Providing Language Models (LMs) with relevant evidence in the context (either via retrieval or user-provided) can significantly improve their ability to provide better-grounded responses. However, recent studies have found that LMs often struggle to fully comprehend and utilize key evidence from the context, especially when it contains noise and irrelevant information—an issue common in real-world scenarios.To address this, we propose SelfElicit, an inference-time approach that helps LMs focus on key contextual evidence through self-guided explicit highlighting.By leveraging the inherent evidence-finding capabilities of LMs using the attention scores of deeper layers, our method automatically identifies and emphasizes key evidence within the input context, facilitating more accurate and grounded responses without additional training or iterative prompting.We demonstrate that SelfElicit brings consistent and significant improvement on multiple evidence-based QA tasks for various LM families while maintaining computational efficiency.Our code and documentation are available at https://github.com/ZhiningLiu1998/SelfElicit.

Missing data imputation is a critical challenge in various domains, such as healthcare and finance, where data completeness is vital for accurate analysis. Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast corpora, have shown strong potential in data generation, making them a promising tool for data imputation. However, challenges persist in designing effective prompts for a finetuning-free process and in mitigating biases and uncertainty in LLM outputs. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, LLM-Forest, which introduces a “forest” of few-shot learning LLM “trees” with their outputs aggregated via confidence-based weighted voting based on LLM self-assessment, inspired by the ensemble learning (Random Forest). This framework is established on a new concept of bipartite information graphs to identify high-quality relevant neighboring entries with both feature and value granularity. Extensive experiments on 9 real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LLM-Forest. The implementation is available at https://github.com/Xinrui17/LLM-Forest

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) critically depends on designing effective instructions, which is particularly challenging for black-box LLMs with inaccessible internal states. To this end, we introduce Learning to Instruct, a novel paradigm that formulates instruction optimization as an LLM fine-tuning objective for a white-box “instruction engineer” LLM, leveraging its rich learning capacity and vast pre-trained knowledge to enable efficient and effective instruction optimization. Within this paradigm, we propose Automatic Instruction Optimizer (AIO), a novel framework that fine-tunes a white-box LLM into a capable instruction engineer. AIO learns to optimize task-aware, human-comprehensible instructions by incorporating task nuances and feedback from the task-solving black-box LLM. To overcome the challenges of inaccessible black-box gradients and high API costs, AIO introduces a novel zeroth-order (ZO) gradient approximation mechanism guided by Thompson Sampling (TS), which reuses informative black-box LLM feedback for improved query efficiency. Extensive experiments show that AIO generally outperforms strong baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, establishing Learning to Instruct as a promising new direction for black-box LLM instruction optimization.