Beyond Single-Negative Preference: Multi-Negative DPO for LLM-Centric Historical Entity Linking — Paper

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown promise for historical entity linking, but preference optimization for this task is often formulated with only one negative candidate per training instance. This discards information from the remaining candidates retrieved for the same mention. We introduce multi-negative direct preference optimisation (MDPO), a reference-based pairwise objective that compares the correct entity with all valid rejected candidates associated with each mention. MDPO preserves the Bradley-Terry formulation of DPO while exploiting the complete candidate set through masked, length-normalised sequence scores. We evaluate MDPO on hipe-2020 and newseye, covering French, German, English, Swedish, and Finnish historical newspaper text. Experiments show that MDPO improves over supervised fine-tuning and single-negative DPO, with particularly strong gains for NIL mentions, semantic ambiguity, OCR noise, and historically difficult names. Further analyses disentangle candidate-generation and selection errors, showing that candidate retrieval remains a key bottleneck for end-to-end entity linking. These results demonstrate that incorporating all within-instance negative candidates is a simple and effective improvement for LLM-based historical entity linking.

Authors 6

Tien Nam Nguyen, Emanuela Boros, Ahmed Hamdi, Adam Jatowt, Micka\"el Coustaty, Antoine Doucet

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.07379
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 7 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: replace
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 7 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.07379
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 7 h agohigh
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 7 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.07379
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 7 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 7 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 7 h agohigh

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T19

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7 h ago

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Authors: Tien Nam Nguyen, Emanuela Boros, Ahmed Hamdi

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Claim history for Official page
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07379	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperBeyond Single-Negative Preference: Multi-Negative DPO for LLM-Centric Historical Entity Linking
New paper: Beyond Single-Negative Preference: Multi-Negative DPO for LLM-Centric Historical Entity Linking
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arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.CL	feed	T1· Official	5 h ago	1

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