Abstract:Multi-document Multi-entity Question Answering inherently demands models to track implicit logic between multiple entities across scattered documents. However, existing Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks suffer from critical limitations: standard RAG's vector similarity-based coarse-grained retrieval often omits critical facts, graph-based RAG fails to efficiently integrate fragmented complex relationship networks, and both lack schema awareness, leading to inadequate cross-document evidence chain construction and inaccurate entity relationship deduction. To address these challenges, we propose DocSage, an end-to-end agentic framework that integrates dynamic schema discovery, structured information extraction, and schema-aware relational reasoning with error guarantees. DocSage operates through three core modules: (1) A schema discovery module dynamically infers query-specific minimal joinable schemas to capture essential entities and relationships; (2) An extraction module transforms unstructured text into semantically coherent relational tables, enhanced by error-aware correction mechanisms to reduce extraction errors; (3) A reasoning module performs multi-hop relational reasoning over structured tables, leveraging schema awareness to efficiently align cross-document entities and aggregate evidence. This agentic design offers three key advantages: precise fact localization via SQL-powered indexing, natural support for cross-document entity joins through relational tables, and mitigated LLM attention diffusion via structured representation. Evaluations on two MDMEQA benchmarks demonstrate that DocSage significantly outperforms state-of-the-art long-context LLMs and RAG systems, achieving more than 27% accuracy improvements respectively.
Abstract:Analyzing Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) from large volumes of data is critical for drafting and publishing comprehensive CTI reports. This process usually follows a three-stage workflow -- triage, deep search and TI drafting. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising route toward automation, existing benchmarks still have limitations. These benchmarks often consist of tasks that do not reflect real-world analyst workflows. For example, human analysts rarely receive tasks in the form of multiple-choice questions. Also, existing benchmarks often rely on model-centric metrics that emphasize lexical overlap rather than actionable, detailed insights essential for security analysts. Moreover, they typically fail to cover the complete three-stage workflow. To address these issues, we introduce CyberThreat-Eval, which is collected from the daily CTI workflow of a world-leading company. This expert-annotated benchmark assesses LLMs on practical tasks across all three stages as mentioned above. It utilizes analyst-centric metrics that measure factual accuracy, content quality, and operational costs. Our evaluation using this benchmark reveals important insights into the limitations of current LLMs. For example, LLMs often lack the nuanced expertise required to handle complex details and struggle to distinguish between correct and incorrect information. To address these challenges, the CTI workflow incorporates both external ground-truth databases and human expert knowledge. TRA allows human experts to iteratively provide feedback for continuous improvement. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/xschen-beb/CyberThreat-Eval}{\texttt{GitHub}} and \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/xse/CyberThreat-Eval}{\texttt{HuggingFace}}.
Abstract:Document-to-table (Doc2Table) extraction derives structured tables from unstructured documents under a target schema, enabling reliable and verifiable SQL-based data analytics. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in flexible information extraction, their ability to produce precisely structured tables remains insufficiently understood, particularly for indirect extraction that requires complex capabilities such as reasoning and conflict resolution. Existing benchmarks neither explicitly distinguish nor comprehensively cover the diverse capabilities required in Doc2Table extraction. We argue that a capability-aware benchmark is essential for systematic evaluation. However, constructing such benchmarks using human-annotated document-table pairs is costly, difficult to scale, and limited in capability coverage. To address this, we adopt a reverse Table2Doc paradigm and design a multi-agent synthesis workflow to generate documents from ground-truth tables. Based on this approach, we present DTBench, a synthetic benchmark that adopts a proposed two-level taxonomy of Doc2Table capabilities, covering 5 major categories and 13 subcategories. We evaluate several mainstream LLMs on DTBench, and demonstrate substantial performance gaps across models, as well as persistent challenges in reasoning, faithfulness, and conflict resolution. DTBench provides a comprehensive testbed for data generation and evaluation, facilitating future research on Doc2Table extraction. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/ZJU-DAILY/DTBench.
Abstract:Graph models are fundamental to data analysis in domains rich with complex relationships. Text-to-Graph-Query-Language (Text-to-GQL) systems act as a translator, converting natural language into executable graph queries. This capability allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to directly analyze and manipulate graph data, posi-tioning them as powerful agent infrastructures for Graph Database Management System (GDBMS). Despite recent progress, existing datasets are often limited in domain coverage, supported graph query languages, or evaluation scope. The advancement of Text-to-GQL systems is hindered by the lack of high-quality benchmark datasets and evaluation methods to systematically compare model capabilities across different graph query languages and domains. In this work, we present Text2GQL-Bench, a unified Text-to-GQL benchmark designed to address these limitations. Text2GQL-Bench couples a multi-GQL dataset that has 178,184 (Question, Query) pairs spanning 13 domains, with a scalable construction framework that generates datasets in different domains, question abstraction levels, and GQLs with heterogeneous resources. To support compre-hensive assessment, we introduce an evaluation method that goes beyond a single end-to-end metric by jointly reporting grammatical validity, similarity, semantic alignment, and execution accuracy. Our evaluation uncovers a stark dialect gap in ISO-GQL generation: even strong LLMs achieve only at most 4% execution accuracy (EX) in zero-shot settings, though a fixed 3-shot prompt raises accuracy to around 50%, the grammatical validity remains lower than 70%. Moreover, a fine-tuned 8B open-weight model reaches 45.1% EX, and 90.8% grammatical validity, demonstrating that most of the performance jump is unlocked by exposure to sufficient ISO-GQL examples.
Abstract:Column type annotation is vital for tasks like data cleaning, integration, and visualization. Recent solutions rely on resource-intensive language models fine-tuned on well-annotated columns from a particular set of tables, i.e., a source data lake. In this paper, we study whether we can adapt an existing pre-trained LM-based model to a new (i.e., target) data lake to minimize the annotations required on the new data lake. However, challenges include the source-target knowledge gap, selecting informative target data, and fine-tuning without losing shared knowledge exist. We propose LakeHopper, a framework that identifies and resolves the knowledge gap through LM interactions, employs a cluster-based data selection scheme for unannotated columns, and uses an incremental fine-tuning mechanism that gradually adapts the source model to the target data lake. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of LakeHopper on two different data lake transfers under both low-resource and high-resource settings.
Abstract:Reward design remains a critical bottleneck in visual reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation. In simulated environments, rewards are conventionally designed based on the distance to a target position. However, such precise positional information is often unavailable in real-world visual settings due to sensory and perceptual limitations. In this study, we propose a method that implicitly infers spatial distances through keypoints extracted from images. Building on this, we introduce Reward Learning with Anticipation Model (ReLAM), a novel framework that automatically generates dense, structured rewards from action-free video demonstrations. ReLAM first learns an anticipation model that serves as a planner and proposes intermediate keypoint-based subgoals on the optimal path to the final goal, creating a structured learning curriculum directly aligned with the task's geometric objectives. Based on the anticipated subgoals, a continuous reward signal is provided to train a low-level, goal-conditioned policy under the hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework with provable sub-optimality bound. Extensive experiments on complex, long-horizon manipulation tasks show that ReLAM significantly accelerates learning and achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Abstract:Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external data, with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) offering crucial information for question answering. Traditional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods rely on semantic parsing, which typically retrieves knowledge strictly necessary for answer generation, thus often suffer from low coverage due to rigid schema requirements and semantic ambiguity. We present KERAG, a novel KG-based RAG pipeline that enhances QA coverage by retrieving a broader subgraph likely to contain relevant information. Our retrieval-filtering-summarization approach, combined with fine-tuned LLMs for Chain-of-Thought reasoning on knowledge sub-graphs, reduces noises and improves QA for both simple and complex questions. Experiments demonstrate that KERAG surpasses state-of-the-art solutions by about 7% in quality and exceeds GPT-4o (Tool) by 10-21%.
Abstract:Foundation models exhibit remarkable generalization across diverse tasks, largely driven by the characteristics of their training data. Recent data-centric methods like pruning and compression aim to optimize training but offer limited theoretical insight into how data properties affect generalization, especially the data characteristics in sample scaling. Traditional perspectives further constrain progress by focusing predominantly on data quantity and training efficiency, often overlooking structural aspects of data quality. In this study, we introduce SCAR, a principled scheme for characterizing the intrinsic structural properties of datasets across four key measures: Scale, Coverage, Authenticity, and Richness. Unlike prior data-centric measures, SCAR captures stable characteristics that remain invariant under dataset scaling, providing a robust and general foundation for data understanding. Leveraging these structural properties, we introduce Foundation Data-a minimal subset that preserves the generalization behavior of the full dataset without requiring model-specific retraining. We model single-modality tasks as step functions and estimate the distribution of the foundation data size to capture step-wise generalization bias across modalities in the target multi-modal dataset. Finally, we develop a SCAR-guided data completion strategy based on this generalization bias, which enables efficient, modality-aware expansion of modality-specific characteristics in multimodal datasets. Experiments across diverse multi-modal datasets and model architectures validate the effectiveness of SCAR in predicting data utility and guiding data acquisition. Code is available at https://github.com/McAloma/SCAR.
Abstract:Transformers exhibit proficiency in capturing long-range dependencies, whereas State Space Models (SSMs) facilitate linear-time sequence modeling. Notwithstanding their synergistic potential, the integration of these architectures presents a significant challenge, primarily attributable to a fundamental incongruity in their respective positional encoding mechanisms: Transformers rely on explicit Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE), while SSMs leverage implicit positional representations via convolutions. This divergence often precipitates discontinuities and suboptimal performance. To address this impediment, we propose a unified rotary position embedding (Unified RoPE) methodology, thereby establishing a consistent positional encoding framework for both self-attention and state-space components. Using this Unified RoPE, we introduce TransXSSM, a hybrid architecture that coherently integrates the Transformer and SSM layers under this unified positional encoding scheme. At a 4K sequence length, TransXSSM exhibits training and inference speeds that are 42.3\% and 29.5\% faster, respectively, relative to standard Transformer models. It also delivers higher accuracy: under comparable settings, it surpasses a Transformer baseline by over 4\% on language modeling benchmarks.TransXSSM furthermore scales more effectively: TransXSSM-1.3B gains 7.22\% in average accuracy over its 320M version (versus about 6\% gains for equivalent Transformers or SSMs). Our results show that unified positional encoding resolves positional incompatibility in hybrid models, enabling efficient, high-performance long-context modeling.
Abstract:Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation methods can effectively transfer reasoning abilities to base models but suffer from two major limitations: excessive verbosity of reasoning traces and inadequate adaptability to problem difficulty. Long reasoning traces significantly increase inference costs, and uniform-length solutions prevent base models from learning adaptive reasoning strategies. To address these issues, we propose a difficulty-aware prompting (DAP) method to dynamically shorten reasoning traces without performance loss. In our approach, a large teacher model first judges each problem's difficulty and then rewrites its reasoning traces to an appropriate shorter length, yielding concise yet complete reasoning traces. Leveraging the DAP pipeline, we curate a distilled dataset called LiteCoT consisting of 100K concise reasoning examples, with solutions averaging only 720 tokens (an order of magnitude shorter than typical CoTs). Using LiteCoT, we distilled a new family of reasoning models called Liter (1.5B, 7B, and 32B) based on the Qwen2.5 architecture. Experiments show that a student model fine-tuned on just 100K of these difficulty-pruned CoT samples outperforms a model distilled on 800K original Long CoT samples, while significantly reducing training and inference costs. Our method also generalizes well: across 11 diverse benchmarks, the shorter difficulty-aware CoTs achieve equal or better accuracy than Long chains, using far fewer tokens. For example, on the challenging AIME24 exam, our approach reaches $74.2\%$ Pass@1 using only about 5K inference tokens, surpassing other methods that consume many more tokens. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Evanwu1125/LiteCoT.