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Designing effective task-level prompts is crucial for improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). While prior work on instruction induction demonstrates that LLMs can infer better instructions with limited examples, existing approaches often rely on input-output pairs, where obtaining labeled answers can be difficult or costly. To address this limitation, we propose Strategy-Induct, a framework that derives task-level instructions solely from a small set of example questions without requiring labeled answers. Our approach first prompts the model to generate explicit reasoning strategies for each question, forming (strategy, question) pairs. These pairs are then used to induce a task instruction that guides reasoning. Experiments across multiple tasks and model scales demonstrate that Strategy-Induct outperforms state-of-the-art methods in question-only settings. Furthermore, we observe that jointly utilizing LLMs and Large Reasoning Models for both task instruction generation and inference can lead to further performance improvements.

ACL 2026

Strategy-Induct: Task-Level Strategy Induction for Instruction Generation

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Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used to generate plausible text on online platforms, without revealing the generation process.
As users increasingly encounter such black-box outputs, detecting hallucinations has become a critical challenge.
To address this challenge, we focus on developing a hallucination detection framework for black-box generators.
Motivated by the observation that hallucinations, once introduced, tend to persist, we sample future contexts.
The sampled future contexts provide valuable clues for hallucination detection and can be effectively integrated with various sampling-based methods.
We extensively demonstrate performance improvements across multiple methods using our proposed sampling approach.

Enhancing Hallucination Detection via Future Context

We perform in-depth evaluations of in-context learning (ICL) on state-of-the-art transformer, state-space, and hybrid large language models over two categories of knowledge-based ICL tasks. Using a combination of behavioral probing and intervention-based methods, we have discovered that, while LLMs of different architectures can behave similarly in task performance, their internals could remain different. We discover that function vectors (FVs) responsible for ICL are primarily located in the self-attention and Mamba layers, and speculate that Mamba2 uses a different mechanism from FVs to perform ICL. FVs are more important for ICL involving parametric knowledge retrieval, but not for contextual knowledge understanding. Our work contributes to a more nuanced understanding across architectures and task types. Methodologically, our approach also highlights the importance of combining both behavioural and mechanistic analyses to investigate LLM capabilities.

Understanding In-Context Learning Beyond Transformers: An Investigation of State Space and Hybrid Architectures

Do reasoning models have "Aha!" moments?
Prior work suggests that models like DeepSeek-R1-Zero undergo sudden mid-trace realizations that lead to accurate outputs, implying an intrinsic capacity for self-correction. 
Yet, it remains unclear whether such intrinsic shifts in reasoning strategy actually improve performance.
Here, we study mid-reasoning shifts and instrument training runs to detect them. 
Our analysis spans $1$M+ reasoning traces, hundreds of training checkpoints, three reasoning domains, and multiple decoding temperatures and model architectures.
We find that reasoning shifts are rare, do not become more frequent with training, and seldom improve accuracy, indicating that they do not correspond to prior perceptions of model insight. 
However, their effect varies with model uncertainty. Building on this finding, we show that artificially triggering extrinsic shifts under high entropy reliably improves accuracy. 
Our results show that mid-reasoning shifts are symptoms of unstable inference behavior rather than an intrinsic mechanism for self-correction.

The Illusion of Insight in Reasoning Models

Large language models (LLMs) seem to offer an easy path to interpretability: just ask them to explain their answers. Yet the features driving an answer often differ from those emphasized in its explanation, meaning post-hoc rationales can misrepresent what actually shaped the model's output. We quantify this gap by comparing the feature-importance distributions of answers and their explanations. Prior analyses reveal such discrepancies, but large-scale study has been limited by the high computational cost of attribution methods. To address this, we introduce the Post-hoc Self-Consistency Bank (PSCB), a large-scale benchmark linking model decisions with diverse explanations and attribution vectors across datasets, methods, and model families. Using PSCB, we find that Spearman rank correlation provides a more reliable signal of alignment than cosine similarity. Building on this insight, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to attribution-based preference data, improving alignment without degrading task accuracy, and show that standard supervised fine-tuning on the same data fails to achieve comparable gains. These improvements generalize robustly across domains, paving the way toward scalable and faithful alignment between LLM decisions and their natural language explanations.

Aligning What LLMs Do and Say: Towards Self-Consistent Explanations

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has achieved notable success in enabling agents to perform complex reasoning and tool use. However, most methods still relies on sparse outcome-based reward for training. Such feedback fails to differentiate intermediate reasoning quality, leading to suboptimal training results. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{Agent Reasoning Reward Model (Agent-RRM)}, a multi-faceted reward model that produces structured feedback for agentic trajectories, including (1) an explicit reasoning trace , (2) a focused critique that provides refinement guidance by highlighting reasoning flaws, and (3) an overall score that evaluates process performance. Leveraging these signals, we systematically investigate three integration strategies: \textbf{Reagent-C} (text-augmented refinement), \textbf{Reagent-R} (reward-augmented guidance), and \textbf{Reagent-U} (unified feedback integration). Extensive evaluations across 12 diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Reagent-U yields substantial performance leaps, achieving 43.7% on GAIA and 46.2% on WebWalkerQA, validating the effectiveness of our reasoning reward model and training schemes. Code, models, and datasets will be released to facilitate future research.

 Exploring Reasoning Reward Model for Agents

Code localization is a primary bottleneck in automated software development. While parallel tool execution can accelerate discovery, existing agents suffer from a 34.9% redundant tool invocation rate, negating the benefits of parallelism. We introduce FuseSearch, which reframes parallel code localization as a quality--efficiency co-optimization problem. By defining tool efficiency---the ratio of novel information gain to total invocations---we employ a two-stage SFT and RL pipeline to train models in adaptive parallel strategies. Unlike fixed-breadth methods, FuseSearch dynamically adjusts search breadth based on task context, transitioning from exploration to refinement. On SWE-bench Verified, FuseSearch-4B matches SOTA performance (84.7% file-level and 56.4% function-level 
$F_1$ scores) while being 93.6% faster, using 67.7% fewer turns and 68.9% fewer tokens. Our findings demonstrate that efficiency-aware training inherently boosts quality by eliminating noisy, redundant signals, enabling high-performance, low-cost localization agents. Code: \url{https://github.com/sxthunder/FuseSearch}

FuseSearch: Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization

The emergence of groundbreaking large language models capable of performing complex reasoning tasks holds significant promise for addressing various scientific challenges, including those arising in complex clinical scenarios. To enable their safe and effective deployment in real-world healthcare settings, it is urgently necessary to benchmark the diagnostic capabilities of current models systematically. Given the limitations of existing medical benchmarks in evaluating advanced diagnostic reasoning, we present DiagnosisArena, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark designed to rigorously assess professional-level diagnostic competence. DiagnosisArena consists of 1,113 pairs of segmented patient cases and corresponding diagnoses, spanning 28 medical specialties, deriving from clinical case reports published in 10 top-tier medical journals. The benchmark is developed through a meticulous construction pipeline, involving multiple rounds of screening and review by both AI systems and human experts, with thorough checks conducted to prevent data leakage. Our study reveals that even the most advanced reasoning models, o3-mini, o1, and DeepSeek-R1, achieve only 45.82%, 31.09%, and 17.79% accuracy, respectively. This finding highlights a significant generalization bottleneck in current large language models when faced with clinical diagnostic reasoning challenges. Through DiagnosisArena, we aim to drive further advancements in AI’s diagnostic reasoning capabilities, enabling more effective solutions for real-world clinical diagnostic challenges. We openly share the benchmark and evaluation tools for further research and development.

DiagnosisArena: Benchmarking Diagnostic Reasoning for Large Language Models

Identifying conditions that a certain drug takes therapeutic effect on a target disease is crucial for clinical decision-making support. However, most existing biomedical information extraction methods have focused on identifying only relations between drugs and diseases, while largely overlooking the context-specific conditions where such relations can apply. To address this problem, we introduce the task of applicability condition extraction for therapeutic drug--disease relations from biomedical research literature. We create the first dataset that has manually annotated triples of drugs, diseases, and applicability conditions on biomedical paper abstracts with 1,119 drug-disease pairs. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate the performance of a range of existing methods. In addition, we propose a new method that enhances LoRA to consider relations between drugs and diseases. Our method consistently outperforms strong baselines across different evaluation settings.

Applicability Condition Extraction for Therapeutic Drug-Disease Relations

Editing presentation slides is a frequent yet tedious task, ranging from creative layout design to repetitive text maintenance. While recent GUI-based agents powered by Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) excel at tasks requiring visual perception, such as spatial layout adjustments, they often incur high computational costs and latency when handling structured, text-centric, or batch processing tasks. In this paper, we propose Talk-to-Your-Slides, a high-efficiency slide editing agent that operates via language-driven structured data manipulation rather than relying on the image modality. By leveraging the underlying object model instead of screen pixels, our approach ensures precise content modification while preserving style fidelity, addressing the limitations of OCR-based visual agents. Our system features a hierarchical architecture that effectively bridges high-level user instructions with low-level execution codes. Experiments demonstrate that for text-centric and formatting tasks, our method enables 34% faster processing, achieves 34% better instruction fidelity, and operates at an 87% lower cost compared to GUI-based baselines. Furthermore, we introduce TSBench, a human-verified benchmark dataset comprising 379 instructions, including a Hard subset designed to evaluate robustness against complex and visually dependent queries. Our code and benchmark are available at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1onwp5m7t3207xZu7HEBTMpdivsiOuqG8?usp=share_link

 Talk to Your Slides: High-Efficiency Slide Editing via Language-Driven Structured Data Manipulation

Large language models (LLMs) are excellent at maintaining high-level, convincing dialogue, but it remains unclear whether their persuasive success reflects genuine understanding of the discourse. We examine this question through informal debates between humans and LLMs, first by measuring their persuasive skills, and then by relating these to their understanding of what is being talked about: namely, their comprehension of argumentative structures and the pragmatic context on the same debates. We find that LLMs effectively maintain coherent, persuasive debates, and can sway the beliefs of both participants and audiences. We also note that awareness or suspicion of AI involvement encourage people to be more critical of the arguments made. However, we also find that LLMs are unable to show comprehension of deeper dialogical structures, such as argument quality or existence of supporting premises. Our results reveal a disconnect between LLM comprehension and dialogical skills, raising ethical and practical concerns on their deployment on explanation-critical contexts. From an argumentation-theoretical perspective, we experimentally question whether an agent, if it can convincingly maintain a dialogue, is required to show it knows what is talking about.

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