Large language models (LLMs) are shaping global values, yet they frequently exhibit a pronounced WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) cultural bias, marginalizing diverse viewpoints and posing challenges for reconciling diverse populations with varying cultural backgrounds and value systems. In this work, we move beyond simple alignment methods to propose a new paradigm for cross-cultural fairness. We introduce a Nash Consensus Negotiation framework under the formulation of cross-cultural consensus as a Nash Equilibrium. Each LLM iteratively proposes and refines natural-language guidelines, guided by a utility function balancing self-consistency with mutual acceptance, while penalizing redundancy. The process expands the proposal space and converges to a consensus, yielding fair and interpretable consensus outcomes. We evaluate our framework against baselines using quantitative metrics, qualitative analysis, and large-scale human studies. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generates higher-quality and more balanced consensus, effectively mitigating assimilation toward WEIRD values. Furthermore, we finetune diverse LLM architectures with negotiation data via preference optimization and supervised reasoning, reducing cultural distances by up to 95.53%. Overall, our work offers a systematic path to mitigate cultural bias in LLMs by guiding them toward self-consistency, mutually-acceptable equilibria.

Multimodal Process Reward Models (MPRMs) have emerged as a pivotal framework for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, the research community currently lacks a dedicated benchmark to rigorously assess the error discernment capabilities of these models.To address this gap, we introduce PRMBench-V, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MPRMs’ proficiency in detecting erroneous reasoning steps across diverse error categories. Leveraging a semi-automated annotation pipeline augmented with human verification, we construct a comprehensive dataset comprising 907 unique queries, each annotated with nine distinct error types, resulting in 8,163 test cases with fine-grained step-level error labels.Through extensive experiments involving over 15 open- and closed-source models, we uncover several key findings: (1) even the strongest existing MPRMs achieve only \textasciitilde30% accuracy in error identification; (2) while partial error detection achieves moderate precision and recall (\textasciitilde60%), overall accuracy remains low (\textasciitilde20%); and (3) benchmark scores exhibit a strong correlation with downstream task performance gains (r=0.86). Furthermore, we demonstrate that PRMBench-V can inform the development of more robust MPRMs: by introducing the Bayesian Rater Reliability Process Reward Model (BR2-PRM), we achieve up to a 4.8% performance improvement through test-time scaling.We believe that PRMBench-V will serve as a valuable resource for advancing MPRM research, enabling more rigorous evaluation and fostering the development of models with fine-grained multimodal reasoning capabilities.

With the widespread use of multi-modal Large Language models (MLLMs), safety issues have become a growing concern. Multi-turn dialogues, which are more common in everyday interactions, pose a greater risk than single prompts; however, existing benchmarks do not adequately consider this situation. To encourage the community to focus on the safety issues of these models in multi-turn dialogues, we introduce SafeMT, a benchmark that features dialogues of varying lengths generated from harmful queries accompanied by images. This benchmark consists of 10,000 samples in total, encompassing 17 different scenarios and four jailbreak methods. Additionally, we propose Safety Index (SI) to evaluate the general safety of MLLMs during conversations. We assess the safety of 17 models using this benchmark and discover that the risk of successful attacks on these models increases as the number of turns in harmful dialogues rises. This observation indicates that the safety mechanisms of these models are inadequate for recognizing the hazard in dialogue interactions. We propose a dialogue safety moderator capable of detecting malicious intent concealed within conversations and providing MLLMs with relevant safety policies. Experimental results from several open-source models indicate that this moderator is more effective in reducing multi-turn Attack Success Rate (ASR) compared to existed guard models.

Reasoning models have attracted increasing attention for their ability to tackle complex tasks, embodying the System II (slow thinking) paradigm in contrast to System I (fast, intuitive responses). Yet a key question remains: Does slower reasoning necessarily lead to more truthful answers? Our findings suggest otherwise. We conduct the first systematic study of the inverse scaling law in slow-thinking paradigms for multimodal reasoning. We find that when confronted with incomplete or misleading visual inputs, slow-thinking models are more prone to fabricating plausible yet false details to justify untruthful reasoning. To analyze this behavior, we construct a 5,000-sample hierarchical prompt dataset annotated by 50 human participants. The prompts progressively increase in complexity, revealing a consistent pattern: slower reasoning models tend to follow depth-first search (DFS) thinking, persistently exploring flawed premises, while faster chat models favor breadth-first search (BFS) inference, showing greater caution under uncertainty. These findings reveal a critical vulnerability of reasoning models: while effective in structured domains such as math, their DFS-style reasoning becomes fragile when confronted with ambiguous, multimodal inputs.

Language agents, i.e., LLM agents, progress rapidly and are increasingly deployed in production environments. This trend underscores the urgent need for rigorous and realistic evaluations. However, most existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings. They typically rely on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlook critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified. Consequently, they understate the difficulty of real deployments, where uncertainty and noise are ubiquitous and agents must proactively explore the environment to uncover new tools. To bridge this gap, we present AgentGym2, a new evaluation framework with task instances grounded in real-world end-to-end working demands. Beyond reasoning and planning, it measures agents’ ability to execute end-to-end procedures, discover tools via exploration, compose tools for unseen tasks, and remain robust to noisy and underspecified information. Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2, revealing a substantial gap between the capability of current agents and the demands of real-world applications.

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly leverage the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to operate in complex environments, the expansion of their action spaces offers agents unsafe capabilities and underscores the risk of power-seeking. While broad action space and greater environment influence are essential for task fulfillment, they creates a fragile risk surface where minor errors or hallucinations are magnified into catastrophic failures. In response, we propose SafeMCP, a server-side defense plugin that constrains tool acquisition via predictive reasoning regarding future safety risks. SafeMCP utilizes an internal world model for look-ahead reasoning to implement a two-tier defense: proactive tool filtering to constrain hazardous power expansion and immediate intervention as a fail-safe. To train SafeMCP, we introduce a three-stage pipeline comprising environmental dynamic grounding, safe policy initialization, and reinforcement learning (RL) with dual verifiable rewards. Experiments on PowerSeeking Bench, ToolEmu, and AgentHarm show that SafeMCP achieves a safe equilibrium, effectively mitigating risks while preserving agent utility.

The rise of Omni-modality Large Language Models (OLLMs) capable of jointly processing text, audio, and visual inputs marks a major step toward general intelligence. Ensuring their alignment with human preferences requires effective Omni-modality Reward Models (ORMs), which serve as surrogates for human judgment to guide OLLMs behavior. However, ORMs evaluation remains underdeveloped in the previous literature. Existing benchmarks are largely text-centric or limited to bimodal tasks, restricting comprehensive assessment for ORMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce Omni-RewardBench, the first benchmark for comprehensive evaluation of ORMs across modalities. In short, our contributions are threefold: (1) a hybrid automatic-annotation and human-verification pipeline to construct high-quality evaluation data; (2) extensive experiments on 20+ models, including inherently omni-modal and modality-bridged systems. Our experimental results demonstrate that current OLLMs fall short as reward models, revealing several common failure modes such as perception failure, modality dominance failure, and cross-modal fusion failure; and (3) strong correlations between Omni-RewardBench scores and downstream performance (IID r = 0.94, OOD r = 0.72), validating its reliability as a predictor of real-world capability and alignment quality.

With the growing prevalence of large language models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has raised significant concerns. However, there is still a lack of definitive standards for evaluating their safety due to the subjective nature of current safety benchmarks. To address this gap, we conducted the first exploration of LLMs’ safety evaluation from a legal perspective by proposing the SafeLawBench benchmark. SafeLawBench categorizes safety risks into three levels based on legal standards, providing a systematic and comprehensive framework for evaluation. It comprises 24,860 multi-choice questions and 1,106 open-domain question-answering (QA) tasks. Our evaluation included 2 closed-source LLMs and 18 open-source LLMs using zero-shot and few-shot prompting, highlighting the safety features of each model. We also evaluated the LLMs’ safety-related reasoning stability and refusal behavior. Additionally, we found that a majority voting mechanism can enhance model performance. Notably, even leading SOTA models like Claude-3.5-Sonnet and GPT-4o have not exceeded 80.5% accuracy in multi-choice tasks on SafeLawBench, while the average accuracy of 20 LLMs remains at 68.8%. We urge the community to prioritize research on the safety of LLMs.

Legal judgment prediction (LJP) aims to function as a judge by making final rulings based on case claims and facts, which plays a vital role in the judicial domain for supporting court decision-making and improving judicial efficiency. However, existing methods often struggle with logical errors when conducting complex legal reasoning. We propose LegalReasoner, which enhances LJP reliability through step-wise verification and correction of the reasoning process. Specifically, it first identifies dispute points to decompose complex cases, and then conducts step-wise reasoning while employing a process verifier to validate each step’s logic from correctness, progressiveness, and potential perspectives. When errors are detected, expert-designed attribution and resolution strategies are applied for correction. To fine-tune LegalReasoner, we release the LegalHK dataset, containing 58,130 Hong Kong court cases with detailed annotations of dispute points, step-by-step reasoning chains, and process verification labels. Experiments demonstrate that LegalReasoner significantly improves concordance with court decisions from 72.37 to 80.27 on LLAMA-3.1-70B. The data is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/weijiezz/LegalHK.

In this work, we introduce the PKU-SafeRLHF dataset, designed to promote research on safety alignment in large language models (LLMs). As a sibling project to SafeRLHF and BeaverTails, we separate annotations of helpfulness and harmlessness for question-answering pairs, providing distinct perspectives on these coupled attributes. Overall, we provide 44.6k refined prompts and 265k question-answer pairs with safety meta-labels for 19 harm categories and three severity levels ranging from minor to severe, with answers generated by Llama-family models. Based on this, we collected 166.8k preference data, including dual-preference (helpfulness and harmlessness decoupled) and single-preference data (trade-off the helpfulness and harmlessness from scratch), respectively. Using the large-scale annotation data, we further train severity-sensitive moderation for the risk control of LLMs and safety-centric RLHF algorithms for the safety alignment of LLMs. We believe this dataset will be a valuable resource for the community, aiding in the safe deployment of LLMs.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced rapid development in recent years. However, in the financial domain, there is a notable lack of effective and specialized multimodal evaluation datasets. To advance the development of MLLMs in the finance domain, we introduce FinMME, encompassing more than 11,000 high-quality financial research samples across 18 financial domains and 6 asset classes, featuring 10 major chart types and 21 subtypes. We ensure data quality through 20 annotators and carefully designed validation mechanisms. Additionally, we develop FinScore, an evaluation system incorporating hallucination penalties and multi-dimensional capability assessment to provide an unbiased evaluation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o exhibit unsatisfactory performance on FinMME, highlighting its challenging nature. The benchmark exhibits high robustness with prediction variations under different prompts remaining below 1%, demonstrating superior reliability compared to existing datasets. Our dataset and evaluation protocol are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/luojunyu/FinMME and https://github.com/luo-junyu/FinMME.

Existing alignment methods share a common topology of information flow, where reward information is collected from humans, modeled with preference learning, and used to tune language models. However, this shared topology has not been systematically characterized, nor have its alternatives been thoroughly explored, leaving the problems of low data efficiency and unreliable generalization unaddressed. As a solution, we introduce a theory of **reward generalization** in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), focusing on the **topology of information flow** at both macro and micro levels. At the macro level, we portray the RLHF information flow as an autoencoding process over behavior distributions, formalizing the RLHF objective of distributional consistency between human preference and model behavior. At the micro level, we present *induced Bayesian networks* to model the impact of dataset topologies on reward generalization. Combining analysis on both levels, we propose **reward modeling from tree-structured preference information**. It is shown to reduce reward uncertainty by up to 𝛩(log n/loglog n) times compared to baselines, where n is the dataset size. Validation on three NLP tasks shows that it achieves an average win rate of 65% against baselines, thus improving reward generalization *for free* via topology design, while *reducing* the amount of data requiring annotation.

The recent introduction of OpenAI’s O1/O3 model represents a significant milestone in developing strong reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). By introducing more computational budget during test-time, LLMs have the potential to explore more accurate and higher-quality solutions. However, such paradigms are primarily verified in domains that have well-defined criteria for responses, such as coding and mathematics. Inspired by the success of this paradigm, we aim to bridge it to more subtle open-domain question answering. Specifically, we utilize search mechanisms such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for both policy model improvement and reward model improvement that achieve better performance in test-time scaling strategies. Our contributions are summarized in two folds: For the training phase, we demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous SOTA automatic data annotation methods and various public instruction-tuning datasets, with fewer data points. This offers a more data-efficient solution for training robust models. For the inference phase, we utilize the intermediate values collected during training data construction to train a process reward model called PRM+. This model employs a novel two-stage training method to provide finer-grained guidance across the generation trajectory. This introduces no additional overhead during training data collection and further enhances performance by scaling test-time computation. Experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the performance of both the policy model and the reward model.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming healthcare through LLM-based agents that can understand and assist with medical tasks. This survey examines the architectures, applications, and challenges of LLM-based agents in medicine. We analyze key components including system profiles, clinical planning, medical reasoning frameworks, and external capacity enhancement. The survey covers major applications in clinical decision support, medical documentation, training simulations, and healthcare service optimization, along with evaluation frameworks and metrics. While these agents show promise in enhancing healthcare delivery, challenges remain in hallucination management, multimodal integration, implementation, and ethics. We conclude by highlighting future directions in medical reasoning, physical system integration, and training simulations, providing researchers and practitioners with a structured overview of the field’s current state and prospects.

Large language models (LLMs) may exhibit unintended or undesirable behaviors. Recent works have concentrated on aligning LLMs to mitigate harmful outputs. Despite these efforts, some anomalies indicate that even a well-conducted alignment process can be easily circumvented, whether intentionally or accidentally. Does alignment fine-tuning yield have robust effects on models, or are its impacts merely superficial? In this work, we make the first exploration of this phenomenon from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Empirically, we demonstrate the elasticity of post-alignment models, i.e., the tendency to revert to the behavior distribution formed during the pre-training phase upon further fine-tuning. Leveraging compression theory, we formally deduce that fine-tuning disproportionately undermines alignment relative to pre-training, potentially by orders of magnitude. We validate the presence of elasticity through experiments on models of varying types and scales. Specifically, we find that model performance declines rapidly before reverting to the pre-training distribution, after which the rate of decline drops significantly. Furthermore, we further reveal that elasticity positively correlates with the increased model size and the expansion of pre-training data. Our findings underscore the need to address the inherent elasticity of LLMs to mitigate their resistance to alignment.

Do Large Language Models (LLMs) hold positions that conflict with your country’s values? Occasionally they do! However, existing works primarily focus on ethical reviews, failing to capture the diversity of national values, which encompass broader policy, legal, and moral considerations. Furthermore, current benchmarks that rely on spectrum tests using manually designed questionnaires are not easily scalable. To address these limitations, we introduce NaVAB, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the alignment of LLMs with the values of five major nations: China, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. NaVAB implements a national value extraction pipeline to efficiently construct value assessment datasets. Specifically, we propose a modeling procedure with instruction tagging to process raw data sources, a screening process to filter value-related topics and a generation process with a Conflict Reduction mechanism to filter non-conflicting values. We conduct extensive experiments on various LLMs across countries, and the results provide insights into assisting in the identification of misaligned scenarios. Moreover, we demonstrate that NaVAB can be combined with alignment techniques to effectively reduce value concerns by aligning LLMs’ values with the target country.

“人工智能对齐(AI Alignment)旨在使人工智能系统的行为与人类的意图和价值观相一致。随着人工智能系统的能力日益增强,对齐失败带来的风险也在不断增加。数百位人工智能专家和公众人物已经表达了对人工智能风险的担忧,他们认为乜减轻人工智能带来的灭绝风险应该成为全球优先考虑的问题,与其他社会规模的风险如大流行病和核战争并列(CAIS,2023)。为了提供对齐领域的全面和最新概述,本文深入探讨了对齐的核心理论、技术和评估。首先,本文确定了人工智能对齐的四个关键目标:鲁棒性(Robustness)、可解释性(Interpretability)、可控性(Controllability)和道德性(Ethicality)(RICE)。在这四个目标原则的指导下,本文概述了当前人工智能对齐研究的全貌,并将其分解为两个关键组成部分:前向对齐和后向对齐。本文旨在为对齐研究提供全面且对初学者友好的调研。同时本文还发布并持续更新网站 www.alignmentsurvey.com,该网站提供了一系列教程、论文集和其他资源。更详尽的讨论与分析请见 https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19852。”