Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in general tasks but struggle with specialized, structured cultural symbols. We introduce BoYaEval, the first comprehensive benchmark dedicated to deciphering diverse Ancient Chinese musical notations, including five types of ancient Chinese music notation systems. These systems utilize unique spatial layouts and specialized ideograms to encode pitch and intricate playing techniques. BoYaEval comprises 3,175 high-quality images across these notation styles and establishes a three-tier evaluation: Structural Parsing (symbol recognition), Instructional Translation (technique mapping), and Musical Reasoning (melody derivation). We evaluate 21 leading MLLMs. Results indicate that while models perform adequately in basic recognition, they fail in cross-system compositional logic, scoring only around 27% on reasoning tasks. BoYaEval highlights the limitations of current MLLMs in processing diverse spatial-symbolic dependencies, bridging the gap between ancient wisdom and modern AI for digitizing intangible cultural heritage. The BoYaEval benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MYTH-Lab/BoYaEval.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, while effective, suffers from an inherent mechanism flaw: linearity induces overthinking. Constrained by sequential generation, models often produce redundant narration and circular self-corrections to maintain logical context. We propose GoT-R1, a framework that fundamentally mitigates this by replacing verbose linear trajectories with high-density reasoning graphs. Unlike CoT, GoT-R1 decouples logic from narration, modeling deliberation as a structured topology of atomic units. We internalize this inductive bias via a two-stage regimen: synthesizing structural data to distill logical skeletons, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to explicitly reinforce topological integrity. Extensive evaluations across mathematical reasoning and instruction following demonstrate that GoT-R1 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Crucially, it achieves these gains with significantly reduced token overhead, demonstrating that structured reasoning density offers a more robust and parsimonious alternative to the recursive verbosity of standard CoT. The GoT-R1 models are open-sourced on Hugging Face at: https://huggingface.co/collections/MYTH-Lab/got-r1.

In fine-grained sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, a large pool of specialized experts replaces a small homogeneous set, shifting performance and throughput to be governed by inference-time expert activation. Yet most existing optimization recipes implicitly assume a fixed activation budget (e.g., a constant Top-k per layer), whose behavior in fine-grained MoEs is poorly understood. We first characterize runtime skipping strategies, quantifying the accuracy–efficiency trade-off of (i) uniform fixed activation and (ii) static layer-wise Top-k allocation found by search. Our analysis reveals that static skipping can already provide substantial throughput gains, but optimal static schedules vary significantly across models and routing mechanisms. We therefore introduce Adaptive Skipping with Entropy-Penalized Thresholding (ASET), a training-free policy that adapts token-level activation using router confidence and entropy while remaining within the model’s original budget. Across the fine-grained MoEs we study, static skipping policies yield 10–78% throughput gains with minimal performance degradation, including ≥10% improvement on DeepSeek-V3 without measurable loss. On the OLMoE testbed, ASET yields a Pareto frontier between average activation and task quality. Overall, these results identify expert skipping as a practical lever for faster fine-grained MoE inference, with adaptive activation helping when fixed budgets are too rigid.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have demonstrated significant potential on tasks across multiple domains. However, ellipses and coreferences, as common phenomena in dialogue scenes, pose challenges to LLMs’ understanding and RAG’s retrieval accuracy. The previous works ignore the negative impact of this fuzzy data on RAG system.We explore the capabilities of LLMs and RAG systems in dialogue scenarios and use Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (IUR) to complete the key information in dialogue to enhance retrieval.Besides, we propose a lightweight IUR model for query rewriting. It is an end-to-end framework for node linking and iterative inference, incorporating two newly proposed probing semantic features derived from generative pre-training. This framework treats IUR as a series of link decisions on the input sequence and the incrementally constructed rewriting outputs.To test the performance of RAG system in the model multi-round dialogue scenario, we construct an RAG dialogue dataset on English and Chinese, Dialogue-RAG-MULTI-v1.0.Experiment results show that utterance rewriting can effectively improve the retrieval and generation ability of RAG system in dialogue scenes. Experiments on IUR tasks demonstrate the excellent performance of our lightweight IUR method.

As a crucial method in prompt engineering, In-Context Learning (ICL) enhances the generalization and knowledge utilization capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) (Dong et al., 2024). However, the lengthy retrieved contexts and limited token throughput in autoregressive models significantly constrain reasoning speed. To address this challenge, we propose N-Gram Trie Speculative Decoding, a novel approach that leverages the overlap between context and model output. This method constructs an n-gram trie from the context to generate drafts, accelerating token generation for LLMs. We evaluate our approach on summarization, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and context-based Question Answering (QA) tasks. Experimental results on Vicuna-7B, Llama2-7B-Chat, and Llama3-8B-Instruct demonstrate substantial speed improvements without compromising accuracy. Compared with various strong baselines, our method achieves the highest mean speedup, showcasing its effectiveness and efficiency.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains. However, their potential as effective language teachers—particularly in complex pedagogical scenarios like teaching Chinese as a second language—remains inadequately assessed. To address this gap, we propose the first pedagogical competence benchmark for LLMs, rigorously evaluating their performance against international standards for Chinese language teachers. Our framework spans three core dimensions: (1) basic knowledge evaluation, covering 32 subtopics across five major categories; (2) international teacher examination, based on data collected from international Chinese teacher certification exams; and (3) teaching practice evaluation, where target LLMs summarize knowledge points and design instructional content for student models, followed by testing the student models to assess the LLM’s ability to distill and teach key concepts.We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 13 latest multilingual and Chinese LLMs. While most models demonstrate promising pedagogical potential, there remains substantial room for improvement in their teaching capabilities. This study contributes to the development of AI-assisted language education tools capable of rivaling human teaching excellence. The benchmark dataset and evaluation scripts used in this study are publicly available at https://github.com/Line-Kite/CLTE.

Semantic entity recognition is an important task in the field of visually-rich document understanding. It distinguishes the semantic types of text by analyzing the position relationship between text nodes and the relation between text content. The existing document understanding models mainly focus on entity categories while ignoring the extraction of entity boundaries. We build a novel hypergraph attention document semantic entity recognition framework, HGA, which uses hypergraph attention to focus on entity boundaries and entity categories at the same time. It can conduct a more detailed analysis of the document text representation analyzed by the upstream model and achieves a better performance of semantic information. We apply this method on the basis of GraphLayoutLM to construct a new semantic entity recognition model HGALayoutLM. Our experiment results on FUNSD, CORD, XFUND and SROIE show that our method can effectively improve the performance of semantic entity recognition tasks based on the original model. The results of HGALayoutLM on FUNSD and XFUND reach the new state-of-the-art results.