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SubscribeMCTS: A Multi-Reference Chinese Text Simplification Dataset
Text simplification aims to make the text easier to understand by applying rewriting transformations. There has been very little research on Chinese text simplification for a long time. The lack of generic evaluation data is an essential reason for this phenomenon. In this paper, we introduce MCTS, a multi-reference Chinese text simplification dataset. We describe the annotation process of the dataset and provide a detailed analysis. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of several unsupervised methods and advanced large language models. We additionally provide Chinese text simplification parallel data that can be used for training, acquired by utilizing machine translation and English text simplification. We hope to build a basic understanding of Chinese text simplification through the foundational work and provide references for future research. All of the code and data are released at https://github.com/blcuicall/mcts/.
Rewriting Pre-Training Data Boosts LLM Performance in Math and Code
The performance of large language models (LLMs) in program synthesis and mathematical reasoning is fundamentally limited by the quality of their pre-training corpora. We introduce two openly licensed datasets, released under the Llama 3.3 Community License, that significantly enhance LLM performance by systematically rewriting public data. SwallowCode (approximately 16.1 billion tokens) refines Python snippets from The-Stack-v2 through a novel four-stage pipeline: syntax validation, pylint-based style filtering, and a two-stage LLM rewriting process that enforces style conformity and transforms snippets into self-contained, algorithmically efficient examples. Unlike prior methods that rely on exclusionary filtering or limited transformations, our transform-and-retain approach upgrades low-quality code, maximizing data utility. SwallowMath (approximately 2.3 billion tokens) enhances Finemath-4+ by removing boilerplate, restoring context, and reformatting solutions into concise, step-by-step explanations. Within a fixed 50 billion token training budget, continual pre-training of Llama-3.1-8B with SwallowCode boosts pass@1 by +17.0 on HumanEval and +17.7 on HumanEval+ compared to Stack-Edu, surpassing the baseline model's code generation capabilities. Similarly, substituting SwallowMath yields +12.4 accuracy on GSM8K and +7.6 on MATH. Ablation studies confirm that each pipeline stage contributes incrementally, with rewriting delivering the largest gains. All datasets, prompts, and checkpoints are publicly available, enabling reproducible research and advancing LLM pre-training for specialized domains.
Don't Transform the Code, Code the Transforms: Towards Precise Code Rewriting using LLMs
Tools for rewriting, refactoring and optimizing code should be fast and correct. Large language models (LLMs), by their nature, possess neither of these qualities. Yet, there remains tremendous opportunity in using LLMs to improve code. We explore the use of LLMs not to transform code, but to code transforms. We propose a chain-of-thought approach to synthesizing code transformations from a small number of input/output code examples that incorporates execution and feedback. Unlike the direct rewrite approach, LLM-generated transformations are easy to inspect, debug, and validate. The logic of the rewrite is explicitly coded and easy to adapt. The compute required to run code transformations is minute compared to that of LLM rewriting. We test our approach on 16 Python code transformations and find that LLM- generated transforms are perfectly precise for 7 of them and less imprecise than direct LLM rewriting on the others. We hope to encourage further research to improving the precision of LLM code rewriting.
Ineq-Comp: Benchmarking Human-Intuitive Compositional Reasoning in Automated Theorem Proving on Inequalities
LLM-based formal proof assistants (e.g., in Lean) hold great promise for automating mathematical discovery. But beyond syntactic correctness, do these systems truly understand mathematical structure as humans do? We investigate this question through the lens of mathematical inequalities -- a fundamental tool across many domains. While modern provers can solve basic inequalities, we probe their ability to handle human-intuitive compositionality. We introduce Ineq-Comp, a benchmark built from elementary inequalities through systematic transformations, including variable duplication, algebraic rewriting, and multi-step composition. Although these problems remain easy for humans, we find that most provers -- including Goedel, STP, and Kimina-7B -- struggle significantly. DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B shows relative robustness -- possibly because it is trained to decompose the problems into sub-problems -- but still suffers a 20\% performance drop (pass@32). Strikingly, performance remains poor for all models even when formal proofs of the constituent parts are provided in context, revealing that the source of weakness is indeed in compositional reasoning. Our results expose a persisting gap between the generalization behavior of current AI provers and human mathematical intuition.
High-performance symbolic-numerics via multiple dispatch
As mathematical computing becomes more democratized in high-level languages, high-performance symbolic-numeric systems are necessary for domain scientists and engineers to get the best performance out of their machine without deep knowledge of code optimization. Naturally, users need different term types either to have different algebraic properties for them, or to use efficient data structures. To this end, we developed Symbolics.jl, an extendable symbolic system which uses dynamic multiple dispatch to change behavior depending on the domain needs. In this work we detail an underlying abstract term interface which allows for speed without sacrificing generality. We show that by formalizing a generic API on actions independent of implementation, we can retroactively add optimized data structures to our system without changing the pre-existing term rewriters. We showcase how this can be used to optimize term construction and give a 113x acceleration on general symbolic transformations. Further, we show that such a generic API allows for complementary term-rewriting implementations. We demonstrate the ability to swap between classical term-rewriting simplifiers and e-graph-based term-rewriting simplifiers. We showcase an e-graph ruleset which minimizes the number of CPU cycles during expression evaluation, and demonstrate how it simplifies a real-world reaction-network simulation to halve the runtime. Additionally, we show a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation solver which is able to be automatically converted into symbolic expressions via multiple dispatch tracing, which is subsequently accelerated and parallelized to give a 157x simulation speedup. Together, this presents Symbolics.jl as a next-generation symbolic-numeric computing environment geared towards modeling and simulation.
Query Rewriting via LLMs
Query rewriting is a classical technique for transforming complex declarative SQL queries into ``lean'' equivalents that are conducive to (a) faster execution from a performance perspective, and (b) better understanding from a developer perspective. The rewriting is typically achieved via transformation rules, but these rules are limited in scope and difficult to update in a production system. In recent times, LLM-based techniques have also been mooted, but they are prone to both semantic and syntactic errors. We investigate here, how the remarkable cognitive capabilities of LLMs can be leveraged for performant query rewriting while incorporating safeguards and optimizations to ensure correctness and efficiency. Our study shows that these goals can be progressively achieved through incorporation of (a) an ensemble suite of basic prompts, (b) database-sensitive prompts via redundancy removal and selectivity-based rewriting rules, and (c) LLM token probability-guided rewrite paths. Further, a suite of statistical and logic-based tools can be used to guard against errors produced by the model. We have implemented the above LLM-infused techniques in the LITHE system, and evaluated complex analytic queries from multiple benchmarks on contemporary database platforms. The results show significant improvements over SOTA rewriting techniques -- for instance, on TPC-DS, LITHE constructed productive (>1.5x speedup) rewrites for two-thirds of the query suite, delivering four times more coverage than SOTA. Further, the geometric mean of its estimated execution speedups was an order-of-magnitude jump over SOTA performance. In essence, LITHE offers a potent and robust LLM-based intermediary between enterprise applications and database engines.
RewriteLM: An Instruction-Tuned Large Language Model for Text Rewriting
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in long-form text generation tasks expressed through natural language instructions. However, user expectations for long-form text rewriting is high, and unintended rewrites (''hallucinations'') produced by the model can negatively impact its overall performance. Existing evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on limited rewriting styles and sentence-level rewriting rather than long-form open-ended rewriting.We introduce OpenRewriteEval, a novel benchmark that covers a wide variety of rewriting types expressed through natural language instructions. It is specifically designed to facilitate the evaluation of open-ended rewriting of long-form texts. In addition, we propose a strong baseline model, RewriteLM, an instruction-tuned large language model for long-form text rewriting. We develop new strategies that facilitate the generation of diverse instructions and preference data with minimal human intervention. We conduct empirical experiments and demonstrate that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art LLMs in text rewriting. Specifically, it excels in preserving the essential content and meaning of the source text, minimizing the generation of ''hallucinated'' content, while showcasing the ability to generate rewrites with diverse wording and structures.
LLM-R2: A Large Language Model Enhanced Rule-based Rewrite System for Boosting Query Efficiency
Query rewrite, which aims to generate more efficient queries by altering a SQL query's structure without changing the query result, has been an important research problem. In order to maintain equivalence between the rewritten query and the original one during rewriting, traditional query rewrite methods always rewrite the queries following certain rewrite rules. However, some problems still remain. Firstly, existing methods of finding the optimal choice or sequence of rewrite rules are still limited and the process always costs a lot of resources. Methods involving discovering new rewrite rules typically require complicated proofs of structural logic or extensive user interactions. Secondly, current query rewrite methods usually rely highly on DBMS cost estimators which are often not accurate. In this paper, we address these problems by proposing a novel method of query rewrite named LLM-R2, adopting a large language model (LLM) to propose possible rewrite rules for a database rewrite system. To further improve the inference ability of LLM in recommending rewrite rules, we train a contrastive model by curriculum to learn query representations and select effective query demonstrations for the LLM. Experimental results have shown that our method can significantly improve the query execution efficiency and outperform the baseline methods. In addition, our method enjoys high robustness across different datasets.
Query Rewriting via Large Language Models
Query rewriting is one of the most effective techniques for coping with poorly written queries before passing them down to the query optimizer. Manual rewriting is not scalable, as it is error-prone and requires deep expertise. Similarly, traditional query rewriting algorithms can only handle a small subset of queries: rule-based techniques do not generalize to new query patterns and synthesis-based techniques cannot handle complex queries. Fortunately, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), equipped with broad general knowledge and advanced reasoning capabilities, has created hopes for solving some of these previously open problems. In this paper, we present GenRewrite, the first holistic system that leverages LLMs for query rewriting. We introduce the notion of Natural Language Rewrite Rules (NLR2s), and use them as hints to the LLM but also a means for transferring knowledge from rewriting one query to another, and thus becoming smarter and more effective over time. We present a novel counterexample-guided technique that iteratively corrects the syntactic and semantic errors in the rewritten query, significantly reducing the LLM costs and the manual effort required for verification. GenRewrite speeds up 22 out of 99 TPC queries (the most complex public benchmark) by more than 2x, which is 2.5x--3.2x higher coverage than state-of-the-art traditional query rewriting and 2.1x higher than the out-of-the-box LLM baseline.
Exploring Rewriting Approaches for Different Conversational Tasks
Conversational assistants often require a question rewriting algorithm that leverages a subset of past interactions to provide a more meaningful (accurate) answer to the user's question or request. However, the exact rewriting approach may often depend on the use case and application-specific tasks supported by the conversational assistant, among other constraints. In this paper, we systematically investigate two different approaches, denoted as rewriting and fusion, on two fundamentally different generation tasks, including a text-to-text generation task and a multimodal generative task that takes as input text and generates a visualization or data table that answers the user's question. Our results indicate that the specific rewriting or fusion approach highly depends on the underlying use case and generative task. In particular, we find that for a conversational question-answering assistant, the query rewriting approach performs best, whereas for a data analysis assistant that generates visualizations and data tables based on the user's conversation with the assistant, the fusion approach works best. Notably, we explore two datasets for the data analysis assistant use case, for short and long conversations, and we find that query fusion always performs better, whereas for the conversational text-based question-answering, the query rewrite approach performs best.
Tailored Visions: Enhancing Text-to-Image Generation with Personalized Prompt Rewriting
Despite significant progress in the field, it is still challenging to create personalized visual representations that align closely with the desires and preferences of individual users. This process requires users to articulate their ideas in words that are both comprehensible to the models and accurately capture their vision, posing difficulties for many users. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by leveraging historical user interactions with the system to enhance user prompts. We propose a novel approach that involves rewriting user prompts based on a newly collected large-scale text-to-image dataset with over 300k prompts from 3115 users. Our rewriting model enhances the expressiveness and alignment of user prompts with their intended visual outputs. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods over baseline approaches, as evidenced in our new offline evaluation method and online tests. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zzjchen/Tailored-Visions .
ReForm: Reflective Autoformalization with Prospective Bounded Sequence Optimization
Autoformalization, which translates natural language mathematics into machine-verifiable formal statements, is critical for using formal mathematical reasoning to solve math problems stated in natural language. While Large Language Models can generate syntactically correct formal statements, they often fail to preserve the original problem's semantic intent. This limitation arises from the LLM approaches' treating autoformalization as a simplistic translation task which lacks mechanisms for self-reflection and iterative refinement that human experts naturally employ. To address these issues, we propose ReForm, a Reflective Autoformalization method that tightly integrates semantic consistency evaluation into the autoformalization process. This enables the model to iteratively generate formal statements, assess its semantic fidelity, and self-correct identified errors through progressive refinement. To effectively train this reflective model, we introduce Prospective Bounded Sequence Optimization (PBSO), which employs different rewards at different sequence positions to ensure that the model develops both accurate autoformalization and correct semantic validations, preventing superficial critiques that would undermine the purpose of reflection. Extensive experiments across four autoformalization benchmarks demonstrate that ReForm achieves an average improvement of 17.2 percentage points over the strongest baselines. To further ensure evaluation reliability, we introduce ConsistencyCheck, a benchmark of 859 expert-annotated items that not only validates LLMs as judges but also reveals that autoformalization is inherently difficult: even human experts produce semantic errors in up to 38.5% of cases.
Enhancing Conversational Search: Large Language Model-Aided Informative Query Rewriting
Query rewriting plays a vital role in enhancing conversational search by transforming context-dependent user queries into standalone forms. Existing approaches primarily leverage human-rewritten queries as labels to train query rewriting models. However, human rewrites may lack sufficient information for optimal retrieval performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose utilizing large language models (LLMs) as query rewriters, enabling the generation of informative query rewrites through well-designed instructions. We define four essential properties for well-formed rewrites and incorporate all of them into the instruction. In addition, we introduce the role of rewrite editors for LLMs when initial query rewrites are available, forming a "rewrite-then-edit" process. Furthermore, we propose distilling the rewriting capabilities of LLMs into smaller models to reduce rewriting latency. Our experimental evaluation on the QReCC dataset demonstrates that informative query rewrites can yield substantially improved retrieval performance compared to human rewrites, especially with sparse retrievers.
PRewrite: Prompt Rewriting with Reinforcement Learning
Prompt engineering is critical for the development of LLM-based applications. However, it is usually done manually in a "trial and error" fashion. This manual procedure can be time consuming, ineffective, and the generated prompts are, in a lot of cases, sub-optimal. Even for the prompts which seemingly work well, there is always a lingering question: can the prompts be made better with further modifications? To address these questions, in this paper, we investigate prompt engineering automation. We consider a specific use case scenario in which developers/users have drafted initial prompts, but lack the time/expertise to optimize them. We propose PRewrite, an automated tool to rewrite these drafts and to generate highly effective new prompts. PRewrite is based on the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework which allows for end-to-end optimization and our design allows the RL search to happen in a large action space. The automated tool leverages manually crafted prompts as starting points which makes the rewriting procedure more guided and efficient. The generated prompts are human readable, and self-explanatory, unlike some of those in previous works. We conducted extensive experiments on diverse datasets and found that the prompts generated with this new method not only outperform professionally crafted prompts, but also prompts generated with other previously proposed methods.
Crafting the Path: Robust Query Rewriting for Information Retrieval
Query rewriting aims to generate a new query that can complement the original query to improve the information retrieval system. Recent studies on query rewriting, such as query2doc (Q2D), query2expand (Q2E) and querey2cot (Q2C), rely on the internal knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate a relevant passage to add information to the query. Nevertheless, the efficacy of these methodologies may markedly decline in instances where the requisite knowledge is not encapsulated within the model's intrinsic parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel structured query rewriting method called Crafting the Path tailored for retrieval systems. Crafting the Path involves a three-step process that crafts query-related information necessary for finding the passages to be searched in each step. Specifically, the Crafting the Path begins with Query Concept Comprehension, proceeds to Query Type Identification, and finally conducts Expected Answer Extraction. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous rewriting methods, especially in less familiar domains for LLMs. We demonstrate that our method is less dependent on the internal parameter knowledge of the model and generates queries with fewer factual inaccuracies. Furthermore, we observe that Crafting the Path has less latency compared to the baselines.
RE-Adapt: Reverse Engineered Adaptation of Large Language Models
We introduce RE-Adapt, an approach to fine-tuning large language models on new domains without degrading any pre-existing instruction-tuning. We reverse engineer an adapter which isolates what an instruction-tuned model has learned beyond its corresponding pretrained base model. Importantly, this requires no additional data or training. We can then fine-tune the base model on a new domain and readapt it to instruction following with the reverse engineered adapter. RE-Adapt and our low-rank variant LoRE-Adapt both outperform other methods of fine-tuning, across multiple popular LLMs and datasets, even when the models are used in conjunction with retrieval-augmented generation.
Recycling the Web: A Method to Enhance Pre-training Data Quality and Quantity for Language Models
Scaling laws predict that the performance of large language models improves with increasing model size and data size. In practice, pre-training has been relying on massive web crawls, using almost all data sources publicly available on the internet so far. However, this pool of natural data does not grow at the same rate as the compute supply. Furthermore, the availability of high-quality texts is even more limited: data filtering pipelines often remove up to 99% of the initial web scrapes to achieve state-of-the-art. To address the "data wall" of pre-training scaling, our work explores ways to transform and recycle data discarded in existing filtering processes. We propose REWIRE, REcycling the Web with guIded REwrite, a method to enrich low-quality documents so that they could become useful for training. This in turn allows us to increase the representation of synthetic data in the final pre-training set. Experiments at 1B, 3B and 7B scales of the DCLM benchmark show that mixing high-quality raw texts and our rewritten texts lead to 1.0, 1.3 and 2.5 percentage points improvement respectively across 22 diverse tasks, compared to training on only filtered web data. Training on the raw-synthetic data mix is also more effective than having access to 2x web data. Through further analysis, we demonstrate that about 82% of the mixed in texts come from transforming lower-quality documents that would otherwise be discarded. REWIRE also outperforms related approaches of generating synthetic data, including Wikipedia-style paraphrasing, question-answer synthesizing and knowledge extraction. These results suggest that recycling web texts holds the potential for being a simple and effective approach for scaling pre-training data.
Adaptive Query Rewriting: Aligning Rewriters through Marginal Probability of Conversational Answers
Query rewriting is a crucial technique for passage retrieval in open-domain conversational question answering (CQA). It decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. Existing methods attempt to incorporate retriever's preference during the training of rewriting models. However, these approaches typically rely on extensive annotations such as in-domain rewrites and/or relevant passage labels, limiting the models' generalization and adaptation capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AdaQR (Adaptive Query Rewriting), a framework for training query rewriting models with limited rewrite annotations from seed datasets and completely no passage label. Our approach begins by fine-tuning compact large language models using only ~10% of rewrite annotations from the seed dataset training split. The models are then utilized to generate rewrite candidates for each query instance. A novel approach is then proposed to assess retriever's preference for these candidates by the probability of answers conditioned on the conversational query by marginalizing the Top-K passages. This serves as the reward for optimizing the rewriter further using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a process free of rewrite and retrieval annotations. Experimental results on four open-domain CQA datasets demonstrate that AdaQR not only enhances the in-domain capabilities of the rewriter with limited annotation requirement, but also adapts effectively to out-of-domain datasets.
Towards an On-device Agent for Text Rewriting
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for text rewriting. Nonetheless, the large sizes of these models make them impractical for on-device inference, which would otherwise allow for enhanced privacy and economical inference. Creating a smaller yet potent language model for text rewriting presents a formidable challenge because it requires balancing the need for a small size with the need to retain the emergent capabilities of the LLM, that requires costly data collection. To address the above challenge, we introduce a new instruction tuning approach for building a mobile-centric text rewriting model. Our strategies enable the generation of high quality training data without any human labeling. In addition, we propose a heuristic reinforcement learning framework which substantially enhances performance without requiring preference data. To further bridge the performance gap with the larger server-side model, we propose an effective approach that combines the mobile rewrite agent with the server model using a cascade. To tailor the text rewriting tasks to mobile scenarios, we introduce MessageRewriteEval, a benchmark that focuses on text rewriting for messages through natural language instructions. Through empirical experiments, we demonstrate that our on-device model surpasses the current state-of-the-art LLMs in text rewriting while maintaining a significantly reduced model size. Notably, we show that our proposed cascading approach improves model performance.
Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision
We consider the problem of automatically generating longer stories of over two thousand words. Compared to prior work on shorter stories, long-range plot coherence and relevance are more central challenges here. We propose the Recursive Reprompting and Revision framework (Re3) to address these challenges by (a) prompting a general-purpose language model to construct a structured overarching plan, and (b) generating story passages by repeatedly injecting contextual information from both the plan and current story state into a language model prompt. We then revise by (c) reranking different continuations for plot coherence and premise relevance, and finally (d) editing the best continuation for factual consistency. Compared to similar-length stories generated directly from the same base model, human evaluators judged substantially more of Re3's stories as having a coherent overarching plot (by 14% absolute increase), and relevant to the given initial premise (by 20%).
An Exploration of Left-Corner Transformations
The left-corner transformation (Rosenkrantz and Lewis, 1970) is used to remove left recursion from context-free grammars, which is an important step towards making the grammar parsable top-down with simple techniques. This paper generalizes prior left-corner transformations to support semiring-weighted production rules and to provide finer-grained control over which left corners may be moved. Our generalized left-corner transformation (GLCT) arose from unifying the left-corner transformation and speculation transformation (Eisner and Blatz, 2007), originally for logic programming. Our new transformation and speculation define equivalent weighted languages. Yet, their derivation trees are structurally different in an important way: GLCT replaces left recursion with right recursion, and speculation does not. We also provide several technical results regarding the formal relationships between the outputs of GLCT, speculation, and the original grammar. Lastly, we empirically investigate the efficiency of GLCT for left-recursion elimination from grammars of nine languages.
Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) play powerful, black-box readers in the retrieve-then-read pipeline, making remarkable progress in knowledge-intensive tasks. This work introduces a new framework, Rewrite-Retrieve-Read instead of the previous retrieve-then-read for the retrieval-augmented LLMs from the perspective of the query rewriting. Unlike prior studies focusing on adapting either the retriever or the reader, our approach pays attention to the adaptation of the search query itself, for there is inevitably a gap between the input text and the needed knowledge in retrieval. We first prompt an LLM to generate the query, then use a web search engine to retrieve contexts. Furthermore, to better align the query to the frozen modules, we propose a trainable scheme for our pipeline. A small language model is adopted as a trainable rewriter to cater to the black-box LLM reader. The rewriter is trained using the feedback of the LLM reader by reinforcement learning. Evaluation is conducted on downstream tasks, open-domain QA and multiple-choice QA. Experiments results show consistent performance improvement, indicating that our framework is proven effective and scalable, and brings a new framework for retrieval-augmented LLM.
ProofNet: Autoformalizing and Formally Proving Undergraduate-Level Mathematics
We introduce ProofNet, a benchmark for autoformalization and formal proving of undergraduate-level mathematics. The ProofNet benchmarks consists of 371 examples, each consisting of a formal theorem statement in Lean 3, a natural language theorem statement, and a natural language proof. The problems are primarily drawn from popular undergraduate pure mathematics textbooks and cover topics such as real and complex analysis, linear algebra, abstract algebra, and topology. We intend for ProofNet to be a challenging benchmark that will drive progress in autoformalization and automatic theorem proving. We report baseline results on statement autoformalization via in-context learning. Moreover, we introduce two novel statement autoformalization methods: prompt retrieval and distilled backtranslation.
RE-IMAGINE: Symbolic Benchmark Synthesis for Reasoning Evaluation
Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have reported high accuracy on reasoning benchmarks. However, it is still unclear whether the observed results arise from true reasoning or from statistical recall of the training set. Inspired by the ladder of causation (Pearl, 2009) and its three levels (associations, interventions and counterfactuals), this paper introduces RE-IMAGINE, a framework to characterize a hierarchy of reasoning ability in LLMs, alongside an automated pipeline to generate problem variations at different levels of the hierarchy. By altering problems in an intermediate symbolic representation, RE-IMAGINE generates arbitrarily many problems that are not solvable using memorization alone. Moreover, the framework is general and can work across reasoning domains, including math, code, and logic. We demonstrate our framework on four widely-used benchmarks to evaluate several families of LLMs, and observe reductions in performance when the models are queried with problem variations. These assessments indicate a degree of reliance on statistical recall for past performance, and open the door to further research targeting skills across the reasoning hierarchy.
ParaRev: Building a dataset for Scientific Paragraph Revision annotated with revision instruction
Revision is a crucial step in scientific writing, where authors refine their work to improve clarity, structure, and academic quality. Existing approaches to automated writing assistance often focus on sentence-level revisions, which fail to capture the broader context needed for effective modification. In this paper, we explore the impact of shifting from sentence-level to paragraph-level scope for the task of scientific text revision. The paragraph level definition of the task allows for more meaningful changes, and is guided by detailed revision instructions rather than general ones. To support this task, we introduce ParaRev, the first dataset of revised scientific paragraphs with an evaluation subset manually annotated with revision instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that using detailed instructions significantly improves the quality of automated revisions compared to general approaches, no matter the model or the metric considered.
Understanding Iterative Revision from Human-Written Text
Writing is, by nature, a strategic, adaptive, and more importantly, an iterative process. A crucial part of writing is editing and revising the text. Previous works on text revision have focused on defining edit intention taxonomies within a single domain or developing computational models with a single level of edit granularity, such as sentence-level edits, which differ from human's revision cycles. This work describes IteraTeR: the first large-scale, multi-domain, edit-intention annotated corpus of iteratively revised text. In particular, IteraTeR is collected based on a new framework to comprehensively model the iterative text revisions that generalize to various domains of formal writing, edit intentions, revision depths, and granularities. When we incorporate our annotated edit intentions, both generative and edit-based text revision models significantly improve automatic evaluations. Through our work, we better understand the text revision process, making vital connections between edit intentions and writing quality, enabling the creation of diverse corpora to support computational modeling of iterative text revisions.
Language Modeling with Editable External Knowledge
When the world changes, so does the text that humans write about it. How do we build language models that can be easily updated to reflect these changes? One popular approach is retrieval-augmented generation, in which new documents are inserted into a knowledge base and retrieved during prediction for downstream tasks. Most prior work on these systems have focused on improving behavior during prediction through better retrieval or reasoning. This paper introduces ERASE, which instead improves model behavior when new documents are acquired, by incrementally deleting or rewriting other entries in the knowledge base each time a document is added. In two new benchmark datasets evaluating models' ability to answer questions about a stream of news articles or conversations, ERASE improves accuracy relative to conventional retrieval-augmented generation by 7-13% (Mixtral-8x7B) and 6-10% (Llama-3-8B) absolute. Code and data are available at https://github.com/belindal/ERASE
RaFe: Ranking Feedback Improves Query Rewriting for RAG
As Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) techniques have evolved, query rewriting has been widely incorporated into the RAG system for downstream tasks like open-domain QA. Many works have attempted to utilize small models with reinforcement learning rather than costly LLMs to improve query rewriting. However, current methods require annotations (e.g., labeled relevant documents or downstream answers) or predesigned rewards for feedback, which lack generalization, and fail to utilize signals tailored for query rewriting. In this paper, we propose ours, a framework for training query rewriting models free of annotations. By leveraging a publicly available reranker, ours~provides feedback aligned well with the rewriting objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that ours~can obtain better performance than baselines.
Context Aware Query Rewriting for Text Rankers using LLM
Query rewriting refers to an established family of approaches that are applied to underspecified and ambiguous queries to overcome the vocabulary mismatch problem in document ranking. Queries are typically rewritten during query processing time for better query modelling for the downstream ranker. With the advent of large-language models (LLMs), there have been initial investigations into using generative approaches to generate pseudo documents to tackle this inherent vocabulary gap. In this work, we analyze the utility of LLMs for improved query rewriting for text ranking tasks. We find that there are two inherent limitations of using LLMs as query re-writers -- concept drift when using only queries as prompts and large inference costs during query processing. We adopt a simple, yet surprisingly effective, approach called context aware query rewriting (CAR) to leverage the benefits of LLMs for query understanding. Firstly, we rewrite ambiguous training queries by context-aware prompting of LLMs, where we use only relevant documents as context.Unlike existing approaches, we use LLM-based query rewriting only during the training phase. Eventually, a ranker is fine-tuned on the rewritten queries instead of the original queries during training. In our extensive experiments, we find that fine-tuning a ranker using re-written queries offers a significant improvement of up to 33% on the passage ranking task and up to 28% on the document ranking task when compared to the baseline performance of using original queries.
Domain Expansion of Image Generators
Can one inject new concepts into an already trained generative model, while respecting its existing structure and knowledge? We propose a new task - domain expansion - to address this. Given a pretrained generator and novel (but related) domains, we expand the generator to jointly model all domains, old and new, harmoniously. First, we note the generator contains a meaningful, pretrained latent space. Is it possible to minimally perturb this hard-earned representation, while maximally representing the new domains? Interestingly, we find that the latent space offers unused, "dormant" directions, which do not affect the output. This provides an opportunity: By "repurposing" these directions, we can represent new domains without perturbing the original representation. In fact, we find that pretrained generators have the capacity to add several - even hundreds - of new domains! Using our expansion method, one "expanded" model can supersede numerous domain-specific models, without expanding the model size. Additionally, a single expanded generator natively supports smooth transitions between domains, as well as composition of domains. Code and project page available at https://yotamnitzan.github.io/domain-expansion/.
Can Question Rewriting Help Conversational Question Answering?
Question rewriting (QR) is a subtask of conversational question answering (CQA) aiming to ease the challenges of understanding dependencies among dialogue history by reformulating questions in a self-contained form. Despite seeming plausible, little evidence is available to justify QR as a mitigation method for CQA. To verify the effectiveness of QR in CQA, we investigate a reinforcement learning approach that integrates QR and CQA tasks and does not require corresponding QR datasets for targeted CQA. We find, however, that the RL method is on par with the end-to-end baseline. We provide an analysis of the failure and describe the difficulty of exploiting QR for CQA.
A Meta-Evaluation of Style and Attribute Transfer Metrics
LLMs make it easy to rewrite text in any style, be it more polite, persuasive, or more positive. We present a large-scale study of evaluation metrics for style and attribute transfer with a focus on content preservation; meaning content not attributed to the style shift is preserved. The de facto evaluation approach uses lexical or semantic similarity metrics often between source sentences and rewrites. While these metrics are not designed to distinguish between style or content differences, empirical meta-evaluation shows a reasonable correlation to human judgment. In fact, recent works find that LLMs prompted as evaluators are only comparable to semantic similarity metrics, even though intuitively, the LLM approach should better fit the task. To investigate this discrepancy, we benchmark 8 metrics for evaluating content preservation on existing datasets and additionally construct a new test set that better aligns with the meta-evaluation aim. Indeed, we then find that the empirical conclusion aligns with the intuition: content preservation metrics for style/attribute transfer must be conditional on the style shift. To support this, we propose a new efficient zero-shot evaluation method using the likelihood of the next token. We hope our meta-evaluation can foster more research on evaluating content preservation metrics, and also to ensure fair evaluation of methods for conducting style transfer.
Discourse-Aware Text Simplification: From Complex Sentences to Linked Propositions
Sentences that present a complex syntax act as a major stumbling block for downstream Natural Language Processing applications whose predictive quality deteriorates with sentence length and complexity. The task of Text Simplification (TS) may remedy this situation. It aims to modify sentences in order to make them easier to process, using a set of rewriting operations, such as reordering, deletion, or splitting. State-of-the-art syntactic TS approaches suffer from two major drawbacks: first, they follow a very conservative approach in that they tend to retain the input rather than transforming it, and second, they ignore the cohesive nature of texts, where context spread across clauses or sentences is needed to infer the true meaning of a statement. To address these problems, we present a discourse-aware TS approach that splits and rephrases complex English sentences within the semantic context in which they occur. Based on a linguistically grounded transformation stage that uses clausal and phrasal disembedding mechanisms, complex sentences are transformed into shorter utterances with a simple canonical structure that can be easily analyzed by downstream applications. With sentence splitting, we thus address a TS task that has hardly been explored so far. Moreover, we introduce the notion of minimality in this context, as we aim to decompose source sentences into a set of self-contained minimal semantic units. To avoid breaking down the input into a disjointed sequence of statements that is difficult to interpret because important contextual information is missing, we incorporate the semantic context between the split propositions in the form of hierarchical structures and semantic relationships. In that way, we generate a semantic hierarchy of minimal propositions that leads to a novel representation of complex assertions that puts a semantic layer on top of the simplified sentences.
PBEBench: A Multi-Step Programming by Examples Reasoning Benchmark inspired by Historical Linguistics
Although many benchmarks evaluate the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) within domains such as mathematics, coding, or data wrangling, few abstract away from domain specifics to examine reasoning as a capability in and of itself. We contribute a novel type of benchmark evaluating the inductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs that is inspired by the forward reconstruction task from historical linguistics but is formulated in an extremely simple, general way (in the form of Programming by Examples). The task involves generating a cascade of simple string rewrite programs to transform a given list of input strings into a list of desired output strings. We present a fully automated pipeline that programmatically generates problems of this type with controllable difficulty, enabling scalable evaluation of reasoning models while avoiding contamination. Using this approach, we construct two benchmarks: PBEBench-Lite, which efficiently stratifies models of varying capabilities, and PBEBench, which requires models to induce programs similar in complexity to those constructed by historical linguists. Our experiments reveal a substantial performance gap between models that leverage test-time compute or LCoT (long chain-of-thought) reasoning and those that do not. Moreover, although recent models show promise, the solve rate for both of them drops below 5% for hard instances of the PBEBench dataset (ground truth cascade lengths of 20 and 30, respectively), falling well short of realistic historical linguistics requirements even with computationally expensive, popular scaling techniques from the PBE and reasoning literature. Additionally, we also study the effectiveness of different scaling strategies and the impact of various hyperparameters on the difficulty of the generated data using gpt-oss-120b, the best-performing open-source model.
CoEdIT: Text Editing by Task-Specific Instruction Tuning
Text editing or revision is an essential function of the human writing process. Understanding the capabilities of LLMs for making high-quality revisions and collaborating with human writers is a critical step toward building effective writing assistants. With the prior success of LLMs and instruction tuning, we leverage instruction-tuned LLMs for text revision to improve the quality of user-generated text and improve the efficiency of the process. We introduce CoEdIT, a state-of-the-art text editing model for writing assistance. CoEdIT takes instructions from the user specifying the attributes of the desired text, such as "Make the sentence simpler" or "Write it in a more neutral style," and outputs the edited text. We present a large language model fine-tuned on a diverse collection of task-specific instructions for text editing (a total of 82K instructions). Our model (1) achieves state-of-the-art performance on various text editing benchmarks, (2) is competitive with publicly available largest-sized LLMs trained on instructions while being sim60x smaller, (3) is capable of generalizing to unseen edit instructions, and (4) exhibits compositional comprehension abilities to generalize to instructions containing different combinations of edit actions. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we show that writers prefer the edits suggested by CoEdIT, relative to other state-of-the-art text editing models. Our code and dataset are publicly available.
QueryBandits for Hallucination Mitigation: Exploiting Semantic Features for No-Regret Rewriting
Advanced reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) have caused higher hallucination prevalence; yet most mitigation work focuses on after-the-fact filtering rather than shaping the queries that trigger them. We introduce QueryBandits, a bandit framework that designs rewrite strategies to maximize a reward model, that encapsulates hallucination propensity based upon the sensitivities of 17 linguistic features of the input query-and therefore, proactively steer LLMs away from generating hallucinations. Across 13 diverse QA benchmarks and 1,050 lexically perturbed queries per dataset, our top contextual QueryBandit (Thompson Sampling) achieves an 87.5% win rate over a no-rewrite baseline and also outperforms zero-shot static prompting ("paraphrase" or "expand") by 42.6% and 60.3% respectively. Therefore, we empirically substantiate the effectiveness of QueryBandits in mitigating hallucination via the intervention that takes the form of a query rewrite. Interestingly, certain static prompting strategies, which constitute a considerable number of current query rewriting literature, have a higher cumulative regret than the no-rewrite baseline, signifying that static rewrites can worsen hallucination. Moreover, we discover that the converged per-arm regression feature weight vectors substantiate that there is no single rewrite strategy optimal for all queries. In this context, guided rewriting via exploiting semantic features with QueryBandits can induce significant shifts in output behavior through forward-pass mechanisms, bypassing the need for retraining or gradient-based adaptation.
On the Transformations across Reward Model, Parameter Update, and In-Context Prompt
Despite the general capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), they still need further adaptation to better serve practical applications. In this paper, we demonstrate the interchangeability of three popular and distinct adaptation tools: parameter updating, reward modeling, and in-context prompting. This interchangeability establishes a triangular framework with six transformation directions, each of which facilitates a variety of applications. Our work offers a holistic view that unifies numerous existing studies and suggests potential research directions. We envision our work as a useful roadmap for future research on LLMs.
Read, Revise, Repeat: A System Demonstration for Human-in-the-loop Iterative Text Revision
Revision is an essential part of the human writing process. It tends to be strategic, adaptive, and, more importantly, iterative in nature. Despite the success of large language models on text revision tasks, they are limited to non-iterative, one-shot revisions. Examining and evaluating the capability of large language models for making continuous revisions and collaborating with human writers is a critical step towards building effective writing assistants. In this work, we present a human-in-the-loop iterative text revision system, Read, Revise, Repeat (R3), which aims at achieving high quality text revisions with minimal human efforts by reading model-generated revisions and user feedbacks, revising documents, and repeating human-machine interactions. In R3, a text revision model provides text editing suggestions for human writers, who can accept or reject the suggested edits. The accepted edits are then incorporated into the model for the next iteration of document revision. Writers can therefore revise documents iteratively by interacting with the system and simply accepting/rejecting its suggested edits until the text revision model stops making further revisions or reaches a predefined maximum number of revisions. Empirical experiments show that R3 can generate revisions with comparable acceptance rate to human writers at early revision depths, and the human-machine interaction can get higher quality revisions with fewer iterations and edits. The collected human-model interaction dataset and system code are available at https://github.com/vipulraheja/IteraTeR. Our system demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/lK08tIpEoaE.
An Evaluation Benchmark for Autoformalization in Lean4
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold the potential to revolutionize autoformalization. The introduction of Lean4, a mathematical programming language, presents an unprecedented opportunity to rigorously assess the autoformalization capabilities of LLMs. This paper introduces a novel evaluation benchmark designed for Lean4, applying it to test the abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Gemini Pro. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that, despite recent advancements, these LLMs still exhibit limitations in autoformalization, particularly in more complex areas of mathematics. These findings underscore the need for further development in LLMs to fully harness their potential in scientific research and development. This study not only benchmarks current LLM capabilities but also sets the stage for future enhancements in autoformalization.
EditEval: An Instruction-Based Benchmark for Text Improvements
Evaluation of text generation to date has primarily focused on content created sequentially, rather than improvements on a piece of text. Writing, however, is naturally an iterative and incremental process that requires expertise in different modular skills such as fixing outdated information or making the style more consistent. Even so, comprehensive evaluation of a model's capacity to perform these skills and the ability to edit remains sparse. This work presents EditEval: An instruction-based, benchmark and evaluation suite that leverages high-quality existing and new datasets for automatic evaluation of editing capabilities such as making text more cohesive and paraphrasing. We evaluate several pre-trained models, which shows that InstructGPT and PEER perform the best, but that most baselines fall below the supervised SOTA, particularly when neutralizing and updating information. Our analysis also shows that commonly used metrics for editing tasks do not always correlate well, and that optimization for prompts with the highest performance does not necessarily entail the strongest robustness to different models. Through the release of this benchmark and a publicly available leaderboard challenge, we hope to unlock future research in developing models capable of iterative and more controllable editing.
Process-Driven Autoformalization in Lean 4
Autoformalization, the conversion of natural language mathematics into formal languages, offers significant potential for advancing mathematical reasoning. However, existing efforts are limited to formal languages with substantial online corpora and struggle to keep pace with rapidly evolving languages like Lean 4. To bridge this gap, we propose a new benchmark Formalization for Lean~4 (\name) designed to evaluate the autoformalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs). This benchmark encompasses a comprehensive assessment of questions, answers, formal statements, and proofs. Additionally, we introduce a Process-Supervised Verifier (PSV) model that leverages the precise feedback from Lean 4 compilers to enhance autoformalization. Our experiments demonstrate that the PSV method improves autoformalization, enabling higher accuracy using less filtered training data. Furthermore, when fine-tuned with data containing detailed process information, PSV can leverage the data more effectively, leading to more significant improvements in autoformalization for Lean 4. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/rookie-joe/PDA.
Beyond Direct Generation: A Decomposed Approach to Well-Crafted Screenwriting with LLMs
The screenplay serves as the foundation for television production, defining narrative structure, character development, and dialogue. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential in creative writing, direct end-to-end generation approaches often fail to produce well-crafted screenplays. We argue this failure stems from forcing a single model to simultaneously master two disparate capabilities: creative narrative construction and rigid format adherence. The resulting outputs may mimic superficial style but lack the deep structural integrity and storytelling substance required for professional use. To enable LLMs to generate high-quality screenplays, we introduce Dual-Stage Refinement (DSR), a decomposed framework that decouples creative narrative generation from format conversion. The first stage transforms a brief outline into rich, novel-style prose. The second stage refines this narrative into a professionally formatted screenplay. This separation enables the model to specialize in one distinct capability at each stage. A key challenge in implementing DSR is the scarcity of paired outline-to-novel training data. We address this through hybrid data synthesis: reverse synthesis deconstructs existing screenplays into structured inputs, while forward synthesis leverages these inputs to generate high-quality narrative texts as training targets. Blind evaluations by professional screenwriters show that DSR achieves a 75% win rate against strong baselines like Gemini-2.5-Pro and reaches 82.7% of human-level performance. Our work demonstrates that decomposed generation architecture with tailored data synthesis effectively specializes LLMs in complex creative domains.
Gödel's Poetry
Formal, automated theorem proving has long been viewed as a challenge to artificial intelligence. We introduce here a new approach to computer theorem proving, one that employs specialized language models for Lean4 proof generation combined with recursive decomposition of difficult theorems into simpler entailing propositions. These models are coordinated through a multi-agent architecture that orchestrates autoformalization (if required), proof generation, decomposition of difficult theorems into simpler entailing propositions, and recursive proof (and/or decomposition) of these propositions. Without decomposition, we achieve a 90.4% pass rate on miniF2F. With decomposition, this is significantly improved. A key technical contribution lies in our extension of the Kimina Lean Server with abstract syntax tree (AST) parsing capabilities to facilitate automated, recursive proof decomposition. The system is made available on PyPI as goedels-poetry (at https://pypi.org/project/goedels-poetry ), and the open-source implementation KellyJDavis/goedels-poetry (at https://github.com/KellyJDavis/goedels-poetry ) facilitates both adaptation to alternative language models and extension with custom functionality.
Data Formulator: AI-powered Concept-driven Visualization Authoring
With most modern visualization tools, authors need to transform their data into tidy formats to create visualizations they want. Because this requires experience with programming or separate data processing tools, data transformation remains a barrier in visualization authoring. To address this challenge, we present a new visualization paradigm, concept binding, that separates high-level visualization intents and low-level data transformation steps, leveraging an AI agent. We realize this paradigm in Data Formulator, an interactive visualization authoring tool. With Data Formulator, authors first define data concepts they plan to visualize using natural languages or examples, and then bind them to visual channels. Data Formulator then dispatches its AI-agent to automatically transform the input data to surface these concepts and generate desired visualizations. When presenting the results (transformed table and output visualizations) from the AI agent, Data Formulator provides feedback to help authors inspect and understand them. A user study with 10 participants shows that participants could learn and use Data Formulator to create visualizations that involve challenging data transformations, and presents interesting future research directions.
Beyond Outlining: Heterogeneous Recursive Planning for Adaptive Long-form Writing with Language Models
Long-form writing agents require flexible integration and interaction across information retrieval, reasoning, and composition. Current approaches rely on predetermined workflows and rigid thinking patterns to generate outlines before writing, resulting in constrained adaptability during writing. In this paper we propose a general agent framework that achieves human-like adaptive writing through recursive task decomposition and dynamic integration of three fundamental task types, i.e. retrieval, reasoning, and composition. Our methodology features: 1) a planning mechanism that interleaves recursive task decomposition and execution, eliminating artificial restrictions on writing workflow; and 2) integration of task types that facilitates heterogeneous task decomposition. Evaluations on both fiction writing and technical report generation show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across all automatic evaluation metrics, which demonstrate the effectiveness and broad applicability of our proposed framework.
CoTKR: Chain-of-Thought Enhanced Knowledge Rewriting for Complex Knowledge Graph Question Answering
Recent studies have explored the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). They typically require rewriting retrieved subgraphs into natural language formats comprehensible to LLMs. However, when tackling complex questions, the knowledge rewritten by existing methods may include irrelevant information, omit crucial details, or fail to align with the question's semantics. To address them, we propose a novel rewriting method CoTKR, Chain-of-Thought Enhanced Knowledge Rewriting, for generating reasoning traces and corresponding knowledge in an interleaved manner, thereby mitigating the limitations of single-step knowledge rewriting. Additionally, to bridge the preference gap between the knowledge rewriter and the question answering (QA) model, we propose a training strategy PAQAF, Preference Alignment from Question Answering Feedback, for leveraging feedback from the QA model to further optimize the knowledge rewriter. We conduct experiments using various LLMs across several KGQA benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with previous knowledge rewriting methods, CoTKR generates the most beneficial knowledge representation for QA models, which significantly improves the performance of LLMs in KGQA.
Looking beyond the next token
The structure of causal language model training assumes that each token can be accurately predicted from the previous context. This contrasts with humans' natural writing and reasoning process, where goals are typically known before the exact argument or phrasings. While this mismatch has been well studied in the literature, the working assumption has been that architectural changes are needed to address this mismatch. We argue that rearranging and processing the training data sequences can allow models to more accurately imitate the true data-generating process, and does not require any other changes to the architecture or training infrastructure. We demonstrate that this technique, Trelawney, and the inference algorithms derived from it allow us to improve performance on several key benchmarks that span planning, algorithmic reasoning, and story generation tasks. Finally, our method naturally enables the generation of long-term goals at no additional cost. We investigate how using the model's goal-generation capability can further improve planning and reasoning. Additionally, we believe Trelawney could potentially open doors to new capabilities beyond the current language modeling paradigm.
Putting People in LLMs' Shoes: Generating Better Answers via Question Rewriter
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities, particularly in the domain of question answering (QA). However, their effectiveness in QA is often undermined by the vagueness of user questions. To address this issue, we introduce single-round instance-level prompt optimization, referred to as question rewriter. By enhancing the intelligibility of human questions for black-box LLMs, our question rewriter improves the quality of generated answers. The rewriter is optimized using direct preference optimization based on feedback collected from automatic criteria for evaluating generated answers; therefore, its training does not require costly human annotations. The experiments across multiple black-box LLMs and long-form question answering (LFQA) datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our method. This paper provides a practical framework for training question rewriters and sets a precedent for future explorations in prompt optimization within LFQA tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/3244we/Question-Rewriter.
SuperWriter: Reflection-Driven Long-Form Generation with Large Language Models
Long-form text generation remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in maintaining coherence, ensuring logical consistency, and preserving text quality as sequence length increases. To address these limitations, we propose SuperWriter-Agent, an agent-based framework designed to enhance the quality and consistency of long-form text generation. SuperWriter-Agent introduces explicit structured thinking-through planning and refinement stages into the generation pipeline, guiding the model to follow a more deliberate and cognitively grounded process akin to that of a professional writer. Based on this framework, we construct a supervised fine-tuning dataset to train a 7B SuperWriter-LM. We further develop a hierarchical Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) procedure that uses Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to propagate final quality assessments and optimize each generation step accordingly. Empirical results across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that SuperWriter-LM achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing even larger-scale baseline models in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation. Furthermore, comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of hierarchical DPO and underscore the value of incorporating structured thinking steps to improve the quality of long-form text generation.
How to Ask Better Questions? A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Dataset for Rewriting Ill-Formed Questions
We present a large-scale dataset for the task of rewriting an ill-formed natural language question to a well-formed one. Our multi-domain question rewriting MQR dataset is constructed from human contributed Stack Exchange question edit histories. The dataset contains 427,719 question pairs which come from 303 domains. We provide human annotations for a subset of the dataset as a quality estimate. When moving from ill-formed to well-formed questions, the question quality improves by an average of 45 points across three aspects. We train sequence-to-sequence neural models on the constructed dataset and obtain an improvement of 13.2% in BLEU-4 over baseline methods built from other data resources. We release the MQR dataset to encourage research on the problem of question rewriting.
BEATS: Optimizing LLM Mathematical Capabilities with BackVerify and Adaptive Disambiguate based Efficient Tree Search
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance across a broad range of tasks and domains. However, they still encounter difficulties in solving mathematical problems due to the rigorous and logical nature of mathematics. Previous studies have employed techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT), prompt engineering, and search-based methods to improve the mathematical problem-solving abilities of LLMs. Despite these efforts, their performance remains suboptimal and demands substantial computational resources. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, BEATS, to enhance mathematical problem-solving abilities. Our method leverages newly designed prompts that guide the model to iteratively rewrite, advance by one step, and generate answers based on previous steps. Additionally, we introduce a new back-verification technique that uses LLMs to validate the correctness of the generated answers. Furthermore, we employ a pruning tree search to optimize search time while achieving strong performance. Notably, our method improves Qwen2-7b-Instruct's score from 36.94 to 61.52, outperforming GPT4's 42.5 on the MATH benchmark.
Ask Optimal Questions: Aligning Large Language Models with Retriever's Preference in Conversational Search
Conversational search, unlike single-turn retrieval tasks, requires understanding the current question within a dialogue context. The common approach of rewrite-then-retrieve aims to decontextualize questions to be self-sufficient for off-the-shelf retrievers, but most existing methods produce sub-optimal query rewrites due to the limited ability to incorporate signals from the retrieval results. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel framework RetPO (Retriever's Preference Optimization), which is designed to optimize a language model (LM) for reformulating search queries in line with the preferences of the target retrieval systems. The process begins by prompting a large LM to produce various potential rewrites and then collects retrieval performance for these rewrites as the retrievers' preferences. Through the process, we construct a large-scale dataset called RF collection, containing Retrievers' Feedback on over 410K query rewrites across 12K conversations. Furthermore, we fine-tune a smaller LM using this dataset to align it with the retrievers' preferences as feedback. The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two recent conversational search benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing baselines, including GPT-3.5.
ConvGQR: Generative Query Reformulation for Conversational Search
In conversational search, the user's real search intent for the current turn is dependent on the previous conversation history. It is challenging to determine a good search query from the whole conversation context. To avoid the expensive re-training of the query encoder, most existing methods try to learn a rewriting model to de-contextualize the current query by mimicking the manual query rewriting. However, manually rewritten queries are not always the best search queries. Training a rewriting model on them would limit the model's ability to produce good search queries. Another useful hint is the potential answer to the question. In this paper, we propose ConvGQR, a new framework to reformulate conversational queries based on generative pre-trained language models (PLMs), one for query rewriting and another for generating potential answers. By combining both, ConvGQR can produce better search queries. In addition, to relate query reformulation to retrieval performance, we propose a knowledge infusion mechanism to optimize both query reformulation and retrieval. Extensive experiments on four conversational search datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ConvGQR.
CoQAR: Question Rewriting on CoQA
Questions asked by humans during a conversation often contain contextual dependencies, i.e., explicit or implicit references to previous dialogue turns. These dependencies take the form of coreferences (e.g., via pronoun use) or ellipses, and can make the understanding difficult for automated systems. One way to facilitate the understanding and subsequent treatments of a question is to rewrite it into an out-of-context form, i.e., a form that can be understood without the conversational context. We propose CoQAR, a corpus containing 4.5K conversations from the Conversational Question-Answering dataset CoQA, for a total of 53K follow-up question-answer pairs. Each original question was manually annotated with at least 2 at most 3 out-of-context rewritings. CoQAR can be used in the supervised learning of three tasks: question paraphrasing, question rewriting and conversational question answering. In order to assess the quality of CoQAR's rewritings, we conduct several experiments consisting in training and evaluating models for these three tasks. Our results support the idea that question rewriting can be used as a preprocessing step for question answering models, thereby increasing their performances.
XtraGPT: LLMs for Human-AI Collaboration on Controllable Academic Paper Revision
Despite the growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in academic workflows, their capabilities remain limited when it comes to supporting high-quality scientific writing. Most existing systems are designed for general-purpose scientific text generation and fail to meet the sophisticated demands of research communication beyond surface-level polishing, such as conceptual coherence across sections. Furthermore, academic writing is inherently iterative and revision-driven, a process not well supported by direct prompting-based paradigms. To address these scenarios, we propose a human-AI collaboration framework for academic paper revision. We first introduce a comprehensive dataset of 7,040 research papers from top-tier venues annotated with over 140,000 instruction-response pairs that reflect realistic, section-level scientific revisions. Building on the dataset, we develop XtraGPT, the first suite of open-source LLMs, designed to provide context-aware, instruction-guided writing assistance, ranging from 1.5B to 14B parameters. Extensive experiments validate that XtraGPT significantly outperforms same-scale baselines and approaches the quality of proprietary systems. Both automated preference assessments and human evaluations confirm the effectiveness of our models in improving scientific drafts.
Learning to Model Editing Processes
Most existing sequence generation models produce outputs in one pass, usually left-to-right. However, this is in contrast with a more natural approach that humans use in generating content; iterative refinement and editing. Recent work has introduced edit-based models for various tasks (such as neural machine translation and text style transfer), but these generally model a single edit step. In this work, we propose modeling editing processes, modeling the whole process of iteratively generating sequences. We form a conceptual framework to describe the likelihood of multi-step edits, and describe neural models that can learn a generative model of sequences based on these multistep edits. We introduce baseline results and metrics on this task, finding that modeling editing processes improves performance on a variety of axes on both our proposed task and related downstream tasks compared to previous single-step models of edits.
PromptEnhancer: A Simple Approach to Enhance Text-to-Image Models via Chain-of-Thought Prompt Rewriting
Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-fidelity images. However, these models often struggle to faithfully render complex user prompts, particularly in aspects like attribute binding, negation, and compositional relationships. This leads to a significant mismatch between user intent and the generated output. To address this challenge, we introduce PromptEnhancer, a novel and universal prompt rewriting framework that enhances any pretrained T2I model without requiring modifications to its weights. Unlike prior methods that rely on model-specific fine-tuning or implicit reward signals like image-reward scores, our framework decouples the rewriter from the generator. We achieve this by training a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rewriter through reinforcement learning, guided by a dedicated reward model we term the AlignEvaluator. The AlignEvaluator is trained to provide explicit and fine-grained feedback based on a systematic taxonomy of 24 key points, which are derived from a comprehensive analysis of common T2I failure modes. By optimizing the CoT rewriter to maximize the reward from our AlignEvaluator, our framework learns to generate prompts that are more precisely interpreted by T2I models. Extensive experiments on the HunyuanImage 2.1 model demonstrate that PromptEnhancer significantly improves image-text alignment across a wide range of semantic and compositional challenges. Furthermore, we introduce a new, high-quality human preference benchmark to facilitate future research in this direction.
Partially Rewriting a Transformer in Natural Language
The greatest ambition of mechanistic interpretability is to completely rewrite deep neural networks in a format that is more amenable to human understanding, while preserving their behavior and performance. In this paper, we attempt to partially rewrite a large language model using simple natural language explanations. We first approximate one of the feedforward networks in the LLM with a wider MLP with sparsely activating neurons - a transcoder - and use an automated interpretability pipeline to generate explanations for these neurons. We then replace the first layer of this sparse MLP with an LLM-based simulator, which predicts the activation of each neuron given its explanation and the surrounding context. Finally, we measure the degree to which these modifications distort the model's final output. With our pipeline, the model's increase in loss is statistically similar to entirely replacing the sparse MLP output with the zero vector. We employ the same protocol, this time using a sparse autoencoder, on the residual stream of the same layer and obtain similar results. These results suggest that more detailed explanations are needed to improve performance substantially above the zero ablation baseline.
Reordering rules for English-Hindi SMT
Reordering is a preprocessing stage for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) system where the words of the source sentence are reordered as per the syntax of the target language. We are proposing a rich set of rules for better reordering. The idea is to facilitate the training process by better alignments and parallel phrase extraction for a phrase-based SMT system. Reordering also helps the decoding process and hence improving the machine translation quality. We have observed significant improvements in the translation quality by using our approach over the baseline SMT. We have used BLEU, NIST, multi-reference word error rate, multi-reference position independent error rate for judging the improvements. We have exploited open source SMT toolkit MOSES to develop the system.
Autoformalization with Large Language Models
Autoformalization is the process of automatically translating from natural language mathematics to formal specifications and proofs. A successful autoformalization system could advance the fields of formal verification, program synthesis, and artificial intelligence. While the long-term goal of autoformalization seemed elusive for a long time, we show large language models provide new prospects towards this goal. We make the surprising observation that LLMs can correctly translate a significant portion (25.3%) of mathematical competition problems perfectly to formal specifications in Isabelle/HOL. We demonstrate the usefulness of this process by improving a previously introduced neural theorem prover via training on these autoformalized theorems. Our methodology results in a new state-of-the-art result on the MiniF2F theorem proving benchmark, improving the proof rate from 29.6% to 35.2%.
Think-Then-Generate: Reasoning-Aware Text-to-Image Diffusion with LLM Encoders
Recent progress in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models (DMs) has enabled high-quality visual synthesis from diverse textual prompts. Yet, most existing T2I DMs, even those equipped with large language model (LLM)-based text encoders, remain text-pixel mappers -- they employ LLMs merely as text encoders, without leveraging their inherent reasoning capabilities to infer what should be visually depicted given the textual prompt. To move beyond such literal generation, we propose the think-then-generate (T2G) paradigm, where the LLM-based text encoder is encouraged to reason about and rewrite raw user prompts; the states of the rewritten prompts then serve as diffusion conditioning. To achieve this, we first activate the think-then-rewrite pattern of the LLM encoder with a lightweight supervised fine-tuning process. Subsequently, the LLM encoder and diffusion backbone are co-optimized to ensure faithful reasoning about the context and accurate rendering of the semantics via Dual-GRPO. In particular, the text encoder is reinforced using image-grounded rewards to infer and recall world knowledge, while the diffusion backbone is pushed to produce semantically consistent and visually coherent images. Experiments show substantial improvements in factual consistency, semantic alignment, and visual realism across reasoning-based image generation and editing benchmarks, achieving 0.79 on WISE score, nearly on par with GPT-4. Our results constitute a promising step toward next-generation unified models with reasoning, expression, and demonstration capacities.
Think Twice: Branch-and-Rethink Reasoning Reward Model
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on thinking models that externalize intermediate steps and allocate extra test-time compute, with think-twice strategies showing that a deliberate second pass can elicit stronger reasoning. In contrast, most reward models (RMs) still compress many quality dimensions into a single scalar in one shot, a design that induces judgment diffusion: attention spreads across evaluation criteria, yielding diluted focus and shallow analysis. We introduce branch-and-rethink (BR-RM), a two-turn RM that transfers the think-twice principle to reward modeling. Turn 1 performs adaptive branching, selecting a small set of instance-critical dimensions (such as factuality and safety) and sketching concise, evidence-seeking hypotheses. Turn 2 executes branch-conditioned rethinking, a targeted reread that tests those hypotheses and scrutinizes only what matters most. We train with GRPO-style reinforcement learning over structured two-turn traces using a simple binary outcome reward with strict format checks, making the approach compatible with standard RLHF pipelines. By converting all-at-oncescoringintofocused, second-lookreasoning, BR-RMreducesjudgmentdiffusionandimproves sensitivity to subtle yet consequential errors while remaining practical and scalable. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging reward modeling benchmarks across diverse domains. The code and the model will be released soon.
StepFun-Formalizer: Unlocking the Autoformalization Potential of LLMs through Knowledge-Reasoning Fusion
Autoformalization aims to translate natural-language mathematical statements into a formal language. While LLMs have accelerated progress in this area, existing methods still suffer from low accuracy. We identify two key abilities for effective autoformalization: comprehensive mastery of formal-language domain knowledge, and reasoning capability of natural language problem understanding and informal-formal alignment. Without the former, a model cannot identify the correct formal objects; without the latter, it struggles to interpret real-world contexts and map them precisely into formal expressions. To address these gaps, we introduce ThinkingF, a data synthesis and training pipeline that improves both abilities. First, we construct two datasets: one by distilling and selecting large-scale examples rich in formal knowledge, and another by generating informal-to-formal reasoning trajectories guided by expert-designed templates. We then apply SFT and RLVR with these datasets to further fuse and refine the two abilities. The resulting 7B and 32B models exhibit both comprehensive formal knowledge and strong informal-to-formal reasoning. Notably, StepFun-Formalizer-32B achieves SOTA BEq@1 scores of 40.5% on FormalMATH-Lite and 26.7% on ProverBench, surpassing all prior general-purpose and specialized models.
Dream2Real: Zero-Shot 3D Object Rearrangement with Vision-Language Models
We introduce Dream2Real, a robotics framework which integrates vision-language models (VLMs) trained on 2D data into a 3D object rearrangement pipeline. This is achieved by the robot autonomously constructing a 3D representation of the scene, where objects can be rearranged virtually and an image of the resulting arrangement rendered. These renders are evaluated by a VLM, so that the arrangement which best satisfies the user instruction is selected and recreated in the real world with pick-and-place. This enables language-conditioned rearrangement to be performed zero-shot, without needing to collect a training dataset of example arrangements. Results on a series of real-world tasks show that this framework is robust to distractors, controllable by language, capable of understanding complex multi-object relations, and readily applicable to both tabletop and 6-DoF rearrangement tasks.
Reframing Instructional Prompts to GPTk's Language
What kinds of instructional prompts are easier to follow for Language Models (LMs)? We study this question by conducting extensive empirical analysis that shed light on important features of successful instructional prompts. Specifically, we study several classes of reframing techniques for manual reformulation of prompts into more effective ones. Some examples include decomposing a complex task instruction into multiple simpler tasks or itemizing instructions into sequential steps. Our experiments compare the zero-shot and few-shot performance of LMs prompted with reframed instructions on 12 NLP tasks across 6 categories. Compared with original instructions, our reframed instructions lead to significant improvements across LMs with different sizes. For example, the same reframed prompts boost few-shot performance of GPT3-series and GPT2-series by 12.5% and 6.7% respectively averaged over all tasks. Furthermore, reframed instructions reduce the number of examples required to prompt LMs in the few-shot setting. We hope these empirically-driven techniques will pave the way towards more effective future prompting algorithms.
IRLab@iKAT24: Learned Sparse Retrieval with Multi-aspect LLM Query Generation for Conversational Search
The Interactive Knowledge Assistant Track (iKAT) 2024 focuses on advancing conversational assistants, able to adapt their interaction and responses from personalized user knowledge. The track incorporates a Personal Textual Knowledge Base (PTKB) alongside Conversational AI tasks, such as passage ranking and response generation. Query Rewrite being an effective approach for resolving conversational context, we explore Large Language Models (LLMs), as query rewriters. Specifically, our submitted runs explore multi-aspect query generation using the MQ4CS framework, which we further enhance with Learned Sparse Retrieval via the SPLADE architecture, coupled with robust cross-encoder models. We also propose an alternative to the previous interleaving strategy, aggregating multiple aspects during the reranking phase. Our findings indicate that multi-aspect query generation is effective in enhancing performance when integrated with advanced retrieval and reranking models. Our results also lead the way for better personalization in Conversational Search, relying on LLMs to integrate personalization within query rewrite, and outperforming human rewrite performance.
Crisp: Cognitive Restructuring of Negative Thoughts through Multi-turn Supportive Dialogues
Cognitive Restructuring (CR) is a psychotherapeutic process aimed at identifying and restructuring an individual's negative thoughts, arising from mental health challenges, into more helpful and positive ones via multi-turn dialogues. Clinician shortage and stigma urge the development of human-LLM interactive psychotherapy for CR. Yet, existing efforts implement CR via simple text rewriting, fixed-pattern dialogues, or a one-shot CR workflow, failing to align with the psychotherapeutic process for effective CR. To address this gap, we propose CRDial, a novel framework for CR, which creates multi-turn dialogues with specifically designed identification and restructuring stages of negative thoughts, integrates sentence-level supportive conversation strategies, and adopts a multi-channel loop mechanism to enable iterative CR. With CRDial, we distill Crisp, a large-scale and high-quality bilingual dialogue dataset, from LLM. We then train Crispers, Crisp-based conversational LLMs for CR, at 7B and 14B scales. Extensive human studies show the superiority of Crispers in pointwise, pairwise, and intervention evaluations.
Improving Iterative Text Revision by Learning Where to Edit from Other Revision Tasks
Iterative text revision improves text quality by fixing grammatical errors, rephrasing for better readability or contextual appropriateness, or reorganizing sentence structures throughout a document. Most recent research has focused on understanding and classifying different types of edits in the iterative revision process from human-written text instead of building accurate and robust systems for iterative text revision. In this work, we aim to build an end-to-end text revision system that can iteratively generate helpful edits by explicitly detecting editable spans (where-to-edit) with their corresponding edit intents and then instructing a revision model to revise the detected edit spans. Leveraging datasets from other related text editing NLP tasks, combined with the specification of editable spans, leads our system to more accurately model the process of iterative text refinement, as evidenced by empirical results and human evaluations. Our system significantly outperforms previous baselines on our text revision tasks and other standard text revision tasks, including grammatical error correction, text simplification, sentence fusion, and style transfer. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we make vital connections between edit intentions and writing quality, and better computational modeling of iterative text revisions.
Learning to Rewrite: Generalized LLM-Generated Text Detection
Large language models (LLMs) present significant risks when used to generate non-factual content and spread disinformation at scale. Detecting such LLM-generated content is crucial, yet current detectors often struggle to generalize in open-world contexts. We introduce Learning2Rewrite, a novel framework for detecting AI-generated text with exceptional generalization to unseen domains. Our method leverages the insight that LLMs inherently modify AI-generated content less than human-written text when tasked with rewriting. By training LLMs to minimize alterations on AI-generated inputs, we amplify this disparity, yielding a more distinguishable and generalizable edit distance across diverse text distributions. Extensive experiments on data from 21 independent domains and four major LLMs (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, and Llama-3) demonstrate that our detector outperforms state-of-the-art detection methods by up to 23.04% in AUROC for in-distribution tests, 37.26% for out-of-distribution tests, and 48.66% under adversarial attacks. Our unique training objective ensures better generalizability compared to directly training for classification, when leveraging the same amount of parameters. Our findings suggest that reinforcing LLMs' inherent rewriting tendencies offers a robust and scalable solution for detecting AI-generated text.
Gender-Neutral Rewriting in Italian: Models, Approaches, and Trade-offs
Gender-neutral rewriting (GNR) aims to reformulate text to eliminate unnecessary gender specifications while preserving meaning, a particularly challenging task in grammatical-gender languages like Italian. In this work, we conduct the first systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) for Italian GNR, introducing a two-dimensional framework that measures both neutrality and semantic fidelity to the input. We compare few-shot prompting across multiple LLMs, fine-tune selected models, and apply targeted cleaning to boost task relevance. Our findings show that open-weight LLMs outperform the only existing model dedicated to GNR in Italian, whereas our fine-tuned models match or exceed the best open-weight LLM's performance at a fraction of its size. Finally, we discuss the trade-off between optimizing the training data for neutrality and meaning preservation.
OmniThink: Expanding Knowledge Boundaries in Machine Writing through Thinking
Machine writing with large language models often relies on retrieval-augmented generation. However, these approaches remain confined within the boundaries of the model's predefined scope, limiting the generation of content with rich information. Specifically, vanilla-retrieved information tends to lack depth, utility, and suffers from redundancy, which negatively impacts the quality of generated articles, leading to shallow, repetitive, and unoriginal outputs. To address these issues, we propose OmniThink, a machine writing framework that emulates the human-like process of iterative expansion and reflection. The core idea behind OmniThink is to simulate the cognitive behavior of learners as they progressively deepen their knowledge of the topics. Experimental results demonstrate that OmniThink improves the knowledge density of generated articles without compromising metrics such as coherence and depth. Human evaluations and expert feedback further highlight the potential of OmniThink to address real-world challenges in the generation of long-form articles.
Encoder-Decoder Framework for Interactive Free Verses with Generation with Controllable High-Quality Rhyming
Composing poetry or lyrics involves several creative factors, but a challenging aspect of generation is the adherence to a more or less strict metric and rhyming pattern. To address this challenge specifically, previous work on the task has mainly focused on reverse language modeling, which brings the critical selection of each rhyming word to the forefront of each verse. On the other hand, reversing the word order requires that models be trained from scratch with this task-specific goal and cannot take advantage of transfer learning from a Pretrained Language Model (PLM). We propose a novel fine-tuning approach that prepends the rhyming word at the start of each lyric, which allows the critical rhyming decision to be made before the model commits to the content of the lyric (as during reverse language modeling), but maintains compatibility with the word order of regular PLMs as the lyric itself is still generated in left-to-right order. We conducted extensive experiments to compare this fine-tuning against the current state-of-the-art strategies for rhyming, finding that our approach generates more readable text and better rhyming capabilities. Furthermore, we furnish a high-quality dataset in English and 12 other languages, analyse the approach's feasibility in a multilingual context, provide extensive experimental results shedding light on good and bad practices for lyrics generation, and propose metrics to compare methods in the future.
Automatically Generating Commit Messages from Diffs using Neural Machine Translation
Commit messages are a valuable resource in comprehension of software evolution, since they provide a record of changes such as feature additions and bug repairs. Unfortunately, programmers often neglect to write good commit messages. Different techniques have been proposed to help programmers by automatically writing these messages. These techniques are effective at describing what changed, but are often verbose and lack context for understanding the rationale behind a change. In contrast, humans write messages that are short and summarize the high level rationale. In this paper, we adapt Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to automatically "translate" diffs into commit messages. We trained an NMT algorithm using a corpus of diffs and human-written commit messages from the top 1k Github projects. We designed a filter to help ensure that we only trained the algorithm on higher-quality commit messages. Our evaluation uncovered a pattern in which the messages we generate tend to be either very high or very low quality. Therefore, we created a quality-assurance filter to detect cases in which we are unable to produce good messages, and return a warning instead.
A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Proactive Self-Refinement for Language Models
Recent advances in self-refinement have demonstrated significant potential for improving the outputs of large language models (LLMs) through iterative refinement. However, most existing self-refinement methods rely on a reactive process with a fixed number of iterations, making it difficult to determine the optimal timing and content of refinement based on the evolving generation context. Inspired by the way humans dynamically refine their thoughts during execution, we propose ProActive Self-Refinement (PASR), a novel method that enables LLMs to refine their outputs during the generation process. Unlike methods that regenerate entire responses, PASR proactively decides whether, when, and how to refine based on the model's internal state and evolving context. We conduct extensive experiments on a diverse set of 10 tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of PASR. Experimental results show that PASR significantly enhances problem-solving performance. In particular, on Qwen3-8B, PASR reduces average token consumption by 41.6 percent compared to standard generation, while also achieving an 8.2 percent improvement in accuracy. Our code and all baselines used in the paper are available in the GitHub.
Teach LLMs to Personalize -- An Approach inspired by Writing Education
Personalized text generation is an emerging research area that has attracted much attention in recent years. Most studies in this direction focus on a particular domain by designing bespoke features or models. In this work, we propose a general approach for personalized text generation using large language models (LLMs). Inspired by the practice of writing education, we develop a multistage and multitask framework to teach LLMs for personalized generation. In writing instruction, the task of writing from sources is often decomposed into multiple steps that involve finding, evaluating, summarizing, synthesizing, and integrating information. Analogously, our approach to personalized text generation consists of multiple stages: retrieval, ranking, summarization, synthesis, and generation. In addition, we introduce a multitask setting that helps the model improve its generation ability further, which is inspired by the observation in education that a student's reading proficiency and writing ability are often correlated. We evaluate our approach on three public datasets, each of which covers a different and representative domain. Our results show significant improvements over a variety of baselines.
The Shared Task on Gender Rewriting
In this paper, we present the results and findings of the Shared Task on Gender Rewriting, which was organized as part of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop. The task of gender rewriting refers to generating alternatives of a given sentence to match different target user gender contexts (e.g., female speaker with a male listener, a male speaker with a male listener, etc.). This requires changing the grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) of certain words referring to the users. In this task, we focus on Arabic, a gender-marking morphologically rich language. A total of five teams from four countries participated in the shared task.
DocETL: Agentic Query Rewriting and Evaluation for Complex Document Processing
Analyzing unstructured data, such as complex documents, has been a persistent challenge in data processing. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in this regard, leading to recent proposals for declarative frameworks for LLM-powered unstructured data processing. However, these frameworks focus on reducing cost when executing user-specified operations using LLMs, rather than improving accuracy, executing most operations as-is. This is problematic for complex tasks and data, where LLM outputs for user-defined operations are often inaccurate, even with optimized prompts. We present DocETL, a system that optimizes complex document processing pipelines, while accounting for LLM shortcomings. DocETL offers a declarative interface for users to define such pipelines and uses an agent-based framework to automatically optimize them, leveraging novel agent-based rewrites (that we call {\em rewrite directives}) and an optimization and evaluation framework that we introduce. We introduce {\em (i)} logical rewriting of pipelines, tailored for LLM-based tasks, {\em (ii)} an agent-guided plan evaluation mechanism that synthesizes and orchestrates task-specific validation prompts, and {\em (iii)} an optimization algorithm that efficiently finds promising plans, considering the time constraints of LLM-based plan generation and evaluation. Our evaluation on three different unstructured document analysis tasks demonstrates that DocETL finds plans with outputs that are 1.34 to 4.6times higher quality (e.g., more accurate, comprehensive) than well-engineered baselines, addressing a critical gap in existing declarative frameworks for unstructured data analysis. DocETL is open-source at docetl.org, and as of October 2024, has amassed over 800 GitHub Stars, with users spanning a variety of domains.
Paper Abstract Writing through Editing Mechanism
We present a paper abstract writing system based on an attentive neural sequence-to-sequence model that can take a title as input and automatically generate an abstract. We design a novel Writing-editing Network that can attend to both the title and the previously generated abstract drafts and then iteratively revise and polish the abstract. With two series of Turing tests, where the human judges are asked to distinguish the system-generated abstracts from human-written ones, our system passes Turing tests by junior domain experts at a rate up to 30% and by non-expert at a rate up to 80%.
A Cognitive Writing Perspective for Constrained Long-Form Text Generation
Like humans, Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to generate high-quality long-form text that adheres to strict requirements in a single pass. This challenge is unsurprising, as successful human writing, according to the Cognitive Writing Theory, is a complex cognitive process involving iterative planning, translating, reviewing, and monitoring. Motivated by these cognitive principles, we aim to equip LLMs with human-like cognitive writing capabilities through CogWriter, a novel training-free framework that transforms LLM constrained long-form text generation into a systematic cognitive writing paradigm. Our framework consists of two key modules: (1) a Planning Agent that performs hierarchical planning to decompose the task, and (2) multiple Generation Agents that execute these plans in parallel. The system maintains quality via continuous monitoring and reviewing mechanisms, which evaluate outputs against specified requirements and trigger necessary revisions. CogWriter demonstrates exceptional performance on LongGenBench, a benchmark for complex constrained long-form text generation. Even when using Qwen-2.5-14B as its backbone, CogWriter surpasses GPT-4o by 22% in complex instruction completion accuracy while reliably generating texts exceeding 10,000 words. We hope this cognitive science-inspired approach provides a paradigm for LLM writing advancements: https://github.com/KaiyangWan/CogWriter{CogWriter}.
RePrompt: Reasoning-Augmented Reprompting for Text-to-Image Generation via Reinforcement Learning
Despite recent progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation, existing models often struggle to faithfully capture user intentions from short and under-specified prompts. While prior work has attempted to enhance prompts using large language models (LLMs), these methods frequently generate stylistic or unrealistic content due to insufficient grounding in visual semantics and real-world composition. Inspired by recent advances in reasoning for language model, we propose RePrompt, a novel reprompting framework that introduces explicit reasoning into the prompt enhancement process via reinforcement learning. Instead of relying on handcrafted rules or stylistic rewrites, our method trains a language model to generate structured, self-reflective prompts by optimizing for image-level outcomes. The tailored reward models assesse the generated images in terms of human preference, semantic alignment, and visual composition, providing indirect supervision to refine prompt generation. Our approach enables end-to-end training without human-annotated data. Experiments on GenEval and T2I-Compbench show that RePrompt significantly boosts spatial layout fidelity and compositional generalization across diverse T2I backbones, establishing new state-of-the-art results.
RefModel: Detecting Refactorings using Foundation Models
Refactoring is a common software engineering practice that improves code quality without altering program behavior. Although tools like ReExtractor+, RefactoringMiner, and RefDiff have been developed to detect refactorings automatically, they rely on complex rule definitions and static analysis, making them difficult to extend and generalize to other programming languages. In this paper, we investigate the viability of using foundation models for refactoring detection, implemented in a tool named RefModel. We evaluate Phi4-14B, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on a dataset of 858 single-operation transformations applied to artificially generated Java programs, covering widely-used refactoring types. We also extend our evaluation by including Gemini 2.5 Pro and o4-mini-high, assessing their performance on 44 real-world refactorings extracted from four open-source projects. These models are compared against RefactoringMiner, RefDiff, and ReExtractor+. RefModel is competitive with, and in some cases outperform, traditional tools. In real-world settings, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro jointly identified 97% of all refactorings, surpassing the best-performing static-analysis-based tools. The models showed encouraging generalization to Python and Golang. They provide natural language explanations and require only a single sentence to define each refactoring type.
Alchemy: Amplifying Theorem-Proving Capability through Symbolic Mutation
Formal proofs are challenging to write even for experienced experts. Recent progress in Neural Theorem Proving (NTP) shows promise in expediting this process. However, the formal corpora available on the Internet are limited compared to the general text, posing a significant data scarcity challenge for NTP. To address this issue, this work proposes Alchemy, a general framework for data synthesis that constructs formal theorems through symbolic mutation. Specifically, for each candidate theorem in Mathlib, we identify all invocable theorems that can be used to rewrite or apply to it. Subsequently, we mutate the candidate theorem by replacing the corresponding term in the statement with its equivalent form or antecedent. As a result, our method increases the number of theorems in Mathlib by an order of magnitude, from 110k to 6M. Furthermore, we perform continual pretraining and supervised finetuning on this augmented corpus for large language models. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving a 5% absolute performance improvement on Leandojo benchmark. Additionally, our synthetic data achieve a 2.5% absolute performance gain on the out-of-distribution miniF2F benchmark. To provide further insights, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of synthetic data composition and the training paradigm, offering valuable guidance for developing a strong theorem prover.
LLM-Assisted Code Cleaning For Training Accurate Code Generators
Natural language to code generation is an important application area of LLMs and has received wide attention from the community. The majority of relevant studies have exclusively concentrated on increasing the quantity and functional correctness of training sets while disregarding other stylistic elements of programs. More recently, data quality has garnered a lot of interest and multiple works have showcased its importance for improving performance. In this work, we investigate data quality for code and find that making the code more structured and readable leads to improved code generation performance of the system. We build a novel data-cleaning pipeline that uses these principles to transform existing programs by 1.) renaming variables, 2.) modularizing and decomposing complex code into smaller helper sub-functions, and 3.) inserting natural-language based plans via LLM based transformations. We evaluate our approach on two challenging algorithmic code generation benchmarks and find that fine-tuning CodeLLaMa-7B on our transformed modularized programs improves the performance by up to 30% compared to fine-tuning on the original dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate improved performance from using a smaller amount of higher-quality data, finding that a model fine-tuned on the entire original dataset is outperformed by a model trained on 15% of our cleaned dataset. Even in comparison to closed-source models, our models outperform the much larger AlphaCoder models.
Writer adaptation for offline text recognition: An exploration of neural network-based methods
Handwriting recognition has seen significant success with the use of deep learning. However, a persistent shortcoming of neural networks is that they are not well-equipped to deal with shifting data distributions. In the field of handwritten text recognition (HTR), this shows itself in poor recognition accuracy for writers that are not similar to those seen during training. An ideal HTR model should be adaptive to new writing styles in order to handle the vast amount of possible writing styles. In this paper, we explore how HTR models can be made writer adaptive by using only a handful of examples from a new writer (e.g., 16 examples) for adaptation. Two HTR architectures are used as base models, using a ResNet backbone along with either an LSTM or Transformer sequence decoder. Using these base models, two methods are considered to make them writer adaptive: 1) model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), an algorithm commonly used for tasks such as few-shot classification, and 2) writer codes, an idea originating from automatic speech recognition. Results show that an HTR-specific version of MAML known as MetaHTR improves performance compared to the baseline with a 1.4 to 2.0 improvement in word error rate (WER). The improvement due to writer adaptation is between 0.2 and 0.7 WER, where a deeper model seems to lend itself better to adaptation using MetaHTR than a shallower model. However, applying MetaHTR to larger HTR models or sentence-level HTR may become prohibitive due to its high computational and memory requirements. Lastly, writer codes based on learned features or Hinge statistical features did not lead to improved recognition performance.
Weaver: Foundation Models for Creative Writing
This work introduces Weaver, our first family of large language models (LLMs) dedicated to content creation. Weaver is pre-trained on a carefully selected corpus that focuses on improving the writing capabilities of large language models. We then fine-tune Weaver for creative and professional writing purposes and align it to the preference of professional writers using a suit of novel methods for instruction data synthesis and LLM alignment, making it able to produce more human-like texts and follow more diverse instructions for content creation. The Weaver family consists of models of Weaver Mini (1.8B), Weaver Base (6B), Weaver Pro (14B), and Weaver Ultra (34B) sizes, suitable for different applications and can be dynamically dispatched by a routing agent according to query complexity to balance response quality and computation cost. Evaluation on a carefully curated benchmark for assessing the writing capabilities of LLMs shows Weaver models of all sizes outperform generalist LLMs several times larger than them. Notably, our most-capable Weaver Ultra model surpasses GPT-4, a state-of-the-art generalist LLM, on various writing scenarios, demonstrating the advantage of training specialized LLMs for writing purposes. Moreover, Weaver natively supports retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and function calling (tool usage). We present various use cases of these abilities for improving AI-assisted writing systems, including integration of external knowledge bases, tools, or APIs, and providing personalized writing assistance. Furthermore, we discuss and summarize a guideline and best practices for pre-training and fine-tuning domain-specific LLMs.
Raidar: geneRative AI Detection viA Rewriting
We find that large language models (LLMs) are more likely to modify human-written text than AI-generated text when tasked with rewriting. This tendency arises because LLMs often perceive AI-generated text as high-quality, leading to fewer modifications. We introduce a method to detect AI-generated content by prompting LLMs to rewrite text and calculating the editing distance of the output. We dubbed our geneRative AI Detection viA Rewriting method Raidar. Raidar significantly improves the F1 detection scores of existing AI content detection models -- both academic and commercial -- across various domains, including News, creative writing, student essays, code, Yelp reviews, and arXiv papers, with gains of up to 29 points. Operating solely on word symbols without high-dimensional features, our method is compatible with black box LLMs, and is inherently robust on new content. Our results illustrate the unique imprint of machine-generated text through the lens of the machines themselves.
DUnE: Dataset for Unified Editing
Even the most advanced language models remain susceptible to errors necessitating to modify these models without initiating a comprehensive retraining process. Model editing refers to the modification of a model's knowledge or representations in a manner that produces the desired outcomes. Prior research primarily centered around editing factual data e.g. "Messi plays for Inter Miami" confining the definition of an edit to a knowledge triplet i.e. (subject, object, relation). However, as the applications of language models expand, so do the diverse ways in which we wish to edit and refine their outputs. In this study, we broaden the scope of the editing problem to include an array of editing cases such as debiasing and rectifying reasoning errors and define an edit as any natural language expression that solicits a change in the model's outputs. We are introducing DUnE-an editing benchmark where edits are natural language sentences and propose that DUnE presents a challenging yet relevant task. To substantiate this claim, we conduct an extensive series of experiments testing various editing approaches to address DUnE, demonstrating their respective strengths and weaknesses. We show that retrieval-augmented language modeling can outperform specialized editing techniques and neither set of approaches has fully solved the generalized editing problem covered by our benchmark.
SymRTLO: Enhancing RTL Code Optimization with LLMs and Neuron-Inspired Symbolic Reasoning
Optimizing Register Transfer Level (RTL) code is crucial for improving the power, performance, and area (PPA) of digital circuits in the early stages of synthesis. Manual rewriting, guided by synthesis feedback, can yield high-quality results but is time-consuming and error-prone. Most existing compiler-based approaches have difficulty handling complex design constraints. Large Language Model (LLM)-based methods have emerged as a promising alternative to address these challenges. However, LLM-based approaches often face difficulties in ensuring alignment between the generated code and the provided prompts. This paper presents SymRTLO, a novel neuron-symbolic RTL optimization framework that seamlessly integrates LLM-based code rewriting with symbolic reasoning techniques. Our method incorporates a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system of optimization rules and Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)-based templates, enabling LLM-based rewriting that maintains syntactic correctness while minimizing undesired circuit behaviors. A symbolic module is proposed for analyzing and optimizing finite state machine (FSM) logic, allowing fine-grained state merging and partial specification handling beyond the scope of pattern-based compilers. Furthermore, a fast verification pipeline, combining formal equivalence checks with test-driven validation, further reduces the complexity of verification. Experiments on the RTL-Rewriter benchmark with Synopsys Design Compiler and Yosys show that SymRTLO improves power, performance, and area (PPA) by up to 43.9%, 62.5%, and 51.1%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
PEER: A Collaborative Language Model
Textual content is often the output of a collaborative writing process: We start with an initial draft, ask for suggestions, and repeatedly make changes. Agnostic of this process, today's language models are trained to generate only the final result. As a consequence, they lack several abilities crucial for collaborative writing: They are unable to update existing texts, difficult to control and incapable of verbally planning or explaining their actions. To address these shortcomings, we introduce PEER, a collaborative language model that is trained to imitate the entire writing process itself: PEER can write drafts, add suggestions, propose edits and provide explanations for its actions. Crucially, we train multiple instances of PEER able to infill various parts of the writing process, enabling the use of self-training techniques for increasing the quality, amount and diversity of training data. This unlocks PEER's full potential by making it applicable in domains for which no edit histories are available and improving its ability to follow instructions, to write useful comments, and to explain its actions. We show that PEER achieves strong performance across various domains and editing tasks.
No Word is an Island -- A Transformation Weighting Model for Semantic Composition
Composition models of distributional semantics are used to construct phrase representations from the representations of their words. Composition models are typically situated on two ends of a spectrum. They either have a small number of parameters but compose all phrases in the same way, or they perform word-specific compositions at the cost of a far larger number of parameters. In this paper we propose transformation weighting (TransWeight), a composition model that consistently outperforms existing models on nominal compounds, adjective-noun phrases and adverb-adjective phrases in English, German and Dutch. TransWeight drastically reduces the number of parameters needed compared to the best model in the literature by composing similar words in the same way.
Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capacity to improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. Two strategies are designed to perform this iterative process: Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompt. Prompt chaining orchestrates the drafting, critiquing, and refining phases through a series of three discrete prompts, while Stepwise prompt integrates these phases within a single prompt. However, the relative effectiveness of the two methods has not been extensively studied. This paper is dedicated to examining and comparing these two methods in the context of text summarization to ascertain which method stands out as the most effective. Experimental results show that the prompt chaining method can produce a more favorable outcome. This might be because stepwise prompt might produce a simulated refinement process according to our various experiments. Since refinement is adaptable to diverse tasks, our conclusions have the potential to be extrapolated to other applications, thereby offering insights that may contribute to the broader development of LLMs.
Visual Story-Writing: Writing by Manipulating Visual Representations of Stories
We define "visual story-writing" as using visual representations of story elements to support writing and revising narrative texts. To demonstrate this approach, we developed a text editor that automatically visualizes a graph of entity interactions, movement between locations, and a timeline of story events. Interacting with these visualizations results in suggested text edits: for example, connecting two characters in the graph creates an interaction between them, moving an entity updates their described location, and rearranging events on the timeline reorganizes the narrative sequence. Through two user studies on narrative text editing and writing, we found that visuals supported participants in planning high-level revisions, tracking story elements, and exploring story variations in ways that encourage creativity. Broadly, our work lays the foundation for writing support, not just through words, but also visuals.
M2R2: Mixture of Multi-Rate Residuals for Efficient Transformer Inference
Residual transformations enhance the representational depth and expressive power of large language models (LLMs). However, applying static residual transformations across all tokens in auto-regressive generation leads to a suboptimal trade-off between inference efficiency and generation fidelity. Existing methods, including Early Exiting, Skip Decoding, and Mixture-of-Depth address this by modulating the residual transformation based on token-level complexity. Nevertheless, these approaches predominantly consider the distance traversed by tokens through the model layers, neglecting the underlying velocity of residual evolution. We introduce Mixture of Multi-rate Residuals (M2R2), a framework that dynamically modulates residual velocity to improve early alignment, enhancing inference efficiency. Evaluations on reasoning oriented tasks such as Koala, Self-Instruct, WizardLM, and MT-Bench show M2R2 surpasses state-of-the-art distance-based strategies, balancing generation quality and speedup. In self-speculative decoding setup, M2R2 achieves up to 2.8x speedups on MT-Bench, outperforming methods like 2-model speculative decoding, Medusa, LookAhead Decoding, and DEED. In Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures, integrating early residual alignment with ahead-of-time expert loading into high-bandwidth memory (HBM) accelerates decoding, reduces expert-switching bottlenecks, and achieves a 2.9x speedup, making it highly effective in resource-constrained environments.
LitLLMs, LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet?
Literature reviews are an essential component of scientific research, but they remain time-intensive and challenging to write, especially due to the recent influx of research papers. This paper explores the zero-shot abilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) in assisting with the writing of literature reviews based on an abstract. We decompose the task into two components: 1. Retrieving related works given a query abstract, and 2. Writing a literature review based on the retrieved results. We analyze how effective LLMs are for both components. For retrieval, we introduce a novel two-step search strategy that first uses an LLM to extract meaningful keywords from the abstract of a paper and then retrieves potentially relevant papers by querying an external knowledge base. Additionally, we study a prompting-based re-ranking mechanism with attribution and show that re-ranking doubles the normalized recall compared to naive search methods, while providing insights into the LLM's decision-making process. In the generation phase, we propose a two-step approach that first outlines a plan for the review and then executes steps in the plan to generate the actual review. To evaluate different LLM-based literature review methods, we create test sets from arXiv papers using a protocol designed for rolling use with newly released LLMs to avoid test set contamination in zero-shot evaluations. We release this evaluation protocol to promote additional research and development in this regard. Our empirical results suggest that LLMs show promising potential for writing literature reviews when the task is decomposed into smaller components of retrieval and planning. Our project page including a demonstration system and toolkit can be accessed here: https://litllm.github.io.
Transforming Delete, Retrieve, Generate Approach for Controlled Text Style Transfer
Text style transfer is the task of transferring the style of text having certain stylistic attributes, while preserving non-stylistic or content information. In this work we introduce the Generative Style Transformer (GST) - a new approach to rewriting sentences to a target style in the absence of parallel style corpora. GST leverages the power of both, large unsupervised pre-trained language models as well as the Transformer. GST is a part of a larger `Delete Retrieve Generate' framework, in which we also propose a novel method of deleting style attributes from the source sentence by exploiting the inner workings of the Transformer. Our models outperform state-of-art systems across 5 datasets on sentiment, gender and political slant transfer. We also propose the use of the GLEU metric as an automatic metric of evaluation of style transfer, which we found to compare better with human ratings than the predominantly used BLEU score.
Improving Autoformalization using Type Checking
Large language models show promise for autoformalization, the task of automatically translating natural language into formal languages. However, current autoformalization methods remain limited. The last reported state-of-the-art performance on the ProofNet formalization benchmark for the Lean proof assistant, achieved using Codex for Lean 3, only showed successful formalization of 16.1% of informal statements. Similarly, our evaluation of GPT-4o for Lean 4 only produces successful translations 34.9% of the time. Our analysis shows that the performance of these models is largely limited by their inability to generate formal statements that successfully type-check (i.e., are syntactically correct and consistent with types) - with a whopping 86.6% of GPT-4o errors starting from a type-check failure. In this work, we propose a method to fix this issue through decoding with type-check filtering, where we initially sample a diverse set of candidate formalizations for an informal statement, then use the Lean proof assistant to filter out candidates that do not type-check. Using GPT-4o as a base model, and combining our method with self-consistency, we obtain a +18.3% absolute increase in formalization accuracy, and achieve a new state-of-the-art of 53.2% on ProofNet with Lean 4.
ProofBridge: Auto-Formalization of Natural Language Proofs in Lean via Joint Embeddings
Translating human-written mathematical theorems and proofs from natural language (NL) into formal languages (FLs) like Lean 4 has long been a significant challenge for AI. Most state-of-the-art methods address this separately, first translating theorems and then generating proofs, creating a fundamental disconnect vis-a-vis true proof auto-formalization. This two-step process and its limitations were evident even in AlphaProof's silver-medal performance at the 2024 IMO, where problem statements needed manual translation before automated proof synthesis. We present ProofBridge, a unified framework for automatically translating entire NL theorems and proofs into Lean 4. At its core is a joint embedding model that aligns NL and FL (NL-FL) theorem-proof pairs in a shared semantic space, enabling cross-modal retrieval of semantically relevant FL examples to guide translation. Our training ensures that NL-FL theorems (and their proofs) are mapped close together in this space if and only if the NL-FL pairs are semantically equivalent. ProofBridge integrates retrieval-augmented fine-tuning with iterative proof repair, leveraging Lean's type checker and semantic equivalence feedback to ensure both syntactic correctness and semantic fidelity. Experiments show substantial improvements in proof auto-formalization over strong baselines (including GPT-5, Gemini-2.5, Kimina-Prover, DeepSeek-Prover), with our retrieval-augmented approach yielding significant gains in semantic correctness (SC, via proving bi-directional equivalence) and type correctness (TC, via type-checking theorem+proof) across pass@k metrics on miniF2F-Test-PF, a dataset we curated. In particular, ProofBridge improves cross-modal retrieval quality by up to 3.28x Recall@1 over all-MiniLM-L6-v2, and achieves +31.14% SC and +1.64% TC (pass@32) compared to the baseline Kimina-Prover-RL-1.7B.
Iterative Translation Refinement with Large Language Models
Large language models have shown surprising performances in understanding instructions and performing natural language tasks. In this paper, we propose iterative translation refinement to leverage the power of large language models for more natural translation and post-editing. We show that by simply involving a large language model in an iterative process, the output quality improves beyond mere translation. Extensive test scenarios with GPT-3.5 reveal that although iterations reduce string-based metric scores, neural metrics indicate comparable if not improved translation quality. Further, human evaluations demonstrate that our method effectively reduces translationese compared to initial GPT translations and even human references, especially for into-English directions. Ablation studies underscore the importance of anchoring the refinement process to the source input and a reasonable initial translation.
Training-free Geometric Image Editing on Diffusion Models
We tackle the task of geometric image editing, where an object within an image is repositioned, reoriented, or reshaped while preserving overall scene coherence. Previous diffusion-based editing methods often attempt to handle all relevant subtasks in a single step, proving difficult when transformations become large or structurally complex. We address this by proposing a decoupled pipeline that separates object transformation, source region inpainting, and target region refinement. Both inpainting and refinement are implemented using a training-free diffusion approach, FreeFine. In experiments on our new GeoBench benchmark, which contains both 2D and 3D editing scenarios, FreeFine outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in image fidelity, and edit precision, especially under demanding transformations. Code and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/CIawevy/FreeFine
Thought Propagation: An Analogical Approach to Complex Reasoning with Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in reasoning tasks with the development of prompting methods. However, existing prompting approaches cannot reuse insights of solving similar problems and suffer from accumulated errors in multi-step reasoning, since they prompt LLMs to reason from scratch. To address these issues, we propose \textit{Thought Propagation (TP)}, which explores the analogous problems and leverages their solutions to enhance the complex reasoning ability of LLMs. These analogous problems are related to the input one, with reusable solutions and problem-solving strategies. Thus, it is promising to propagate insights of solving previous analogous problems to inspire new problem-solving. To achieve this, TP first prompts LLMs to propose and solve a set of analogous problems that are related to the input one. Then, TP reuses the results of analogous problems to directly yield a new solution or derive a knowledge-intensive plan for execution to amend the initial solution obtained from scratch. TP is compatible with existing prompting approaches, allowing plug-and-play generalization and enhancement in a wide range of tasks without much labor in task-specific prompt engineering. Experiments across three challenging tasks demonstrate TP enjoys a substantial improvement over the baselines by an average of 12\% absolute increase in finding the optimal solutions in Shortest-path Reasoning, 13\% improvement of human preference in Creative Writing, and 15\% enhancement in the task completion rate of LLM-Agent Planning.
Learn from the Past: Language-conditioned Object Rearrangement with Large Language Models
Object rearrangement is a significant task for collaborative robots, where they are directed to manipulate objects into a specified goal state. Determining the placement of objects is a major challenge that influences the efficiency of the rearrangement process. Most current methods heavily rely on pre-collected datasets to train the model for predicting the goal position and are restricted to specific instructions, which limits their broader applicability and effectiveness.In this paper, we propose a framework of language-conditioned object rearrangement based on the Large Language Model (LLM). Particularly, our approach mimics human reasoning by using past successful experiences as a reference to infer the desired goal position. Based on LLM's strong natural language comprehension and inference ability, our method can generalise to handle various everyday objects and free-form language instructions in a zero-shot manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods can effectively execute the robotic rearrangement tasks, even those involving long sequential orders.
LLM-Ref: Enhancing Reference Handling in Technical Writing with Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in data synthesis but can be inaccurate in domain-specific tasks, which retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems address by leveraging user-provided data. However, RAGs require optimization in both retrieval and generation stages, which can affect output quality. In this paper, we present LLM-Ref, a writing assistant tool that aids researchers in writing articles from multiple source documents with enhanced reference synthesis and handling capabilities. Unlike traditional RAG systems that use chunking and indexing, our tool retrieves and generates content directly from text paragraphs. This method facilitates direct reference extraction from the generated outputs, a feature unique to our tool. Additionally, our tool employs iterative response generation, effectively managing lengthy contexts within the language model's constraints. Compared to baseline RAG-based systems, our approach achieves a 3.25times to 6.26times increase in Ragas score, a comprehensive metric that provides a holistic view of a RAG system's ability to produce accurate, relevant, and contextually appropriate responses. This improvement shows our method enhances the accuracy and contextual relevance of writing assistance tools.
Herald: A Natural Language Annotated Lean 4 Dataset
Verifiable formal languages like Lean have profoundly impacted mathematical reasoning, particularly through the use of large language models (LLMs) for automated reasoning. A significant challenge in training LLMs for these formal languages is the lack of parallel datasets that align natural language with formal language proofs. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a novel framework for translating the Mathlib4 corpus (a unified library of mathematics in formal language Lean 4) into natural language. Building upon this, we employ a dual augmentation strategy that combines tactic-based and informal-based approaches, leveraging the Lean-jixia system, a Lean 4 analyzer. We present the results of this pipeline on Mathlib4 as Herald (Hierarchy and Retrieval-based Translated Lean Dataset). We also propose the Herald Translator, which is fine-tuned on Herald. Herald translator achieves a 93.2% accuracy (Pass@128) on formalizing statements in the miniF2F-test and a 22.5% accuracy on our internal graduate-level textbook dataset, outperforming InternLM2-Math-Plus-7B (74.0% and 7.5%) and TheoremLlama (50.1% and 4.0%). Furthermore, we propose a section-level translation framework for real-world applications. As a direct application of Herald translator, we have successfully translated a template section in the Stack project, marking a notable progress in the automatic formalization of graduate-level mathematical literature. Our model, along with the datasets, will be open-sourced to the public soon.
MAMUT: A Novel Framework for Modifying Mathematical Formulas for the Generation of Specialized Datasets for Language Model Training
Mathematical formulas are a fundamental and widely used component in various scientific fields, serving as a universal language for expressing complex concepts and relationships. While state-of-the-art transformer models excel in processing and understanding natural language, they encounter challenges with mathematical notation, which involves a complex structure and diverse representations. This study focuses on the development of specialized training datasets to enhance the encoding of mathematical content. We introduce Math Mutator (MAMUT), a framework capable of generating equivalent and falsified versions of a given mathematical formula in LaTeX notation, effectively capturing the mathematical variety in notation of the same concept. Based on MAMUT, we have generated four large mathematical datasets containing diverse notation, which can be used to train language models with enhanced mathematical embeddings.
FlowAlign: Trajectory-Regularized, Inversion-Free Flow-based Image Editing
Recent inversion-free, flow-based image editing methods such as FlowEdit leverages a pre-trained noise-to-image flow model such as Stable Diffusion 3, enabling text-driven manipulation by solving an ordinary differential equation (ODE). While the lack of exact latent inversion is a core advantage of these methods, it often results in unstable editing trajectories and poor source consistency. To address this limitation, we propose {\em FlowAlign}, a novel inversion-free flow-based framework for consistent image editing with optimal control-based trajectory control. Specifically, FlowAlign introduces source similarity at the terminal point as a regularization term to promote smoother and more consistent trajectories during the editing process. Notably, our terminal point regularization is shown to explicitly balance semantic alignment with the edit prompt and structural consistency with the source image along the trajectory. Furthermore, FlowAlign naturally supports reverse editing by simply reversing the ODE trajectory, highliting the reversible and consistent nature of the transformation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowAlign outperforms existing methods in both source preservation and editing controllability.
POEM: Precise Object-level Editing via MLLM control
Diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-image generation, producing high-quality, realistic images from textual descriptions. Beyond generation, object-level image editing remains a challenging problem, requiring precise modifications while preserving visual coherence. Existing text-based instructional editing methods struggle with localized shape and layout transformations, often introducing unintended global changes. Image interaction-based approaches offer better accuracy but require manual human effort to provide precise guidance. To reduce this manual effort while maintaining a high image editing accuracy, in this paper, we propose POEM, a framework for Precise Object-level Editing using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). POEM leverages MLLMs to analyze instructional prompts and generate precise object masks before and after transformation, enabling fine-grained control without extensive user input. This structured reasoning stage guides the diffusion-based editing process, ensuring accurate object localization and transformation. To evaluate our approach, we introduce VOCEdits, a benchmark dataset based on PASCAL VOC 2012, augmented with instructional edit prompts, ground-truth transformations, and precise object masks. Experimental results show that POEM outperforms existing text-based image editing approaches in precision and reliability while reducing manual effort compared to interaction-based methods.
UniFusion: Vision-Language Model as Unified Encoder in Image Generation
Although recent advances in visual generation have been remarkable, most existing architectures still depend on distinct encoders for images and text. This separation constrains diffusion models' ability to perform cross-modal reasoning and knowledge transfer. Prior attempts to bridge this gap often use the last layer information from VLM, employ multiple visual encoders, or train large unified models jointly for text and image generation, which demands substantial computational resources and large-scale data, limiting its accessibility.We present UniFusion, a diffusion-based generative model conditioned on a frozen large vision-language model (VLM) that serves as a unified multimodal encoder. At the core of UniFusion is the Layerwise Attention Pooling (LAP) mechanism that extracts both high level semantics and low level details from text and visual tokens of a frozen VLM to condition a diffusion generative model. We demonstrate that LAP outperforms other shallow fusion architectures on text-image alignment for generation and faithful transfer of visual information from VLM to the diffusion model which is key for editing. We propose VLM-Enabled Rewriting Injection with Flexibile Inference (VERIFI), which conditions a diffusion transformer (DiT) only on the text tokens generated by the VLM during in-model prompt rewriting. VERIFI combines the alignment of the conditioning distribution with the VLM's reasoning capabilities for increased capabilities and flexibility at inference. In addition, finetuning on editing task not only improves text-image alignment for generation, indicative of cross-modality knowledge transfer, but also exhibits tremendous generalization capabilities. Our model when trained on single image editing, zero-shot generalizes to multiple image references further motivating the unified encoder design of UniFusion.
Synthetic Prompting: Generating Chain-of-Thought Demonstrations for Large Language Models
Large language models can perform various reasoning tasks by using chain-of-thought prompting, which guides them to find answers through step-by-step demonstrations. However, the quality of the prompts depends on the demonstrations given to the models, and creating many of them by hand is costly. We introduce Synthetic prompting, a method that leverages a few handcrafted examples to prompt the model to generate more examples by itself, and selects effective demonstrations to elicit better reasoning. Our method alternates between a backward and forward process to generate new examples. The backward process generates a question that match a sampled reasoning chain, so that the question is solvable and clear. The forward process produces a more detailed reasoning chain for the question, improving the quality of the example. We evaluate our method on numerical, symbolic, and algorithmic reasoning tasks, and show that it outperforms existing prompting techniques.
Improving Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training via Sequence Span Rewriting
In this paper, we generalize text infilling (e.g., masked language models) by proposing Sequence Span Rewriting (SSR) as a self-supervised sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) pre-training objective. SSR provides more fine-grained learning signals for text representations by supervising the model to rewrite imperfect spans to ground truth, and it is more consistent than text infilling with many downstream seq2seq tasks that rewrite a source sentences into a target sentence. Our experiments with T5 models on various seq2seq tasks show that SSR can substantially improve seq2seq pre-training. Moreover, we observe SSR is especially helpful to improve pre-training a small-size seq2seq model with a powerful imperfect span generator, which indicates a new perspective of transferring knowledge from a large model to a smaller model for seq2seq pre-training.
Learning to Write with Coherence From Negative Examples
Coherence is one of the critical factors that determine the quality of writing. We propose writing relevance (WR) training method for neural encoder-decoder natural language generation (NLG) models which improves coherence of the continuation by leveraging negative examples. WR loss regresses the vector representation of the context and generated sentence toward positive continuation by contrasting it with the negatives. We compare our approach with Unlikelihood (UL) training in a text continuation task on commonsense natural language inference (NLI) corpora to show which method better models the coherence by avoiding unlikely continuations. The preference of our approach in human evaluation shows the efficacy of our method in improving coherence.
Improving Bot Response Contradiction Detection via Utterance Rewriting
Though chatbots based on large neural models can often produce fluent responses in open domain conversations, one salient error type is contradiction or inconsistency with the preceding conversation turns. Previous work has treated contradiction detection in bot responses as a task similar to natural language inference, e.g., detect the contradiction between a pair of bot utterances. However, utterances in conversations may contain co-references or ellipsis, and using these utterances as is may not always be sufficient for identifying contradictions. This work aims to improve the contradiction detection via rewriting all bot utterances to restore antecedents and ellipsis. We curated a new dataset for utterance rewriting and built a rewriting model on it. We empirically demonstrate that this model can produce satisfactory rewrites to make bot utterances more complete. Furthermore, using rewritten utterances improves contradiction detection performance significantly, e.g., the AUPR and joint accuracy scores (detecting contradiction along with evidence) increase by 6.5% and 4.5% (absolute increase), respectively.
RefactorBench: Evaluating Stateful Reasoning in Language Agents Through Code
Recent advances in language model (LM) agents and function calling have enabled autonomous, feedback-driven systems to solve problems across various digital domains. To better understand the unique limitations of LM agents, we introduce RefactorBench, a benchmark consisting of 100 large handcrafted multi-file refactoring tasks in popular open-source repositories. Solving tasks within RefactorBench requires thorough exploration of dependencies across multiple files and strong adherence to relevant instructions. Every task is defined by 3 natural language instructions of varying specificity and is mutually exclusive, allowing for the creation of longer combined tasks on the same repository. Baselines on RefactorBench reveal that current LM agents struggle with simple compositional tasks, solving only 22% of tasks with base instructions, in contrast to a human developer with short time constraints solving 87%. Through trajectory analysis, we identify various unique failure modes of LM agents, and further explore the failure mode of tracking past actions. By adapting a baseline agent to condition on representations of state, we achieve a 43.9% improvement in solving RefactorBench tasks. We further extend our state-aware approach to encompass entire digital environments and outline potential directions for future research. RefactorBench aims to support the study of LM agents by providing a set of real-world, multi-hop tasks within the realm of code.
Controllable Sentence Simplification
Text simplification aims at making a text easier to read and understand by simplifying grammar and structure while keeping the underlying information identical. It is often considered an all-purpose generic task where the same simplification is suitable for all; however multiple audiences can benefit from simplified text in different ways. We adapt a discrete parametrization mechanism that provides explicit control on simplification systems based on Sequence-to-Sequence models. As a result, users can condition the simplifications returned by a model on attributes such as length, amount of paraphrasing, lexical complexity and syntactic complexity. We also show that carefully chosen values of these attributes allow out-of-the-box Sequence-to-Sequence models to outperform their standard counterparts on simplification benchmarks. Our model, which we call ACCESS (as shorthand for AudienCe-CEntric Sentence Simplification), establishes the state of the art at 41.87 SARI on the WikiLarge test set, a +1.42 improvement over the best previously reported score.
LongWriter-Zero: Mastering Ultra-Long Text Generation via Reinforcement Learning
Ultra-long generation by large language models (LLMs) is a widely demanded scenario, yet it remains a significant challenge due to their maximum generation length limit and overall quality degradation as sequence length increases. Previous approaches, exemplified by LongWriter, typically rely on ''teaching'', which involves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on synthetic long-form outputs. However, this strategy heavily depends on synthetic SFT data, which is difficult and costly to construct, often lacks coherence and consistency, and tends to be overly artificial and structurally monotonous. In this work, we propose an incentivization-based approach that, starting entirely from scratch and without relying on any annotated or synthetic data, leverages reinforcement learning (RL) to foster the emergence of ultra-long, high-quality text generation capabilities in LLMs. We perform RL training starting from a base model, similar to R1-Zero, guiding it to engage in reasoning that facilitates planning and refinement during the writing process. To support this, we employ specialized reward models that steer the LLM towards improved length control, writing quality, and structural formatting. Experimental evaluations show that our LongWriter-Zero model, trained from Qwen2.5-32B, consistently outperforms traditional SFT methods on long-form writing tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results across all metrics on WritingBench and Arena-Write, and even surpassing 100B+ models such as DeepSeek R1 and Qwen3-235B. We open-source our data and model checkpoints under https://huggingface.co/THU-KEG/LongWriter-Zero-32B
Simple and Scalable Strategies to Continually Pre-train Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) are routinely pre-trained on billions of tokens, only to start the process over again once new data becomes available. A much more efficient solution is to continually pre-train these models, saving significant compute compared to re-training. However, the distribution shift induced by new data typically results in degraded performance on previous data or poor adaptation to the new data. In this work, we show that a simple and scalable combination of learning rate (LR) re-warming, LR re-decaying, and replay of previous data is sufficient to match the performance of fully re-training from scratch on all available data, as measured by final loss and language model (LM) evaluation benchmarks. Specifically, we show this for a weak but realistic distribution shift between two commonly used LLM pre-training datasets (EnglishrightarrowEnglish) and a stronger distribution shift (EnglishrightarrowGerman) at the 405M parameter model scale with large dataset sizes (hundreds of billions of tokens). Selecting the weak but realistic shift for larger-scale experiments, we also find that our continual learning strategies match the re-training baseline for a 10B parameter LLM. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can be successfully updated via simple and scalable continual learning strategies, matching the re-training baseline using only a fraction of the compute. Finally, inspired by previous work, we propose alternatives to the cosine learning rate schedule that help circumvent forgetting induced by LR re-warming and that are not bound to a fixed token budget.
LLM-Collaboration on Automatic Science Journalism for the General Audience
Science journalism reports current scientific discoveries to non-specialists, aiming to enable public comprehension of the state of the art. However, this task can be challenging as the audience often lacks specific knowledge about the presented research. To address this challenge, we propose a framework that integrates three LLMs mimicking the real-world writing-reading-feedback-revision workflow, with one LLM acting as the journalist, a smaller LLM as the general public reader, and the third LLM as an editor. The journalist's writing is iteratively refined by feedback from the reader and suggestions from the editor. Our experiments demonstrate that by leveraging the collaboration of two 7B and one 1.8B open-source LLMs, we can generate articles that are more accessible than those generated by existing methods, including advanced models such as GPT-4.
RECAP: REwriting Conversations for Intent Understanding in Agentic Planning
Understanding user intent is essential for effective planning in conversational assistants, particularly those powered by large language models (LLMs) coordinating multiple agents. However, real-world dialogues are often ambiguous, underspecified, or dynamic, making intent detection a persistent challenge. Traditional classification-based approaches struggle to generalize in open-ended settings, leading to brittle interpretations and poor downstream planning. We propose RECAP (REwriting Conversations for Agent Planning), a new benchmark designed to evaluate and advance intent rewriting, reframing user-agent dialogues into concise representations of user goals. RECAP captures diverse challenges such as ambiguity, intent drift, vagueness, and mixed-goal conversations. Alongside the dataset, we introduce an LLM-based evaluator that assesses planning utility given the rewritten intent. Using RECAP, we develop a prompt-based rewriting approach that outperforms baselines. We further demonstrate that fine-tuning two DPO-based rewriters yields additional utility gains. Our results highlight intent rewriting as a critical and tractable component for improving agent planning in open-domain dialogue systems.
Lean Workbook: A large-scale Lean problem set formalized from natural language math problems
Large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various natural language processing tasks, especially in solving mathematical problems. However, large language models are not good at math theorem proving using formal languages like Lean. A significant challenge in this area is the scarcity of training data available in these formal languages. To address this issue, we propose a novel pipeline that iteratively generates and filters synthetic data to translate natural language mathematical problems into Lean 4 statements, and vice versa. Our results indicate that the synthetic data pipeline can provide useful training data and improve the performance of LLMs in translating and understanding complex mathematical problems and proofs. Our final dataset contains about 57K formal-informal question pairs along with searched proof from the math contest forum and 21 new IMO questions. We open-source our code at https://github.com/InternLM/InternLM-Math and our data at https://huggingface.co/datasets/InternLM/Lean-Workbook.
Prompt reinforcing for long-term planning of large language models
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of natural language processing tasks and can be adapted through prompting. However, they remain suboptimal in multi-turn interactions, often relying on incorrect early assumptions and failing to track user goals over time, which makes such tasks particularly challenging. Prior works in dialogue systems have shown that long-term planning is essential for handling interactive tasks. In this work, we propose a prompt optimisation framework inspired by reinforcement learning, which enables such planning to take place by only modifying the task instruction prompt of the LLM-based agent. By generating turn-by-turn feedback and leveraging experience replay for prompt rewriting, our proposed method shows significant improvement in multi-turn tasks such as text-to-SQL and task-oriented dialogue. Moreover, it generalises across different LLM-based agents and can leverage diverse LLMs as meta-prompting agents. This warrants future research in reinforcement learning-inspired parameter-free optimisation methods.
