Positional encodings are fundamental to Transformers, yet explicit methods like RoPE can degrade under length extrapolation and may incur extra arithmetic and memory-access overhead. In this paper, we propose Scoped Position Encoding (ScoPE), a novel framework that reimagines structured sparsity as an intrinsic position encoding mechanism. Instead of relying on explicit arithmetic signals, ScoPE assigns exponentially scaled look-back scopes to attention heads. We theoretically demonstrate that this simple topological constraint transforms multi-head attention into a hierarchical processor, yielding an order awareness horizon that grows exponentially with depth up to the sequence length. Consequently, ScoPE is parameter-free and avoids relying on fragile positional arithmetic. Empirically, it significantly enhances efficiency by masking the majority of attention computations, offering a theoretical 8x reduction in attention FLOPs at long contexts. Extensive evaluations on LLaMA-3-8B architectures reveal that ScoPE achieves superior native length extrapolation and robust retrieval fidelity compared to RoPE, all while substantially reducing training and inference latency. The code is available at https://github.com/oncemoe/ScoPE.

Logical reasoning is a key capability of large language models, yet current benchmarks focus almost entirely on tasks that just check basic logical consistency and overlook the reflective reasoning required for paradox detection and resolution. To fill the gap, we present ParaSuite, the first pipeline dedicated to paradox research that automates data synthesis, evaluation, and training. We introduce PARADOX, a synthetic, high-quality data spanning two difficulty tiers and three academic domains, accompanied by specialized evaluation metrics and solving algorithms. We propose ParadoxBreaker-7B, trained with Mutual-Information Guided Fine-Tuning and reinforcement learning step verify paradox reward(PAPO). Experiments demonstrate significant improvements in both paradoxical and general STEM reasoning.

Emotional reasoning is essential for improving human-AI interactions, particularly in mental health support and empathetic systems. However, current approaches, which primarily map sensory inputs to fixed emotion labels, fail to understand the intricate relationships between motivations, thoughts, and emotions, thereby limiting their ability to generalize across flexible emotional reasoning tasks. To address this, we propose a novel third-person appraisal agent that simulates human-like emotional reasoning through three phases: Primary Appraisal, Secondary Appraisal, and Reappraisal. In the Primary Appraisal phase, a third-person generator powered by a large language model (LLM) infers emotions based on cognitive appraisal theory. The Secondary Appraisal phase uses an evaluator LLM to provide feedback, guiding the generator in refining its predictions. The generator then uses counterfactual reasoning to adjust its process and explore alternative emotional responses. The Reappraisal phase utilizes reinforced fine-tuning (ReFT) by employing a reflective actor-critic framework to further enhance the model’s performance and generalization. This process uses reward signals and learns from appraisal trajectories without human annotations. Our approach outperforms baseline LLMs in various emotional reasoning tasks, demonstrating superior generalization and interpretability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first cognition-based architecture designed to enhance emotional reasoning in LLMs, advancing AI towards human-like emotional understanding.

Supervised Fine-tuning has been pivotal in training autoregressive language models, yet it introduces exposure bias. To mitigate this, Post Fine-tuning, including on-policy and off-policy methods, has emerged as a solution to enhance models further. However, each has its limitations regarding performance enhancements and susceptibility to overfitting. In this paper, we introduce a novel on-policy approach called Evolution Strategy Optimization (ESO), which is designed by harnessing the principle of biological evolution, namely survival of the fittest. Particularly, we consider model tuning as an evolution process, and each output sentence generated by the model can provide a perturbation signal to the model parameter space. Then, the fitness of perturbation signals is quantified by the difference between its score and the averaged one offered by a reward function, which guides the optimization process. Empirically, the proposed method can achieve superior performance in various tasks and comparable performance in the human alignment task.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive performance in generating long-form content, they frequently present a hazard of producing factual inaccuracies or hallucinations. An effective strategy to mitigate this hazard is to leverage off-the-shelf LLMs to detect hallucinations after the generation. The primary challenge resides in the comprehensive elicitation of the intrinsic knowledge acquired during their pre-training phase. However, existing methods that employ multi-step reasoning chains predominantly fall short of addressing this issue. Moreover, since existing methods for hallucination detection tend to decompose text into isolated statements, they are unable to understand the contextual semantic relations in long-form content. In this paper, we study a novel concept, self-elicitation, to leverage self-generated thoughts derived from prior statements as catalysts to elicit the expression of intrinsic knowledge and understand contextual semantics. We present a framework, SelfElicit, to integrate self-elicitation with graph structures to effectively organize the elicited knowledge and facilitate factual evaluations. Extensive experiments on five datasets in various domains demonstrate the effectiveness of self-elicitation and the superiority of our proposed method.

Multi-label document classification (MLDC) aims to allocate more than one label to each document and attracts increasing attention in many practical applications. However, previous studies have failed to pay sufficient attention to the lack of semantic information on labels and the long-tail problem prevalent in the datasets. Additionally, most existing methods focus on optimizing document features, overlooking the potential of high-quality label features to enhance classification performance. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective paradigm for MLDC. Regarding the problem of insufficient label information and imbalance in the sample size of categories, we utilize large language models (LLMs) to semantically expand the label content and generate pseudo-samples for the tail categories. To optimize the features of both documents and labels, we design the contrastive learning boosted feature optimization module facilitated by the similarity matrices. Finally, we construct a label-guided feature selection module to incorporate the optimized label features into the input features to provide richer semantic information for the classifier. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.