The knowledge base in a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system is typically assembled once and never revised, even though the facts a query requires are often fragmented across documents and buried in irrelevant content. We argue that the knowledge base should be treated as a trainable component and propose WriteBack-RAG, a framework that uses labeled examples to identify where retrieval succeeds, isolate the relevant documents, and distill them into compact knowledge units that are indexed alongside the original corpus. Because the method modifies only the corpus, it can be applied once as an offline preprocessing step and combined with any RAG pipeline. Across four RAG methods, six benchmarks, and two LLM backbones, WriteBack-RAG improves every evaluated setting, with gains averaging +2.14%. Cross-method transfer experiments further show that the distilled knowledge benefits RAG pipelines other than the one used to produce it, confirming that the improvement resides in the corpus itself.
Time series forecasting is critical across finance, healthcare, and cloud computing, yet progress is constrained by a fundamental bottleneck: the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce \textsc{QuitoBench}, a regime-balanced benchmark for time series forecasting with coverage across eight trend$\times$seasonality$\times$forecastability (TSF) regimes, designed to capture forecasting-relevant properties rather than application-defined domain labels. The benchmark is built upon \textsc{Quito}, a billion-scale time series corpus of application traffic from Alipay spanning nine business domains. Benchmarking 10 models from deep learning, foundation models, and statistical baselines across 232,200 evaluation instances, we report four key findings: (i) a context-length crossover where deep learning models lead at short context ($L=96$) but foundation models dominate at long context ($L \ge 576$); (ii) forecastability is the dominant difficulty driver, producing a $3.64 \times$ MAE gap across regimes; (iii) deep learning models match or surpass foundation models at $59 \times$ fewer parameters; and (iv) scaling the amount of training data provides substantially greater benefit than scaling model size for both model families. These findings are validated by strong cross-benchmark and cross-metric consistency. Our open-source release enables reproducible, regime-aware evaluation for time series forecasting research.
The landscape of extremely low-resource machine translation (MT) is characterized by perplexing variability in reported performance, often making results across different language pairs difficult to contextualize. For researchers focused on specific language groups -- such as ancient languages -- it is nearly impossible to determine if breakthroughs reported in other contexts (e.g., native African or American languages) result from superior methodologies or are merely artifacts of benchmark collection. To address this problem, we introduce the FRED Difficulty Metrics, which include the Fertility Ratio (F), Retrieval Proxy (R), Pre-training Exposure (E), and Corpus Diversity (D) and serve as dataset-intrinsic metrics to contextualize reported scores. These metrics reveal that a significant portion of result variability is explained by train-test overlap and pre-training exposure rather than model capability. Additionally, we identify that some languages -- particularly extinct and non-Latin indigenous languages -- suffer from poor tokenization coverage (high token fertility), highlighting a fundamental limitation of transferring models from high-resource languages that lack a shared vocabulary. By providing these indices alongside performance scores, we enable more transparent evaluation of cross-lingual transfer and provide a more reliable foundation for the XLR MT community.
Islamic inheritance (Ilm al-Mawarith) is a multi-stage legal reasoning task requiring the identification of eligible heirs, resolution of blocking rules (hajb), assignment of fixed and residual shares, handling of adjustments such as awl and radd, and generation of a consistent final distribution. The task is further complicated by variations across legal schools and civil-law codifications, requiring models to operate under explicit legal configurations. We present a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline for this setting, combining rule-grounded synthetic data generation, hybrid retrieval (dense and BM25) with cross-encoder reranking, and schema-constrained output validation. A symbolic inheritance calculator is used to generate a large high-quality synthetic corpus with full intermediate reasoning traces, ensuring legal and numerical consistency. The proposed system achieves a MIR-E score of 0.935 and ranks first on the official QIAS 2026 blind-test leaderboard. Results demonstrate that retrieval-grounded, schema-aware generation significantly improves reliability in high-precision Arabic legal reasoning tasks.
System prompt instructions that cooperate in English compete in Spanish, with the same semantic content, but opposite interaction topology. We present instruction-level ablation experiments across four languages and four models showing that this topology inversion is mediated by social register: the imperative mood carries different obligatory force across speech communities, and models trained on multilingual data have learned these conventions. Declarative rewriting of a single instruction block reduces cross-linguistic variance by 81% (p = 0.029, permutation test). Rewriting three of eleven imperative blocks shifts Spanish instruction topology from competitive to cooperative, with spillover effects on unrewritten blocks. These findings suggest that models process instructions as social acts, not technical specifications: "NEVER do X" is an exercise of authority whose force is language-dependent, while "X: disabled" is a factual description that transfers across languages. If register mediates instruction-following at inference time, it plausibly does so during training. We state this as a testable prediction: constitutional AI principles authored in imperative mood may create language-dependent alignment. Corpus: 22 hand-authored probes against a production system prompt decomposed into 56 blocks.
Clinical documentation is a critical factor for patient safety, diagnosis, and continuity of care. The administrative burden of EHRs is a significant factor in physician burnout. This is a critical issue for low-resource languages, including Finnish. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a domain-aligned natural language processing (NLP); large language model for medical transcription in Finnish by fine-tuning LLaMA 3.1-8B on a small validated corpus of simulated clinical conversations by students at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. The fine-tuning process for medical transcription used a controlled preprocessing and optimization approach. The fine-tuning effectiveness was evaluated by sevenfold cross-validation. The evaluation metrics for fine-tuned LLaMA 3.1-8B were BLEU = 0.1214, ROUGE-L = 0.4982, and BERTScore F1 = 0.8230. The results showed a low n-gram overlap but a strong semantic similarity with reference transcripts. This study indicate that fine-tuning can be an effective approach for translation of medical discourse in spoken Finnish and support the feasibility of fine-tuning a privacy-oriented domain-specific large language model for clinical documentation in Finnish. Beside that provide directions for future work.
In-context Learning enables training-free adaptation via demonstrations but remains highly sensitive to example selection and formatting. In unified multimodal models spanning understanding and generation, this sensitivity is exacerbated by cross-modal interference and varying cognitive demands. Consequently, In-context Learning efficacy is often non-monotonic and highly task-dependent. To diagnose these behaviors, we introduce a six-level capability-oriented taxonomy that categorizes the functional role of demonstrations from basic perception to high-order discernment. Guided by this cognitive framework, we construct UniICL-760K, a large-scale corpus featuring curated 8-shot In-context Learning episodes across 15 subtasks, alongside UniICL-Bench for rigorous, controlled evaluation. As an architectural intervention to stabilize few-shot adaptation, we propose the Context-Adaptive Prototype Modulator, a lightweight, plug-and-play module. Evaluations on UniICL-Bench show that our approach yields highly competitive unified results, outperforming larger-parameter multimodal large language model baselines on most understanding In-context Learning tasks. Data and code will be available soon at https://github.com/xuyicheng-zju/UniICL.
The remarkable progress of reinforcement learning (RL) is intrinsically tied to the environments used to train and evaluate artificial agents. Moving beyond traditional qualitative reviews, this work presents a large-scale, data-driven empirical investigation into the evolution of RL environments. By programmatically processing a massive corpus of academic literature and rigorously distilling over 2,000 core publications, we propose a quantitative methodology to map the transition from isolated physical simulations to generalist, language-driven foundation agents. Implementing a novel, multi-dimensional taxonomy, we systematically analyze benchmarks against diverse application domains and requisite cognitive capabilities. Our automated semantic and statistical analysis reveals a profound, data-verified paradigm shift: the bifurcation of the field into a "Semantic Prior" ecosystem dominated by Large Language Models (LLMs) and a "Domain-Specific Generalization" ecosystem. Furthermore, we characterize the "cognitive fingerprints" of these distinct domains to uncover the underlying mechanisms of cross-task synergy, multi-domain interference, and zero-shot generalization. Ultimately, this study offers a rigorous, quantitative roadmap for designing the next generation of Embodied Semantic Simulators, bridging the gap between continuous physical control and high-level logical reasoning.
Synthetic insider threat benchmarks face a consistency problem: corpora generated without an external factual constraint cannot rule out cross-artifact contradictions. The CERT dataset -- the field's canonical benchmark -- is also static, lacks cross-surface correlation scenarios, and predates the LLM era. We present OrgForge-IT, a verifiable synthetic benchmark in which a deterministic simulation engine maintains ground truth and language models generate only surface prose, making cross-artifact consistency an architectural guarantee. The corpus spans 51 simulated days, 2,904 telemetry records at a 96.4% noise rate, and four detection scenarios designed to defeat single-surface and single-day triage strategies across three threat classes and eight injectable behaviors. A ten-model leaderboard reveals several findings: (1) triage and verdict accuracy dissociate - eight models achieve identical triage F1=0.80 yet split between verdict F1=1.0 and 0.80; (2) baseline false-positive rate is a necessary companion to verdict F1, with models at identical verdict accuracy differing by two orders of magnitude on triage noise; (3) victim attribution in the vishing scenario separates tiers - Tier A models exonerate the compromised account holder while Tier B models detect the attack but misclassify the victim; (4) rigid multi-signal thresholds structurally exclude single-surface negligent insiders, demonstrating the necessity of parallel, threat-class-specific triage pipelines; and (5) agentic software-engineering training acts as a force multiplier for multi-day temporal correlation, but only when paired with frontier-level parameter scale. Finally, prompt sensitivity analysis reveals that unstructured prompts induce vocabulary hallucination, motivating a two-track scoring framework separating prompt adherence from reasoning capability. OrgForge-IT is open source under the MIT license.
Recent advances in generative recommendation have leveraged pretrained LLMs by formulating sequential recommendation as autoregressive generation over a unified token space comprising language tokens and itemic identifiers, where each item is represented by a compact sequence of discrete tokens, namely Semantic IDs (SIDs). This SID-based formulation enables efficient decoding over large-scale item corpora and provides a natural interface for LLM-based recommenders to leverage rich world knowledge. Meanwhile, breakthroughs in LLM reasoning motivate reasoning-enhanced recommendation, yet effective reasoning over SIDs remains underexplored and challenging. Itemic tokens are not natively meaningful to LLMs; moreover, recommendation-oriented SID reasoning is hard to evaluate, making high-quality supervision scarce. To address these challenges, we propose SIDReasoner, a two-stage framework that elicits reasoning over SIDs by strengthening SID--language alignment to unlock transferable LLM reasoning, rather than relying on large amounts of recommendation-specific reasoning traces. Concretely, SIDReasoner first enhances SID-language alignment via multi-task training on an enriched SID-centered corpus synthesized by a stronger teacher model, grounding itemic tokens in diverse semantic and behavioral contexts. Building on this enhanced alignment, SIDReasoner further improves recommendation reasoning through outcome-driven reinforced optimization, which guides the model toward effective reasoning trajectories without requiring explicit reasoning annotations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our reasoning-augmented SID-based generative recommendation. Beyond accuracy, the results highlight the broader potential of large reasoning models for generative recommendation, including improved interpretability and cross-domain generalization.