arXiv AI

Multimodal Language Models Benchmarked Against the NRC Reactor Operator Licensing Examination: Fine-Tuning and Retrieval Strategies

arXiv:2607. 22067v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Competence claims for a language model in a safety-critical domain are credible when measured against a standard the domain already enforces.

arXiv AI
Jun 26

NebulaExp-8B: An Empirical Post-Training Pipeline via Full-Scale Ablation Research

arXiv:2606. 26671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training alignment determines the reasoning and human preference following capabilities of large language models, yet most existing works withhold detailed data construction, filtering rules and training recipes, which hinders community reproducibility and lightweight model optimization.

By Qiaobo Hao, Yangqian Wu, Shunyi Wang, Zhongjian Zhang, Ziqun Li, Yayin He, Muqing Li, Chen Zhong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

OraclePhys: A Systematic Framework for LLM Fine-Tuning on Structural Mechanics

OraclePhys is a fine‑tuning framework for large language models on structural mechanics, comprising a graded benchmark (OraclePhys‑Bench), a 30K supervision dataset (OraclePhys‑30K), and a controlled training study. The study shows that the form of the label’s answer, rather than its length, determines what the model learns, and that certain training objectives can produce models that match or exceed existing LLMs on spatial structural response tasks. The trained 8B model reaches the data‑precision frontier, outperforming zero‑shot and 32‑shot baselines at a specialist level.

By Mingyu Li, Guorui Song, Jing Lin, Haoqian Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Simulator-Grounded Large Language Models for Industrial Causal Reasoning: Tool-Use, Structured Injection, and Plant-Portable Retrieval for Wastewater Treatment Decision Support

arXiv:2608. 05151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wastewater operators need answers grounded in how their plant's variables interact and how fast effects propagate, not in generic pretraining text, when asking causal questions such as "why is N2O rising?

By Gary Simethy, Daniel Ortiz Arroyo, Petar Durdevic
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Think Inside the Chunk: RegulaRAG for Regulation-Compliant Scenario Generation using LLMs: A Case Study of UN Regulation No. 152

arXiv:2608. 16394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating regulation-compliant test scenarios is essential for validating safety-critical automotive systems, yet Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to ground outputs in long, hierarchical standards.

By Vahid Zolfaghari, Nenad Petrovic, Andr\'E Schamschurko, Alois Knoll
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Thinking in a Low-Resource Language: What SFT Builds, What RL Fixes, What Accuracy Cannot See

The paper evaluates how three large mixture‑of‑experts models (Alibaba, OpenAI, NVIDIA) can be fine‑tuned to reason in a low‑resource language, specifically Greek. Accuracy metrics show little change, but the authors uncover significant qualitative improvements: after supervised fine‑tuning, models reason in Greek on ~98% of items, with better grammaticality and retained general ability. Reinforcement learning with pre‑registered rewards further eliminates reasoning‑channel leaks and format skips, while the Greek‑reasoning habit remains robust to an accuracy‑only gradient.

By Ayoub Kirouane, Christos Petrocheilos
arXiv AI
Aug 28

MemToC: Benchmarking Memory-Tool Conflict Resolution in Large Language Models

MemToC is a controlled benchmark that tests how large language models resolve conflicts between their internal memory and tool outputs. It contains 6,504 episodes built from 542 factual questions, each paired with a model‑generated closed‑book answer and a tool return whose correctness is known, creating four distinct source‑correctness scenarios. Across five 7‑9B open‑weight models, tool responses overwhelmingly dominate closed‑book answers, and only a minority of instruction‑tuned models correctly retain a verified answer when the tool is wrong, while most follow a correct tool or repeat a wrong tool.

By Arseniy Varlamov, Rishat Zinnatullin, Elisei Rykov, Alexander Panchenko, Ilseyar Alimova
arXiv AI
Aug 3

ModelEquivBench: Certifying Multi-Relational Evaluation of LLM-Generated Optimization Models

arXiv:2607. 29431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models increasingly generate optimization models from natural language, but existing evaluation often reduces a generated model and its ground truth to a single equivalent/not-equivalent verdict or an execution-success rate--labels that are neither independently checkable nor faithful to the multiple distinct senses in which two formulations can agree.

By Penglin Zhu, Jungang Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 7

PoolBench: A Benchmark for Pooling Strategies in Concept Representation Evaluation for Decoder-Only LLMs

arXiv:2608. 05162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pooling is a consequential but under-examined design choice in decoder-only concept representation work: practitioners must collapse token-level hidden states into a passage-level vector, yet no shared protocol exists for comparing this choice across concepts, models, and tasks.

By Ayushi Agarwal