AQuilt: Weaving Logic and Self-Inspection into Low-Cost, High-Relevance Data Synthesis for Specialist LLMs

Despite the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) in general domains, they often underperform in specialized domains. Existing approaches typically rely on data synthesis methods and yield promising results by using unlabeled data to capture domain-specific features. However, these methods either incur high computational costs or suffer from performance limitations, while also demonstrating insufficient generalization across different tasks. To address these challenges, we propose AQuilt, a framework for constructing instruction-tuning data for any specialized domains from corresponding unlabeled data, including Answer, Question, Unlabeled data, Inspection, Logic, and Task type. By incorporating logic and inspection, we encourage reasoning processes and self-inspection to enhance model performance. Moreover, customizable task instructions enable high-quality data generation for any task. As a result, we construct a dataset of 703k examples to train a powerful data synthesis model. Experiments show that AQuilt is comparable to DeepSeek-V3 while utilizing just 17% of the production cost. Further analysis demonstrates that our generated data exhibits higher relevance to downstream tasks. Source code, models, and scripts are available at https://github.com/Krueske/AQuilt.

3DKeyAD: High-Resolution 3D Point Cloud Anomaly Detection via Keypoint-Guided Point Clustering

High-resolution 3D point clouds are highly effective for detecting subtle structural anomalies in industrial inspection. However, their dense and irregular nature imposes significant challenges, including high computational cost, sensitivity to spatial misalignment, and difficulty in capturing localized structural differences. This paper introduces a registration-based anomaly detection framework that combines multi-prototype alignment with cluster-wise discrepancy analysis to enable precise 3D anomaly localization. Specifically, each test sample is first registered to multiple normal prototypes to enable direct structural comparison. To evaluate anomalies at a local level, clustering is performed over the point cloud, and similarity is computed between features from the test sample and the prototypes within each cluster. Rather than selecting cluster centroids randomly, a keypoint-guided strategy is employed, where geometrically informative points are chosen as centroids. This ensures that clusters are centered on feature-rich regions, enabling more meaningful and stable distance-based comparisons. Extensive experiments on the Real3D-AD benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both object-level and point-level anomaly detection, even using only raw features.

KaLM-Embedding-V2: Superior Training Techniques and Data Inspire A Versatile Embedding Model

In this paper, we propose KaLM-Embedding-V2, a versatile and compact embedding model, which achieves impressive performance in general-purpose text embedding tasks by leveraging superior training techniques and data. Our key innovations include: (1) To better align the architecture with representation learning, we remove the causal attention mask and adopt a fully bidirectional transformer with simple yet effective mean-pooling to produce fixed-length embeddings; (2) We employ a multi-stage training pipeline: (i) pre-training on large-scale weakly supervised open-source corpora; (ii) fine-tuning on high-quality retrieval and non-retrieval datasets; and (iii) model-soup parameter averaging for robust generalization. Besides, we introduce a focal-style reweighting mechanism that concentrates learning on difficult samples and an online hard-negative mixing strategy to continuously enrich hard negatives without expensive offline mining; (3) We collect over 20 categories of data for pre-training and 100 categories of data for fine-tuning, to boost both the performance and generalization of the embedding model. Extensive evaluations on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) Chinese and English show that our model significantly outperforms others of comparable size, and competes with 3x, 14x, 18x, and 26x larger embedding models, setting a new standard for a versatile and compact embedding model with less than 1B parameters.

Text Embeddings Should Capture Implicit Semantics, Not Just Surface Meaning

This position paper argues that the text embedding research community should move beyond surface meaning and embrace implicit semantics as a central modeling goal. Text embedding models have become foundational in modern NLP, powering a wide range of applications and drawing increasing research attention. Yet, much of this progress remains narrowly focused on surface-level semantics. In contrast, linguistic theory emphasizes that meaning is often implicit, shaped by pragmatics, speaker intent, and sociocultural context. Current embedding models are typically trained on data that lacks such depth and evaluated on benchmarks that reward the capture of surface meaning. As a result, they struggle with tasks requiring interpretive reasoning, speaker stance, or social meaning. Our pilot study highlights this gap, showing that even state-of-the-art models perform only marginally better than simplistic baselines on implicit semantics tasks. To address this, we call for a paradigm shift: embedding research should prioritize more diverse and linguistically grounded training data, design benchmarks that evaluate deeper semantic understanding, and explicitly frame implicit meaning as a core modeling objective, better aligning embeddings with real-world language complexity.

PRISM: A Framework for Producing Interpretable Political Bias Embeddings with Political-Aware Cross-Encoder

Semantic Text Embedding is a fundamental NLP task that encodes textual content into vector representations, where proximity in the embedding space reflects semantic similarity. While existing embedding models excel at capturing general meaning, they often overlook ideological nuances, limiting their effectiveness in tasks that require an understanding of political bias. To address this gap, we introduce PRISM, the first framework designed to Produce inteRpretable polItical biaS eMbeddings. PRISM operates in two key stages: (1) Controversial Topic Bias Indicator Mining, which systematically extracts fine-grained political topics and their corresponding bias indicators from weakly labeled news data, and (2) Cross-Encoder Political Bias Embedding, which assigns structured bias scores to news articles based on their alignment with these indicators. This approach ensures that embeddings are explicitly tied to bias-revealing dimensions, enhancing both interpretability and predictive power. Through extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets, we demonstrate that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art text embedding models in political bias classification while offering highly interpretable representations that facilitate diversified retrieval and ideological analysis. The source code is available at https://github.com/dukesun99/ACL-PRISM.

Adaptive Detoxification: Safeguarding General Capabilities of LLMs through Toxicity-Aware Knowledge Editing

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive language capabilities but remain vulnerable to malicious prompts and jailbreaking attacks. Existing knowledge editing methods for LLM detoxification face two major challenges. First, they often rely on entity-specific localization, making them ineffective against adversarial inputs without explicit entities. Second, these methods suffer from over-editing, where detoxified models reject legitimate queries, compromising overall performance. In this paper, we propose ToxEdit, a toxicity-aware knowledge editing approach that dynamically detects toxic activation patterns during forward propagation. It then routes computations through adaptive inter-layer pathways to mitigate toxicity effectively. This design ensures precise toxicity mitigation while preserving LLMs' general capabilities. To more accurately assess over-editing, we also enhance the SafeEdit benchmark by incorporating instruction-following evaluation tasks. Experimental results on multiple LLMs demonstrate that our ToxEdit outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in both detoxification performance and safeguarding general capabilities of LLMs.

Evaluating and Steering Modality Preferences in Multimodal Large Language Model

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on complex tasks with multimodal context. However, it is still understudied whether they exhibit modality preference when processing multimodal contexts. To study this question, we first build a \textbf{MC\textsuperscript{2}} benchmark under controlled evidence conflict scenarios to systematically evaluate modality preference, which is the tendency to favor one modality over another when making decisions based on multimodal conflicting evidence. Our extensive evaluation reveals that all 18 tested MLLMs generally demonstrate clear modality bias, and modality preference can be influenced by external interventions. An in-depth analysis reveals that the preference direction can be captured within the latent representations of MLLMs. Built on this, we propose a probing and steering method based on representation engineering to explicitly control modality preference without additional fine-tuning or carefully crafted prompts. Our method effectively amplifies modality preference toward a desired direction and applies to downstream tasks such as hallucination mitigation and multimodal machine translation, yielding promising improvements.

MTSA: Multi-turn Safety Alignment for LLMs through Multi-round Red-teaming

The proliferation of jailbreak attacks against large language models (LLMs) highlights the need for robust security measures. However, in multi-round dialogues, malicious intentions may be hidden in interactions, leading LLMs to be more prone to produce harmful responses. In this paper, we propose the \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{T}urn \textbf{S}afety \textbf{A}lignment (\ourapproach) framework, to address the challenge of securing LLMs in multi-round interactions. It consists of two stages: In the thought-guided attack learning stage, the red-team model learns about thought-guided multi-round jailbreak attacks to generate adversarial prompts. In the adversarial iterative optimization stage, the red-team model and the target model continuously improve their respective capabilities in interaction. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-turn reinforcement learning algorithm based on future rewards to enhance the robustness of safety alignment. Experimental results show that the red-team model exhibits state-of-the-art attack capabilities, while the target model significantly improves its performance on safety benchmarks.

A Token is Worth over 1,000 Tokens: Efficient Knowledge Distillation through Low-Rank Clone

Training high-performing Small Language Models (SLMs) remains costly, even with knowledge distillation and pruning from larger teacher models. Existing work often faces three key challenges: (1) information loss from hard pruning, (2) inefficient alignment of representations, and (3) underutilization of informative activations, particularly from Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs). To address these challenges, we introduce Low-Rank Clone (LRC), an efficient pre-training method that constructs SLMs aspiring to behavioral equivalence with strong teacher models. LRC trains a set of low-rank projection matrices that jointly enable soft pruning by compressing teacher weights, and activation clone by aligning student activations, including FFN signals, with those of the teacher. This unified design maximizes knowledge transfer while removing the need for explicit alignment modules. Extensive experiments with open-source teachers (e.g., Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-3B/7B-Instruct) show that LRC matches or surpasses state-of-the-art models trained on trillions of tokens--while using only 20B tokens, achieving over 1,000x training efficiency. Our codes and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/CURRENTF/LowRankClone and https://huggingface.co/collections/JitaiHao/low-rank-clone-lrc-6828389e96a93f1d4219dfaf.

Enhancing Target-unspecific Tasks through a Features Matrix

Recent developments in prompt learning of large vision-language models have significantly improved performance in target-specific tasks. However, these prompt optimizing methods often struggle to tackle the target-unspecific or generalizable tasks effectively. It may be attributed to the fact that overfitting training causes the model to forget its general knowledge having strong promotion on target-unspecific tasks. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel Features Matrix (FM) regularization approach designed to enhance these models on target-unspecific tasks. Our method extracts and leverages general knowledge, shaping a Features Matrix (FM). Specifically, the FM captures the semantics of diverse inputs from a deep and fine perspective, preserving essential general knowledge, which mitigates the risk of overfitting. Representative evaluations demonstrate that: 1) the FM is compatible with existing frameworks as a generic and flexible module, and 2) the FM significantly showcases its effectiveness in enhancing target-unspecific tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance.