EMULATE: A Multi-Agent Framework for Determining the Veracity of Atomic Claims by Emulating Human Actions

Determining the veracity of atomic claims is an imperative component of many recently proposed fact-checking systems. Many approaches tackle this problem by first retrieving evidence by querying a search engine and then performing classification by providing the evidence set and atomic claim to a large language model, but this process deviates from what a human would do in order to perform the task. Recent work attempted to address this issue by proposing iterative evidence retrieval, allowing for evidence to be collected several times and only when necessary. Continuing along this line of research, we propose a novel claim verification system, called EMULATE, which is designed to better emulate human actions through the use of a multi-agent framework where each agent performs a small part of the larger task, such as ranking search results according to predefined criteria or evaluating webpage content. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks show clear improvements over prior work, demonstrating the efficacy of our new multi-agent framework.

On Path to Multimodal Generalist: General-Level and General-Bench

The Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) is currently experiencing rapid growth, driven by the advanced capabilities of LLMs. Unlike earlier specialists, existing MLLMs are evolving towards a Multimodal Generalist paradigm. Initially limited to understanding multiple modalities, these models have advanced to not only comprehend but also generate across modalities. Their capabilities have expanded from coarse-grained to fine-grained multimodal understanding and from supporting limited modalities to arbitrary ones. While many benchmarks exist to assess MLLMs, a critical question arises: Can we simply assume that higher performance across tasks indicates a stronger MLLM capability, bringing us closer to human-level AI? We argue that the answer is not as straightforward as it seems. This project introduces General-Level, an evaluation framework that defines 5-scale levels of MLLM performance and generality, offering a methodology to compare MLLMs and gauge the progress of existing systems towards more robust multimodal generalists and, ultimately, towards AGI. At the core of the framework is the concept of Synergy, which measures whether models maintain consistent capabilities across comprehension and generation, and across multiple modalities. To support this evaluation, we present General-Bench, which encompasses a broader spectrum of skills, modalities, formats, and capabilities, including over 700 tasks and 325,800 instances. The evaluation results that involve over 100 existing state-of-the-art MLLMs uncover the capability rankings of generalists, highlighting the challenges in reaching genuine AI. We expect this project to pave the way for future research on next-generation multimodal foundation models, providing a robust infrastructure to accelerate the realization of AGI. Project page: https://generalist.top/

VistaDPO: Video Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Direct Preference Optimization for Large Video Models

Large Video Models (LVMs) built upon Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in video understanding but often suffer from misalignment with human intuition and video hallucination issues. To address these challenges, we introduce VistaDPO, a novel framework for Video Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Direct Preference Optimization. VistaDPO enhances text-video preference alignment across three hierarchical levels: i) Instance Level, aligning overall video content with responses; ii) Temporal Level, aligning video temporal semantics with event descriptions; and iii) Perceptive Level, aligning spatial objects with language tokens. Given the lack of datasets for fine-grained video-language preference alignment, we construct VistaDPO-7k, a dataset of 7.2K QA pairs annotated with chosen and rejected responses, along with spatial-temporal grounding information such as timestamps, keyframes, and bounding boxes. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as Video Hallucination, Video QA, and Captioning performance tasks demonstrate that VistaDPO significantly improves the performance of existing LVMs, effectively mitigating video-language misalignment and hallucination. The code and data are available at https://github.com/HaroldChen19/VistaDPO.

Aristotle: Mastering Logical Reasoning with A Logic-Complete Decompose-Search-Resolve Framework

In the context of large language models (LLMs), current advanced reasoning methods have made impressive strides in various reasoning tasks. However, when it comes to logical reasoning tasks, major challenges remain in both efficacy and efficiency. This is rooted in the fact that these systems fail to fully leverage the inherent structure of logical tasks throughout the reasoning processes such as decomposition, search, and resolution. To address this, we propose a logic-complete reasoning framework, Aristotle, with three key components: Logical Decomposer, Logical Search Router, and Logical Resolver. In our framework, symbolic expressions and logical rules are comprehensively integrated into the entire reasoning process, significantly alleviating the bottlenecks of logical reasoning, i.e., reducing sub-task complexity, minimizing search errors, and resolving logical contradictions. The experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that Aristotle consistently outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning frameworks in both accuracy and efficiency, particularly excelling in complex logical reasoning scenarios. We will open-source all our code at https://github.com/Aiden0526/Aristotle.

Effi-Code: Unleashing Code Efficiency in Language Models

As the use of large language models (LLMs) for code generation becomes more prevalent in software development, it is critical to enhance both the efficiency and correctness of the generated code. Existing methods and models primarily focus on the correctness of LLM-generated code, ignoring efficiency. In this work, we present Effi-Code, an approach to enhancing code generation in LLMs that can improve both efficiency and correctness. We introduce a Self-Optimization process based on Overhead Profiling that leverages open-source LLMs to generate a high-quality dataset of correct and efficient code samples. This dataset is then used to fine-tune various LLMs. Our method involves the iterative refinement of generated code, guided by runtime performance metrics and correctness checks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on the Effi-Code show significant improvements in both code correctness and efficiency across task types. For example, the pass@1 of DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B-Instruct generated code increases from \textbf{43.3\%} to \textbf{76.8\%}, and the average execution time for the same correct tasks decreases by \textbf{30.5\%}. Effi-Code offers a scalable and generalizable approach to improving code generation in AI systems, with potential applications in software development, algorithm design, and computational problem-solving. The source code of Effi-Code was released in \url{https://github.com/huangd1999/Effi-Code}.

PAD: Personalized Alignment at Decoding-Time

Aligning with personalized preferences, which vary significantly across cultural, educational, and political differences, poses a significant challenge due to the computational costs and data demands of traditional alignment methods. In response, this paper presents Personalized Alignment at Decoding-time (PAD), a novel framework designed to align LLM outputs with diverse personalized preferences during the inference phase, eliminating the need for additional training. By introducing a unique personalized reward modeling strategy, this framework decouples the text generation process from personalized preferences, facilitating the generation of generalizable token-level personalized rewards. The PAD algorithm leverages these rewards to guide the decoding process, dynamically tailoring the base model's predictions to personalized preferences. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PAD not only outperforms existing training-based alignment methods in terms of aligning with diverse preferences but also shows significant generalizability to preferences unseen during training and scalability across different base models. This work advances the capability of LLMs to meet user needs in real-time applications, presenting a substantial step forward in personalized LLM alignment.

PanoSent: A Panoptic Sextuple Extraction Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

While existing Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has received extensive effort and advancement, there are still gaps in defining a more holistic research target seamlessly integrating multimodality, conversation context, fine-granularity, and also covering the changing sentiment dynamics as well as cognitive causal rationales. This paper bridges the gaps by introducing a multimodal conversational ABSA, where two novel subtasks are proposed: 1) Panoptic Sentiment Sextuple Extraction, panoramically recognizing holder, target, aspect, opinion, sentiment, rationale from multi-turn multi-party multimodal dialogue. 2) Sentiment Flipping Analysis, detecting the dynamic sentiment transformation throughout the conversation with the causal reasons. To benchmark the tasks, we construct PanoSent, a dataset annotated both manually and automatically, featuring high quality, large scale, multimodality, multilingualism, multi-scenarios, and covering both implicit and explicit sentiment elements. To effectively address the tasks, we devise a novel Chain-of-Sentiment reasoning framework, together with a novel multimodal large language model (namely Sentica) and a paraphrase-based verification mechanism. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our methods over strong baselines, validating the efficacy of all our proposed methods. The work is expected to open up a new era for the ABSA community, and thus all our codes and data are open at https://PanoSent.github.io/