C-Flat++: Towards a More Efficient and Powerful Framework for Continual Learning

Balancing sensitivity to new tasks and stability for retaining past knowledge is crucial in continual learning (CL). Recently, sharpness-aware minimization has proven effective in transfer learning and has also been adopted in continual learning (CL) to improve memory retention and learning efficiency. However, relying on zeroth-order sharpness alone may favor sharper minima over flatter ones in certain settings, leading to less robust and potentially suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we propose \textbf{C}ontinual \textbf{Flat}ness (\textbf{C-Flat}), a method that promotes flatter loss landscapes tailored for CL. C-Flat offers plug-and-play compatibility, enabling easy integration with minimal modifications to the code pipeline. Besides, we present a general framework that integrates C-Flat into all major CL paradigms and conduct comprehensive comparisons with loss-minima optimizers and flat-minima-based CL methods. Our results show that C-Flat consistently improves performance across a wide range of settings. In addition, we introduce C-Flat++, an efficient yet effective framework that leverages selective flatness-driven promotion, significantly reducing the update cost required by C-Flat. Extensive experiments across multiple CL methods, datasets, and scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/WanNaa/C-Flat.

Graph-R1: Towards Agentic GraphRAG Framework via End-to-end Reinforcement Learning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination in LLMs by incorporating external knowledge, but relies on chunk-based retrieval that lacks structural semantics. GraphRAG methods improve RAG by modeling knowledge as entity-relation graphs, but still face challenges in high construction cost, fixed one-time retrieval, and reliance on long-context reasoning and prompt design. To address these challenges, we propose Graph-R1, an agentic GraphRAG framework via end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL). It introduces lightweight knowledge hypergraph construction, models retrieval as a multi-turn agent-environment interaction, and optimizes the agent process via an end-to-end reward mechanism. Experiments on standard RAG datasets show that Graph-R1 outperforms traditional GraphRAG and RL-enhanced RAG methods in reasoning accuracy, retrieval efficiency, and generation quality.

Branch, or Layer? Zeroth-Order Optimization for Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models

Continual learning in vision-language models (VLMs) faces critical challenges in balancing parameter efficiency, memory consumption, and optimization stability. While First-Order (FO) optimization (e.g., SGD) dominate current approaches, their deterministic gradients often trap models in suboptimal local minima and incur substantial memory overhead. This paper pioneers a systematic exploration of Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization for vision-language continual learning (VLCL). We first identify the incompatibility of naive full-ZO adoption in VLCL due to modality-specific instability. To resolve this, we selectively applying ZO to either vision or language modalities while retaining FO in the complementary branch. Furthermore, we develop a layer-wise optimization paradigm that interleaves ZO and FO across network layers, capitalizing on the heterogeneous learning dynamics of shallow versus deep representations. A key theoretical insight reveals that ZO perturbations in vision branches exhibit higher variance than language counterparts, prompting a gradient sign normalization mechanism with modality-specific perturbation constraints. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing memory consumption by 89.1% compared to baselines. Code will be available upon publication.

MASTER: Multi-Agent Security Through Exploration of Roles and Topological Structures -- A Comprehensive Framework

Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) exhibit remarkable problem-solving and task planning capabilities across diverse domains due to their specialized agentic roles and collaborative interactions. However, this also amplifies the severity of security risks under MAS attacks. To address this, we introduce MASTER, a novel security research framework for MAS, focusing on diverse Role configurations and Topological structures across various scenarios. MASTER offers an automated construction process for different MAS setups and an information-flow-based interaction paradigm. To tackle MAS security challenges in varied scenarios, we design a scenario-adaptive, extensible attack strategy utilizing role and topological information, which dynamically allocates targeted, domain-specific attack tasks for collaborative agent execution. Our experiments demonstrate that such an attack, leveraging role and topological information, exhibits significant destructive potential across most models. Additionally, we propose corresponding defense strategies, substantially enhancing MAS resilience across diverse scenarios. We anticipate that our framework and findings will provide valuable insights for future research into MAS security challenges.

DecoupledESC: Enhancing Emotional Support Generation via Strategy-Response Decoupled Preference Optimization

Recent advances in Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) have improved emotional support generation by fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, common psychological errors still persist. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) shows promise in reducing such errors through pairwise preference learning, its effectiveness in ESC tasks is limited by two key challenges: (1) Entangled data structure: Existing ESC data inherently entangles psychological strategies and response content, making it difficult to construct high-quality preference pairs; and (2) Optimization ambiguity: Applying vanilla DPO to such entangled pairwise data leads to ambiguous training objectives. To address these issues, we introduce Inferential Preference Mining (IPM) to construct high-quality preference data, forming the IPM-PrefDial dataset. Building upon this data, we propose a Decoupled ESC framework inspired by Gross's Extended Process Model of Emotion Regulation, which decomposes the ESC task into two sequential subtasks: strategy planning and empathic response generation. Each was trained via SFT and subsequently enhanced by DPO to align with the psychological preference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Decoupled ESC framework outperforms joint optimization baselines, reducing preference bias and improving response quality.

Bidirectional LMs are Better Knowledge Memorizers? A Benchmark for Real-world Knowledge Injection

Despite significant advances in large language models (LLMs), their knowledge memorization capabilities remain underexplored, due to the lack of standardized and high-quality test ground. In this paper, we introduce a novel, real-world and large-scale knowledge injection benchmark that evolves continuously over time without requiring human intervention. Specifically, we propose WikiDYK, which leverages recently-added and human-written facts from Wikipedia's "Did You Know..." entries. These entries are carefully selected by expert Wikipedia editors based on criteria such as verifiability and clarity. Each entry is converted into multiple question-answer pairs spanning diverse task formats from easy cloze prompts to complex multi-hop questions. WikiDYK contains 12,290 facts and 77,180 questions, which is also seamlessly extensible with future updates from Wikipedia editors. Extensive experiments using continued pre-training reveal a surprising insight: despite their prevalence in modern LLMs, Causal Language Models (CLMs) demonstrate significantly weaker knowledge memorization capabilities compared to Bidirectional Language Models (BiLMs), exhibiting a 23% lower accuracy in terms of reliability. To compensate for the smaller scales of current BiLMs, we introduce a modular collaborative framework utilizing ensembles of BiLMs as external knowledge repositories to integrate with LLMs. Experiment shows that our framework further improves the reliability accuracy by up to 29.1%.

LearNAT: Learning NL2SQL with AST-guided Task Decomposition for Large Language Models

Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) has emerged as a critical task for enabling seamless interaction with databases. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in this domain. However, existing NL2SQL methods predominantly rely on closed-source LLMs leveraging prompt engineering, while open-source models typically require fine-tuning to acquire domain-specific knowledge. Despite these efforts, open-source LLMs struggle with complex NL2SQL tasks due to the indirect expression of user query objectives and the semantic gap between user queries and database schemas. Inspired by the application of reinforcement learning in mathematical problem-solving to encourage step-by-step reasoning in LLMs, we propose LearNAT (Learning NL2SQL with AST-guided Task Decomposition), a novel framework that improves the performance of open-source LLMs on complex NL2SQL tasks through task decomposition and reinforcement learning. LearNAT introduces three key components: (1) a Decomposition Synthesis Procedure that leverages Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) to guide efficient search and pruning strategies for task decomposition, (2) Margin-aware Reinforcement Learning, which employs fine-grained step-level optimization via DPO with AST margins, and (3) Adaptive Demonstration Reasoning, a mechanism for dynamically selecting relevant examples to enhance decomposition capabilities. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, Spider and BIRD, demonstrate that LearNAT enables a 7B-parameter open-source LLM to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4, while offering improved efficiency and accessibility.

HyperGraphRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hypergraph-Structured Knowledge Representation

While standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based on chunks, GraphRAG structures knowledge as graphs to leverage the relations among entities. However, previous GraphRAG methods are limited by binary relations: one edge in the graph only connects two entities, which cannot well model the n-ary relations among more than two entities that widely exist in reality. To address this limitation, we propose HyperGraphRAG, a novel hypergraph-based RAG method that represents n-ary relational facts via hyperedges, modeling the complicated n-ary relations in the real world. To retrieve and generate over hypergraphs, we introduce a complete pipeline with a hypergraph construction method, a hypergraph retrieval strategy, and a hypergraph-guided generation mechanism. Experiments across medicine, agriculture, computer science, and law demonstrate that HyperGraphRAG outperforms standard RAG and GraphRAG in accuracy and generation quality.

TRACE: Real-Time Multimodal Common Ground Tracking in Situated Collaborative Dialogues

We present TRACE, a novel system for live *common ground* tracking in situated collaborative tasks. With a focus on fast, real-time performance, TRACE tracks the speech, actions, gestures, and visual attention of participants, uses these multimodal inputs to determine the set of task-relevant propositions that have been raised as the dialogue progresses, and tracks the group's epistemic position and beliefs toward them as the task unfolds. Amid increased interest in AI systems that can mediate collaborations, TRACE represents an important step forward for agents that can engage with multiparty, multimodal discourse.

Generalizability of Neural Networks Minimizing Empirical Risk Based on Expressive Ability

The primary objective of learning methods is generalization. Classic uniform generalization bounds, which rely on VC-dimension or Rademacher complexity, fail to explain the significant attribute that over-parameterized models in deep learning exhibit nice generalizability. On the other hand, algorithm-dependent generalization bounds, like stability bounds, often rely on strict assumptions. To establish generalizability under less stringent assumptions, this paper investigates the generalizability of neural networks that minimize or approximately minimize empirical risk. We establish a lower bound for population accuracy based on the expressiveness of these networks, which indicates that with an adequate large number of training samples and network sizes, these networks, including over-parameterized ones, can generalize effectively. Additionally, we provide a necessary condition for generalization, demonstrating that, for certain data distributions, the quantity of training data required to ensure generalization exceeds the network size needed to represent the corresponding data distribution. Finally, we provide theoretical insights into several phenomena in deep learning, including robust generalization, importance of over-parameterization, and effect of loss function on generalization.