Continual Learning (CL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a fundamental Stability-Plasticity Dilemma: balancing the plasticity to acquire new capabilities with the stability to preserve prior knowledge. While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods, such as LoRA, enable efficient adaptation, we identify a critical flaw in current approaches termed Rank-Blindness: the enforcement of a single rank constraint across diverse tasks, which entangles task-shared and task-specific knowledge, leading to catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks and underfitting on complex new ones. To address this, we propose SpaRTA, a novel rehearsal-free framework guided by a rank-spectrum perspective that explicitly disentangles knowledge into two orthogonal subspaces. Specifically, SpaRTA employs a low-rank branch to capture task-shared representations and a high-rank branch to model task-specific features. To integrate these complementary representations, we introduce a context-aware dynamic router that adaptively fuses the two branches based on input semantics, while an explicit orthogonality constraint minimizes interference between shared and specific parameter subspaces. This design effectively isolates task-specific updates from shared knowledge, preventing the overwriting of prior capabilities while preserving strong adaptation capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpaRTA achieves a superior stability-plasticity balance compared to single-rank baselines. Notably, the proposed spectral disentanglement strategy substantially reduces inter-task interference and yields strong zero-shot generalization on unseen tasks. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/SpaRTA.

As the parameter size of language models continues to grow, effective model compression is required to reduce their computational and memory overhead. Existing compression methods suffer from bottleneck issues: when the compression ratio is increased, performance degrades significantly. Low-rank decomposition and quantization are two prominent compression methods that have been proven to significantly reduce the computational and memory requirements of Large Language Models (LLMs) while maintaining model accuracy. Evidently, combining these two methods will break through the existing compression bottleneck. However, how these two methods interact when combined remains a critical question for developers, as many assume they are orthogonal, meaning their combination would not introduce additional errors beyond those independently introduced by each method. This paper provides the first mathematical proof that low-rank decomposition and quantization are non-orthogonal. We validate these findings through a series of experiments on large language models. Our results demonstrate that these methods are non-orthogonal, and their combination leads to significant performance degradation. Importantly, we propose a novel approach Diagonal Adhesive Method (DAM), which can effectively combine the two methods and mitigate the performance loss. Our research provides deep insights into model compression and lays a solid theoretical and experimental foundation for future related studies.

Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to evolve sustainably requires simultaneously preserving previously acquired knowledge (Past), effectively acquiring new task-specific skills (Present), and reserving sufficient parameter capacity for subsequent adaptation (Future). However, existing continual learning (CL) paradigms often prioritize immediate performance through dense updates, leading to catastrophic forgetting and rapid exhaustion of model capacity. To harmonize these conflicting demands, we draw inspiration from the brain’s functional partitioning and propose the Null-Space Constrained Parameter Region Specificity Method (PaRSP). PaRSP establishes a dynamic "Task-Region Mapping" that distinguishes between specialized neurons and generalist neurons. By precisely localizing a sparse "functional core" for each task, PaRSP restricts updates to specific regions via null-space orthogonality, preserving the vast majority of the network as an immutable "long-term memory bank." This induced sparsity not only enhances plasticity via targeted adaptation and minimizes interference to ensure stability, but also strategically reserves substantial capacity, securing sustainability for future evolution. Extensive experiments validate PaRSP’s state-of-the-art performance, particularly on Standard CL and Long Sequence benchmarks, effectively harmonizing the stability-plasticity-sustainability trade-off. Code is available at https://github.com/JinhuiBot/PaRSP

While recent self-training approaches have reduced reliance on human-labeled data for aligning LLMs, they still face critical limitations: (i) sensitivity to synthetic data quality, leading to instability and bias amplification in iterative training; (ii) ineffective optimization due to a diminishing gap between positive and negative responses over successive training iterations. In this paper, we propose Team-based self-Play with dual Adaptive Weighting (TPAW), a novel self-play algorithm designed to improve alignment in a fully self-supervised setting. TPAW adopts a team-based framework in which the current policy model both collaborates with and competes against historical checkpoints, promoting more stable and efficient optimization. To further enhance learning, we design two adaptive weighting mechanisms: (i) a response reweighting scheme that adjusts the importance of target responses, and (ii) a player weighting strategy that dynamically modulates each team member’s contribution during training. Initialized from a SFT model, TPAW iteratively refines alignment without requiring additional human supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that TPAW consistently outperforms existing baselines across various base models and LLM benchmarks.

The advancement of Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) in Chinese is significantly hindered by the scarcity of high-quality, spontaneous dialogue datasets compared to their English counterparts. In this work, we introduce EmotionTalk, the first interactive Chinese multimodal dataset designed to capture the nuance of authentic emotional interplay. Collected from 19 professional actors, the dataset spans 23.6 hours of dyadic conversations across diverse scenarios. A key contribution of EmotionTalk is its multi-grained annotation system, which integrates standard categorical and dimensional labels with fine-grained emotional speaking style captions, enabling research into interpretable emotion analysis. We establish comprehensive benchmarks for emotion recognition and captioning tasks, verifying the dataset’s effectiveness and the necessity of multimodal fusion. EmotionTalk serves as a critical resource for bridging the gap in non-English affective computing and is publicly released for the research community.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard paradigm for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge. However, RAG performance often degrades substantially when faced with noisy, outdated, or conflicting retrieved information. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that Prior-Guided Reasoning—a strategy that explicitly elicits the model’s parametric knowledge as prior information to guide reasoning on retrieved documents—effectively mitigates the impact of external conflicts. Building on this, we propose BrPr (Bernoulli-gated reinforcement learning for Prior-Guided reasoning), a framework that achieves robust performance across varying degrees of external inconsistency. Furthermore, by employing a Bernoulli-gated dropout mechanism during training, BrPr distills the prior-driven reasoning capability into the model parameters, enabling efficient latent reasoning without explicit prior generation. The experimental results demonstrate that BrPr consistently exhibits superior robustness to external conflicts and noise.

Post-training quantization has emerged as a widely adopted technique for compressing and accelerating the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). The primary challenges in LLMs quantization stem from activation outliers, which significantly degrade model performance especially at lower bit precision. While recent approaches attempt to mitigate outliers through linear transformations across feature dimensions, our analysis reveals that the transformed weights and activations still exhibit persistent outlier patterns with concentrated magnitude distributions. In this paper, we first model the mathematical relationship between quantization error and outliers, and then introduce a new metric Flatness to quantify the distribution of outliers. Based on this, we derive the theoretical optimal solution with respect to Flatness. Building on these insights, we propose Bidirectional Diagonal Quantization (BDQ), a novel post-training quantization framework that effectively disperses outlier patterns through optimized matrix transformations. BDQ strategically distributes outlier magnitudes across matrix dimensions via learned diagonal operations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BDQ establishes a new quantization benchmark. It achieves less than 1% accuracy drop in W4A4 quantization on the LLaMA-3-8B model. In the more challenging W2A4KV16 experiment, compared to state-of-the-art approaches, BDQ reduces the performance gap by 39.1% on the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-LLaMA-70B model.

Large language models (LLMs) can carry out human-like dialogue, but unlike humans, they are stateless due to the superposition property. However, during multi-turn, multi-agent interactions, LLMs begin to exhibit consistent, character-like behaviors—hinting at a form of emergent lifelong learning. Despite this, existing benchmarks often fail to capture these dynamics, primarily focusing on static, open-ended evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce LifeState-BENCH, a benchmark designed to assess lifelong learning in LLMs. It features two episodic datasets—Hamlet and a synthetic script collection—rich in narrative structure and character interactions. Our fact-checking evaluation probes models’ self-awareness, episodic memory retrieval, and relationship tracking, across both parametric and non-parametric approaches. Experiments on models like Llama3.1-8B, GPT-4-turbo, and DeepSeek R1, we demonstrate that non-parametric methods significantly outperform parametric ones in managing stateful learning. However, all models exhibit challenges with catastrophic forgetting as interactions extend, highlighting the need for further advancements in lifelong learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various tasks, yet they often struggle with context-faithfulness generations that properly reflect contextual knowledge. While existing approaches focus on enhancing the decoding strategies, they ignore the fundamental mechanism of how contextual information is processed within LLMs’ internal states. As a result, LLMs remain limited in their ability to fully leverage contextual knowledge. In this paper, we propose Context-aware Layer Enhancement (CaLE), a novel intervention method that enhances the utilization of contextual knowledge within LLMs’ internal representations. By employing 𝒱-usable information analysis, CaLE strategically amplifies the growth of contextual information at an optimal layer, thereby enriching representations in the final layer. Our experiments demonstrate that CaLE effectively improves context-faithful generation in Question-Answering tasks, particularly in scenarios involving unknown or conflicting contextual knowledge.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT. However, developing robust ASR models for young children’s speech remains challenging due to differences in pronunciation, tone, and pace compared to adult speech. In this paper, we introduce a new Mandarin speech dataset focused on children aged 3 to 5, addressing the scarcity of resources in this area. The dataset comprises 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation. We provide a comprehensive analysis of speaker demographics, speech duration distribution and geographic coverage. Additionally, we evaluate ASR performance on models trained from scratch, such as Conformer, as well as fine-tuned pre-trained models like HuBERT and Whisper, where fine-tuning demonstrates significant performance improvements. Furthermore, we assess speaker verification (SV) on our dataset, showing that, despite the challenges posed by the unique vocal characteristics of young children, the dataset effectively supports both ASR and SV tasks. This dataset is a valuable contribution to Mandarin child speech research and holds potential for applications in educational technology and child-computer interaction. It will be open-source and freely available for all academic purposes.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with multimodal encoders on modality-specific data expands the modalities that LLMs can handle, leading to the formation of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). However, this paradigm heavily relies on resource-intensive and inflexible fine-tuning from scratch with new multimodal data. In this paper, we propose MMER (Multi-modality Expansion and Retention), a training-free approach that integrates existing MLLMs for effective multimodal expansion while retaining their original performance. Specifically, MMER reuses MLLMs’ multimodal encoders while merging their LLM parameters. By comparing original and merged LLM parameters, MMER generates binary masks to approximately separate LLM parameters for each modality. These decoupled parameters can independently process modality-specific inputs, reducing parameter conflicts and preserving original MLLMs’ fidelity. MMER can also mitigate catastrophic forgetting by applying a similar process to MLLMs fine-tuned on new tasks. Extensive experiments show significant improvements over baselines, proving that MMER effectively expands LLMs’ multimodal capabilities while retaining 99% of the original performance, and also markedly mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

Due to the large number of parameters, the inference phase of Large Language Models (LLMs) is resource-intensive. Unlike traditional model compression, which needs retraining, recent dynamic computation methods show that not all components are required for inference, enabling a training-free pipeline.In this paper, we focus on the dynamic depth of LLM generation. A token-position aware layer skipping framework is proposed to save 1.5x times operations efficiently while maintaining performance.We first observed that tokens predicted later have lower perplexity and thus require less computation. Then, we propose a training-free algorithm called Position-Aware Depth Decay Decoding (), which leverages a power-law decay function, ⌊ L × (𝛼ⁱ) ⌋, to determine the number of layers to retain when generating token T_i. Remarkably, without any retraining, the achieves success across a wide range of generation tasks for the first time.Experiments on large language models (the Llama) with 7 ∼ 70 billion parameters show that can achieve an average 1.5x speedup compared with the full-inference pipeline while maintaining comparable performance with nearly no performance drop (<1%) on the GSM8K and BBH benchmarks.

Recent research shows that supplementing Large Language Models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs can enhance their performance. However, existing methods often introduce noise in the retrieval and reasoning pipeline, hindering LLMs’ ability to effectively integrate external knowledge for complex multi-hop question answering. To address this, we propose RefKG, a novel framework designed to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs through reflective engagement with knowledge graphs. RefKG autonomously conduct retrieval and reflection on knowledge graphs. It consists of three modules: Query Decoupling, LLM-Driven Knowledge Graph Exploration, and Inference with Knowledge Reconstruction. We also introduce a multi-task tuning strategy that not only integrates external knowledge into LLMs but also trains them to leverage this knowledge for answering questions. This significantly improves their performance on knowledge-intensive tasks. Experiments on fact verification and knowledge graph question answering demonstrate RefKG’s effectiveness.

Multimodal reasoning with large language models (LLMs) often suffers from hallucinations and the presence of deficient or outdated knowledge within LLMs. Some approaches have sought to mitigate these issues by employing textual knowledge graphs, but their singular modality of knowledge limits comprehensive cross-modal understanding. In this paper, we propose the Multimodal Reasoning with Multimodal Knowledge Graph (MR-MKG) method, which leverages multimodal knowledge graphs (MMKGs) to learn rich and semantic knowledge across modalities, significantly enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of LLMs. In particular, a relation graph attention network is utilized for encoding MMKGs and a cross-modal alignment module is designed for optimizing image-text alignment. A MMKG-grounded dataset is constructed to equip LLMs with initial expertise in multimodal reasoning through pretraining. Remarkably, MR-MKG achieves superior performance while training on only a small fraction of parameters, approximately 2.25% of the LLM’s parameter size. Experimental results on multimodal question answering and multimodal analogy reasoning tasks demonstrate that our MR-MKG method outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

Large language models (LLMs) internalize enormous parametric knowledge during pre-training. Concurrently, realistic applications necessitate external contextual knowledge to aid models on the underlying tasks. This raises a crucial dilemma known as knowledge conflicts, where the contextual knowledge clashes with the parametric knowledge. However, existing decoding works are specialized in resolving knowledge conflicts and could inadvertently deteriorate performance in absence of conflicts. In this paper, we propose an adaptive decoding method, termed as contextual information-entropy constraint decoding (COIECD), to discern whether the knowledge conflicts occur and resolve them. It can improve the model’s faithfulness to conflicting context, and simultaneously maintain high performance among non-conflicting context. Our experiments show that COIECD exhibits strong performance and robustness over knowledge conflicts in realistic datasets.

Knowledge editing technology is crucial for maintaining the accuracy and timeliness of large language models (LLMs) . However, the setting of this task overlooks a significant portion of commonsense knowledge based on free-text in the real world, characterized by broad knowledge scope, long content and non instantiation. The editing objects of previous methods (e.g., MEMIT) were single token or entity, which were not suitable for commonsense knowledge in free-text form. To address the aforementioned challenges, we conducted experiments from two perspectives: knowledge localization and knowledge editing. Firstly, we introduced Knowledge Localization for Free-Text(KLFT) method, revealing the challenges associated with the distribution of commonsense knowledge in MLP and Attention layers, as well as in decentralized distribution. Next, we propose a Dynamics-aware Editing Method(DEM), which utilizes a Dynamics-aware Module to locate the parameter positions corresponding to commonsense knowledge, and uses Knowledge Editing Module to update knowledge. The DEM method fully explores the potential of the MLP and Attention layers, and successfully edits commonsense knowledge based on free-text. The experimental results indicate that the DEM can achieve excellent editing performance.

Commonsense question answering is important for making decisions about everyday matters. Although existing commonsense question answering works based on fully fine-tuned PLMs have achieved promising results, they suffer from prohibitive computation costs as well as poor interpretability. Some works improve the PLMs by incorporating knowledge to provide certain evidence, via elaborately designed GNN modules which require expertise. In this paper, we propose a simple knowledgeable parameter efficient tuning network to couple PLMs with external knowledge for commonsense question answering. Specifically, we design a trainable parameter-sharing adapter attached to a parameter-freezing PLM to incorporate knowledge at a small cost. The adapter is equipped with both entity- and query-related knowledge via two auxiliary knowledge-related tasks (i.e., span masking and relation discrimination). To make the adapter focus on the relevant knowledge, we design gating and attention mechanisms to respectively filter and fuse the query information from the PLM. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that KPE is parameter-efficient and can effectively incorporate knowledge for improving commonsense question answering.

Recently, numerous efforts have continued to push up performance boundaries of document-level relation extraction (DocRE) and have claimed significant progress in DocRE. In this paper, we do not aim at proposing a novel model for DocRE. Instead, we take a closer look at the field to see if these performance gains are actually true. By taking a comprehensive literature review and a thorough examination of popular DocRE datasets, we find that these performance gains are achieved upon a strong or even untenable assumption in common: all named entities are perfectly localized, normalized, and typed in advance. Next, we construct four types of entity mention attacks to examine the robustness of typical DocRE models by behavioral probing. We also have a close check on model usability in a more realistic setting. Our findings reveal that most of current DocRE models are vulnerable to entity mention attacks and difficult to be deployed in real-world end-user NLP applications. Our study calls more attentions for future research to stop simplifying problem setups, and to model DocRE in the wild rather than in an unrealistic Utopian world.

Sarcasm employs ambivalence, where one says something positive but actually means negative, and vice versa. The essence of sarcasm, which is also a sufficient and necessary condition, is the conflict between literal and implied sentiments expressed in one sentence. However, it is difficult to recognize such sentiment conflict because the sentiments are mixed or even implicit. As a result, the recognition of sophisticated and obscure sentiment brings in a great challenge to sarcasm detection. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Channel Framework by modeling both literal and implied sentiments separately. Based on this dual-channel framework, we design the Dual-Channel Network (DC-Net) to recognize sentiment conflict. Experiments on political debates (i.e. IAC-V1 and IAC-V2) and Twitter datasets show that our proposed DC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on sarcasm recognition. Our code is released to support research.

Quotation extraction aims to extract quotations from written text. There are three components in a quotation: source refers to the holder of the quotation, cue is the trigger word(s), and content is the main body. Existing solutions for quotation extraction mainly utilize rule-based approaches and sequence labeling models. While rule-based approaches often lead to low recalls, sequence labeling models cannot well handle quotations with complicated structures. In this paper, we propose the Context and Former-Label Enhanced Net () for quotation extraction. is able to extract complicated quotations with components of variable lengths and complicated structures. On two public datasets (and ) and one proprietary dataset (), we show that our achieves state-of-the-art performance on complicated quotation extraction.

Comparative opinion is a common linguistic phenomenon. The opinion is expressed by comparing multiple targets on a shared aspect, e.g., “camera A is better than camera B in picture quality”. Among the various subtasks in opinion mining, comparative opinion classification is relatively less studied. Current solutions use rules or classifiers to identify opinions, i.e., better, worse, or same, through feature engineering. Because the features are directly derived from the input sentence, these solutions are sensitive to the order of the targets mentioned in the sentence. For example, “camera A is better than camera B” means the same as “camera B is worse than camera A”; but the features of these two sentences are completely different. In this paper, we approach comparative opinion classification through prompt learning, taking the advantage of embedded knowledge in pre-trained language model. We design a twin framework with dual prompts, named CORT. This extremely simple model delivers state-of-the-art and robust performance on all benchmark datasets for comparative opinion classification. We believe CORT well serves as a new baseline for comparative opinion classification.