
To bridge this gap, we formulate a function module discovery problem and propose an Unsupervised LLM Cross-layer MOdule Discovery (ULCMOD) framework that simultaneously disentangles the large set of neurons in the entire LLM into modules while discovering the topics of input samples related to these modules.
Our framework introduces a novel objective function and an efficient Iterative Decoupling (IterD) algorithm.
Extensive experiments show that our method discovers high-quality, disentangled modules that capture more meaningful semantic information and achieve superior performance in various downstream tasks.
Moreover, our qualitative analysis reveals that the discovered modules show function comprehensiveness, function hierarchy, and clear function spatial arrangement within LLMs.
Our work provides a novel tool for interpreting LLMs' function modules, filling a critical gap in LLMs' interpretability research.
Language Model Distillation: A Temporal Difference Imitation Learning Perspective
Authors: Zishun Yu; Shangzhe Li; Xinhua Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large language models have led to significant progress across many NLP tasks, although their massive sizes often incur substantial computational costs. Distillation has become a common practice to compress these large and highly capable models into smaller, more efficient ones. Many existing language model distillation methods can be viewed as behavior cloning from the perspective of imitation learning or inverse reinforcement learning. This viewpoint has inspired subsequent studies that leverage (inverse) reinforcement learning techniques, including variations of behavior cloning and temporal difference learning methods. Rather than proposing yet another specific temporal difference method, we introduce a general framework for temporal difference-based distillation by exploiting the distributional sparsity of the teacher model. Specifically, it is often observed that language models assign most probability mass to a small subset of tokens. Motivated by this observation, we design a temporal difference learning framework that operates on a reduced action space (a subset of vocabulary), and demonstrate how practical algorithms can be derived and the resulting performance improvements.
MCTS-SQL: Light-Weight LLMs Can Master the Text-to-SQL Through Monte Carlo Tree Search
Authors: Shuozhi Yuan; Liming Chen; Miaomiao Yuan; Zhao Jin
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Text-to-SQL is a fundamental yet challenging task in the NLP area, aiming at translating natural language questions into SQL queries. While recent advances in large language models have greatly improved performance, most existing approaches depend on models with tens of billions of parameters or costly APIs, limiting their applicability in resource-constrained environments. For real world, especially on edge devices, it is crucial for Text-to-SQL to ensure cost-effectiveness. Therefore, enabling the light-weight models for Text-to-SQL is of great practical significance. However, smaller LLMs often struggle with complicated user instruction, redundant schema linking or syntax correctness. To address these challenges, we propose MCTS-SQL, a novel framework that uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to guide SQL generation through multi-step refinement. Since the light-weight models' weak performance of single-shot prediction, we generate better results through several trials with feedback.  However, directly applying MCTS-based methods inevitably leads to significant time and computational overhead. Driven by this issue, we propose a token-level prefix-cache mechanism that stores prior information during iterations, effectively improved the execution speed. Experiments results on the SPIDER and BIRD benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Using a small open-source Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B, our method outperforms ChatGPT-3.5. When leveraging a more powerful model Gemini 2.5 to explore the performance upper bound, we achieved results competitive with the SOTA. Our findings demonstrate that even small models can be effectively deployed in practical Text-to-SQL systems with the right strategy.
Promoting Efficient Reasoning with Verifiable Stepwise Reward
Authors: Chuhuai Yue; Chengqi Dong; Yinan Gao; Hang He; Jiajun Chai; Wei Lin; Guojun Yin
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently achieved significant progress in complex reasoning tasks, aided by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. However, LRMs often suffer from overthinking, expending excessive computation on simple problems and reducing efficiency. Existing efficient reasoning methods typically require accurate task assessment to preset token budgets or select reasoning modes, which limits their flexibility and reliability. In this work, we revisit the essence of overthinking and identify that encouraging effective steps while penalizing ineffective ones is key to its solution. To this end, we propose a novel rule-based verifiable stepwise reward mechanism (VSRM), which assigns rewards based on the performance of intermediate states in the reasoning trajectory. This approach is intuitive and naturally fits the step-by-step nature of reasoning tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on standard mathematical reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24 and AIME25, by integrating VSRM with PPO and Reinforce++. Results show that our method achieves substantial output length reduction while maintaining original reasoning performance, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and accuracy. Further analysis of overthinking frequency and pass@k score before and after training demonstrates that our approach indeed effectively suppresses ineffective steps and encourages effective reasoning, fundamentally alleviating the overthinking problem.
MARS: Multimodal Adaptive Reasoning Model for Avoiding Overthinking
Authors: Tan Yue; Qiong Wu; Dongyan Zhao
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown advanced performance in vision-language tasks. However, existing multimodal reasoning models often suffer from excessive reasoning steps, leading to high computational costs and inefficiency. In this paper, we propose the Multimodal Adaptive Reasoning Model (MARS), which enables adaptive adjustment of the reasoning strategy based on question difficulty. Specifically, MARS adopts a three-stage training framework based on our constructed training dataset (MART): 1) CoT Masking Learning to enhance reasoning logicality by predicting masked reasoning steps. 2) Adaptive Reasoning Instruction Learning to train the model to skip or keep reasoning steps according to difficulty levels. 3) CoT Lightweight Reinforcement Learning with the Information Bottleneck Principle based GRPO algorithm to reduce CoT length while maintaining performance and generalizability. Results on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets show that MARS significantly reduces the CoT length (90.2% decrease) while improving accuracy (0.54%), outperforming existing SOTA open-source and proprietary MLLMs.
Reducing the Scope of Language Models
Authors: David Yunis; Siyu Huo; Chulaka Gunasekara; Danish Contractor
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are deployed in a wide variety of user-facing applications. Typically, these deployments have some specific purpose, like answering questions grounded on documentation or acting as coding assistants, but they require general language understanding. In such deployments, LLMs should respond only to queries that align with the intended purpose and reject all other requests, such as generating poetry or answering questions about physics, a task we refer to as 'scoping'. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of various methods, ranging from prompting, fine-tuning to preference learning and the recently proposed general alignment technique known as Circuit Breakers (CB). Across three families of language models and a broad variety of tasks, we show that it is possible to scope language models. We examine scoping for multiple topics, and fine-grained topics. We ablate diversity of irrelevant queries, layer different techniques, conduct adversarial evaluations and more. Among other results, we find that when diverse examples of irrelevant queries are available, simple supervised fine-tuning produces the best results, but when such diversity is low, Circuit Breakers perform quite well. One can often get the benefits of both methods by layering them in succession. We intend our study to serve as a practitioner's guide to scoping LLMs.
ExPairT-LLM: Exact Learning for LLM Code Selection by Pairwise Queries
Authors: Tom Yuviler; Dana Drachsler-Cohen
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Despite recent advances in LLMs, the task of code generation is still challenging. To cope, code selection algorithms select the best program from multiple programs generated by an LLM. However, existing algorithms can fail to identify the correct program, either because they fail to distinguish nonequivalent programs or because they rely on an LLM and assume it always correctly determines the output for every input. We present ExPairT-LLM, an exact learning algorithm for code selection that selects a program by posing two new types of queries to an LLM oracle: pairwise membership and pairwise equivalence. These queries are simpler for LLMs and enable ExPairT-LLM to identify the correct program through a tournament, which is robust to some LLM mistakes. We evaluate ExPairT-LLM on four popular code datasets. Its pass@1 (success rate) outperforms the state-of-the-art code selection algorithm on average by +13.0% and up to +27.1%. It also improves the pass@1 of LLMs performing complex reasoning by +24.0%.
CAMA: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models with Causal Knowledge
Authors: Lei Zan; Keli Zhang; Ruichu Cai; Lujia Pan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of tasks, yet they still struggle with complex mathematical reasoning, a challenge fundamentally rooted in deep structural dependencies. To address this challenge, we propose CAusal MAthematician (CAMA), a two stage causal framework that equips LLMs with explicit, reusable mathematical structure. In the learning stage, CAMA first constructs the Mathematical Causal Graph (MCG), a high level representation of solution strategies, by combining LLM priors with causal discovery algorithms applied to a corpus of question solution pairs. The resulting MCG encodes essential knowledge points and their causal dependencies. To better align the graph with downstream reasoning tasks, CAMA further refines the MCG through iterative feedback derived from a selected subset of the question solution pairs. In the reasoning stage, given a new question, CAMA dynamically extracts a task relevant subgraph from the MCG, conditioned on both the question content and the LLM’s intermediate reasoning trace. This subgraph, which encodes the most pertinent knowledge points and their causal dependencies, is then injected back into the LLM to guide its reasoning process. Empirical results on real world datasets show that CAMA significantly improves LLM performance on challenging mathematical problems. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that structured guidance consistently outperforms unstructured alternatives, and that incorporating asymmetric causal relationships yields greater improvements than using symmetric associations alone.
Expert-Inspired Multi-Agent Coordination for Multi-Objective Molecular Optimization
Authors: Daojian Zeng; Tianle Li; Jiahao Yang; Jiacai Yi; Xieping Gao; Lincheng Jiang; Tengfei Ma; Xiangxiang Zeng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Multi-objective molecular optimization is a fundamental yet inherently challenging task in drug discovery, as it requires simultaneously optimizing multiple, often conflicting, molecular properties.  Although recent deep learning methods have shown promise, they often lack objective-specific specialization and dynamic coordination, making them ineffective in handling competing objectives and difficult to scale in complex, high-dimensional molecular design tasks. Inspired by the division of labor among domain experts in medicinal chemistry, we propose MAMO, a multi-agent framework for molecular design that simulates expert collaboration. Each agent specializes in optimizing a single objective, and their interactions are orchestrated by a central scheduling module that dynamically reallocates tasks based on evaluation feedback. This coordination mechanism enables interpretable and goal-conditioned optimization while adaptively balancing conflicting objectives. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAMO consistently achieves superior performance in both objective quality and Pareto diversity, particularly in scenarios with strong inter-objective conflict. Our results highlight the potential of multi-agent coordination strategies for scalable and conflict-aware molecular design.
SlideTailor: Personalized Presentation Slide Generation for Scientific Papers
Authors: Wenzheng Zeng; Mingyu Ouyang; Langyuan Cui; Hwee Tou Ng
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Automatic presentation slide generation can greatly streamline content creation. However, since preferences of each user may vary, existing under-specified formulations often lead to suboptimal results that fail to align with individual user needs. We introduce a novel task that conditions paper-to-slides generation on user-specified preferences. We propose a human behavior-inspired agentic framework, SlideTailor, that progressively generates editable slides in a user-aligned manner. Instead of requiring users to write their preferences in detailed textual form, our system only asks for a paper-slides example pair and a visual template—natural and easy-to-provide artifacts that implicitly encode rich user preferences across content and visual style. Despite the implicit and unlabeled nature of these inputs, our framework effectively distills and generalizes the preferences to guide customized slide generation. We also introduce a novel chain-of-speech mechanism to align slide content with planned oral narration. Such a design significantly enhances the quality of generated slides and enables downstream applications like video presentations. To support this new task, we construct a benchmark dataset that captures diverse user preferences, with carefully designed interpretable metrics for robust evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
ToolACE-R: Model-aware Iterative Training and Adaptive Refinement for Tool learning
Authors: Xingshan Zeng; Weiwen Liu; Xu Huang; Zezhong Wang; Lingzhi Wang; Liangyou Li; Yasheng Wang; Lifeng Shang; Xin Jiang; Ruiming Tang; Qun Liu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Tool learning, which allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage external tools for solving complex user tasks, has emerged as a promising avenue for extending model capabilities. However, existing approaches primarily focus on data synthesis for fine-tuning LLMs to invoke tools effectively, largely ignoring how to fully stimulate the potential of the model. In this paper, we propose ToolACE-R, a novel framework that includes both model-aware iterative training and adaptive refinement for tool learning. ToolACE-R features a model-aware iterative training procedure that progressively adjust training samples based on the model’s evolving capabilities to maximize its potential. Additionally, it incorporates self-refinement training corpus which emphasizes LLM's ability to iteratively refine their tool calls, optimizing performance without requiring external feedback. Furthermore, we introduce adaptive self-refinement for efficient test-time scaling, where the trained model can autonomously determine when to stop the process based on iterative self-refinement. We conduct extensive experiments across several benchmark datasets, showing that ToolACE-R achieves competitive performance compared to advanced LLMs. The performance can be further improved efficiently through adaptive self-refinement. These results highlight the effectiveness and generalizability of ToolACE-R, offering a promising direction for more efficient and scalable tool learning.
MathSmith: Towards Extremely Hard Mathematical Reasoning by Forging Synthetic Problems with a Reinforced Policy
Authors: Shaoxiong Zhan; Yanlin Lai; Ziyu Lu; Dahua Lin; Ziqing Yang; Fei Tan
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large language models have achieved substantial progress in mathematical reasoning, yet their advancement is limited by the scarcity of high-quality, high-difficulty training data. Existing synthesis methods largely rely on transforming human-written templates, limiting both diversity and scalability. We propose MathSmith, a novel framework for synthesizing challenging mathematical problems to enhance LLM reasoning. Rather than modifying existing problems, MathSmith constructs new ones from scratch by randomly sampling concept–explanation pairs from PlanetMath, ensuring data independence and avoiding contamination. To increase difficulty, we design nine predefined strategies as soft constraints during rationales. We further adopts reinforcement learning to jointly optimize structural validity, reasoning complexity, and answer consistency. The length of the reasoning trace generated under autoregressive prompting is used to reflect cognitive complexity, encouraging the creation of more demanding problems aligned with long-chain-of-thought reasoning. Experiments across five benchmarks, categorized as easy & medium (GSM8K, MATH-500) and hard (AIME2024, AIME2025, OlympiadBench), show that MathSmith consistently outperforms existing baselines under both short and long CoT settings. Additionally, a weakness-focused variant generation module enables targeted improvement on specific concepts. Overall, MathSmith exhibits strong scalability, generalization, and transferability, highlighting the promise of high-difficulty synthetic data in advancing LLM reasoning capabilities.
JELV: A Judge of Edit-Level Validity for Evaluation and Automated Reference Expansion in Grammatical Error Correction
Authors: Yuhao Zhan; Yuqing Zhang; Jing Yuan; Qixiang Ma; Zhiqi Yang; Yu Gu; Zemin Liu; Fei Wu
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Existing Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems suffer from limited reference diversity, leading to underestimated evaluation and restricted model generalization. 
To address this issue, we introduce the Judge of Edit-Level Validity (JELV), an automated framework to validate correction edits from grammaticality, faithfulness, and fluency. 
Using our proposed human-annotated Pair-wise Edit-level Validity Dataset (PEVData) as benchmark, JELV offers two implementations: a multi-turn LLM-as-Judges pipeline achieving 90% agreement with human annotators, and a distilled DeBERTa classifier with 85% precision on valid edits. 
We then apply JELV to reclassify misjudged false positives in evaluation and derive a comprehensive evaluation metric by integrating false positive decoupling and fluency scoring, resulting in state-of-the-art correlation with human judgments.
We also apply JELV to filter LLM-generated correction candidates, expanding the BEA19's single-reference dataset containing 38,692 source sentences. Retraining top GEC systems on this expanded dataset yields measurable performance gains. JELV provides a scalable solution for enhancing reference diversity and strengthening both evaluation and model generalization.
Global-Local Confidence Fusion for Hallucination Detection in Mathematical Reasoning Task
Authors: Bo Zhang; Cong Gao; Linkang Yang; Bingxu Han; Minghao Hu; Zhunchen Luo; Guotong Geng; Xiaoying Bai; Jun Zhang; Wen Yao; Zhong Wang
Venue: AAAI 2026 (main)

Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve promising results on complex reasoning tasks but remain susceptible to hallucinations. Existing hallucination detection methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often focus solely on final answers, overlooking inconsistencies between the answer and reasoning process. This limitation reduces their ability to detect hallucinations during inference. Moreover, training-free approaches lack mechanisms for confidence estimation, resulting in an unquantified detection output. In contrast, training-based methods can provide fine-grained assessments but often neglect the self-correction capability of LRMs, where earlier errors may be corrected in subsequent steps, leading to inaccurate hallucination detection. To address these challenges, we propose ConfFuse, a unified framework that fuses global and local confidence scores for hallucination detection. A Global Hallucination Detection Model (GHDM) is trained using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to assess hallucinations at the level of entire reasoning chains, yielding global confidence estimates. Simultaneously, a Process Reward Model (PRM) estimates step-wise confidence scores to capture local logical flaws. A weighted fusion strategy combines the global confidence score with the minimum local score to jointly reflect overall reasoning consistency and local soundness. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ConfFuse surpasses Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-8B by up to 11.86% and 5.46% in F1 score on in-distribution datasets, and achieves average improvements of 4.65% and 2.80% on out-of-distribution datasets. These results verify the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed framework.