new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Jan 8

From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review

Large language models and autonomous AI agents have evolved rapidly, resulting in a diverse array of evaluation benchmarks, frameworks, and collaboration protocols. However, the landscape remains fragmented and lacks a unified taxonomy or comprehensive survey. Therefore, we present a side-by-side comparison of benchmarks developed between 2019 and 2025 that evaluate these models and agents across multiple domains. In addition, we propose a taxonomy of approximately 60 benchmarks that cover general and academic knowledge reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, code generation and software engineering, factual grounding and retrieval, domain-specific evaluations, multimodal and embodied tasks, task orchestration, and interactive assessments. Furthermore, we review AI-agent frameworks introduced between 2023 and 2025 that integrate large language models with modular toolkits to enable autonomous decision-making and multi-step reasoning. Moreover, we present real-world applications of autonomous AI agents in materials science, biomedical research, academic ideation, software engineering, synthetic data generation, chemical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving, geographic information systems, multimedia, healthcare, and finance. We then survey key agent-to-agent collaboration protocols, namely the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP), the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A). Finally, we discuss recommendations for future research, focusing on advanced reasoning strategies, failure modes in multi-agent LLM systems, automated scientific discovery, dynamic tool integration via reinforcement learning, integrated search capabilities, and security vulnerabilities in agent protocols.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 28, 2025

ScholarSearch: Benchmarking Scholar Searching Ability of LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs)' search capabilities have garnered significant attention. Existing benchmarks, such as OpenAI's BrowseComp, primarily focus on general search scenarios and fail to adequately address the specific demands of academic search. These demands include deeper literature tracing and organization, professional support for academic databases, the ability to navigate long-tail academic knowledge, and ensuring academic rigor. Here, we proposed ScholarSearch, the first dataset specifically designed to evaluate the complex information retrieval capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in academic research. ScholarSearch possesses the following key characteristics: Academic Practicality, where question content closely mirrors real academic learning and research environments, avoiding deliberately misleading models; High Difficulty, with answers that are challenging for single models (e.g., Grok DeepSearch or Gemini Deep Research) to provide directly, often requiring at least three deep searches to derive; Concise Evaluation, where limiting conditions ensure answers are as unique as possible, accompanied by clear sources and brief solution explanations, greatly facilitating subsequent audit and verification, surpassing the current lack of analyzed search datasets both domestically and internationally; and Broad Coverage, as the dataset spans at least 15 different academic disciplines. Through ScholarSearch, we expect to more precisely measure and promote the performance improvement of LLMs in complex academic information retrieval tasks. The data is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/PKU-DS-LAB/ScholarSearch

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 10, 2025

AceMap: Knowledge Discovery through Academic Graph

The exponential growth of scientific literature requires effective management and extraction of valuable insights. While existing scientific search engines excel at delivering search results based on relational databases, they often neglect the analysis of collaborations between scientific entities and the evolution of ideas, as well as the in-depth analysis of content within scientific publications. The representation of heterogeneous graphs and the effective measurement, analysis, and mining of such graphs pose significant challenges. To address these challenges, we present AceMap, an academic system designed for knowledge discovery through academic graph. We present advanced database construction techniques to build the comprehensive AceMap database with large-scale academic entities that contain rich visual, textual, and numerical information. AceMap also employs innovative visualization, quantification, and analysis methods to explore associations and logical relationships among academic entities. AceMap introduces large-scale academic network visualization techniques centered on nebular graphs, providing a comprehensive view of academic networks from multiple perspectives. In addition, AceMap proposes a unified metric based on structural entropy to quantitatively measure the knowledge content of different academic entities. Moreover, AceMap provides advanced analysis capabilities, including tracing the evolution of academic ideas through citation relationships and concept co-occurrence, and generating concise summaries informed by this evolutionary process. In addition, AceMap uses machine reading methods to generate potential new ideas at the intersection of different fields. Exploring the integration of large language models and knowledge graphs is a promising direction for future research in idea evolution. Please visit https://www.acemap.info for further exploration.

  • 26 authors
·
Mar 4, 2024

Low-Resource Multi-Granularity Academic Function Recognition Based on Multiple Prompt Knowledge

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs), e.g., SciBERT, generally requires large numbers of annotated data to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a range of NLP tasks in the scientific domain. However, obtaining the fine-tune data for scientific NLP task is still challenging and expensive. Inspired by recent advancement in prompt learning, in this paper, we propose the Mix Prompt Tuning (MPT), which is a semi-supervised method to alleviate the dependence on annotated data and improve the performance of multi-granularity academic function recognition tasks with a small number of labeled examples. Specifically, the proposed method provides multi-perspective representations by combining manual prompt templates with automatically learned continuous prompt templates to help the given academic function recognition task take full advantage of knowledge in PLMs. Based on these prompt templates and the fine-tuned PLM, a large number of pseudo labels are assigned to the unlabeled examples. Finally, we fine-tune the PLM using the pseudo training set. We evaluate our method on three academic function recognition tasks of different granularity including the citation function, the abstract sentence function, and the keyword function, with datasets from computer science domain and biomedical domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and statistically significant improvements against strong baselines. In particular, it achieves an average increase of 5% in Macro-F1 score compared with fine-tuning, and 6% in Macro-F1 score compared with other semi-supervised method under low-resource settings. In addition, MPT is a general method that can be easily applied to other low-resource scientific classification tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
May 5, 2023

Context-Aware Academic Emotion Dataset and Benchmark

Academic emotion analysis plays a crucial role in evaluating students' engagement and cognitive states during the learning process. This paper addresses the challenge of automatically recognizing academic emotions through facial expressions in real-world learning environments. While significant progress has been made in facial expression recognition for basic emotions, academic emotion recognition remains underexplored, largely due to the scarcity of publicly available datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce RAER, a novel dataset comprising approximately 2,700 video clips collected from around 140 students in diverse, natural learning contexts such as classrooms, libraries, laboratories, and dormitories, covering both classroom sessions and individual study. Each clip was annotated independently by approximately ten annotators using two distinct sets of academic emotion labels with varying granularity, enhancing annotation consistency and reliability. To our knowledge, RAER is the first dataset capturing diverse natural learning scenarios. Observing that annotators naturally consider context cues-such as whether a student is looking at a phone or reading a book-alongside facial expressions, we propose CLIP-CAER (CLIP-based Context-aware Academic Emotion Recognition). Our method utilizes learnable text prompts within the vision-language model CLIP to effectively integrate facial expression and context cues from videos. Experimental results demonstrate that CLIP-CAER substantially outperforms state-of-the-art video-based facial expression recognition methods, which are primarily designed for basic emotions, emphasizing the crucial role of context in accurately recognizing academic emotions. Project page: https://zgsfer.github.io/CAER

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025 1

Clinical Camel: An Open-Source Expert-Level Medical Language Model with Dialogue-Based Knowledge Encoding

Large Language Models (LLMs) present immense potential in the medical field, yet concerns over data privacy, regulatory compliance, and model stability restrict their widespread adoption. Although the distillation of high-performing closed-source LLMs has proven effective for general tasks, their application in healthcare is limited due to reduced domain knowledge and remnants of alignment behavior hindering clinical tasks. To address these challenges, we propose Dialogue-Based Knowledge Encoding (DBKE). DBKE enhances models' implicit knowledge base and primes them for conversational recall, augmenting their conversational capabilities and enabling a soft alignment for subsequent use cases. By transforming dense academic source text into synthetic dialogue, DBKE broadens the model's knowledge base and enables a soft alignment that guides downstream behaviours. We present Clinical Camel, an open-source, healthcare-focused conversational model, to showcase the effectiveness of DBKE. Clinical Camel outperforms GPT-3.5 on the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1 and Step 3 with scores of 53.2 % and 58.2 %, respectively, compared to GPT-3.5's scores of 36.1 % and 55.7 %. Clinical Camel adeptly handles multi-stage clinical case problems, provides adaptive counseling, and generates clinical notes. However, it is prone to hallucinations, which pose a significant obstacle in safety-critical settings. The performance of Clinical Camel underscores the importance of continued research and development of open-source models for the safe and effective integration of LLMs in healthcare settings.

  • 6 authors
·
May 19, 2023 1

Leveraging Large Language Models for Semantic Query Processing in a Scholarly Knowledge Graph

The proposed research aims to develop an innovative semantic query processing system that enables users to obtain comprehensive information about research works produced by Computer Science (CS) researchers at the Australian National University (ANU). The system integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ANU Scholarly Knowledge Graph (ASKG), a structured repository of all research-related artifacts produced at ANU in the CS field. Each artifact and its parts are represented as textual nodes stored in a Knowledge Graph (KG). To address the limitations of traditional scholarly KG construction and utilization methods, which often fail to capture fine-grained details, we propose a novel framework that integrates the Deep Document Model (DDM) for comprehensive document representation and the KG-enhanced Query Processing (KGQP) for optimized complex query handling. DDM enables a fine-grained representation of the hierarchical structure and semantic relationships within academic papers, while KGQP leverages the KG structure to improve query accuracy and efficiency with LLMs. By combining the ASKG with LLMs, our approach enhances knowledge utilization and natural language understanding capabilities. The proposed system employs an automatic LLM-SPARQL fusion to retrieve relevant facts and textual nodes from the ASKG. Initial experiments demonstrate that our framework is superior to baseline methods in terms of accuracy retrieval and query efficiency. We showcase the practical application of our framework in academic research scenarios, highlighting its potential to revolutionize scholarly knowledge management and discovery. This work empowers researchers to acquire and utilize knowledge from documents more effectively and provides a foundation for developing precise and reliable interactions with LLMs.

  • 4 authors
·
May 24, 2024

FM2DS: Few-Shot Multimodal Multihop Data Synthesis with Knowledge Distillation for Question Answering

Multimodal multihop question answering is a complex task that requires reasoning over multiple sources of information, such as images and text, to answer questions. While there has been significant progress in visual question answering, the multihop setting remains unexplored due to the lack of high-quality datasets. Current methods focus on single-hop question answering or a single modality, which makes them unsuitable for real-world scenarios such as analyzing multimodal educational materials, summarizing lengthy academic articles, or interpreting scientific studies that combine charts, images, and text. To address this gap, we propose a novel methodology, introducing the first framework for creating a high-quality dataset that enables training models for multimodal multihop question answering. Our approach consists of a 5-stage pipeline that involves acquiring relevant multimodal documents from Wikipedia, synthetically generating high-level questions and answers, and validating them through rigorous criteria to ensure quality data. We evaluate our methodology by training models on our synthesized dataset and testing on two benchmarks, our results demonstrate that, with an equal sample size, models trained on our synthesized data outperform those trained on human-collected data by 1.9 in exact match (EM) on average. We believe our data synthesis method will serve as a strong foundation for training and evaluating multimodal multihop question answering models.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 9, 2024

The Noisy Path from Source to Citation: Measuring How Scholars Engage with Past Research

Academic citations are widely used for evaluating research and tracing knowledge flows. Such uses typically rely on raw citation counts and neglect variability in citation types. In particular, citations can vary in their fidelity as original knowledge from cited studies may be paraphrased, summarized, or reinterpreted, possibly wrongly, leading to variation in how much information changes from cited to citing paper. In this study, we introduce a computational pipeline to quantify citation fidelity at scale. Using full texts of papers, the pipeline identifies citations in citing papers and the corresponding claims in cited papers, and applies supervised models to measure fidelity at the sentence level. Analyzing a large-scale multi-disciplinary dataset of approximately 13 million citation sentence pairs, we find that citation fidelity is higher when authors cite papers that are 1) more recent and intellectually close, 2) more accessible, and 3) the first author has a lower H-index and the author team is medium-sized. Using a quasi-experiment, we establish the "telephone effect" - when citing papers have low fidelity to the original claim, future papers that cite the citing paper and the original have lower fidelity to the original. Our work reveals systematic differences in citation fidelity, underscoring the limitations of analyses that rely on citation quantity alone and the potential for distortion of evidence.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 27, 2025

The Future of AI: Exploring the Potential of Large Concept Models

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to drive transformative innovations, with significant progress in conversational interfaces, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent content creation. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the rise of Generative AI has marked a pivotal era, with the term Large Language Models (LLMs) becoming a ubiquitous part of daily life. LLMs have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in tasks such as text summarization, code generation, and creative writing. However, these models are inherently limited by their token-level processing, which restricts their ability to perform abstract reasoning, conceptual understanding, and efficient generation of long-form content. To address these limitations, Meta has introduced Large Concept Models (LCMs), representing a significant shift from traditional token-based frameworks. LCMs use concepts as foundational units of understanding, enabling more sophisticated semantic reasoning and context-aware decision-making. Given the limited academic research on this emerging technology, our study aims to bridge the knowledge gap by collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing existing grey literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of LCMs. Specifically, we (i) identify and describe the features that distinguish LCMs from LLMs, (ii) explore potential applications of LCMs across multiple domains, and (iii) propose future research directions and practical strategies to advance LCM development and adoption.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 8, 2025

Benchmarking Document Parsers on Mathematical Formula Extraction from PDFs

Correctly parsing mathematical formulas from PDFs is critical for training large language models and building scientific knowledge bases from academic literature, yet existing benchmarks either exclude formulas entirely or lack semantically-aware evaluation metrics. We introduce a novel benchmarking framework centered on synthetically generated PDFs with precise LaTeX ground truth, enabling systematic control over layout, formulas, and content characteristics. A key methodological contribution is pioneering LLM-as-a-judge for semantic formula assessment, combined with a robust two-stage matching pipeline that handles parser output inconsistencies. Through human validation on 250 formula pairs (750 ratings from 30 evaluators), we demonstrate that LLM-based evaluation achieves substantially higher correlation with human judgment (Pearson r=0.78) compared to CDM (r=0.34) and text similarity (r~0). Evaluating 20+ contemporary PDF parsers (including specialized OCR models, vision-language models, and rule-based approaches) across 100 synthetic documents with 2,000+ formulas reveals significant performance disparities. Our findings provide crucial insights for practitioners selecting parsers for downstream applications and establish a robust, scalable methodology that enables reproducible evaluation of PDF formula extraction quality. Code and benchmark data: https://github.com/phorn1/pdf-parse-bench

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 10, 2025

PhysMaster: Building an Autonomous AI Physicist for Theoretical and Computational Physics Research

Advances in LLMs have produced agents with knowledge and operational capabilities comparable to human scientists, suggesting potential to assist, accelerate, and automate research. However, existing studies mainly evaluate such systems on well-defined benchmarks or general tasks like literature retrieval, limiting their end-to-end problem-solving ability in open scientific scenarios. This is particularly true in physics, which is abstract, mathematically intensive, and requires integrating analytical reasoning with code-based computation. To address this, we propose PhysMaster, an LLM-based agent functioning as an autonomous theoretical and computational physicist. PhysMaster couples absract reasoning with numerical computation and leverages LANDAU, the Layered Academic Data Universe, which preserves retrieved literature, curated prior knowledge, and validated methodological traces, enhancing decision reliability and stability. It also employs an adaptive exploration strategy balancing efficiency and open-ended exploration, enabling robust performance in ultra-long-horizon tasks. We evaluate PhysMaster on problems from high-energy theory, condensed matter theory to astrophysics, including: (i) acceleration, compressing labor-intensive research from months to hours; (ii) automation, autonomously executing hypothesis-driven loops ; and (iii) autonomous discovery, independently exploring open problems.

  • 21 authors
·
Dec 22, 2025

SPRING: GPT-4 Out-performs RL Algorithms by Studying Papers and Reasoning

Open-world survival games pose significant challenges for AI algorithms due to their multi-tasking, deep exploration, and goal prioritization requirements. Despite reinforcement learning (RL) being popular for solving games, its high sample complexity limits its effectiveness in complex open-world games like Crafter or Minecraft. We propose a novel approach, SPRING, to read the game's original academic paper and use the knowledge learned to reason and play the game through a large language model (LLM). Prompted with the LaTeX source as game context and a description of the agent's current observation, our SPRING framework employs a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with game-related questions as nodes and dependencies as edges. We identify the optimal action to take in the environment by traversing the DAG and calculating LLM responses for each node in topological order, with the LLM's answer to final node directly translating to environment actions. In our experiments, we study the quality of in-context "reasoning" induced by different forms of prompts under the setting of the Crafter open-world environment. Our experiments suggest that LLMs, when prompted with consistent chain-of-thought, have great potential in completing sophisticated high-level trajectories. Quantitatively, SPRING with GPT-4 outperforms all state-of-the-art RL baselines, trained for 1M steps, without any training. Finally, we show the potential of games as a test bed for LLMs.

  • 8 authors
·
May 24, 2023

PMC-LLaMA: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Medicine

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding. While demonstrating proficiency in everyday conversations and question-answering situations, these models frequently struggle in domains that require precision, such as medical applications, due to their lack of domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we describe the procedure for building a powerful, open-source language model specifically designed for medicine applications, termed as PMC-LLaMA. Our contributions are threefold: (i) we systematically investigate the process of adapting a general-purpose foundation language model towards medical domain, this involves data-centric knowledge injection through the integration of 4.8M biomedical academic papers and 30K medical textbooks, as well as comprehensive fine-tuning for alignment with domain-specific instructions; (ii) we contribute a large-scale, comprehensive dataset for instruction tuning. This dataset encompasses medical question-answering (QA), rationale for reasoning, and conversational dialogues, comprising a total of 202M tokens; (iii) we conduct thorough ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of each proposed component. While evaluating on various public medical question-answering benchmarks, our lightweight PMCLLaMA, which consists of only 13 billion parameters, exhibits superior performance, even surpassing ChatGPT. All models, codes, datasets can be found in https://github.com/chaoyi-wu/PMC-LLaMA.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 27, 2023

ResearchQA: Evaluating Scholarly Question Answering at Scale Across 75 Fields with Survey-Mined Questions and Rubrics

Evaluating long-form responses to research queries heavily relies on expert annotators, restricting attention to areas like AI where researchers can conveniently enlist colleagues. Yet, research expertise is widespread: survey articles synthesize knowledge distributed across the literature. We introduce ResearchQA, a resource for evaluating LLM systems by distilling survey articles from 75 research fields into 21K queries and 160K rubric items. Each rubric, derived jointly with queries from survey sections, lists query-specific answer evaluation criteria, i.e., citing papers, making explanations, and describing limitations. Assessments by 31 Ph.D. annotators in 8 fields indicate 96% of queries support Ph.D. information needs and 87% of rubric items should be addressed in system responses by a sentence or more. Using our rubrics, we are able to construct an automatic pairwise judge obtaining 74% agreement with expert judgments. We leverage ResearchQA to analyze competency gaps in 18 systems in over 7.6K pairwise evaluations. No parametric or retrieval-augmented system we evaluate exceeds 70% on covering rubric items, and the highest-ranking agentic system shows 75% coverage. Error analysis reveals that the highest-ranking system fully addresses less than 11% of citation rubric items, 48% of limitation items, and 49% of comparison items. We release our data to facilitate more comprehensive multi-field evaluations.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 30, 2025

ScholarCopilot: Training Large Language Models for Academic Writing with Accurate Citations

Academic writing requires both coherent text generation and precise citation of relevant literature. Although recent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have significantly improved factual accuracy in general-purpose text generation, their capacity to adequately support professional academic writing remains limited. In this work, we introduce ScholarCopilot, a unified framework designed to enhance existing large language models for generating professional academic articles with accurate and contextually relevant citations. ScholarCopilot dynamically determines when to retrieve scholarly references by generating a retrieval token [RET], and then utilizes its representation to look up relevant citations from a database. The retrieved references are fed into the model to augment the generation process. We jointly optimize both the generation and citation tasks within a single framework to increase efficiency. Trained on 500K papers from arXiv, our model achieves a top-1 retrieval accuracy of 40.1% on our evaluation dataset, outperforming baselines such as E5-Mistral-7B-Instruct (15.0%) and BM25 (9.8%). On a dataset of 1,000 academic writing samples, ScholarCopilot scores 16.2/25 in generation quality (measured across relevance, coherence, academic rigor, completeness, and innovation), surpassing models with 10x more parameters such as Qwen-2.5-72B-Instruct (15.8/25). Human studies also confirm ScholarCopilot's superior performance in citation recall, writing efficiency, and overall user experience, confirming the effectiveness of our approach.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 1, 2025 2

MechGPT, a language-based strategy for mechanics and materials modeling that connects knowledge across scales, disciplines and modalities

For centuries, researchers have sought out ways to connect disparate areas of knowledge. While early scholars (Galileo, da Vinci, etc.) were experts across fields, specialization has taken hold later. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, we can now explore relationships across areas (e.g., mechanics-biology) or disparate domains (e.g., failure mechanics-art). To achieve this, we use a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), here for a subset of knowledge in multiscale materials failure. The approach includes the use of a general-purpose LLM to distill question-answer pairs from raw sources followed by LLM fine-tuning. The resulting MechGPT LLM foundation model is used in a series of computational experiments to explore its capacity for knowledge retrieval, various language tasks, hypothesis generation, and connecting knowledge across disparate areas. While the model has some ability to recall knowledge from training, we find that LLMs are particularly useful to extract structural insights through Ontological Knowledge Graphs. These interpretable graph structures provide explanatory insights, frameworks for new research questions, and visual representations of knowledge that also can be used in retrieval-augmented generation. Three versions of MechGPT are discussed, featuring different sizes from 13 billion to 70 billion parameters, and reaching context lengths of more than 10,000 tokens. This provides ample capacity for sophisticated retrieval augmented strategies, as well as agent-based modeling where multiple LLMs interact collaboratively and/or adversarially, the incorporation of new data from the literature or web searches, as well as multimodality.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023

LitSearch: A Retrieval Benchmark for Scientific Literature Search

Literature search questions, such as "where can I find research on the evaluation of consistency in generated summaries?" pose significant challenges for modern search engines and retrieval systems. These questions often require a deep understanding of research concepts and the ability to reason over entire articles. In this work, we introduce LitSearch, a retrieval benchmark comprising 597 realistic literature search queries about recent ML and NLP papers. LitSearch is constructed using a combination of (1) questions generated by GPT-4 based on paragraphs containing inline citations from research papers and (2) questions about recently published papers, manually written by their authors. All LitSearch questions were manually examined or edited by experts to ensure high quality. We extensively benchmark state-of-the-art retrieval models and also evaluate two LLM-based reranking pipelines. We find a significant performance gap between BM25 and state-of-the-art dense retrievers, with a 24.8% difference in absolute recall@5. The LLM-based reranking strategies further improve the best-performing dense retriever by 4.4%. Additionally, commercial search engines and research tools like Google Search perform poorly on LitSearch, lagging behind the best dense retriever by 32 points. Taken together, these results show that LitSearch is an informative new testbed for retrieval systems while catering to a real-world use case.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 10, 2024

Evaluating Prompt-based Question Answering for Object Prediction in the Open Research Knowledge Graph

There have been many recent investigations into prompt-based training of transformer language models for new text genres in low-resource settings. The prompt-based training approach has been found to be effective in generalizing pre-trained or fine-tuned models for transfer to resource-scarce settings. This work, for the first time, reports results on adopting prompt-based training of transformers for scholarly knowledge graph object prediction. The work is unique in the following two main aspects. 1) It deviates from the other works proposing entity and relation extraction pipelines for predicting objects of a scholarly knowledge graph. 2) While other works have tested the method on text genera relatively close to the general knowledge domain, we test the method for a significantly different domain, i.e. scholarly knowledge, in turn testing the linguistic, probabilistic, and factual generalizability of these large-scale transformer models. We find that (i) per expectations, transformer models when tested out-of-the-box underperform on a new domain of data, (ii) prompt-based training of the models achieve performance boosts of up to 40\% in a relaxed evaluation setting, and (iii) testing the models on a starkly different domain even with a clever training objective in a low resource setting makes evident the domain knowledge capture gap offering an empirically-verified incentive for investing more attention and resources to the scholarly domain in the context of transformer models.

  • 3 authors
·
May 22, 2023

Inside-Out: Hidden Factual Knowledge in LLMs

This work presents a framework for assessing whether large language models (LLMs) encode more factual knowledge in their parameters than what they express in their outputs. While a few studies hint at this possibility, none has clearly defined or demonstrated this phenomenon. We first propose a formal definition of knowledge, quantifying it for a given question as the fraction of correct-incorrect answer pairs where the correct one is ranked higher. This gives rise to external and internal knowledge, depending on the information used to score individual answer candidates: either the model's observable token-level probabilities or its intermediate computations. Hidden knowledge arises when internal knowledge exceeds external knowledge. We then present a case study, applying this framework to three popular open-weights LLMs in a closed-book QA setup. Our results indicate that: (1) LLMs consistently encode more factual knowledge internally than what they express externally, with an average gap of 40%. (2) Surprisingly, some knowledge is so deeply hidden that a model can internally know an answer perfectly, yet fail to generate it even once, despite large-scale repeated sampling of 1,000 answers. This reveals fundamental limitations in the generation capabilities of LLMs, which (3) puts a practical constraint on scaling test-time compute via repeated answer sampling in closed-book QA: significant performance improvements remain inaccessible because some answers are practically never sampled, yet if they were, we would be guaranteed to rank them first.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 19, 2025 1

Susu Box or Piggy Bank: Assessing Cultural Commonsense Knowledge between Ghana and the U.S

Recent work has highlighted the culturally-contingent nature of commonsense knowledge. We introduce AMAMMER{epsilon}, a test set of 525 multiple-choice questions designed to evaluate the commonsense knowledge of English LLMs, relative to the cultural contexts of Ghana and the United States. To create AMAMMER{epsilon}, we select a set of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) from existing commonsense datasets and rewrite them in a multi-stage process involving surveys of Ghanaian and U.S. participants. In three rounds of surveys, participants from both pools are solicited to (1) write correct and incorrect answer choices, (2) rate individual answer choices on a 5-point Likert scale, and (3) select the best answer choice from the newly-constructed MCQ items, in a final validation step. By engaging participants at multiple stages, our procedure ensures that participant perspectives are incorporated both in the creation and validation of test items, resulting in high levels of agreement within each pool. We evaluate several off-the-shelf English LLMs on AMAMMER{epsilon}. Uniformly, models prefer answers choices that align with the preferences of U.S. annotators over Ghanaian annotators. Additionally, when test items specify a cultural context (Ghana or the U.S.), models exhibit some ability to adapt, but performance is consistently better in U.S. contexts than Ghanaian. As large resources are devoted to the advancement of English LLMs, our findings underscore the need for culturally adaptable models and evaluations to meet the needs of diverse English-speaking populations around the world.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024

Alloprof: a new French question-answer education dataset and its use in an information retrieval case study

Teachers and students are increasingly relying on online learning resources to supplement the ones provided in school. This increase in the breadth and depth of available resources is a great thing for students, but only provided they are able to find answers to their queries. Question-answering and information retrieval systems have benefited from public datasets to train and evaluate their algorithms, but most of these datasets have been in English text written by and for adults. We introduce a new public French question-answering dataset collected from Alloprof, a Quebec-based primary and high-school help website, containing 29 349 questions and their explanations in a variety of school subjects from 10 368 students, with more than half of the explanations containing links to other questions or some of the 2 596 reference pages on the website. We also present a case study of this dataset in an information retrieval task. This dataset was collected on the Alloprof public forum, with all questions verified for their appropriateness and the explanations verified both for their appropriateness and their relevance to the question. To predict relevant documents, architectures using pre-trained BERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated. This dataset will allow researchers to develop question-answering, information retrieval and other algorithms specifically for the French speaking education context. Furthermore, the range of language proficiency, images, mathematical symbols and spelling mistakes will necessitate algorithms based on a multimodal comprehension. The case study we present as a baseline shows an approach that relies on recent techniques provides an acceptable performance level, but more work is necessary before it can reliably be used and trusted in a production setting.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 10, 2023

Hubble: a Model Suite to Advance the Study of LLM Memorization

We present Hubble, a suite of fully open-source large language models (LLMs) for the scientific study of LLM memorization. Hubble models come in standard and perturbed variants: standard models are pretrained on a large English corpus, and perturbed models are trained in the same way but with controlled insertion of text (e.g., book passages, biographies, and test sets) designed to emulate key memorization risks. Our core release includes 8 models -- standard and perturbed models with 1B or 8B parameters, pretrained on 100B or 500B tokens -- establishing that memorization risks are determined by the frequency of sensitive data relative to size of the training corpus (i.e., a password appearing once in a smaller corpus is memorized better than the same password in a larger corpus). Our release also includes 6 perturbed models with text inserted at different pretraining phases, showing that sensitive data without continued exposure can be forgotten. These findings suggest two best practices for addressing memorization risks: to dilute sensitive data by increasing the size of the training corpus, and to order sensitive data to appear earlier in training. Beyond these general empirical findings, Hubble enables a broad range of memorization research; for example, analyzing the biographies reveals how readily different types of private information are memorized. We also demonstrate that the randomized insertions in Hubble make it an ideal testbed for membership inference and machine unlearning, and invite the community to further explore, benchmark, and build upon our work.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 22, 2025

LLMs4All: A Review on Large Language Models for Research and Applications in Academic Disciplines

Cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques keep reshaping our view of the world. For example, Large Language Models (LLMs) based applications such as ChatGPT have shown the capability of generating human-like conversation on extensive topics. Due to the impressive performance on a variety of language-related tasks (e.g., open-domain question answering, translation, and document summarization), one can envision the far-reaching impacts that can be brought by the LLMs with broader real-world applications (e.g., customer service, education and accessibility, and scientific discovery). Inspired by their success, this paper will offer an overview of state-of-the-art LLMs and their integration into a wide range of academic disciplines, including: (1) arts, letters, and law (e.g., history, philosophy, political science, arts and architecture, law), (2) economics and business (e.g., finance, economics, accounting, marketing), and (3) science and engineering (e.g., mathematics, physics and mechanical engineering, chemistry and chemical engineering, life sciences and bioengineering, earth sciences and civil engineering, computer science and electrical engineering). Integrating humanity and technology, in this paper, we will explore how LLMs are shaping research and practice in these fields, while also discussing key limitations, open challenges, and future directions in the era of generative AI. The review of how LLMs are engaged across disciplines-along with key observations and insights-can help researchers and practitioners interested in exploiting LLMs to advance their works in diverse real-world applications.

  • 32 authors
·
Sep 23, 2025 2

T2Ranking: A large-scale Chinese Benchmark for Passage Ranking

Passage ranking involves two stages: passage retrieval and passage re-ranking, which are important and challenging topics for both academics and industries in the area of Information Retrieval (IR). However, the commonly-used datasets for passage ranking usually focus on the English language. For non-English scenarios, such as Chinese, the existing datasets are limited in terms of data scale, fine-grained relevance annotation and false negative issues. To address this problem, we introduce T2Ranking, a large-scale Chinese benchmark for passage ranking. T2Ranking comprises more than 300K queries and over 2M unique passages from real-world search engines. Expert annotators are recruited to provide 4-level graded relevance scores (fine-grained) for query-passage pairs instead of binary relevance judgments (coarse-grained). To ease the false negative issues, more passages with higher diversities are considered when performing relevance annotations, especially in the test set, to ensure a more accurate evaluation. Apart from the textual query and passage data, other auxiliary resources are also provided, such as query types and XML files of documents which passages are generated from, to facilitate further studies. To evaluate the dataset, commonly used ranking models are implemented and tested on T2Ranking as baselines. The experimental results show that T2Ranking is challenging and there is still scope for improvement. The full data and all codes are available at https://github.com/THUIR/T2Ranking/

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 7, 2023

LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing

This work is motivated by two key trends. On one hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable versatility in various generative tasks such as writing, drawing, and question answering, significantly reducing the time required for many routine tasks. On the other hand, researchers, whose work is not only time-consuming but also highly expertise-demanding, face increasing challenges as they have to spend more time reading, writing, and reviewing papers. This raises the question: how can LLMs potentially assist researchers in alleviating their heavy workload? This study focuses on the topic of LLMs assist NLP Researchers, particularly examining the effectiveness of LLM in assisting paper (meta-)reviewing and its recognizability. To address this, we constructed the ReviewCritique dataset, which includes two types of information: (i) NLP papers (initial submissions rather than camera-ready) with both human-written and LLM-generated reviews, and (ii) each review comes with "deficiency" labels and corresponding explanations for individual segments, annotated by experts. Using ReviewCritique, this study explores two threads of research questions: (i) "LLMs as Reviewers", how do reviews generated by LLMs compare with those written by humans in terms of quality and distinguishability? (ii) "LLMs as Metareviewers", how effectively can LLMs identify potential issues, such as Deficient or unprofessional review segments, within individual paper reviews? To our knowledge, this is the first work to provide such a comprehensive analysis.

  • 40 authors
·
Jun 23, 2024

LitLLMs, LLMs for Literature Review: Are we there yet?

Literature reviews are an essential component of scientific research, but they remain time-intensive and challenging to write, especially due to the recent influx of research papers. This paper explores the zero-shot abilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) in assisting with the writing of literature reviews based on an abstract. We decompose the task into two components: 1. Retrieving related works given a query abstract, and 2. Writing a literature review based on the retrieved results. We analyze how effective LLMs are for both components. For retrieval, we introduce a novel two-step search strategy that first uses an LLM to extract meaningful keywords from the abstract of a paper and then retrieves potentially relevant papers by querying an external knowledge base. Additionally, we study a prompting-based re-ranking mechanism with attribution and show that re-ranking doubles the normalized recall compared to naive search methods, while providing insights into the LLM's decision-making process. In the generation phase, we propose a two-step approach that first outlines a plan for the review and then executes steps in the plan to generate the actual review. To evaluate different LLM-based literature review methods, we create test sets from arXiv papers using a protocol designed for rolling use with newly released LLMs to avoid test set contamination in zero-shot evaluations. We release this evaluation protocol to promote additional research and development in this regard. Our empirical results suggest that LLMs show promising potential for writing literature reviews when the task is decomposed into smaller components of retrieval and planning. Our project page including a demonstration system and toolkit can be accessed here: https://litllm.github.io.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 14, 2024

Large language models for automated scholarly paper review: A survey

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted human society, influencing various domains. Among them, academia is not simply a domain affected by LLMs, but it is also the pivotal force in the development of LLMs. In academic publications, this phenomenon is represented during the incorporation of LLMs into the peer review mechanism for reviewing manuscripts. We proposed the concept of automated scholarly paper review (ASPR) in our previous paper. As the incorporation grows, it now enters the coexistence phase of ASPR and peer review, which is described in that paper. LLMs hold transformative potential for the full-scale implementation of ASPR, but they also pose new issues and challenges that need to be addressed. In this survey paper, we aim to provide a holistic view of ASPR in the era of LLMs. We begin with a survey to find out which LLMs are used to conduct ASPR. Then, we review what ASPR-related technological bottlenecks have been solved with the incorporation of LLM technology. After that, we move on to explore new methods, new datasets, new source code, and new online systems that come with LLMs for ASPR. Furthermore, we summarize the performance and issues of LLMs in ASPR, and investigate the attitudes and reactions of publishers and academia to ASPR. Lastly, we discuss the challenges associated with the development of LLMs for ASPR. We hope this survey can serve as an inspirational reference for the researchers and promote the progress of ASPR for its actual implementation.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 17, 2025

Automatic assessment of text-based responses in post-secondary education: A systematic review

Text-based open-ended questions in academic formative and summative assessments help students become deep learners and prepare them to understand concepts for a subsequent conceptual assessment. However, grading text-based questions, especially in large courses, is tedious and time-consuming for instructors. Text processing models continue progressing with the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms. Especially after breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLM), there is immense potential to automate rapid assessment and feedback of text-based responses in education. This systematic review adopts a scientific and reproducible literature search strategy based on the PRISMA process using explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria to study text-based automatic assessment systems in post-secondary education, screening 838 papers and synthesizing 93 studies. To understand how text-based automatic assessment systems have been developed and applied in education in recent years, three research questions are considered. All included studies are summarized and categorized according to a proposed comprehensive framework, including the input and output of the system, research motivation, and research outcomes, aiming to answer the research questions accordingly. Additionally, the typical studies of automated assessment systems, research methods, and application domains in these studies are investigated and summarized. This systematic review provides an overview of recent educational applications of text-based assessment systems for understanding the latest AI/NLP developments assisting in text-based assessments in higher education. Findings will particularly benefit researchers and educators incorporating LLMs such as ChatGPT into their educational activities.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 30, 2023

Establishing Knowledge Preference in Language Models

Language models are known to encode a great amount of factual knowledge through pretraining. However, such knowledge might be insufficient to cater to user requests, requiring the model to integrate external knowledge sources and adhere to user-provided specifications. When answering questions about ongoing events, the model should use recent news articles to update its response; when asked to provide recommendations, the model should prioritize user specifications over retrieved product reviews; when some facts are edited in the model, the updated facts should override all prior knowledge learned by the model even if they are conflicting. In all of the cases above, the model faces a decision between its own parametric knowledge, (retrieved) contextual knowledge, and user instruction knowledge. In this paper, we (1) unify such settings into the problem of knowledge preference and define a three-level preference hierarchy over these knowledge sources; (2) compile a collection of existing datasets IfQA, MQuAKE, and MRQA covering a combination of settings (with/without user specifications, with/without context documents) to systematically evaluate how well models obey the intended knowledge preference; and (3) propose a dataset synthesis method that composes diverse question-answer pairs with user assumptions and related context to directly fine-tune LMs for instilling the hierarchy of knowledge. We demonstrate that a 7B model, fine-tuned on only a few thousand examples automatically generated by our proposed method, effectively achieves superior performance (more than 18% improvement across all evaluation benchmarks) in adhering to the desired knowledge preference hierarchy.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 17, 2024

EAIRA: Establishing a Methodology for Evaluating AI Models as Scientific Research Assistants

Recent advancements have positioned AI, and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), as transformative tools for scientific research, capable of addressing complex tasks that require reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. Their exceptional capabilities suggest their potential as scientific research assistants but also highlight the need for holistic, rigorous, and domain-specific evaluation to assess effectiveness in real-world scientific applications. This paper describes a multifaceted methodology for Evaluating AI models as scientific Research Assistants (EAIRA) developed at Argonne National Laboratory. This methodology incorporates four primary classes of evaluations. 1) Multiple Choice Questions to assess factual recall; 2) Open Response to evaluate advanced reasoning and problem-solving skills; 3) Lab-Style Experiments involving detailed analysis of capabilities as research assistants in controlled environments; and 4) Field-Style Experiments to capture researcher-LLM interactions at scale in a wide range of scientific domains and applications. These complementary methods enable a comprehensive analysis of LLM strengths and weaknesses with respect to their scientific knowledge, reasoning abilities, and adaptability. Recognizing the rapid pace of LLM advancements, we designed the methodology to evolve and adapt so as to ensure its continued relevance and applicability. This paper describes the methodology state at the end of February 2025. Although developed within a subset of scientific domains, the methodology is designed to be generalizable to a wide range of scientific domains.

  • 26 authors
·
Feb 27, 2025

Towards Lifelong Learning of Large Language Models: A Survey

As the applications of large language models (LLMs) expand across diverse fields, the ability of these models to adapt to ongoing changes in data, tasks, and user preferences becomes crucial. Traditional training methods, relying on static datasets, are increasingly inadequate for coping with the dynamic nature of real-world information. Lifelong learning, also known as continual or incremental learning, addresses this challenge by enabling LLMs to learn continuously and adaptively over their operational lifetime, integrating new knowledge while retaining previously learned information and preventing catastrophic forgetting. This survey delves into the sophisticated landscape of lifelong learning, categorizing strategies into two primary groups: Internal Knowledge and External Knowledge. Internal Knowledge includes continual pretraining and continual finetuning, each enhancing the adaptability of LLMs in various scenarios. External Knowledge encompasses retrieval-based and tool-based lifelong learning, leveraging external data sources and computational tools to extend the model's capabilities without modifying core parameters. The key contributions of our survey are: (1) Introducing a novel taxonomy categorizing the extensive literature of lifelong learning into 12 scenarios; (2) Identifying common techniques across all lifelong learning scenarios and classifying existing literature into various technique groups within each scenario; (3) Highlighting emerging techniques such as model expansion and data selection, which were less explored in the pre-LLM era. Through a detailed examination of these groups and their respective categories, this survey aims to enhance the adaptability, reliability, and overall performance of LLMs in real-world applications.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024

Automatic answering of scientific questions using the FACTS-V1 framework: New methods in research to increase efficiency through the use of AI

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) offers various possibilities to expand and support educational research. Specifically, the implementation of AI can be used to develop new frameworks to establish new research tools that accelerate and meaningfully expand the efficiency of data evaluation and interpretation (Buckingham Shum et al., 2023). This article presents the prototype of the FACTS-V1 (Filtering and Analysis of Content in Textual Sources) framework. With the help of the application, numerous scientific papers can be automatically extracted, analyzed and interpreted from open access document servers without having to rely on proprietary applications and their limitations. The FACTS-V1 prototype consists of three building blocks. The first part deals with the extraction of texts, the second with filtering and interpretation, and the last with the actual statistical evaluation (topic modeling) using an interactive overview. The aim of the framework is to provide recommendations for future scientific questions based on existing data. The functionality is illustrated by asking how the use of AI will change the education sector. The data used to answer the question comes from 82 scientific papers on the topic of AI from 2024. The papers are publicly available on the peDOCS document server of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Research and Educational Information.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 1, 2024

What's In Your Field? Mapping Scientific Research with Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models

The scientific literature's exponential growth makes it increasingly challenging to navigate and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools for understanding scientific text, but they fail to capture detailed relationships across large bodies of work. Unstructured approaches, like retrieval augmented generation, can sift through such corpora to recall relevant facts; however, when millions of facts influence the answer, unstructured approaches become cost prohibitive. Structured representations offer a natural complement -- enabling systematic analysis across the whole corpus. Recent work enhances LLMs with unstructured or semistructured representations of scientific concepts; to complement this, we try extracting structured representations using LLMs. By combining LLMs' semantic understanding with a schema of scientific concepts, we prototype a system that answers precise questions about the literature as a whole. Our schema applies across scientific fields and we extract concepts from it using only 20 manually annotated abstracts. To demonstrate the system, we extract concepts from 30,000 papers on arXiv spanning astrophysics, fluid dynamics, and evolutionary biology. The resulting database highlights emerging trends and, by visualizing the knowledge graph, offers new ways to explore the ever-growing landscape of scientific knowledge. Demo: abby101/surveyor-0 on HF Spaces. Code: https://github.com/chiral-carbon/kg-for-science.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 12, 2025

Augmenting Pre-trained Language Models with QA-Memory for Open-Domain Question Answering

Retrieval augmented language models have recently become the standard for knowledge intensive tasks. Rather than relying purely on latent semantics within the parameters of large neural models, these methods enlist a semi-parametric memory to encode an index of knowledge for the model to retrieve over. Most prior work has employed text passages as the unit of knowledge, which has high coverage at the cost of interpretability, controllability, and efficiency. The opposite properties arise in other methods which have instead relied on knowledge base (KB) facts. At the same time, more recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of storing and retrieving from an index of Q-A pairs derived from text lewis2021paq. This approach yields a high coverage knowledge representation that maintains KB-like properties due to its representations being more atomic units of information. In this work we push this line of research further by proposing a question-answer augmented encoder-decoder model and accompanying pretraining strategy. This yields an end-to-end system that not only outperforms prior QA retrieval methods on single-hop QA tasks but also enables compositional reasoning, as demonstrated by strong performance on two multi-hop QA datasets. Together, these methods improve the ability to interpret and control the model while narrowing the performance gap with passage retrieval systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 9, 2022

SPIQA: A Dataset for Multimodal Question Answering on Scientific Papers

Seeking answers to questions within long scientific research articles is a crucial area of study that aids readers in quickly addressing their inquiries. However, existing question-answering (QA) datasets based on scientific papers are limited in scale and focus solely on textual content. To address this limitation, we introduce SPIQA (Scientific Paper Image Question Answering), the first large-scale QA dataset specifically designed to interpret complex figures and tables within the context of scientific research articles across various domains of computer science. Leveraging the breadth of expertise and ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to understand figures, we employ automatic and manual curation to create the dataset. We craft an information-seeking task involving multiple images that cover a wide variety of plots, charts, tables, schematic diagrams, and result visualizations. SPIQA comprises 270K questions divided into training, validation, and three different evaluation splits. Through extensive experiments with 12 prominent foundational models, we evaluate the ability of current multimodal systems to comprehend the nuanced aspects of research articles. Additionally, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation strategy with in-context retrieval that allows fine-grained, step-by-step assessment and improves model performance. We further explore the upper bounds of performance enhancement with additional textual information, highlighting its promising potential for future research and the dataset's impact on revolutionizing how we interact with scientific literature.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 12, 2024 3