Right Question is Already Half the Answer: Fully Unsupervised LLM Reasoning Incentivization

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in challenging tasks such as mathematical reasoning, existing methods to enhance reasoning ability predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) on reasoning-specific data after pre-training. However, these approaches critically depend on external supervisions--such as human labelled reasoning traces, verified golden answers, or pre-trained reward models--which limits scalability and practical applicability. In this work, we propose Entropy Minimized Policy Optimization (EMPO), which makes an early attempt at fully unsupervised LLM reasoning incentivization. EMPO does not require any supervised information for incentivizing reasoning capabilities (i.e., neither verifiable reasoning traces, problems with golden answers, nor additional pre-trained reward models). By continuously minimizing the predictive entropy of LLMs on unlabeled user queries in a latent semantic space, EMPO enables purely self-supervised evolution of reasoning capabilities with strong flexibility and practicality. Our experiments demonstrate competitive performance of EMPO on both mathematical reasoning and free-form commonsense reasoning tasks. Specifically, without any supervised signals, EMPO boosts the accuracy of Qwen2.5-Math-7B Base from 30.7\% to 48.1\% on mathematical benchmarks and improves truthfulness accuracy of Qwen2.5-7B Instruct from 87.16\% to 97.25\% on TruthfulQA.

InversionGNN: A Dual Path Network for Multi-Property Molecular Optimization

Exploring chemical space to find novel molecules that simultaneously satisfy multiple properties is crucial in drug discovery. However, existing methods often struggle with trading off multiple properties due to the conflicting or correlated nature of chemical properties. To tackle this issue, we introduce InversionGNN framework, an effective yet sample-efficient dual-path graph neural network (GNN) for multi-objective drug discovery. In the direct prediction path of InversionGNN, we train the model for multi-property prediction to acquire knowledge of the optimal combination of functional groups. Then the learned chemical knowledge helps the inversion generation path to generate molecules with required properties. In order to decode the complex knowledge of multiple properties in the inversion path, we propose a gradient-based Pareto search method to balance conflicting properties and generate Pareto optimal molecules. Additionally, InversionGNN is able to search the full Pareto front approximately in discrete chemical space. Comprehensive experimental evaluations show that InversionGNN is both effective and sample-efficient in various discrete multi-objective settings including drug discovery.

Measuring Diversity in Synthetic Datasets

Large language models (LLMs) are widely adopted to generate synthetic datasets for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as text classification and summarization. However, accurately measuring the diversity of these synthetic datasets-an aspect crucial for robust model performance-remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce DCScore, a novel method for measuring synthetic dataset diversity from a classification perspective. Specifically, DCScore formulates diversity evaluation as a sample classification task, leveraging mutual relationships among samples. We further provide theoretical verification of the diversity-related axioms satisfied by DCScore, highlighting its role as a principled diversity evaluation method. Experimental results on synthetic datasets reveal that DCScore enjoys a stronger correlation with multiple diversity pseudo-truths of evaluated datasets, underscoring its effectiveness. Moreover, both empirical and theoretical evidence demonstrate that DCScore substantially reduces computational costs compared to existing approaches. Code is available at: https://github.com/BlueWhaleLab/DCScore.

COME: Test-time adaption by Conservatively Minimizing Entropy

Machine learning models must continuously self-adjust themselves for novel data distribution in the open world. As the predominant principle, entropy minimization (EM) has been proven to be a simple yet effective cornerstone in existing test-time adaption (TTA) methods. While unfortunately its fatal limitation (i.e., overconfidence) tends to result in model collapse. For this issue, we propose to Conservatively Minimize the Entropy (COME), which is a simple drop-in replacement of traditional EM to elegantly address the limitation. In essence, COME explicitly models the uncertainty by characterizing a Dirichlet prior distribution over model predictions during TTA. By doing so, COME naturally regularizes the model to favor conservative confidence on unreliable samples. Theoretically, we provide a preliminary analysis to reveal the ability of COME in enhancing the optimization stability by introducing a data-adaptive lower bound on the entropy. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on commonly used benchmarks, showing significant improvements in terms of classification accuracy and uncertainty estimation under various settings including standard, life-long and open-world TTA, i.e., up to $34.5\%$ improvement on accuracy and $15.1\%$ on false positive rate.

The Best of Both Worlds: On the Dilemma of Out-of-distribution Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for model trustworthiness which aims to sensitively identify semantic OOD samples and robustly generalize for covariate-shifted OOD samples. However, we discover that the superior OOD detection performance of state-of-the-art methods is achieved by secretly sacrificing the OOD generalization ability. Specifically, the classification accuracy of these models could deteriorate dramatically when they encounter even minor noise. This phenomenon contradicts the goal of model trustworthiness and severely restricts their applicability in real-world scenarios. What is the hidden reason behind such a limitation? In this work, we theoretically demystify the ``\textit{sensitive-robust}'' dilemma that lies in many existing OOD detection methods. Consequently, a theory-inspired algorithm is induced to overcome such a dilemma. By decoupling the uncertainty learning objective from a Bayesian perspective, the conflict between OOD detection and OOD generalization is naturally harmonized and a dual-optimal performance could be expected. Empirical studies show that our method achieves superior performance on standard benchmarks. To our best knowledge, this work is the first principled OOD detection method that achieves state-of-the-art OOD detection performance without compromising OOD generalization ability. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/QingyangZhang/DUL}{https://github.com/QingyangZhang/DUL}.

ConML: A Universal Meta-Learning Framework with Task-Level Contrastive Learning

Meta-learning enables learning systems to adapt quickly to new tasks, similar to humans. To emulate this human-like rapid learning and enhance alignment and discrimination abilities, we propose ConML, a universal meta-learning framework that can be applied to various meta-learning algorithms without relying on specific model architectures nor target models. The core of ConML is task-level contrastive learning, which extends contrastive learning from the representation space in unsupervised learning to the model space in meta-learning. By leveraging task identity as an additional supervision signal during meta-training, we contrast the outputs of the meta-learner in the model space, minimizing inner-task distance (between models trained on different subsets of the same task) and maximizing inter-task distance (between models from different tasks). We demonstrate that ConML integrates seamlessly with optimization-based, metric-based, and amortization-based meta-learning algorithms, as well as in-context learning, resulting in performance improvements across diverse few-shot learning tasks.

Probing the Safety Response Boundary of Large Language Models via Unsafe Decoding Path Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are implicit troublemakers. While they provide valuable insights and assist in problem-solving, they can also potentially serve as a resource for malicious activities. Implementing safety alignment could mitigate the risk of LLMs generating harmful responses. We argue that: even when an LLM appears to successfully block harmful queries, there may still be hidden vulnerabilities that could act as ticking time bombs. To identify these underlying weaknesses, we propose to use a cost value model as both a detector and an attacker. Trained on external or self-generated harmful datasets, the cost value model could successfully influence the original safe LLM to output toxic content in decoding process. For instance, LLaMA-2-chat 7B outputs 39.18% concrete toxic content, along with only 22.16% refusals without any harmful suffixes. These potential weaknesses can then be exploited via prompt optimization such as soft prompts on images. We name this decoding strategy: Jailbreak Value Decoding (JVD), emphasizing that seemingly secure LLMs may not be as safe as we initially believe. They could be used to gather harmful data or launch covert attacks.

UniMoT: Unified Molecule-Text Language Model with Discrete Token Representation

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse tasks has driven the research community to extend their capabilities to molecular applications. However, most molecular LLMs employ adapter-based architectures that do not treat molecule and text modalities equally and lack a supervision signal for the molecule modality. To address these issues, we introduce UniMoT, a Unified Molecule-Text LLM adopting a tokenizer-based architecture that expands the vocabulary of LLM with molecule tokens. Specifically, we introduce a Vector Quantization-driven tokenizer that incorporates a Q-Former to bridge the modality gap between molecule and text. This tokenizer transforms molecules into sequences of molecule tokens with causal dependency, encapsulating high-level molecular and textual information. Equipped with this tokenizer, UniMoT can unify molecule and text modalities under a shared token representation and an autoregressive training paradigm, enabling it to interpret molecules as a foreign language and generate them as text. Following a four-stage training scheme, UniMoT emerges as a multi-modal generalist capable of performing both molecule-to-text and text-to-molecule tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniMoT achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of molecule comprehension and generation tasks.

HIGHT: Hierarchical Graph Tokenization for Graph-Language Alignment

Recently there has been a surge of interest in extending the success of large language models (LLMs) to graph modality, such as social networks and molecules. As LLMs are predominantly trained with 1D text data, most existing approaches adopt a graph neural network to represent a graph as a series of node tokens and feed these tokens to LLMs for graph-language alignment. Despite achieving some successes, existing approaches have overlooked the hierarchical structures that are inherent in graph data. Especially, in molecular graphs, the high-order structural information contains rich semantics of molecular functional groups, which encode crucial biochemical functionalities of the molecules. We establish a simple benchmark showing that neglecting the hierarchical information in graph tokenization will lead to subpar graph-language alignment and severe hallucination in generated outputs. To address this problem, we propose a novel strategy called HIerarchical GrapH Tokenization (HIGHT). HIGHT employs a hierarchical graph tokenizer that extracts and encodes the hierarchy of node, motif, and graph levels of informative tokens to improve the graph perception of LLMs. HIGHT also adopts an augmented graph-language supervised fine-tuning dataset, enriched with the hierarchical graph information, to further enhance the graph-language alignment. Extensive experiments on 7 molecule-centric benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of HIGHT in reducing hallucination by 40%, as well as significant improvements in various molecule-language downstream tasks.

One Fits All: Learning Fair Graph Neural Networks for Various Sensitive Attributes

Recent studies have highlighted fairness issues in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), where they produce discriminatory predictions against specific protected groups categorized by sensitive attributes such as race and age. While various efforts to enhance GNN fairness have made significant progress, these approaches are often tailored to specific sensitive attributes. Consequently, they necessitate retraining the model from scratch to accommodate changes in the sensitive attribute requirement, resulting in high computational costs. To gain deeper insights into this issue, we approach the graph fairness problem from a causal modeling perspective, where we identify the confounding effect induced by the sensitive attribute as the underlying reason. Motivated by this observation, we formulate the fairness problem in graphs from an invariant learning perspective, which aims to learn invariant representations across environments. Accordingly, we propose a graph fairness framework based on invariant learning, namely FairINV, which enables the training of fair GNNs to accommodate various sensitive attributes within a single training session. Specifically, FairINV incorporates sensitive attribute partition and trains fair GNNs by eliminating spurious correlations between the label and various sensitive attributes. Experimental results on several real-world datasets demonstrate that FairINV significantly outperforms state-of-the-art fairness approaches, underscoring its effectiveness. Our code is available via: https://github.com/ZzoomD/FairINV/.