arXiv Machine Learning

BLADE: Distilled LLM Regularization for Calibrated Knowledge Graph Completion

BLADE is a variational model for knowledge graph completion that separates latent truth from graph recording and uses distilled offline language‑model judgments as a frozen teacher regularizer. The model provides calibrated probabilities and epistemic uncertainty through posterior samples, while the teacher is only an optional triage factor during inference. Across five benchmarks, BLADE matches ranking performance and significantly reduces expected calibration error, improving ECE, Brier score, and NLL over several baselines, and shows strong performance under controlled missingness and leakage stress tests.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

CaSKG: Counterfactual-Causal Skill Graphs for Scalable Agent Skill Retrieval

CaSKG introduces a counterfactual‑causal skill graph framework that calibrates procedural relations before retrieval, building a high‑recall directed candidate graph from semantic, lexical, input/output, and structural evidence and refining it with repair evidence and optional LLM judgment. The framework applies direction‑conditioned textual counterfactual probes—removing, substituting, and reordering skill pairs—to aggregate evidence with Bayesian smoothing, producing a state‑filtered weighted graph for task‑conditioned expansion. Evaluated across six LLM backbones on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld, CaSKG outperforms existing Graph‑of‑Skills methods, improving macro‑average scores and reducing mean environment steps while preserving essential skill dependencies.

By Zhiyuan Li, Linyuan Gao, Xuechun Ding, Hongwei Chen, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

ALRA: Adaptive Local Relational Alignment for Logit-Based Pre-training Distillation of Autoregressive Language Models

The paper introduces Adaptive Local Relational Alignment (ALRA), a logit‑based knowledge distillation method for autoregressive language models that combines student‑generated token proposals with teacher guidance at each prediction position. ALRA dynamically selects the number of candidate tokens based on the teacher’s probability spread, uses Adaptive Local Divergence to match both mass and relative token distributions, and applies Student‑Weighted Pairwise Relational Alignment to focus on high‑probability token pairs. Experiments on The Pile show that 200M‑ and 500M‑parameter students trained with ALRA outperform the best baseline by roughly 1 percentage point and surpass pre‑training without distillation by over 2 percentage points on nine zero‑shot benchmarks.

By Quang Hoang Trung, Quang Huu Hieu, Nguyen Van Hoang Phuc, Vo Nguyen Le Duy
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

GEAR: Generative Expansion and Real Anchoring for Two-Stage Distillation of Tabular Foundation Models

GEAR is a two‑stage framework that distills tabular foundation models into lightweight MLP or tree‑based predictors for efficient CPU deployment. In the first stage, synthetic covariates are used as teacher‑query locations to train the student on soft TFM targets, expanding coverage beyond observed rows. The second stage re‑anchors the student to the target distribution using real labels and out‑of‑fold teacher predictions, preventing self‑labeling leakage and improving performance. Experiments on TALENT and TabArena show that GEAR‑distilled MLPs outperform supervised MLPs by up to 2.00 AUC points on binary tasks and 1.35 on multiclass tasks, and also outperform CatBoost, while dramatically reducing inference time and memory usage.

By Qi Qin, Jiajie Zhu, Dali Chen, Yuzhao Zhang, Jia-Xing Han, Yu Su, Peng Zhang, Ying Yan, Yifan Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

CALIBURN: Self-Calibrated LLM Unlearning Alignment

CALIBURN is a new approach to large language model (LLM) unlearning that measures a model’s confidence in undesirable knowledge and uses this measure to fine‑tune unlearning gradient updates. By doing so, it offers more precise control over what is forgotten while better preserving the model’s overall utility. Experiments on benchmarks such as MUSE and WMDP show that CALIBURN outperforms existing methods in balancing knowledge removal with utility retention.

By Zhengbang Yang, Yisheng Zhong, Junyuan Hong, Zhuangdi Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

QVAC Genesis III: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Open Synthetic STEM Corpus for Efficient Language Model Pre-Training

QVAC Genesis III is a 191.43 B‑token synthetic STEM corpus covering 19 domains and multiple difficulty levels, created through a dual generation strategy that uses a weak edge‑scale student model to generate corrective explanations and contrastive reasoning. The authors evaluate the corpus with an LLM‑as‑a‑parser protocol and demonstrate that 1.7 B‑parameter models trained on QVAC Genesis III outperform those trained on Cosmopedia‑v2 and the Cosmo‑1B model on ARC, GPQA Diamond, and MMLU STEM benchmarks, achieving up to +28.57% improvement on ARC‑E and a 99.45% valid answer rate.

By Davide Vitabile, N. Ranjan, Akshay Nambiar, Kamal K. Gupta, Amril Nazir
arXiv AI
Jun 3

CoEval: Ranking Language Models for Custom Tasks Without Labeled Data or Trustworthy Benchmarks

arXiv:2606. 03650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Choosing or ranking language models for a specific application is hardest when no task-specific labeled data exists, and standard public benchmarks cannot be trusted, their items having likely leaked into pretraining, so scores reflect memorization rather than fitness.

By Alexander Apartsin, Yehudit Aperstein
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

ABAI at COLIEE 2026 Task 1: Multi-Stage Retrieval with GraphRAG-Enhanced Meta-Learning, and a Post-Hoc Study of the Cross-Validation-to-Test Gap

The paper reports the ABAI submission to COLIEE 2026 Task 1, a case law retrieval challenge that suppresses cited passages, and details a four‑stage retrieval pipeline: multi‑view BM25 with reciprocal rank fusion, neural reranking, graph‑based features via a graph attention network, and a LightGBM meta‑learner over 34 features. The best run achieved an F1 score of 0.177 on the official test set, compared to a cross‑validated 0.311, and the authors attribute the gap to a recall ceiling, temporal distribution shift, and threshold miscalibration. A controlled post‑hoc study examined the impact of threshold transfer, decision quality across time, and query similarity, and identified specific remedies—such as BM25 length‑normalisation tuning, event‑triple views, and dense fusion—that improved recall, while other interventions had no effect.

By Minhan Cho, Soyoung Park, Daejin Choi, Jinyoung Han