Abstract:Legal judgment prediction offers a compelling method to aid legal practitioners and researchers. However, the research question remains relatively under-explored: Should multiple defendants and charges be treated separately in LJP? To address this, we introduce a new dataset namely multi-person multi-charge prediction (MPMCP), and seek the answer by evaluating the performance of several prevailing legal large language models (LLMs) on four practical legal judgment scenarios: (S1) single defendant with a single charge, (S2) single defendant with multiple charges, (S3) multiple defendants with a single charge, and (S4) multiple defendants with multiple charges. We evaluate the dataset across two LJP tasks, i.e., charge prediction and penalty term prediction. We have conducted extensive experiments and found that the scenario involving multiple defendants and multiple charges (S4) poses the greatest challenges, followed by S2, S3, and S1. The impact varies significantly depending on the model. For example, in S4 compared to S1, InternLM2 achieves approximately 4.5% lower F1-score and 2.8% higher LogD, while Lawformer demonstrates around 19.7% lower F1-score and 19.0% higher LogD. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/lololo-xiao/MultiJustice-MPMCP.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, especially when guided by explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that verbalizes intermediate steps. While CoT improves both interpretability and accuracy, its dependence on natural language reasoning limits the model's expressive bandwidth. Latent reasoning tackles this bottleneck by performing multi-step inference entirely in the model's continuous hidden state, eliminating token-level supervision. To advance latent reasoning research, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of latent reasoning. We begin by examining the foundational role of neural network layers as the computational substrate for reasoning, highlighting how hierarchical representations support complex transformations. Next, we explore diverse latent reasoning methodologies, including activation-based recurrence, hidden state propagation, and fine-tuning strategies that compress or internalize explicit reasoning traces. Finally, we discuss advanced paradigms such as infinite-depth latent reasoning via masked diffusion models, which enable globally consistent and reversible reasoning processes. By unifying these perspectives, we aim to clarify the conceptual landscape of latent reasoning and chart future directions for research at the frontier of LLM cognition. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: https://github.com/multimodal-art-projection/LatentCoT-Horizon/.
Abstract:Knowledge distillation is a model compression technique in which a compact "student" network is trained to replicate the predictive behavior of a larger "teacher" network. In logit-based knowledge distillation it has become the de facto approach to augment cross-entropy with a distillation term. Typically this term is either a KL divergence-matching marginal probabilities or a correlation-based loss capturing intra- and inter-class relationships but in every case it sits as an add-on to cross-entropy with its own weight that must be carefully tuned. In this paper we adopt a choice-theoretic perspective and recast knowledge distillation under the Plackett-Luce model by interpreting teacher logits as "worth" scores. We introduce Plackett-Luce Distillation (PLD), a weighted list-wise ranking loss in which the teacher model transfers knowledge of its full ranking of classes, weighting each ranked choice by its own confidence. PLD directly optimizes a single teacher-optimal ranking of the true label first, followed by the remaining classes in descending teacher confidence, yielding a convex, translation-invariant surrogate that subsumes weighted cross-entropy. Empirically on standard image classification benchmarks, PLD improves Top-1 accuracy by an average of +0.42% over DIST (arXiv:2205.10536) and +1.04% over KD (arXiv:1503.02531) in homogeneous settings and by +0.48% and +1.09% over DIST and KD, respectively, in heterogeneous settings.
Abstract:Implicit reasoning is the ability of a language model to solve multi-hop reasoning tasks in a single forward pass, without chain of thought. We investigate this capability using GPT2-style language models trained from scratch on controlled $k$-hop reasoning datasets ($k = 2, 3, 4$). We show that while such models can indeed learn implicit $k$-hop reasoning, the required training data grows exponentially in $k$, and the required number of transformer layers grows linearly in $k$. We offer a theoretical explanation for why this depth growth is necessary. We further find that the data requirement can be mitigated, but not eliminated, through curriculum learning.
Abstract:We present MiMo-7B, a large language model born for reasoning tasks, with optimization across both pre-training and post-training stages. During pre-training, we enhance the data preprocessing pipeline and employ a three-stage data mixing strategy to strengthen the base model's reasoning potential. MiMo-7B-Base is pre-trained on 25 trillion tokens, with additional Multi-Token Prediction objective for enhanced performance and accelerated inference speed. During post-training, we curate a dataset of 130K verifiable mathematics and programming problems for reinforcement learning, integrating a test-difficulty-driven code-reward scheme to alleviate sparse-reward issues and employing strategic data resampling to stabilize training. Extensive evaluations show that MiMo-7B-Base possesses exceptional reasoning potential, outperforming even much larger 32B models. The final RL-tuned model, MiMo-7B-RL, achieves superior performance on mathematics, code and general reasoning tasks, surpassing the performance of OpenAI o1-mini. The model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/xiaomimimo/MiMo.
Abstract:Accurately evaluating machine-translated text remains a long-standing challenge, particularly for long documents. Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can serve as reliable and interpretable sentence-level translation evaluators via MQM error span annotations. With modern LLMs supporting larger context windows, a natural question arises: can we feed entire document translations into an LLM for quality assessment? Ideally, evaluation should be invariant to text length, producing consistent error spans regardless of input granularity. However, our analysis shows that text length significantly impacts evaluation: longer texts lead to fewer error spans and reduced system ranking accuracy. To address this limitation, we evaluate several strategies, including granularity-aligned prompting, Focus Sentence Prompting (FSP), and a fine-tuning approach to better align LLMs with the evaluation task. The latter two methods largely mitigate this length bias, making LLMs more reliable for long-form translation evaluation.
Abstract:Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks, where models need to reason over extensive input contexts to aggregate target information. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has shown promise for multi-step reasoning, its effectiveness for long-context scenarios remains underexplored. Through systematic investigation across diverse tasks, we demonstrate that CoT's benefits generalize across most long-context scenarios and amplify with increasing context length. Motivated by this critical observation, we propose LongRePS, a process-supervised framework that teaches models to generate high-quality reasoning paths for enhanced long-context performance. Our framework incorporates a self-sampling mechanism to bootstrap reasoning paths and a novel quality assessment protocol specifically designed for long-context scenarios. Experimental results on various long-context benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving significant improvements over outcome supervision baselines on both in-domain tasks (+13.6/+3.8 points for LLaMA/Qwen on MuSiQue) and cross-domain generalization (+9.3/+8.1 points on average across diverse QA tasks). Our code, data and trained models are made public to facilitate future research.
Abstract:With the development of large language models (LLMs), there has been an increasing need for significant advancements in handling long contexts. To enhance long-context capabilities, constructing high-quality training data with long-range dependencies is crucial. Existing methods to select long-context data often rely on sentence-level analysis, which can be greatly optimized in both performance and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel token-level framework, LongAttn, which leverages the self-attention mechanism of LLMs to measure the long-range dependencies for the data. By calculating token-level dependency strength and distribution uniformity of token scores, LongAttn effectively quantifies long-range dependencies, enabling more accurate and efficient data selection. We filter LongABC-32K from open-source long-context datasets (ArXiv, Book, and Code). Through our comprehensive experiments, LongAttn has demonstrated its excellent effectiveness, scalability, and efficiency. To facilitate future research in long-context data, we released our code and the high-quality long-context training data LongABC-32K.
Abstract:Text embeddings are typically evaluated on a limited set of tasks, which are constrained by language, domain, and task diversity. To address these limitations and provide a more comprehensive evaluation, we introduce the Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) - a large-scale, community-driven expansion of MTEB, covering over 500 quality-controlled evaluation tasks across 250+ languages. MMTEB includes a diverse set of challenging, novel tasks such as instruction following, long-document retrieval, and code retrieval, representing the largest multilingual collection of evaluation tasks for embedding models to date. Using this collection, we develop several highly multilingual benchmarks, which we use to evaluate a representative set of models. We find that while large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters can achieve state-of-the-art performance on certain language subsets and task categories, the best-performing publicly available model is multilingual-e5-large-instruct with only 560 million parameters. To facilitate accessibility and reduce computational cost, we introduce a novel downsampling method based on inter-task correlation, ensuring a diverse selection while preserving relative model rankings. Furthermore, we optimize tasks such as retrieval by sampling hard negatives, creating smaller but effective splits. These optimizations allow us to introduce benchmarks that drastically reduce computational demands. For instance, our newly introduced zero-shot English benchmark maintains a ranking order similar to the full-scale version but at a fraction of the computational cost.
Abstract:This paper introduces AFRIDOC-MT, a document-level multi-parallel translation dataset covering English and five African languages: Amharic, Hausa, Swahili, Yor\`ub\'a, and Zulu. The dataset comprises 334 health and 271 information technology news documents, all human-translated from English to these languages. We conduct document-level translation benchmark experiments by evaluating neural machine translation (NMT) models and large language models (LLMs) for translations between English and these languages, at both the sentence and pseudo-document levels. These outputs are realigned to form complete documents for evaluation. Our results indicate that NLLB-200 achieved the best average performance among the standard NMT models, while GPT-4o outperformed general-purpose LLMs. Fine-tuning selected models led to substantial performance gains, but models trained on sentences struggled to generalize effectively to longer documents. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that some LLMs exhibit issues such as under-generation, repetition of words or phrases, and off-target translations, especially for African languages.