Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify data from partially labeled datasets by jointly recognizing known categories and discovering novel ones.Despite recent advances, existing methods still suffer from weak text–label alignment, inconsistent objectives across known and novel categories, and poor discrimination of semantically similar clusters. To mitigate these issues, we propose TLSA, a unified framework that enforces contrastive alignment between text and label representations within a shared semantic space. Specifically, we first design a label-semantic aware dual-encoder equipped with a symmetric contrastive objective to achieve text-label alignment. Then, we leverage LLM-based label induction to generate explicit and semantically meaningful names for previously unseen categories, followed by a graph-based refinement strategy that disambiguates semantically overlapping clusters through forced renaming. Finally, a confidence-aware sampling strategy ensures balanced learning across both easy and hard instances. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that TLSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GCD methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Wenxi-Xu/TLSA.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown growing promise in biomedical research, particularly for knowledge-driven interpretation tasks. However, their ability to reliably reason from gene-level knowledge to functional understanding, However, their ability to reliably reason from gene-level knowledge to functional understanding, a core requirement for knowledge-enhanced cell atlas interpretation, remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce SciHorizon-GENE, a large-scale gene-centric benchmark constructed from authoritative biological databases. The benchmark integrates curated knowledge for over 190K human genes and comprises more than 540K questions covering diverse gene-to-function reasoning scenarios relevant to cell type annotation, functional interpretation, and mechanism-oriented analysis. Motivated by behavioral patterns observed in preliminary examinations, SciHorizon-GENE evaluates LLMs along four biologically critical perspectives: research attention sensitivity, hallucination tendency, answer completeness, and literature influence, explicitly targeting failure modes that limit the safe adoption of LLMs in biological interpretation pipelines. We systematically evaluate a wide range of state-of-the-art general-purpose and biomedical LLMs, revealing substantial heterogeneity in gene-level reasoning capabilities and persistent challenges in generating faithful, complete, and literature-grounded functional interpretations. Our benchmark establishes a systematic foundation for analyzing LLM behavior at the gene scale and offers insights for model selection and development, with direct relevance to knowledge-enhanced biological interpretation.

In the era of the knowledge economy, understanding how job skills influence salary is crucial for promoting recruitment with competitive salary systems and aligned salary expectations. Despite efforts on salary prediction based on job positions and talent demographics, there still lacks methods to effectively discern the set-structured skills' intricate composition effect on job salary. While recent advances in neural networks have significantly improved accurate set-based quantitative modeling, their lack of explainability hinders obtaining insights into the skills' composition effects. Indeed, model explanation for set data is challenging due to the combinatorial nature, rich semantics, and unique format. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel intrinsically explainable set-based neural prototyping approach, namely LGDESetNet, for explainable salary prediction that can reveal disentangled skill sets that impact salary from both local and global perspectives. Specifically, we propose a skill graph-enhanced disentangled discrete subset selection layer to identify multi-faceted influential input subsets with varied semantics. Furthermore, we propose a set-oriented prototype learning method to extract globally influential prototypical sets. The resulting output is transparently derived from the semantic interplay between these input subsets and global prototypes. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance than state-of-the-art baselines in salary prediction while providing explainable insights into salary-influencing patterns.

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to identify both known and novel categories from partially labeled data, reflecting more realistic open-world learning scenarios. However, most existing methods rely solely on one-hot discriminative supervision, leading to overfitting on seen classes and poor generalization to unseen ones. Recent advances introduce large language models (LLMs) to incorporate external semantics, yet they often suffer from semantic–label misalignment and weak semantic integration during training. We propose GenDis, a Generative–Discriminative Dual-View Co-Training framework that unifies discriminative classification and semantic label generation within an LLM. Discriminative pseudo-labels guide the formation of a separable generative latent space, enabling semantically meaningful supervision for novel classes. To ensure consistency between the two views, we employ Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA)-based alignment and a curriculum-guided, dispersion-aware pseudo-labeling strategy for iterative refinement. Extensive experiments on five GCD benchmarks demonstrate that GenDis substantially outperforms prior methods, validating the effectiveness of dual-view co-training with semantically enriched supervision. The anonymized repository is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GenDis.

Recently, with the rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based Open-domain Question Answering (OpenQA) methods have reaped the benefits of emergent understanding and answering capabilities enabled by massive parameters compared to traditional methods. However, most of these methods encounter two critical challenges: how to integrate knowledge into LLMs effectively and how to adaptively generate results with specific answer formats. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, which aims to improve the OpenQA performance by exploring knowledge integration and controllable generation on LLMs simultaneously, namely GenKI. Specifically, we first train a dense passage retrieval model to retrieve associated knowledge from a given knowledge base. Subsequently, we introduce a novel knowledge integration model that incorporates the retrieval knowledge into instructions during fine-tuning to intensify the model. Furthermore, to enable controllable generation in LLMs, we leverage a certain fine-tuned LLM and an ensemble framework based on text consistency incorporating all coherence, fluency, and answer format assurance. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on three datasets with diverse answer formats demonstrate the effectiveness of GenKI with comparison of state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, ablation studies have disclosed a linear relationship between the frequency of retrieved knowledge and the model's ability to recall knowledge accurately with the ground truth. Tests focusing on the out-of-domain scenario and knowledge base independence scenario have further affirmed the robustness and controllable capability of GenKI. Our code of GenKI is available at https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/GenKI.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in recruitment has rapidly advanced in areas such as resume evaluation, person-job matching, and recommendation. However, AI’s role in assisting interview questioning for skill assessment remains limited. This study proposes the Topic-Oriented Suggestion Model (TOSM), a deep learning framework designed to suggest skill assessment keywords tailored to multi-round interviews. The framework comprises two modules: a Graph-based Topic Learning Module, which captures latent relationships between skills and their contextual dependencies through graph representation learning, and a Topic-specific Keyword Suggestion Module, which dynamically adapts attention to the thematic topic focus of each interview round. Using a real-world dataset of multi-round interview cases from a leading technology company, TOSM achieves superior performance compared with baseline methods in keyword suggestion tasks. Visualization analyses further demonstrate that the model components effectively bridge vocabulary mismatches across different recruitment texts and adjusts its focus according to each interview round. This study contributes by proposing a novel framework that integrates graph-based topic model with multi-label learning. It extends AI-assisted recruitment research to the domain of interviewer questioning. It also provides practical implications for developing intelligent interview systems that support interviewer-side question design and improve the structure and efficiency of skill assessment in multi-round interviews.

The impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) enable them to perform recommendation through prompting, facilitating a novel paradigm of universal recommender systems. However, in practice, LLMs often exhibit some inherent stereotypes that should be avoided in recommendations. This necessitates aligning LLMs to meet the fairness requirements of recommendation systems. But the typical alignment methods often require substantial human labors for external supervision, which is further exacerbated when addressing fairness across multiple sensitive attributes. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Mixture of Experts (MoE) contrastive learning approach to enhance fairness of LLM-based recommenders without additional external supervision. Specifically, we first leverage contrastive learning, along with counterfactual data augmentation, to improve fairness by reducing the difference between the hidden states of contrastive sample pairs. Besides, to better handle scenarios involving multiple sensitive attributes, we propose a LoRA-based MoE framework to disentangle attribute relationships for efficient fine-tuning. And to avoid the distortion from the varying sample training difficulty due to the differing involved attributes, we further incorporate a tailored Curriculum Learning strategy, which progressively trains on samples of increasing difficulty based on the sensitive attributes involved. Finally, extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Open-set text classification (OSTC) requires models to correctly classify in-distribution (ID) samples while reliably rejecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs—an essential capability for real-world NLP systems. Most OSTC methods train on ID data under the closed assumption that all outputs belong to the known label space and then perform OOD detection with the biased representations, which inherently lack awareness of unknowns and thus yield overconfident predictions on OOD inputs. In this work, we present UnLLM, an Unknown-aware Large Language Model for OSTC. Instead of fixing classification to the entire known label space, we reformulate it into a subset-conditioned text generation task: the LLM is prompted with sampled subsets of known labels, and any instance outside the candidate set is explicitly assigned as “unknown”. This reformulation transforms OOD detection from a post-hoc procedure into an intrinsic modeling capability. More importantly, our approach is the first to explicitly incorporate the unknown into classification, enabling systematic modeling of unknowns through a unified representation–logits–inference optimization, which progressively strengthens the model’s capacity to capture open-set risk. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks show that UnLLM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. Code is available in an anonymous repository: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UnLLM-03C2.

Motivation: Biomedical question answering often requires evidence beyond topically retrieved literature, including gene alias resolution, database identifier normalization, and atlas-derived biological measurements. However, existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems typically follow a fixed workflow and lack an explicit mechanism for deciding when retrieved text is sufficient, when curated biomedical knowledge is required, or when executable evidence assembly over structured measurements should be invoked. This motivates a substrate-aware large language model (LLM) harness that selectively assembles sufficient evidence across literature, knowledge bases, and biological atlases. Results: We introduce BioHarness, an LLM harness for staged biomedical evidence assembly across literature retrieval, curated biomedical knowledge resources, and atlas-derived structured measurements. BioHarness first attempts to answer from reranked literature evidence and escalates through grounded cascade control to REPL-style evidence assembly only when the current evidence is uncertain, weakly grounded, or substrate-mismatched. Across 19,302 biomedical QA items spanning seven answer formats, BioHarness improves the pooled score from 65.9 to 71.0 over the strongest non-oracle baseline. Ablations, case studies, and backbone-scaling analyses show that these gains arise from repairing evidence-substrate mismatches through reranking, entity grounding, and structured measurement access, rather than from indiscriminately invoking more reasoning steps, retrieving additional literature, or relying on a particular answer-model scale.

AI-for-Science (AI4Science) is increasingly transforming scientific discovery by embedding machine learning models into prediction, simulation, and hypothesis generation workflows across domains. However, the effectiveness of these models is fundamentally constrained by the AI-readiness of scientific data, for which no scalable and systematic evaluation mechanism currently exists. In this work, we propose SciHorizon-DataEVA, a novel agentic system to scalable AI-readiness evaluation of heterogeneous scientific data. At the evaluation-criteria level, we introduce the Sci-TQA2 principles, which organize AI-readiness into four complementary dimensions: Governance Trustworthiness, Data Quality, AI Compatibility, and Scientific Adaptability. Each dimension is decomposed into measurable atomic elements that enable fine-grained and executable assessment. To operationalize these principles at scale, we develop Sci-TQA2-Eval, a hierarchical multi-agent evaluation approach orchestrated through a directed, cyclic workflow. Our Sci-TQA2-Eval dynamically constructs dataset-aware evaluation specifications by combining lightweight dataset profiling, applicability-aware metric activation, and knowledge-augmented planning grounded in domain constraints and dataset-paper signals. These specifications are executed through an adaptive, tool-centric evaluation mechanism with built-in verification and self-correction, enabling scalable and reliable assessment across heterogeneous scientific data. Extensive experiments on scientific datasets spanning multiple domains demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of SciHorizon-DataEVA for principled AI-readiness evaluation.

Scientific data are increasingly used by AI agents, yet existing dataset representations provide limited support for autonomous discovery, interpretation, and invocation. This limitation stems from the fragmentation of scientific data across heterogeneous repositories and from dataset representations designed primarily for human use. To address this limitation, we introduce the Scientific Data Skill (SciDSK), an agent-ready representation that packages dataset-specific knowledge and operational guidance as a reusable agent skill. A SciDSK integrates dataset descriptions, scientific context, file organization, usage procedures, quality checks, and provenance information while retaining the underlying data in its original repository. We define a structured SciDSK specification and develop a systematic construction pipeline that grounds each SciDSK in authoritative dataset records and associated supporting materials. We further establish the Scientific Data Skill Bank, a unified platform that publishes SciDSK resources across six scientific disciplines and supports package access, persistent identification, and traceability to source datasets. We evaluate SciDSK through a retrieval benchmark for dataset discovery and controlled cases for dataset interpretation. The results show that SciDSK improves agent-driven dataset discovery and provides more precise and actionable support for dataset interpretation. These findings support the value of organizing dataset-specific knowledge in an agent-ready representation.

The rapid growth of AI for Science (AI4S) has underscored the significance of scientific datasets, leading to the establishment of numerous national scientific data centers and sharing platforms. Despite this progress, efficiently promoting dataset sharing and utilization for scientific research remains challenging. Scientific datasets contain intricate domain-specific knowledge and contexts, rendering traditional collaborative filtering-based recommenders inadequate. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer unprecedented opportunities to build conversational agents capable of deep semantic understanding and personalized recommendations. In response, we present ScienceDB AI, a novel LLM-driven agentic recommender system developed on Science Data Bank (ScienceDB), one of the largest global scientific data-sharing platforms. ScienceDB AI leverages natural language conversations and deep reasoning to accurately recommend datasets aligned with researchers' scientific intents and evolving requirements. The system introduces several innovations: a Scientific Intention Perceptor to extract structured experimental elements from complicated queries, a Structured Memory Compressor to manage multi-turn dialogues effectively, and a Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Trustworthy RAG) framework. The Trustworthy RAG employs a two-stage retrieval mechanism and provides citable dataset references via Citable Scientific Task Record (CSTR) identifiers, enhancing recommendation trustworthiness and reproducibility. Through extensive offline and online experiments using over 10 million real-world datasets, ScienceDB AI has demonstrated significant effectiveness. To our knowledge, ScienceDB AI is the first LLM-driven conversational recommender tailored explicitly for large-scale scientific dataset sharing services. The platform is publicly accessible at: https://ai.scidb.cn/en.

Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) provides high-dimensional profiles of cellular states, enabling data-driven modeling of cellular dynamics over time. In practice, time-resolved scRNA-seq is collected at only a few discrete time points as unpaired snapshot populations, leaving substantial temporal gaps. This motivates trajectory inference at unmeasured time points. Existing methods mainly follow two directions, optimal-transport (OT) alignment provides distribution-level matching between observed snapshots, while continuous-time generative models support forecasting via learned dynamics. However, two challenges remain: (i) unpaired snapshots render local transitions between adjacent time points ambiguous, leading to unstable supervision; and (ii) long-horizon prediction relies on repeated integration, where small modeling errors compound and cause distribution drift. To address these challenges, we propose single-cell Flow Matching (scFM), a latent generative framework based on coupling-conditioned flow matching. First, we compute entropically regularized OT couplings between adjacent snapshots and use them to construct soft, weighted flow-matching targets for learning time-dependent velocity fields. Second, we learn bidirectional velocity fields and leverage their consistency to refine couplings and improve temporal coherence under sparse supervision. Third, we introduce distribution-level alignment and latent dynamic regularization to anchor long rollouts and mitigate drift. Experiments on real-world time-series scRNA-seq datasets show that scFM consistently improves distributional prediction performance for both temporal interpolation and extrapolation. Moreover, scFM yields more accurate trajectory reconstruction and temporally coherent visualizations where intermediate time points are absent, indicating a more faithful recovery of underlying temporal gene expression dynamics.

Job mobility prediction is an emerging field with significant benefits for organizations and individuals, including enhanced job recommendations and career planning. Existing approaches leveraging textual information primarily rely on traditional neural network embedding methods, which are limited in capturing relationships between job-related entities at the semantic level. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer greater potential by utilizing extensive background knowledge to better understand latent patterns in career trajectories, pure LLMs often struggle with hallucination issues due to insufficient domain-specific knowledge. To bridge this gap, we propose a knowledge graph-enhanced LLM framework, S mart C areer P redictor ( SCP ). Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) a job-related sub-knowledge graph retrieval mechanism to retain the most relevant job transition patterns, addressing the hallucination problem by providing enriched background knowledge; (2) an entropy-based retrieval score to alleviate graph imbalance issues by ensuring a more equitable representation of career entities; and (3) a multi-modal adapter to effectively integrate textual and graph-based information, enabling more accurate and context-aware job mobility predictions. Experimental results on two real-world career datasets show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in next career hop prediction. The code for this paper is available at https://github.com/cuishuting/SCP .

Route-planning agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for supporting everyday human mobility through natural language interaction and tool-mediated decision making. However, systematic evaluation in real-world mobility settings is hindered by diverse routing demands, non-deterministic mapping services, and limited reproducibility. In this study, we introduce MobilityBench, a scalable benchmark for evaluating LLM-based route-planning agents in real-world mobility scenarios. MobilityBench is constructed from large-scale, anonymized real user queries collected from Amap and covers a broad spectrum of route-planning intents across multiple cities worldwide. To enable reproducible, end-to-end evaluation, we design a deterministic API-replay sandbox that eliminates environmental variance from live services. We further propose a multi-dimensional evaluation protocol centered on outcome validity, complemented by assessments of instruction understanding, planning, tool use, and efficiency. Using MobilityBench, we evaluate multiple LLM-based route-planning agents across diverse real-world mobility scenarios and provide an in-depth analysis of their behaviors and performance. Our findings reveal that current models perform competently on Basic information retrieval and Route Planning tasks, yet struggle considerably with Preference-Constrained Route Planning, underscoring significant room for improvement in personalized mobility applications. We publicly release the benchmark data, evaluation toolkit, and documentation at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/MobilityBench .

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved prominent success in various applications, driven by their foundational capabilities and strong generalization potential. While their impact on natural language processing is well-established, recent works highlight their significant promise in other applications as well. One such area is traffic forecasting, where LLMs demonstrated the ability to generate powerful analytical insights, offering new opportunities for advancing Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). This survey summarizes 160 related works, providing a comprehensive review of methods, applications, and challenges. Specifically, we summarize the efforts to bridge the gap between time series data and language models, exploring their design principles and applications in various traffic scenarios, including traffic forecasting, traffic recommendation, mobility forecasting, urban management, signal control, and safety analysis. For deeper insights, we discuss existing challenges and highlight future research directions. This survey identifies three key limitations of current works: (1) LLM-based traffic models face practical deployment hurdles; (2) there lacks a unified benchmark across various applications; (3) resident privacy protection demands attention in their real-world applications. By providing a foundational understanding of LLMs for traffic forecasting, this survey aims to benefit not only the traffic mining community but also contribute to the broader advancement of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

With the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) paradigms towards agentic AI, the widespread integration of large language models (LLMs) enhances system capabilities while also introducing situational risks and challenges of value misalignment, making value alignment in agentic AI systems a critical issue. This paper constructs a multi-level value framework encompassing L0 (universal values), L1 (cultural and industry values), and L2 (context-specific values). Guided by this framework, we conduct an in-depth analysis along the technical stack: at the LLM level, we examine value injection mechanisms through pretraining and post-training; at the single-agent level, we focus on representation and injecting values to agents, Profiles and memory, and planning and action; at the multi-agent level, we summarize collaborative alignment methods such as communication strategy optimization and multi-objective reinforcement learning. Following a systematic review of existing datasets and methods for multi-level alignment evaluation, we outline future research directions, including inter-agent value coordination mechanisms, high-quality scenario data sharing, game-theoretic design for value alignment in agent interaction and communication protocol alignment—aiming to establish a more systematic and dynamic evaluation framework and to promote robust and trustworthy value consensus in agentic AI systems within social collaboration.