Stop When Further Reasoning Won't Help: Attention-State Adaptive Generation in Reasoning Models

By incorporating test-time compute scaling, large reasoning models (LRMs) can solve complex problems through explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning processes. However, they often suffer from overthinking, resulting in redundant token outputs and degraded accuracy. Current methods to mitigate this issue remain limited: training-based approaches require substantial computational resources, while training-free methods rely on well-crafted prompts or unreliable confidence signals. In this work, we investigate early stopping from the perspective of attention distributions and propose a simple method, ASAG, which infers the model's reasoning state and adaptively adjusts the generation strategy. The proposed framework is training-free and plug-and-play, enabling seamless integration into existing LRMs. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements across mainstream LRMs with varying parameter scales, including the DeepSeek-R1-Distill and Qwen3 series. Specifically, ASAG improves average accuracy by 3.2% while reducing the number of generated tokens by nearly 40% across all reasoning tasks on Qwen3-8B.

Mitigating KG Quality Issues: A Robust Multi-Hop GraphRAG Retrieval Framework

Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation enhances multi-hop reasoning but relies on imperfect knowledge graphs that frequently suffer from inherent quality issues. Current approaches often overlook these issues, consequently struggling with retrieval drift driven by spurious noise and retrieval hallucinations stemming from incomplete information. To address these challenges, we propose C2RAG (Constraint-Checked Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a framework aimed at robust multi-hop retrieval over the imperfect KG. First, C2RAG performs constraint-based retrieval by decomposing each query into atomic constraint triples, with using fine-grained constraint anchoring to filter candidates for suppressing retrieval drift. Second, C2RAG introduces a sufficiency check to explicitly prevent retrieval hallucinations by deciding whether the current evidence is sufficient to justify structural propagation, and activating textual recovery otherwise. Extensive experiments on multi-hop benchmarks demonstrate that C2RAG consistently outperforms the latest baselines by 3.4\% EM and 3.9\% F1 on average, while exhibiting improved robustness under KG issues.

GraphCogent: Overcoming LLMs' Working Memory Constraints via Multi-Agent Collaboration in Complex Graph Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) show promising performance on small-scale graph reasoning tasks but fail when handling real-world graphs with complex queries. This phenomenon stems from LLMs' inability to effectively process complex graph topology and perform multi-step reasoning simultaneously. To address these limitations, we propose GraphCogent, a collaborative agent framework inspired by human Working Memory Model that decomposes graph reasoning into specialized cognitive processes: sense, buffer, and execute. The framework consists of three modules: Sensory Module standardizes diverse graph text representations via subgraph sampling, Buffer Module integrates and indexes graph data across multiple formats, and Execution Module combines tool calling and model generation for efficient reasoning. We also introduce Graph4real, a comprehensive benchmark contains with four domains of real-world graphs (Web, Social, Transportation, and Citation) to evaluate LLMs' graph reasoning capabilities. Our Graph4real covers 21 different graph reasoning tasks, categorized into three types (Structural Querying, Algorithmic Reasoning, and Predictive Modeling tasks), with graph scales that are 10 times larger than existing benchmarks. Experiments show that Llama3.1-8B based GraphCogent achieves a 50% improvement over massive-scale LLMs like DeepSeek-R1 (671B). Compared to state-of-the-art agent-based baseline, our framework outperforms by 20% in accuracy while reducing token usage by 80% for in-toolset tasks and 30% for out-toolset tasks. Code will be available after review.

EmoAttack: Emotion-to-Image Diffusion Models for Emotional Backdoor Generation

Text-to-image diffusion models can create realistic images based on input texts. Users can describe an object to convey their opinions visually. In this work, we unveil a previously unrecognized and latent risk of using diffusion models to generate images; we utilize emotion in the input texts to introduce negative contents, potentially eliciting unfavorable emotions in users. Emotions play a crucial role in expressing personal opinions in our daily interactions, and the inclusion of maliciously negative content can lead users astray, exacerbating negative emotions. Specifically, we identify the emotion-aware backdoor attack (EmoAttack) that can incorporate malicious negative content triggered by emotional texts during image generation. We formulate such an attack as a diffusion personalization problem to avoid extensive model retraining and propose the EmoBooth. Unlike existing personalization methods, our approach fine-tunes a pre-trained diffusion model by establishing a mapping between a cluster of emotional words and a given reference image containing malicious negative content. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we built a dataset and conducted extensive analysis and discussion about its effectiveness. Given consumers' widespread use of diffusion models, uncovering this threat is critical for society.