Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Yet in the domain of tool learning, the lack of RMs specifically designed for function-calling tasks has limited progress toward more capable agentic AI. We introduce ToolRM, a family of lightweight reward models tailored for general tool-use scenarios. To build these models, we propose a novel pipeline that constructs high-quality pairwise preference data using rule-based scoring and multidimensional sampling. This yields ToolPref-Pairwise-30K, a diverse, balanced, and challenging preference dataset that supports both generative and discriminative reward modeling. We also introduce TRBench_BFCL, a benchmark built on the agent evaluation suite BFCL to evaluate RMs on tool calling tasks. Trained on our constructed data, models from the Qwen3-4B/8B series achieve up to 17.94% higher accuracy, substantially outperforming frontier LLMs and RMs in pairwise reward judgments. Beyond training objectives, generative ToolRM generalizes to broader critique tasks, including Best-of-N sampling and self-correction. Experiments on ACEBench highlight its effectiveness and efficiency, enabling inference-time scaling while reducing output token usage by over 66%. Its support for downstream RL training further validates its practical utility. We release data to facilitate future research.

Evaluating code large language models (Code LLMs) requires reliable detection of data leakage, where benchmark performance is artificially inflated by exposure to benchmark data during pre-training. Existing approaches either assume access to proprietary training corpora, rely on brittle heuristics such as timestamp filtering, or use external reference sets with manually tuned, non-generalizable thresholds. To address these limitations, we introduce SrDetection, a unified self-referential leakage detection framework for both gray-box (access to model logits) and black-box (access to model outputs) settings. SrDetection generates semantically equivalent variants of a benchmark sample and detects leakage by contrasting the model’s behavior on the original versus its variants, flagging cases where the original is disproportionately easier for the model. We further design a controlled leakage detection testbed and evaluate SrDetection in this environment. Across different models and training stages, SrDetection improves average F1 by 21.52 points in the gray-box setting and 14.46 points in the black-box setting over strong baselines, demonstrating robust, threshold-independent leakage detection. Finally, a gray-box study of 15 widely used Code LLMs on four popular benchmarks reveals benchmark-specific leakage patterns beyond prior overlap-based analyses[Source code and data are available at <https://github.com/SMinL/SrDetectionCode>].

Intellectual Property (IP) is a highly specialized domain that integrates technical and legal knowledge, making it inherently complex and knowledge-intensive. Recent advancements in LLMs have demonstrated their potential to handle IP tasks, enabling more efficient analysis, understanding, and generation of IP-related content. However, existing datasets and benchmarks focus narrowly on patents or cover limited aspects of the IP field, lacking alignment with real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce **IPBench**, the first comprehensive IP task taxonomy and a large-scale bilingual benchmark encompassing **8 IP mechanisms and 20 distinct tasks**, designed to evaluate LLMs in real-world IP practice. We benchmark **19 main LLMs**, ranging from general purpose to domain-specific, including chat-oriented and reasoning-focused models, under zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought settings. Our results show that even the top-performing model, DeepSeek-V3, achieves only 75.8% accuracy, indicating significant room for improvement. Notably, open-source IP and law-oriented models lag behind closed-source general-purpose models. To foster future research, we publicly release IPBench, and will expand it with additional tasks to better reflect real-world complexities and support model advancements in the IP domain. We provide the data, code in the supplementary materials.

Currently, most reinforcement learning tasks focus on domains like mathematics and programming, where verification is relatively straightforward. However, in subjective tasks such as role-playing, alignment techniques struggle to make progress, primarily because subjective reward modeling using the Bradley-Terry model faces significant challenges when dealing with ambiguous preferences. To improve reward modeling in subjective tasks, this paper proposes AAM (Act-Adaptive Margin), which enhances reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model’s internal parameter knowledge. We design two versions of AAM that efficiently generate contextually-appropriate preference gaps without additional human annotation. This approach fundamentally improves how reward models handle subjective rewards by better integrating generative understanding with preference scoring. To validate AAM’s effectiveness in subjective reward modeling, we conduct evaluations on RewardBench, JudgeBench, and challenging role-playing tasks. Results show that AAM significantly improves subjective reward modeling performance, enhancing Bradley-Terry reward models by 2.95% in general tasks and 4.85% in subjective role-playing tasks. Furthermore, reward models trained with AAM can help downstream alignment tasks achieve better results. Our test results show that applying rewards generated by AAM-Augmented RM to preference learning techniques (e.g., GRPO) achieves state-of-the-art results on CharacterEval and Charm. The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated strong performance by producing extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces before answering. However, this paradigm often induces over-reasoning: redundant calculations and circular self-verification that increase computational cost without improving outcomes. Existing evaluations largely emphasize final accuracy or coarse token counts, and lack automated tools to separate essential logic from structural redundancy. We introduce CoTJudger, a graph-driven framework that quantifies reasoning efficiency by converting free-form CoTs into directed dependency graphs and extracting the Shortest Effective Path (SEP) needed to reach a correct solution. This yields an interpretable efficiency signal – how much of a CoT is necessary versus structurally redundant – that is comparable across models and tasks. Evaluating 21 LRMs, CoTJudger reveals pervasive redundancy and surfaces recurring failure modes, including verification obsession and compensatory redundancy. These results provide a practical metric for disentangling reasoning ability from computational waste, enabling more targeted evaluation and diagnosis of LRM efficiency.

As code large language models (LLMs) evolve into tool-interactive agents via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), their generalization is increasingly limited by low-quality synthetic data and the diminishing returns of quantity scaling; moreover, quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data. We propose TDScaling, a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume. Moreover, TDScaling is more data-efficient: under a fixed training budget, increasing trajectory diversity yields larger gains than adding more trajectories, improving the performance-cost trade-off for agent training. TDScaling integrates four innovations: (1) a Business Cluster mechanism that captures real-service logical dependencies; (2) a Blueprint-driven multi-agent paradigm that enforces trajectory coherence; (3) an adaptive evolution mechanism that steers synthesis toward long-tail scenarios using Domain Entropy, Reasoning Mode Entropy, and Cumulative Action Complexity to prevent mode collapse; and (4) a sandboxed code tool that mitigates catastrophic forgetting of intrinsic coding capabilities. Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks (BFCL, 𝜏²-Bench) and code agent tasks (RebenchT, CodeCI, BIRD) demonstrate a win-win outcome: TDScaling improves both tool-use generalization and inherent coding proficiency. Crucially, we show that trajectory diversity scaling attains a substantially higher performance ceiling than quantity scaling, establishing a resource-efficient paradigm for training robust code agents under data bottlenecks.

The development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has seen significant progress, driven by increasing demands across various fields (e.g., multimodal agents, embodied intelligence). While model-driven approaches aim to enhance MLLM capabilities through diverse architectures, their performance gains have become increasingly marginal. In contrast, data-driven methods, which scale up image-text instruction datasets, have proven more effective but face challenges related to limited data diversity and complexity. The absence of high-quality instruction data remains a major bottleneck in MLLM development. To address this issue, we propose , a novel multimodal instruction data evolution framework. This framework iteratively enhances data quality through a refined combination of fine-grained perception, cognitive reasoning, and interaction evolution, generating a more complex and diverse image-text instruction dataset that significantly improves MLLM capabilities. Starting with an initial dataset, SEED-163K, we employ to systematically expand instruction diversity, extend visual reasoning steps to improve cognitive abilities, and extract fine-grained visual details to enhance understanding and robustness. To rigorously evaluate our approach, we conduct extensive qualitative analysis and quantitative experiments across 13 vision-language tasks. Compared to baseline models trained on the original seed dataset, our method achieves an average accuracy improvement of 3.1 percentage points. Moreover, our approach attains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in nine tasks while using significantly less data than existing state-of-the-art models.

Stories are central to human culture, serving to share ideas, preserve traditions, and foster connections. Automatic story generation, a key advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), offers new possibilities for creating personalized content, exploring creative ideas, and enhancing interactive experiences. However, existing methods struggle to maintain narrative coherence and logical consistency. This disconnect compromises the overall storytelling experience, underscoring the need for substantial improvements. Inspired by human cognitive processes, we introduce Storyteller, a novel approach that systemically improves the coherence and consistency of automatically generated stories. Storyteller introduces a plot node structure based on linguistically grounded subject-verb-object (SVO) triplets, which capture essential story events and ensure a consistent logical flow. Unlike previous methods, Storyteller integrates two dynamic modules—the STORYLINE and narrative entity knowledge graph (NEKG)—that continuously interact with the story generation process. This integration produces structurally sound, cohesive and immersive narratives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Storyteller significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving an 84.33% average win rate through human preference evaluation. At the same time, it is also far ahead in other aspects including creativity, coherence, engagement, and relevance.

Argumentation Mining (AM) aims to extract argumentative structures from texts by identifying argumentation components (ACs) and their argumentative relations (ARs). While previous works focus on representation learning to encode ACs and AC pairs, they fail to explicitly model the underlying reasoning patterns of AM, resulting in limited interpretability. This paper proposes a novel  ̲First- ̲Order  ̲Logic reasoning framework for  ̲AM (FOL-AM), designed to explicitly capture logical reasoning paths within argumentative texts. By interpreting multiple AM subtasks as a unified relation query task modeled using FOL rules, FOL-AM facilitates multi-hop relational reasoning and enhances interpretability. The framework supports two flexible implementations: a fine-tuned approach to leverage task-specific learning, and a prompt-based method utilizing large language models to harness their generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments on two AM benchmarks demonstrate that FOL-AM outperforms strong baselines while significantly improving explainability.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are measured on numerous benchmarks like image captioning, visual question answer, and reasoning. However, these benchmarks often include overly simple or uninformative samples, making it difficult to effectively distinguish the performance of different MLLMs. Additionally, evaluating models across many benchmarks creates a significant computational burden. To address these issues, we propose LIME (Less Is More for MLLM Evaluation), a refined and efficient benchmark curated using a semi-automated pipeline. This pipeline filters out uninformative samples and eliminates answer leakage by focusing on tasks that require image-based understanding. Our experiments show that LIME reduces the number of samples by 76% and evaluation time by 77%, while it can more effectively distinguish different models’ abilities. Notably, we find that traditional automatic metrics like CIDEr are insufficient for evaluating MLLMs’ captioning performance, and excluding the caption task score yields a more accurate reflection of overall model performance. All code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LIME-49CD

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in text understanding and generation. However, their tendency to produce factually inconsistent outputs—commonly referred to as “hallucinations”—remains a critical challenge. Existing approaches, such as retrieval-based and inference-time correction methods, primarily address this issue at the input or output level, often overlooking the intrinsic information refinement process and the role of premature layers. Meanwhile, alignment- and fine-tuning-based methods are resource-intensive. In this paper, we propose **PLI** (**P**remature **L**ayers **I**nterpolation), a novel, training-free, and plug-and-play intervention designed to enhance factuality. PLI mitigates hallucinations by inserting premature layers formed through mathematical interpolation with adjacent layers. Inspired by stable diffusion and sampling steps, PLI extends the depth of information processing and transmission in LLMs, improving factual coherence. Experiments on four publicly available datasets demonstrate that PLI effectively reduces hallucinations while outperforming existing baselines in most cases. Further analysis suggests that the success of layer interpolation is closely linked to LLMs’ internal mechanisms. To promote reproducibility, we will release our code and data upon acceptance.

Current research in LLM-based simulation systems lacks comprehensive solutions for modeling real-world court proceedings, while existing legal language models struggle with dynamic courtroom interactions. We present **AgentCourt**, a comprehensive legal simulation framework that addresses these challenges through adversarial evolution of LLM-based agents. Our AgentCourt introduces a new adversarial evolutionary approach for agents called **AdvEvol**, which performs dynamic knowledge learning and evolution through structured adversarial interactions in a simulated courtroom program, breaking the limitations of the traditional reliance on static knowledge bases or manual annotations. By simulating 1,000 civil cases, we construct an evolving knowledge base that enhances the agents’ legal reasoning abilities. The evolved lawyer agents demonstrated outstanding performance on our newly introduced **CourtBench** benchmark, achieving a 12.1% improvement in performance compared to the original lawyer agents. Evaluations by professional lawyers confirm the effectiveness of our approach across three critical dimensions: cognitive agility, professional knowledge, and logical rigor. Beyond outperforming specialized legal models in interactive reasoning tasks, our findings emphasize the importance of adversarial learning in legal AI and suggest promising directions for extending simulation-based legal reasoning to broader judicial and regulatory contexts.

Speculative decoding (SD) is a promising method for accelerating the decoding process of Large Language Models (LLMs). The efficiency of SD primarily hinges on the consistency between the draft model and the verify model. However, existing drafting approaches typically require additional modules to be trained, which can be challenging to implement and ensure compatibility across various LLMs. In this paper, we propose CLaSp, an in-context layer-skipping strategy for self-speculative decoding. Unlike prior methods, CLaSp does not require additional drafting modules or extra training. Instead, it employs a plug-and-play mechanism by skipping intermediate layers of the verify model to construct a compressed draft model. Specifically, we develop a dynamic programming algorithm that optimizes the layer-skipping process by leveraging the complete hidden states from the last verification stage as an objective. This enables CLaSp to dynamically adjust its layer-skipping strategy after each verification stage, without relying on pre-optimized sets of skipped layers. Experimental results across diverse downstream tasks demonstrate that CLaSp achieves a speedup of 1.3× ∼ 1.7× on LLaMA3 series models without altering the original distribution of the generated text.

Model distillation is a fundamental technique in building large language models (LLMs), transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model. However, distillation can lead to model homogenization, reducing diversity among models and impairing their ability to robustly handle complex or novel tasks. These limitations underscore the need to systematically quantify the distillation process and its impact. In this work, we propose a framework to evaluate and quantify model distillation. Our method addresses two key aspects: (1) Identifying identity cognition contradictions to assess discrepancies in how models perceive and represent identity-related information, and (2) Analyzing multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. Experimental results demonstrate two key insights: (1) Well-known closed-source and open-source LLMs usually exhibit high distillation degrees, except for Claude, Doubao, and Gemini. (2) Base LLMs show higher distillation degrees compared to aligned LLMs. By offering a systematic approach to improve the transparency of LLM data distillation, we call for LLMs with more independent development and more transparent technical reports to improve LLMs’ robustness and safety. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Aegis1863/LLMs-Distillation-Quantification.