Temporal reasoning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) to understand real-world dynamics. Existing research on temporal reasoning has predominantly focused on the Gregorian calendar. However, as many countries and regions concurrently adopt multiple calendar systems, temporal reasoning across calendars becomes crucial for LLMs in global and multicultural contexts. Unfortunately, cross-calendar temporal reasoning remains underexplored, with no dedicated benchmark available to evaluate this capability. To bridge this gap, we introduce SPAN, a cross-calendar temporal reasoning benchmark, which requires LLMs to perform intra-calendar temporal reasoning and inter-calendar temporal conversion. SPAN features ten cross-calendar temporal reasoning directions, two reasoning types, and two question formats across six calendars. To enable time-variant and contamination-free evaluation, we propose a template-driven protocol for dynamic instance generation that enables assessment on a user-specified Gregorian date. We conduct extensive experiments on both open- and closed-source state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs over a range of dates spanning 100 years from 1960 to 2060. Our evaluations show that these LLMs achieve an average accuracy of only 34.5%, with none exceeding 80%, indicating that this task remains challenging. Through in-depth analysis of reasoning types, question formats, and temporal reasoning directions, we identify two key obstacles for LLMs: Future-Date Degradation and Calendar Asymmetry Bias. To strengthen LLMs' cross-calendar temporal reasoning capability, we further develop an LLM-powered Time Agent that leverages tool-augmented code generation. Empirical results show that Time Agent achieves an average accuracy of 95.31%, outperforming several competitive baselines, highlighting the potential of tool-augmented code generation to advance cross-calendar temporal reasoning. We hope this work will inspire further efforts toward more temporally and culturally adaptive LLMs.

Document-level relation extraction (RE) aims to extract relational triples from a document. One of its primary challenges is to predict implicit relations between entities, which are not explicitly expressed in the document but can usually be extracted through relational reasoning. Previous methods mainly implicitly model relational reasoning through the interaction among entities or entity pairs. However, they suffer from two deficiencies: 1) they often consider only one reasoning pattern, of which coverage on relational triples is limited; 2) they do not explicitly model the process of relational reasoning. In this paper, to deal with the first problem, we propose a document-level RE model with a reasoning module that contains a core unit, the reasoning multi-head self-attention unit. This unit is a variant of the conventional multi-head self-attention and utilizes four attention heads to model four common reasoning patterns, respectively, which can cover more relational triples than previous methods. Then, to address the second issue, we propose a self-distillation training framework, which contains two branches sharing parameters. In the first branch, we first randomly mask some entity pair feature vectors in the document, and then train our reasoning module to infer their relations by exploiting the feature information of other related entity pairs. By doing so, we can explicitly model the process of relational reasoning. However, because the additional masking operation is not used during testing, it causes an input gap between training and testing scenarios, which would hurt the model performance. To reduce this gap, we perform conventional supervised training without masking operation in the second branch and utilize Kullback-Leibler divergence loss to minimize the difference between the predictions of the two branches. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, of which experimental results demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms all competitive baselines. Our source code is available at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/DocRE-SD

Conventional knowledge distillation (KD) approaches are commonly employed to compress neural machine translation (NMT) models.However, they only obtain one lightweight student each time.Consequently, we have to conduct KD multiple times when different students are required at the same time, which could be resource-intensive.Additionally, these students are individually optimized, and thus lack interactions with each other, leading to their potential not being fully exerted.In this work, we propose a novel All-In-One Knowledge Distillation (AIO-KD) framework for NMT, which generates multiple satisfactory students at once.Under AIO-KD, we first randomly extract fewer-layer subnetworks from the teacher as the sample students.Then, we jointly optimize the teacher and these students, where the students simultaneously learn the knowledge from the teacher and interact with other students via mutual learning.When utilized, we re-extract the candidate students, satisfying the specifications of various devices.Particularly, we adopt carefully-designed strategies for AIO-KD: 1) we dynamically detach gradients to prevent poorly-performed students from negatively affecting the teacher during the knowledge transfer, which could subsequently impact other students; 2) we design a twostage mutual learning strategy, which alleviates the negative impacts of poorly-performed students on the early-stage student interactions.Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and eco-friendliness of AIO-KD.Our source code is available at https://github. com/DeepLearnXMU/AIO-KD.

Most existing methods on robust neural machine translation (NMT) construct adversarial examples by injecting noise into authentic examples and indiscriminately exploit two types of examples. They require the model to translate both the authentic source sentence and its adversarial counterpart into the identical target sentence within the same training stage, which may be a suboptimal choice to achieve robust NMT. In this paper, we first conduct a preliminary study to confirm this claim and further propose an Iterative Scheduled Data-switch Training Framework to mitigate this problem. Specifically, we introduce two training stages, iteratively switching between authentic and adversarial examples. Compared with previous studies, our model focuses more on just one type of examples at each single stage, which can better exploit authentic and adversarial examples, and thus obtaining a better robust NMT model. Moreover, we introduce an improved curriculum learning method with a sampling strategy to better schedule the process of noise injection. Experimental results show that our model significantly surpasses several competitive baselines on four translation benchmarks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/RobustNMT-ISDST.

Document-level relation extraction (RE) aimsto extract the relations between entities from the input document that usually containing many difficultly-predicted entity pairs whose relations can only be predicted through relational inference.Existing methods usually directly predict the relations of all entity pairs of input document in a one-pass manner, ignoring the fact that predictions of some entity pairs heavily depend on the predicted results of other pairs.To deal with this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel document-level RE model with iterative inference.Our model is mainly composed of two modules: 1) a base module expected to provide preliminary relation predictions on entity pairs; 2) an inference module introduced to refine these preliminary predictions by iteratively dealing with difficultlypredicted entity pairs depending on other pairs in an easy-to-hard manner.Unlike previous methods which only consider feature information of entity pairs, our inference module is equipped with two Extended Cross Attention units, allowing it to exploit both feature information and previous predictions of entity pairs during relational inference.Furthermore, we adopt a two-stage strategy to train our model.At the first stage, we only train our base module.During the second stage, we train the whole model, where contrastive learning is introduced to enhance the training of inference module.Experimental results on three commonly-used datasets show that our model consistently outperforms other competitive baselines.Our source code is available at https://github. com/DeepLearnXMU/DocRE-II.