Daily Papers

Audio-language models have shown promising results in various sound understanding tasks, yet they remain limited in their ability to reason over the fine-grained semantics of sound. In this paper, we present AudSemThinker, a model whose reasoning is structured around a framework of auditory semantics inspired by human cognition. To support this, we introduce AudSem, a novel dataset specifically curated for semantic descriptor reasoning in audio-language models. AudSem addresses the persistent challenge of data contamination in zero-shot evaluations by providing a carefully filtered collection of audio samples paired with captions generated through a robust multi-stage pipeline. Our experiments demonstrate that AudSemThinker outperforms state-of-the-art models across multiple training settings, highlighting its strength in semantic audio reasoning. Both AudSemThinker and the AudSem dataset are released publicly.

We introduce HoVer (HOppy VERification), a dataset for many-hop evidence extraction and fact verification. It challenges models to extract facts from several Wikipedia articles that are relevant to a claim and classify whether the claim is Supported or Not-Supported by the facts. In HoVer, the claims require evidence to be extracted from as many as four English Wikipedia articles and embody reasoning graphs of diverse shapes. Moreover, most of the 3/4-hop claims are written in multiple sentences, which adds to the complexity of understanding long-range dependency relations such as coreference. We show that the performance of an existing state-of-the-art semantic-matching model degrades significantly on our dataset as the number of reasoning hops increases, hence demonstrating the necessity of many-hop reasoning to achieve strong results. We hope that the introduction of this challenging dataset and the accompanying evaluation task will encourage research in many-hop fact retrieval and information verification. We make the HoVer dataset publicly available at https://hover-nlp.github.io

Multi-step multimodal reasoning tasks pose significant challenges for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and finding effective ways to enhance their performance in such scenarios remains an unresolved issue. In this paper, we propose AR-MCTS, a universal framework designed to progressively improve the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs through Active Retrieval (AR) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Our approach begins with the development of a unified retrieval module that retrieves key supporting insights for solving complex reasoning problems from a hybrid-modal retrieval corpus. To bridge the gap in automated multimodal reasoning verification, we employ the MCTS algorithm combined with an active retrieval mechanism, which enables the automatic generation of step-wise annotations. This strategy dynamically retrieves key insights for each reasoning step, moving beyond traditional beam search sampling to improve the diversity and reliability of the reasoning space. Additionally, we introduce a process reward model that aligns progressively to support the automatic verification of multimodal reasoning tasks. Experimental results across three complex multimodal reasoning benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of the AR-MCTS framework in enhancing the performance of various multimodal models. Further analysis demonstrates that AR-MCTS can optimize sampling diversity and accuracy, yielding reliable multimodal reasoning.

A promising approach for knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is to select the sense whose contextualized embeddings computed for its definition sentence are closest to those computed for a target word in a given sentence. This approach relies on the similarity of the sense and context embeddings computed by a pre-trained language model. We propose a semantic specialization for WSD where contextualized embeddings are adapted to the WSD task using solely lexical knowledge. The key idea is, for a given sense, to bring semantically related senses and contexts closer and send different/unrelated senses farther away. We realize this idea as the joint optimization of the Attract-Repel objective for sense pairs and the self-training objective for context-sense pairs while controlling deviations from the original embeddings. The proposed method outperformed previous studies that adapt contextualized embeddings. It achieved state-of-the-art performance on knowledge-based WSD when combined with the reranking heuristic that uses the sense inventory. We found that the similarity characteristics of specialized embeddings conform to the key idea. We also found that the (dis)similarity of embeddings between the related/different/unrelated senses correlates well with the performance of WSD.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving a code snippet given a textual description of its functionality. Recent work has been focused on using similarity metrics between neural embeddings of text and code. However, current language models are known to struggle with longer, compositional text, and multi-step reasoning. To overcome this limitation, we propose supplementing the query sentence with a layout of its semantic structure. The semantic layout is used to break down the final reasoning decision into a series of lower-level decisions. We use a Neural Module Network architecture to implement this idea. We compare our model - NS3 (Neuro-Symbolic Semantic Search) - to a number of baselines, including state-of-the-art semantic code retrieval methods, and evaluate on two datasets - CodeSearchNet and Code Search and Question Answering. We demonstrate that our approach results in more precise code retrieval, and we study the effectiveness of our modular design when handling compositional queries.

In this work, we focus on the problem of retrieving relevant arguments for a query claim covering diverse aspects. State-of-the-art methods rely on explicit mappings between claims and premises, and thus are unable to utilize large available collections of premises without laborious and costly manual annotation. Their diversity approach relies on removing duplicates via clustering which does not directly ensure that the selected premises cover all aspects. This work introduces a new multi-step approach for the argument retrieval problem. Rather than relying on ground-truth assignments, our approach employs a machine learning model to capture semantic relationships between arguments. Beyond that, it aims to cover diverse facets of the query, instead of trying to identify duplicates explicitly. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach leads to a significant improvement in the argument retrieval task even though it requires less data.

Recent work by (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017a,b; Richardson et al., 2018) looks at semantic parser induction and question answering in the domain of source code libraries and APIs. In this brief note, we formalize the representations being learned in these studies and introduce a simple domain specific language and a systematic translation from this language to first-order logic. By recasting the target representations in terms of classical logic, we aim to broaden the applicability of existing code datasets for investigating more complex natural language understanding and reasoning problems in the software domain.

The emergent few-shot reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have excited the natural language and machine learning community over recent years. Despite of numerous successful applications, the underlying mechanism of such in-context capabilities still remains unclear. In this work, we hypothesize that the learned semantics of language tokens do the most heavy lifting during the reasoning process. Different from human's symbolic reasoning process, the semantic representations of LLMs could create strong connections among tokens, thus composing a superficial logical chain. To test our hypothesis, we decouple semantics from the language reasoning process and evaluate three kinds of reasoning abilities, i.e., deduction, induction and abduction. Our findings reveal that semantics play a vital role in LLMs' in-context reasoning -- LLMs perform significantly better when semantics are consistent with commonsense but struggle to solve symbolic or counter-commonsense reasoning tasks by leveraging in-context new knowledge. The surprising observations question whether modern LLMs have mastered the inductive, deductive and abductive reasoning abilities as in human intelligence, and motivate research on unveiling the magic existing within the black-box LLMs. On the whole, our analysis provides a novel perspective on the role of semantics in developing and evaluating language models' reasoning abilities. Code is available at {https://github.com/XiaojuanTang/ICSR}.

In this work, we aim to connect two research areas: instruction models and retrieval-based models. While instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at extracting information from text, they are not suitable for semantic retrieval. Similarity search over embedding vectors allows to index and query vectors, but the similarity reflected in the embedding is sub-optimal for many use cases. We identify the task of retrieving sentences based on abstract descriptions of their content. We demonstrate the inadequacy of current text embeddings and propose an alternative model that significantly improves when used in standard nearest neighbor search. The model is trained using positive and negative pairs sourced through prompting an a large language model (LLM). While it is easy to source the training material from an LLM, the retrieval task cannot be performed by the LLM directly. This demonstrates that data from LLMs can be used not only for distilling more efficient specialized models than the original LLM, but also for creating new capabilities not immediately possible using the original model.

Recent works have extended notions of feature importance to semantic concepts that are inherently interpretable to the users interacting with a black-box predictive model. Yet, precise statistical guarantees, such as false positive rate control, are needed to communicate findings transparently and to avoid unintended consequences in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we formalize the global (i.e., over a population) and local (i.e., for a sample) statistical importance of semantic concepts for the predictions of opaque models, by means of conditional independence, which allows for rigorous testing. We use recent ideas of sequential kernelized testing (SKIT) to induce a rank of importance across concepts, and showcase the effectiveness and flexibility of our framework on synthetic datasets as well as on image classification tasks using vision-language models such as CLIP.

Current approaches to learning semantic representations of sentences often use prior word-level knowledge. The current study aims to leverage visual information in order to capture sentence level semantics without the need for word embeddings. We use a multimodal sentence encoder trained on a corpus of images with matching text captions to produce visually grounded sentence embeddings. Deep Neural Networks are trained to map the two modalities to a common embedding space such that for an image the corresponding caption can be retrieved and vice versa. We show that our model achieves results comparable to the current state-of-the-art on two popular image-caption retrieval benchmark data sets: MSCOCO and Flickr8k. We evaluate the semantic content of the resulting sentence embeddings using the data from the Semantic Textual Similarity benchmark task and show that the multimodal embeddings correlate well with human semantic similarity judgements. The system achieves state-of-the-art results on several of these benchmarks, which shows that a system trained solely on multimodal data, without assuming any word representations, is able to capture sentence level semantics. Importantly, this result shows that we do not need prior knowledge of lexical level semantics in order to model sentence level semantics. These findings demonstrate the importance of visual information in semantics.

Natural Language Understanding has seen an increasing number of publications in the last few years, especially after robust word embeddings models became prominent, when they proved themselves able to capture and represent semantic relationships from massive amounts of data. Nevertheless, traditional models often fall short in intrinsic issues of linguistics, such as polysemy and homonymy. Any expert system that makes use of natural language in its core, can be affected by a weak semantic representation of text, resulting in inaccurate outcomes based on poor decisions. To mitigate such issues, we propose a novel approach called Most Suitable Sense Annotation (MSSA), that disambiguates and annotates each word by its specific sense, considering the semantic effects of its context. Our approach brings three main contributions to the semantic representation scenario: (i) an unsupervised technique that disambiguates and annotates words by their senses, (ii) a multi-sense embeddings model that can be extended to any traditional word embeddings algorithm, and (iii) a recurrent methodology that allows our models to be re-used and their representations refined. We test our approach on six different benchmarks for the word similarity task, showing that our approach can produce state-of-the-art results and outperforms several more complex state-of-the-art systems.

Augmenting pretrained language models with retrievers to select the supporting documents has shown promise in effectively solving common NLP problems, including language modeling and question answering, in an interpretable way. In this paper, we first study the strengths and weaknesses of different retriever-augmented language models (REALM, kNN-LM, FiD coupled with DPR, and ATLAS and Flan-T5 coupled with Contriever) in reasoning over the retrieved statements in different tasks. We show how the retrieve-then-read models' limitations in reasoning are rooted both in the retriever module as well as the language model. Our experimental results demonstrate that the similarity metric used by the retrievers is generally insufficient for reasoning tasks. Additionally, we show that the language models in retriever-augmented models do not take the complicated relations between the statements into account, which leads to poor reasoning performance even when using the larger models. Moreover, we analyze the reasoning performance of large language models using multihop retrieval but we only observe minor improvements. Overall, this shows great room for further research in this area.

Open-domain semantic parsing remains a challenging task, as models often rely on heuristics and struggle to handle unseen concepts. In this paper, we investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) for this task and introduce Retrieval-Augmented Semantic Parsing (RASP), a simple yet effective approach that integrates external lexical knowledge into the parsing process. Our experiments not only show that LLMs outperform previous encoder-decoder baselines for semantic parsing, but that RASP further enhances their ability to predict unseen concepts, nearly doubling the performance of previous models on out-of-distribution concepts. These findings highlight the promise of leveraging large language models and retrieval mechanisms for robust and open-domain semantic parsing.

We introduce the use of Poincar\'e embeddings to improve existing state-of-the-art approaches to domain-specific taxonomy induction from text as a signal for both relocating wrong hyponym terms within a (pre-induced) taxonomy as well as for attaching disconnected terms in a taxonomy. This method substantially improves previous state-of-the-art results on the SemEval-2016 Task 13 on taxonomy extraction. We demonstrate the superiority of Poincar\'e embeddings over distributional semantic representations, supporting the hypothesis that they can better capture hierarchical lexical-semantic relationships than embeddings in the Euclidean space.

We introduce sub-sentence encoder, a contrastively-learned contextual embedding model for fine-grained semantic representation of text. In contrast to the standard practice with sentence embeddings, where the meaning of an entire sequence of text is encoded into a fixed-length vector, the sub-sentence encoder learns to produce distinct contextual embeddings corresponding to different atomic propositions, i.e. atomic units of meaning expressed within a text sequence. The sub-sentence embeddings are contrastively learned to recognize (inferred) semantic equivalence between propositions across different text sequences. Our experiments show the effectiveness of sub-sentence encoders in applications, such as retrieving supporting facts for fine-grained text attribution or recognizing the conditional semantic similarity between texts. In practice, we demonstrate that sub-sentence encoders keep the same level of inference cost and space complexity compared to sentence encoders.

Dense retrieval has become a prominent method to obtain relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain NLP tasks. When we use a learned dense retriever on a retrieval corpus at inference time, an often-overlooked design choice is the retrieval unit in which the corpus is indexed, e.g. document, passage, or sentence. We discover that the retrieval unit choice significantly impacts the performance of both retrieval and downstream tasks. Distinct from the typical approach of using passages or sentences, we introduce a novel retrieval unit, proposition, for dense retrieval. Propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid and presented in a concise, self-contained natural language format. We conduct an empirical comparison of different retrieval granularity. Our results reveal that proposition-based retrieval significantly outperforms traditional passage or sentence-based methods in dense retrieval. Moreover, retrieval by proposition also enhances the performance of downstream QA tasks, since the retrieved texts are more condensed with question-relevant information, reducing the need for lengthy input tokens and minimizing the inclusion of extraneous, irrelevant information.

Taking inspiration from Set Theory, we introduce SetCSE, an innovative information retrieval framework. SetCSE employs sets to represent complex semantics and incorporates well-defined operations for structured information querying under the provided context. Within this framework, we introduce an inter-set contrastive learning objective to enhance comprehension of sentence embedding models concerning the given semantics. Furthermore, we present a suite of operations, including SetCSE intersection, difference, and operation series, that leverage sentence embeddings of the enhanced model for complex sentence retrieval tasks. Throughout this paper, we demonstrate that SetCSE adheres to the conventions of human language expressions regarding compounded semantics, provides a significant enhancement in the discriminatory capability of underlying sentence embedding models, and enables numerous information retrieval tasks involving convoluted and intricate prompts which cannot be achieved using existing querying methods.

Vector space word representations are learned from distributional information of words in large corpora. Although such statistics are semantically informative, they disregard the valuable information that is contained in semantic lexicons such as WordNet, FrameNet, and the Paraphrase Database. This paper proposes a method for refining vector space representations using relational information from semantic lexicons by encouraging linked words to have similar vector representations, and it makes no assumptions about how the input vectors were constructed. Evaluated on a battery of standard lexical semantic evaluation tasks in several languages, we obtain substantial improvements starting with a variety of word vector models. Our refinement method outperforms prior techniques for incorporating semantic lexicons into the word vector training algorithms.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a foundational paradigm for knowledge-grounded text generation. However, existing RAG pipelines often fail to ensure that the reasoning trajectories align with the evidential constraints imposed by retrieved content. In this paper, we reframe RAG as a problem of retrieval-aware reasoning and identify a core challenge: reasoning misalignment-the mismatch between a model's reasoning trajectory and the retrieved evidence. To address this challenge, we propose AlignRAG, a novel test-time framework that mitigates reasoning misalignment through iterative Critique-Driven Alignment (CDA) steps. In contrast to prior approaches that rely on static training or post-hoc selection, AlignRAG actively refines reasoning trajectories during inference by enforcing fine-grained alignment with evidence. Our framework introduces a new paradigm for retrieval-aware reasoning by: (1) constructing context-rich training corpora; (2) generating contrastive critiques from preference-aware reasoning trajectories; (3) training a dedicated Critic Language Model (CLM) to identify reasoning misalignments; and (4) applying CDA steps to optimize reasoning trajectories iteratively. Empirical results demonstrate that AlignRAG consistently outperforms all baselines and could integrate as a plug-and-play module into existing RAG pipelines without further changes. By reconceptualizing RAG as a structured reasoning trajectory and establishing the test-time framework for correcting reasoning misalignments in RAG, AlignRAG provides practical advancements for retrieval-aware generation.

Humans can reason compositionally when presented with new tasks. Previous research shows that appropriate prompting techniques enable large language models (LLMs) to solve artificial compositional generalization tasks such as SCAN. In this work, we identify additional challenges in more realistic semantic parsing tasks with larger vocabulary and refine these prompting techniques to address them. Our best method is based on least-to-most prompting: it decomposes the problem using prompting-based syntactic parsing, then uses this decomposition to select appropriate exemplars and to sequentially generate the semantic parse. This method allows us to set a new state of the art for CFQ while requiring only 1% of the training data used by traditional approaches. Due to the general nature of our approach, we expect similar efforts will lead to new results in other tasks and domains, especially for knowledge-intensive applications.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities in complex tasks. However, they lack up-to-date knowledge and experience hallucinations during reasoning, which can lead to incorrect reasoning processes and diminish their performance and trustworthiness. Knowledge graphs (KGs), which capture vast amounts of facts in a structured format, offer a reliable source of knowledge for reasoning. Nevertheless, existing KG-based LLM reasoning methods only treat KGs as factual knowledge bases and overlook the importance of their structural information for reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel method called reasoning on graphs (RoG) that synergizes LLMs with KGs to enable faithful and interpretable reasoning. Specifically, we present a planning-retrieval-reasoning framework, where RoG first generates relation paths grounded by KGs as faithful plans. These plans are then used to retrieve valid reasoning paths from the KGs for LLMs to conduct faithful reasoning. Furthermore, RoG not only distills knowledge from KGs to improve the reasoning ability of LLMs through training but also allows seamless integration with any arbitrary LLMs during inference. Extensive experiments on two benchmark KGQA datasets demonstrate that RoG achieves state-of-the-art performance on KG reasoning tasks and generates faithful and interpretable reasoning results.

Reasoning is central to human intelligence, enabling structured problem-solving across diverse tasks. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced their reasoning abilities in arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic domains. However, effectively extending these capabilities into multimodal contexts-where models must integrate both visual and textual inputs-continues to be a significant challenge. Multimodal reasoning introduces complexities, such as handling conflicting information across modalities, which require models to adopt advanced interpretative strategies. Addressing these challenges involves not only sophisticated algorithms but also robust methodologies for evaluating reasoning accuracy and coherence. This paper offers a concise yet insightful overview of reasoning techniques in both textual and multimodal LLMs. Through a thorough and up-to-date comparison, we clearly formulate core reasoning challenges and opportunities, highlighting practical methods for post-training optimization and test-time inference. Our work provides valuable insights and guidance, bridging theoretical frameworks and practical implementations, and sets clear directions for future research.

Large language models equipped with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) represent a burgeoning field aimed at enhancing answering capabilities by leveraging external knowledge bases. Although the application of RAG with language-only models has been extensively explored, its adaptation into multimodal vision-language models remains nascent. Going beyond mere answer generation, the primary goal of multimodal RAG is to cultivate the models' ability to reason in response to relevant queries. To this end, we introduce a novel multimodal RAG framework named RMR (Retrieval Meets Reasoning). The RMR framework employs a bi-modal retrieval module to identify the most relevant question-answer pairs, which then serve as scaffolds for the multimodal reasoning process. This training-free approach not only encourages the model to engage deeply with the reasoning processes inherent in the retrieved content but also facilitates the generation of answers that are precise and richly interpretable. Surprisingly, utilizing solely the ScienceQA dataset, collected from elementary and high school science curricula, RMR significantly boosts the performance of various vision-language models across a spectrum of benchmark datasets, including A-OKVQA, MMBench, and SEED. These outcomes highlight the substantial potential of our multimodal retrieval and reasoning mechanism to improve the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models.

Compositional Reasoning (CR) entails grasping the significance of attributes, relations, and word order. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs), comprising a visual encoder and a Large Language Model (LLM) decoder, have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in such reasoning tasks. This prompts a crucial question: have VLMs effectively tackled the CR challenge? We conjecture that existing CR benchmarks may not adequately push the boundaries of modern VLMs due to the reliance on an LLM-only negative text generation pipeline. Consequently, the negatives produced either appear as outliers from the natural language distribution learned by VLMs' LLM decoders or as improbable within the corresponding image context. To address these limitations, we introduce ConMe -- a compositional reasoning benchmark and a novel data generation pipeline leveraging VLMs to produce `hard CR Q&A'. Through a new concept of VLMs conversing with each other to collaboratively expose their weaknesses, our pipeline autonomously generates, evaluates, and selects challenging compositional reasoning questions, establishing a robust CR benchmark, also subsequently validated manually. Our benchmark provokes a noteworthy, up to 33%, decrease in CR performance compared to preceding benchmarks, reinstating the CR challenge even for state-of-the-art VLMs.

We present a novel approach for training small language models for reasoning-intensive document ranking that combines knowledge distillation with reinforcement learning optimization. While existing methods often rely on expensive human annotations or large black-box language models, our methodology leverages web data and a teacher LLM to automatically generate high-quality training examples with relevance explanations. By framing document ranking as a reinforcement learning problem and incentivizing explicit reasoning capabilities, we train a compact 3B parameter language model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the BRIGHT benchmark. Our model ranks third on the leaderboard while using substantially fewer parameters than other approaches, outperforming models that are over 20 times larger. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that generating explanations during inference, rather than directly predicting relevance scores, enables more effective reasoning with smaller language models. The self-supervised nature of our method offers a scalable and interpretable solution for modern information retrieval systems.

Modeling semantic plausibility requires commonsense knowledge about the world and has been used as a testbed for exploring various knowledge representations. Previous work has focused specifically on modeling physical plausibility and shown that distributional methods fail when tested in a supervised setting. At the same time, distributional models, namely large pretrained language models, have led to improved results for many natural language understanding tasks. In this work, we show that these pretrained language models are in fact effective at modeling physical plausibility in the supervised setting. We therefore present the more difficult problem of learning to model physical plausibility directly from text. We create a training set by extracting attested events from a large corpus, and we provide a baseline for training on these attested events in a self-supervised manner and testing on a physical plausibility task. We believe results could be further improved by injecting explicit commonsense knowledge into a distributional model.

Pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in image retrieval from text. However, their performance drops drastically when confronted with linguistically complex texts that they struggle to comprehend. Inspired by the Divide-and-Conquer algorithm and dual-process theory, in this paper, we regard linguistically complex texts as compound proposition texts composed of multiple simple proposition sentences and propose an end-to-end Neural Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning framework, dubbed NDCR. It contains three main components: 1) Divide: a proposition generator divides the compound proposition text into simple proposition sentences and produces their corresponding representations, 2) Conquer: a pretrained VLMs-based visual-linguistic interactor achieves the interaction between decomposed proposition sentences and images, 3) Combine: a neural-symbolic reasoner combines the above reasoning states to obtain the final solution via a neural logic reasoning approach. According to the dual-process theory, the visual-linguistic interactor and neural-symbolic reasoner could be regarded as analogical reasoning System 1 and logical reasoning System 2. We conduct extensive experiments on a challenging image retrieval from contextual descriptions data set. Experimental results and analyses indicate NDCR significantly improves performance in the complex image-text reasoning problem. Code link: https://github.com/YunxinLi/NDCR.

Existing large language models (LLMs) show exceptional problem-solving capabilities but might struggle with complex reasoning tasks. Despite the successes of chain-of-thought and tree-based search methods, they mainly depend on the internal knowledge of LLMs to search over intermediate reasoning steps, limited to dealing with simple tasks involving fewer reasoning steps. In this paper, we propose RAG-Star, a novel RAG approach that integrates the retrieved information to guide the tree-based deliberative reasoning process that relies on the inherent knowledge of LLMs. By leveraging Monte Carlo Tree Search, RAG-Star iteratively plans intermediate sub-queries and answers for reasoning based on the LLM itself. To consolidate internal and external knowledge, we propose an retrieval-augmented verification that utilizes query- and answer-aware reward modeling to provide feedback for the inherent reasoning of LLMs. Our experiments involving Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and GPT-4o demonstrate that RAG-Star significantly outperforms previous RAG and reasoning methods.

Transformers have been shown to be able to perform deductive reasoning on a logical rulebase containing rules and statements written in English natural language. While the progress is promising, it is currently unclear if these models indeed perform logical reasoning by understanding the underlying logical semantics in the language. To this end, we propose RobustLR, a suite of evaluation datasets that evaluate the robustness of these models to minimal logical edits in rulebases and some standard logical equivalence conditions. In our experiments with RoBERTa and T5, we find that the models trained in prior works do not perform consistently on the different perturbations in RobustLR, thus showing that the models are not robust to the proposed logical perturbations. Further, we find that the models find it especially hard to learn logical negation and disjunction operators. Overall, using our evaluation sets, we demonstrate some shortcomings of the deductive reasoning-based language models, which can eventually help towards designing better models for logical reasoning over natural language. All the datasets and code base have been made publicly available.

We introduce MCTS-RAG, a novel approach that enhances the reasoning capabilities of small language models on knowledge-intensive tasks by leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide relevant context and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to refine reasoning paths. MCTS-RAG dynamically integrates retrieval and reasoning through an iterative decision-making process. Unlike standard RAG methods, which typically retrieve information independently from reasoning and thus integrate knowledge suboptimally, or conventional MCTS reasoning, which depends solely on internal model knowledge without external facts, MCTS-RAG combines structured reasoning with adaptive retrieval. This integrated approach enhances decision-making, reduces hallucinations, and ensures improved factual accuracy and response consistency. The experimental results on multiple reasoning and knowledge-intensive datasets datasets (i.e., ComplexWebQA, GPQA, and FoolMeTwice) show that our method enables small-scale LMs to achieve performance comparable to frontier LLMs like GPT-4o by effectively scaling inference-time compute, setting a new standard for reasoning in small-scale models.

It is a common practice for recent works in vision language cross-modal reasoning to adopt a binary or multi-choice classification formulation taking as input a set of source image(s) and textual query. In this work, we take a sober look at such an unconditional formulation in the sense that no prior knowledge is specified with respect to the source image(s). Inspired by the designs of both visual commonsense reasoning and natural language inference tasks, we propose a new task termed Premise-based Multi-modal Reasoning(PMR) where a textual premise is the background presumption on each source image. The PMR dataset contains 15,360 manually annotated samples which are created by a multi-phase crowd-sourcing process. With selected high-quality movie screenshots and human-curated premise templates from 6 pre-defined categories, we ask crowd-source workers to write one true hypothesis and three distractors (4 choices) given the premise and image through a cross-check procedure. Besides, we generate adversarial samples to alleviate the annotation artifacts and double the size of PMR. We benchmark various state-of-the-art (pretrained) multi-modal inference models on PMR and conduct comprehensive experimental analyses to showcase the utility of our dataset.

In this work we propose a simple and efficient framework for learning sentence representations from unlabelled data. Drawing inspiration from the distributional hypothesis and recent work on learning sentence representations, we reformulate the problem of predicting the context in which a sentence appears as a classification problem. Given a sentence and its context, a classifier distinguishes context sentences from other contrastive sentences based on their vector representations. This allows us to efficiently learn different types of encoding functions, and we show that the model learns high-quality sentence representations. We demonstrate that our sentence representations outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised representation learning methods on several downstream NLP tasks that involve understanding sentence semantics while achieving an order of magnitude speedup in training time.

Recent development in vision-language approaches has instigated a paradigm shift in learning visual recognition models from language supervision. These approaches align objects with language queries (e.g. "a photo of a cat") and improve the models' adaptability to identify novel objects and domains. Recently, several studies have attempted to query these models with complex language expressions that include specifications of fine-grained semantic details, such as attributes, shapes, textures, and relations. However, simply incorporating language descriptions as queries does not guarantee accurate interpretation by the models. In fact, our experiments show that GLIP, the state-of-the-art vision-language model for object detection, often disregards contextual information in the language descriptions and instead relies heavily on detecting objects solely by their names. To tackle the challenges, we propose a new description-conditioned (DesCo) paradigm of learning object recognition models with rich language descriptions consisting of two major innovations: 1) we employ a large language model as a commonsense knowledge engine to generate rich language descriptions of objects based on object names and the raw image-text caption; 2) we design context-sensitive queries to improve the model's ability in deciphering intricate nuances embedded within descriptions and enforce the model to focus on context rather than object names alone. On two novel object detection benchmarks, LVIS and OminiLabel, under the zero-shot detection setting, our approach achieves 34.8 APr minival (+9.1) and 29.3 AP (+3.6), respectively, surpassing the prior state-of-the-art models, GLIP and FIBER, by a large margin.

We propose to extract meaning representations from autoregressive language models by considering the distribution of all possible trajectories extending an input text. This strategy is prompt-free, does not require fine-tuning, and is applicable to any pre-trained autoregressive model. Moreover, unlike vector-based representations, distribution-based representations can also model asymmetric relations (e.g., direction of logical entailment, hypernym/hyponym relations) by using algebraic operations between likelihood functions. These ideas are grounded in distributional perspectives on semantics and are connected to standard constructions in automata theory, but to our knowledge they have not been applied to modern language models. We empirically show that the representations obtained from large models align well with human annotations, outperform other zero-shot and prompt-free methods on semantic similarity tasks, and can be used to solve more complex entailment and containment tasks that standard embeddings cannot handle. Finally, we extend our method to represent data from different modalities (e.g., image and text) using multimodal autoregressive models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tianyu139/meaning-as-trajectories

Exploiting large language models (LLMs) to tackle deductive reasoning has garnered growing attention. It still remains highly challenging to achieve satisfactory results in complex deductive problems, characterized by plenty of premises (i.e., facts or rules) entailing intricate relationships among entities and requiring multi-hop reasoning. One intuitive solution is to decompose the original task into smaller sub-tasks, and then chain the multiple casual reasoning steps together in a forward (e.g., Selection-Inference) or backward (e.g., LAMBADA) direction. However, these techniques inevitably necessitate a large number of overall stages, leading to computationally expensive operations and a higher possibility of making misleading steps. In addition to stage-by-stage decomposition, we draw inspiration from another aspect of human problem-solving. Humans tend to distill the most relevant information and organize their thoughts systematically (e.g., creating mind maps), which assists them in answering questions or drawing conclusions precisely and quickly. In light of this, we propose a novel reasoning approach named Concise and Organized Perception (COP). COP carefully analyzes the given statements to efficiently identify the most pertinent information while eliminating redundancy. It then prompts the LLMs in a more organized form that adapts to the model's inference process. By perceiving concise and organized proofs, the deductive reasoning abilities of LLMs can be better elicited, and the risk of acquiring errors caused by excessive reasoning stages is mitigated. Furthermore, our approach can be combined with the aforementioned ones to further boost their performance. Extensive experimental results on three popular deductive benchmarks (i.e., ProofWriter, PrOntoQA and PrOntoQA-OOD) show that COP significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

The widely studied task of Natural Language Inference (NLI) requires a system to recognize whether one piece of text is textually entailed by another, i.e. whether the entirety of its meaning can be inferred from the other. In current NLI datasets and models, textual entailment relations are typically defined on the sentence- or paragraph-level. However, even a simple sentence often contains multiple propositions, i.e. distinct units of meaning conveyed by the sentence. As these propositions can carry different truth values in the context of a given premise, we argue for the need to recognize the textual entailment relation of each proposition in a sentence individually. We propose PropSegmEnt, a corpus of over 35K propositions annotated by expert human raters. Our dataset structure resembles the tasks of (1) segmenting sentences within a document to the set of propositions, and (2) classifying the entailment relation of each proposition with respect to a different yet topically-aligned document, i.e. documents describing the same event or entity. We establish strong baselines for the segmentation and entailment tasks. Through case studies on summary hallucination detection and document-level NLI, we demonstrate that our conceptual framework is potentially useful for understanding and explaining the compositionality of NLI labels.

Pretrained language models are long known to be subpar in capturing sentence and document-level semantics. Though heavily investigated, transferring perturbation-based methods from unsupervised visual representation learning to NLP remains an unsolved problem. This is largely due to the discreteness of subword units brought by tokenization of language models, limiting small perturbations of inputs to form semantics-preserved positive pairs. In this work, we conceptualize the learning of sentence-level textual semantics as a visual representation learning process. Drawing from cognitive and linguistic sciences, we introduce an unsupervised visual sentence representation learning framework, employing visually-grounded text perturbation methods like typos and word order shuffling, resonating with human cognitive patterns, and enabling perturbation to texts to be perceived as continuous. Our approach is further bolstered by large-scale unsupervised topical alignment training and natural language inference supervision, achieving comparable performance in semantic textual similarity (STS) to existing state-of-the-art NLP methods. Additionally, we unveil our method's inherent zero-shot cross-lingual transferability and a unique leapfrogging pattern across languages during iterative training. To our knowledge, this is the first representation learning method devoid of traditional language models for understanding sentence and document semantics, marking a stride closer to human-like textual comprehension. Our code is available at https://github.com/gowitheflow-1998/Pixel-Linguist

The context window of large language models (LLMs) has been extended significantly in recent years. However, while the context length that the LLM can process has grown, the capability of the model to accurately reason over that context degrades noticeably. This occurs because modern LLMs often become overwhelmed by the vast amount of information in the context; when answering questions, the model must identify and reason over relevant evidence sparsely distributed throughout the text. To alleviate the challenge of long-context reasoning, we develop a retrieve-then-reason framework, enabling LLMs to reason over relevant evidence collected during an intermediate retrieval step. We find that modern LLMs struggle to accurately retrieve relevant facts and instead, often hallucinate "retrieved facts", resulting in flawed reasoning and the production of incorrect answers. To address these issues, we introduce ALR^2, a method that augments the long-context reasoning capability of LLMs via an explicit two-stage procedure, i.e., aligning LLMs with the objectives of both retrieval and reasoning. We demonstrate the efficacy of ALR^2 for mitigating performance degradation in long-context reasoning tasks. Through extensive experiments on long-context QA benchmarks, we find our method to outperform competitive baselines by large margins, achieving at least 8.4 and 7.9 EM gains on the long-context versions of HotpotQA and SQuAD datasets, respectively.

Language Models are the core for almost any Natural Language Processing system nowadays. One of their particularities is their contextualized representations, a game changer feature when a disambiguation between word senses is necessary. In this paper we aim to explore to what extent language models are capable of discerning among senses at inference time. We performed this analysis by prompting commonly used Languages Models such as BERT or RoBERTa to perform the task of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). We leverage the relation between word senses and domains, and cast WSD as a textual entailment problem, where the different hypothesis refer to the domains of the word senses. Our results show that this approach is indeed effective, close to supervised systems.

To correctly use in-context information, language models (LMs) must bind entities to their attributes. For example, given a context describing a "green square" and a "blue circle", LMs must bind the shapes to their respective colors. We analyze LM representations and identify the binding ID mechanism: a general mechanism for solving the binding problem, which we observe in every sufficiently large model from the Pythia and LLaMA families. Using causal interventions, we show that LMs' internal activations represent binding information by attaching binding ID vectors to corresponding entities and attributes. We further show that binding ID vectors form a continuous subspace, in which distances between binding ID vectors reflect their discernability. Overall, our results uncover interpretable strategies in LMs for representing symbolic knowledge in-context, providing a step towards understanding general in-context reasoning in large-scale LMs.

We introduce the Probabilistic Worldbuilding Model (PWM), a new fully-symbolic Bayesian model of semantic parsing and reasoning, as a first step in a research program toward more domain- and task-general NLU and AI. Humans create internal mental models of their observations which greatly aid in their ability to understand and reason about a large variety of problems. In PWM, the meanings of sentences, acquired facts about the world, and intermediate steps in reasoning are all expressed in a human-readable formal language, with the design goal of interpretability. PWM is Bayesian, designed specifically to be able to generalize to new domains and new tasks. We derive and implement an inference algorithm that reads sentences by parsing and abducing updates to its latent world model that capture the semantics of those sentences, and evaluate it on two out-of-domain question-answering datasets: (1) ProofWriter and (2) a new dataset we call FictionalGeoQA, designed to be more representative of real language but still simple enough to focus on evaluating reasoning ability, while being robust against heuristics. Our method outperforms baselines on both, thereby demonstrating its value as a proof-of-concept.

Semantic representations of text, i.e. representations of natural language which capture meaning by geometry, are essential for areas such as information retrieval and document grouping. High-dimensional trained dense vectors have received much attention in recent years as such representations. We investigate the structure of semantic spaces that arise from embeddings made with Sentence-BERT and find that the representations suffer from a well-known problem in high dimensions called hubness. Hubness results in asymmetric neighborhood relations, such that some texts (the hubs) are neighbours of many other texts while most texts (so-called anti-hubs), are neighbours of few or no other texts. We quantify the semantic quality of the embeddings using hubness scores and error rate of a neighbourhood based classifier. We find that when hubness is high, we can reduce error rate and hubness using hubness reduction methods. We identify a combination of two methods as resulting in the best reduction. For example, on one of the tested pretrained models, this combined method can reduce hubness by about 75% and error rate by about 9%. Thus, we argue that mitigating hubness in the embedding space provides better semantic representations of text.

Text-video retrieval is a challenging cross-modal task, which aims to align visual entities with natural language descriptions. Current methods either fail to leverage the local details or are computationally expensive. What's worse, they fail to leverage the heterogeneous concepts in data. In this paper, we propose the Disentangled Conceptualization and Set-to-set Alignment (DiCoSA) to simulate the conceptualizing and reasoning process of human beings. For disentangled conceptualization, we divide the coarse feature into multiple latent factors related to semantic concepts. For set-to-set alignment, where a set of visual concepts correspond to a set of textual concepts, we propose an adaptive pooling method to aggregate semantic concepts to address the partial matching. In particular, since we encode concepts independently in only a few dimensions, DiCoSA is superior at efficiency and granularity, ensuring fine-grained interactions using a similar computational complexity as coarse-grained alignment. Extensive experiments on five datasets, including MSR-VTT, LSMDC, MSVD, ActivityNet, and DiDeMo, demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the task of associating a word in a given context with its most suitable meaning among a set of possible candidates. While the task has recently witnessed renewed interest, with systems achieving performances above the estimated inter-annotator agreement, at the time of writing it still struggles to find downstream applications. We argue that one of the reasons behind this is the difficulty of applying WSD to plain text. Indeed, in the standard formulation, models work under the assumptions that a) all the spans to disambiguate have already been identified, and b) all the possible candidate senses of each span are provided, both of which are requirements that are far from trivial. In this work, we present a new task called Word Sense Linking (WSL) where, given an input text and a reference sense inventory, systems have to both identify which spans to disambiguate and then link them to their most suitable meaning.We put forward a transformer-based architecture for the task and thoroughly evaluate both its performance and those of state-of-the-art WSD systems scaled to WSL, iteratively relaxing the assumptions of WSD. We hope that our work will foster easier integration of lexical semantics into downstream applications.

We consider the problem of Recognizing Textual Entailment within an Information Retrieval context, where we must simultaneously determine the relevancy as well as degree of entailment for individual pieces of evidence to determine a yes/no answer to a binary natural language question. We compare several variants of neural networks for sentence embeddings in a setting of decision-making based on evidence of varying relevance. We propose a basic model to integrate evidence for entailment, show that joint training of the sentence embeddings to model relevance and entailment is feasible even with no explicit per-evidence supervision, and show the importance of evaluating strong baselines. We also demonstrate the benefit of carrying over text comprehension model trained on an unrelated task for our small datasets. Our research is motivated primarily by a new open dataset we introduce, consisting of binary questions and news-based evidence snippets. We also apply the proposed relevance-entailment model on a similar task of ranking multiple-choice test answers, evaluating it on a preliminary dataset of school test questions as well as the standard MCTest dataset, where we improve the neural model state-of-art.

Conversational systems often rely on embedding models for intent classification and intent clustering tasks. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), which enable instructional embeddings allowing one to adjust semantics over the embedding space using prompts, are being viewed as a panacea for these downstream conversational tasks. However, traditional evaluation benchmarks rely solely on task metrics that don't particularly measure gaps related to semantic understanding. Thus, we propose an intent semantic toolkit that gives a more holistic view of intent embedding models by considering three tasks -- (1) intent classification, (2) intent clustering, and (3) a novel triplet task. The triplet task gauges the model's understanding of two semantic concepts paramount in real-world conversational systems -- negation and implicature. We observe that current embedding models fare poorly in semantic understanding of these concepts. To address this, we propose a pre-training approach to improve the embedding model by leveraging augmentation with data generated by an auto-regressive model and a contrastive loss term. Our approach improves the semantic understanding of the intent embedding model on the aforementioned linguistic dimensions while slightly effecting their performance on downstream task metrics.

The unprecedented surge in video data production in recent years necessitates efficient tools to extract meaningful frames from videos for downstream tasks. Long-term temporal reasoning is a key desideratum for frame retrieval systems. While state-of-the-art foundation models, like VideoLLaMA and ViCLIP, are proficient in short-term semantic understanding, they surprisingly fail at long-term reasoning across frames. A key reason for this failure is that they intertwine per-frame perception and temporal reasoning into a single deep network. Hence, decoupling but co-designing semantic understanding and temporal reasoning is essential for efficient scene identification. We propose a system that leverages vision-language models for semantic understanding of individual frames but effectively reasons about the long-term evolution of events using state machines and temporal logic (TL) formulae that inherently capture memory. Our TL-based reasoning improves the F1 score of complex event identification by 9-15% compared to benchmarks that use GPT4 for reasoning on state-of-the-art self-driving datasets such as Waymo and NuScenes.

A characteristic feature of human semantic cognition is its ability to not only store and retrieve the properties of concepts observed through experience, but to also facilitate the inheritance of properties (can breathe) from superordinate concepts (animal) to their subordinates (dog) -- i.e. demonstrate property inheritance. In this paper, we present COMPS, a collection of minimal pair sentences that jointly tests pre-trained language models (PLMs) on their ability to attribute properties to concepts and their ability to demonstrate property inheritance behavior. Analyses of 22 different PLMs on COMPS reveal that they can easily distinguish between concepts on the basis of a property when they are trivially different, but find it relatively difficult when concepts are related on the basis of nuanced knowledge representations. Furthermore, we find that PLMs can demonstrate behavior consistent with property inheritance to a great extent, but fail in the presence of distracting information, which decreases the performance of many models, sometimes even below chance. This lack of robustness in demonstrating simple reasoning raises important questions about PLMs' capacity to make correct inferences even when they appear to possess the prerequisite knowledge.

Robustness of reasoning remains a significant challenge for large language models, and addressing it is essential for the practical applicability of AI-driven reasoning systems. We introduce Semantic Self-Verification (SSV), a novel approach that addresses the key challenge in combining language models with the rigor of logical solvers: to accurately formulate the reasoning problem from natural language to the formal language of the solver. SSV uses a consistency-based approach to produce strong abstract formalizations of problems using concrete instantiations that are generated by the model and verified by the solver. In addition to significantly advancing the overall reasoning accuracy over the state-of-the-art, a key novelty that this approach presents is a feature of verification that has near-perfect precision over a significant coverage of cases, as we demonstrate on open reasoning benchmarks. We propose such *near-certain reasoning* as a new approach to reduce the need for manual verification in many cases, taking us closer to more dependable and autonomous AI reasoning systems.

Semantic representation and inference is essential for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The state of the art for semantic representation and inference is deep learning, and particularly Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and transformer Self-Attention models. This thesis investigates the use of deep learning for novel semantic representation and inference, and makes contributions in the following three areas: creating training data, improving semantic representations and extending inference learning. In terms of creating training data, we contribute the largest publicly available dataset of real-life factual claims for the purpose of automatic claim verification (MultiFC), and we present a novel inference model composed of multi-scale CNNs with different kernel sizes that learn from external sources to infer fact checking labels. In terms of improving semantic representations, we contribute a novel model that captures non-compositional semantic indicators. By definition, the meaning of a non-compositional phrase cannot be inferred from the individual meanings of its composing words (e.g., hot dog). Motivated by this, we operationalize the compositionality of a phrase contextually by enriching the phrase representation with external word embeddings and knowledge graphs. Finally, in terms of inference learning, we propose a series of novel deep learning architectures that improve inference by using syntactic dependencies, by ensembling role guided attention heads, incorporating gating layers, and concatenating multiple heads in novel and effective ways. This thesis consists of seven publications (five published and two under review).

Text representations using neural word embeddings have proven effective in many NLP applications. Recent researches adapt the traditional word embedding models to learn vectors of multiword expressions (concepts/entities). However, these methods are limited to textual knowledge bases (e.g., Wikipedia). In this paper, we propose a novel and simple technique for integrating the knowledge about concepts from two large scale knowledge bases of different structure (Wikipedia and Probase) in order to learn concept representations. We adapt the efficient skip-gram model to seamlessly learn from the knowledge in Wikipedia text and Probase concept graph. We evaluate our concept embedding models on two tasks: (1) analogical reasoning, where we achieve a state-of-the-art performance of 91% on semantic analogies, (2) concept categorization, where we achieve a state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets achieving categorization accuracy of 100% on one and 98% on the other. Additionally, we present a case study to evaluate our model on unsupervised argument type identification for neural semantic parsing. We demonstrate the competitive accuracy of our unsupervised method and its ability to better generalize to out of vocabulary entity mentions compared to the tedious and error prone methods which depend on gazetteers and regular expressions.

The recently introduced BERT model exhibits strong performance on several language understanding benchmarks. In this paper, we describe a simple re-implementation of BERT for commonsense reasoning. We show that the attentions produced by BERT can be directly utilized for tasks such as the Pronoun Disambiguation Problem and Winograd Schema Challenge. Our proposed attention-guided commonsense reasoning method is conceptually simple yet empirically powerful. Experimental analysis on multiple datasets demonstrates that our proposed system performs remarkably well on all cases while outperforming the previously reported state of the art by a margin. While results suggest that BERT seems to implicitly learn to establish complex relationships between entities, solving commonsense reasoning tasks might require more than unsupervised models learned from huge text corpora.

A recent approach to neurosymbolic reasoning is to explicitly combine the strengths of large language models (LLMs) and symbolic solvers to tackle complex reasoning tasks. However, current approaches face significant limitations, including poor generalizability due to task-specific prompts, inefficiencies caused by the lack of separation between knowledge and queries, and restricted inferential capabilities. These shortcomings hinder their scalability and applicability across diverse domains. In this paper, we introduce VERUS-LM, a novel framework designed to address these challenges. VERUS-LM employs a generic prompting mechanism, clearly separates domain knowledge from queries, and supports a wide range of different logical reasoning tasks. This framework enhances adaptability, reduces computational cost, and allows for richer forms of reasoning, such as optimization and constraint satisfaction. We show that our approach succeeds in diverse reasoning on a novel dataset, markedly outperforming LLMs. Additionally, our system achieves competitive results on common reasoning benchmarks when compared to other state-of-the-art approaches, and significantly surpasses them on the difficult AR-LSAT dataset. By pushing the boundaries of hybrid reasoning, VERUS-LM represents a significant step towards more versatile neurosymbolic AI systems

This paper introduces Grounded Image Text Matching with Mismatched Relation (GITM-MR), a novel visual-linguistic joint task that evaluates the relation understanding capabilities of transformer-based pre-trained models. GITM-MR requires a model to first determine if an expression describes an image, then localize referred objects or ground the mismatched parts of the text. We provide a benchmark for evaluating pre-trained models on this task, with a focus on the challenging settings of limited data and out-of-distribution sentence lengths. Our evaluation demonstrates that pre-trained models lack data efficiency and length generalization ability. To address this, we propose the Relation-sensitive Correspondence Reasoning Network (RCRN), which incorporates relation-aware reasoning via bi-directional message propagation guided by language structure. RCRN can be interpreted as a modular program and delivers strong performance in both length generalization and data efficiency.

Self-supervised learning on large-scale multi-modal datasets allows learning semantically meaningful embeddings in a joint multi-modal representation space without relying on human annotations. These joint embeddings enable zero-shot cross-modal tasks like retrieval and classification. However, these methods often struggle to generalize well on out-of-domain data as they ignore the semantic structure present in modality-specific embeddings. In this context, we propose a novel Semantic-Structure-Preserving Consistency approach to improve generalizability by preserving the modality-specific relationships in the joint embedding space. To capture modality-specific semantic relationships between samples, we propose to learn multiple anchors and represent the multifaceted relationship between samples with respect to their relationship with these anchors. To assign multiple anchors to each sample, we propose a novel Multi-Assignment Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. Our experimentation demonstrates that our proposed approach learns semantically meaningful anchors in a self-supervised manner. Furthermore, our evaluation on MSR-VTT and YouCook2 datasets demonstrates that our proposed multi-anchor assignment based solution achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes to both inand out-of-domain datasets. Code: https://github.com/Swetha5/Multi_Sinkhorn_Knopp

We propose the Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner (NS-CL), a model that learns visual concepts, words, and semantic parsing of sentences without explicit supervision on any of them; instead, our model learns by simply looking at images and reading paired questions and answers. Our model builds an object-based scene representation and translates sentences into executable, symbolic programs. To bridge the learning of two modules, we use a neuro-symbolic reasoning module that executes these programs on the latent scene representation. Analogical to human concept learning, the perception module learns visual concepts based on the language description of the object being referred to. Meanwhile, the learned visual concepts facilitate learning new words and parsing new sentences. We use curriculum learning to guide the searching over the large compositional space of images and language. Extensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our model on learning visual concepts, word representations, and semantic parsing of sentences. Further, our method allows easy generalization to new object attributes, compositions, language concepts, scenes and questions, and even new program domains. It also empowers applications including visual question answering and bidirectional image-text retrieval.

This paper presents a novel approach to Zero-Shot Action Recognition. Recent works have explored the detection and classification of objects to obtain semantic information from videos with remarkable performance. Inspired by them, we propose using video captioning methods to extract semantic information about objects, scenes, humans, and their relationships. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to represent both videos and labels with descriptive sentences. More specifically, we represent videos using sentences generated via video captioning methods and classes using sentences extracted from documents acquired through search engines on the Internet. Using these representations, we build a shared semantic space employing BERT-based embedders pre-trained in the paraphrasing task on multiple text datasets. The projection of both visual and semantic information onto this space is straightforward, as they are sentences, enabling classification using the nearest neighbor rule. We demonstrate that representing videos and labels with sentences alleviates the domain adaptation problem. Additionally, we show that word vectors are unsuitable for building the semantic embedding space of our descriptions. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art performance on the UCF101 dataset by 3.3 p.p. in accuracy under the TruZe protocol and achieves competitive results on both the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets under the conventional protocol (0/50\% - training/testing split). Our code is available at https://github.com/valterlej/zsarcap.

Inspired by the outstanding zero-shot capability of vision language models (VLMs) in image classification tasks, open-vocabulary object detection has attracted increasing interest by distilling the broad VLM knowledge into detector training. However, most existing open-vocabulary detectors learn by aligning region embeddings with categorical labels (e.g., bicycle) only, disregarding the capability of VLMs on aligning visual embeddings with fine-grained text description of object parts (e.g., pedals and bells). This paper presents DVDet, a Descriptor-Enhanced Open Vocabulary Detector that introduces conditional context prompts and hierarchical textual descriptors that enable precise region-text alignment as well as open-vocabulary detection training in general. Specifically, the conditional context prompt transforms regional embeddings into image-like representations that can be directly integrated into general open vocabulary detection training. In addition, we introduce large language models as an interactive and implicit knowledge repository which enables iterative mining and refining visually oriented textual descriptors for precise region-text alignment. Extensive experiments over multiple large-scale benchmarks show that DVDet outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently by large margins.

We introduce a new dataset for joint reasoning about natural language and images, with a focus on semantic diversity, compositionality, and visual reasoning challenges. The data contains 107,292 examples of English sentences paired with web photographs. The task is to determine whether a natural language caption is true about a pair of photographs. We crowdsource the data using sets of visually rich images and a compare-and-contrast task to elicit linguistically diverse language. Qualitative analysis shows the data requires compositional joint reasoning, including about quantities, comparisons, and relations. Evaluation using state-of-the-art visual reasoning methods shows the data presents a strong challenge.

Sentence embedding methods using natural language inference (NLI) datasets have been successfully applied to various tasks. However, these methods are only available for limited languages due to relying heavily on the large NLI datasets. In this paper, we propose DefSent, a sentence embedding method that uses definition sentences from a word dictionary, which performs comparably on unsupervised semantics textual similarity (STS) tasks and slightly better on SentEval tasks than conventional methods. Since dictionaries are available for many languages, DefSent is more broadly applicable than methods using NLI datasets without constructing additional datasets. We demonstrate that DefSent performs comparably on unsupervised semantics textual similarity (STS) tasks and slightly better on SentEval tasks to the methods using large NLI datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/hpprc/defsent .

Understanding the semantics of visual scenes is a fundamental challenge in Computer Vision. A key aspect of this challenge is that objects sharing similar semantic meanings or functions can exhibit striking visual differences, making accurate identification and categorization difficult. Recent advancements in text-to-image frameworks have led to models that implicitly capture natural scene statistics. These frameworks account for the visual variability of objects, as well as complex object co-occurrences and sources of noise such as diverse lighting conditions. By leveraging large-scale datasets and cross-attention conditioning, these models generate detailed and contextually rich scene representations. This capability opens new avenues for improving object recognition and scene understanding in varied and challenging environments. Our work presents StableSemantics, a dataset comprising 224 thousand human-curated prompts, processed natural language captions, over 2 million synthetic images, and 10 million attention maps corresponding to individual noun chunks. We explicitly leverage human-generated prompts that correspond to visually interesting stable diffusion generations, provide 10 generations per phrase, and extract cross-attention maps for each image. We explore the semantic distribution of generated images, examine the distribution of objects within images, and benchmark captioning and open vocabulary segmentation methods on our data. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to release a diffusion dataset with semantic attributions. We expect our proposed dataset to catalyze advances in visual semantic understanding and provide a foundation for developing more sophisticated and effective visual models. Website: https://stablesemantics.github.io/StableSemantics

A unique aspect of human visual understanding is the ability to flexibly interpret abstract concepts: acquiring lifted rules explaining what they symbolize, grounding them across familiar and unfamiliar contexts, and making predictions or reasoning about them. While off-the-shelf vision-language models excel at making literal interpretations of images (e.g., recognizing object categories such as tree branches), they still struggle to make sense of such visual abstractions (e.g., how an arrangement of tree branches may form the walls of a maze). To address this challenge, we introduce Deep Schema Grounding (DSG), a framework that leverages explicit structured representations of visual abstractions for grounding and reasoning. At the core of DSG are schemas--dependency graph descriptions of abstract concepts that decompose them into more primitive-level symbols. DSG uses large language models to extract schemas, then hierarchically grounds concrete to abstract components of the schema onto images with vision-language models. The grounded schema is used to augment visual abstraction understanding. We systematically evaluate DSG and different methods in reasoning on our new Visual Abstractions Dataset, which consists of diverse, real-world images of abstract concepts and corresponding question-answer pairs labeled by humans. We show that DSG significantly improves the abstract visual reasoning performance of vision-language models, and is a step toward human-aligned understanding of visual abstractions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential in reasoning while they still suffer from severe factual hallucinations due to timeliness, accuracy, and coverage of parametric knowledge. Meanwhile, integrating reasoning with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) remains challenging due to ineffective task decomposition and redundant retrieval, which can introduce noise and degrade response quality. In this paper, we propose DeepRAG, a framework that models retrieval-augmented reasoning as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), enabling strategic and adaptive retrieval. By iteratively decomposing queries, DeepRAG dynamically determines whether to retrieve external knowledge or rely on parametric reasoning at each step. Experiments show that DeepRAG improves retrieval efficiency while improving answer accuracy by 21.99%, demonstrating its effectiveness in optimizing retrieval-augmented reasoning.

Understanding entailment and contradiction is fundamental to understanding natural language, and inference about entailment and contradiction is a valuable testing ground for the development of semantic representations. However, machine learning research in this area has been dramatically limited by the lack of large-scale resources. To address this, we introduce the Stanford Natural Language Inference corpus, a new, freely available collection of labeled sentence pairs, written by humans doing a novel grounded task based on image captioning. At 570K pairs, it is two orders of magnitude larger than all other resources of its type. This increase in scale allows lexicalized classifiers to outperform some sophisticated existing entailment models, and it allows a neural network-based model to perform competitively on natural language inference benchmarks for the first time.

Due to their similarity-based learning objectives, pretrained sentence encoders often internalize stereotypical assumptions that reflect the social biases that exist within their training corpora. In this paper, we describe several kinds of stereotypes concerning different communities that are present in popular sentence representation models, including pretrained next sentence prediction and contrastive sentence representation models. We compare such models to textual entailment models that learn language logic for a variety of downstream language understanding tasks. By comparing strong pretrained models based on text similarity with textual entailment learning, we conclude that the explicit logic learning with textual entailment can significantly reduce bias and improve the recognition of social communities, without an explicit de-biasing process

Reasoning over knowledge graphs (KGs) is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of the complex relationships between entities and the underlying logic of their relations. Current approaches rely on learning geometries to embed entities in vector space for logical query operations, but they suffer from subpar performance on complex queries and dataset-specific representations. In this paper, we propose a novel decoupled approach, Language-guided Abstract Reasoning over Knowledge graphs (LARK), that formulates complex KG reasoning as a combination of contextual KG search and logical query reasoning, to leverage the strengths of graph extraction algorithms and large language models (LLM), respectively. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art KG reasoning methods on standard benchmark datasets across several logical query constructs, with significant performance gain for queries of higher complexity. Furthermore, we show that the performance of our approach improves proportionally to the increase in size of the underlying LLM, enabling the integration of the latest advancements in LLMs for logical reasoning over KGs. Our work presents a new direction for addressing the challenges of complex KG reasoning and paves the way for future research in this area.

Large language models have been shown to suffer from reasoning inconsistency issues. That is, they fail more in situations unfamiliar to the training data, even though exact or very similar reasoning paths exist in more common cases that they can successfully solve. Such observations motivate us to propose methods that encourage models to understand the high-level and abstract reasoning processes during training instead of only the final answer. This way, models can transfer the exact solution to similar cases, regardless of their relevance to the pre-training data distribution. In this work, we propose SAL, a self-supervised analogical learning framework. SAL mimics the human analogy process and trains models to explicitly transfer high-quality symbolic solutions from cases that they know how to solve to other rare cases in which they tend to fail more. We show that the resulting models after SAL learning outperform base language models on a wide range of reasoning benchmarks, such as StrategyQA, GSM8K, and HotpotQA, by 2% to 20%. At the same time, we show that our model is more generalizable and controllable through analytical studies.

Machine learning about language can be improved by supplying it with specific knowledge and sources of external information. We present here a new version of the linked open data resource ConceptNet that is particularly well suited to be used with modern NLP techniques such as word embeddings. ConceptNet is a knowledge graph that connects words and phrases of natural language with labeled edges. Its knowledge is collected from many sources that include expert-created resources, crowd-sourcing, and games with a purpose. It is designed to represent the general knowledge involved in understanding language, improving natural language applications by allowing the application to better understand the meanings behind the words people use. When ConceptNet is combined with word embeddings acquired from distributional semantics (such as word2vec), it provides applications with understanding that they would not acquire from distributional semantics alone, nor from narrower resources such as WordNet or DBPedia. We demonstrate this with state-of-the-art results on intrinsic evaluations of word relatedness that translate into improvements on applications of word vectors, including solving SAT-style analogies.

We introduce semantic towers, an extrinsic knowledge representation method, and compare it to intrinsic knowledge in large language models for ontology learning. Our experiments show a trade-off between performance and semantic grounding for extrinsic knowledge compared to a fine-tuned model intrinsic knowledge. We report our findings on the Large Language Models for Ontology Learning (LLMs4OL) 2024 challenge.

Despite their remarkable successes, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), including vision-and-language models (VLMs) and unimodal language models (ULMs), fail to understand precise semantics. For example, semantically equivalent sentences expressed using different lexical compositions elicit diverging representations. The degree of this divergence and its impact on encoded semantics is not very well understood. In this paper, we introduce the SUGARCREPE++ dataset to analyze the sensitivity of VLMs and ULMs to lexical and semantic alterations. Each sample in SUGARCREPE++ dataset consists of an image and a corresponding triplet of captions: a pair of semantically equivalent but lexically different positive captions and one hard negative caption. This poses a 3-way semantic (in)equivalence problem to the language models. We comprehensively evaluate VLMs and ULMs that differ in architecture, pre-training objectives and datasets to benchmark the performance of SUGARCREPE++ dataset. Experimental results highlight the difficulties of VLMs in distinguishing between lexical and semantic variations, particularly in object attributes and spatial relations. Although VLMs with larger pre-training datasets, model sizes, and multiple pre-training objectives achieve better performance on SUGARCREPE++, there is a significant opportunity for improvement. We show that all the models which achieve better performance on compositionality datasets need not perform equally well on SUGARCREPE++, signifying that compositionality alone may not be sufficient for understanding semantic and lexical alterations. Given the importance of the property that the SUGARCREPE++ dataset targets, it serves as a new challenge to the vision-and-language community.

Vision and Language (VL) models offer an effective method for aligning representation spaces of images and text, leading to numerous applications such as cross-modal retrieval, visual question answering, captioning, and more. However, the aligned image-text spaces learned by all the popular VL models are still suffering from the so-called `object bias' - their representations behave as `bags of nouns', mostly ignoring or downsizing the attributes, relations, and states of objects described/appearing in texts/images. Although some great attempts at fixing these `compositional reasoning' issues were proposed in the recent literature, the problem is still far from being solved. In this paper, we uncover two factors limiting the VL models' compositional reasoning performance. These two factors are properties of the paired VL dataset used for finetuning and pre-training the VL model: (i) the caption quality, or in other words `image-alignment', of the texts; and (ii) the `density' of the captions in the sense of mentioning all the details appearing on the image. We propose a fine-tuning approach for automatically treating these factors leveraging a standard VL dataset (CC3M). Applied to CLIP, we demonstrate its significant compositional reasoning performance increase of up to sim27% over the base model, up to sim20% over the strongest baseline, and by 6.7% on average.

Prompt engineering has emerged as an indispensable technique for extending the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). This approach leverages task-specific instructions, known as prompts, to enhance model efficacy without modifying the core model parameters. Rather than updating the model parameters, prompts allow seamless integration of pre-trained models into downstream tasks by eliciting desired model behaviors solely based on the given prompt. Prompts can be natural language instructions that provide context to guide the model or learned vector representations that activate relevant knowledge. This burgeoning field has enabled success across various applications, from question-answering to commonsense reasoning. However, there remains a lack of systematic organization and understanding of the diverse prompt engineering methods and techniques. This survey paper addresses the gap by providing a structured overview of recent advancements in prompt engineering, categorized by application area. For each prompting approach, we provide a summary detailing the prompting methodology, its applications, the models involved, and the datasets utilized. We also delve into the strengths and limitations of each approach and include a taxonomy diagram and table summarizing datasets, models, and critical points of each prompting technique. This systematic analysis enables a better understanding of this rapidly developing field and facilitates future research by illuminating open challenges and opportunities for prompt engineering.

Recent studies of the emergent capabilities of transformer-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models have indicated that they have an understanding of lexical and compositional semantics. We provide evidence that suggests these claims should be taken with a grain of salt: we find that state-of-the-art Natural Language Inference (NLI) models are sensitive towards minor semantics preserving surface-form variations, which lead to sizable inconsistent model decisions during inference. Notably, this behaviour differs from valid and in-depth comprehension of compositional semantics, however does neither emerge when evaluating model accuracy on standard benchmarks nor when probing for syntactic, monotonic, and logically robust reasoning. We propose a novel framework to measure the extent of semantic sensitivity. To this end, we evaluate NLI models on adversarially generated examples containing minor semantics-preserving surface-form input noise. This is achieved using conditional text generation, with the explicit condition that the NLI model predicts the relationship between the original and adversarial inputs as a symmetric equivalence entailment. We systematically study the effects of the phenomenon across NLI models for in- and out-of- domain settings. Our experiments show that semantic sensitivity causes performance degradations of 12.92% and 23.71% average over in- and out-of- domain settings, respectively. We further perform ablation studies, analysing this phenomenon across models, datasets, and variations in inference and show that semantic sensitivity can lead to major inconsistency within model predictions.

With the fast-paced development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), we can now converse with AI systems in natural languages to understand images. However, the reasoning power and world knowledge embedded in the large language models have been much less investigated and exploited for image perception tasks. In this paper, we propose Lenna, a language-enhanced reasoning detection assistant, which utilizes the robust multimodal feature representation of MLLMs, while preserving location information for detection. This is achieved by incorporating an additional <DET> token in the MLLM vocabulary that is free of explicit semantic context but serves as a prompt for the detector to identify the corresponding position. To evaluate the reasoning capability of Lenna, we construct a ReasonDet dataset to measure its performance on reasoning-based detection. Remarkably, Lenna demonstrates outstanding performance on ReasonDet and comes with significantly low training costs. It also incurs minimal transferring overhead when extended to other tasks. Our code and model will be available at https://git.io/Lenna.

Humans make numerous inferences in text comprehension to understand discourse. This paper aims to understand the commonalities and disparities in the inference judgments between humans and state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). Leveraging a comprehensively curated entailment verification benchmark, we evaluate both human and LLM performance across various reasoning categories. Our benchmark includes datasets from three categories (NLI, contextual QA, and rationales) that include multi-sentence premises and different knowledge types, thereby evaluating the inference capabilities in complex reasoning instances. Notably, our findings reveal LLMs' superiority in multi-hop reasoning across extended contexts, while humans excel in tasks necessitating simple deductive reasoning. Leveraging these insights, we introduce a fine-tuned Flan-T5 model that outperforms GPT-3.5 and rivals with GPT-4, offering a robust open-source solution for entailment verification. As a practical application, we showcase the efficacy of our finetuned model in enhancing self-consistency in model-generated explanations, resulting in a 6% performance boost on average across three multiple-choice question-answering datasets.

Word embeddings have been shown to be useful across state-of-the-art systems in many natural language processing tasks, ranging from question answering systems to dependency parsing. (Herbelot and Vecchi, 2015) explored word embeddings and their utility for modeling language semantics. In particular, they presented an approach to automatically map a standard distributional semantic space onto a set-theoretic model using partial least squares regression. We show in this paper that a simple baseline achieves a +51% relative improvement compared to their model on one of the two datasets they used, and yields competitive results on the second dataset.

The increasing concern with misinformation has stimulated research efforts on automatic fact checking. The recently-released FEVER dataset introduced a benchmark fact-verification task in which a system is asked to verify a claim using evidential sentences from Wikipedia documents. In this paper, we present a connected system consisting of three homogeneous neural semantic matching models that conduct document retrieval, sentence selection, and claim verification jointly for fact extraction and verification. For evidence retrieval (document retrieval and sentence selection), unlike traditional vector space IR models in which queries and sources are matched in some pre-designed term vector space, we develop neural models to perform deep semantic matching from raw textual input, assuming no intermediate term representation and no access to structured external knowledge bases. We also show that Pageview frequency can also help improve the performance of evidence retrieval results, that later can be matched by using our neural semantic matching network. For claim verification, unlike previous approaches that simply feed upstream retrieved evidence and the claim to a natural language inference (NLI) model, we further enhance the NLI model by providing it with internal semantic relatedness scores (hence integrating it with the evidence retrieval modules) and ontological WordNet features. Experiments on the FEVER dataset indicate that (1) our neural semantic matching method outperforms popular TF-IDF and encoder models, by significant margins on all evidence retrieval metrics, (2) the additional relatedness score and WordNet features improve the NLI model via better semantic awareness, and (3) by formalizing all three subtasks as a similar semantic matching problem and improving on all three stages, the complete model is able to achieve the state-of-the-art results on the FEVER test set.

In recent years supervised representation learning has provided state of the art or close to the state of the art results in semantic analysis tasks including ranking and information retrieval. The core idea is to learn how to embed items into a latent space such that they optimize a supervised objective in that latent space. The dimensions of the latent space have no clear semantics, and this reduces the interpretability of the system. For example, in personalization models, it is hard to explain why a particular item is ranked high for a given user profile. We propose a novel model of representation learning called Supervised Explicit Semantic Analysis (SESA) that is trained in a supervised fashion to embed items to a set of dimensions with explicit semantics. The model learns to compare two objects by representing them in this explicit space, where each dimension corresponds to a concept from a knowledge base. This work extends Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) with a supervised model for ranking problems. We apply this model to the task of Job-Profile relevance in LinkedIn in which a set of skills defines our explicit dimensions of the space. Every profile and job are encoded to this set of skills their similarity is calculated in this space. We use RNNs to embed text input into this space. In addition to interpretability, our model makes use of the web-scale collaborative skills data that is provided by users for each LinkedIn profile. Our model provides state of the art result while it remains interpretable.

Incorporating domain-specific priors in search and navigation tasks has shown promising results in improving generalization and sample complexity over end-to-end trained policies. In this work, we study how object embeddings that capture spatial semantic priors can guide search and navigation tasks in a structured environment. We know that humans can search for an object like a book, or a plate in an unseen house, based on the spatial semantics of bigger objects detected. For example, a book is likely to be on a bookshelf or a table, whereas a plate is likely to be in a cupboard or dishwasher. We propose a method to incorporate such spatial semantic awareness in robots by leveraging pre-trained language models and multi-relational knowledge bases as object embeddings. We demonstrate using these object embeddings to search a query object in an unseen indoor environment. We measure the performance of these embeddings in an indoor simulator (AI2Thor). We further evaluate different pre-trained embedding onSuccess Rate(SR) and success weighted by Path Length(SPL).

This paper examines the encoding of analogy in large-scale pretrained language models, such as BERT and GPT-2. Existing analogy datasets typically focus on a limited set of analogical relations, with a high similarity of the two domains between which the analogy holds. As a more realistic setup, we introduce the Scientific and Creative Analogy dataset (SCAN), a novel analogy dataset containing systematic mappings of multiple attributes and relational structures across dissimilar domains. Using this dataset, we test the analogical reasoning capabilities of several widely-used pretrained language models (LMs). We find that state-of-the-art LMs achieve low performance on these complex analogy tasks, highlighting the challenges still posed by analogy understanding.

We introduce Rank1, the first reranking model trained to take advantage of test-time compute. Rank1 demonstrates the applicability within retrieval of using a reasoning language model (i.e. OpenAI's o1, Deepseek's R1, etc.) for distillation in order to rapidly improve the performance of a smaller model. We gather and open-source a dataset of more than 600,000 examples of R1 reasoning traces from queries and passages in MS MARCO. Models trained on this dataset show: (1) state-of-the-art performance on advanced reasoning and instruction following datasets; (2) work remarkably well out of distribution due to the ability to respond to user-input prompts; and (3) have explainable reasoning chains that can be given to users or RAG-based systems. Further, we demonstrate that quantized versions of these models retain strong performance while using less compute/memory. Overall, Rank1 shows that test-time compute allows for a fundamentally new type of explainable and performant reranker model for search.

Many methods now exist for conditioning model outputs on task instructions, retrieved documents, and user-provided explanations and feedback. Rather than relying solely on examples of task inputs and outputs, these approaches use valuable additional data for improving model correctness and aligning learned models with human priors. Meanwhile, a growing body of evidence suggests that some language models can (1) store a large amount of knowledge in their parameters, and (2) perform inference over tasks in textual inputs at test time. These results raise the possibility that, for some tasks, humans cannot explain to a model any more about the task than it already knows or could infer on its own. In this paper, we study the circumstances under which explanations of individual data points can (or cannot) improve modeling performance. In order to carefully control important properties of the data and explanations, we introduce a synthetic dataset for experiments, and we also make use of three existing datasets with explanations: e-SNLI, TACRED, and SemEval. We first give a formal framework for the available modeling approaches, in which explanation data can be used as model inputs, as targets, or as a prior. After arguing that the most promising role for explanation data is as model inputs, we propose to use a retrieval-based method and show that it solves our synthetic task with accuracies upwards of 95%, while baselines without explanation data achieve below 65% accuracy. We then identify properties of datasets for which retrieval-based modeling fails. With the three existing datasets, we find no improvements from explanation retrieval. Drawing on findings from our synthetic task, we suggest that at least one of six preconditions for successful modeling fails to hold with these datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/peterbhase/ExplanationRoles

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) is an essential ingredient in effective usage of modern large language models, but our understanding of the reasoning strategies underlying these capabilities remains limited. While some prior works have attempted to categorize CoTs using predefined strategy types, such approaches are constrained by human intuition and fail to capture the full diversity of model behaviors. In this work, we introduce the CoT Encyclopedia, a bottom-up framework for analyzing and steering model reasoning. Our method automatically extracts diverse reasoning criteria from model-generated CoTs, embeds them into a semantic space, clusters them into representative categories, and derives contrastive rubrics to interpret reasoning behavior. Human evaluations show that this framework produces more interpretable and comprehensive analyses than existing methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that this understanding enables performance gains: we can predict which strategy a model is likely to use and guide it toward more effective alternatives. Finally, we provide practical insights, such as that training data format (e.g., free-form vs. multiple-choice) has a far greater impact on reasoning behavior than data domain, underscoring the importance of format-aware model design.

In this study, we investigate in-context learning (ICL) in document-level event argument extraction (EAE) to alleviate the dependency on large-scale labeled data for this task. We introduce the Heuristic-Driven Link-of-Analogy (HD-LoA) prompting to address the challenge of example selection and to develop a prompting strategy tailored for EAE. Specifically, we hypothesize and validate that LLMs learn task-specific heuristics from demonstrations via ICL. Building upon this hypothesis, we introduce an explicit heuristic-driven demonstration construction approach, which transforms the haphazard example selection process into a methodical method that emphasizes task heuristics. Additionally, inspired by the analogical reasoning of human, we propose the link-of-analogy prompting, which enables LLMs to process new situations by drawing analogies to known situations, enhancing their performance on unseen classes beyond limited ICL examples. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing prompting methods and few-shot supervised learning methods on document-level EAE datasets. Additionally, the HD-LoA prompting shows effectiveness in diverse tasks like sentiment analysis and natural language inference, demonstrating its broad adaptability.

Large language models have recently shown human level performance on a variety of reasoning tasks. However, the ability of these models to perform complex visual reasoning has not been studied in detail yet. A key challenge in many visual reasoning tasks is that the visual information needs to be tightly integrated in the reasoning process. We propose to address this challenge by drawing inspiration from human visual problem solving which depends on a variety of low-level visual capabilities. It can often be cast as the three step-process of ``Look, Remember, Reason'': visual information is incrementally extracted using low-level visual routines in a step-by-step fashion until a final answer is reached. We follow the same paradigm to enable existing large language models, with minimal changes to the architecture, to solve visual reasoning problems. To this end, we introduce rationales over the visual input that allow us to integrate low-level visual capabilities, such as object recognition and tracking, as surrogate tasks. We show competitive performance on diverse visual reasoning tasks from the CLEVR, CATER, and ACRE datasets over state-of-the-art models designed specifically for these tasks.

This paper presents a significant improvement on the previous conference paper known as DefSent. The prior study seeks to improve sentence embeddings of language models by projecting definition sentences into the vector space of dictionary entries. We discover that this approach is not fully explored due to the methodological limitation of using word embeddings of language models to represent dictionary entries. This leads to two hindrances. First, dictionary entries are constrained by the single-word vocabulary, and thus cannot be fully exploited. Second, semantic representations of language models are known to be anisotropic, but pre-processing word embeddings for DefSent is not allowed because its weight is frozen during training and tied to the prediction layer. In this paper, we propose a novel method to progressively build entry embeddings not subject to the limitations. As a result, definition sentences can be projected into a quasi-isotropic or isotropic vector space of unlimited dictionary entries, so that sentence embeddings of noticeably better quality are attainable. We abbreviate our approach as DefSent+ (a plus version of DefSent), involving the following strengths: 1) the task performance on measuring sentence similarities is significantly improved compared to DefSent; 2) when DefSent+ is used to further train data-augmented models like SIMCSE, SNCSE, and SynCSE, state-of-the-art performance on measuring sentence similarities can be achieved among the approaches without using manually labeled datasets; 3) DefSent+ is also competitive in feature-based transfer for NLP downstream tasks.

In this study, we introduced a new benchmark consisting of a curated dataset and a defined evaluation process to assess the compositional reasoning capabilities of large language models within the chemistry domain. We designed and validated a fully automated pipeline, verified by subject matter experts, to facilitate this task. Our approach integrates OpenAI reasoning models with named entity recognition (NER) systems to extract chemical entities from recent literature, which are then augmented with external knowledge bases to form a comprehensive knowledge graph. By generating multi-hop questions across these graphs, we assess LLM performance in both context-augmented and non-context augmented settings. Our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art models face significant challenges in multi-hop compositional reasoning. The results reflect the importance of augmenting LLMs with document retrieval, which can have a substantial impact on improving their performance. However, even perfect retrieval accuracy with full context does not eliminate reasoning errors, underscoring the complexity of compositional reasoning. This work not only benchmarks and highlights the limitations of current LLMs but also presents a novel data generation pipeline capable of producing challenging reasoning datasets across various domains. Overall, this research advances our understanding of reasoning in computational linguistics.

This paper demonstrates how the limitations of pre-trained models and open evaluation datasets factor into assessing the performance of binary semantic similarity classification tasks. As (1) end-user-facing documentation around the curation of these datasets and pre-trained model training regimes is often not easily accessible and (2) given the lower friction and higher demand to quickly deploy such systems in real-world contexts, our study reinforces prior work showing performance disparities across datasets, embedding techniques and distance metrics, while highlighting the importance of understanding how data is collected, curated and analyzed in semantic similarity classification.

We present an open-vocabulary and zero-shot method for arbitrary referring expression segmentation (RES), targeting input expressions that are more general than what prior works were designed to handle. Specifically, our inputs encompass both object- and part-level labels as well as implicit references pointing to properties or qualities of object/part function, design, style, material, etc. Our model, coined RESAnything, leverages Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) reasoning, where the key idea is attribute prompting. We generate detailed descriptions of object/part attributes including shape, color, and location for potential segment proposals through systematic prompting of a large language model (LLM), where the proposals are produced by a foundational image segmentation model. Our approach encourages deep reasoning about object or part attributes related to function, style, design, etc., enabling the system to handle implicit queries without any part annotations for training or fine-tuning. As the first zero-shot and LLM-based RES method, RESAnything achieves clearly superior performance among zero-shot methods on traditional RES benchmarks and significantly outperforms existing methods on challenging scenarios involving implicit queries and complex part-level relations. Finally, we contribute a new benchmark dataset to offer ~3K carefully curated RES instances to assess part-level, arbitrary RES solutions.

The commonsense reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs), especially in abductive reasoning and defeasible reasoning, remain poorly understood. Most benchmarks focus on typical visual scenarios, making it difficult to discern whether model performance stems from keen perception and reasoning skills, or reliance on pure statistical recall. We argue that by focusing on atypical events in videos, clearer insights can be gained on the core capabilities of VLMs. Explaining and understanding such out-of-distribution events requires models to extend beyond basic pattern recognition and regurgitation of their prior knowledge. To this end, we introduce BlackSwanSuite, a benchmark for evaluating VLMs' ability to reason about unexpected events through abductive and defeasible tasks. Our tasks artificially limit the amount of visual information provided to models while questioning them about hidden unexpected events, or provide new visual information that could change an existing hypothesis about the event. We curate a comprehensive benchmark suite comprising over 3,800 MCQ, 4,900 generative and 6,700 yes/no tasks, spanning 1,655 videos. After extensively evaluating various state-of-the-art VLMs, including GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, as well as open-source VLMs such as LLaVA-Video, we find significant performance gaps of up to 32% from humans on these tasks. Our findings reveal key limitations in current VLMs, emphasizing the need for enhanced model architectures and training strategies.

We present a meta-learning framework for learning new visual concepts quickly, from just one or a few examples, guided by multiple naturally occurring data streams: simultaneously looking at images, reading sentences that describe the objects in the scene, and interpreting supplemental sentences that relate the novel concept with other concepts. The learned concepts support downstream applications, such as answering questions by reasoning about unseen images. Our model, namely FALCON, represents individual visual concepts, such as colors and shapes, as axis-aligned boxes in a high-dimensional space (the "box embedding space"). Given an input image and its paired sentence, our model first resolves the referential expression in the sentence and associates the novel concept with particular objects in the scene. Next, our model interprets supplemental sentences to relate the novel concept with other known concepts, such as "X has property Y" or "X is a kind of Y". Finally, it infers an optimal box embedding for the novel concept that jointly 1) maximizes the likelihood of the observed instances in the image, and 2) satisfies the relationships between the novel concepts and the known ones. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Chain-of-thought reasoning has significantly improved the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains. However, this reasoning process has been confined exclusively to textual space, limiting its effectiveness in visually intensive tasks. To address this limitation, we introduce the concept of reasoning in the pixel-space. Within this novel framework, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are equipped with a suite of visual reasoning operations, such as zoom-in and select-frame. These operations enable VLMs to directly inspect, interrogate, and infer from visual evidences, thereby enhancing reasoning fidelity for visual tasks. Cultivating such pixel-space reasoning capabilities in VLMs presents notable challenges, including the model's initially imbalanced competence and its reluctance to adopt the newly introduced pixel-space operations. We address these challenges through a two-phase training approach. The first phase employs instruction tuning on synthesized reasoning traces to familiarize the model with the novel visual operations. Following this, a reinforcement learning (RL) phase leverages a curiosity-driven reward scheme to balance exploration between pixel-space reasoning and textual reasoning. With these visual operations, VLMs can interact with complex visual inputs, such as information-rich images or videos to proactively gather necessary information. We demonstrate that this approach significantly improves VLM performance across diverse visual reasoning benchmarks. Our 7B model, \model, achieves 84\% on V* bench, 74\% on TallyQA-Complex, and 84\% on InfographicsVQA, marking the highest accuracy achieved by any open-source model to date. These results highlight the importance of pixel-space reasoning and the effectiveness of our framework.

Deep learning methods are highly accurate, yet their opaque decision process prevents them from earning full human trust. Concept-based models aim to address this issue by learning tasks based on a set of human-understandable concepts. However, state-of-the-art concept-based models rely on high-dimensional concept embedding representations which lack a clear semantic meaning, thus questioning the interpretability of their decision process. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Deep Concept Reasoner (DCR), the first interpretable concept-based model that builds upon concept embeddings. In DCR, neural networks do not make task predictions directly, but they build syntactic rule structures using concept embeddings. DCR then executes these rules on meaningful concept truth degrees to provide a final interpretable and semantically-consistent prediction in a differentiable manner. Our experiments show that DCR: (i) improves up to +25% w.r.t. state-of-the-art interpretable concept-based models on challenging benchmarks (ii) discovers meaningful logic rules matching known ground truths even in the absence of concept supervision during training, and (iii), facilitates the generation of counterfactual examples providing the learnt rules as guidance.

While Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting approaches have significantly consolidated the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), they still face limitations that require extensive human effort or have performance needs to be improved. Existing endeavors have focused on bridging these gaps; however, these approaches either hinge on external data and cannot completely eliminate manual effort, or they fall short in effectively directing LLMs to generate high-quality exemplary prompts. To address the said pitfalls, we propose a novel prompt approach for automatic reasoning named LBS3, inspired by curriculum learning which better reflects human learning habits. Specifically, LBS3 initially steers LLMs to recall easy-to-hard proxy queries that are pertinent to the target query. Following this, it invokes a progressive strategy that utilizes exemplary prompts stemmed from easy-proxy queries to direct LLMs in solving hard-proxy queries, enabling the high-quality of the proxy solutions. Finally, our extensive experiments in various reasoning-intensive tasks with varying open- and closed-source LLMs show that LBS3 achieves strongly competitive performance compared to the SOTA baselines.

Despite notable advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that expand large language model (LLM) capabilities through external retrieval, these systems often struggle to meet the complex and diverse needs of real-world industrial applications. The reliance on retrieval alone proves insufficient for extracting deep, domain-specific knowledge performing in logical reasoning from specialized corpora. To address this, we introduce sPecIalized KnowledgE and Rationale Augmentation Generation (PIKE-RAG), focusing on extracting, understanding, and applying specialized knowledge, while constructing coherent rationale to incrementally steer LLMs toward accurate responses. Recognizing the diverse challenges of industrial tasks, we introduce a new paradigm that classifies tasks based on their complexity in knowledge extraction and application, allowing for a systematic evaluation of RAG systems' problem-solving capabilities. This strategic approach offers a roadmap for the phased development and enhancement of RAG systems, tailored to meet the evolving demands of industrial applications. Furthermore, we propose knowledge atomizing and knowledge-aware task decomposition to effectively extract multifaceted knowledge from the data chunks and iteratively construct the rationale based on original query and the accumulated knowledge, respectively, showcasing exceptional performance across various benchmarks.

Enterprise documents such as forms, invoices, receipts, reports, contracts, and other similar records, often carry rich semantics at the intersection of textual and spatial modalities. The visual cues offered by their complex layouts play a crucial role in comprehending these documents effectively. In this paper, we present DocLLM, a lightweight extension to traditional large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over visual documents, taking into account both textual semantics and spatial layout. Our model differs from existing multimodal LLMs by avoiding expensive image encoders and focuses exclusively on bounding box information to incorporate the spatial layout structure. Specifically, the cross-alignment between text and spatial modalities is captured by decomposing the attention mechanism in classical transformers to a set of disentangled matrices. Furthermore, we devise a pre-training objective that learns to infill text segments. This approach allows us to address irregular layouts and heterogeneous content frequently encountered in visual documents. The pre-trained model is fine-tuned using a large-scale instruction dataset, covering four core document intelligence tasks. We demonstrate that our solution outperforms SotA LLMs on 14 out of 16 datasets across all tasks, and generalizes well to 4 out of 5 previously unseen datasets.

With the growing success of reasoning models across complex natural language tasks, researchers in the Information Retrieval (IR) community have begun exploring how similar reasoning capabilities can be integrated into passage rerankers built on Large Language Models (LLMs). These methods typically employ an LLM to produce an explicit, step-by-step reasoning process before arriving at a final relevance prediction. But, does reasoning actually improve reranking accuracy? In this paper, we dive deeper into this question, studying the impact of the reasoning process by comparing reasoning-based pointwise rerankers (ReasonRR) to standard, non-reasoning pointwise rerankers (StandardRR) under identical training conditions, and observe that StandardRR generally outperforms ReasonRR. Building on this observation, we then study the importance of reasoning to ReasonRR by disabling its reasoning process (ReasonRR-NoReason), and find that ReasonRR-NoReason is surprisingly more effective than ReasonRR. Examining the cause of this result, our findings reveal that reasoning-based rerankers are limited by the LLM's reasoning process, which pushes it toward polarized relevance scores and thus fails to consider the partial relevance of passages, a key factor for the accuracy of pointwise rerankers.

State-of-the-art deep-learning-based approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) are credited with various capabilities that involve reasoning with natural language texts. In this paper we carry out a large-scale empirical study investigating the detection of formally valid inferences in controlled fragments of natural language for which the satisfiability problem becomes increasingly complex. We find that, while transformer-based language models perform surprisingly well in these scenarios, a deeper analysis re-veals that they appear to overfit to superficial patterns in the data rather than acquiring the logical principles governing the reasoning in these fragments.

One of the common traits of past and present approaches for Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is that they rely upon discrete labels drawn from a predefined linguistic inventory to classify predicate senses and their arguments. However, we argue this need not be the case. In this paper, we present an approach that leverages Definition Modeling to introduce a generalized formulation of SRL as the task of describing predicate-argument structures using natural language definitions instead of discrete labels. Our novel formulation takes a first step towards placing interpretability and flexibility foremost, and yet our experiments and analyses on PropBank-style and FrameNet-style, dependency-based and span-based SRL also demonstrate that a flexible model with an interpretable output does not necessarily come at the expense of performance. We release our software for research purposes at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/dsrl.

Recent advances in natural language processing, primarily propelled by Large Language Models (LLMs), have showcased their remarkable capabilities grounded in in-context learning. A promising avenue for guiding LLMs in intricate reasoning tasks involves the utilization of intermediate reasoning steps within the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm. Nevertheless, the central challenge lies in the effective selection of exemplars for facilitating in-context learning. In this study, we introduce a framework that leverages Dual Queries and Low-rank approximation Re-ranking (DQ-LoRe) to automatically select exemplars for in-context learning. Dual Queries first query LLM to obtain LLM-generated knowledge such as CoT, then query the retriever to obtain the final exemplars via both question and the knowledge. Moreover, for the second query, LoRe employs dimensionality reduction techniques to refine exemplar selection, ensuring close alignment with the input question's knowledge. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DQ-LoRe significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in the automatic selection of exemplars for GPT-4, enhancing performance from 92.5% to 94.2%. Our comprehensive analysis further reveals that DQ-LoRe consistently outperforms retrieval-based approaches in terms of both performance and adaptability, especially in scenarios characterized by distribution shifts. DQ-LoRe pushes the boundary of in-context learning and opens up new avenues for addressing complex reasoning challenges. Our code is released at https://github.com/AI4fun/DQ-LoRe}{https://github.com/AI4fun/DQ-LoRe.

In-context learning (ICL) using large language models for tasks with many labels is challenging due to the limited context window, which makes it difficult to fit a sufficient number of examples in the prompt. In this paper, we use a pre-trained dense retrieval model to bypass this limitation, giving the model only a partial view of the full label space for each inference call. Testing with recent open-source LLMs (OPT, LLaMA), we set new state of the art performance in few-shot settings for three common intent classification datasets, with no finetuning. We also surpass fine-tuned performance on fine-grained sentiment classification in certain cases. We analyze the performance across number of in-context examples and different model scales, showing that larger models are necessary to effectively and consistently make use of larger context lengths for ICL. By running several ablations, we analyze the model's use of: a) the similarity of the in-context examples to the current input, b) the semantic content of the class names, and c) the correct correspondence between examples and labels. We demonstrate that all three are needed to varying degrees depending on the domain, contrary to certain recent works.

As Transformers have become state-of-the-art models for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, the need to understand and explain their predictions is increasingly apparent. Especially in unsupervised applications, such as information retrieval tasks, similarity models built on top of foundation model representations have been widely applied. However, their inner prediction mechanisms have mostly remained opaque. Recent advances in explainable AI have made it possible to mitigate these limitations by leveraging improved explanations for Transformers through layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP). Using BiLRP, an extension developed for computing second-order explanations in bilinear similarity models, we investigate which feature interactions drive similarity in NLP models. We validate the resulting explanations and demonstrate their utility in three corpus-level use cases, analyzing grammatical interactions, multilingual semantics, and biomedical text retrieval. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of different semantic similarity tasks and models, highlighting how novel explainable AI methods enable in-depth analyses and corpus-level insights.

The recently introduced continuous Skip-gram model is an efficient method for learning high-quality distributed vector representations that capture a large number of precise syntactic and semantic word relationships. In this paper we present several extensions that improve both the quality of the vectors and the training speed. By subsampling of the frequent words we obtain significant speedup and also learn more regular word representations. We also describe a simple alternative to the hierarchical softmax called negative sampling. An inherent limitation of word representations is their indifference to word order and their inability to represent idiomatic phrases. For example, the meanings of "Canada" and "Air" cannot be easily combined to obtain "Air Canada". Motivated by this example, we present a simple method for finding phrases in text, and show that learning good vector representations for millions of phrases is possible.

This study focuses on improving the performance of lightweight Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning tasks. We introduce a novel method for measuring mathematical logic similarity and design an automatic screening mechanism to construct a set of reference problems that integrate both semantic and logical similarity. By employing carefully crafted positive and negative example prompts, we guide the model towards adopting sound reasoning logic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to utilize retrieval-enhanced generation for mathematical problem-solving. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a 15.8% improvement over the Chain of Thought approach on the SVAMP dataset and a 21.5 % improvement on the GSM8K dataset. Further application of this method to a large-scale model with 175 billion parameters yields performance comparable to the best results on both aforementioned datasets. Finally, we conduct an analysis of errors during the reasoning process, providing valuable insights and directions for future research on reasoning tasks using large language models.

We propose a new framework for understanding and representing related salient events in a video using visual semantic role labeling. We represent videos as a set of related events, wherein each event consists of a verb and multiple entities that fulfill various roles relevant to that event. To study the challenging task of semantic role labeling in videos or VidSRL, we introduce the VidSitu benchmark, a large-scale video understanding data source with 29K 10-second movie clips richly annotated with a verb and semantic-roles every 2 seconds. Entities are co-referenced across events within a movie clip and events are connected to each other via event-event relations. Clips in VidSitu are drawn from a large collection of movies ({sim}3K) and have been chosen to be both complex ({sim}4.2 unique verbs within a video) as well as diverse ({sim}200 verbs have more than 100 annotations each). We provide a comprehensive analysis of the dataset in comparison to other publicly available video understanding benchmarks, several illustrative baselines and evaluate a range of standard video recognition models. Our code and dataset is available at vidsitu.org.

We evaluate how well Large Language Models (LLMs) latently recall and compose facts to answer multi-hop queries like "In the year Scarlett Johansson was born, the Summer Olympics were hosted in the country of". One major challenge in evaluating this ability is that LLMs may have developed shortcuts by encounters of the head entity "Scarlett Johansson" and the answer entity "United States" in the same training sequences or merely guess the answer based on frequency-based priors. To prevent shortcuts, we exclude test queries where the head and answer entities co-appear in pretraining corpora. Through careful selection of relations and facts and systematic removal of cases where models might guess answers or exploit partial matches, we construct an evaluation dataset SOCRATES (ShOrtCut-fRee lATent rEaSoning). We observe that LLMs demonstrate promising latent multi-hop reasoning abilities without exploiting shortcuts, but only for certain types of queries. For queries requiring latent recall of countries as the intermediate answer, the best models achieve 80% latent composability, but this drops to just 5% for the recall of years. Comparisons with Chain-of-Thought composability highlight a significant gap between the ability of models to reason latently versus explicitly. Analysis reveals that latent representations of the intermediate answer are constructed more often in queries with higher latent composability, and shows the emergence of latent multi-hop reasoning during pretraining.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant improvements in various natural language processing tasks, but it is still challenging for LLMs to perform knowledge-intensive complex question answering due to LLMs' inefficacy in reasoning planning and the hallucination problem. A typical solution is to employ retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) coupled with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, which decomposes complex questions into chain-like sub-questions and applies iterative RAG at each sub-question. However, prior works exhibit sub-optimal reasoning planning and overlook dynamic knowledge retrieval from heterogeneous sources. In this paper, we propose AtomR, a novel heterogeneous knowledge reasoning framework that conducts multi-source reasoning at the atomic level. Drawing inspiration from the graph modeling of knowledge, AtomR leverages large language models (LLMs) to decompose complex questions into combinations of three atomic knowledge operators, significantly enhancing the reasoning process at both the planning and execution stages. We also introduce BlendQA, a novel evaluation benchmark tailored to assess complex heterogeneous knowledge reasoning. Experiments show that AtomR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across three single-source and two multi-source reasoning benchmarks, with notable performance gains of 9.4% on 2WikiMultihop and 9.5% on BlendQA.

This paper identifies the misinterpretation of the context can be a significant issue during the reasoning process of large language models, spanning from smaller models like Llama3.2-3B-Instruct to cutting-edge ones like DeepSeek-R1. For example, in the phrase "10 dollars per kilo," LLMs might not recognize that "per" means "for each," leading to calculation errors. We introduce a novel, post-training approach called **Stick to the Facts (SIFT)** to tackle this. SIFT leverages increasing inference-time compute to ground LLM reasoning in contexts. At the core of SIFT lies the *Sticker*, which is generated by the model itself to explicitly emphasize the key information within the context. Given the curated Sticker, SIFT generates two predictions -- one from the original query and one from the query augmented with the Sticker. If they differ, the Sticker is sequentially refined via *forward* optimization (to better align the extracted facts with the query) and *inverse* generation (to conform with the model's inherent tendencies) for more faithful reasoning outcomes. Studies across diverse models (from 3B to 100B+) and benchmarks (e.g., GSM8K, MATH-500) reveal consistent performance improvements. Notably, SIFT improves the pass@1 accuracy of DeepSeek-R1 on AIME2024 from 78.33% to **85.67**%, establishing a new state-of-the-art in the open-source community. The code is available at https://github.com/zhijie-group/SIFT.

Existing dense retrieval models struggle with reasoning-intensive retrieval task as they fail to capture implicit relevance that requires reasoning beyond surface-level semantic information. To address these challenges, we propose Scenario-Profiled Indexing with Knowledge Expansion (SPIKE), a dense retrieval framework that explicitly indexes implicit relevance by decomposing documents into scenario-based retrieval units. SPIKE organizes documents into scenario, which encapsulates the reasoning process necessary to uncover implicit relationships between hypothetical information needs and document content. SPIKE constructs a scenario-augmented dataset using a powerful teacher large language model (LLM), then distills these reasoning capabilities into a smaller, efficient scenario generator. During inference, SPIKE incorporates scenario-level relevance alongside document-level relevance, enabling reasoning-aware retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPIKE consistently enhances retrieval performance across various query types and dense retrievers. It also enhances the retrieval experience for users through scenario and offers valuable contextual information for LLMs in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

Logical reasoning remains a challenge for natural language processing, but it can be improved by training language models to mimic theorem provers on procedurally generated problems. Previous work used domain-specific proof generation algorithms, which biases reasoning toward specific proof traces and limits auditability and extensibility. We present a simpler and more general declarative framework with flexible context-sensitive rules binding multiple languages (specifically, simplified English and the TPTP theorem-proving language). We construct first-order logic problems by selecting up to 32 premises and one hypothesis. We demonstrate that using semantic constraints during generation and careful English verbalization of predicates enhances logical reasoning without hurting natural English tasks. We use relatively small DeBERTa-v3 models to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the FOLIO human-authored logic dataset, surpassing GPT-4 in accuracy with or without an external solver by 12%.

Recent approaches in domain-specific named entity recognition (NER), such as biomedical NER, have shown remarkable advances. However, they still lack of faithfulness, producing erroneous predictions. We assume that knowledge of entities can be useful in verifying the correctness of the predictions. Despite the usefulness of knowledge, resolving such errors with knowledge is nontrivial, since the knowledge itself does not directly indicate the ground-truth label. To this end, we propose VerifiNER, a post-hoc verification framework that identifies errors from existing NER methods using knowledge and revises them into more faithful predictions. Our framework leverages the reasoning abilities of large language models to adequately ground on knowledge and the contextual information in the verification process. We validate effectiveness of VerifiNER through extensive experiments on biomedical datasets. The results suggest that VerifiNER can successfully verify errors from existing models as a model-agnostic approach. Further analyses on out-of-domain and low-resource settings show the usefulness of VerifiNER on real-world applications.

Recent works have argued that high-level semantic concepts are encoded "linearly" in the representation space of large language models. In this work, we study the origins of such linear representations. To that end, we introduce a simple latent variable model to abstract and formalize the concept dynamics of the next token prediction. We use this formalism to show that the next token prediction objective (softmax with cross-entropy) and the implicit bias of gradient descent together promote the linear representation of concepts. Experiments show that linear representations emerge when learning from data matching the latent variable model, confirming that this simple structure already suffices to yield linear representations. We additionally confirm some predictions of the theory using the LLaMA-2 large language model, giving evidence that the simplified model yields generalizable insights.

Although we have witnessed impressive progress in Semantic Role Labeling (SRL), most of the research in the area is carried out assuming that the majority of predicates are verbs. Conversely, predicates can also be expressed using other parts of speech, e.g., nouns and adjectives. However, non-verbal predicates appear in the benchmarks we commonly use to measure progress in SRL less frequently than in some real-world settings -- newspaper headlines, dialogues, and tweets, among others. In this paper, we put forward a new PropBank dataset which boasts wide coverage of multiple predicate types. Thanks to it, we demonstrate empirically that standard benchmarks do not provide an accurate picture of the current situation in SRL and that state-of-the-art systems are still incapable of transferring knowledge across different predicate types. Having observed these issues, we also present a novel, manually-annotated challenge set designed to give equal importance to verbal, nominal, and adjectival predicate-argument structures. We use such dataset to investigate whether we can leverage different linguistic resources to promote knowledge transfer. In conclusion, we claim that SRL is far from "solved", and its integration with other semantic tasks might enable significant improvements in the future, especially for the long tail of non-verbal predicates, thereby facilitating further research on SRL for non-verbal predicates.

Logical reasoning is fundamental for humans yet presents a substantial challenge in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. Initially, researchers used Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR) systems that did not scale and required non trivial manual effort. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated the ability to overcome various limitations of formal Knowledge Representation (KR) systems. Consequently, there is a growing interest in using LLMs for logical reasoning via natural language. This work strives to understand the proficiency of LLMs in logical reasoning by offering a brief review of the latest progress in this area; with a focus on the logical reasoning datasets, tasks, and the methods adopted to utilize LLMs for reasoning. To offer a thorough analysis, we have compiled a benchmark titled LogiGLUE. This includes 24 varied datasets encompassing deductive, abductive, and inductive reasoning. We have standardized these datasets into Seq2Seq tasks to facilitate straightforward training and evaluation for future research. Utilizing LogiGLUE as a foundation, we have trained an instruction fine tuned language model, resulting in LogiT5. We study single task training, multi task training, and a chain of thought knowledge distillation fine tuning technique to assess the performance of model across the different logical reasoning categories. By this comprehensive process, we aim to shed light on the capabilities and potential pathways for enhancing logical reasoning proficiency in LLMs, paving the way for more advanced and nuanced developments in this critical field.

Reasoning, as an essential ability for complex problem-solving, can provide back-end support for various real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, negotiation, etc. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge research on reasoning with language model prompting. We introduce research works with comparisons and summaries and provide systematic resources to help beginners. We also discuss the potential reasons for emerging such reasoning abilities and highlight future research directions. Resources are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/Prompt4ReasoningPapers (updated periodically).

We present evidence that language models can learn meaning despite being trained only to perform next token prediction on text, specifically a corpus of programs. Each program is preceded by a specification in the form of (textual) input-output examples. Working with programs enables us to precisely define concepts relevant to meaning in language (e.g., correctness and semantics), making program synthesis well-suited as an intermediate testbed for characterizing the presence (or absence) of meaning in language models. We first train a Transformer model on the corpus of programs, then probe the trained model's hidden states as it completes a program given a specification. Despite providing no inductive bias toward learning the semantics of the language, we find that a linear probe is able to extract abstractions of both current and future program states from the model states. Moreover, there is a strong, statistically significant correlation between the accuracy of the probe and the model's ability to generate a program that implements the specification. To evaluate whether the semantics are represented in the model states rather than learned by the probe, we design a novel experimental procedure that intervenes on the semantics of the language while preserving the lexicon and syntax. We also demonstrate that the model learns to generate correct programs that are, on average, shorter than those in the training set, which is evidence that language model outputs may differ from the training distribution in semantically meaningful ways. In summary, this paper does not propose any new techniques for training language models, but develops an experimental framework for and provides insights into the acquisition and representation of (formal) meaning in language models.

Although contemporary large language models (LMs) demonstrate impressive question-answering capabilities, their answers are typically the product of a single call to the model. This entails an unwelcome degree of opacity and compromises performance, especially on problems that are inherently multi-step. To address these limitations, we show how LMs can be made to perform faithful multi-step reasoning via a process whose causal structure mirrors the underlying logical structure of the problem. Our approach works by chaining together reasoning steps, where each step results from calls to two fine-tuned LMs, one for selection and one for inference, to produce a valid reasoning trace. Our method carries out a beam search through the space of reasoning traces to improve reasoning quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on multi-step logical deduction and scientific question-answering, showing that it outperforms baselines on final answer accuracy, and generates humanly interpretable reasoning traces whose validity can be checked by the user.

Recent advances in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled unified processing of language, vision, and structured inputs, opening the door to complex tasks such as logical deduction, spatial reasoning, and scientific analysis. Despite their promise, the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, particularly those augmented with intermediate thinking traces (MLLMs-T), remain poorly understood and lack standardized evaluation benchmarks. Existing work focuses primarily on perception or final answer correctness, offering limited insight into how models reason or fail across modalities. To address this gap, we introduce the MMMR, a new benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate multi-modal reasoning with explicit thinking. The MMMR comprises 1) a high-difficulty dataset of 1,083 questions spanning six diverse reasoning types with symbolic depth and multi-hop demands and 2) a modular Reasoning Trace Evaluation Pipeline (RTEP) for assessing reasoning quality beyond accuracy through metrics like relevance, consistency, and structured error annotations. Empirical results show that MLLMs-T overall outperform non-thinking counterparts, but even top models like Claude-3.7-Sonnet and Gemini-2.5 Pro suffer from reasoning pathologies such as inconsistency and overthinking. This benchmark reveals persistent gaps between accuracy and reasoning quality and provides an actionable evaluation pipeline for future model development. Overall, the MMMR offers a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and improving the next generation of multi-modal reasoning systems.

Word embeddings are an essential component in a wide range of natural language processing applications. However, distributional semantic models are known to struggle when only a small number of context sentences are available. Several methods have been proposed to obtain higher-quality vectors for these words, leveraging both this context information and sometimes the word forms themselves through a hybrid approach. We show that the current tasks do not suffice to evaluate models that use word-form information, as such models can easily leverage word forms in the training data that are related to word forms in the test data. We introduce 3 new tasks, allowing for a more balanced comparison between models. Furthermore, we show that hyperparameters that have largely been ignored in previous work can consistently improve the performance of both baseline and advanced models, achieving a new state of the art on 4 out of 6 tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in complex reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, allowing models to break down problems into manageable sub-tasks. However, existing CoT evaluation techniques either require annotated CoT data or fall short in accurately assessing intermediate reasoning steps, leading to high rates of false positives. In this paper, we formalize CoT reasoning in LLMs through an information-theoretic lens. Specifically, our framework quantifies the `information gain' at each reasoning step, enabling the identification of failure modes in LLMs without the need for expensive annotated datasets. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on toy and GSM-8K data, where it significantly outperforms existing outcome-based methods by providing more accurate insights into model performance on individual tasks.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in leveraging pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for various time series applications. However, the semantic space of LLMs, established through the pre-training, is still underexplored and may help yield more distinctive and informative representations to facilitate time series forecasting. To this end, we propose Semantic Space Informed Prompt learning with LLM (S^2IP-LLM) to align the pre-trained semantic space with time series embeddings space and perform time series forecasting based on learned prompts from the joint space. We first design a tokenization module tailored for cross-modality alignment, which explicitly concatenates patches of decomposed time series components to create embeddings that effectively encode the temporal dynamics. Next, we leverage the pre-trained word token embeddings to derive semantic anchors and align selected anchors with time series embeddings by maximizing the cosine similarity in the joint space. This way, S^2IP-LLM can retrieve relevant semantic anchors as prompts to provide strong indicators (context) for time series that exhibit different temporal dynamics. With thorough empirical studies on multiple benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed S^2IP-LLM can achieve superior forecasting performance over state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, our ablation studies and visualizations verify the necessity of prompt learning informed by semantic space.

We present SeaEval, a benchmark for multilingual foundation models. In addition to characterizing how these models understand and reason with natural language, we also investigate how well they comprehend cultural practices, nuances, and values. Alongside standard accuracy metrics, we investigate the brittleness of foundation models in the dimensions of semantics and multilinguality. Our analyses span both open-sourced and closed models, leading to empirical results across classic NLP tasks, reasoning, and cultural comprehension. Key findings indicate (1) Most models exhibit varied behavior when given paraphrased instructions. (2) Many models still suffer from exposure bias (e.g., positional bias, majority label bias). (3) For questions rooted in factual, scientific, and commonsense knowledge, consistent responses are expected across multilingual queries that are semantically equivalent. Yet, most models surprisingly demonstrate inconsistent performance on these queries. (4) Multilingually-trained models have not attained "balanced multilingual" capabilities. Our endeavors underscore the need for more generalizable semantic representations and enhanced multilingual contextualization. SeaEval can serve as a launchpad for more thorough investigations and evaluations for multilingual and multicultural scenarios.

We propose a novel Generalized Zero-Shot learning (GZSL) method that is agnostic to both unseen images and unseen semantic vectors during training. Prior works in this context propose to map high-dimensional visual features to the semantic domain, we believe contributes to the semantic gap. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel low-dimensional embedding of visual instances that is "visually semantic." Analogous to semantic data that quantifies the existence of an attribute in the presented instance, components of our visual embedding quantifies existence of a prototypical part-type in the presented instance. In parallel, as a thought experiment, we quantify the impact of noisy semantic data by utilizing a novel visual oracle to visually supervise a learner. These factors, namely semantic noise, visual-semantic gap and label noise lead us to propose a new graphical model for inference with pairwise interactions between label, semantic data, and inputs. We tabulate results on a number of benchmark datasets demonstrating significant improvement in accuracy over state-of-the-art under both semantic and visual supervision.

Solving math word problems requires deductive reasoning over the quantities in the text. Various recent research efforts mostly relied on sequence-to-sequence or sequence-to-tree models to generate mathematical expressions without explicitly performing relational reasoning between quantities in the given context. While empirically effective, such approaches typically do not provide explanations for the generated expressions. In this work, we view the task as a complex relation extraction problem, proposing a novel approach that presents explainable deductive reasoning steps to iteratively construct target expressions, where each step involves a primitive operation over two quantities defining their relation. Through extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, we show that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing strong baselines. We further demonstrate that the deductive procedure not only presents more explainable steps but also enables us to make more accurate predictions on questions that require more complex reasoning.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but struggle with reasoning errors due to hallucinations and flawed logic. To investigate their internal representations of reasoning, we introduce ArrangementPuzzle, a novel puzzle dataset with structured solutions and automated stepwise correctness verification. We trained a classifier model on LLM activations on this dataset and found that it achieved over 80% accuracy in predicting reasoning correctness, implying that LLMs internally distinguish between correct and incorrect reasoning steps, with the strongest representations in middle-late Transformer layers. Further analysis reveals that LLMs encode abstract reasoning concepts within the middle activation layers of the transformer architecture, distinguishing logical from semantic equivalence. These findings provide insights into LLM reasoning mechanisms and contribute to improving AI reliability and interpretability, thereby offering the possibility to manipulate and refine LLM reasoning.

We introduce iterative retrieval, a novel framework that empowers retrievers to make iterative decisions through policy optimization. Finding an optimal portfolio of retrieved items is a combinatorial optimization problem, generally considered NP-hard. This approach provides a learned approximation to such a solution, meeting specific task requirements under a given family of large language models (LLMs). We propose a training procedure based on reinforcement learning, incorporating feedback from LLMs. We instantiate an iterative retriever for composing in-context learning (ICL) exemplars and apply it to various semantic parsing tasks that demand synthesized programs as outputs. By adding only 4M additional parameters for state encoding, we convert an off-the-shelf dense retriever into a stateful iterative retriever, outperforming previous methods in selecting ICL exemplars on semantic parsing datasets such as CalFlow, TreeDST, and MTOP. Additionally, the trained iterative retriever generalizes across different inference LLMs beyond the one used during training.

We propose a novel Chain Guided Retriever-reader ({\tt CGR}) framework to model the reasoning chain for multi-hop Science Question Answering. Our framework is capable of performing explainable reasoning without the need of any corpus-specific annotations, such as the ground-truth reasoning chain, or human-annotated entity mentions. Specifically, we first generate reasoning chains from a semantic graph constructed by Abstract Meaning Representation of retrieved evidence facts. A Chain-aware loss, concerning both local and global chain information, is also designed to enable the generated chains to serve as distant supervision signals for training the retriever, where reinforcement learning is also adopted to maximize the utility of the reasoning chains. Our framework allows the retriever to capture step-by-step clues of the entire reasoning process, which is not only shown to be effective on two challenging multi-hop Science QA tasks, namely OpenBookQA and ARC-Challenge, but also favors explainability.

In this paper we present VideoSET, a method for Video Summary Evaluation through Text that can evaluate how well a video summary is able to retain the semantic information contained in its original video. We observe that semantics is most easily expressed in words, and develop a text-based approach for the evaluation. Given a video summary, a text representation of the video summary is first generated, and an NLP-based metric is then used to measure its semantic distance to ground-truth text summaries written by humans. We show that our technique has higher agreement with human judgment than pixel-based distance metrics. We also release text annotations and ground-truth text summaries for a number of publicly available video datasets, for use by the computer vision community.

Recent research highlights the challenges retrieval models face in retrieving useful contexts and the limitations of generation models in effectively utilizing those contexts in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) settings. To address these challenges, we introduce RAG-RL, the first reasoning language model (RLM) specifically trained for RAG. RAG-RL demonstrates that stronger answer generation models can identify relevant contexts within larger sets of retrieved information -- thereby alleviating the burden on retrievers -- while also being able to utilize those contexts more effectively. Moreover, we show that curriculum design in the reinforcement learning (RL) post-training process is a powerful approach to enhancing model performance. We benchmark our method on two open-domain question-answering datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results, surpassing previous SOTA generative reader models. In addition, we offers empirical insights into various curriculum learning strategies, providing a deeper understanding of their impact on model performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but prone to hallucinations due to static knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps by injecting external information, but current methods often are costly, generalize poorly, or ignore the internal knowledge of the model. In this paper, we introduce R1-Searcher++, a novel framework designed to train LLMs to adaptively leverage both internal and external knowledge sources. R1-Searcher++ employs a two-stage training strategy: an initial SFT Cold-start phase for preliminary format learning, followed by RL for Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition. The RL stage uses outcome-supervision to encourage exploration, incorporates a reward mechanism for internal knowledge utilization, and integrates a memorization mechanism to continuously assimilate retrieved information, thereby enriching the model's internal knowledge. By leveraging internal knowledge and external search engine, the model continuously improves its capabilities, enabling efficient retrieval-augmented reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that R1-Searcher++ outperforms previous RAG and reasoning methods and achieves efficient retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/R1-Searcher-plus.

Despite impressive advancements in Visual-Language Models (VLMs) for multi-modal tasks, their reliance on RGB inputs limits precise spatial understanding. Existing methods for integrating spatial cues, such as point clouds or depth, either require specialized sensors or fail to effectively exploit depth information for higher-order reasoning. To this end, we propose a novel Spatial Sense and Reasoning method, dubbed SSR, a novel framework that transforms raw depth data into structured, interpretable textual rationales. These textual rationales serve as meaningful intermediate representations to significantly enhance spatial reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we leverage knowledge distillation to compress the generated rationales into compact latent embeddings, which facilitate resource-efficient and plug-and-play integration into existing VLMs without retraining. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we introduce a new dataset named SSR-CoT, a million-scale visual-language reasoning dataset enriched with intermediate spatial reasoning annotations, and present SSRBench, a comprehensive multi-task benchmark. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate SSR substantially improves depth utilization and enhances spatial reasoning, thereby advancing VLMs toward more human-like multi-modal understanding. Our project page is at https://yliu-cs.github.io/SSR.

Recent advancements demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1 have shown that complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs), including sophisticated behaviors such as self-verification and self-correction, can be achieved by RL with verifiable rewards and significantly improves model performance on challenging tasks such as AIME. Motivated by these findings, our study investigates whether similar reasoning capabilities can be successfully integrated into large vision-language models (LVLMs) and assesses their impact on challenging multimodal reasoning tasks. We consider an approach that iteratively leverages supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on lightweight training data and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to further improve model generalization. Initially, reasoning capabilities were distilled from pure-text R1 models by generating reasoning steps using high-quality captions of the images sourced from diverse visual datasets. Subsequently, iterative RL training further enhance reasoning skills, with each iteration's RL-improved model generating refined SFT datasets for the next round. This iterative process yielded OpenVLThinker, a LVLM exhibiting consistently improved reasoning performance on challenging benchmarks such as MathVista, MathVerse, and MathVision, demonstrating the potential of our strategy for robust vision-language reasoning. The code, model and data are held at https://github.com/yihedeng9/OpenVLThinker.

In recent years, short Text Matching tasks have been widely applied in the fields ofadvertising search and recommendation. The difficulty lies in the lack of semantic information and word ambiguity caused by the short length of the text. Previous works have introduced complement sentences or knowledge bases to provide additional feature information. However, these methods have not fully interacted between the original sentence and the complement sentence, and have not considered the noise issue that may arise from the introduction of external knowledge bases. Therefore, this paper proposes a short Text Matching model that combines contrastive learning and external knowledge. The model uses a generative model to generate corresponding complement sentences and uses the contrastive learning method to guide the model to obtain more semantically meaningful encoding of the original sentence. In addition, to avoid noise, we use keywords as the main semantics of the original sentence to retrieve corresponding knowledge words in the knowledge base, and construct a knowledge graph. The graph encoding model is used to integrate the knowledge base information into the model. Our designed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two publicly available Chinese Text Matching datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model.

Identifying subordinate-level categories from images is a longstanding task in computer vision and is referred to as fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR). It has tremendous significance in real-world applications since an average layperson does not excel at differentiating species of birds or mushrooms due to subtle differences among the species. A major bottleneck in developing FGVR systems is caused by the need of high-quality paired expert annotations. To circumvent the need of expert knowledge we propose Fine-grained Semantic Category Reasoning (FineR) that internally leverages the world knowledge of large language models (LLMs) as a proxy in order to reason about fine-grained category names. In detail, to bridge the modality gap between images and LLM, we extract part-level visual attributes from images as text and feed that information to a LLM. Based on the visual attributes and its internal world knowledge the LLM reasons about the subordinate-level category names. Our training-free FineR outperforms several state-of-the-art FGVR and language and vision assistant models and shows promise in working in the wild and in new domains where gathering expert annotation is arduous.

With the emergence of advanced reasoning models like OpenAI o3 and DeepSeek-R1, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities. However, their ability to perform rigorous logical reasoning remains an open question. This survey synthesizes recent advancements in logical reasoning within LLMs, a critical area of AI research. It outlines the scope of logical reasoning in LLMs, its theoretical foundations, and the benchmarks used to evaluate reasoning proficiency. We analyze existing capabilities across different reasoning paradigms - deductive, inductive, abductive, and analogical - and assess strategies to enhance reasoning performance, including data-centric tuning, reinforcement learning, decoding strategies, and neuro-symbolic approaches. The review concludes with future directions, emphasizing the need for further exploration to strengthen logical reasoning in AI systems.

We present a reality check on large language models and inspect the promise of retrieval augmented language models in comparison. Such language models are semi-parametric, where models integrate model parameters and knowledge from external data sources to make their predictions, as opposed to the parametric nature of vanilla large language models. We give initial experimental findings that semi-parametric architectures can be enhanced with views, a query analyzer/planner, and provenance to make a significantly more powerful system for question answering in terms of accuracy and efficiency, and potentially for other NLP tasks

We present a new resource for the NLP community, namely a large (3.5M+ sentence) knowledge base of *generic statements*, e.g., "Trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere", collected from multiple corpora. This is the first large resource to contain *naturally occurring* generic sentences, as opposed to extracted or crowdsourced triples, and thus is rich in high-quality, general, semantically complete statements. All GenericsKB sentences are annotated with their topical term, surrounding context (sentences), and a (learned) confidence. We also release GenericsKB-Best (1M+ sentences), containing the best-quality generics in GenericsKB augmented with selected, synthesized generics from WordNet and ConceptNet. In tests on two existing datasets requiring multihop reasoning (OBQA and QASC), we find using GenericsKB can result in higher scores and better explanations than using a much larger corpus. This demonstrates that GenericsKB can be a useful resource for NLP applications, as well as providing data for linguistic studies of generics and their semantics. GenericsKB is available at https://allenai.org/data/genericskb.

Composing knowledge from multiple pieces of texts is a key challenge in multi-hop question answering. We present a multi-hop reasoning dataset, Question Answering via Sentence Composition(QASC), that requires retrieving facts from a large corpus and composing them to answer a multiple-choice question. QASC is the first dataset to offer two desirable properties: (a) the facts to be composed are annotated in a large corpus, and (b) the decomposition into these facts is not evident from the question itself. The latter makes retrieval challenging as the system must introduce new concepts or relations in order to discover potential decompositions. Further, the reasoning model must then learn to identify valid compositions of these retrieved facts using common-sense reasoning. To help address these challenges, we provide annotation for supporting facts as well as their composition. Guided by these annotations, we present a two-step approach to mitigate the retrieval challenges. We use other multiple-choice datasets as additional training data to strengthen the reasoning model. Our proposed approach improves over current state-of-the-art language models by 11% (absolute). The reasoning and retrieval problems, however, remain unsolved as this model still lags by 20% behind human performance.

We introduce LexBench, a comprehensive evaluation suite enabled to test language models (LMs) on ten semantic phrase processing tasks. Unlike prior studies, it is the first work to propose a framework from the comparative perspective to model the general semantic phrase (i.e., lexical collocation) and three fine-grained semantic phrases, including idiomatic expression, noun compound, and verbal construction. Thanks to \ourbenchmark, we assess the performance of 15 LMs across model architectures and parameter scales in classification, extraction, and interpretation tasks. Through the experiments, we first validate the scaling law and find that, as expected, large models excel better than the smaller ones in most tasks. Second, we investigate further through the scaling semantic relation categorization and find that few-shot LMs still lag behind vanilla fine-tuned models in the task. Third, through human evaluation, we find that the performance of strong models is comparable to the human level regarding semantic phrase processing. Our benchmarking findings can serve future research aiming to improve the generic capability of LMs on semantic phrase comprehension. Our source code and data are available at https://github.com/jacklanda/LexBench

We introduce a new test of how well language models capture meaning in children's books. Unlike standard language modelling benchmarks, it distinguishes the task of predicting syntactic function words from that of predicting lower-frequency words, which carry greater semantic content. We compare a range of state-of-the-art models, each with a different way of encoding what has been previously read. We show that models which store explicit representations of long-term contexts outperform state-of-the-art neural language models at predicting semantic content words, although this advantage is not observed for syntactic function words. Interestingly, we find that the amount of text encoded in a single memory representation is highly influential to the performance: there is a sweet-spot, not too big and not too small, between single words and full sentences that allows the most meaningful information in a text to be effectively retained and recalled. Further, the attention over such window-based memories can be trained effectively through self-supervision. We then assess the generality of this principle by applying it to the CNN QA benchmark, which involves identifying named entities in paraphrased summaries of news articles, and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Detecting objects based on language information is a popular task that includes Open-Vocabulary object Detection (OVD) and Referring Expression Comprehension (REC). In this paper, we advance them to a more practical setting called Described Object Detection (DOD) by expanding category names to flexible language expressions for OVD and overcoming the limitation of REC only grounding the pre-existing object. We establish the research foundation for DOD by constructing a Description Detection Dataset (D^3). This dataset features flexible language expressions, whether short category names or long descriptions, and annotating all described objects on all images without omission. By evaluating previous SOTA methods on D^3, we find some troublemakers that fail current REC, OVD, and bi-functional methods. REC methods struggle with confidence scores, rejecting negative instances, and multi-target scenarios, while OVD methods face constraints with long and complex descriptions. Recent bi-functional methods also do not work well on DOD due to their separated training procedures and inference strategies for REC and OVD tasks. Building upon the aforementioned findings, we propose a baseline that largely improves REC methods by reconstructing the training data and introducing a binary classification sub-task, outperforming existing methods. Data and code are available at https://github.com/shikras/d-cube and related works are tracked in https://github.com/Charles-Xie/awesome-described-object-detection.

Automatically highlighting words that cause semantic differences between two documents could be useful for a wide range of applications. We formulate recognizing semantic differences (RSD) as a token-level regression task and study three unsupervised approaches that rely on a masked language model. To assess the approaches, we begin with basic English sentences and gradually move to more complex, cross-lingual document pairs. Our results show that an approach based on word alignment and sentence-level contrastive learning has a robust correlation to gold labels. However, all unsupervised approaches still leave a large margin of improvement. Code to reproduce our experiments is available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/recognizing-semantic-differences

Recent advancements in long-context language models (LCLMs) promise to transform Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by simplifying pipelines. With their expanded context windows, LCLMs can process entire knowledge bases and perform retrieval and reasoning directly -- a capability we define as In-Context Retrieval and Reasoning (ICR^2). However, existing benchmarks like LOFT often overestimate LCLM performance by providing overly simplified contexts. To address this, we introduce ICR^2, a benchmark that evaluates LCLMs in more realistic scenarios by including confounding passages retrieved with strong retrievers. We then propose three methods to enhance LCLM performance: (1) retrieve-then-generate fine-tuning, (2) retrieval-attention-probing, which uses attention heads to filter and de-noise long contexts during decoding, and (3) joint retrieval head training alongside the generation head. Our evaluation of five well-known LCLMs on LOFT and ICR^2 demonstrates significant gains with our best approach applied to Mistral-7B: +17 and +15 points by Exact Match on LOFT, and +13 and +2 points on ICR^2, compared to vanilla RAG and supervised fine-tuning, respectively. It even outperforms GPT-4-Turbo on most tasks despite being a much smaller model.

We introduce Phi-4-reasoning, a 14-billion parameter reasoning model that achieves strong performance on complex reasoning tasks. Trained via supervised fine-tuning of Phi-4 on carefully curated set of "teachable" prompts-selected for the right level of complexity and diversity-and reasoning demonstrations generated using o3-mini, Phi-4-reasoning generates detailed reasoning chains that effectively leverage inference-time compute. We further develop Phi-4-reasoning-plus, a variant enhanced through a short phase of outcome-based reinforcement learning that offers higher performance by generating longer reasoning traces. Across a wide range of reasoning tasks, both models outperform significantly larger open-weight models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B model and approach the performance levels of full DeepSeek-R1 model. Our comprehensive evaluations span benchmarks in math and scientific reasoning, coding, algorithmic problem solving, planning, and spatial understanding. Interestingly, we observe a non-trivial transfer of improvements to general-purpose benchmarks as well. In this report, we provide insights into our training data, our training methodologies, and our evaluations. We show that the benefit of careful data curation for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) extends to reasoning language models, and can be further amplified by reinforcement learning (RL). Finally, our evaluation points to opportunities for improving how we assess the performance and robustness of reasoning models.

We propose a novel dependency-based hybrid tree model for semantic parsing, which converts natural language utterance into machine interpretable meaning representations. Unlike previous state-of-the-art models, the semantic information is interpreted as the latent dependency between the natural language words in our joint representation. Such dependency information can capture the interactions between the semantics and natural language words. We integrate a neural component into our model and propose an efficient dynamic-programming algorithm to perform tractable inference. Through extensive experiments on the standard multilingual GeoQuery dataset with eight languages, we demonstrate that our proposed approach is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance across several languages. Analysis also justifies the effectiveness of using our new dependency-based representation.

This paper proposes a question-answering (QA) benchmark for spatial reasoning on natural language text which contains more realistic spatial phenomena not covered by prior work and is challenging for state-of-the-art language models (LM). We propose a distant supervision method to improve on this task. Specifically, we design grammar and reasoning rules to automatically generate a spatial description of visual scenes and corresponding QA pairs. Experiments show that further pretraining LMs on these automatically generated data significantly improves LMs' capability on spatial understanding, which in turn helps to better solve two external datasets, bAbI, and boolQ. We hope that this work can foster investigations into more sophisticated models for spatial reasoning over text.

Distributional word representation methods exploit word co-occurrences to build compact vector encodings of words. While these representations enjoy widespread use in modern natural language processing, it is unclear whether they accurately encode all necessary facets of conceptual meaning. In this paper, we evaluate how well these representations can predict perceptual and conceptual features of concrete concepts, drawing on two semantic norm datasets sourced from human participants. We find that several standard word representations fail to encode many salient perceptual features of concepts, and show that these deficits correlate with word-word similarity prediction errors. Our analyses provide motivation for grounded and embodied language learning approaches, which may help to remedy these deficits.

A common thread of retrieval-augmented methods in the existing literature focuses on retrieving encyclopedic knowledge, such as Wikipedia, which facilitates well-defined entity and relation spaces that can be modeled. However, applying such methods to commonsense reasoning tasks faces two unique challenges, i.e., the lack of a general large-scale corpus for retrieval and a corresponding effective commonsense retriever. In this paper, we systematically investigate how to leverage commonsense knowledge retrieval to improve commonsense reasoning tasks. We proposed a unified framework of retrieval-augmented commonsense reasoning (called RACo), including a newly constructed commonsense corpus with over 20 million documents and novel strategies for training a commonsense retriever. We conducted experiments on four different commonsense reasoning tasks. Extensive evaluation results showed that our proposed RACo can significantly outperform other knowledge-enhanced method counterparts, achieving new SoTA performance on the CommonGen and CREAK leaderboards.

Semantic matching is of central importance to many natural language tasks bordes2014semantic,RetrievalQA. A successful matching algorithm needs to adequately model the internal structures of language objects and the interaction between them. As a step toward this goal, we propose convolutional neural network models for matching two sentences, by adapting the convolutional strategy in vision and speech. The proposed models not only nicely represent the hierarchical structures of sentences with their layer-by-layer composition and pooling, but also capture the rich matching patterns at different levels. Our models are rather generic, requiring no prior knowledge on language, and can hence be applied to matching tasks of different nature and in different languages. The empirical study on a variety of matching tasks demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed model on a variety of matching tasks and its superiority to competitor models.

Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have shown promising performance on a variety of recognition tasks using the standard zero-shot classification procedure -- computing similarity between the query image and the embedded words for each category. By only using the category name, they neglect to make use of the rich context of additional information that language affords. The procedure gives no intermediate understanding of why a category is chosen, and furthermore provides no mechanism for adjusting the criteria used towards this decision. We present an alternative framework for classification with VLMs, which we call classification by description. We ask VLMs to check for descriptive features rather than broad categories: to find a tiger, look for its stripes; its claws; and more. By basing decisions on these descriptors, we can provide additional cues that encourage using the features we want to be used. In the process, we can get a clear idea of what features the model uses to construct its decision; it gains some level of inherent explainability. We query large language models (e.g., GPT-3) for these descriptors to obtain them in a scalable way. Extensive experiments show our framework has numerous advantages past interpretability. We show improvements in accuracy on ImageNet across distribution shifts; demonstrate the ability to adapt VLMs to recognize concepts unseen during training; and illustrate how descriptors can be edited to effectively mitigate bias compared to the baseline.

Conditional inference on joint textual and visual clues is a multi-modal reasoning task that textual clues provide prior permutation or external knowledge, which are complementary with visual content and pivotal to deducing the correct option. Previous methods utilizing pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performances, yet they show a lack of multimodal context reasoning capability, especially for text-modal information. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-modal Context Reasoning approach, named ModCR. Compared to VLMs performing reasoning via cross modal semantic alignment, it regards the given textual abstract semantic and objective image information as the pre-context information and embeds them into the language model to perform context reasoning. Different from recent vision-aided language models used in natural language processing, ModCR incorporates the multi-view semantic alignment information between language and vision by introducing the learnable alignment prefix between image and text in the pretrained language model. This makes the language model well-suitable for such multi-modal reasoning scenario on joint textual and visual clues. We conduct extensive experiments on two corresponding data sets and experimental results show significantly improved performance (exact gain by 4.8% on PMR test set) compared to previous strong baselines. Code Link: https://github.com/YunxinLi/Multimodal-Context-Reasoning.

3D visual grounding involves finding a target object in a 3D scene that corresponds to a given sentence query. Although many approaches have been proposed and achieved impressive performance, they all require dense object-sentence pair annotations in 3D point clouds, which are both time-consuming and expensive. To address the problem that fine-grained annotated data is difficult to obtain, we propose to leverage weakly supervised annotations to learn the 3D visual grounding model, i.e., only coarse scene-sentence correspondences are used to learn object-sentence links. To accomplish this, we design a novel semantic matching model that analyzes the semantic similarity between object proposals and sentences in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, we first extract object proposals and coarsely select the top-K candidates based on feature and class similarity matrices. Next, we reconstruct the masked keywords of the sentence using each candidate one by one, and the reconstructed accuracy finely reflects the semantic similarity of each candidate to the query. Additionally, we distill the coarse-to-fine semantic matching knowledge into a typical two-stage 3D visual grounding model, which reduces inference costs and improves performance by taking full advantage of the well-studied structure of the existing architectures. We conduct extensive experiments on ScanRefer, Nr3D, and Sr3D, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Premise selection is a crucial yet challenging step in mathematical formalization, especially for users with limited experience. Due to the lack of available formalization projects, existing approaches that leverage language models often suffer from data scarcity. In this work, we introduce an innovative method for training a premise retriever to support the formalization of mathematics. Our approach employs a BERT model to embed proof states and premises into a shared latent space. The retrieval model is trained within a contrastive learning framework and incorporates a domain-specific tokenizer along with a fine-grained similarity computation method. Experimental results show that our model is highly competitive compared to existing baselines, achieving strong performance while requiring fewer computational resources. Performance is further enhanced through the integration of a re-ranking module. To streamline the formalization process, we will release a search engine that enables users to query Mathlib theorems directly using proof states, significantly improving accessibility and efficiency. Codes are available at https://github.com/ruc-ai4math/Premise-Retrieval.

Recent large language model (LLM) reasoning, despite its success, suffers from limited domain knowledge, susceptibility to hallucinations, and constrained reasoning depth, particularly in small-scale models deployed in resource-constrained environments. This paper presents the first investigation into integrating step-wise knowledge graph retrieval with step-wise reasoning to address these challenges, introducing a novel paradigm termed as graph-augmented reasoning. Our goal is to enable frozen, small-scale LLMs to retrieve and process relevant mathematical knowledge in a step-wise manner, enhancing their problem-solving abilities without additional training. To this end, we propose KG-RAR, a framework centered on process-oriented knowledge graph construction, a hierarchical retrieval strategy, and a universal post-retrieval processing and reward model (PRP-RM) that refines retrieved information and evaluates each reasoning step. Experiments on the Math500 and GSM8K benchmarks across six models demonstrate that KG-RAR yields encouraging results, achieving a 20.73\% relative improvement with Llama-3B on Math500.

Our collective attention span is shortened by the flood of online information. With FarFetched, we address the need for automated claim validation based on the aggregated evidence derived from multiple online news sources. We introduce an entity-centric reasoning framework in which latent connections between events, actions, or statements are revealed via entity mentions and represented in a graph database. Using entity linking and semantic similarity, we offer a way for collecting and combining information from diverse sources in order to generate evidence relevant to the user's claim. Then, we leverage textual entailment recognition to quantitatively determine whether this assertion is credible, based on the created evidence. Our approach tries to fill the gap in automated claim validation for less-resourced languages and is showcased on the Greek language, complemented by the training of relevant semantic textual similarity (STS) and natural language inference (NLI) models that are evaluated on translated versions of common benchmarks.

Large-scale datasets for natural language inference are created by presenting crowd workers with a sentence (premise), and asking them to generate three new sentences (hypotheses) that it entails, contradicts, or is logically neutral with respect to. We show that, in a significant portion of such data, this protocol leaves clues that make it possible to identify the label by looking only at the hypothesis, without observing the premise. Specifically, we show that a simple text categorization model can correctly classify the hypothesis alone in about 67% of SNLI (Bowman et. al, 2015) and 53% of MultiNLI (Williams et. al, 2017). Our analysis reveals that specific linguistic phenomena such as negation and vagueness are highly correlated with certain inference classes. Our findings suggest that the success of natural language inference models to date has been overestimated, and that the task remains a hard open problem.

Recently, prompt-tuning has achieved promising results for specific few-shot classification tasks. The core idea of prompt-tuning is to insert text pieces (i.e., templates) into the input and transform a classification task into a masked language modeling problem. However, for relation extraction, determining an appropriate prompt template requires domain expertise, and it is cumbersome and time-consuming to obtain a suitable label word. Furthermore, there exists abundant semantic and prior knowledge among the relation labels that cannot be ignored. To this end, we focus on incorporating knowledge among relation labels into prompt-tuning for relation extraction and propose a Knowledge-aware Prompt-tuning approach with synergistic optimization (KnowPrompt). Specifically, we inject latent knowledge contained in relation labels into prompt construction with learnable virtual type words and answer words. Then, we synergistically optimize their representation with structured constraints. Extensive experimental results on five datasets with standard and low-resource settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowPrompt for reproducibility.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities, but they still struggle with faithful reasoning due to knowledge gaps and hallucinations. To address these issues, knowledge graphs (KGs) have been utilized to enhance LLM reasoning through their structured knowledge. However, existing KG-enhanced methods, either retrieval-based or agent-based, encounter difficulties in accurately retrieving knowledge and efficiently traversing KGs at scale. In this work, we introduce graph-constrained reasoning (GCR), a novel framework that bridges structured knowledge in KGs with unstructured reasoning in LLMs. To eliminate hallucinations, GCR ensures faithful KG-grounded reasoning by integrating KG structure into the LLM decoding process through KG-Trie, a trie-based index that encodes KG reasoning paths. KG-Trie constrains the decoding process, allowing LLMs to directly reason on graphs and generate faithful reasoning paths grounded in KGs. Additionally, GCR leverages a lightweight KG-specialized LLM for graph-constrained reasoning alongside a powerful general LLM for inductive reasoning over multiple reasoning paths, resulting in accurate reasoning with zero reasoning hallucination. Extensive experiments on several KGQA benchmarks demonstrate that GCR achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong zero-shot generalizability to unseen KGs without additional training.

One of the main methods for computational interpretation of a text is mapping it into a vector in some embedding space. Such vectors can then be used for a variety of textual processing tasks. Recently, most embedding spaces are a product of training large language models (LLMs). One major drawback of this type of representation is their incomprehensibility to humans. Understanding the embedding space is crucial for several important needs, including the need to debug the embedding method and compare it to alternatives, and the need to detect biases hidden in the model. In this paper, we present a novel method of understanding embeddings by transforming a latent embedding space into a comprehensible conceptual space. We present an algorithm for deriving a conceptual space with dynamic on-demand granularity. We devise a new evaluation method, using either human rater or LLM-based raters, to show that the conceptualized vectors indeed represent the semantics of the original latent ones. We show the use of our method for various tasks, including comparing the semantics of alternative models and tracing the layers of the LLM. The code is available online https://github.com/adiSimhi/Interpreting-Embedding-Spaces-by-Conceptualization.

The reasoning segmentation task, which demands a nuanced comprehension of intricate queries to accurately pinpoint object regions, is attracting increasing attention. However, Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLM) often find it difficult to accurately localize the objects described in complex reasoning contexts. We believe that the act of reasoning segmentation should mirror the cognitive stages of human visual search, where each step is a progressive refinement of thought toward the final object. Thus we introduce the Chains of Reasoning and Segmenting (CoReS) and find this top-down visual hierarchy indeed enhances the visual search process. Specifically, we propose a dual-chain structure that generates multi-modal, chain-like outputs to aid the segmentation process. Furthermore, to steer the MLLM's outputs into this intended hierarchy, we incorporate in-context inputs as guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our CoReS, which surpasses the state-of-the-art method by 6.5\% on the ReasonSeg dataset. Project: https://chain-of-reasoning-and-segmentation.github.io/.

Reasoning is a fundamental component for achieving language understanding. Among the multiple types of reasoning, conditional reasoning, the ability to draw different conclusions depending on some condition, has been understudied in large language models (LLMs). Recent prompting methods, such as chain of thought, have significantly improved LLMs on reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, there is still little understanding of what triggers reasoning abilities in LLMs. We hypothesize that code prompts can trigger conditional reasoning in LLMs trained on text and code. We propose a chain of prompts that transforms a natural language problem into code and prompts the LLM with the generated code. Our experiments find that code prompts exhibit a performance boost between 2.6 and 7.7 points on GPT 3.5 across multiple datasets requiring conditional reasoning. We then conduct experiments to discover how code prompts elicit conditional reasoning abilities and through which features. We observe that prompts need to contain natural language text accompanied by high-quality code that closely represents the semantics of the instance text. Furthermore, we show that code prompts are more efficient, requiring fewer demonstrations, and that they trigger superior state tracking of variables or key entities.

We propose InstructDET, a data-centric method for referring object detection (ROD) that localizes target objects based on user instructions. While deriving from referring expressions (REC), the instructions we leverage are greatly diversified to encompass common user intentions related to object detection. For one image, we produce tremendous instructions that refer to every single object and different combinations of multiple objects. Each instruction and its corresponding object bounding boxes (bbxs) constitute one training data pair. In order to encompass common detection expressions, we involve emerging vision-language model (VLM) and large language model (LLM) to generate instructions guided by text prompts and object bbxs, as the generalizations of foundation models are effective to produce human-like expressions (e.g., describing object property, category, and relationship). We name our constructed dataset as InDET. It contains images, bbxs and generalized instructions that are from foundation models. Our InDET is developed from existing REC datasets and object detection datasets, with the expanding potential that any image with object bbxs can be incorporated through using our InstructDET method. By using our InDET dataset, we show that a conventional ROD model surpasses existing methods on standard REC datasets and our InDET test set. Our data-centric method InstructDET, with automatic data expansion by leveraging foundation models, directs a promising field that ROD can be greatly diversified to execute common object detection instructions.

Understanding how semantic meaning is encoded in the representation spaces of large language models is a fundamental problem in interpretability. In this paper, we study the two foundational questions in this area. First, how are categorical concepts, such as {'mammal', 'bird', 'reptile', 'fish'}, represented? Second, how are hierarchical relations between concepts encoded? For example, how is the fact that 'dog' is a kind of 'mammal' encoded? We show how to extend the linear representation hypothesis to answer these questions. We find a remarkably simple structure: simple categorical concepts are represented as simplices, hierarchically related concepts are orthogonal in a sense we make precise, and (in consequence) complex concepts are represented as polytopes constructed from direct sums of simplices, reflecting the hierarchical structure. We validate these theoretical results on the Gemma large language model, estimating representations for 957 hierarchically related concepts using data from WordNet.

Words have been represented in a high-dimensional vector space that encodes their semantic similarities, enabling downstream applications such as retrieving synonyms, antonyms, and relevant contexts. However, despite recent advances in multilingual language models (LMs), the effectiveness of these models' representations in semantic retrieval contexts has not been comprehensively explored. To fill this gap, this paper introduces the MINERS, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of multilingual LMs in semantic retrieval tasks, including bitext mining and classification via retrieval-augmented contexts. We create a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of LMs in retrieving samples across over 200 diverse languages, including extremely low-resource languages in challenging cross-lingual and code-switching settings. Our results demonstrate that by solely retrieving semantically similar embeddings yields performance competitive with state-of-the-art approaches, without requiring any fine-tuning.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a critical mechanism in contemporary NLP to support Large Language Models(LLMs) in systematically accessing richer factual context. However, the integration of RAG mechanisms brings its inherent challenges, as LLMs need to deal with potentially noisy contexts. Recent studies have shown that LLMs still struggle to critically analyse RAG-based in-context information, a limitation that may lead to incorrect inferences and hallucinations. In this paper, we investigate how to elicit critical reasoning in RAG via contrastive explanations. In particular, we propose Contrastive-RAG (C-RAG), a framework that (i) retrieves relevant documents given a query, (ii) selects and exemplifies relevant passages, and (iii) generates explanations that explicitly contrast the relevance of the passages to (iv) support the final answer. We show the impact of C-RAG building contrastive reasoning demonstrations from LLMs to instruct smaller models for retrieval-augmented tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that C-RAG improves state-of-the-art RAG models while (a) requiring significantly fewer prompts and demonstrations and (b) being robust to perturbations in the retrieved documents.

Analyzing the pattern of semantic variation in long real-world texts such as books or transcripts is interesting from the stylistic, cognitive, and linguistic perspectives. It is also useful for applications such as text segmentation, document summarization, and detection of semantic novelty. The recent emergence of several vector-space methods for sentence embedding has made such analysis feasible. However, this raises the issue of how consistent and meaningful the semantic representations produced by various methods are in themselves. In this paper, we compare several recent sentence embedding methods via time-series of semantic similarity between successive sentences and matrices of pairwise sentence similarity for multiple books of literature. In contrast to previous work using target tasks and curated datasets to compare sentence embedding methods, our approach provides an evaluation of the methods 'in the wild'. We find that most of the sentence embedding methods considered do infer highly correlated patterns of semantic similarity in a given document, but show interesting differences.

Large Vision-Language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities in tasks requiring a fine-grained understanding of literal images and text, such as visual question-answering or visual entailment. However, there has been little exploration of these models' capabilities when presented with images and captions containing figurative phenomena such as metaphors or humor, the meaning of which is often implicit. To close this gap, we propose a new task and a high-quality dataset: Visual Figurative Language Understanding with Textual Explanations (V-FLUTE). We frame the visual figurative language understanding problem as an explainable visual entailment task, where the model has to predict whether the image (premise) entails a claim (hypothesis) and justify the predicted label with a textual explanation. Using a human-AI collaboration framework, we build a high-quality dataset, V-FLUTE, that contains 6,027 <image, claim, label, explanation> instances spanning five diverse multimodal figurative phenomena: metaphors, similes, idioms, sarcasm, and humor. The figurative phenomena can be present either in the image, the caption, or both. We further conduct both automatic and human evaluations to assess current VLMs' capabilities in understanding figurative phenomena.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex tasks. Recent advancements in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have further improved performance in System-2 reasoning domains like mathematics and programming by harnessing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to enhance the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, while longer CoT reasoning sequences improve performance, they also introduce significant computational overhead due to verbose and redundant outputs, known as the "overthinking phenomenon". In this paper, we provide the first structured survey to systematically investigate and explore the current progress toward achieving efficient reasoning in LLMs. Overall, relying on the inherent mechanism of LLMs, we categorize existing works into several key directions: (1) model-based efficient reasoning, which considers optimizing full-length reasoning models into more concise reasoning models or directly training efficient reasoning models; (2) reasoning output-based efficient reasoning, which aims to dynamically reduce reasoning steps and length during inference; (3) input prompts-based efficient reasoning, which seeks to enhance reasoning efficiency based on input prompt properties such as difficulty or length control. Additionally, we introduce the use of efficient data for training reasoning models, explore the reasoning capabilities of small language models, and discuss evaluation methods and benchmarking.

Math word problem (MWP) solving requires generating a reasoning path based on a given problem description that often contains irrelevant conditions. Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting methods elicited multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) to solve MWPs. However, they were seriously confused by the irrelevant conditions, resulting in low accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named I^3C that instructs LLMs to identify and ignore irrelevant conditions. It identifies a set of irrelevant condition candidates that have a weak semantic relevance with the question. Then it prompts LLMs to verify the irrelevant conditions. Lastly it instructs the LLMs with the verification on relevant and irrelevant conditions to avoid confusion and improve reasoning paths. Moreover, we propose to select (problem, reasoning paths) pairs as demonstrations to enhance I^3C with few-shot reasoning. We develop I^3C-Select that selects the most confusing problems based on the semantic relevance measurement. We conduct extensive experiments on eight MWP datasets. I^3C can be combined with any CoT prompting methods to improve the performance of solving MWPs. Notably, with GPT-3.5-Turbo and I^3C-Select, we achieve an accuracy of 96.0 and 94.1 on GSM-IC2-1K and GSM-ICM-1K, respectively, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art few-shot prompting method Complex-CoT by +11.7 and +11.1. Our implementation is made publicly available at https://wzy6642.github.io/I3C.github.io/.

Inspecting the information encoded in hidden representations of large language models (LLMs) can explain models' behavior and verify their alignment with human values. Given the capabilities of LLMs in generating human-understandable text, we propose leveraging the model itself to explain its internal representations in natural language. We introduce a framework called Patchscopes and show how it can be used to answer a wide range of research questions about an LLM's computation. We show that prior interpretability methods based on projecting representations into the vocabulary space and intervening on the LLM computation, can be viewed as special instances of this framework. Moreover, several of their shortcomings such as failure in inspecting early layers or lack of expressivity can be mitigated by a Patchscope. Beyond unifying prior inspection techniques, Patchscopes also opens up new possibilities such as using a more capable model to explain the representations of a smaller model, and unlocks new applications such as self-correction in multi-hop reasoning.

Investigating the reasoning abilities of transformer models, and discovering new challenging tasks for them, has been a topic of much interest. Recent studies have found these models to be surprisingly strong at performing deductive reasoning over formal logical theories expressed in natural language. A shortcoming of these studies, however, is that they do not take into account that logical theories, when sampled uniformly at random, do not necessarily lead to hard instances. We propose a new methodology for creating challenging algorithmic reasoning datasets that focus on natural language satisfiability (NLSat) problems. The key idea is to draw insights from empirical sampling of hard propositional SAT problems and from complexity-theoretic studies of language. This methodology allows us to distinguish easy from hard instances, and to systematically increase the complexity of existing reasoning benchmarks such as RuleTaker. We find that current transformers, given sufficient training data, are surprisingly robust at solving the resulting NLSat problems of substantially increased difficulty. They also exhibit some degree of scale-invariance - the ability to generalize to problems of larger size and scope. Our results, however, reveal important limitations too: a careful sampling of training data is crucial for building models that generalize to larger problems, and transformer models' limited scale-invariance suggests they are far from learning robust deductive reasoning algorithms.

Automatically and accurately identifying user intents and filling the associated slots from their spoken language are critical to the success of dialogue systems. Traditional methods require manually defining the DOMAIN-INTENT-SLOT schema and asking many domain experts to annotate the corresponding utterances, upon which neural models are trained. This procedure brings the challenges of information sharing hindering, out-of-schema, or data sparsity in open-domain dialogue systems. To tackle these challenges, we explore a new task of {\em automatic intent-slot induction} and propose a novel domain-independent tool. That is, we design a coarse-to-fine three-step procedure including Role-labeling, Concept-mining, And Pattern-mining (RCAP): (1) role-labeling: extracting keyphrases from users' utterances and classifying them into a quadruple of coarsely-defined intent-roles via sequence labeling; (2) concept-mining: clustering the extracted intent-role mentions and naming them into abstract fine-grained concepts; (3) pattern-mining: applying the Apriori algorithm to mine intent-role patterns and automatically inferring the intent-slot using these coarse-grained intent-role labels and fine-grained concepts. Empirical evaluations on both real-world in-domain and out-of-domain datasets show that: (1) our RCAP can generate satisfactory SLU schema and outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised learning method; (2) our RCAP can be directly applied to out-of-domain datasets and gain at least 76\% improvement of F1-score on intent detection and 41\% improvement of F1-score on slot filling; (3) our RCAP exhibits its power in generic intent-slot extractions with less manual effort, which opens pathways for schema induction on new domains and unseen intent-slot discovery for generalizable dialogue systems.

There have been many successful applications of sentence embedding methods. However, it has not been well understood what properties are captured in the resulting sentence embeddings depending on the supervision signals. In this paper, we focus on two types of sentence embedding methods with similar architectures and tasks: one fine-tunes pre-trained language models on the natural language inference task, and the other fine-tunes pre-trained language models on word prediction task from its definition sentence, and investigate their properties. Specifically, we compare their performances on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks using STS datasets partitioned from two perspectives: 1) sentence source and 2) superficial similarity of the sentence pairs, and compare their performances on the downstream and probing tasks. Furthermore, we attempt to combine the two methods and demonstrate that combining the two methods yields substantially better performance than the respective methods on unsupervised STS tasks and downstream tasks.

We introduce a new type of deep contextualized word representation that models both (1) complex characteristics of word use (e.g., syntax and semantics), and (2) how these uses vary across linguistic contexts (i.e., to model polysemy). Our word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model (biLM), which is pre-trained on a large text corpus. We show that these representations can be easily added to existing models and significantly improve the state of the art across six challenging NLP problems, including question answering, textual entailment and sentiment analysis. We also present an analysis showing that exposing the deep internals of the pre-trained network is crucial, allowing downstream models to mix different types of semi-supervision signals.

By leveraging the retrieval of information from external knowledge databases, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced capabilities for accomplishing many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, due to the inherent flaws of current retrieval systems, there might exist irrelevant information within those retrieving top-ranked passages. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation into the robustness of LLMs to different types of irrelevant information under various conditions. We initially introduce a framework to construct high-quality irrelevant information that ranges from semantically unrelated, partially related, and related to questions. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the constructed irrelevant information not only scores highly on similarity metrics, being highly retrieved by existing systems, but also bears semantic connections to the context. Our investigation reveals that current LLMs still face challenges in discriminating highly semantically related information and can be easily distracted by these irrelevant yet misleading contents. Besides, we also find that current solutions for handling irrelevant information have limitations in improving the robustness of LLMs to such distractions. Resources are available at https://github.com/Di-viner/LLM-Robustness-to-Irrelevant-Information.

Recent advancements in large language models have significantly improved their context windows, yet challenges in effective long-term memory management remain. We introduce MemTree, an algorithm that leverages a dynamic, tree-structured memory representation to optimize the organization, retrieval, and integration of information, akin to human cognitive schemas. MemTree organizes memory hierarchically, with each node encapsulating aggregated textual content, corresponding semantic embeddings, and varying abstraction levels across the tree's depths. Our algorithm dynamically adapts this memory structure by computing and comparing semantic embeddings of new and existing information to enrich the model's context-awareness. This approach allows MemTree to handle complex reasoning and extended interactions more effectively than traditional memory augmentation methods, which often rely on flat lookup tables. Evaluations on benchmarks for multi-turn dialogue understanding and document question answering show that MemTree significantly enhances performance in scenarios that demand structured memory management.

Logical reasoning is central to complex human activities, such as thinking, debating, and planning; it is also a central component of many AI systems as well. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which encoder-only transformer language models (LMs) can reason according to logical rules. We ask whether those LMs can deduce theorems in propositional calculus and first-order logic; if their relative success in these problems reflects general logical capabilities; and which layers contribute the most to the task. First, we show for several encoder-only LMs that they can be trained, to a reasonable degree, to determine logical validity on various datasets. Next, by cross-probing fine-tuned models on these datasets, we show that LMs have difficulty in transferring their putative logical reasoning ability, which suggests that they may have learned dataset-specific features, instead of a general capability. Finally, we conduct a layerwise probing experiment, which shows that the hypothesis classification task is mostly solved through higher layers.

Existing reasoning evaluation frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) predominantly either assess text-based reasoning or vision-language understanding capabilities, with limited dynamic interplay between textual and visual constraints. To address this limitation, we introduce CrossWordBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of both LLMs and LVLMs through the medium of crossword puzzles-a task requiring multimodal adherence to semantic constraints from text-based clues and intersectional constraints from visual grid structures. CrossWordBench leverages a controllable puzzle generation framework that produces puzzles in multiple formats (text and image) and offers different evaluation strategies ranging from direct puzzle solving to interactive modes. Our extensive evaluation of over 20 models reveals that reasoning LLMs outperform non-reasoning models substantially by effectively leveraging crossing-letter constraints. We further demonstrate that LVLMs struggle with the task, showing a strong correlation between their puzzle-solving performance and grid-parsing accuracy. Our findings offer insights into the limitations of the reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and LVLMs, and provide an effective approach for creating multimodal constrained tasks for future evaluations.

We consider learning representations of entities and relations in KBs using the neural-embedding approach. We show that most existing models, including NTN (Socher et al., 2013) and TransE (Bordes et al., 2013b), can be generalized under a unified learning framework, where entities are low-dimensional vectors learned from a neural network and relations are bilinear and/or linear mapping functions. Under this framework, we compare a variety of embedding models on the link prediction task. We show that a simple bilinear formulation achieves new state-of-the-art results for the task (achieving a top-10 accuracy of 73.2% vs. 54.7% by TransE on Freebase). Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes the learned relation embeddings to mine logical rules such as "BornInCity(a,b) and CityInCountry(b,c) => Nationality(a,c)". We find that embeddings learned from the bilinear objective are particularly good at capturing relational semantics and that the composition of relations is characterized by matrix multiplication. More interestingly, we demonstrate that our embedding-based rule extraction approach successfully outperforms a state-of-the-art confidence-based rule mining approach in mining Horn rules that involve compositional reasoning.

We present a Chain-of-Action (CoA) framework for multimodal and retrieval-augmented Question-Answering (QA). Compared to the literature, CoA overcomes two major challenges of current QA applications: (i) unfaithful hallucination that is inconsistent with real-time or domain facts and (ii) weak reasoning performance over compositional information. Our key contribution is a novel reasoning-retrieval mechanism that decomposes a complex question into a reasoning chain via systematic prompting and pre-designed actions. Methodologically, we propose three types of domain-adaptable `Plug-and-Play' actions for retrieving real-time information from heterogeneous sources. We also propose a multi-reference faith score (MRFS) to verify and resolve conflicts in the answers. Empirically, we exploit both public benchmarks and a Web3 case study to demonstrate the capability of CoA over other methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in reasoning, exemplified by the success of OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1. However, integrating reasoning with external search processes remains challenging, especially for complex multi-hop questions requiring multiple retrieval steps. We propose ReSearch, a novel framework that trains LLMs to Reason with Search via reinforcement learning without using any supervised data on reasoning steps. Our approach treats search operations as integral components of the reasoning chain, where when and how to perform searches is guided by text-based thinking, and search results subsequently influence further reasoning. We train ReSearch on Qwen2.5-7B(-Instruct) and Qwen2.5-32B(-Instruct) models and conduct extensive experiments. Despite being trained on only one dataset, our models demonstrate strong generalizability across various benchmarks. Analysis reveals that ReSearch naturally elicits advanced reasoning capabilities such as reflection and self-correction during the reinforcement learning process.

Network interpretation as an effort to reveal the features learned by a network remains largely visualization-based. In this paper, our goal is to tackle semantic network interpretation at both filter and decision level. For filter-level interpretation, we represent the concepts a filter encodes with a probability distribution of visual attributes. The decision-level interpretation is achieved by textual summarization that generates an explanatory sentence containing clues behind a network's decision. A Bayesian inference algorithm is proposed to automatically associate filters and network decisions with visual attributes. Human study confirms that the semantic interpretation is a beneficial alternative or complement to visualization methods. We demonstrate the crucial role that semantic network interpretation can play in understanding a network's failure patterns. More importantly, semantic network interpretation enables a better understanding of the correlation between a model's performance and its distribution metrics like filter selectivity and concept sparseness.

Knowledge graph-based retrieval-augmented generation seeks to mitigate hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) caused by insufficient or outdated knowledge. However, existing methods often fail to fully exploit the prior knowledge embedded in knowledge graphs (KGs), particularly their structural information and explicit or implicit constraints. The former can enhance the faithfulness of LLMs' reasoning, while the latter can improve the reliability of response generation. Motivated by these, we propose a trustworthy reasoning framework, termed Deliberation over Priors (DP), which sufficiently utilizes the priors contained in KGs. Specifically, DP adopts a progressive knowledge distillation strategy that integrates structural priors into LLMs through a combination of supervised fine-tuning and Kahneman-Tversky optimization, thereby improving the faithfulness of relation path generation. Furthermore, our framework employs a reasoning-introspection strategy, which guides LLMs to perform refined reasoning verification based on extracted constraint priors, ensuring the reliability of response generation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that DP achieves new state-of-the-art performance, especially a Hit@1 improvement of 13% on the ComplexWebQuestions dataset, and generates highly trustworthy responses. We also conduct various analyses to verify its flexibility and practicality. The code is available at https://github.com/reml-group/Deliberation-on-Priors.

We present a Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset (FewRel), consisting of 70, 000 sentences on 100 relations derived from Wikipedia and annotated by crowdworkers. The relation of each sentence is first recognized by distant supervision methods, and then filtered by crowdworkers. We adapt the most recent state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods for relation classification and conduct a thorough evaluation of these methods. Empirical results show that even the most competitive few-shot learning models struggle on this task, especially as compared with humans. We also show that a range of different reasoning skills are needed to solve our task. These results indicate that few-shot relation classification remains an open problem and still requires further research. Our detailed analysis points multiple directions for future research. All details and resources about the dataset and baselines are released on http://zhuhao.me/fewrel.

Language-Image Pre-training has demonstrated promising results on zero-shot and few-shot downstream tasks by prompting visual models with natural language prompts. However, most recent studies only use a single prompt for tuning, neglecting the inherent step-to-step cognitive reasoning process that humans conduct in complex task settings, for example, when processing images from unfamiliar domains. Chain of Thought is a simple and effective approximation to human reasoning process and has been proven useful for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Based on this cognitive intuition, we believe that conducting effective reasoning is also an important problem in visual tasks, and a chain of thought could be a solution to this problem. In this work, we propose a novel chain of thought prompt tuning for vision-language modeling. Extensive experiments show that our method not only generalizes better in image classification tasks, has greater transferability beyond a single dataset, and has stronger domain generalization performance, but also performs much better in imagetext retrieval and visual question answering, which require more reasoning capabilities. We are the first to successfully adapt chain-of-thought prompting that combines visual and textual embeddings. We will release our codes

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as GPT-4V have recently demonstrated incredible strides on diverse vision language tasks. We dig into vision-based deductive reasoning, a more sophisticated but less explored realm, and find previously unexposed blindspots in the current SOTA VLMs. Specifically, we leverage Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPMs), to assess VLMs' abilities to perform multi-hop relational and deductive reasoning relying solely on visual clues. We perform comprehensive evaluations of several popular VLMs employing standard strategies such as in-context learning, self-consistency, and Chain-of-thoughts (CoT) on three diverse datasets, including the Mensa IQ test, IntelligenceTest, and RAVEN. The results reveal that despite the impressive capabilities of LLMs in text-based reasoning, we are still far from achieving comparable proficiency in visual deductive reasoning. We found that certain standard strategies that are effective when applied to LLMs do not seamlessly translate to the challenges presented by visual reasoning tasks. Moreover, a detailed analysis reveals that VLMs struggle to solve these tasks mainly because they are unable to perceive and comprehend multiple, confounding abstract patterns in RPM examples.

The Flickr30k dataset has become a standard benchmark for sentence-based image description. This paper presents Flickr30k Entities, which augments the 158k captions from Flickr30k with 244k coreference chains, linking mentions of the same entities across different captions for the same image, and associating them with 276k manually annotated bounding boxes. Such annotations are essential for continued progress in automatic image description and grounded language understanding. They enable us to define a new benchmark for localization of textual entity mentions in an image. We present a strong baseline for this task that combines an image-text embedding, detectors for common objects, a color classifier, and a bias towards selecting larger objects. While our baseline rivals in accuracy more complex state-of-the-art models, we show that its gains cannot be easily parlayed into improvements on such tasks as image-sentence retrieval, thus underlining the limitations of current methods and the need for further research.

The recent tremendous success of unsupervised word embeddings in a multitude of applications raises the obvious question if similar methods could be derived to improve embeddings (i.e. semantic representations) of word sequences as well. We present a simple but efficient unsupervised objective to train distributed representations of sentences. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised models on most benchmark tasks, highlighting the robustness of the produced general-purpose sentence embeddings.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are highly proficient in language-based tasks. Their language capabilities have positioned them at the forefront of the future AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) race. However, on closer inspection, Valmeekam et al. (2024); Zecevic et al. (2023); Wu et al. (2024) highlight a significant gap between their language proficiency and reasoning abilities. Reasoning in LLMs and Vision Language Models (VLMs) aims to bridge this gap by enabling these models to think and re-evaluate their actions and responses. Reasoning is an essential capability for complex problem-solving and a necessary step toward establishing trust in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This will make AI suitable for deployment in sensitive domains, such as healthcare, banking, law, defense, security etc. In recent times, with the advent of powerful reasoning models like OpenAI O1 and DeepSeek R1, reasoning endowment has become a critical research topic in LLMs. In this paper, we provide a detailed overview and comparison of existing reasoning techniques and present a systematic survey of reasoning-imbued language models. We also study current challenges and present our findings.

Visual generation models have made remarkable progress in creating realistic images from text prompts, yet struggle with complex prompts that specify multiple objects with precise spatial relationships and attributes. Effective handling of such prompts requires explicit reasoning about the semantic content and spatial layout. We present GoT-R1, a framework that applies reinforcement learning to enhance semantic-spatial reasoning in visual generation. Building upon the Generation Chain-of-Thought approach, GoT-R1 enables models to autonomously discover effective reasoning strategies beyond predefined templates through carefully designed reinforcement learning. To achieve this, we propose a dual-stage multi-dimensional reward framework that leverages MLLMs to evaluate both the reasoning process and final output, enabling effective supervision across the entire generation pipeline. The reward system assesses semantic alignment, spatial accuracy, and visual quality in a unified approach. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements on T2I-CompBench benchmark, particularly in compositional tasks involving precise spatial relationships and attribute binding. GoT-R1 advances the state-of-the-art in image generation by successfully transferring sophisticated reasoning capabilities to the visual generation domain. To facilitate future research, we make our code and pretrained models publicly available at https://github.com/gogoduan/GoT-R1.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have shown promise in extracting interpretable features from complex neural networks. We present one of the first applications of SAEs to dense text embeddings from large language models, demonstrating their effectiveness in disentangling semantic concepts. By training SAEs on embeddings of over 420,000 scientific paper abstracts from computer science and astronomy, we show that the resulting sparse representations maintain semantic fidelity while offering interpretability. We analyse these learned features, exploring their behaviour across different model capacities and introducing a novel method for identifying ``feature families'' that represent related concepts at varying levels of abstraction. To demonstrate the practical utility of our approach, we show how these interpretable features can be used to precisely steer semantic search, allowing for fine-grained control over query semantics. This work bridges the gap between the semantic richness of dense embeddings and the interpretability of sparse representations. We open source our embeddings, trained sparse autoencoders, and interpreted features, as well as a web app for exploring them.

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) has created an urgent need for robust tools to detect LLM-generated text, especially in light of paraphrasing techniques that often evade existing detection methods. To address this challenge, we present a novel semantic-enhanced framework for detecting LLM-generated text (SEFD) that leverages a retrieval-based mechanism to fully utilize text semantics. Our framework improves upon existing detection methods by systematically integrating retrieval-based techniques with traditional detectors, employing a carefully curated retrieval mechanism that strikes a balance between comprehensive coverage and computational efficiency. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach in sequential text scenarios common in real-world applications, such as online forums and Q\&A platforms. Through comprehensive experiments across various LLM-generated texts and detection methods, we demonstrate that our framework substantially enhances detection accuracy in paraphrasing scenarios while maintaining robustness for standard LLM-generated content.

In this paper we introduce the olog, or ontology log, a category-theoretic model for knowledge representation (KR). Grounded in formal mathematics, ologs can be rigorously formulated and cross-compared in ways that other KR models (such as semantic networks) cannot. An olog is similar to a relational database schema; in fact an olog can serve as a data repository if desired. Unlike database schemas, which are generally difficult to create or modify, ologs are designed to be user-friendly enough that authoring or reconfiguring an olog is a matter of course rather than a difficult chore. It is hoped that learning to author ologs is much simpler than learning a database definition language, despite their similarity. We describe ologs carefully and illustrate with many examples. As an application we show that any primitive recursive function can be described by an olog. We also show that ologs can be aligned or connected together into a larger network using functors. The various methods of information flow and institutions can then be used to integrate local and global world-views. We finish by providing several different avenues for future research.

The key challenge in semantic search is to create models that are both accurate and efficient in pinpointing relevant sentences for queries. While BERT-style bi-encoders excel in efficiency with pre-computed embeddings, they often miss subtle nuances in search tasks. Conversely, GPT-style LLMs with cross-encoder designs capture these nuances but are computationally intensive, hindering real-time applications. In this paper, we present D2LLMs-Decomposed and Distilled LLMs for semantic search-that combines the best of both worlds. We decompose a cross-encoder into an efficient bi-encoder integrated with Pooling by Multihead Attention and an Interaction Emulation Module, achieving nuanced understanding and pre-computability. Knowledge from the LLM is distilled into this model using contrastive, rank, and feature imitation techniques. Our experiments show that D2LLM surpasses five leading baselines in terms of all metrics across three tasks, particularly improving NLI task performance by at least 6.45%. The source code is available at https://github.com/codefuse-ai/D2LLM.

Semantic search for candidate retrieval is an important yet neglected problem in retrieval-based Chatbots, which aims to select a bunch of candidate responses efficiently from a large pool. The existing bottleneck is to ensure the model architecture having two points: 1) rich interactions between a query and a response to produce query-relevant responses; 2) ability of separately projecting the query and the response into latent spaces to apply efficiently in semantic search during online inference. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel approach, called Multitask-based Semantic Search Neural Network (MSSNN) for candidate retrieval, which accomplishes query-response interactions through multi-tasks. The method employs a Seq2Seq modeling task to learn a good query encoder, and then performs a word prediction task to build response embeddings, finally conducts a simple matching model to form the dot-product scorer. Experimental studies have demonstrated the potential of the proposed approach.

Knowledge base population seeks to expand knowledge graphs with facts that are typically extracted from a text corpus. Recently, language models pretrained on large corpora have been shown to contain factual knowledge that can be retrieved using cloze-style strategies. Such approach enables zero-shot recall of facts, showing competitive results in object prediction compared to supervised baselines. However, prompt-based fact retrieval can be brittle and heavily depend on the prompts and context used, which may produce results that are unintended or hallucinatory.We propose to use textual entailment to validate facts extracted from language models through cloze statements. Our results show that triple validation based on textual entailment improves language model predictions in different training regimes. Furthermore, we show that entailment-based triple validation is also effective to validate candidate facts extracted from other sources including existing knowledge graphs and text passages where named entities are recognized.

In an effort to create a more efficient AI system, we introduce a new multi-modality learning framework that leverages a modality-agnostic concept space possessing abstract knowledge and a set of modality-specific projection models tailored to process distinct modality inputs and map them onto the concept space. Decoupled from specific modalities and their associated projection models, the concept space focuses on learning abstract knowledge that is universally applicable across modalities. Subsequently, the knowledge embedded into the concept space streamlines the learning processes of modality-specific projection models. We evaluate our framework on two popular tasks: Image-Text Matching and Visual Question Answering. Our framework achieves performance on par with benchmark models while demonstrating more efficient learning curves.

The growing power of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized how people access and utilize information. Notably, the LLMs excel at performing fine-grained data representation, which facilitates precise retrieval of information. They also generate high-quality answers based on external references, enabling the production of useful knowledge. The recent introduction of reasoning models, like OpenAI O1 and DeepSeek R1, marks another leap forward, highlighting LLMs' ability to think progressively before delivering final answers. This breakthrough significantly improves the ability to address complex tasks, e.g., coding and math proofs. Inspired by this progress, we aim to develop similar capabilities for retrieval models, which hold great promise for tackling critical challenges in the field, including multi-task retrieval, zero-shot retrieval, and tasks requiring intensive reasoning of complex relationships. With this motivation, we propose a novel approach called O1 Embedder, which generates useful thoughts for the input query before making retrieval for the target documents. To realize this objective, we conquer two technical difficulties. First, we design a data synthesis workflow, creating training signals for O1 Embedder by generating initial thoughts from an LLM-expert and subsequently refining them using a retrieval committee. Second, we optimize the training process, enabling a pre-trained model to be jointly fine-tuned to generate retrieval thoughts via behavior cloning and perform dense retrieval through contrastive learning. Our approach is evaluated by comprehensive experiments, where substantial improvements are achieved across 12 popular datasets, spanning both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. These results highlight O1 Embedder's remarkable accuracy and generalizability, paving the way for the development of next-generation IR foundation models.

This survey paper proposes a clearer view of natural language reasoning in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, we provide a distinct definition for natural language reasoning in NLP, based on both philosophy and NLP scenarios, discuss what types of tasks require reasoning, and introduce a taxonomy of reasoning. Practically, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on natural language reasoning in NLP, mainly covering classical logical reasoning, natural language inference, multi-hop question answering, and commonsense reasoning. The paper also identifies and views backward reasoning, a powerful paradigm for multi-step reasoning, and introduces defeasible reasoning as one of the most important future directions in natural language reasoning research. We focus on single-modality unstructured natural language text, excluding neuro-symbolic techniques and mathematical reasoning.

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) models are used to learn continuous representations of entities and relations. A key task in the literature is predicting missing links between entities. However, Knowledge Graphs are not just sets of links but also have semantics underlying their structure. Semantics is crucial in several downstream tasks, such as query answering or reasoning. We introduce the subgraph inference task, where a model has to generate likely and semantically valid subgraphs. We propose IntelliGraphs, a set of five new Knowledge Graph datasets. The IntelliGraphs datasets contain subgraphs with semantics expressed in logical rules for evaluating subgraph inference. We also present the dataset generator that produced the synthetic datasets. We designed four novel baseline models, which include three models based on traditional KGEs. We evaluate their expressiveness and show that these models cannot capture the semantics. We believe this benchmark will encourage the development of machine learning models that emphasize semantic understanding.

With the explosive growth of web videos and emerging large-scale vision-language pre-training models, e.g., CLIP, retrieving videos of interest with text instructions has attracted increasing attention. A common practice is to transfer text-video pairs to the same embedding space and craft cross-modal interactions with certain entities in specific granularities for semantic correspondence. Unfortunately, the intrinsic uncertainties of optimal entity combinations in appropriate granularities for cross-modal queries are understudied, which is especially critical for modalities with hierarchical semantics, e.g., video, text, etc. In this paper, we propose an Uncertainty-Adaptive Text-Video Retrieval approach, termed UATVR, which models each look-up as a distribution matching procedure. Concretely, we add additional learnable tokens in the encoders to adaptively aggregate multi-grained semantics for flexible high-level reasoning. In the refined embedding space, we represent text-video pairs as probabilistic distributions where prototypes are sampled for matching evaluation. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmarks justify the superiority of our UATVR, which achieves new state-of-the-art results on MSR-VTT (50.8%), VATEX (64.5%), MSVD (49.7%), and DiDeMo (45.8%). The code is available at https://github.com/bofang98/UATVR.

Inference, especially those derived from inductive processes, is a crucial component in our conversation to complement the information implicitly or explicitly conveyed by a speaker. While recent large language models show remarkable advances in inference tasks, their performance in inductive reasoning, where not all information is present in the context, is far behind deductive reasoning. In this paper, we analyze the behavior of the models based on the task difficulty defined by the semantic information gap -- which distinguishes inductive and deductive reasoning (Johnson-Laird, 1988, 1993). Our analysis reveals that the disparity in information between dialogue contexts and desired inferences poses a significant challenge to the inductive inference process. To mitigate this information gap, we investigate a contrastive learning approach by feeding negative samples. Our experiments suggest negative samples help models understand what is wrong and improve their inference generations.

Understanding information from visually rich documents remains a significant challenge for traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods. Existing benchmarks predominantly focus on image-based question answering (QA), overlooking the fundamental challenges of efficient retrieval, comprehension, and reasoning within dense visual documents. To bridge this gap, we introduce ViDoSeek, a novel dataset designed to evaluate RAG performance on visually rich documents requiring complex reasoning. Based on it, we identify key limitations in current RAG approaches: (i) purely visual retrieval methods struggle to effectively integrate both textual and visual features, and (ii) previous approaches often allocate insufficient reasoning tokens, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose ViDoRAG, a novel multi-agent RAG framework tailored for complex reasoning across visual documents. ViDoRAG employs a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based hybrid strategy to effectively handle multi-modal retrieval. To further elicit the model's reasoning capabilities, we introduce an iterative agent workflow incorporating exploration, summarization, and reflection, providing a framework for investigating test-time scaling in RAG domains. Extensive experiments on ViDoSeek validate the effectiveness and generalization of our approach. Notably, ViDoRAG outperforms existing methods by over 10% on the competitive ViDoSeek benchmark.

Current Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems can answer intelligent questions about `Known' visual content. However, their performance drops significantly when questions about visually and linguistically `Unknown' concepts are presented during inference (`Open-world' scenario). A practical VQA system should be able to deal with novel concepts in real world settings. To address this problem, we propose an exemplar-based approach that transfers learning (i.e., knowledge) from previously `Known' concepts to answer questions about the `Unknown'. We learn a highly discriminative joint embedding space, where visual and semantic features are fused to give a unified representation. Once novel concepts are presented to the model, it looks for the closest match from an exemplar set in the joint embedding space. This auxiliary information is used alongside the given Image-Question pair to refine visual attention in a hierarchical fashion. Since handling the high dimensional exemplars on large datasets can be a significant challenge, we introduce an efficient matching scheme that uses a compact feature description for search and retrieval. To evaluate our model, we propose a new split for VQA, separating Unknown visual and semantic concepts from the training set. Our approach shows significant improvements over state-of-the-art VQA models on the proposed Open-World VQA dataset and standard VQA datasets.

News Image Captioning aims to create captions from news articles and images, emphasizing the connection between textual context and visual elements. Recognizing the significance of human faces in news images and the face-name co-occurrence pattern in existing datasets, we propose a face-naming module for learning better name embeddings. Apart from names, which can be directly linked to an image area (faces), news image captions mostly contain context information that can only be found in the article. We design a retrieval strategy using CLIP to retrieve sentences that are semantically close to the image, mimicking human thought process of linking articles to images. Furthermore, to tackle the problem of the imbalanced proportion of article context and image context in captions, we introduce a simple yet effective method Contrasting with Language Model backbone (CoLaM) to the training pipeline. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of our framework. We out-perform the previous state-of-the-art (without external data) by 7.97/5.80 CIDEr scores on GoodNews/NYTimes800k. Our code is available at https://github.com/tingyu215/VACNIC.