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Wednesday 21 January

Computation and Language

Retrieval-Augmented Self-Taught Reasoning Model with Adaptive Chain-of-Thought for ASR Named Entity Correction

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems frequently misrecognize domain-specific phrases like named entities, which can cause catastrophic failures in downstream tasks. A new family of named entity correction methods based on large language models (LLMs) has recently emerged. However, these approaches have yet to fully exploit the sophisticated reasoning capabilities inherent to LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented generation framework for correcting named entity errors in ASR. Our approach consists of two key components: (1) a rephrasing language model (RLM) for named entity recognition, followed by candidate retrieval using a phonetic-level edit distance; and (2) a novel self-taught reasoning model with adaptive chain-of-thought (A-STAR) that dynamically adjusts the depth of its reasoning based on task difficulty. Experiments on the AISHELL-1 and Homophone datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves relative reductions in the named entity character error rate of 17.96% and 34.42%, respectively, compared to a strong baseline.
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All authors Junjie An, Jingguang Tian, Tianyi Wang, Yu Gao, Xiaofeng Mou, Yi Xu

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from q-bio.GN

Mind the Gap No More: Achieving Zero-Gap Multimodal Integration via One Tokenizer

A central challenge in developing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is effectively integrating heterogeneous inputs into a cohesive reasoning engine. Current paradigms predominantly rely on modular architectures that introduce modality-specific encoders and cross-modal fusion mechanisms. However, these designs are fundamentally bottlenecked by a geometric modality gap, forcing the LLM to expend significant computational capacity on geometric reconciliation rather than deep cross-modal reasoning. In this work, we formally characterize this modality gap and theoretically demonstrate that native architectures, specifically those employing a unified vocabulary, intrinsically maintain a zero-gap state across all hidden layers. Guided by these theoretical findings, we propose One Tokenizer, a native architecture that maps all modalities directly into a shared token space. We empirically validate this framework on a DNA–text multimodal testbed. Our extensive evaluations reveal that by achieving seamless integration within the LLM's native latent space, One Tokenizer consistently outperforms encoder-based modular counterparts, providing a fundamentally superior framework for deep biological reasoning.
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All authors Yanan Li, Christina Yi Jin, Yuan Jin, Manli Luo, Tie Xu, Shuai Jiao, Wei He, Qing Zhang

Computation and Language

From Biased Chatbots to Biased Agents: Examining Role Assignment Effects on LLM Agent Robustness

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents capable of actions with real-world impacts beyond text generation. While persona-induced biases in text generation are well documented, their effects on agent task performance remain largely unexplored, even though such effects pose more direct operational risks. In this work, we present the first systematic case study showing that demographic-based persona assignments can alter LLM agents' behavior and degrade performance across diverse domains. Evaluating widely deployed models on agentic benchmarks spanning strategic reasoning, planning, and technical operations, we uncover substantial performance variations - up to 26.2% degradation, driven by task-irrelevant persona cues. These shifts appear across task types and model architectures, indicating that persona conditioning and simple prompt injections can distort an agent's decision-making reliability. Our findings reveal an overlooked vulnerability in current LLM agentic systems: persona assignments can introduce implicit biases and increase behavioral volatility, raising concerns for the safe and robust deployment of LLM agents.
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Computation and Language

A Lightweight LLM Framework for Disaster Humanitarian Information Classification

Timely classification of humanitarian information from social media is critical for effective disaster response. However, deploying large language models (LLMs) for this task faces challenges in resource-constrained emergency settings. This paper develops a lightweight, cost-effective framework for disaster tweet classification using parameter-efficient fine-tuning. We construct a unified experimental corpus by integrating and normalizing the HumAID dataset (76,484 tweets across 19 disaster events) into a dual-task benchmark: humanitarian information categorization and event type identification. Through systematic evaluation of prompting strategies, LoRA fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on Llama 3.1 8B, we demonstrate that: (1) LoRA achieves 79.62% humanitarian classification accuracy (+37.79% over zero-shot) while training only ~2% of parameters; (2) QLoRA enables efficient deployment with 99.4% of LoRA performance at 50% memory cost; (3) contrary to common assumptions, RAG strategies degrade fine-tuned model performance due to label noise from retrieved examples. These findings establish a practical, reproducible pipeline for building reliable crisis intelligence systems with limited computational resources.
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All authors Han Jinzhen, Kim Jisung, Yang Jong Soo, Yun Hong Sik

Computation and Language

Code Mixologist : A Practitioner's Guide to Building Code-Mixed LLMs

Code-mixing and code-switching (CSW) remain challenging phenomena for large language models (LLMs). Despite recent advances in multilingual modeling, LLMs often struggle in mixed-language settings, exhibiting systematic degradation in grammaticality, factuality, and safety behavior. This work provides a comprehensive overview of CSW research in modern large language model settings. We introduce a unifying taxonomy that organizes prior work along dimensions of data, modeling, and evaluation, and we distill these findings into a practical playbook of actionable recommendations for building, adapting, and evaluating CSW-capable LLMs. We review modeling approaches ranging from CSW-tailored pre-training and task-specific post-training to prompting strategies and in-context learning. We analyze current evaluation practices, highlighting sources of instability and limited reproducibility, and we catalog existing benchmarks while critically examining their linguistic coverage and English-centric biases. Finally, we discuss emerging safety concerns, including use of code-mixing as a mechanism for bypassing model safeguards, and identify open research challenges.
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All authors Himanshu Gupta, Pratik Jayarao, Chaitanya Dwivedi, Neeraj Varshney

Computation and Language

Mechanistic Interpretability for Large Language Model Alignment: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their internal decision-making processes remain largely opaque. Mechanistic interpretability (i.e., the systematic study of how neural networks implement algorithms through their learned representations and computational structures) has emerged as a critical research direction for understanding and aligning these models. This paper surveys recent progress in mechanistic interpretability techniques applied to LLM alignment, examining methods ranging from circuit discovery to feature visualization, activation steering, and causal intervention. We analyze how interpretability insights have informed alignment strategies including reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), constitutional AI, and scalable oversight. Key challenges are identified, including the superposition hypothesis, polysemanticity of neurons, and the difficulty of interpreting emergent behaviors in large-scale models. We propose future research directions focusing on automated interpretability, cross-model generalization of circuits, and the development of interpretability-driven alignment techniques that can scale to frontier models.
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Computation and Language

From Instruction to Output: The Role of Prompting in Modern NLG

Prompt engineering has emerged as an integral technique for extending the strengths and abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to gain significant performance gains in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. This approach, which requires instructions to be composed in natural language to bring out the knowledge from LLMs in a structured way, has driven breakthroughs in various NLP tasks. Yet there is still no structured framework or coherent understanding of the varied prompt engineering methods and techniques, particularly in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG). This survey aims to help fill that gap by outlining recent developments in prompt engineering, and their effect on different NLG tasks. It reviews recent advances in prompting methods and their impact on NLG tasks, presenting prompt design as an input-level control mechanism that complements fine-tuning and decoding approaches. The paper introduces a taxonomy of prompting paradigms, a decision framework for prompt selection based on varying factors for the practitioners, outlines emerging trends and challenges, and proposes a framework that links design, optimization, and evaluation to support more controllable and generalizable NLG.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

PRISM: Deriving a White-Box Transformer as a Signal-Noise Decomposition Operator via Maximum Coding Rate Reduction

Deep learning models, particularly Transformers, are often criticized as "black boxes" and lack interpretability. We propose Prism, a white-box attention-based architecture derived from the principles of Maximizing Coding Rate Reduction ($\text{MCR}^2$). By modeling the attention mechanism as a gradient ascent process on a distinct signal-noise manifold, we introduce a specific irrational frequency separation ($\pi$-RoPE) to enforce incoherence between signal (semantic) and noise (syntactic) subspaces. We show empirical evidence that these geometric inductive biases can induce unsupervised functional disentanglement alone. Prism spontaneously specializes its attention heads into spectrally distinct regimes: low-frequency heads capturing long-range causal dependencies (signal) and high-frequency heads handling local syntactic constraints and structural artifacts. To provide a theoretical grounding for these spectral phenomena, we draw an analogy between attention mechanism and a Hamiltonian dynamical system and identify that the standard geometric progression of Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) induces dense resonance networks (Arnold Tongues), leading to feature rank collapse. Empirical validation on 124M-parameter models trained on OpenWebText demonstrates that Prism spontaneously isolates the Attention Sink pathology and maintains isentropic information flow across layers. Further, we suggest a physics-informed plug-and-play intervention KAM-RoPE for large language models (LLMs). Our results suggest that interpretability and performance can be unified through principled geometric construction, offering a theoretically grounded alternative to heuristic architectural modifications
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.IR

DS@GT at TREC TOT 2025: Bridging Vague Recollection with Fusion Retrieval and Learned Reranking

We develop a two-stage retrieval system that combines multiple complementary retrieval methods with a learned reranker and LLM-based reranking, to address the TREC Tip-of-the-Tongue (ToT) task. In the first stage, we employ hybrid retrieval that merges LLM-based retrieval, sparse (BM25), and dense (BGE-M3) retrieval methods. We also introduce topic-aware multi-index dense retrieval that partitions the Wikipedia corpus into 24 topical domains. In the second stage, we evaluate both a trained LambdaMART reranker and LLM-based reranking. To support model training, we generate 5000 synthetic ToT queries using LLMs. Our best system achieves recall of 0.66 and NDCG@1000 of 0.41 on the test set by combining hybrid retrieval with Gemini-2.5-flash reranking, demonstrating the effectiveness of fusion retrieval.
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Computation and Language

AdversaRiskQA: An Adversarial Factuality Benchmark for High-Risk Domains

Hallucination in large language models (LLMs) remains an acute concern, contributing to the spread of misinformation and diminished public trust, particularly in high-risk domains. Among hallucination types, factuality is crucial, as it concerns a model's alignment with established world knowledge. Adversarial factuality, defined as the deliberate insertion of misinformation into prompts with varying levels of expressed confidence, tests a model's ability to detect and resist confidently framed falsehoods. Existing work lacks high-quality, domain-specific resources for assessing model robustness under such adversarial conditions, and no prior research has examined the impact of injected misinformation on long-form text factuality. To address this gap, we introduce AdversaRiskQA, the first verified and reliable benchmark systematically evaluating adversarial factuality across Health, Finance, and Law. The benchmark includes two difficulty levels to test LLMs' defensive capabilities across varying knowledge depths. We propose two automated methods for evaluating the adversarial attack success and long-form factuality. We evaluate six open- and closed-source LLMs from the Qwen, GPT-OSS, and GPT families, measuring misinformation detection rates. Long-form factuality is assessed on Qwen3 (30B) under both baseline and adversarial conditions. Results show that after excluding meaningless responses, Qwen3 (80B) achieves the highest average accuracy, while GPT-5 maintains consistently high accuracy. Performance scales non-linearly with model size, varies by domains, and gaps between difficulty levels narrow as models grow. Long-form evaluation reveals no significant correlation between injected misinformation and the model's factual output. AdversaRiskQA provides a valuable benchmark for pinpointing LLM weaknesses and developing more reliable models for high-stakes applications.
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All authors Adam Szelestey, Sofie van Engelen, Tianhao Huang, Justin Snelders, Qintao Zeng, Songgaojun Deng

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

The Dark Side of AI Transformers: Sentiment Polarization & the Loss of Business Neutrality by NLP Transformers

The use of Transfer Learning & Transformers has steadily improved accuracy and has significantly contributed in solving complex computation problems. However, this transformer led accuracy improvement in Applied AI Analytics specifically in sentiment analytics comes with the dark side. It is observed during experiments that a lot of these improvements in transformer led accuracy of one class of sentiment has been at the cost of polarization of another class of sentiment and the failing of neutrality. This lack of neutrality poses an acute problem in the Applied NLP space, which relies heavily on the computational outputs of sentiment analytics for reliable industry ready tasks.
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Computation and Language

Computational Representations of Character Significance in Novels

Characters in novels have typically been modeled based on their presence in scenes in narrative, considering aspects like their actions, named mentions, and dialogue. This conception of character places significant emphasis on the main character who is present in the most scenes. In this work, we instead adopt a framing developed from a new literary theory proposing a six-component structural model of character. This model enables a comprehensive approach to character that accounts for the narrator-character distinction and includes a component neglected by prior methods, discussion by other characters. We compare general-purpose LLMs with task-specific transformers for operationalizing this model of character on major 19th-century British realist novels. Our methods yield both component-level and graph representations of character discussion. We then demonstrate that these representations allow us to approach literary questions at scale from a new computational lens. Specifically, we explore Woloch's classic "the one vs the many" theory of character centrality and the gendered dynamics of character discussion.
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All authors Haaris Mian, Melanie Subbiah, Sharon Marcus, Nora Shaalan, Kathleen McKeown

Computation and Language

ViT Registers and Fractal ViT

Drawing inspiration from recent findings including surprisingly decent performance of transformers without positional encoding (NoPE) in the domain of language models and how registers (additional throwaway tokens not tied to input) may improve the performance of large vision transformers (ViTs), we invent and test a variant of ViT called fractal ViT that breaks permutation invariance among the tokens by applying an attention mask between the regular tokens and “summary tokens” similar to registers, in isolation or in combination with various positional encodings. These models do not improve upon ViT with registers, highlighting the fact that these findings may be scale, domain, or application-specific.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Tracking the Limits of Knowledge Propagation: How LLMs Fail at Multi-Step Reasoning with Conflicting Knowledge

A common solution for mitigating outdated or incorrect information in Large Language Models (LLMs) is to provide updated facts in-context or through knowledge editing. However, these methods introduce knowledge conflicts when the knowledge update fails to overwrite the model's parametric knowledge, which propagate to faulty reasoning. Current benchmarks for this problem, however, largely focus only on single knowledge updates and fact recall without evaluating how these updates affect downstream reasoning. In this work, we introduce TRACK (Testing Reasoning Amid Conflicting Knowledge), a new benchmark for studying how LLMs propagate new knowledge through multi-step reasoning when it conflicts with the model's initial parametric knowledge. Spanning three reasoning-intensive scenarios (WIKI, CODE, and MATH), TRACK introduces multiple, realistic conflicts to mirror real-world complexity. Our results on TRACK reveal that providing updated facts to models for reasoning can worsen performance compared to providing no updated facts to a model, and that this performance degradation exacerbates as more updated facts are provided. We show this failure stems from both inability to faithfully integrate updated facts, but also flawed reasoning even when knowledge is integrated. TRACK provides a rigorous new benchmark to measure and guide future progress on propagating conflicting knowledge in multi-step reasoning.
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All authors Yiyang Feng, Zeming Chen, Haotian Wu, Jiawei Zhou, Antoine Bosselut

Computation and Language

Multi-Persona Thinking for Bias Mitigation in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit social biases, which can lead to harmful stereotypes and unfair outcomes. We propose Multi-Persona Thinking (MPT), a simple inference-time framework that reduces social bias by encouraging reasoning from multiple perspectives. MPT guides the model to consider contrasting social identities, such as male and female, together with a neutral viewpoint. These viewpoints then interact through an iterative reasoning process to identify and correct biased judgments. This design transforms the potential weakness of persona assignment into a mechanism to mitigate bias. We evaluate MPT on two widely used bias benchmarks with both open-source and closed-source models. Our results show that MPT achieves a lower bias than the existing prompting-based methods while maintaining the core reasoning ability.
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All authors Yuxing Chen, Guoqing Luo, Zijun Wu, Lili Mou

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

MiRAGE: A Multiagent Framework for Generating Multimodal Multihop Question-Answer Dataset for RAG Evaluation

The rapid evolution of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) toward multimodal, high-stakes enterprise applications has outpaced the development of domain specific evaluation benchmarks. Existing datasets often rely on general-domain corpora or purely textual retrieval, failing to capture the complexity of specialized technical documents where information is inextricably multimodal and reasoning requires synthesizing disjoint evidence. We address this gap by introducing MiRAGE, a Multiagent framework for RAG systems Evaluation, that leverages a collaborative swarm of specialized agents to generate verified, domain-specific, multimodal, and multi-hop Question-Answer datasets. MiRAGE orchestrates a swarm of specialized agents: a recursive context optimization loop to aggregate scattered evidence, an adversarial verifier agent to guarantee factual grounding, and an agent to recognize the expert persona and the relevant domain to mimic expert cognitive workflows. Extensive empirical evaluation across four distinct domains (regulations, finance, quantitative biology, and journalism) demonstrates that MiRAGE generates datasets with significantly higher reasoning complexity (>2.3 average hops) and factual faithfulness. Our ablation studies point that MiRAGE can be powered by LLMs if textual descriptions of the images are available. Visual grounding still remains a frontier. By automating the creation of gold standard evaluation datasets that reflect the latent thematic structure of proprietary corpora, MiRAGE provides the necessary infrastructure to rigorously benchmark the next generation information retrieval systems.
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Computation and Language

Benchmarking LLMs for Pairwise Causal Discovery in Biomedical and Multi-Domain Contexts

The safe deployment of large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes fields like biomedicine, requires them to be able to reason about cause and effect. We investigate this ability by testing 13 open-source LLMs on a fundamental task: pairwise causal discovery (PCD) from text. Our benchmark, using 12 diverse datasets, evaluates two core skills: 1) Causal Detection (identifying if a text contains a causal link) and 2) Causal Extraction (pulling out the exact cause and effect phrases). We tested various prompting methods, from simple instructions (zero-shot) to more complex strategies like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Few-shot In-Context Learning (FICL). The results show major deficiencies in current models. The best model for detection, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B, only achieved a mean score of 49.57% ($C_{detect}$), while the best for extraction, Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, reached just 47.12% ($C_{extract}$). Models performed best on simple, explicit, single-sentence relations. However, performance plummeted for more difficult (and realistic) cases, such as implicit relationships, links spanning multiple sentences, and texts containing multiple causal pairs. We provide a unified evaluation framework, built on a dataset validated with high inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa \ge 0.758$), and make all our data, code, and prompts publicly available to spur further research. \href{https://github.com/sydneyanuyah/CausalDiscovery}{Code available here: https://github.com/sydneyanuyah/CausalDiscovery}
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All authors Sydney Anuyah, Sneha Shajee-Mohan, Ankit-Singh Chauhan, Sunandan Chakraborty

Computation and Language

Chunking, Retrieval, and Re-ranking: An Empirical Evaluation of RAG Architectures for Policy Document Question Answering

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into the public health policy sector offers a transformative approach to navigating the vast repositories of regulatory guidance maintained by agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). However, the propensity for LLMs to generate hallucinations, defined as plausible but factually incorrect assertions, presents a critical barrier to the adoption of these technologies in high-stakes environments where information integrity is non-negotiable. This empirical evaluation explores the effectiveness of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures in mitigating these risks by grounding generative outputs in authoritative document context. Specifically, this study compares a baseline Vanilla LLM against Basic RAG and Advanced RAG pipelines utilizing cross-encoder re-ranking. The experimental framework employs a Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 model and an all-MiniLM-L6-v2 embedding model to process a corpus of official CDC policy analytical frameworks and guidance documents. The analysis measures the impact of two distinct chunking strategies, recursive character-based and token-based semantic splitting, on system accuracy, measured through faithfulness and relevance scores across a curated set of complex policy scenarios. Quantitative findings indicate that while Basic RAG architectures provide a substantial improvement in faithfulness (0.621) over Vanilla baselines (0.347), the Advanced RAG configuration achieves a superior faithfulness average of 0.797. These results demonstrate that two-stage retrieval mechanisms are essential for achieving the precision required for domain-specific policy question answering, though structural constraints in document segmentation remain a significant bottleneck for multi-step reasoning tasks.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Not Your Typical Sycophant: The Elusive Nature of Sycophancy in Large Language Models

We propose a novel perspective for probing LLM sycophancy in a direct and neutral way, mitigating various forms of uncontrolled bias, noise, or manipulative language, deliberately injected to prompts in prior works. A key novelty of our approach is the use of an LLM-as-a-judge in a zero-sum betting game. Within this framework, sycophancy serves one individual (the user) while explicitly incurring cost on another. Comparing 11 leading models we find that while most models exhibit significant sycophantic tendencies in the common setting, in which sycophancy is self-serving to the user and incurs no cost on others, seven of the models exhibit “moral remorse”, five of which significantly over-compensate for their sycophancy in case it explicitly harms a third party. We refer to this phenomenon as `anti-sycophancy' bias and discuss possible causes for this shift.
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Computation and Language

Domain-Specific Knowledge Graphs in RAG-Enhanced Healthcare LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) generate fluent answers but can struggle with trustworthy, domain-specific reasoning. We evaluate whether domain knowledge graphs (KGs) improve Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for healthcare by constructing three PubMed-derived graphs: $\mathbb{G}_1$ (T2DM), $\mathbb{G}_2$ (Alzheimer's disease), and $\mathbb{G}_3$ (AD+T2DM). We design two probes: Probe 1 targets merged AD T2DM knowledge, while Probe 2 targets the intersection of $\mathbb{G}_1$ and $\mathbb{G}_2$. Seven instruction-tuned LLMs are tested across retrieval sources {No-RAG, $\mathbb{G}_1$, $\mathbb{G}_2$, $\mathbb{G}_1$ + $\mathbb{G}_2$, $\mathbb{G}_3$, $\mathbb{G}_1$+$\mathbb{G}_2$ + $\mathbb{G}_3$} and three decoding temperatures. Results show that scope alignment between probe and KG is decisive: precise, scope-matched retrieval (notably $\mathbb{G}_2$) yields the most consistent gains, whereas indiscriminate graph unions often introduce distractors that reduce accuracy. Larger models frequently match or exceed KG-RAG with a No-RAG baseline on Probe 1, indicating strong parametric priors, whereas smaller/mid-sized models benefit more from well-scoped retrieval. Temperature plays a secondary role; higher values rarely help. We conclude that precision-first, scope-matched KG-RAG is preferable to breadth-first unions, and we outline practical guidelines for graph selection, model sizing, and retrieval/reranking. Code and Data available here - https://github.com/sydneyanuyah/RAGComparison
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All authors Sydney Anuyah, Mehedi Mahmud Kaushik, Hao Dai, Rakesh Shiradkar, Arjan Durresi, Sunandan Chakraborty

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.CV

CURE: Curriculum-guided Multi-task Training for Reliable Anatomy Grounded Report Generation

Medical vision-language models can automate the generation of radiology reports but struggle with accurate visual grounding and factual consistency. Existing models often misalign textual findings with visual evidence, leading to unreliable or weakly grounded predictions. We present CURE, an error-aware curriculum learning framework that improves grounding and report quality without any additional data. CURE fine-tunes a multimodal instructional model on phrase grounding, grounded report generation, and anatomy-grounded report generation using public datasets. The method dynamically adjusts sampling based on model performance, emphasizing harder samples to improve spatial and textual alignment. CURE improves grounding accuracy by +0.35 IoU, boosts report quality by +0.192 CXRFEScore, and reduces hallucinations by 18.6%. CURE is a data-efficient framework that enhances both grounding accuracy and report reliability. Code is available at https://github.com/PabloMessina/CURE and model weights at https://huggingface.co/pamessina/medgemma-4b-it-cure
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All authors Pablo Messina, Andrés Villa, Juan León Alcázar, Karen Sánchez, Carlos Hinojosa, Denis Parra, Álvaro Soto, Bernard Ghanem

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

LOGIC: Efficient and Robust Contextual Biasing for Speech LLMs via Logit-Space Integration

Recognizing entity phrases remains a critical challenge for speech large language models. Existing prompting methods lack an explicit decoding-time biasing weight, limiting their controllability. Generative error correction methods can introduce hallucinated over-corrections. To address these limitations, we propose LOGIC (logit-space integration for contextual biasing), a robust framework operating directly in the logit space. By decoupling context injection from input processing, LOGIC enables explicit control over the biasing strength. Extensive experiments with an open-source speech large language model across 11 locales demonstrate that LOGIC achieves an average 9% relative reduction in entity word error rate, with an average false alarm rate increase of 0.3% and a 2.8% relative runtime overhead. When combined with prompting, LOGIC can reduce entity word error rate by 5% relative to the prompt-only method.
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Computation and Language

Beyond Fixed Psychological Personas: State Beats Trait, but Language Models are State-Blind

User interactions with language models vary due to static properties of the user (trait) and the specific context of the interaction (state). However, existing persona datasets (like PersonaChat, PANDORA etc.) capture only trait, and ignore the impact of state. We introduce Chameleon, a dataset of 5,001 contextual psychological profiles from 1,667 Reddit users, each measured across multiple contexts. Using the Chameleon dataset, we present three key findings. First, inspired by Latent State-Trait theory, we decompose variance and find that 74% is within-person(state) while only 26% is between-person (trait). Second, we find that LLMs are state-blind: they focus on trait only, and produce similar responses regardless of state. Third, we find that reward models react to user state, but inconsistently: different models favor or penalize the same users in opposite directions. We release Chameleon to support research on affective computing, personalized dialogue, and RLHF alignment.
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All authors Tamunotonye Harry, Ivoline Ngong, Chima Nweke, Yuanyuan Feng, Joseph Near

Computation and Language

Memorization Dynamics in Knowledge Distillation for Language Models

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is increasingly adopted to transfer capabilities from large language models to smaller ones, offering significant improvements in efficiency and utility while often surpassing standard fine-tuning. Beyond performance, KD is also explored as a privacy-preserving mechanism to mitigate the risk of training data leakage. While training data memorization has been extensively studied in standard pre-training and fine-tuning settings, its dynamics in a knowledge distillation setup remain poorly understood. In this work, we study memorization across the KD pipeline using three large language model (LLM) families (Pythia, OLMo-2, Qwen-3) and three datasets (FineWeb, Wikitext, Nemotron-CC-v2). We find: (1) distilled models memorize significantly less training data than standard fine-tuning (reducing memorization by more than 50%); (2) some examples are inherently easier to memorize and account for a large fraction of memorization during distillation (over ~95%); (3) student memorization is predictable prior to distillation using features based on zlib entropy, KL divergence, and perplexity; and (4) while soft and hard distillation have similar overall memorization rates, hard distillation poses a greater risk: it inherits $2.7\times$ more teacher-specific examples than soft distillation. Overall, we demonstrate that distillation can provide both improved generalization and reduced memorization risks compared to standard fine-tuning.
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All authors Jaydeep Borkar, Karan Chadha, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Yuchen Zhang, Irina-Elena Veliche, Archi Mitra, David A. Smith, Zheng Xu, Diego Garcia-Olano

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.HC

VegaChat: A Robust Framework for LLM-Based Chart Generation and Assessment

Natural-language-to-visualization (NL2VIS) systems based on large language models (LLMs) have substantially improved the accessibility of data visualization. However, their further adoption is hindered by two coupled challenges: (i) the absence of standardized evaluation metrics makes it difficult to assess progress in the field and compare different approaches; and (ii) natural language descriptions are inherently underspecified, so multiple visualizations may be valid for the same query. To address these issues, we introduce VegaChat, a framework for generating, validating, and assessing declarative visualizations from natural language. We propose two complementary metrics: Spec Score, a deterministic metric that measures specification-level similarity without invoking an LLM, and Vision Score, a library-agnostic, image-based metric that leverages a multimodal LLM to assess chart similarity and prompt compliance. We evaluate VegaChat on the NLV Corpus and on the annotated subset of ChartLLM. VegaChat achieves near-zero rates of invalid or empty visualizations, while Spec Score and Vision Score exhibit strong correlation with human judgments (Pearson 0.65 and 0.71, respectively), indicating that the proposed metrics support consistent, cross-library comparison. The code and evaluation artifacts are available at https://zenodo.org/records/17062309.
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All authors Marko Hostnik, Rauf Kurbanov, Yaroslav Sokolov, Artem Trofimov

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

You Need Better Attention Priors

We generalize the attention mechanism by viewing it through the lens of Entropic Optimal Transport, revealing that standard attention corresponds to a transport problem regularized by an implicit uniform prior. We introduce Generalized Optimal transport Attention with Trainable priors (GOAT), a new attention mechanism that replaces this naive assumption with a learnable, continuous prior. This prior maintains full compatibility with optimized kernels such as FlashAttention. GOAT also provides an EOT-based explanation of attention sinks and materializes a solution for them, avoiding the representational trade-offs of standard attention. Finally, by absorbing spatial information into the core attention computation, GOAT learns an extrapolatable prior that combines the flexibility of learned positional embeddings with the length generalization of fixed encodings.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.SD

Abusive music and song transformation using GenAI and LLMs

Repeated exposure to violence and abusive content in music and song content can influence listeners' emotions and behaviours, potentially normalising aggression or reinforcing harmful stereotypes. In this study, we explore the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically transform abusive words (vocal delivery) and lyrical content in popular music. Rather than simply muting or replacing a single word, our approach transforms the tone, intensity, and sentiment, thus not altering just the lyrics, but how it is expressed. We present a comparative analysis of four selected English songs and their transformed counterparts, evaluating changes through both acoustic and sentiment-based lenses. Our findings indicate that Gen-AI significantly reduces vocal aggressiveness, with acoustic analysis showing improvements in Harmonic to Noise Ratio, Cepstral Peak Prominence, and Shimmer. Sentiment analysis reduced aggression by 63.3-85.6% across artists, with major improvements in chorus sections (up to 88.6% reduction). The transformed versions maintained musical coherence while mitigating harmful content, offering a promising alternative to traditional content moderation that avoids triggering the "forbidden fruit" effect, where the censored content becomes more appealing simply because it is restricted. This approach demonstrates the potential for GenAI to create safer listening experiences while preserving artistic expression.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Logic Programming on Knowledge Graph Networks And its Application in Medical Domain

The rash development of knowledge graph research has brought big driving force to its application in many areas, including the medicine and healthcare domain. However, we have found that the application of some major information processing techniques on knowledge graph still lags behind. This defect includes the failure to make sufficient use of advanced logic reasoning, advanced artificial intelligence techniques, special-purpose programming languages, modern probabilistic and statistic theories et al. on knowledge graphs development and application. In particular, the multiple knowledge graphs cooperation and competition techniques have not got enough attention from researchers. This paper develops a systematic theory, technique and application of the concept 'knowledge graph network' and its application in medical and healthcare domain. Our research covers its definition, development, reasoning, computing and application under different conditions such as unsharp, uncertain, multi-modal, vectorized, distributed, federated. Almost in each case we provide (real data) examples and experiment results. Finally, a conclusion of innovation is provided.
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All authors Chuanqing Wang, Zhenmin Zhao, Shanshan Du, Chaoqun Fei, Songmao Zhang, Ruqian Lu

Computation and Language

Robust Fake News Detection using Large Language Models under Adversarial Sentiment Attacks

Misinformation and fake news have become a pressing societal challenge, driving the need for reliable automated detection methods. Prior research has highlighted sentiment as an important signal in fake news detection, either by analyzing which sentiments are associated with fake news or by using sentiment and emotion features for classification. However, this poses a vulnerability since adversaries can manipulate sentiment to evade detectors especially with the advent of large language models (LLMs). A few studies have explored adversarial samples generated by LLMs, but they mainly focus on stylistic features such as writing style of news publishers. Thus, the crucial vulnerability of sentiment manipulation remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of state-of-the-art fake news detectors under sentiment manipulation. We introduce AdSent, a sentiment-robust detection framework designed to ensure consistent veracity predictions across both original and sentiment-altered news articles. Specifically, we (1) propose controlled sentiment-based adversarial attacks using LLMs, (2) analyze the impact of sentiment shifts on detection performance. We show that changing the sentiment heavily impacts the performance of fake news detection models, indicating biases towards neutral articles being real, while non-neutral articles are often classified as fake content. (3) We introduce a novel sentiment-agnostic training strategy that enhances robustness against such perturbations. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that AdSent significantly outperforms competitive baselines in both accuracy and robustness, while also generalizing effectively to unseen datasets and adversarial scenarios.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.CY

Evaluation of Large Language Models in Legal Applications: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly integrated into legal applications, including judicial decision support, legal practice assistance, and public-facing legal services. While LLMs show strong potential in handling legal knowledge and tasks, their deployment in real-world legal settings raises critical concerns beyond surface-level accuracy, involving the soundness of legal reasoning processes and trustworthy issues such as fairness and reliability. Systematic evaluation of LLM performance in legal tasks has therefore become essential for their responsible adoption. This survey identifies key challenges in evaluating LLMs for legal tasks grounded in real-world legal practice. We analyze the major difficulties involved in assessing LLM performance in the legal domain, including outcome correctness, reasoning reliability, and trustworthiness. Building on these challenges, we review and categorize existing evaluation methods and benchmarks according to their task design, datasets, and evaluation metrics. We further discuss the extent to which current approaches address these challenges, highlight their limitations, and outline future research directions toward more realistic, reliable, and legally grounded evaluation frameworks for LLMs in legal domains.
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All authors Yiran Hu, Huanghai Liu, Chong Wang, Kunran Li, Tien-Hsuan Wu, Haitao Li, Xinran Xu, Siqing Huo, Weihang Su, Ning Zheng, Siyuan Zheng, Qingyao Ai, Yun Liu, Renjun Bian, Yiqun Liu, Charles L.A. Clarke, Weixing Shen, Ben Kao