TOOL4POI: A Tool-Augmented LLM Framework for Next POI Recommendation

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is a fundamental task in location-based services. While recent advances leverage Large Language Model (LLM) for sequential modeling, existing LLM-based approaches face two key limitations: (i) strong reliance on the contextual completeness of user histories, resulting in poor performance on out-of-history (OOH) scenarios; (ii) limited scalability, due to the restricted context window of LLMs, which limits their ability to access and process a large number of candidate POIs. To address these challenges, we propose Tool4POI, a novel tool-augmented framework that enables LLMs to perform open-set POI recommendation through external retrieval and reasoning. Tool4POI consists of three key modules: preference extraction module, multi-turn candidate retrieval module, and reranking module, which together summarize long-term user interests, interact with external tools to retrieve relevant POIs, and refine final recommendations based on recent behaviors. Unlike existing methods, Tool4POI requires no task-specific fine-tuning and is compatible with off-the-shelf LLMs in a plug-and-play manner. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that Tool4POI substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 40% accuracy on challenging OOH scenarios where existing methods fail, and delivering average improvements of 20% and 30% on Acc@5 and Acc@10, respectively.

ArenaBencher: Automatic Benchmark Evolution via Multi-Model Competitive Evaluation

Benchmarks are central to measuring the capabilities of large language models and guiding model development, yet widespread data leakage from pretraining corpora undermines their validity. Models can match memorized content rather than demonstrate true generalization, which inflates scores, distorts cross-model comparisons, and misrepresents progress. We introduce ArenaBencher, a model-agnostic framework for automatic benchmark evolution that updates test cases while preserving comparability. Given an existing benchmark and a diverse pool of models to be evaluated, ArenaBencher infers the core ability of each test case, generates candidate question-answer pairs that preserve the original objective, verifies correctness and intent with an LLM as a judge, and aggregates feedback from multiple models to select candidates that expose shared weaknesses. The process runs iteratively with in-context demonstrations that steer generation toward more challenging and diagnostic cases. We apply ArenaBencher to math problem solving, commonsense reasoning, and safety domains and show that it produces verified, diverse, and fair updates that uncover new failure modes, increase difficulty while preserving test objective alignment, and improve model separability. The framework provides a scalable path to continuously evolve benchmarks in step with the rapid progress of foundation models.

A Survey on Responsible LLMs: Inherent Risk, Malicious Use, and Mitigation Strategy

While large language models (LLMs) present significant potential for supporting numerous real-world applications and delivering positive social impacts, they still face significant challenges in terms of the inherent risk of privacy leakage, hallucinated outputs, and value misalignment, and can be maliciously used for generating toxic content and unethical purposes after been jailbroken. Therefore, in this survey, we present a comprehensive review of recent advancements aimed at mitigating these issues, organized across the four phases of LLM development and usage: data collecting and pre-training, fine-tuning and alignment, prompting and reasoning, and post-processing and auditing. We elaborate on the recent advances for enhancing the performance of LLMs in terms of privacy protection, hallucination reduction, value alignment, toxicity elimination, and jailbreak defenses. In contrast to previous surveys that focus on a single dimension of responsible LLMs, this survey presents a unified framework that encompasses these diverse dimensions, providing a comprehensive view of enhancing LLMs to better serve real-world applications.