pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Black-Box Prompt Optimization as the Scale of LLMs Continues to Grow
Authors: Ziyu Zhou, Yihang Wu, Jingyuan Yang, Zhan Xiao, Rongjun Li
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00

Black-Box prompt optimization methods have emerged as a promising strategy for refining input prompts to better align large language models (LLMs), thereby enhancing their task performance. Although these methods have demonstrated encouraging results, most studies and experiments have primarily focused on smaller-scale models (e.g., 7B, 14B) or earlier versions (e.g., GPT-3.5) of LLMs. As the scale of LLMs continues to increase, such as with DeepSeek V3 (671B), it remains an open question whether these black-box optimization techniques will continue to yield significant performance improvements for models of such scale. In response to this, we select three well-known black-box optimization methods and evaluate them on large-scale LLMs (DeepSeek V3 and Gemini 2.0 Flash) across four NLU and NLG datasets. The results show that these black-box prompt optimization methods offer only limited improvements on these large-scale LLMs. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the scale of the model is the primary factor contributing to the limited benefits observed. To explore this hypothesis, we conducted experiments on LLMs of varying sizes (Qwen 2.5 series, ranging from 7B to 72B) and observed an inverse scaling law, wherein the effectiveness of black-box optimization methods diminished as the model size increased.
LLMSR@XLLM25: Less is More: Enhancing Structured Multi-Agent Reasoning via Quality-Guided Distillation
Authors: Jiahao Yuan, Xingzhe Sun, Xing Yu, Jingwen Wang, Dehui Du, Zhiqing Cui, Zixiang Di
Date: 2025-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

The LLMSR@XLLM25 formulates a low-resource structural reasoning task that challenges LLMs to generate interpretable, step-by-step rationales with minimal labeled data. We present Less is More, the third-place winning approach in the LLMSR@XLLM25, which focuses on structured reasoning from only 24 labeled examples. Our approach leverages a multi-agent framework with reverse-prompt induction, retrieval-augmented reasoning synthesis via GPT-4o, and dual-stage reward-guided filtering to distill high-quality supervision across three subtasks: question parsing, CoT parsing, and step-level verification. All modules are fine-tuned from Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct under a unified LoRA+ setup. By combining structure validation with reward filtering across few-shot and zero-shot prompts, our pipeline consistently improves structure reasoning quality. These results underscore the value of controllable data distillation in enhancing structured inference under low-resource constraints. Our code is available at https://github.com/JhCircle/Less-is-More.
Not that Groove: Zero-Shot Symbolic Music Editing
Authors: Li Zhang
Date: 2025-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation

Most work in AI music generation focused on audio, which has seen limited use in the music production industry due to its rigidity. To maximize flexibility while assuming only textual instructions from producers, we are among the first to tackle symbolic music editing. We circumvent the known challenge of lack of labeled data by proving that LLMs with zero-shot prompting can effectively edit drum grooves. The recipe of success is a creatively designed format that interfaces LLMs and music, while we facilitate evaluation by providing an evaluation dataset with annotated unit tests that highly aligns with musicians' judgment.
Discriminative Finetuning of Generative Large Language Models without Reward Models and Human Preference Data
Authors: Siqi Guo, Ilgee Hong, Vicente Balmaseda, Changlong Yu, Liang Qiu, Xin Liu, Haoming Jiang, Tuo Zhao, Tianbao Yang
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) has become a crucial step for aligning pretrained large language models (LLMs) using supervised datasets of input-output pairs. However, despite being supervised, SFT is inherently limited by its generative training objective. To address its limitations, the existing common strategy is to follow SFT with a separate phase of preference optimization (PO), which relies on either human-labeled preference data or a strong reward model to guide the learning process. In this paper, we address the limitations of SFT by exploring one of the most successful techniques in conventional supervised learning: discriminative learning. We introduce Discriminative Fine-Tuning (DFT), an improved variant of SFT, which mitigates the burden of collecting human-labeled preference data or training strong reward models. Unlike SFT that employs a generative approach and overlooks negative data, DFT adopts a discriminative paradigm that increases the probability of positive answers while suppressing potentially negative ones, aiming for data prediction instead of token prediction. Our contributions include: (i) a discriminative probabilistic framework for fine-tuning LLMs by explicitly modeling the discriminative likelihood of an answer among all possible outputs given an input; (ii) efficient algorithms to optimize this discriminative likelihood; and (iii) extensive experiments demonstrating DFT's effectiveness, achieving performance better than SFT and comparable to if not better than SFT$\rightarrow$PO. The code can be found at https://github.com/Optimization-AI/DFT.
Hypernym Mercury: Token Optimization Through Semantic Field Constriction And Reconstruction From Hypernyms. A New Text Compression Method
Authors: Chris Forrester, Octavia Sulea
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Compression, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Text Compression, Token Reduction

Compute optimization using token reduction of LLM prompts is an emerging task in the fields of NLP and next generation, agentic AI. In this white paper, we introduce a novel (patent pending) text representation scheme and a first-of-its-kind word-level semantic compression of paragraphs that can lead to over 90% token reduction, while retaining high semantic similarity to the source text. We explain how this novel compression technique can be lossless and how the detail granularity is controllable. We discuss benchmark results over open source data (i.e. Bram Stoker's Dracula available through Project Gutenberg) and show how our results hold at the paragraph level, across multiple genres and models.
Task-Adaptive Semantic Communications with Controllable Diffusion-based Data Regeneration
Authors: Fupei Guo, Achintha Wijesinghe, Songyang Zhang, Zhi Ding
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Communication

Semantic communications represent a new paradigm of next-generation networking that shifts bit-wise data delivery to conveying the semantic meanings for bandwidth efficiency. To effectively accommodate various potential downstream tasks at the receiver side, one should adaptively convey the most critical semantic information. This work presents a novel task-adaptive semantic communication framework based on diffusion models that is capable of dynamically adjusting the semantic message delivery according to various downstream tasks. Specifically, we initialize the transmission of a deep-compressed general semantic representation from the transmitter to enable diffusion-based coarse data reconstruction at the receiver. The receiver identifies the task-specific demands and generates textual prompts as feedback. Integrated with the attention mechanism, the transmitter updates the semantic transmission with more details to better align with the objectives of the intended receivers. Our test results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in adaptively preserving critical task-relevant information for semantic communications while preserving high compression efficiency.
Assessing and Mitigating Medical Knowledge Drift and Conflicts in Large Language Models
Authors: Weiyi Wu, Xinwen Xu, Chongyang Gao, Xingjian Diao, Siting Li, Lucas A. Salas, Jiang Gui
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have great potential in the field of health care, yet they face great challenges in adapting to rapidly evolving medical knowledge. This can lead to outdated or contradictory treatment suggestions. This study investigated how LLMs respond to evolving clinical guidelines, focusing on concept drift and internal inconsistencies. We developed the DriftMedQA benchmark to simulate guideline evolution and assessed the temporal reliability of various LLMs. Our evaluation of seven state-of-the-art models across 4,290 scenarios demonstrated difficulties in rejecting outdated recommendations and frequently endorsing conflicting guidance. Additionally, we explored two mitigation strategies: Retrieval-Augmented Generation and preference fine-tuning via Direct Preference Optimization. While each method improved model performance, their combination led to the most consistent and reliable results. These findings underscore the need to improve LLM robustness to temporal shifts to ensure more dependable applications in clinical practice.
SciCom Wiki: Fact-Checking and FAIR Knowledge Distribution for Scientific Videos and Podcasts
Authors: Tim Wittenborg, Constantin Sebastian Tremel, Niklas Stehr, Oliver Karras, Markus Stocker, Sören Auer
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Knowledge Graphs, Misinformation

Democratic societies need accessible, reliable information. Videos and Podcasts have established themselves as the medium of choice for civic dissemination, but also as carriers of misinformation. The emerging Science Communication Knowledge Infrastructure (SciCom KI) curating non-textual media is still fragmented and not adequately equipped to scale against the content flood. Our work sets out to support the SciCom KI with a central, collaborative platform, the SciCom Wiki, to facilitate FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) media representation and the fact-checking of their content, particularly for videos and podcasts. Building an open-source service system centered around Wikibase, we survey requirements from 53 stakeholders, refine these in 11 interviews, and evaluate our prototype based on these requirements with another 14 participants. To address the most requested feature, fact-checking, we developed a neurosymbolic computational fact-checking approach, converting heterogenous media into knowledge graphs. This increases machine-readability and allows comparing statements against equally represented ground-truth. Our computational fact-checking tool was iteratively evaluated through 10 expert interviews, a public user survey with 43 participants verified the necessity and usability of our tool. Overall, our findings identified several needs to systematically support the SciCom KI. The SciCom Wiki, as a FAIR digital library complementing our neurosymbolic computational fact-checking framework, was found suitable to address the raised requirements. Further, we identified that the SciCom KI is severely underdeveloped regarding FAIR knowledge and related systems facilitating its collaborative creation and curation. Our system can provide a central knowledge node, yet a collaborative effort is required to scale against the imminent (mis-)information flood.
SEM: Reinforcement Learning for Search-Efficient Large Language Models
Authors: Zeyang Sha, Shiwen Cui, Weiqiang Wang
Date: 2025-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: MMLU, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Retrieval

Recent advancements in Large Language Models(LLMs) have demonstrated their capabilities not only in reasoning but also in invoking external tools, particularly search engines. However, teaching models to discern when to invoke search and when to rely on their internal knowledge remains a significant challenge. Existing reinforcement learning approaches often lead to redundant search behaviors, resulting in inefficiencies and over-cost. In this paper, we propose SEM, a novel post-training reinforcement learning framework that explicitly trains LLMs to optimize search usage. By constructing a balanced dataset combining MuSiQue and MMLU, we create scenarios where the model must learn to distinguish between questions it can answer directly and those requiring external retrieval. We design a structured reasoning template and employ Group Relative Policy Optimization(GRPO) to post-train the model's search behaviors. Our reward function encourages accurate answering without unnecessary search while promoting effective retrieval when needed. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces redundant search operations while maintaining or improving answer accuracy across multiple challenging benchmarks. This framework advances the model's reasoning efficiency and extends its capability to judiciously leverage external knowledge.
TSLFormer: A Lightweight Transformer Model for Turkish Sign Language Recognition Using Skeletal Landmarks
Authors: Kutay Ertürk, Furkan Altınışık, İrem Sarıaltın, Ömer Nezih Gerek
Date: 2025-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Sign Language Recognition

This study presents TSLFormer, a light and robust word-level Turkish Sign Language (TSL) recognition model that treats sign gestures as ordered, string-like language. Instead of using raw RGB or depth videos, our method only works with 3D joint positions - articulation points - extracted using Google's Mediapipe library, which focuses on the hand and torso skeletal locations. This creates efficient input dimensionality reduction while preserving important semantic gesture information. Our approach revisits sign language recognition as sequence-to-sequence translation, inspired by the linguistic nature of sign languages and the success of transformers in natural language processing. Since TSLFormer uses the self-attention mechanism, it effectively captures temporal co-occurrence within gesture sequences and highlights meaningful motion patterns as words unfold. Evaluated on the AUTSL dataset with over 36,000 samples and 227 different words, TSLFormer achieves competitive performance with minimal computational cost. These results show that joint-based input is sufficient for enabling real-time, mobile, and assistive communication systems for hearing-impaired individuals.
BioProBench: Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark in Biological Protocol Understanding and Reasoning
Authors: Yuyang Liu, Liuzhenghao Lv, Xiancheng Zhang, Li Yuan, Yonghong Tian
Date: 2025-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Biological protocols are fundamental to reproducible and safe life science research. While LLMs excel on general tasks, their systematic evaluation on these highly specialized, accuracy-critical, and inherently procedural texts remains limited. In this work, we present BioProBench, the first large-scale, integrated multi-task benchmark for biological protocol understanding and reasoning. While limited benchmarks have touched upon specific aspects like protocol QA, BioProBench provides a comprehensive suite of five core tasks: Protocol Question Answering, Step Ordering, Error Correction, Protocol Generation, and Protocol Reasoning, enabling a holistic evaluation of LLMs on procedural biological texts. Built upon 27K original protocols, it yields nearly 556K high-quality structured instances. We evaluate 12 mainstream open/closed-source LLMs on BioProBench. Experimental results reveal that while top models preform well on surface understanding tasks, struggle significantly with deep reasoning and structured generation tasks like ordering and generation. Furthermore, model comparisons reveal diverse performance: certain open-source models approach closed-source levels on some tasks, yet bio-specific small models lag behind general LLMs, indicating limitations on complex procedural content. Overall, our findings underscore that procedural reasoning within biological protocols represents a significant challenge for current LLMs. BioProBench serves as a standardized framework to diagnose these specific limitations and guide the development of AI systems better equipped for safely automating complex scientific procedures. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/YuyangSunshine/bioprotocolbench and https://huggingface.co/datasets/GreatCaptainNemo/BioProBench.
The Sound of Populism: Distinct Linguistic Features Across Populist Variants
Authors: Yu Wang, Runxi Yu, Zhongyuan Wang, Jing He
Date: 2025-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

This study explores the sound of populism by integrating the classic Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) features, which capture the emotional and stylistic tones of language, with a fine-tuned RoBERTa model, a state-of-the-art context-aware language model trained to detect nuanced expressions of populism. This approach allows us to uncover the auditory dimensions of political rhetoric in U.S. presidential inaugural and State of the Union addresses. We examine how four key populist dimensions (i.e., left-wing, right-wing, anti-elitism, and people-centrism) manifest in the linguistic markers of speech, drawing attention to both commonalities and distinct tonal shifts across these variants. Our findings reveal that populist rhetoric consistently features a direct, assertive ``sound" that forges a connection with ``the people'' and constructs a charismatic leadership persona. However, this sound is not simply informal but strategically calibrated. Notably, right-wing populism and people-centrism exhibit a more emotionally charged discourse, resonating with themes of identity, grievance, and crisis, in contrast to the relatively restrained emotional tones of left-wing and anti-elitist expressions.
Evaluating Financial Sentiment Analysis with Annotators Instruction Assisted Prompting: Enhancing Contextual Interpretation and Stock Prediction Accuracy
Authors: A M Muntasir Rahman, Ajim Uddin, Guiling "Grace" Wang
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Sentiment Analysis, Stock Prediction, Stock Price Prediction

Financial sentiment analysis (FSA) presents unique challenges to LLMs that surpass those in typical sentiment analysis due to the nuanced language used in financial contexts. The prowess of these models is often undermined by the inherent subjectivity of sentiment classifications in existing benchmark datasets like Financial Phrasebank. These datasets typically feature undefined sentiment classes that reflect the highly individualized perspectives of annotators, leading to significant variability in annotations. This variability results in an unfair expectation for LLMs during benchmarking, where they are tasked to conjecture the subjective viewpoints of human annotators without sufficient context. In this paper, we introduce the Annotators' Instruction Assisted Prompt, a novel evaluation prompt designed to redefine the task definition of FSA for LLMs. By integrating detailed task instructions originally intended for human annotators into the LLMs' prompt framework, AIAP aims to standardize the understanding of sentiment across both human and machine interpretations, providing a fair and context-rich foundation for sentiment analysis. We utilize a new dataset, WSBS, derived from the WallStreetBets subreddit to demonstrate how AIAP significantly enhances LLM performance by aligning machine operations with the refined task definitions. Experimental results demonstrate that AIAP enhances LLM performance significantly, with improvements up to 9.08. This context-aware approach not only yields incremental gains in performance but also introduces an innovative sentiment-indexing method utilizing model confidence scores. This method enhances stock price prediction models and extracts more value from the financial sentiment analysis, underscoring the significance of WSB as a critical source of financial text. Our research offers insights into both improving FSA through better evaluation methods.
Efficient Fairness Testing in Large Language Models: Prioritizing Metamorphic Relations for Bias Detection
Authors: Suavis Giramata, Madhusudan Srinivasan, Venkat Naidu Gudivada, Upulee Kanewala
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Bias Detection, Diversity, Fairness, Fault Detection, Sentence

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in various applications, raising critical concerns about fairness and potential biases in their outputs. This paper explores the prioritization of metamorphic relations (MRs) in metamorphic testing as a strategy to efficiently detect fairness issues within LLMs. Given the exponential growth of possible test cases, exhaustive testing is impractical; therefore, prioritizing MRs based on their effectiveness in detecting fairness violations is crucial. We apply a sentence diversity-based approach to compute and rank MRs to optimize fault detection. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed prioritization approach improves fault detection rates by 22% compared to random prioritization and 12% compared to distance-based prioritization, while reducing the time to the first failure by 15% and 8%, respectively. Furthermore, our approach performs within 5% of fault-based prioritization in effectiveness, while significantly reducing the computational cost associated with fault labeling. These results validate the effectiveness of diversity-based MR prioritization in enhancing fairness testing for LLMs.
CellVerse: Do Large Language Models Really Understand Cell Biology?
Authors: Fan Zhang, Tianyu Liu, Zhihong Zhu, Hao Wu, Haixin Wang, Donghao Zhou, Yefeng Zheng, Kun Wang, Xian Wu, Pheng-Ann Heng
Date: 2025-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Response Prediction, Question Answering

Recent studies have demonstrated the feasibility of modeling single-cell data as natural languages and the potential of leveraging powerful large language models (LLMs) for understanding cell biology. However, a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs' performance on language-driven single-cell analysis tasks still remains unexplored. Motivated by this challenge, we introduce CellVerse, a unified language-centric question-answering benchmark that integrates four types of single-cell multi-omics data and encompasses three hierarchical levels of single-cell analysis tasks: cell type annotation (cell-level), drug response prediction (drug-level), and perturbation analysis (gene-level). Going beyond this, we systematically evaluate the performance across 14 open-source and closed-source LLMs ranging from 160M to 671B on CellVerse. Remarkably, the experimental results reveal: (1) Existing specialist models (C2S-Pythia) fail to make reasonable decisions across all sub-tasks within CellVerse, while generalist models such as Qwen, Llama, GPT, and DeepSeek family models exhibit preliminary understanding capabilities within the realm of cell biology. (2) The performance of current LLMs falls short of expectations and has substantial room for improvement. Notably, in the widely studied drug response prediction task, none of the evaluated LLMs demonstrate significant performance improvement over random guessing. CellVerse offers the first large-scale empirical demonstration that significant challenges still remain in applying LLMs to cell biology. By introducing CellVerse, we lay the foundation for advancing cell biology through natural languages and hope this paradigm could facilitate next-generation single-cell analysis.