Toward Stable Value Alignment: Introducing Independent Modules for Consistent Value Guidance

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values typically relies on post-training or inference-time steering that directly manipulates the backbone's parameters or representation space. However, a critical gap exists: the model's residual stream is highly dynamic, in which values exist as fragile, low-dimensional properties, inherently incompatible with the stability required for consistent value expression. In this paper, we propose the Stable Value Guidance Transformer (SVGT), which addresses this gap through an independent value module incorporating two key designs: (1) independent value modeling, maintaining normative representations in a dedicated value space isolated from the backbone, and (2) explicit behavioral guidance, transducing these stable signals into learnable latent Bridge Tokens. These tokens serve as dynamic value anchors to explicitly steer the generative trajectory, ensuring robust adherence across diverse contexts without disrupting the backbone's internal representations. Experiments across multiple backbones and safety benchmarks show that SVGT generally reduces harmful scores by over 70% while maintaining generation fluency, demonstrating the efficacy of architecturally grounded value modeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/Clervils/SVGT.git.

Agent-ValueBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Agent Values

Autonomous agents have rapidly matured as task executors and seen widespread deployment via harnesses such as OpenClaw. Safety concerns have rightly drawn growing research attention, and beneath them lie the values silently steering agent behavior. Existing value benchmarks, however, remain confined to LLMs, leaving agent values largely uncharted. From intuitive, empirical, and theoretical vantage points, we show that an agent's values diverge from those of its underlying LLM, and the agentic modality further introduces dataset-, evaluation-, and system-level challenges absent from text-only protocols. We close this gap with Agent-ValueBench, the first benchmark dedicated to agent values. It features 394 executable environments across 16 domains, offering 4,335 value-conflict tasks that cover 28 value systems and 332 dimensions. Every instance is co-synthesized through our purpose-built end-to-end pipeline and curated per-instance by professional psychologists. Each task ships with two pole-aligned golden trajectories whose checkpoints anchor a trajectory-level rubric-based judge. Benchmarking 14 frontier proprietary and open-weights models across 4 mainstream harnesses, we uncover three concerted findings. Agent values first manifest as a Value Tide of cross-model homogeneity beneath interpretable counter-currents. This tide bends non-additively under harness pull, and yet more decisively under deliberate steering via embedded skills. Together these results signal that the agent-alignment lever is shifting from classical model alignment and prompt steering toward harness alignment and skill steering.

Context-Value-Action Architecture for Value-Driven Large Language Model Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in simulating human behavior, yet existing agents often exhibit behavioral rigidity, a flaw frequently masked by the self-referential bias of current "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluations. By evaluating against empirical ground truth, we reveal a counter-intuitive phenomenon: increasing the intensity of prompt-driven reasoning does not enhance fidelity but rather exacerbates value polarization, collapsing population diversity. To address this, we propose the Context-Value-Action (CVA) architecture, grounded in the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model and Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values. Unlike methods relying on self-verification, CVA decouples action generation from cognitive reasoning via a novel Value Verifier trained on authentic human data to explicitly model dynamic value activation. Experiments on CVABench, which comprises over 1.1 million real-world interaction traces, demonstrate that CVA significantly outperforms baselines. Our approach effectively mitigates polarization while offering superior behavioral fidelity and interpretability.

FoE: Forest of Errors Makes the First Solution the Best in Large Reasoning Models

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) like DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks, exhibiting human-like patterns in exploring multiple alternative solutions. Upon closer inspection, however, we uncover a surprising phenomenon: The First is The Best, where alternative solutions are not merely suboptimal but potentially detrimental. This observation challenges widely accepted test-time scaling laws, leading us to hypothesize that errors within the reasoning path scale concurrently with test time. Through comprehensive empirical analysis, we characterize errors as a forest-structured Forest of Errors (FoE) and conclude that FoE makes the First the Best, which is underpinned by rigorous theoretical analysis. Leveraging these insights, we propose RED, a self-guided efficient reasoning framework comprising two components: I) Refining First, which suppresses FoE growth in the first solution; and II) Discarding Subs, which prunes subsequent FoE via dual-consistency. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks and six backbone models demonstrate that RED outperforms eight competitive baselines, achieving performance gains of up to 19.0% while reducing token consumption by 37.7% ~ 70.4%. Moreover, comparative experiments on FoE metrics shed light on how RED achieves effectiveness.

NeuReasoner: Towards Explainable, Controllable, and Unified Reasoning via Mixture-of-Neurons

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks. However, closer scrutiny reveals persistent failure modes compromising performance and cost: I) Intra-step level, marked by calculation or derivation errors; II) Inter-step level, involving oscillation and stagnation; and III) Instance level, causing maladaptive over-thinking. Existing endeavors target isolated levels without unification, while their black-box nature and reliance on RL hinder explainability and controllability. To bridge these gaps, we conduct an in-depth white-box analysis, identifying key neurons (Mixture of Neurons, MoN) and their fluctuation patterns associated with distinct failures. Building upon these insights, we propose NeuReasoner, an explainable, controllable, and unified reasoning framework driven by MoN. Technically, NeuReasoner integrates lightweight MLPs for failure detection with a special token-triggered self-correction mechanism learned via SFT. During inference, special tokens are inserted upon failure detection to actuate controllable remedial behaviors. Extensive evaluations across six benchmarks, six backbone models (8B~70B) against nine competitive baselines, demonstrate that NeuReasoner achieves performance gains of up to 27.0% while reducing token consumption by 19.6% ~ 63.3%.

Meta Context Engineering via Agentic Skill Evolution

The operational efficacy of large language models relies heavily on their inference-time context. This has established Context Engineering (CE) as a formal discipline for optimizing these inputs. Current CE methods rely on manually crafted harnesses, such as rigid generation-reflection workflows and predefined context schemas. They impose structural biases and restrict context optimization to a narrow, intuition-bound design space. To address this, we introduce Meta Context Engineering (MCE), a bi-level framework that supersedes static CE heuristics by co-evolving CE skills and context artifacts. In MCE iterations, a meta-level agent refines engineering skills via agentic crossover, a deliberative search over the history of skills, their executions, and evaluations. A base-level agent executes these skills, learns from training rollouts, and optimizes context as flexible files and code. We evaluate MCE across five disparate domains under offline and online settings. MCE demonstrates consistent performance gains, achieving 5.6--53.8% relative improvement over state-of-the-art agentic CE methods (mean of 16.9%), while maintaining superior context adaptability, transferability, and efficiency in both context usage and training.

Meta-R1: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Metacognition

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities on complex tasks, exhibiting emergent, human-like thinking patterns. Despite their advances, we identify a fundamental limitation: current LRMs lack a dedicated meta-level cognitive system-an essential faculty in human cognition that enables "thinking about thinking". This absence leaves their emergent abilities uncontrollable (non-adaptive reasoning), unreliable (intermediate error), and inflexible (lack of a clear methodology). To address this gap, we introduce Meta-R1, a systematic and generic framework that endows LRMs with explicit metacognitive capabilities. Drawing on principles from cognitive science, Meta-R1 decomposes the reasoning process into distinct object-level and meta-level components, orchestrating proactive planning, online regulation, and adaptive early stopping within a cascaded framework. Experiments on three challenging benchmarks and against eight competitive baselines demonstrate that Meta-R1 is: (I) high-performing, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by up to 27.3%; (II) token-efficient, reducing token consumption to 15.7% ~ 32.7% and improving efficiency by up to 14.8% when compared to its vanilla counterparts; and (III) transferable, maintaining robust performance across datasets and model backbones.

AuroRA: Breaking Low-Rank Bottleneck of LoRA with Nonlinear Mapping

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method validated across NLP and CV domains. However, LoRA faces an inherent low-rank bottleneck: narrowing its performance gap with full finetuning requires increasing the rank of its parameter matrix, resulting in significant parameter overhead. Recent linear LoRA variants have attempted to enhance expressiveness by introducing additional linear mappings; however, their composition remains inherently linear and fails to fundamentally improve LoRA's representational capacity. To address this limitation, we propose AuroRA, which incorporates an Adaptive Nonlinear Layer (ANL) between two linear projectors to capture fixed and learnable nonlinearities. This combination forms an MLP-like structure with a compressed rank, enabling flexible and precise approximation of diverse target functions while theoretically guaranteeing lower approximation errors and bounded gradients. Extensive experiments on 22 datasets and 6 pretrained models demonstrate that AuroRA: (I) not only matches or surpasses full fine-tuning performance with only 6.18% ~ 25% of LoRA's parameters but also (II) outperforms state-of-the-art PEFT methods by up to 10.88% in both NLP and CV tasks, and (III) exhibits robust performance across various rank configurations.

EAVIT: Efficient and Accurate Human Value Identification from Text data via LLMs

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized various fields, including the identification and discovery of human values within text data. While traditional NLP models, such as BERT, have been employed for this task, their ability to represent textual data is significantly outperformed by emerging LLMs like GPTs. However, the performance of online LLMs often degrades when handling long contexts required for value identification, which also incurs substantial computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose EAVIT, an efficient and accurate framework for human value identification that combines the strengths of both locally fine-tunable and online black-box LLMs. Our framework employs a value detector - a small, local language model - to generate initial value estimations. These estimations are then used to construct concise input prompts for online LLMs, enabling accurate final value identification. To train the value detector, we introduce explanation-based training and data generation techniques specifically tailored for value identification, alongside sampling strategies to optimize the brevity of LLM input prompts. Our approach effectively reduces the number of input tokens by up to 1/6 compared to directly querying online LLMs, while consistently outperforming traditional NLP methods and other LLM-based strategies.

Large Language Model Psychometrics: A Systematic Review of Evaluation, Validation, and Enhancement

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has outpaced traditional evaluation methodologies. It presents novel challenges, such as measuring human-like psychological constructs, navigating beyond static and task-specific benchmarks, and establishing human-centered evaluation. These challenges intersect with Psychometrics, the science of quantifying the intangible aspects of human psychology, such as personality, values, and intelligence. This survey introduces and synthesizes an emerging interdisciplinary field of LLM Psychometrics, which leverages psychometric instruments, theories, and principles to evaluate, understand, and enhance LLMs. We systematically explore the role of Psychometrics in shaping benchmarking principles, broadening evaluation scopes, refining methodologies, validating results, and advancing LLM capabilities. This paper integrates diverse perspectives to provide a structured framework for researchers across disciplines, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of this nascent field. Ultimately, we aim to provide actionable insights for developing future evaluation paradigms that align with human-level AI and promote the advancement of human-centered AI systems for societal benefit. A curated repository of LLM psychometric resources is available at https://github.com/valuebyte-ai/Awesome-LLM-Psychometrics.