pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PHYBench: Holistic Evaluation of Physical Perception and Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authors: Shi Qiu, Shaoyang Guo, Zhuo-Yang Song, Yunbo Sun, Zeyu Cai, Jiashen Wei, Tianyu Luo, Yixuan Yin, Haoxu Zhang, Yi Hu, Chenyang Wang, Chencheng Tang, Haoling Chang, Qi Liu, Ziheng Zhou, Tianyu Zhang, Jingtian Zhang, Zhangyi Liu, Minghao Li, Yuku Zhang, Boxuan Jing, Xianqi Yin, Yutong Ren, Zizhuo Fu, Jiaming Ji, Weike Wang, Xudong Tian, Anqi Lv, Laifu Man, Jianxiang Li, Feiyu Tao, Qihua Sun, Zhou Liang, Yushu Mu, Zhongxuan Li, Jing-Jun Zhang, Shutao Zhang, Xiaotian Li, Xingqi Xia, Jiawei Lin, Zheyu Shen, Jiahang Chen, Qiuhao Xiong, Binran Wang, Fengyuan Wang, Ziyang Ni, Bohan Zhang, Fan Cui, Changkun Shao, Qing-Hong Cao, Ming-Xing Luo, Yaodong Yang, Muhan Zhang, Hua Xing Zhu
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00

Current benchmarks for evaluating the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant limitations: task oversimplification, data contamination, and flawed evaluation items. These deficiencies necessitate more rigorous assessment methods. To address these limitations, we introduce PHYBench, a benchmark of 500 original physics problems ranging from high school to Physics Olympiad difficulty. PHYBench addresses data contamination through original content and employs a systematic curation pipeline to eliminate flawed items. Evaluations show that PHYBench activates more tokens and provides stronger differentiation between reasoning models compared to other baselines like AIME 2024, OlympiadBench and GPQA. Even the best-performing model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, achieves only 36.9% accuracy compared to human experts' 61.9%. To further enhance evaluation precision, we introduce the Expression Edit Distance (EED) Score for mathematical expression assessment, which improves sample efficiency by 204% over binary scoring. Moreover, PHYBench effectively elicits multi-step and multi-condition reasoning, providing a platform for examining models' reasoning robustness, preferences, and deficiencies. The benchmark results and dataset are publicly available at https://www.phybench.cn/.
FISH-Tuning: Enhancing PEFT Methods with Fisher Information
Authors: Kang Xue, Ming Dong, Xinhui Tu, Tingting He
Date: 2025-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

The rapid growth in the parameter size of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred the development of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods to mitigate the substantial computational costs of fine-tuning. Among these, Fisher Induced Sparse uncHanging (FISH) Mask is a selection-based PEFT technique that identifies a critical subset of pre-trained parameters using approximate Fisher information. While addition-based and reparameterization-based PEFT methods like LoRA and Adapter already fine-tune only a small number of parameters, the newly introduced parameters within these methods themselves present an opportunity for further optimization. Selectively fine-tuning only the most impactful among these new parameters could further reduce resource consumption while maintaining, or even improving, fine-tuning effectiveness. In this paper, we propose \textbf{FISH-Tuning}, a novel approach that incorporates FISH Mask into such PEFT methods, including LoRA, Adapter, and their variants. By leveraging Fisher information to identify and update only the most significant parameters within these added or reparameterized components, FISH-Tuning aims to achieve superior performance without increasing training time or inference latency compared to the vanilla PEFT methods. Experimental results across various datasets and pre-trained models demonstrate that FISH-Tuning consistently outperforms the vanilla PEFT methods when using the same proportion of trainable parameters. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FISH-Tuning-6F7C.
SLOT: Sample-specific Language Model Optimization at Test-time
Authors: Yang Hu, Xingyu Zhang, Xueji Fang, Zhiyang Chen, Xiao Wang, Huatian Zhang, GuoJun Qi
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Model Optimization

We propose SLOT (Sample-specific Language Model Optimization at Test-time), a novel and parameter-efficient test-time inference approach that enhances a language model's ability to more accurately respond to individual prompts. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex instructions, leading to poor performances on those not well represented among general samples. To address this, SLOT conducts few optimization steps at test-time to update a light-weight sample-specific parameter vector. It is added to the final hidden layer before the output head, and enables efficient adaptation by caching the last layer features during per-sample optimization. By minimizing the cross-entropy loss on the input prompt only, SLOT helps the model better aligned with and follow each given instruction. In experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms the compared models across multiple benchmarks and LLMs. For example, Qwen2.5-7B with SLOT achieves an accuracy gain of 8.6% on GSM8K from 57.54% to 66.19%, while DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B with SLOT achieves a SOTA accuracy of 68.69% on GPQA among 70B-level models. Our code is available at https://github.com/maple-research-lab/SLOT.
UniEdit: A Unified Knowledge Editing Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Qizhou Chen, Dakan Wang, Taolin Zhang, Zaoming Yan, Chengsong You, Chengyu Wang, Xiaofeng He
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, knowledge editing, Knowledge Graphs, Model Editing

Model editing aims to enhance the accuracy and reliability of large language models (LLMs) by efficiently adjusting their internal parameters. Currently, most LLM editing datasets are confined to narrow knowledge domains and cover a limited range of editing evaluation. They often overlook the broad scope of editing demands and the diversity of ripple effects resulting from edits. In this context, we introduce UniEdit, a unified benchmark for LLM editing grounded in open-domain knowledge. First, we construct editing samples by selecting entities from 25 common domains across five major categories, utilizing the extensive triple knowledge available in open-domain knowledge graphs to ensure comprehensive coverage of the knowledge domains. To address the issues of generality and locality in editing, we design an Neighborhood Multi-hop Chain Sampling (NMCS) algorithm to sample subgraphs based on a given knowledge piece to entail comprehensive ripple effects to evaluate. Finally, we employ proprietary LLMs to convert the sampled knowledge subgraphs into natural language text, guaranteeing grammatical accuracy and syntactical diversity. Extensive statistical analysis confirms the scale, comprehensiveness, and diversity of our UniEdit benchmark. We conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple LLMs and editors, analyzing their performance to highlight strengths and weaknesses in editing across open knowledge domains and various evaluation criteria, thereby offering valuable insights for future research endeavors.
LLMSR@XLLM25: An Empirical Study of LLM for Structural Reasoning
Authors: Xinye Li, Mingqi Wan, Dianbo Sui
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00

We present Team asdfo123's submission to the LLMSR@XLLM25 shared task, which evaluates large language models on producing fine-grained, controllable, and interpretable reasoning processes. Systems must extract all problem conditions, decompose a chain of thought into statement-evidence pairs, and verify the logical validity of each pair. Leveraging only the off-the-shelf Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct, we craft a concise few-shot, multi-turn prompt that first enumerates all conditions and then guides the model to label, cite, and adjudicate every reasoning step. A lightweight post-processor based on regular expressions normalises spans and enforces the official JSON schema. Without fine-tuning, external retrieval, or ensembling, our method ranks 5th overall, achieving macro F1 scores on par with substantially more complex and resource-consuming pipelines. We conclude by analysing the strengths and limitations of our approach and outlining directions for future research in structural reasoning with LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/asdfo123/LLMSR-asdfo123.
ExpertSteer: Intervening in LLMs through Expert Knowledge
Authors: Weixuan Wang, Minghao Wu, Barry Haddow, Alexandra Birch
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet guiding them to follow desired behaviours during inference remains a significant challenge. Activation steering offers a promising method to control the generation process of LLMs by modifying their internal activations. However, existing methods commonly intervene in the model's behaviour using steering vectors generated by the model itself, which constrains their effectiveness to that specific model and excludes the possibility of leveraging powerful external expert models for steering. To address these limitations, we propose ExpertSteer, a novel approach that leverages arbitrary specialized expert models to generate steering vectors, enabling intervention in any LLMs. ExpertSteer transfers the knowledge from an expert model to a target LLM through a cohesive four-step process: first aligning representation dimensions with auto-encoders to enable cross-model transfer, then identifying intervention layer pairs based on mutual information analysis, next generating steering vectors from the expert model using Recursive Feature Machines, and finally applying these vectors on the identified layers during inference to selectively guide the target LLM without updating model parameters. We conduct comprehensive experiments using three LLMs on 15 popular benchmarks across four distinct domains. Experiments demonstrate that ExpertSteer significantly outperforms established baselines across diverse tasks at minimal cost.
Bidirectional LMs are Better Knowledge Memorizers? A Benchmark for Real-world Knowledge Injection
Authors: Yuwei Zhang, Wenhao Yu, Shangbin Feng, Yifan Zhu, Letian Peng, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, Jingbo Shang
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization, World Knowledge

Despite significant advances in large language models (LLMs), their knowledge memorization capabilities remain underexplored, due to the lack of standardized and high-quality test ground. In this paper, we introduce a novel, real-world and large-scale knowledge injection benchmark that evolves continuously over time without requiring human intervention. Specifically, we propose WikiDYK, which leverages recently-added and human-written facts from Wikipedia's "Did You Know..." entries. These entries are carefully selected by expert Wikipedia editors based on criteria such as verifiability and clarity. Each entry is converted into multiple question-answer pairs spanning diverse task formats from easy cloze prompts to complex multi-hop questions. WikiDYK contains 12,290 facts and 77,180 questions, which is also seamlessly extensible with future updates from Wikipedia editors. Extensive experiments using continued pre-training reveal a surprising insight: despite their prevalence in modern LLMs, Causal Language Models (CLMs) demonstrate significantly weaker knowledge memorization capabilities compared to Bidirectional Language Models (BiLMs), exhibiting a 23% lower accuracy in terms of reliability. To compensate for the smaller scales of current BiLMs, we introduce a modular collaborative framework utilizing ensembles of BiLMs as external knowledge repositories to integrate with LLMs. Experiment shows that our framework further improves the reliability accuracy by up to 29.1%.
HBO: Hierarchical Balancing Optimization for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models
Authors: Weixuan Wang, Minghao Wu, Barry Haddow, Alexandra Birch
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilevel Optimization

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on a mixture of diverse datasets poses challenges due to data imbalance and heterogeneity. Existing methods often address these issues across datasets (globally) but overlook the imbalance and heterogeneity within individual datasets (locally), which limits their effectiveness. We introduce Hierarchical Balancing Optimization (HBO), a novel method that enables LLMs to autonomously adjust data allocation during fine-tuning both across datasets (globally) and within each individual dataset (locally). HBO employs a bilevel optimization strategy with two types of actors: a Global Actor, which balances data sampling across different subsets of the training mixture, and several Local Actors, which optimizes data usage within each subset based on difficulty levels. These actors are guided by reward functions derived from the LLM's training state, which measure learning progress and relative performance improvement. We evaluate HBO on three LLM backbones across nine diverse tasks in multilingual and multitask setups. Results show that HBO consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving significant accuracy gains. Our in-depth analysis further demonstrates that both the global actor and local actors of HBO effectively adjust data usage during fine-tuning. HBO provides a comprehensive solution to the challenges of data imbalance and heterogeneity in LLM fine-tuning, enabling more effective training across diverse datasets.
LLM-Based Evaluation of Low-Resource Machine Translation: A Reference-less Dialect Guided Approach with a Refined Sylheti-English Benchmark
Authors: Md. Atiqur Rahman, Sabrina Islam, Mushfiqul Haque Omi
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence

Evaluating machine translation (MT) for low-resource languages poses a persistent challenge, primarily due to the limited availability of high quality reference translations. This issue is further exacerbated in languages with multiple dialects, where linguistic diversity and data scarcity hinder robust evaluation. Large Language Models (LLMs) present a promising solution through reference-free evaluation techniques; however, their effectiveness diminishes in the absence of dialect-specific context and tailored guidance. In this work, we propose a comprehensive framework that enhances LLM-based MT evaluation using a dialect guided approach. We extend the ONUBAD dataset by incorporating Sylheti-English sentence pairs, corresponding machine translations, and Direct Assessment (DA) scores annotated by native speakers. To address the vocabulary gap, we augment the tokenizer vocabulary with dialect-specific terms. We further introduce a regression head to enable scalar score prediction and design a dialect-guided (DG) prompting strategy. Our evaluation across multiple LLMs shows that the proposed pipeline consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving the highest gain of +0.1083 in Spearman correlation, along with improvements across other evaluation settings. The dataset and the code are available at https://github.com/180041123-Atiq/MTEonLowResourceLanguage.
Learning Auxiliary Tasks Improves Reference-Free Hallucination Detection in Open-Domain Long-Form Generation
Authors: Chengwei Qin, Wenxuan Zhou, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Nanshu Wang, Tengyu Xu, Alexander Radovic, Eryk Helenowski, Arya Talebzadeh, Aditya Tayade, Sinong Wang, Shafiq Joty, Han Fang, Hao Ma
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Form, Hallucination

Hallucination, the generation of factually incorrect information, remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), especially in open-domain long-form generation. Existing approaches for detecting hallucination in long-form tasks either focus on limited domains or rely heavily on external fact-checking tools, which may not always be available. In this work, we systematically investigate reference-free hallucination detection in open-domain long-form responses. Our findings reveal that internal states (e.g., model's output probability and entropy) alone are insufficient for reliably (i.e., better than random guessing) distinguishing between factual and hallucinated content. To enhance detection, we explore various existing approaches, including prompting-based methods, probing, and fine-tuning, with fine-tuning proving the most effective. To further improve the accuracy, we introduce a new paradigm, named RATE-FT, that augments fine-tuning with an auxiliary task for the model to jointly learn with the main task of hallucination detection. With extensive experiments and analysis using a variety of model families & datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our method, e.g., +3% over general fine-tuning methods on LongFact.
Teach2Eval: An Indirect Evaluation Method for LLM by Judging How It Teaches
Authors: YuHang Zhou, Xutian Chen, Yixin Cao, Yuchen Ni, Yu He, Siyu Tian, Xiang Liu, Jian Zhang, Chuanjun Ji, Guangnan Ye, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Memorization, Multiple-choice

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has outpaced the development of effective evaluation methods. Traditional benchmarks rely on task-specific metrics and static datasets, which often suffer from fairness issues, limited scalability, and contamination risks. In this paper, we introduce Teach2Eval, an indirect evaluation framework inspired by the Feynman Technique. Instead of directly testing LLMs on predefined tasks, our method evaluates a model's multiple abilities to teach weaker student models to perform tasks effectively. By converting open-ended tasks into standardized multiple-choice questions (MCQs) through teacher-generated feedback, Teach2Eval enables scalable, automated, and multi-dimensional assessment. Our approach not only avoids data leakage and memorization but also captures a broad range of cognitive abilities that are orthogonal to current benchmarks. Experimental results across 26 leading LLMs show strong alignment with existing human and model-based dynamic rankings, while offering additional interpretability for training guidance.
Distribution Prompting: Understanding the Expressivity of Language Models Through the Next-Token Distributions They Can Produce
Authors: Haojin Wang, Zining Zhu, Freda Shi
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00

Autoregressive neural language models (LMs) generate a probability distribution over tokens at each time step given a prompt. In this work, we attempt to systematically understand the probability distributions that LMs can produce, showing that some distributions are significantly harder to elicit than others. Specifically, for any target next-token distribution over the vocabulary, we attempt to find a prompt that induces the LM to output a distribution as close as possible to the target, using either soft or hard gradient-based prompt tuning. We find that (1) in general, distributions with very low or very high entropy are easier to approximate than those with moderate entropy; (2) among distributions with the same entropy, those containing ''outlier tokens'' are easier to approximate; (3) target distributions generated by LMs -- even LMs with different tokenizers -- are easier to approximate than randomly chosen targets. These results offer insights into the expressiveness of LMs and the challenges of using them as probability distribution proposers.
Leveraging Robust Optimization for LLM Alignment under Distribution Shifts
Authors: Mingye Zhu, Yi Liu, Zheren Fu, Yongdong Zhang, Zhendong Mao
Date: 2025-04-08 00:00:00

Preference alignment methods are increasingly critical for steering large language models (LLMs) to generate outputs consistent with human values. While recent approaches often rely on synthetic data generated by LLMs for scalability and cost-efficiency reasons, this reliance can introduce distribution shifts that undermine the nuanced representation of human preferences needed for desirable outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel distribution-aware optimization framework that improves preference alignment despite such shifts. Our approach first leverages well-learned classifiers to assign a calibration value to each training sample, quantifying its alignment with the target human-preferred distribution. These values are then incorporated into a robust optimization objective that minimizes the worst-case loss over regions of the data space most relevant to human preferences. By explicitly focusing optimization on the target distribution, our approach mitigates the impact of distributional mismatch and improves the generation of responses that better reflect intended values.
Examining Linguistic Shifts in Academic Writing Before and After the Launch of ChatGPT: A Study on Preprint Papers
Authors: Tong Bao, Yi Zhao, Jin Mao, Chengzhi Zhang
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have prompted academic concerns about their impact on academic writing. Existing studies have primarily examined LLM usage in academic writing through quantitative approaches, such as word frequency statistics and probability-based analyses. However, few have systematically examined the potential impact of LLMs on the linguistic characteristics of academic writing. To address this gap, we conducted a large-scale analysis across 823,798 abstracts published in last decade from arXiv dataset. Through the linguistic analysis of features such as the frequency of LLM-preferred words, lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, cohesion, readability and sentiment, the results indicate a significant increase in the proportion of LLM-preferred words in abstracts, revealing the widespread influence of LLMs on academic writing. Additionally, we observed an increase in lexical complexity and sentiment in the abstracts, but a decrease in syntactic complexity, suggesting that LLMs introduce more new vocabulary and simplify sentence structure. However, the significant decrease in cohesion and readability indicates that abstracts have fewer connecting words and are becoming more difficult to read. Moreover, our analysis reveals that scholars with weaker English proficiency were more likely to use the LLMs for academic writing, and focused on improving the overall logic and fluency of the abstracts. Finally, at discipline level, we found that scholars in Computer Science showed more pronounced changes in writing style, while the changes in Mathematics were minimal.
One-for-All Pruning: A Universal Model for Customized Compression of Large Language Models
Authors: Rongguang Ye, Ming Tang
Date: 2025-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: All

Existing pruning methods for large language models (LLMs) focus on achieving high compression rates while maintaining model performance. Although these methods have demonstrated satisfactory performance in handling a single user's compression request, their processing time increases linearly with the number of requests, making them inefficient for real-world scenarios with multiple simultaneous requests. To address this limitation, we propose a Univeral Model for Customized Compression (UniCuCo) for LLMs, which introduces a StratNet that learns to map arbitrary requests to their optimal pruning strategy. The challenge in training StratNet lies in the high computational cost of evaluating pruning strategies and the non-differentiable nature of the pruning process, which hinders gradient backpropagation for StratNet updates. To overcome these challenges, we leverage a Gaussian process to approximate the evaluation process. Since the gradient of the Gaussian process is computable, we can use it to approximate the gradient of the non-differentiable pruning process, thereby enabling StratNet updates. Experimental results show that UniCuCo is 28 times faster than baselines in processing 64 requests, while maintaining comparable accuracy to baselines.