Large language models are trained on static corpora but deployed in a dynamic world, leading to systematic temporal failures—from mis-anchored expressions and inconsistent timelines to hallucinated future events, stale world knowledge, and related issues. Existing surveys on temporal knowledge graphs, retrieval-augmented generation, hallucination, and knowledge editing cover only isolated fragments of this space: they are typically task-centric and do not offer a holistic theoretical account of how frozen LLMs represent and reason about time. This survey provides a unified perspective on temporal reasoning in LLMs. We formalize temporal queries in an information-theoretic framework based on the parametric reachability of temporal premises and answers, which induces four temporal information regimes corresponding to internal reasoning, answer recency, premise anchoring, and genuine world indeterminacy. Under this lens, we delineate the landscape of temporal failure modes, consolidate methodologies for diagnosing temporal deficiencies, and synthesize mitigation approaches into a coherent design space. Together, these contributions provide a systematic roadmap toward reliable time-aware large language models.

Knowledge within large language models (LLMs) inevitably lags behind an evolving world, motivating knowledge editing methods that update facts without expensive retraining. In multi-hop knowledge editing, models must not only recall updated facts but also correctly propagate them through multi-step reasoning chains. However, most existing approaches rely on unidirectional, feed-forward pipelines, decomposing questions and retrieving edited facts in a rigid hop-wise sequence. This design is brittle: a minor retrieval error or logical mismatch at an early hop can become a silent failure that cascades to the final answer without an explicit recovery mechanism. To address this limitation, we propose Critic-Guided Multi-Agent Reasoning for Knowledge Editing (CARE), a framework for closed-loop post-edit reasoning. A Critic agent performs chain-level verification by checking both global coherence and step-wise correctness, and triggers bounded backtracking for iterative self-correction, while a Selector agent supplies high-fidelity, low-noise candidate pools from the edit store to enable effective revision. Experiments on MQuAKE-2002 and MQuAKE-hard demonstrate that CARE effectively mitigates error propagation, achieving a new state-of-the-art.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) via semantic parsing. However, existing retrieval-augmented approaches typically retrieve entities and relations in isolation based solely on semantic similarity, ignoring the structural information of the Knowledge Base (KB) and the question. To address this limitation, we propose SELF-KBQA (Subgraph-Guided Executable Logical Form Generation), a novel framework that empowers LLMs to generate logical forms conditioned on structurally aligned and semantically relevant subgraphs. Specifically, we introduce a structure-aware subgraph retrieval stage that ranks candidate subgraphs by aligning them with the question’s structure, along with semantic relevance. Subsequently, we employ a token-budgeted evidence condensation strategy to distill the top-ranked subgraphs into compact contexts for the generation stage. Extensive experiments on GrailQA, WebQSP, and GraphQuestions demonstrate that SELF-KBQA achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Existing code large language models (LLMs) often rely on large-scale instruction data distilled from proprietary LLMs for fine-tuning, which typically incurs high costs. In this paper, we explore the potential of small-scale open-source LLMs (e.g., 7B) as synthesizers for high-quality code instruction data construction. We first observe that the data synthesis capability of small-scale LLMs can be enhanced by training on a few superior data synthesis samples from proprietary LLMs. Building on this, we propose a novel iterative self-distillation approach to bootstrap small-scale LLMs, transforming them into powerful synthesizers that reduce reliance on proprietary LLMs and minimize costs. Concretely, in each iteration, to obtain diverse and high-quality self-distilled data, we design multi-checkpoint sampling and multi-aspect scoring strategies for initial data selection. Furthermore, to identify the most influential samples, we introduce a gradient-based influence estimation method for final data filtering. Based on the code instruction datasets from the small-scale synthesizers, we develop SCoder, a family of code generation models fine-tuned from DeepSeek-Coder. SCoder models achieve state-of-the-art code generation capabilities, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to extract accurate answers from the Knowledge Base (KB). Traditional Semantic Parsing (SP)-based methods are widely used but struggle with complex queries. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in improving KBQA performance. However, the challenge of generating error-free logical forms remains, as skeleton, topic Entity, and relation Errors still frequently occur. To address these challenges, we propose CompKBQA(Component-wise Task Decomposition for Knowledge Base Question Answering), a novel framework that optimizes the process of fine-tuning a LLM for generating logical forms by enabling the LLM to progressively learn relevant sub-tasks like skeleton generation, topic entity generation, and relevant relations generation. Additionally, we propose R³, which retrieves and incorporates KB information into the process of logical form generation. Experimental evaluations on two benchmark KBQA datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, demonstrate that CompKBQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the importance of task decomposition and KB-aware learning.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in code generation, yet they still face challenges when tackling tasks that extend beyond their basic capabilities. Recently, the concept of self-debugging has been proposed as a way to enhance code generation performance by leveraging execution feedback from tests. However, the availability of high-quality tests in real-world scenarios is often limited. In this context, self-debugging with self-generated tests emerges as a promising solution, though its limitations and practical potential have not been fully explored. To address this gap, we investigate the efficacy of self-debugging in code generation tasks. We propose and analyze two distinct paradigms for the self-debugging process: post-execution and in-execution self-debugging. Our findings reveal that post-execution self-debugging struggles with the test bias introduced by self-generated tests, which can lead to misleading feedback. In contrast, in-execution self-debugging enables LLMs to mitigate this bias and leverage intermediate states during program execution. By focusing on runtime information rather than relying solely on potentially flawed self-generated tests, this approach demonstrates significant promise for improving the robustness and accuracy of LLMs in code generation tasks.

In event argument extraction (EAE), a promising approach involves jointly encoding text and argument roles, and performing multiple token linking operations. This approach further falls into two categories. One extracts arguments within a single event, while the other attempts to extract arguments from multiple events simultaneously. However, the former lacks to leverage cross-event information and the latter requires tougher predictions with longer encoded role sequences and extra linking operations. In this paper, we design a novel separation-and-fusion paradigm to separately acquire cross-event information and fuse it into the argument extraction of a target event. Following the paradigm, we propose a novel multiple token linking model named Sep2F, which can effectively build event correlations via roles and preserve the simple linking predictions of single-event extraction. In particular, we employ one linking module to extract arguments for the target event and another to aggregate the role information of multiple events. More importantly, we propose a novel two-fold fusion module to ensure that the aggregated cross-event information serves EAE well. We evaluate our proposed model on sentence-level and document-level datasets, including ACE05, RAMS, WikiEvents and MLEE. The extensive experimental results indicate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art EAE models on all the datasets.

Recently, significant progress has been made in employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for semantic parsing to address Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) tasks. Previous work utilize LLMs to generate query statements on Knowledge Bases (KBs) for retrieving answers. However, LLMs often generate incorrect query statements due to the lack of relevant knowledge in the previous methods. To address this, we propose a framework called Augmenting Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs with Graph Structures in Knowledge Base Question Answering (ARG-KBQA), which retrieves question-related graph structures to improve the performance of LLMs. Unlike other methods that directly retrieve relations or triples from KBs, we introduce an unsupervised two-stage ranker to perform multi-hop beam search on KBs, which could provide LLMs with more relevant information to the questions. Experimental results demonstrate that ARG-KBQA sets a new state-of-the-art on GrailQA and WebQSP under the few-shot setting. Additionally, ARG-KBQA significantly outperforms previous few-shot methods on questions with unseen query statement in the training data.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) can provide explainable reasoning for large language models (LLMs), alleviating their hallucination problem. Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) is a typical benchmark to evaluate the methods enhancing LLMs with KG. Previous methods on KG-enhanced LLM for KGQA either enhance LLMs with KG retrieval in a single round or perform multi-hop KG reasoning in multiple rounds with LLMs. Both of them conduct retrieving and reasoning based solely on the whole original question, without any processing to the question. To tackle this limitation, we propose a framework of KG-enhanced LLM based on question decomposition and atomic retrieval, called KELDaR. We introduce question decomposition tree as the framework for LLM reasoning. This approach extracts the implicit information of reasoning steps within complex questions, serving as a guide to facilitate atomic retrieval on KG targeting the atomic-level simple questions at leaves of the tree. Additionally, we design strategies for atomic retrieval, which extract and retrieve question-relevant KG subgraphs to assist the few-shot LLM in answering atomic-level questions. Experiments on KGQA datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing reasoning-based baselines. And in a low-cost setting without additional training or fine-tuning, our framework achieves competitive or superior results compared to most existing training-based baselines.

Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) is an emerging task in emotion cause analysis, which extracts potential emotion-cause pairs from an emotional document. Most recent studies use end-to-end methods to tackle the ECPE task. However, these methods either suffer from a label sparsity problem or fail to model complicated relations between emotions and causes. Furthermore, they all do not consider explicit semantic information of clauses. To this end, we transform the ECPE task into a document-level machine reading comprehension (MRC) task and propose a Multi-turn MRC framework with Rethink mechanism (MM-R). Our framework can model complicated relations between emotions and causes while avoiding generating the pairing matrix (the leading cause of the label sparsity problem). Besides, the multi-turn structure can fuse explicit semantic information flow between emotions and causes. Extensive experiments on the benchmark emotion cause corpus demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.