RuleMem: Active Rule Memory for Long-Term Conversational Agents

Question answering agents in long-term conversations must reason over massive, temporally dispersed dialogue histories. However, existing memory mechanisms primarily treat past information as \textit{passively} stored facts, leading to semantic gaps and unreliable reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose RuleMem, a rule-based memory framework that induces reusable logical rules from historical interactions to \textit{actively} guide both evidence retrieval and reasoning. Specifically, RuleMem constructs natural-language Horn clauses from conversations and validates them via a Rule Perplexity Consistency (RPC) mechanism. These induced rules enable the retrieval of semantically distant evidence while providing an explicit logical structure for answer generation. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of RuleMem on two long-term conversational benchmarks, LoCoMo and LongMemEval_s*. In a rigorous comparison against 14 baselines on LoCoMo, RuleMem achieved the highest accuracy, exceeding the baseline average by 27.47 points (a 54.3% relative improvement).

Unifying Conformal Language Tasks with In-Context Ensembles

Many NLP tasks, such as summarization and extractive question answering, reduce to retrieving relevant content from documents under two constraints: coverage, retaining enough pertinent information to achieve some goal, and conciseness, removing as much irrelevant information as possible. Conformal prediction methods have been used to guarantee coverage, and must be optimized for conciseness through design of a score function. State-of-the-art scoring functions use hand-engineered LLM prompts asking the model to rate the importance of content, but manual prompt engineering is labor-intensive and task-specific. We introduce the Conformal Relevance framework which uses in-context learning example curation and ensembling to create a score function which maintains coverage while improving conciseness with minimal manual input. We demonstrate this framework's application on seven NLP tasks, and also theoretically study the impact of diversity for ensembled conformal scores, giving a complementarity condition that characterizes when ensembling improves worst-case sentence scores, and a saturation bound on ensemble improvement.

Cite or Decline: A Strict Course-Grounded Chatbot for STEM Lecture Videos

Recorded lecture videos, often enhanced with search and summarization features, are a standard study resource. However, students cannot easily ask course specific questions or verify answers against an instructor's lecture. We report a semester-long deployment of VideoPoints platform with a retrieval-augmented chatbot that answers from course lecture materials and returns timestamped citations. The chatbot retrieves only from the active course, uses chapter summaries to guide transcript ranking, and returns clickable timestamped citations. Students used it for quick lookups and exam review. Across 833 messages, 70.5% included citations, none crossed a course boundary, and when no lecture evidence matched, the chatbot usually declined rather than answering. Among the users, citations were the most consistently useful feature, while practice-question generation was the strongest unmet request. We also evaluated the design on the real-world test split of EduVidQA, a public multimodal benchmark for lecture-video question answering. Our design improved correct-lecture retrieval by 6.3 percentage points over dense-only retrieval. Together, the results show that effective deployment depends on course isolation, supported citations, and alignment with students' study practices.

Learning Evidence Sufficiency Boundaries for Selective Answering in Grounded Multi-Hop QA

Grounded question answering systems should answer only when the supplied evidence supports the answer. In multi-hop QA, this requirement is difficult because partial evidence can make an unsupported answer appear plausible. We study selective answering through evidence sufficiency boundaries: for the same question, a model should abstain under unsupported or partially supported context, answer when the context first becomes sufficient, and keep the answer stable when redundant evidence is added. We introduce Evidence Sufficiency Boundary Training, a generation-native training framework that constructs ordered evidence chains and supervises the abstain-to-answer transition directly. The method combines level supervision, a boundary flip margin, post-boundary stability, and answer recall protection. We build evidence chains from HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MuSiQue, then evaluate models with chain metrics, raw QA utility, and unsupported-answer rates on external non-answerable sets. With Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct and LoRA adaptation, Evidence Sufficiency Boundary Training gives the strongest boundary localization among the tested systems, with flip accuracy of 0.807 compared with 0.781 for a token-level abstention baseline. It also achieves the lowest overall unsupported-answer rate on external non-answerable evaluation, 0.095 compared with 0.101 for the same baseline, while retaining competitive raw QA F1. The results show that grounded selective answering improves when training marks the evidence level where refusal should give way to answering.

How Correct Is Your Answer? A Semantic Correctness Framework for Open QA Evaluation

Reliable evaluation of open-ended question answering remains a bottleneck for measuring answer correctness of modern LLMs. Unlike multiple-choice tasks, free-form answers may be correct in many surface forms and may fail in qualitatively different ways, including incompleteness, contradiction, overgeneration, and endorsement of false premises. Existing judgment-based and similarity-based metrics often collapse these distinctions. We address this gap with three reusable contributions. First, we introduce a semantic correctness taxonomy that assigns open-ended answers to eight ordered classes, separating verbose-but-correct answers from those contaminated by hallucinated content. Second, we release CAP-Correctness, an 8.8k-example benchmark spanning widely used QA datasets, and CAP-Statements, an 11k-example dataset for converting question-answer pairs into declarative statements for natural language inference (NLI) training and statement-based evaluation. Third, we introduce CAP (Context-Aware Precision), a reference-based metric that scores question-conditioned statements using bidirectional NLI. Under a monotonicity protocol testing whether metrics respect the taxonomy's intended ordering, CAP outperforms established baselines.

H2Table: Hierarchical Hypergraph-Enhanced Large Language Models for Complex Table Reasoning

Tables are ubiquitous across diverse domains, yet reasoning over them remains a significant challenge for modern large language models (LLMs). Current approaches typically linearize tables into sequences, inherently overlooking their intrinsic two-dimensional and hierarchical structure. To address this, we propose H2Table (Hierarchical Hypergraph-Enhanced Table Reasoning), a novel framework that represents complex tables as hierarchical nested hypergraphs. To process this representation, we design a tailored hypergraph encoder to facilitate message passing between hyperedges (headers) and nodes (cells), thereby perceiving the semantic entailment relationships between them within complex tables. Furthermore, we introduce a set of learnable query vectors acting as a lightweight bridge to extract representative structural embeddings from the encoder into the LLM. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively handles complex table question answering tasks with hierarchical nested headers. Notably, on the HiTab dataset, H2Table achieves an average improvement of 22.88% over state-of-the-art baselines on highly complex tables with a nesting depth of four. Our code is available at: https://github.com/lila120/h2table.

EDRAC: Benchmarking Arabic Dialect Reading Comprehension

Dialectal Arabic (DA) remains under-resourced compared to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), particularly for machine reading comprehension (MRC) and question answering (QA). Existing Arabic QA benchmarks primarily focus on formal written MSA or multiple-choice QA, with limited coverage of naturally spoken dialects. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. We introduce EDRAC, the first large-scale benchmark for dialectal Arabic machine reading comprehension (MRC) and generative QA, covering five major dialects: Egyptian, Moroccan, Emirati, Syrian, and Saudi Arabic. EDRAC contains 499 passages derived from naturally occurring spoken interactions and 4,977 corresponding QA pairs generated through a human--LLM collaborative pipeline combining iterative generation, LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, and human verification. We benchmark Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs on EDRAC using lexical and semantic metrics. Our results reveal substantial gaps between semantic answer quality and dialectal fidelity, highlighting the limitations of existing evaluation metrics for dialectal Arabic generation. EDRAC provides a realistic and challenging MRC benchmark for future research on dialectal Arabic NLP.

Staged Linguistic Seeding: Grounded Query Expansion for Verified-Unit QA in AI Contact Centers

Customer-service QA in an AI contact center (AICC) runs under deployment constraints that benchmark QA misses: tight voice-hotline latency and a high cost for unsupported or wrong automatic answers. We deploy a system that answers only from a closed set of verified QA units: it returns a retrieved unit verbatim, or routes to clarify, abstain, or handoff. The index is enriched offline by staged linguistic seeding (SLS): a human authors a per-unit world-grounded slot recipe, gpt-4.1-mini renders it into variants, and a light human gate filters them. One methodology is reused across both domains, so inference stays a single retrieval pass with no query-time generation. On held-out query variants from two industrial domains, SLS lifts hybrid R@1 to 0.881/0.930 (+0.27/+0.34), with gains across all five retrievers tested. At the same gpt-4.1-mini generation budget, SLS beats doc2query by +0.20/+0.32, while cross-provenance evaluation provides additional evidence of transfer across generated-query distributions. Verified-unit answering also removes free-form generation's unsupported-content surface (7-13% versus approximately 0%). We report this as an application study, including negative results.

SCoNE: Selective Context-aware Neuron Editing for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is highly sensitive to retrieval noise: when retrieved documents mix informative and irrelevant context, LLMs are easily distracted, leading to hallucinations. To overcome this, we propose SCoNE (Selective Context-aware Neuron Editing), a training-free model editing approach that improves retrieval noise robustness by selectively strengthening context-aware FFN neurons that are identified by both high attribution and high cross-input variability. SCoNE requires only a small number of mining samples, no fine-tuning, and no inference-time overhead. Across various knowledge-intensive question-answering benchmarks and two LLM backbones, SCoNE consistently outperforms competitive baseline methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/HYU-ARK-Lab/SCoNE.

TopoCompress: Long Context Compression via Graph-Wired Semantic Trajectories

Long-context compression is essential for reducing the cost and latency of large language model inference. However, existing methods can fragment important evidence, require additional training or alignment, and often depend on the target model for effective compression. We introduce TopoCompress, a training-free and model-agnostic framework that compresses long contexts by selecting coherent semantic spans. TopoCompress first scores each span using dense and lexical query relevance together with semantic acceleration. It then constructs a hybrid graph that connects spans based on semantic similarity and sequential adjacency, and propagates the query-guided relevance scores over the graph. Across five long-context tasks-HotpotQA, 2WikiMQA, MuSiQue, Qasper, and MultiFieldQA-en-TopoCompress consistently outperforms strong compression baselines. Notably, TopoCompress achieves performance comparable to the strongest baseline while using a 4x smaller compression budget, and provides a 1.41x smaller compression time over the fastest baseline.

BiG-SURE - Bipartite Graph for Semantic Uncertainty and Reliability Estimation of LLMs

Reliable uncertainty estimation is a crucial requirement for deploying large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) in safety-critical settings, especially when the model parameters are not accessible (black-box). We propose BiG-SURE, an uncertainty estimator based on cross-temperature semantic agreement. The method samples low-temperature responses as stable semantic anchors and high-temperature responses as probes under meaning-preserving input transformations. It then constructs an anchor-probe Bipartite Graph (BiG) using NLI-based entailment scores and defines confidence through the normalized squared spectral energy of this matrix, with uncertainty given by its complement. This bipartite graph-based Semantic Uncertainty and Reliability Estimation (SURE) score measures whether high-temperature probes remain semantically aligned with the model's stable low-temperature belief or not. We evaluate BiG-SURE on text QA, multilingual QA, and multimodal QA tasks across multiple model families. In these experiments, BiG-SURE improves average abstention AUROC over prior black-box uncertainty estimators, while remaining simple, unsupervised, and applicable to black-box model settings.

Compression-Aware Abstention: Teaching LLMs to Refuse When KV-Compression Masks Remove Answer Evidence

KV-cache compression reduces LLM inference memory by evicting context tokens, but when the evicted tokens contain answer-bearing evidence, the model may hallucinate instead of recognizing that the compressed context is insufficient. We address this failure from a behavioral perspective: to our knowledge, this is the first work to formulate compression-aware abstention as a learning problem, in which a model learns to answer when supporting evidence survives compression and abstain when it does not. We construct supervision from compressor survival masks and tight answer-bearing spans, labeling examples as Confident when evidence survives and Abstain when it is removed. A 10.1M-parameter LoRA adapter trained on ~2.6K MuSiQue 2-hop QA examples reduces base-model hallucinations by 97% under prompt-style truncation while preserving correct answering on evidence-retaining examples. Unlike prompt-only abstention baselines, which over-abstain on many answerable high-retention examples, the trained adapter learns a conditional policy. We also evaluate the method under actual compressed-cache decoding, where multi-compressor training yields a 6-22x relative lift over the unaided base on evidence-retaining examples. Controlled-deletion experiments show that the learned behavior is driven by evidence content rather than input length alone.

CorporateBench: Large-Scale Q&A Benchmarking with Temporal Knowledge Bases

LLMs are increasingly able to answer complex questions about enterprise-scale document collections. But evaluation is hard: companies don't want to share internal communications, and synthetic datasets have been overly simple. We present CorporateBench (CB), a human-validated multi-task Q&A benchmark whose scale approaches the conditions LLMs encounter in corporate communication networks, with evaluation corpora surpassing 230,000 documents. CB evaluates LLMs across two dimensions (information extraction and knowledge base querying) through four synthetically generated firms ranging from 12 to 10,000 employees. Each corpus is sampled from a temporally evolving knowledge base describing a consistent world, guaranteeing cross-document logical consistency even across hundreds of thousands of documents. We evaluate five LLMs on CB, revealing increasingly poor performance as input size approaches realistic scales. CB provides LLM developers a metric for corporate communication reasoning, filling a crucial gap in the benchmarking ecosystem.

BrailleBench: Investigating Multi-Criteria Braille Comprehension in Large Language Models

Although Large language models (LLMs) mediate access to knowledge and computational assistance, their capabilities should benefit vulnerable groups in the same way. However, it is unclear whether existing AI systems are inclusive enough for blind and deafblind users to access the same functionality through Braille, whose indicators, contractions, and digital representations introduce distinct requirements for model comprehension. To this end, we introduce BrailleBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs in Braille comprehension from different Criteria. BrailleBench aligns 5,570 instances from five datasets, including mathematics, commonsense, and multi-hop question answering across English and Braille Grades 1 and 2. Different configurations are designed to understand whether the systems can comprehend Braille-authored content, express answers in Braille, and complete end-to-end Braille interaction. To ensure the quality and prevent evaluation bias, the benchmark is built through a deterministic, expert-reviewed pipeline via a self-created Braille Toolkit without using any data instances generated by LLMs. We evaluate six representative LLMs from various aspects. The results reveal a persistent gap between print-English capability and Braille accessibility. Braille understanding and expression are asymmetric, where Grade 2 is especially fragile on the input side compared to Grade 1, and fully Braille requests further reduce performance. The experimental observations provide valuable guidance for the development of future Braille AI systems. All related resources in BrailleBench are publicly available for future research.

Co-Evolving Structured Knowledge and Reasoning in Language Models

Retrieval-augmented methods improve factual accuracy by grounding language models in external knowledge, but retrieving over unstructured text often introduces irrelevant context and offers limited control over the retrieved information. Structured knowledge bases offer a more controllable alternative, yet they are expensive to construct and often brittle to reason over. To address these limitations, we propose KBevo: a co-evolving framework that jointly learns to construct a structured knowledge base and reason over it for knowledge-intensive question answering. By optimizing both components end-to-end with QA outcome rewards, our method enables reasoning success to directly improve the quality of the constructed knowledge base. This leads to larger, better-connected knowledge structures with higher answer reachability, while also improving compositional factual reasoning and controllability compared to standard retrieval baselines.

When RAG Fails to Equalize: Geo-bias in Factual Question Answering over Public Companies

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely assumed to mitigate factual errors in large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear whether retrieval uniformly compensates for missing knowledge. We study this question in a controlled factual QA setting over public companies, constructing a benchmark of approximately 2,000 firms across global equity indices. We evaluate six LLMs on four atomic attributes under four conditions: no-context, perfect context, misleading context, and distraction context. We find strong geographic disparities in no-context accuracy, indicating uneven parametric knowledge. While perfect context improves performance, it does not eliminate these gaps: gains are correlated with baseline accuracy, suggesting retrieval effectiveness is coupled to internal representations. Under misleading context, models frequently copy incorrect information. Larger models improve overall performance but do not remove these structural effects. These results challenge the view of RAG as a universal corrective and highlight the interaction between model knowledge, context quality, and entity representation.

SelfGraphRAG: Bridging the Supervision Gap in Graph-Based RAG with Synthetic QA Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language models by incorporating external knowledge without retraining, but existing methods often underuse the relational structure encoded in knowledge graphs. Graph-based RAG can capture entity relationships, yet supervised graph retrieval typically requires labeled question-answer data that may not be available for newly constructed graphs. We address this limitation with SelfGraphRAG, a framework that generates question-answer pairs directly from knowledge graph structure and uses them to train a query-conditioned graph retriever. The generated questions capture multi-hop paths and local neighborhoods, providing relational supervision without manual annotation. Experiments on multi-hop question answering and classification benchmarks show that SelfGraphRAG improves retrieval precision and downstream reasoning performance over embedding-based baselines. These results suggest that knowledge graph structure can provide useful supervision for training graph retrievers when labeled data are unavailable.

OPDSearch+: On-Policy Distillation with RL Refinement for Search-Augmented Reasoning

Search-augmented reasoning remains difficult for small language models. On-policy distillation (OPD) from trained teachers offers a promising direction, but suffers from two issues: (1) high-quality multi-turn search trajectories depend on dynamic retriever responses, making SFT data prohibitively expensive to collect at scale; (2) task-specifically trained teachers incur substantial training cost, while directly applying OPD with an off-the-shelf teacher without task-specific fine-tuning constrains the student to the teacher's performance ceiling and suffers from severe training instability. We propose OPDSearch+, the first distillation paradigm that requires no teacher fine-tuning for search-augmented reasoning. We investigate the role of a frozen off-the-shelf instruct model as the teacher in on-policy distillation, and reveal a key insight: the teacher reshapes the student's policy distribution so that subsequent RL converges to a superior solution that RL alone cannot reach. In stage one, the student interacts with a live search engine and is distilled via a per-position forward KL objective, transferring reasoning decomposition and evidence integration skills without any task-specific teacher training. In stage two, RL refines the distilled student from a richer behavioral foundation, achieving performance that RL alone cannot reach from scratch. Across seven QA benchmarks, OPDSearch+ with a 3B model consistently outperforms all prior 3B RL baselines, achieving gains of 13.1% on HotpotQA and 8.5% on 2WikiMultihopQA.

PARTAB: Partition-Aware Reasoning with Structured Evidence for Scalable Table Understanding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in table reasoning, but their effectiveness degrades as tables grow in size and complexity due to irrelevant context and difficulty localizing the evidence required for reasoning. Existing approaches typically reason over either the full table or a single reduced view, which can still obscure important row-column relationships. We introducePARTAB (Partition-Aware Reasoning overTables), a framework that constructs a structured evidence interface between the LLM and the table. PARTAB represents query-relevant evidence as semantically coherent, row-linked table regions and performs hierarchical selection over column groups and row-level partitions before composing the selected evidence for answer generation. We evaluate PARTAB on multiple table reasoning benchmarks, covering question answering, fact verification, and numerical reasoning. PARTAB consistently improves over full-table prompting and several recent table reasoning methods, achieving strong performance on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact while remaining competitive on numerical reasoning. Additional analyses show that semantic partitioning and targeted evidence selection improve evidence localization, substantially reduce the reasoning context, and provide larger benefits on complex tables. These results demonstrate the value of structured, partition aware evidence construction for scalable table reasoning.

EvoWiki: Incremental State Overwriting and Traceable Question Answering for Cross-Meeting Knowledge Evolution

In long-term collaboration spanning multiple meetings, factual states such as decisions and risks are continually revised, overturned, and replaced. Existing long-context methods typically stack the entire history, while many RAG and structured-memory methods organize knowledge as static or append-only facts and rely on semantic relevance at read time. Without explicit modeling of knowledge lifecycles, these approaches may retain conflicting old and new states simultaneously or discard history, leading to stale retrieval and answers that are difficult to verify. We present EvoWiki, an incremental question-answering architecture for dynamic long-form text. EvoWiki decouples offline incremental construction (BUILD) from online structured reading (READ). BUILD captures the intra-meeting micro-evolution from proposal to decision and uses entity version chains and a fine-grained State-Overwrite Protocol to explicitly distinguish current valid states from superseded history while preserving meeting-level provenance anchors. READ bypasses relevance-based Top-k retrieval and performs deterministic entity addressing, temporal resolution, and cross-entity multi-hop aggregation over the complete Wiki to produce grounded and traceable answers. We further introduce CrossMeet, a high-fidelity bilingual benchmark designed to simulate long-term state evolution, covering factual consistency, temporal reasoning, and cross-meeting multi-hop reasoning. Across six datasets and two reader models, EvoWiki improves macro-average Judge Accuracy over the strongest baselines by 9.72 and 10.00 percentage points, respectively. Human evaluation shows that EvoWiki is more robust and factually faithful under frequent state flips, validating valid-state-oriented reading as a reliable approach to cross-meeting knowledge evolution.

Comparing Chunking and Embedding Strategies for Turkish RAG Systems

Retrieval-Augmented Generation conditions a language model on chunks retrieved from a document collection. Its accuracy is therefore limited by the chunking and embedding stages that determine what can be retrieved. We compare Turkish document question answering across three chunking strategies (fixed-length, semantic, and layout-aware Docling), five embedding models, and two LLMs, over three documents with contrasting layouts. Every configuration answers the same question set, which allows component effects to be separated by paired testing rather than inferred from separate benchmarks. The fully crossed design yields 9{,}000 graded question-answer evaluations, each scored by an independent judge model, and component comparisons are tested by paired McNemar tests under Holm correction. The three leading embedding models are statistically indistinguishable, so language specialization yields no measurable retrieval advantage. The faster LLM is not the more accurate one. The preferred configuration depends on content type, since layout-aware chunking helps table-heavy documents far more than text-heavy ones.

GeoRisk-RAG: A Hierarchy-Aware Risk Framework for Improving RAG Reliability through Selective Answering

Current work on improving reliability in large language model (LLM)- generated answers has primarily leveraged Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), knowledge-graph augmentation, and reinforcement learning. While these methods are adept at enhancing and measuring reliability through semantic similarity and faithfulness, they often struggle to distinguish semantic similarity from geographic validity. This is especially critical in natural hazard management domains where geographic granularity (i.e., town vs. city vs. state) is significant for decision-making, as responses valid in one municipality may not transfer to another. In such domains, a confidently wrong answer carries greater risk than abstaining. We present GeoRisk-RAG, a novel hierarchy-aware framework that addresses this geographic-validity gap through selective answering. This framework explicitly estimates geographic applicability using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based distance for context retrieval before response generation. Experiments on a novel held-out wildfire-related question-answering (QA) dataset show that GeoRisk-RAG significantly reduces false confidence rates for location-dependent questions, lowering the rate to 0.009 compared with ~0.090 for standard semantic similarity and reranking baselines, while consistently achieving higher human preference alignment. This work provides a more comprehensive assessment of end-to-end RAG pipelines by integrating geographic validity and selective-answering behavior for safer decision-making in geospatial domains.

EnSI-RAG: Entity-Structure-Indexed Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long-Document Question Answering

Question answering (QA) over long, connected documents remains challenging because relevant evidence may span multiple entities and their relationships. Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods typically index documents as raw chunks and retrieve them through embedding similarity. Their performance degrades when chunk boundaries separate entities from supporting evidence or when a question requires multi-hop reasoning across the corpus. We propose EnSI-RAG (Entity-Structure-Indexed Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a framework that constructs a query-independent, entity-centered index. Each record (e, t, k, v) represents an entity e, its type t, a semantic category k in {property, relation, aspect}, and a value v, while retaining links to the original source passages. At query time, these records serve as retrieval handles, and an LLM synthesizes the retrieved passages into the final answer. This design separates evidence localization from answer synthesis while preserving traceable source evidence. Across Loong and Oolong, EnSI-RAG achieves an average accuracy of 78.24. Relative to the published baseline scores used as references, this is 6.62 points higher, suggesting its effectiveness across these settings. The code is available at https://github.com/RamonMeng/EnSI-RAG.

Enhancing LLMs in Predictive Political QA with Semi-Structured Data

Predictive political question answering (QA), such as predicting how a political actor will vote, goes beyond factual lookup. External political resources offer rich historical evidence, but rarely contain the answer itself. Existing LLM augmentation methods, including actor-profile-based simulation and knowledge graph evidence injection, improve political reasoning but largely treat external resources as knowledge-based evidence, leaving prediction-relevant signals under-modeled. We identify two complementary signals for predictive political QA: actor stances that capture issue-specific preferences, and high-order structure signals that capture indirect dependencies among political actors. We propose PSL, a dual-view framework that converts semi-structured political records into inference-oriented evidence for LLMs. PSL extracts stance signals from question-relevant actor records in a semantic view, and learns structure-aware actor representations from an actor interaction graph in a vector view. Across three real-world datasets and multiple LLMs, PSL consistently outperforms baselines, with ablations confirming the complementary gains of stance and structure signals.

PSK at WMT 2026 MIST: Task-Specialized QLoRA Adapters for Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering

We describe the PSK submission to the WMT 2026 Multilingual Instruction Shared Task. Our system uses the 3.35B-parameter Tiny Aya Global model with three QLoRA adapters, one for each task. The adapters are trained on multilingual document-summary pairs, passage-based question answering, and filtered standalone question answering. The summarization data also includes scientific papers with their author-written abstracts. On our held-out split, the context and summarization adapters perform better than our multitask adapter, which was trained only on data supplied by the organizers. Results for open QA are mixed and vary with answer length and evaluation method. We therefore submit three systems with the same context and summarization adapters but different open-QA adapters.

SABET-QA: Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Question Answering over Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGQA) requires reasoning over time-sensitive facts, yet existing embedding-based methods struggle with multi-step queries due to single-pass reasoning pipelines. We propose SABET-QA, a framework that iteratively refines reasoning states across multiple hops via a bidirectional entity-temporal scoring mechanism and a slot-aware contextualization module that aligns question semantics with temporal KG embeddings. A differentiable working memory enables progressive hypothesis refinement, while auxiliary temporal boundaries serve as coarse supervision when available. Experiments on CronQuestions, Complex-CronQuestions, MultiTQ, and TimeQuestions demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, particularly on complex multi-step temporal queries.

DeepWeaver: Bridging the Evidence Synthesis Gap in Open-Ended Question Answering

Retrieve-then-generate pipelines are commonly used to produce deep-research answers for open-ended questions, but retrieval alone is insufficient: LLMs must organize noisy and fragmented evidence into comprehensive, well-cited answers. We refer to this process as evidence synthesis. However, direct generation often underuses evidence, misaligns citations, and collapses diverse information into shallow summaries, exposing an evidence synthesis gap between retrieval and generation. Thus, we propose DeepWeaver, a novel framework that weaves noisy retrieved evidence into comprehensive answers by maintaining Thought Block Chains (TBCs), a structured representation that groups claims, salient information, keywords, and supporting evidence. DeepWeaver uses subordinate TBCs to inspect residual evidence, commit TBC revisions, and discover new claims before final generation. We evaluate DeepWeaver on open-ended QA over both knowledge bases and the web, and introduce LoQA, a high-density benchmark for evidence synthesis. Across multiple LLMs, DeepWeaver improves content sufficiency, citation grounding, and detail preservation on LoQA, while achieving deeper insights and higher citation quality on DeepResearch Bench. These results show that evidence weaving is an effective mechanism for bridging retrieval and generation in open-ended QA. Our code is available at https://github.com/KlozeWang/DeepWeaver.

Cross-Model Memory Transfer via Target-Side Reader Adaptation

Methods for improving knowledge use in large language models typically fall into two regimes. Non-parametric retrieval offers flexible access to external knowledge, but adds retrieval latency, context overhead, and only shallow integration with the backbone. Parametric adaptation is efficient at inference time, but entangles knowledge with model weights and can be hard to update, audit, or transfer. Engram-style hashed memory occupies a middle regime: it stores learned information in an external, addressable table, yet consumes that table through a small learned reader. This raises a basic question: when such a memory is moved across backbones, what matters more, the frozen memory itself or the target-side reader? We study this question through cross-model frozen-memory extraction, in which a memory trained on a source model is frozen and attached to a different target model, with only a lightweight reader trained. Ablations show that learned memory content and correct addressing both matter, but the transferred table becomes useful only through a reader aligned to the target model. In downstream question answering tasks, a dual-layer, four-branch reader nearly closes the gap between same-model and cross-model reuse, achieving an average score of 38.8 under our controlled evaluation protocol. Moreover, when the provider reader is directly compatible with the target interface, the frozen artifact can provide substantial utility without target-side training, while optional reader adaptation yields further improvement. These results suggest that Engram can serve as a reusable external knowledge artifact, provided that the target has access to a compatible reader interface; target-side adaptation can further improve alignment when direct reader reuse is insufficient.

FTA-Mem: Fact-Time-Affect Anchored Memory for Low-Density Long-Term Dialogue

Long-term emotional-support agents require memory mechanisms for personalized understanding across sessions. However, emotional-support dialogue is often low-density: turns are incomplete, evidence is scattered, and user states evolve over time. Existing memory methods usually rely on fixed units, such as turn-level notes or session summaries, which may lose details or introduce redundant noise. We propose FTA-Mem, a structured memory framework for low-density long-term dialogue. FTA-Mem uses Boundary-preserving Window Segmentation (BWS) to form coherent situation fragments, and constructs Fact-Time-Affect Memory Units (FTA Units) that jointly encode factual content, temporal grounding, and affective context. Retrieved units are then synthesized into structured context for answer generation. Experiments on ES-MemEval and LoCoMo show that FTA-Mem improves overall long-term memory question answering across benchmarks with different information-density characteristics. On ES-MemEval, FTA-Mem achieves 0.3871 F1 and 0.6668 BERTScore. Further analysis shows that situation-level FTA construction better balances evidence preservation and construction cost than coarse session-level or overly fine-grained turn-pair construction, providing an effective granularity trade-off for long-term dialogue memory.

STAIR: Semantic-Temporal Automaton for Interpretable Reasoning in Temporal Question Answering

By leveraging large-scale pretraining, LLMs can interpret diverse temporal expressions and question formulations without task-specific training. However, existing prompt-based neuro-symbolic systems continue to rely on LLMs for both semantic interpretation and exact temporal inference. Consequently, discrete decisions regarding intervals, time anchors, and ordered states remain vulnerable to probabilistic errors and difficult to verify. We present STAIR, a \textbf{S}emantic-\textbf{T}emporal \textbf{A}utomaton for \textbf{I}nterpretable \textbf{R}easoning. STAIR separates semantic interpretation from precise temporal inference: an answer-free LLM adapter maps complex question formulations to normalized temporal intents, while a deterministic temporal automaton with finite control and guarded transitions executes the corresponding policies over canonicalized evidence. Following a rule-first design, STAIR resolves standard questions without invoking an LLM and applies semantic adaptation only when the rule path fails to produce an executable intent. This approach reduces free-form reasoning, making temporal decisions verifiable and interpretable. Specifically, guarded execution supports precise point-time containment and before/after selection, while semantic adaptation handles non-exact intervals and time-anchored queries. Across the TimeQA-Easy, TimeQA-Hard, TempReason-L2, and TempReason-L3 datasets, STAIR consistently outperforms strong baselines in the TQA task using matched model settings, achieving average F1 improvements of 16.57\% and 3.10\% when utilizing the Qwen2.5-7B and GPT-4o-mini models, respectively. Furthermore, ablations and diagnostic analyses demonstrate that STAIR excels at handling both boundary-sensitive and order-sensitive queries, while its guarded execution and semantic adaptation ensure precise point-time reasoning and inexact intervals, respectively.