Literature review tables are essential for summarizing and comparing collections of scientific papers. In this paper, we study automatic generation of such tables from a pool of papers to satisfy a user’s information need. Building on recent work (Newman et al., 2024), we move beyond oracle settings by (i) simulating well-specified yet schema-agnostic user demands that avoid leaking gold column names or values, (ii) explicitly modeling retrieval noise via semantically related but out-of-scope distractor papers verified by human annotators, and (iii) introducing a lightweight, annotation-free, utilization-oriented evaluation that decomposes utility (schema coverage, unary cell fidelity, pairwise relational consistency) and measures paper selection via a two-way QA procedure (gold→system and system→gold) with recall, precision, and F1. To support reproducible evaluation, we introduce arXiv2Table, a benchmark of 1,957 tables referencing 7,158 papers, with human-verified distractors and rewritten, schema-agnostic user demands. We also develop an iterative, batch-based generation method that co-refines paper filtering and schema over multiple rounds. We validate the evaluation protocol with human audits and cross-evaluator checks. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently improves over strong baselines, while absolute scores remain modest, underscoring the task’s difficulty. Our data and code is available at https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/arXiv2Table.

A core part of scientific peer review involves providing expert critiques that directly assess the scientific claims a paper makes. While it is now possible to automatically generate plausible (if generic) reviews, ensuring that these reviews are sound and grounded in the papers’ claims remains challenging. To facilitate LLM benchmarking on these challenges, we introduce CLAIMCHECK, an annotated dataset of NeurIPS 2023 and 2024 submissions and reviews mined from OpenReview. CLAIMCHECK is richly annotated by ML experts for weakness statements in the reviews and the paper claims that they dispute, as well as fine-grained labels of the validity, objectivity, and type of the identified weaknesses. We benchmark several LLMs on three claim-centric tasks supported by CLAIMCHECK, requiring models to (1) associate weaknesses with the claims they dispute, (2) predict fine-grained labels for weaknesses and rewrite the weaknesses to enhance their specificity, and (3) verify a paper’s claims with grounded reasoning. Our experiments reveal that cutting-edge LLMs, while capable of predicting weakness labels in (2), continue to underperform relative to human experts on all other tasks.

We propose a simple yet effective and robust method for contrastive captioning: generating discriminative captions that distinguish target images from very similar alternative distractor images. Our approach is built on a pragmatic inference procedure that formulates captioning as a reference game between a speaker, which produces possible captions describing the target, and a listener, which selects the target given the caption. Unlike previous methods that derive both speaker and listener distributions from a single captioning model, we leverage an off-the-shelf CLIP model to parameterize the listener. Compared with captioner-only pragmatic models, our method benefits from rich vision-language alignment representations from CLIP when reasoning over distractors. Like previous methods for discriminative captioning, our method uses a hyperparameter to control the tradeoff between the informativity (how likely captions are to allow a human listener to discriminate the target image) and the fluency of the captions. However, we find that our method is substantially more robust to the value of this hyperparameter than past methods, which allows us to automatically optimize the captions for informativity — outperforming past methods for discriminative captioning by 11% to 15% accuracy in human evaluations.

We propose a structured extension to bidirectional-context conditional language generation, or “infilling,” inspired by Frame Semantic theory. Guidance is provided through one of two approaches: (1) model fine-tuning, conditioning directly on observed symbolic frames, and (2) a novel extension to disjunctive lexically constrained decoding that leverages frame semantic lexical units. Automatic and human evaluations confirm that frame-guided generation allows for explicit manipulation of intended infill semantics, with minimal loss in distinguishability from human-generated text. Our methods flexibly apply to a variety of use scenarios, and we provide an interactive web demo.

Discourse relations among arguments reveal logical structures of a debate conversation. However, no prior work has explicitly studied how the sequence of discourse relations influence a claim’s impact. This paper empirically shows that the discourse relations between two arguments along the context path are essential factors for identifying the persuasive power of an argument. We further propose DisCOC to inject and fuse the sentence-level structural discourse information with contextualized features derived from large-scale language models. Experimental results and extensive analysis show that the attention and gate mechanisms that explicitly model contexts and texts can indeed help the argument impact classification task defined by Durmus et al. (2019), and discourse structures among the context path of the claim to be classified can further boost the performance.