Information extraction is the process of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured text data.
Ontologies are essential for structuring domain knowledge, improving accessibility, sharing, and reuse. However, traditional ontology construction relies on manual annotation and conventional natural language processing (NLP) techniques, making the process labour-intensive and costly, especially in specialised fields like casting manufacturing. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers new possibilities for automating knowledge extraction. This study investigates three LLM-based approaches, including pre-trained LLM-driven method, in-context learning (ICL) method and fine-tuning method to extract terms and relations from domain-specific texts using limited data. We compare their performances and use the best-performing method to build a casting ontology that validated by domian expert.
Large Language Models (LLMs) need to be in accordance with human values-being helpful, harmless, and honest (HHH)-is important for safe deployment. Existing works use Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to align LLMs. However, these works face challenges in multi-objective settings, such as SFT leading to interference between conflicting objectives, while MoEs suffer from miscalibrated routing. We term this failure mode Axis Collapse, marked by (1) disjoint feature spaces causing catastrophic forgetting, and (2) unreliable inference from misrouted experts. To resolve this, we propose AlignX, a two-stage framework. Stage 1 uses prompt-injected fine-tuning to extract axis-specific task features, mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Stage 2 deploys a MoCaE module that calibrates expert routing using fractal and natural geometry, improving inference reliability. AlignX achieves significant gains on Alpaca (Helpfulness), BeaverTails (Harmlessness), and TruthfulQA (Honesty), with +171.5% win rate, +110.1% in truthfulness-informativeness, and 4.3% fewer safety violations. It also reduces latency and memory usage by over 35% compared to prior MoEs. Results across four LLMs validate its generalizability.
Large language models (LLMs) are advancing rapidly in medical NLP, yet Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) with its distinctive ontology, terminology, and reasoning patterns requires domain-faithful evaluation. Existing TCM benchmarks are fragmented in coverage and scale and rely on non-unified or generation-heavy scoring that hinders fair comparison. We present the LingLanMiDian (LingLan) benchmark, a large-scale, expert-curated, multi-task suite that unifies evaluation across knowledge recall, multi-hop reasoning, information extraction, and real-world clinical decision-making. LingLan introduces a consistent metric design, a synonym-tolerant protocol for clinical labels, a per-dataset 400-item Hard subset, and a reframing of diagnosis and treatment recommendation into single-choice decision recognition. We conduct comprehensive, zero-shot evaluations on 14 leading open-source and proprietary LLMs, providing a unified perspective on their strengths and limitations in TCM commonsense knowledge understanding, reasoning, and clinical decision support; critically, the evaluation on Hard subset reveals a substantial gap between current models and human experts in TCM-specialized reasoning. By bridging fundamental knowledge and applied reasoning through standardized evaluation, LingLan establishes a unified, quantitative, and extensible foundation for advancing TCM LLMs and domain-specific medical AI research. All evaluation data and code are available at https://github.com/TCMAI-BJTU/LingLan and http://tcmnlp.com.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential as conversational agents. Yet, their effectiveness remains limited by deficiencies in robust long-term memory, particularly in complex, long-term web-based services such as online emotional support. However, existing long-term dialogue benchmarks primarily focus on static and explicit fact retrieval, failing to evaluate agents in critical scenarios where user information is dispersed, implicit, and continuously evolving. To address this gap, we introduce ES-MemEval, a comprehensive benchmark that systematically evaluates five core memory capabilities: information extraction, temporal reasoning, conflict detection, abstention, and user modeling, in long-term emotional support settings, covering question answering, summarization, and dialogue generation tasks. To support the benchmark, we also propose EvoEmo, a multi-session dataset for personalized long-term emotional support that captures fragmented, implicit user disclosures and evolving user states. Extensive experiments on open-source long-context, commercial, and retrieval-augmented (RAG) LLMs show that explicit long-term memory is essential for reducing hallucinations and enabling effective personalization. At the same time, RAG improves factual consistency but struggles with temporal dynamics and evolving user states. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of current paradigms and motivate more robust integration of memory and retrieval for long-term personalized dialogue systems.
Infographics are widely used to communicate information with a combination of text, icons, and data visualizations, but once exported as images their content is locked into pixels, making updates, localization, and reuse expensive. We describe \textsc{Images2Slides}, an API-based pipeline that converts a static infographic (PNG/JPG) into a native, editable Google Slides slide by extracting a region-level specification with a vision-language model (VLM), mapping pixel geometry into slide coordinates, and recreating elements using the Google Slides batch update API. The system is model-agnostic and supports multiple VLM backends via a common JSON region schema and deterministic postprocessing. On a controlled benchmark of 29 programmatically generated infographic slides with known ground-truth regions, \textsc{Images2Slides} achieves an overall element recovery rate of $0.989\pm0.057$ (text: $0.985\pm0.083$, images: $1.000\pm0.000$), with mean text transcription error $\mathrm{CER}=0.033\pm0.149$ and mean layout fidelity $\mathrm{IoU}=0.364\pm0.161$ for text regions and $0.644\pm0.131$ for image regions. We also highlight practical engineering challenges in reconstruction, including text size calibration and non-uniform backgrounds, and describe failure modes that guide future work.
Adapting large pretrained models to new tasks efficiently and continually is crucial for real-world deployment but remains challenging due to catastrophic forgetting and the high cost of retraining. While parameter-efficient tuning methods like low rank adaptation (LoRA) reduce computational demands, they lack mechanisms for strict continual learning and knowledge integration, without relying on data replay, or multiple adapters. We propose Share, a novel approach to parameter efficient continual finetuning that learns and dynamically updates a single, shared low-rank subspace, enabling seamless adaptation across multiple tasks and modalities. Share constructs a foundational subspace that extracts core knowledge from past tasks and incrementally integrates new information by identifying essential subspace directions. Knowledge from each new task is incorporated into this evolving subspace, facilitating forward knowledge transfer, while minimizing catastrophic interference. This approach achieves up to 100x parameter reduction and 281x memory savings over traditional LoRA methods, maintaining performance comparable to jointly trained models. A single Share model can replace hundreds of task-specific LoRA adapters, supporting scalable, asynchronous continual learning. Experiments across image classification, natural language understanding, 3D pose estimation, and text-to-image generation validate its effectiveness, making Share a practical and scalable solution for lifelong learning in large-scale AI systems.
Proprietary large language models (LLMs) embody substantial economic value and are generally exposed only as black-box APIs, yet adversaries can still exploit their outputs to extract knowledge via distillation. Existing defenses focus exclusively on text-based distillation, leaving the important logit-based distillation largely unexplored. In this work, we analyze this problem and present an effective solution from an information-theoretic perspective. We characterize distillation-relevant information in teacher outputs using the conditional mutual information (CMI) between teacher logits and input queries conditioned on ground-truth labels. This quantity captures contextual information beneficial for model extraction, motivating us to defend distillation via CMI minimization. Guided by our theoretical analysis, we propose learning a transformation matrix that purifies the original outputs to enhance distillation resistance. We further derive a CMI-inspired anti-distillation objective to optimize this transformation, which effectively removes distillation-relevant information while preserving output utility. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs and strong distillation algorithms demonstrate that the proposed method significantly degrades distillation performance while preserving task accuracy, effectively protecting models' intellectual property.
Most existing CLIP-style medical vision--language pretraining methods rely on global or local alignment with substantial paired data. However, global alignment is easily dominated by non-diagnostic information, while local alignment fails to integrate key diagnostic evidence. As a result, learning reliable diagnostic representations becomes difficult, which limits their applicability in medical scenarios with limited paired data. To address this issue, we propose an LLM-Guided Diagnostic Evidence Alignment method (LGDEA), which shifts the pretraining objective toward evidence-level alignment that is more consistent with the medical diagnostic process. Specifically, we leverage LLMs to extract key diagnostic evidence from radiology reports and construct a shared diagnostic evidence space, enabling evidence-aware cross-modal alignment and allowing LGDEA to effectively exploit abundant unpaired medical images and reports, thereby substantially alleviating the reliance on paired data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves consistent and significant improvements on phrase grounding, image--text retrieval, and zero-shot classification, and even rivals pretraining methods that rely on substantial paired data.
Large Language Models (LLMs) promise to accelerate discovery by reasoning across the expanding scientific landscape. Yet, the challenge is no longer access to information but connecting it in meaningful, domain-spanning ways. In materials science, where innovation demands integrating concepts from molecular chemistry to mechanical performance, this is especially acute. Neither humans nor single-agent LLMs can fully contend with this torrent of information, with the latter often prone to hallucinations. To address this bottleneck, we introduce a multi-agent framework guided by large-scale knowledge graphs to find sustainable substitutes for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)-chemicals currently under intense regulatory scrutiny. Agents in the framework specialize in problem decomposition, evidence retrieval, design parameter extraction, and graph traversal, uncovering latent connections across distinct knowledge pockets to support hypothesis generation. Ablation studies show that the full multi-agent pipeline outperforms single-shot prompting, underscoring the value of distributed specialization and relational reasoning. We demonstrate that by tailoring graph traversal strategies, the system alternates between exploitative searches focusing on domain-critical outcomes and exploratory searches surfacing emergent cross-connections. Illustrated through the exemplar of biomedical tubing, the framework generates sustainable PFAS-free alternatives that balance tribological performance, thermal stability, chemical resistance, and biocompatibility. This work establishes a framework combining knowledge graphs with multi-agent reasoning to expand the materials design space, showcasing several initial design candidates to demonstrate the approach.
Time series forecasting has traditionally been formulated as a model-centric, static, and single-pass prediction problem that maps historical observations to future values. While this paradigm has driven substantial progress, it proves insufficient in adaptive and multi-turn settings where forecasting requires informative feature extraction, reasoning-driven inference, iterative refinement, and continual adaptation over time. In this paper, we argue for agentic time series forecasting (ATSF), which reframes forecasting as an agentic process composed of perception, planning, action, reflection, and memory. Rather than focusing solely on predictive models, ATSF emphasizes organizing forecasting as an agentic workflow that can interact with tools, incorporate feedback from outcomes, and evolve through experience accumulation. We outline three representative implementation paradigms -- workflow-based design, agentic reinforcement learning, and a hybrid agentic workflow paradigm -- and discuss the opportunities and challenges that arise when shifting from model-centric prediction to agentic forecasting. Together, this position aims to establish agentic forecasting as a foundation for future research at the intersection of time series forecasting.