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Mar 14

Can We Further Elicit Reasoning in LLMs? Critic-Guided Planning with Retrieval-Augmentation for Solving Challenging Tasks

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities but may struggle with complex reasoning and factual correctness. Existing methods harness the strengths of chain-of-thought and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to decompose a complex problem into simpler steps and apply retrieval to improve factual correctness. These methods work well on straightforward reasoning tasks but often falter on challenging tasks such as competitive programming and mathematics, due to frequent reasoning errors and irrelevant knowledge retrieval. To address this, we introduce Critic-guided planning with Retrieval-augmentation, CR-Planner, a novel framework that leverages fine-tuned critic models to guide both reasoning and retrieval processes through planning. CR-Planner solves a problem by iteratively selecting and executing sub-goals. Initially, it identifies the most promising sub-goal from reasoning, query generation, and retrieval, guided by rewards given by a critic model named sub-goal critic. It then executes this sub-goal through sampling and selecting the optimal output based on evaluations from another critic model named execution critic. This iterative process, informed by retrieved information and critic models, enables CR-Planner to effectively navigate the solution space towards the final answer. We employ Monte Carlo Tree Search to collect the data for training the critic models, allowing for a systematic exploration of action sequences and their long-term impacts. We validate CR-Planner on challenging domain-knowledge-intensive and reasoning-heavy tasks, including competitive programming, theorem-driven math reasoning, and complex domain retrieval problems. Our experiments demonstrate that CR-Planner significantly outperforms baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in addressing challenging problems by improving both reasoning and retrieval.

Conversation Routines: A Prompt Engineering Framework for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems

This study introduces Conversation Routines (CR), a structured prompt engineering framework for developing task-oriented dialog systems using Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs demonstrate remarkable natural language understanding capabilities, engineering them to reliably execute complex business workflows remains challenging. The proposed CR framework enables the development of Conversation Agentic Systems (CAS) through natural language specifications, embedding task-oriented logic within LLM prompts. This approach provides a systematic methodology for designing and implementing complex conversational workflows while maintaining behavioral consistency. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness through two proof-of-concept implementations: a Train Ticket Booking System and an Interactive Troubleshooting Copilot. These case studies validate CR's capability to encode sophisticated behavioral patterns and decision logic while preserving natural conversational flexibility. Results show that CR enables domain experts to design conversational workflows in natural language while leveraging custom functions (tools) developed by software engineers, creating an efficient division of responsibilities where developers focus on core API implementation and domain experts handle conversation design. While the framework shows promise in accessibility and adaptability, we identify key challenges including computational overhead, non-deterministic behavior, and domain-specific logic optimization. Future research directions include CR evaluation methods based on prompt engineering frameworks driven by goal-oriented grading criteria, improving scalability for complex multi-agent interactions, and enhancing system robustness to address the identified limitations across diverse business applications.

Enhancing Large Language Models' Situated Faithfulness to External Contexts

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often augmented with external information as contexts, but this external information can sometimes be inaccurate or even intentionally misleading. We argue that robust LLMs should demonstrate situated faithfulness, dynamically calibrating their trust in external information based on their confidence in the internal knowledge and the external context. To benchmark this capability, we evaluate LLMs across several QA datasets, including a newly created dataset called RedditQA featuring in-the-wild incorrect contexts sourced from Reddit posts. We show that when provided with both correct and incorrect contexts, both open-source and proprietary models tend to overly rely on external information, regardless of its factual accuracy. To enhance situated faithfulness, we propose two approaches: Self-Guided Confidence Reasoning (SCR) and Rule-Based Confidence Reasoning (RCR). SCR enables models to self-access the confidence of external information relative to their own internal knowledge to produce the most accurate answer. RCR, in contrast, extracts explicit confidence signals from the LLM and determines the final answer using predefined rules. Our results show that for LLMs with strong reasoning capabilities, such as GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, SCR outperforms RCR, achieving improvements of up to 24.2% over a direct input augmentation baseline. Conversely, for a smaller model like Llama-3-8B, RCR outperforms SCR. Fine-tuning SCR with our proposed Confidence Reasoning Direct Preference Optimization (CR-DPO) method improves performance on both seen and unseen datasets, yielding an average improvement of 8.9% on Llama-3-8B. In addition to quantitative results, we offer insights into the relative strengths of SCR and RCR. Our findings highlight promising avenues for improving situated faithfulness in LLMs. The data and code are released.

Class-relation Knowledge Distillation for Novel Class Discovery

We tackle the problem of novel class discovery, which aims to learn novel classes without supervision based on labeled data from known classes. A key challenge lies in transferring the knowledge in the known-class data to the learning of novel classes. Previous methods mainly focus on building a shared representation space for knowledge transfer and often ignore modeling class relations. To address this, we introduce a class relation representation for the novel classes based on the predicted class distribution of a model trained on known classes. Empirically, we find that such class relation becomes less informative during typical discovery training. To prevent such information loss, we propose a novel knowledge distillation framework, which utilizes our class-relation representation to regularize the learning of novel classes. In addition, to enable a flexible knowledge distillation scheme for each data point in novel classes, we develop a learnable weighting function for the regularization, which adaptively promotes knowledge transfer based on the semantic similarity between the novel and known classes. To validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, including CIFAR100, Stanford Cars, CUB, and FGVC-Aircraft datasets. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on almost all benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/kleinzcy/Cr-KD-NCD{here}.

Cross-Ray Neural Radiance Fields for Novel-view Synthesis from Unconstrained Image Collections

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is a revolutionary approach for rendering scenes by sampling a single ray per pixel and it has demonstrated impressive capabilities in novel-view synthesis from static scene images. However, in practice, we usually need to recover NeRF from unconstrained image collections, which poses two challenges: 1) the images often have dynamic changes in appearance because of different capturing time and camera settings; 2) the images may contain transient objects such as humans and cars, leading to occlusion and ghosting artifacts. Conventional approaches seek to address these challenges by locally utilizing a single ray to synthesize a color of a pixel. In contrast, humans typically perceive appearance and objects by globally utilizing information across multiple pixels. To mimic the perception process of humans, in this paper, we propose Cross-Ray NeRF (CR-NeRF) that leverages interactive information across multiple rays to synthesize occlusion-free novel views with the same appearances as the images. Specifically, to model varying appearances, we first propose to represent multiple rays with a novel cross-ray feature and then recover the appearance by fusing global statistics, i.e., feature covariance of the rays and the image appearance. Moreover, to avoid occlusion introduced by transient objects, we propose a transient objects handler and introduce a grid sampling strategy for masking out the transient objects. We theoretically find that leveraging correlation across multiple rays promotes capturing more global information. Moreover, extensive experimental results on large real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of CR-NeRF.

A Knowledge-Injected Curriculum Pretraining Framework for Question Answering

Knowledge-based question answering (KBQA) is a key task in NLP research, and also an approach to access the web data and knowledge, which requires exploiting knowledge graphs (KGs) for reasoning. In the literature, one promising solution for KBQA is to incorporate the pretrained language model (LM) with KGs by generating KG-centered pretraining corpus, which has shown its superiority. However, these methods often depend on specific techniques and resources to work, which may not always be available and restrict its application. Moreover, existing methods focus more on improving language understanding with KGs, while neglect the more important human-like complex reasoning. To this end, in this paper, we propose a general Knowledge-Injected Curriculum Pretraining framework (KICP) to achieve comprehensive KG learning and exploitation for KBQA tasks, which is composed of knowledge injection (KI), knowledge adaptation (KA) and curriculum reasoning (CR). Specifically, the KI module first injects knowledge into the LM by generating KG-centered pretraining corpus, and generalizes the process into three key steps that could work with different implementations for flexible application. Next, the KA module learns knowledge from the generated corpus with LM equipped with an adapter as well as keeps its original natural language understanding ability to reduce the negative impacts of the difference between the generated and natural corpus. Last, to enable the LM with complex reasoning, the CR module follows human reasoning patterns to construct three corpora with increasing difficulties of reasoning, and further trains the LM from easy to hard in a curriculum manner. We provide an implementation of the general framework, and evaluate the proposed KICP on four real-word datasets. The results demonstrate that our framework can achieve higher performances.

Deliberate Reasoning for LLMs as Structure-aware Planning with Accurate World Model

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) remains a key challenge, especially for tasks that require complex, multi-step decision-making. Humans excel at these tasks by leveraging deliberate planning with an internal world model to simulate the potential outcomes of various actions. Inspired by this, we propose a novel multi-step reasoning framework for LLMs, referred to as Structure-aware Planning with Accurate World Model (SWAP). Unlike previous approaches that rely solely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in natural language, SWAP incorporates structural information to guide the reasoning process via a world model and provides a soft verification mechanism over the steps. Moreover, SWAP overcomes the challenge of accurate world state predictions in complex reasoning tasks by introducing a Generator-Discriminator architecture, which enables more reliable world modeling. Specifically, the generator predicts the next state, and the discriminator ensures alignment with the logical consistency required by the problem context. SWAP also encourages the policy model to explore a broad range of potential actions to prevent premature convergence. By resolving the bottlenecks of generation diversity for both actions and states using diversity-based modeling (DBM) and improving discrimination accuracy through contrastive ranking (CR), SWAP significantly enhances the reasoning performance of LLMs. We evaluate SWAP across diverse reasoning-intensive benchmarks including math reasoning, logical reasoning, and coding tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SWAP achieves substantial improvements over the baselines and consistently outperforms existing LLMs of similar sizes.

MoDeGPT: Modular Decomposition for Large Language Model Compression

Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped the landscape of artificial intelligence by demonstrating exceptional performance across various tasks. However, substantial computational requirements make their deployment challenging on devices with limited resources. Recently, compression methods using low-rank matrix techniques have shown promise, yet these often lead to degraded accuracy or introduce significant overhead in parameters and inference latency. This paper introduces Modular Decomposition (MoDeGPT), a novel structured compression framework that does not need recovery fine-tuning while resolving the above drawbacks. MoDeGPT partitions the Transformer block into modules comprised of matrix pairs and reduces the hidden dimensions via reconstructing the module-level outputs. MoDeGPT is developed based on a theoretical framework that utilizes three well-established matrix decomposition algorithms -- Nystr\"om approximation, CR decomposition, and SVD -- and applies them to our redefined transformer modules. Our comprehensive experiments show MoDeGPT, without backward propagation, matches or surpasses previous structured compression methods that rely on gradient information, and saves 98% of compute costs on compressing a 13B model. On Llama-2/3 and OPT models, MoDeGPT maintains 90-95% zero-shot performance with 25-30% compression rates. Moreover, the compression can be done on a single GPU within a few hours and increases the inference throughput by up to 46%.

Evidence to Generate (E2G): A Single-agent Two-step Prompting for Context Grounded and Retrieval Augmented Reasoning

While chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has revolutionized how LLMs perform reasoning tasks, its current methods and variations (e.g, Self-consistency, ReACT, Reflexion, Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT), Cumulative Reasoning (CR)) suffer from limitations like slowness, limited context grounding, hallucination and inconsistent outputs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Evidence to Generate (E2G), a novel single-agent, two-step prompting framework. Instead of unverified reasoning claims, this innovative approach leverages the power of "evidence for decision making" by first focusing exclusively on the thought sequences (the series of intermediate steps) explicitly mentioned in the context which then serve as extracted evidence, guiding the LLM's output generation process with greater precision and efficiency. This simple yet powerful approach unlocks the true potential of chain-of-thought like prompting, paving the way for faster, more reliable, and more contextually aware reasoning in LLMs. \tool achieves remarkable results robustly across a wide range of knowledge-intensive reasoning and generation tasks, surpassing baseline approaches with state-of-the-art LLMs. For example, (i) on LogiQA benchmark using GPT-4 as backbone model, \tool achieves a new state-of-the Accuracy of 53.8% exceeding CoT by 18%, ToT by 11%, CR by 9% (ii) a variant of E2G with PaLM2 outperforms the variable-shot performance of Gemini Ultra by 0.9 F1 points, reaching an F1 score of 83.3 on a subset of DROP.

A Model RRNet for Spectral Information Exploitation and LAMOST Medium-resolution Spectrum Parameter Estimation

This work proposes a Residual Recurrent Neural Network (RRNet) for synthetically extracting spectral information, and estimating stellar atmospheric parameters together with 15 chemical element abundances for medium-resolution spectra from Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST). The RRNet consists of two fundamental modules: a residual module and a recurrent module. The residual module extracts spectral features based on the longitudinally driving power from parameters, while the recurrent module recovers spectral information and restrains the negative influences from noises based on Cross-band Belief Enhancement. RRNet is trained by the spectra from common stars between LAMOST DR7 and APOGEE-Payne catalog. The 17 stellar parameters and their uncertainties for 2.37 million medium-resolution spectra from LAMOST DR7 are predicted. For spectra with S/N >= 10, the precision of estimations Teff and log g are 88 K and 0.13 dex respectively, elements C, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Fe, Ni are 0.05 dex to 0.08 dex, and N, O, S, K, Ti, Cr, Mn are 0.09 dex to 0.14 dex, while that of Cu is 0.19 dex. Compared with StarNet and SPCANet, RRNet shows higher accuracy and robustness. In comparison to Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment and Galactic Archaeology with HERMES surveys, RRNet manifests good consistency within a reasonable range of bias. Finally, this work releases a catalog for 2.37 million medium-resolution spectra from the LAMOST DR7, the source code, the trained model and the experimental data respectively for astronomical science exploration and data processing algorithm research reference.