Tianyi Xu


2026

The escalating demand for comprehensive literature surveys in rapidly evolving research areas makes manual writing increasingly impractical, underscoring the necessity of automation. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a promising foundation for this task, yet guiding them to generate accurate, reliable content remains a fundamental challenge, as issues such as hallucinations and vague organization often persist. To address this, we propose FIKSurvey, a feedback-driven framework grounded in the idea that “Feedback is the key for automatic survey generation.” Specifically, FIKSurvey systematically incorporates feedback across three dimensions: outline feedback for structural clarity, citation feedback for evidence validation, and content feedback for readability and analytical depth. The framework also supports optional human-in-the-loop intervention for user-specific needs. Experiments confirm that FIKSurvey substantially improves both citation and content quality, demonstrating feedback as the critical mechanism for automatic survey generation.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route to language adaptation, but improvements on demanding capabilities such as mathematical reasoning often remain limited. This limitation is driven in part by the uneven domain coverage and missing task-relevant knowledge that characterize many low-resource language corpora. We present AfriqueLLM, a suite of open LLMs adapted to 20 African languages through CPT on 26B tokens. We perform a comprehensive empirical study across five base models spanning sizes and architectures, including Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and systematically analyze how CPT data composition shapes downstream performance. In particular, we vary mixtures that include math, code, and synthetic translated data, and evaluate the resulting models on a range of multilingual benchmarks. Our results identify data composition as the primary driver of CPT gains. Adding math, code, and synthetic translated data yields consistent improvements, including on reasoning-oriented evaluations. Within a fixed architecture, larger models typically improve performance, but architectural choices dominate scale when comparing across model families. Moreover, strong multilingual performance in the base model does not reliably predict post-CPT outcomes; robust architectures coupled with task-aligned data provide a more dependable recipe. Finally, our best models improve long-context performance, including document-level translation.