Credible plan-driven RAG method for Multi-hop Question Answering

Multi-hop question answering (QA) presents a considerable challenge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), requiring the structured decomposition of complex queries into logical reasoning paths and the generation of dependable intermediate results. However, deviations in reasoning paths or errors in intermediate results, which are common in current RAG methods, may propagate and accumulate throughout the reasoning process, diminishing the accuracy of the answer to complex queries. To address this challenge, we propose the Plan-then-Act-and-Review (PAR RAG) framework, which is organized into three key stages: planning, act, and review, and aims to offer an interpretable and incremental reasoning paradigm for accurate and reliable multi-hop question answering by mitigating error propagation.PAR RAG initially applies a top-down problem decomposition strategy, formulating a comprehensive plan that integrates multiple executable steps from a holistic viewpoint. This approach avoids the pitfalls of local optima common in traditional RAG methods, ensuring the accuracy of the entire reasoning path. Subsequently, PAR RAG incorporates a plan execution mechanism based on multi-granularity verification. By utilizing both coarse-grained similarity information and fine-grained relevant data, the framework thoroughly checks and adjusts intermediate results, ensuring process accuracy while effectively managing error propagation and amplification. Experimental results on multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that the PAR RAG framework substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in key metrics, including EM and F1 scores.

Physics Informed Constrained Learning of Dynamics from Static Data

A physics-informed neural network (PINN) models the dynamics of a system by integrating the governing physical laws into the architecture of a neural network. By enforcing physical laws as constraints, PINN overcomes challenges with data scarsity and potentially high dimensionality. Existing PINN frameworks rely on fully observed time-course data, the acquisition of which could be prohibitive for many systems. In this study, we developed a new PINN learning paradigm, namely Constrained Learning, that enables the approximation of first-order derivatives or motions using non-time course or partially observed data. Computational principles and a general mathematical formulation of Constrained Learning were developed. We further introduced MPOCtrL (Message Passing Optimization-based Constrained Learning) an optimization approach tailored for the Constrained Learning framework that strives to balance the fitting of physical models and observed data. Its code is available at github link: https://github.com/ptdang1001/MPOCtrL Experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrated that MPOCtrL can effectively detect the nonlinear dependency between observed data and the underlying physical properties of the system. In particular, on the task of metabolic flux analysis, MPOCtrL outperforms all existing data-driven flux estimators.

DianJin-R1: Evaluating and Enhancing Financial Reasoning in Large Language Models

Effective reasoning remains a core challenge for large language models (LLMs) in the financial domain, where tasks often require domain-specific knowledge, precise numerical calculations, and strict adherence to compliance rules. We propose DianJin-R1, a reasoning-enhanced framework designed to address these challenges through reasoning-augmented supervision and reinforcement learning. Central to our approach is DianJin-R1-Data, a high-quality dataset constructed from CFLUE, FinQA, and a proprietary compliance corpus (Chinese Compliance Check, CCC), combining diverse financial reasoning scenarios with verified annotations. Our models, DianJin-R1-7B and DianJin-R1-32B, are fine-tuned from Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct using a structured format that generates both reasoning steps and final answers. To further refine reasoning quality, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning method that incorporates dual reward signals: one encouraging structured outputs and another rewarding answer correctness. We evaluate our models on five benchmarks: three financial datasets (CFLUE, FinQA, and CCC) and two general reasoning benchmarks (MATH-500 and GPQA-Diamond). Experimental results show that DianJin-R1 models consistently outperform their non-reasoning counterparts, especially on complex financial tasks. Moreover, on the real-world CCC dataset, our single-call reasoning models match or even surpass the performance of multi-agent systems that require significantly more computational cost. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of DianJin-R1 in enhancing financial reasoning through structured supervision and reward-aligned learning, offering a scalable and practical solution for real-world applications.

Meta-rater: A Multi-dimensional Data Selection Method for Pre-training Language Models

The composition of pre-training datasets for large language models (LLMs) remains largely undisclosed, hindering transparency and efforts to optimize data quality, a critical driver of model performance. Current data selection methods, such as natural language quality assessments, diversity-based filters, and classifier-based approaches, are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies. To address these gaps, we propose PRRC to evaluate data quality across Professionalism, Readability, Reasoning, and Cleanliness. We further introduce Meta-rater, a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates these dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings. Meta-rater employs proxy models to train a regression model that predicts validation loss, enabling the identification of optimal combinations of quality scores. Experiments demonstrate that Meta-rater doubles convergence speed for 1.3B parameter models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23, with scalable benefits observed in 3.3B models trained on 100B tokens. Additionally, we release the annotated SlimPajama-627B dataset, labeled across 25 quality metrics (including PRRC), to advance research in data-centric LLM development. Our work establishes that holistic, multi-dimensional quality integration significantly outperforms conventional single-dimension approaches, offering a scalable paradigm for enhancing pre-training efficiency and model capability.

Probing and Inducing Combinational Creativity in Vision-Language Models

The ability to combine existing concepts into novel ideas stands as a fundamental hallmark of human intelligence. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like GPT-4V and DALLE-3 have sparked debate about whether their outputs reflect combinational creativity--defined by M. A. Boden (1998) as synthesizing novel ideas through combining existing concepts--or sophisticated pattern matching of training data. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we investigate the combinational creativity of VLMs from the lens of concept blending. We propose the Identification-Explanation-Implication (IEI) framework, which decomposes creative processes into three levels: identifying input spaces, extracting shared attributes, and deriving novel semantic implications. To validate this framework, we curate CreativeMashup, a high-quality dataset of 666 artist-generated visual mashups annotated according to the IEI framework. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that in comprehension tasks, best VLMs have surpassed average human performance while falling short of expert-level understanding; in generation tasks, incorporating our IEI framework into the generation pipeline significantly enhances the creative quality of VLMs outputs. Our findings establish both a theoretical foundation for evaluating artificial creativity and practical guidelines for improving creative generation in VLMs.

Metric-Solver: Sliding Anchored Metric Depth Estimation from a Single Image

Accurate and generalizable metric depth estimation is crucial for various computer vision applications but remains challenging due to the diverse depth scales encountered in indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, we introduce Metric-Solver, a novel sliding anchor-based metric depth estimation method that dynamically adapts to varying scene scales. Our approach leverages an anchor-based representation, where a reference depth serves as an anchor to separate and normalize the scene depth into two components: scaled near-field depth and tapered far-field depth. The anchor acts as a normalization factor, enabling the near-field depth to be normalized within a consistent range while mapping far-field depth smoothly toward zero. Through this approach, any depth from zero to infinity in the scene can be represented within a unified representation, effectively eliminating the need to manually account for scene scale variations. More importantly, for the same scene, the anchor can slide along the depth axis, dynamically adjusting to different depth scales. A smaller anchor provides higher resolution in the near-field, improving depth precision for closer objects while a larger anchor improves depth estimation in far regions. This adaptability enables the model to handle depth predictions at varying distances and ensure strong generalization across datasets. Our design enables a unified and adaptive depth representation across diverse environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Metric-Solver outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and cross-dataset generalization.

Learning to Be A Doctor: Searching for Effective Medical Agent Architectures

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks, and their application in the medical domain holds particular promise due to the demand for high generalizability and reliance on interdisciplinary knowledge. However, existing medical agent systems often rely on static, manually crafted workflows that lack the flexibility to accommodate diverse diagnostic requirements and adapt to emerging clinical scenarios. Motivated by the success of automated machine learning (AutoML), this paper introduces a novel framework for the automated design of medical agent architectures. Specifically, we define a hierarchical and expressive agent search space that enables dynamic workflow adaptation through structured modifications at the node, structural, and framework levels. Our framework conceptualizes medical agents as graph-based architectures composed of diverse, functional node types and supports iterative self-improvement guided by diagnostic feedback. Experimental results on skin disease diagnosis tasks demonstrate that the proposed method effectively evolves workflow structures and significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy over time. This work represents the first fully automated framework for medical agent architecture design and offers a scalable, adaptable foundation for deploying intelligent agents in real-world clinical environments.

OmniVDiff: Omni Controllable Video Diffusion for Generation and Understanding

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for controllable video diffusion, OmniVDiff, aiming to synthesize and comprehend multiple video visual content in a single diffusion model. To achieve this, OmniVDiff treats all video visual modalities in the color space to learn a joint distribution, while employing an adaptive control strategy that dynamically adjusts the role of each visual modality during the diffusion process, either as a generation modality or a conditioning modality. This allows flexible manipulation of each modality's role, enabling support for a wide range of tasks. Consequently, our model supports three key functionalities: (1) Text-conditioned video generation: multi-modal visual video sequences (i.e., rgb, depth, canny, segmentaion) are generated based on the text conditions in one diffusion process; (2) Video understanding: OmniVDiff can estimate the depth, canny map, and semantic segmentation across the input rgb frames while ensuring coherence with the rgb input; and (3) X-conditioned video generation: OmniVDiff generates videos conditioned on fine-grained attributes (e.g., depth maps or segmentation maps). By integrating these diverse tasks into a unified video diffusion framework, OmniVDiff enhances the flexibility and scalability for controllable video diffusion, making it an effective tool for a variety of downstream applications, such as video-to-video translation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting its potential for various video-related applications.

A simulation-heuristics dual-process model for intuitive physics

The role of mental simulation in human physical reasoning is widely acknowledged, but whether it is employed across scenarios with varying simulation costs and where its boundary lies remains unclear. Using a pouring-marble task, our human study revealed two distinct error patterns when predicting pouring angles, differentiated by simulation time. While mental simulation accurately captured human judgments in simpler scenarios, a linear heuristic model better matched human predictions when simulation time exceeded a certain boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose a dual-process framework, Simulation-Heuristics Model (SHM), where intuitive physics employs simulation for short-time simulation but switches to heuristics when simulation becomes costly. By integrating computational methods previously viewed as separate into a unified model, SHM quantitatively captures their switching mechanism. The SHM aligns more precisely with human behavior and demonstrates consistent predictive performance across diverse scenarios, advancing our understanding of the adaptive nature of intuitive physical reasoning.

HD-RAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Hybrid Documents Containing Text and Hierarchical Tables

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) effectively combines LLMs generative capabilities with external retrieval-based information. The Hybrid Document RAG task aims to integrate textual and hierarchical tabular data for more comprehensive retrieval and generation in complex scenarios. However, there is no existing dataset specifically designed for this task that includes both text and tabular data. Additionally, existing methods struggle to retrieve relevant tabular data and integrate it with text. Semantic similarity-based retrieval lacks accuracy, while table-specific methods fail to handle complex hierarchical structures effectively. Furthermore, the QA task requires complex reasoning and calculations, further complicating the challenge. In this paper, we propose a new large-scale dataset, DocRAGLib, specifically designed for the question answering (QA) task scenario under Hybrid Document RAG. To tackle these challenges, we introduce HD-RAG, a novel framework that incorporates a row-and-column level (RCL) table representation, employs a two-stage process combining ensemble and LLM-based retrieval, and integrates RECAP, which is designed for multi-step reasoning and complex calculations in Document-QA tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments with DocRAGLib, showing that HD-RAG outperforms existing baselines in both retrieval accuracy and QA performance, demonstrating its effectiveness.