Beyond a Million Tokens: Benchmarking and Enhancing Long-Term Memory in LLMs

Evaluating the abilities of large language models (LLMs) for tasks that require long-term memory and thus long-context reasoning, for example in conversational settings, is hampered by the existing benchmarks, which often lack narrative coherence, cover narrow domains, and only test simple recall-oriented tasks. This paper introduces a comprehensive solution to these challenges. First, we present a novel framework for automatically generating long (up to 10M tokens), coherent, and topically diverse conversations, accompanied by probing questions targeting a wide range of memory abilities. From this, we construct BEAM, a new benchmark comprising 100 conversations and 2,000 validated questions. Second, to enhance model performance, we propose LIGHT-a framework inspired by human cognition that equips LLMs with three complementary memory systems: a long-term episodic memory, a short-term working memory, and a scratchpad for accumulating salient facts. Our experiments on BEAM reveal that even LLMs with 1M token context windows (with and without retrieval-augmentation) struggle as dialogues lengthen. In contrast, LIGHT consistently improves performance across various models, achieving an average improvement of 3.5%-12.69% over the strongest baselines, depending on the backbone LLM. An ablation study further confirms the contribution of each memory component.

Doc2Query++: Topic-Coverage based Document Expansion and its Application to Dense Retrieval via Dual-Index Fusion

Document expansion (DE) via query generation tackles vocabulary mismatch in sparse retrieval, yet faces limitations: uncontrolled generation producing hallucinated or redundant queries with low diversity; poor generalization from in-domain training (e.g., MS MARCO) to out-of-domain data like BEIR; and noise from concatenation harming dense retrieval. While Large Language Models (LLMs) enable cross-domain query generation, basic prompting lacks control, and taxonomy-based methods rely on domain-specific structures, limiting applicability. To address these challenges, we introduce Doc2Query++, a DE framework that structures query generation by first inferring a document's latent topics via unsupervised topic modeling for cross-domain applicability, then using hybrid keyword selection to create a diverse and relevant keyword set per document. This guides LLM not only to leverage keywords, which ensure comprehensive topic representation, but also to reduce redundancy through diverse, relevant terms. To prevent noise from query appending in dense retrieval, we propose Dual-Index Fusion strategy that isolates text and query signals, boosting performance in dense settings. Extensive experiments show Doc2Query++ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving substantial gains in MAP, nDCG@10 and Recall@100 across diverse datasets on both sparse and dense retrieval.

Leveraging Large Language Models to Identify Conversation Threads in Collaborative Learning

Understanding how ideas develop and flow in small-group conversations is critical for analyzing collaborative learning. A key structural feature of these interactions is threading, the way discourse talk naturally organizes into interwoven topical strands that evolve over time. While threading has been widely studied in asynchronous text settings, detecting threads in synchronous spoken dialogue remains challenging due to overlapping turns and implicit cues. At the same time, large language models (LLMs) show promise for automating discourse analysis but often struggle with long-context tasks that depend on tracing these conversational links. In this paper, we investigate whether explicit thread linkages can improve LLM-based coding of relational moves in group talk. We contribute a systematic guidebook for identifying threads in synchronous multi-party transcripts and benchmark different LLM prompting strategies for automated threading. We then test how threading influences performance on downstream coding of conversational analysis frameworks, that capture core collaborative actions such as agreeing, building, and eliciting. Our results show that providing clear conversational thread information improves LLM coding performance and underscores the heavy reliance of downstream analysis on well-structured dialogue. We also discuss practical trade-offs in time and cost, emphasizing where human-AI hybrid approaches can yield the best value. Together, this work advances methods for combining LLMs and robust conversational thread structures to make sense of complex, real-time group interactions.

MTOS: A LLM-Driven Multi-topic Opinion Simulation Framework for Exploring Echo Chamber Dynamics

The polarization of opinions, information segregation, and cognitive biases on social media have attracted significant academic attention. In real-world networks, information often spans multiple interrelated topics, posing challenges for opinion evolution and highlighting the need for frameworks that simulate interactions among topics. Existing studies based on large language models (LLMs) focus largely on single topics, limiting the capture of cognitive transfer in multi-topic, cross-domain contexts. Traditional numerical models, meanwhile, simplify complex linguistic attitudes into discrete values, lacking interpretability, behavioral consistency, and the ability to integrate multiple topics. To address these issues, we propose Multi-topic Opinion Simulation (MTOS), a social simulation framework integrating multi-topic contexts with LLMs. MTOS leverages LLMs alongside short-term and long-term memory, incorporates multiple user-selection interaction mechanisms and dynamic topic-selection strategies, and employs a belief decay mechanism to enable perspective updates across topics. We conduct extensive experiments on MTOS, varying topic numbers, correlation types, and performing ablation studies to assess features such as group polarization and local consistency. Results show that multi-topic settings significantly alter polarization trends: positively correlated topics amplify echo chambers, negatively correlated topics inhibit them, and irrelevant topics also mitigate echo chamber effects through resource competition. Compared with numerical models, LLM-based agents realistically simulate dynamic opinion changes, reproduce linguistic features of news texts, and capture complex human reasoning, improving simulation interpretability and system stability.

From Amateur to Master: Infusing Knowledge into LLMs via Automated Curriculum Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at general tasks but underperform in specialized domains like economics and psychology, which require deep, principled understanding. To address this, we introduce ACER (Automated Curriculum-Enhanced Regimen) that transforms generalist models into domain experts without sacrificing their broad capabilities. ACER first synthesizes a comprehensive, textbook-style curriculum by generating a table of contents for a subject and then creating question-answer (QA) pairs guided by Bloom's taxonomy. This ensures systematic topic coverage and progressively increasing difficulty. The resulting synthetic corpus is used for continual pretraining with an interleaved curriculum schedule, aligning learning across both content and cognitive dimensions. Experiments with Llama 3.2 (1B and 3B) show significant gains in specialized MMLU subsets. In challenging domains like microeconomics, where baselines struggle, ACER boosts accuracy by 5 percentage points. Across all target domains, we observe a consistent macro-average improvement of 3 percentage points. Notably, ACER not only prevents catastrophic forgetting but also facilitates positive cross-domain knowledge transfer, improving performance on non-target domains by 0.7 points. Beyond MMLU, ACER enhances performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks like ARC and GPQA by over 2 absolute points, while maintaining stable performance on general reasoning tasks. Our results demonstrate that ACER offers a scalable and effective recipe for closing critical domain gaps in LLMs.

AutoSurvey2: Empowering Researchers with Next Level Automated Literature Surveys

The rapid growth of research literature, particularly in large language models (LLMs), has made producing comprehensive and current survey papers increasingly difficult. This paper introduces autosurvey2, a multi-stage pipeline that automates survey generation through retrieval-augmented synthesis and structured evaluation. The system integrates parallel section generation, iterative refinement, and real-time retrieval of recent publications to ensure both topical completeness and factual accuracy. Quality is assessed using a multi-LLM evaluation framework that measures coverage, structure, and relevance in alignment with expert review standards. Experimental results demonstrate that autosurvey2 consistently outperforms existing retrieval-based and automated baselines, achieving higher scores in structural coherence and topical relevance while maintaining strong citation fidelity. By combining retrieval, reasoning, and automated evaluation into a unified framework, autosurvey2 provides a scalable and reproducible solution for generating long-form academic surveys and contributes a solid foundation for future research on automated scholarly writing. All code and resources are available at https://github.com/annihi1ation/auto_research.

From Outliers to Topics in Language Models: Anticipating Trends in News Corpora

This paper examines how outliers, often dismissed as noise in topic modeling, can act as weak signals of emerging topics in dynamic news corpora. Using vector embeddings from state-of-the-art language models and a cumulative clustering approach, we track their evolution over time in French and English news datasets focused on corporate social responsibility and climate change. The results reveal a consistent pattern: outliers tend to evolve into coherent topics over time across both models and languages.

From Delegates to Trustees: How Optimizing for Long-Term Interests Shapes Bias and Alignment in LLM

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising accuracy in predicting survey responses and policy preferences, which has increased interest in their potential to represent human interests in various domains. Most existing research has focused on behavioral cloning, effectively evaluating how well models reproduce individuals' expressed preferences. Drawing on theories of political representation, we highlight an underexplored design trade-off: whether AI systems should act as delegates, mirroring expressed preferences, or as trustees, exercising judgment about what best serves an individual's interests. This trade-off is closely related to issues of LLM sycophancy, where models can encourage behavior or validate beliefs that may be aligned with a user's short-term preferences, but is detrimental to their long-term interests. Through a series of experiments simulating votes on various policy issues in the U.S. context, we apply a temporal utility framework that weighs short and long-term interests (simulating a trustee role) and compare voting outcomes to behavior-cloning models (simulating a delegate). We find that trustee-style predictions weighted toward long-term interests produce policy decisions that align more closely with expert consensus on well-understood issues, but also show greater bias toward models' default stances on topics lacking clear agreement. These findings reveal a fundamental trade-off in designing AI systems to represent human interests. Delegate models better preserve user autonomy but may diverge from well-supported policy positions, while trustee models can promote welfare on well-understood issues yet risk paternalism and bias on subjective topics.

PerCoR: Evaluating Commonsense Reasoning in Persian via Multiple-Choice Sentence Completion

We introduced PerCoR (Persian Commonsense Reasoning), the first large-scale Persian benchmark for commonsense reasoning. PerCoR contains 106K multiple-choice sentence-completion problems drawn from more than forty news, cultural, and other web sources. We introduce a novel conjunction-based segmentation strategy to generate coherent sentence-completion pairs, enabling broad topical and structural diversity. To create challenging distractors, we propose DRESS-AF (Distractor Ranking via Embedding Similarity Scoring and Adversarial Filtering), a generation-free adversarial filtering method that selects distractors from the pool of gold continuations while maximising model confusion. Human annotators score 89% on PerCoR, while OpenAI-o3 achieves the highest performance at 92.18%, followed closely by Claude-Sonnet-3.7 (91.17%). The strongest open-source model, DeepSeek-R1, reaches 82.51%, underscoring both the dataset's difficulty and the remaining performance gap in Persian commonsense reasoning. We further show that DRESS-AF transfers to the English HellaSwag benchmark, increasing its difficulty without hurting human solvability. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MCINext/PerCoR.

Real Deep Research for AI, Robotics and Beyond

With the rapid growth of research in AI and robotics now producing over 10,000 papers annually it has become increasingly difficult for researchers to stay up to date. Fast evolving trends, the rise of interdisciplinary work, and the need to explore domains beyond one's expertise all contribute to this challenge. To address these issues, we propose a generalizable pipeline capable of systematically analyzing any research area: identifying emerging trends, uncovering cross domain opportunities, and offering concrete starting points for new inquiry. In this work, we present Real Deep Research (RDR) a comprehensive framework applied to the domains of AI and robotics, with a particular focus on foundation models and robotics advancements. We also briefly extend our analysis to other areas of science. The main paper details the construction of the RDR pipeline, while the appendix provides extensive results across each analyzed topic. We hope this work sheds light for researchers working in the field of AI and beyond.