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Computer Science Computation and Language

cs.CL Watch Computation and Language

Friday 20 March

Computation and Language

FrameNet Semantic Role Classification by Analogy

Van-Duy Ngo, Stergos Afantenos, Emiliano Lorini et al. (+1 more)

In this paper, we adopt a relational view of analogies applied to Semantic Role Classification in FrameNet. We define analogies as formal relations over the Cartesian product of frame evoking lexical units (LUs) and frame element (FEs) pairs, which we use to construct a new dataset. Each element of this binary relation is labelled as a valid analogical instance if the frame elements share the same semantic role, or as invalid otherwise. This formulation allows us to transform Semantic Role Classification into binary classification and train a lightweight Artificial Neural Network (ANN) that exhibits rapid convergence with minimal parameters. Unconventionally, no Semantic Role information is introduced to the neural network during training. We recover semantic roles during inference by computing probability distributions over candidates of all semantic roles within a given frame through random sampling and analogical transfer. This approach allows us to surpass previous state-of-the-art results while maintaining computational efficiency and frugality.
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All authors Van-Duy Ngo, Stergos Afantenos, Emiliano Lorini, Miguel Couceiro

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.SD

Borderless Long Speech Synthesis

Xingchen Song, Di Wu, Dinghao Zhou et al. (+12 more)

Most existing text-to-speech (TTS) systems either synthesize speech sentence by sentence and stitch the results together, or drive synthesis from plain-text dialogues alone. Both approaches leave models with little understanding of global context or paralinguistic cues, making it hard to capture real-world phenomena such as multi-speaker interactions (interruptions, overlapping speech), evolving emotional arcs, and varied acoustic environments. We introduce the Borderless Long Speech Synthesis framework for agent-centric, borderless long audio synthesis. Rather than targeting a single narrow task, the system is designed as a unified capability set spanning VoiceDesigner, multi-speaker synthesis, Instruct TTS, and long-form text synthesis. On the data side, we propose a "Labeling over filtering/cleaning" strategy and design a top-down, multi-level annotation schema we call Global-Sentence-Token. On the model side, we adopt a backbone with a continuous tokenizer and add Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning together with Dimension Dropout, both of which markedly improve instruction following under complex conditions. We further show that the system is Native Agentic by design: the hierarchical annotation doubles as a Structured Semantic Interface between the LLM Agent and the synthesis engine, creating a layered control protocol stack that spans from scene semantics down to phonetic detail. Text thereby becomes an information-complete, wide-band control channel, enabling a front-end LLM to convert inputs of any modality into structured generation commands, extending the paradigm from Text2Speech to borderless long speech synthesis.
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All authors Xingchen Song, Di Wu, Dinghao Zhou, Pengyu Cheng, Hongwu Ding, Yunchao He, Jie Wang, Shengfan Shen, Sixiang Lv, Lichun Fan, Hang Su, Yifeng Wang, Shuai Wang, Meng Meng, Jian Luan

Computation and Language

Neither Here Nor There: Cross-Lingual Representation Dynamics of Code-Mixed Text in Multilingual Encoders

Debajyoti Mazumder, Divyansh Pathak, Prashant Kodali et al. (+1 more)

Multilingual encoder-based language models are widely used for code-mixed analysis, yet their internal representations of code-mixed inputs – and their relationship to the constituent languages – remain poorly understood. Using Hindi-English as a case study, we construct a unified trilingual corpus of parallel English, Hindi (Devanagari), and Romanized code-mixed sentences. We then probe cross-lingual representation alignment in standard multilingual encoders and their code-mix-adapted variants using CKA, token-level saliency, and entropy-based uncertainty analysis. We find that while standard models align English and Hindi well, code-mixed inputs remain loosely connected to either language – and that continued pre-training on code-mixed data improves English-code-mixed alignment at the cost of English-Hindi alignment. Interpretability analyses further reveal a clear asymmetry: models process code-mixed text through an English-dominant semantic subspace, while native-script Hindi provides complementary signals that reduce representational uncertainty. Motivated by these findings, we introduce a trilingual post-training alignment objective that brings code-mixed representations closer to both constituent languages simultaneously, yielding more balanced cross-lingual alignment and downstream gains on sentiment analysis and hate speech detection – showing that grounding code-mixed representations in their constituent languages meaningfully helps cross-lingual understanding. Code is available at: https://github.com/debajyotimaz/tri_align_EMNLP_2026.
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All authors Debajyoti Mazumder, Divyansh Pathak, Prashant Kodali, Jasabanta Patro

Computation and Language

Rethinking Ground Truth: A Case Study on Human Label Variation in MLLM Benchmarking

Tomas Ruiz, Tanalp Agustoslu and Carsten Schwemmer

Human Label Variation (HLV), i.e. systematic differences among annotators' judgments, remains underexplored in benchmarks despite rapid progress in large language model (LLM) development. We address this gap by introducing an evaluation protocol for multimodal large language model (MLLM) benchmarking that explicitly accounts for two conditions: (1) human label agreement and (2) disagreement. We apply this protocol to two state-of-the-art MLLM families (Gemma 3, Qwen 2.5 VL) using non-aggregated human annotations from a social media content classification dataset. Across tasks, we find that larger models tend to perform best on high-agreement subsets, yet often underperform medium-sized models when human disagreement is high, indicating that parameter count alone does not determine sensitivity to ambiguity and subjectivity. These results show that benchmarks based solely on consensus labels can overstate model capabilities in such domains and that incorporating human label variation yields more realistic and robust assessments of MLLMs in content moderation pipelines.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Layer-wise Target Propagation: Efficient Component Attribution through Target Centric Propagation

Lasse Marten Jantsch, Dong-Jae Koh, Seonghyeon Lee et al. (+1 more)

Understanding the internal mechanisms of transformer-based large language models (LLMs) is crucial for their reliable deployment and effective operation. While recent efforts have yielded a plethora of attribution methods attempting to balance faithfulness and computational efficiency, dense component attribution remains prohibitively expensive. In this work, we introduce Layer-wise Target Propagation (LTP), a novel framework that faithfully traces information flow on the frozen transformer in one forward and one backward pass without requiring counterfactual examples. LTP analytically decomposes and linearizes the computational structure of the Transformers into distinct pathways along which it propagates a targeted unembedding vector to receive the effective representation at each residual position. This target-centric propagation achieves O(1) time complexity with respect to the number of model components, scaling to long input sequences and dense component attribution. Extensive experiments on standard interpretability benchmarks demonstrate that LTP achieves state-of-the-art faithfulness and unprecedented efficiency compared to existing baselines.
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All authors Lasse Marten Jantsch, Dong-Jae Koh, Seonghyeon Lee, Young-Kyoon Suh

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

FedPDPO: Federated Personalized Direct Preference Optimization for Large Language Model Alignment

Kewen Zhu, Liping Yi, Zhiming Zhao et al. (+3 more)

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences in federated learning (FL) is challenging due to decentralized, privacy-sensitive, and highly non-IID preference data. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) offers an efficient alternative to reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), but its direct application in FL suffers from severe performance degradation under non-IID data and limited generalization of implicit rewards. To bridge this gap, we propose FedPDPO (Federated Personalized Direct Preference Optimization), a personalized federated framework for preference alignment of LLMs. It adopts a parameter-efficient fine-tuning architecture where each client maintains a frozen pretrained LLM backbone augmented with a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter, enabling communication-efficient aggregation. To address non-IID heterogeneity, we devise (1) the globally shared LoRA adapter with the personalized client-specific LLM head. Moreover, we introduce (2) a personalized DPO training strategy with a client-specific explicit reward head to complement implicit rewards and further alleviate non-IID heterogeneity, and (3) a bottleneck adapter to balance global and local features. We provide theoretical analysis establishing the probabilistic foundation and soundness. Extensive experiments on multiple preference datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving up to 4.80% average accuracy improvements in federated intra-domain and cross-domain settings.
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All authors Kewen Zhu, Liping Yi, Zhiming Zhao, Zhuang Qi, Han Yu, Qinghua Hu

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.SD

MOSS-TTSD: Text to Spoken Dialogue Generation

Yuqian Zhang, Donghua Yu, Zhengyuan Lin et al. (+15 more)

Spoken dialogue generation is crucial for applications like podcasts, dynamic commentary, and entertainment content, but poses significant challenges compared to single-utterance text-to-speech (TTS). Key requirements include accurate turn-taking, cross-turn acoustic consistency, and long-form stability, which current models often fail to address due to a lack of dialogue context modeling. To bridge this gap, we present MOSS-TTSD, a spoken dialogue synthesis model designed for expressive, multi-party conversational speech across multiple languages. With enhanced long-context modeling, MOSS-TTSD generates long-form spoken conversations from dialogue scripts with explicit speaker tags, supporting up to 60 minutes of single-pass synthesis, multi-party dialogue with up to 5 speakers, and zero-shot voice cloning from a short reference audio clip. The model supports various mainstream languages, including English and Chinese, and is adapted to several long-form scenarios. Additionally, to address limitations of existing evaluation methods, we propose TTSD-eval, an objective evaluation framework based on forced alignment that measures speaker attribution accuracy and speaker similarity without relying on speaker diarization tools. Both objective and subjective evaluation results show that MOSS-TTSD surpasses strong open-source and proprietary baselines in dialogue synthesis.
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All authors Yuqian Zhang, Donghua Yu, Zhengyuan Lin, Botian Jiang, Mingshu Chen, Yaozhou Jiang, Yiwei Zhao, Yiyang Zhang, Yucheng Yuan, Hanfu Chen, Kexin Huang, Jun Zhan, Cheng Chang, Zhaoye Fei, Shimin Li, Xiaogui Yang, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu

Computation and Language

PoC: Performance-oriented Context Compression for Large Language Models via Performance Prediction

Runsong Zhao, Shilei Liu, Jiwei Tang et al. (+8 more)

While context compression can mitigate the growing inference costs of Large Language Models (LLMs) by shortening contexts, existing methods that specify a target compression ratio or length suffer from unpredictable performance degradation, hindering their reliable deployment. We introduce a paradigm shift to Performance-oriented Context Compression (PoC), where developers specify an acceptable performance floor instead of a compression ratio. PoC employs a lightweight performance predictor to automatically find the most aggressive compression ratio that satisfies this constraint before steering an off-the-shelf compressor. We design and compare two predictor variants: a simple context-agnostic predictor and a more sophisticated context-aware one that considers the input's inherent compressibility. On both question-answering and summarization benchmarks, the context-aware predictor consistently achieves lower performance prediction error than the context-agnostic predictor, while the resulting context-aware PoC attains a superior overall performance. Our work paves the way for a more reliable, efficient, and performance-aware deployment of context compression for LLMs.
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All authors Runsong Zhao, Shilei Liu, Jiwei Tang, Langming Liu, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yujin Yuan, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng

Computation and Language

LoopRPT: Reinforcement Pre-Training for Looped Language Models

Guo Tang, Shixin Jiang, Heng Chang et al. (+7 more)

Looped language models (LoopLMs) perform iterative latent computation to refine internal representations, offering an alternative to explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, existing reinforcement learning (RL) paradigms primarily target output tokens, creating a structural mismatch with looped architectures whose reasoning unfolds implicitly. In this work, we propose LoopRPT, a reinforcement pre-training framework tailored for LoopLMs. By reframing next-token prediction as a next-token reasoning task, LoopRPT assigns reinforcement signals directly to latent steps using an EMA teacher reference and noisy latent rollouts. This formulation enables RL to directly shape intermediate representations, compressing effective reasoning into fewer iterations. We instantiate LoopRPT on Ouro across multiple model scales. Results show that LoopRPT improves per-step representation quality and achieves Pareto dominance in accuracy-computation trade-offs. Large gains on hard tokens indicate that LoopRPT enhances early-stage reasoning rather than merely encouraging premature exits. Our findings highlight reinforcement pre-training as a principled paradigm for learning efficient latent reasoning in LoopLMs.
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All authors Guo Tang, Shixin Jiang, Heng Chang, Zihan Zhang, Nuo Chen, Yuhan Li, Huiming Fan, Jia Li, Ming Liu, Bing Qin

Computation and Language

TAB-AUDIT: Detecting AI-Fabricated Scientific Tables via Multi-View Likelihood Mismatch

Shuo Huang, Yan Pen and Lizhen Qu

AI-generated fabricated scientific manuscripts raise growing concerns with large-scale breaches of academic integrity. In this work, we present the first systematic study on detecting AI-generated fabricated scientific tables in empirical NLP papers, as information in tables serve as critical evidence for claims. We construct FabTab, the first benchmark dataset of fabricated manuscripts with tables, comprising 1,173 AI-generated papers and 1,215 human-authored ones in empirical NLP. Through a comprehensive analysis, we identify systematic differences between fabricated and real tables and operationalize them into a set of discriminative features within the TAB-AUDIT framework. The key feature, within-table mismatch, captures the perplexity gap between a table's skeleton and its numerical content. Experimental results show that RandomForest built on these features significantly outperform prior state-of-the-art methods, achieving 0.987 AUROC in-domain and 0.883 AUROC out-of-domain. Our findings highlight experimental tables as a critical forensic signal for detecting AI-generated scientific fraud and provide a new benchmark for future research.
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Computation and Language

EvoTaxo: Building and Evolving Taxonomy from Social Media Streams

Yiyang Li, Tianyi Ma and Yanfang Ye

Constructing taxonomies from social media corpora is challenging because posts are short, noisy, semantically entangled, and temporally dynamic. Existing taxonomy induction methods are largely designed for static corpora and often struggle to balance robustness, scalability, and sensitivity to evolving discourse. We propose EvoTaxo, a LLM-based framework for building and evolving taxonomies from temporally ordered social media streams. Rather than clustering raw posts directly, EvoTaxo converts each post into a structured draft action over the current taxonomy, accumulates structural evidence over time windows, and consolidates candidate edits through dual-view clustering that combines semantic similarity with temporal locality. A refinement-and-arbitration procedure then selects reliable edits before execution, while each node maintains a concept memory bank to preserve semantic boundaries over time. Experiments on two Reddit corpora show that EvoTaxo produces more balanced taxonomies than baselines, with clearer post-to-leaf assignment, better corpus coverage at comparable taxonomy size, and stronger structural quality. A case study on the Reddit community /r/ICE_Raids further shows that EvoTaxo captures meaningful temporal shifts in discourse. Our codebase is available here.
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Computation and Language

DataProphet: Demystifying Supervision Data Generalization in Multimodal LLMs

Xuan Qi, Luxi He, Dan Roth et al. (+1 more)

Conventional wisdom for selecting supervision data for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is to prioritize datasets that appear similar to the target benchmark, such as text-intensive or vision-centric tasks. However, it remains unclear whether such intuitive similarity reliably predicts downstream performance gains. In this work, we take a first step toward answering a practical question: can we estimate the influence of a training dataset on a target benchmark before any training is performed? To investigate this question, we conduct an in-depth analysis of transfer across 14 vision-language datasets spanning 7 diverse tasks. Our results show that intuitive task similarity is an unreliable predictor of transferability, and that generalization depends more on the specific dataset than on its broad task category. Motivated by this finding, we propose DATAPROPHET, a simple and effective training-free metric that combines multimodal perplexity, similarity, and data diversity. Experiments show that DATAPROPHET produces supervision-data rankings that strongly correlate with rankings based on actual post-training performance gains, achieving a Kendall's tau of 86.0%. Moreover, DATAPROPHET enables better supervision-data selection, yielding up to 6.9% improvement over uniform selection, 1.4% over a state-of-the-art training-based baseline, and 0.2% above oracle selection based on experimental performance. Our code and data will be released.
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All authors Xuan Qi, Luxi He, Dan Roth, Xingyu Fu

Computation and Language

Structured Prompting for Arabic Essay Proficiency: A Trait-Centric Evaluation Approach

Salim Al Mandhari, Hieu Pham Dinh, Mo El-Haj et al. (+1 more)

This paper presents a novel prompt engineering framework for trait specific Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) in Arabic, leveraging large language models (LLMs) under zero-shot and few-shot configurations. Addressing the scarcity of scalable, linguistically informed AES tools for Arabic, we introduce a three-tier prompting strategy (standard, hybrid, and rubric-guided) that guides LLMs in evaluating distinct language proficiency traits such as organization, vocabulary, development, and style. The hybrid approach simulates multi-agent evaluation with trait specialist raters, while the rubric-guided method incorporates scored exemplars to enhance model alignment. In zero and few-shot settings, we evaluate eight LLMs on the QAES dataset, the first publicly available Arabic AES resource with trait level annotations. Experimental results using Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) and Confidence Intervals show that Fanar-1-9B-Instruct achieves the highest trait level agreement in both zero and few-shot prompting (QWK = 0.28 and CI = 0.41), with rubric-guided prompting yielding consistent gains across all traits and models. Discourse-level traits such as Development and Style showed the greatest improvements. These findings confirm that structured prompting, not model scale alone, enables effective AES in Arabic. Our study presents the first comprehensive framework for proficiency oriented Arabic AES and sets the foundation for scalable assessment in low resource educational contexts.
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All authors Salim Al Mandhari, Hieu Pham Dinh, Mo El-Haj, Paul Rayson

Computation and Language

BEAVER: A Training-Free Hierarchical Prompt Compression Method via Structure-Aware Page Selection

Zhengpei Hu, Kai Li, Dapeng Fu et al. (+4 more)

The exponential expansion of context windows in LLMs has unlocked capabilities for long-document understanding but introduced severe bottlenecks in inference latency and information utilization. Existing compression methods often suffer from high training costs or semantic fragmentation due to aggressive token pruning. In this paper, we propose BEAVER, a novel training-free framework that shifts compression from linear token removal to structure-aware hierarchical selection. BEAVER maximizes hardware parallelism by mapping variable-length contexts into dense page-level tensors via dual-path pooling, and preserves discourse integrity through a hybrid planner combining semantic and lexical dual-branch selection with sentence smoothing. Extensive evaluations on four long-context benchmarks demonstrate that BEAVER achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods like LongLLMLingua. Notably, on the RULER benchmark, BEAVER maintains high fidelity in multi-needle retrieval where baselines deteriorate. Regarding efficiency, BEAVER reduces latency by 26.4x on 128k contexts, offering a scalable solution for high-throughput applications. Our code is available at https://cslikai.cn/BEAVER/.
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All authors Zhengpei Hu, Kai Li, Dapeng Fu, Chang Zeng, Yue Li, Yuanhao Tang, Jianqiang Huang

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.SD

CAF-Score: Calibrating CLAP with LALMs for Reference-free Audio Captioning Evaluation

Insung Lee, Taeyoung Jeong, Haejun Yoo et al. (+2 more)

While Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have advanced audio captioning, robust evaluation remains difficult. Reference-based metrics are expensive and often fail to assess acoustic fidelity, while Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP)-based approaches frequently overlook syntactic errors and fine-grained details. We propose CAF-Score, a reference-free metric that calibrates CLAP's coarse-grained semantic alignment with the fine-grained comprehension and syntactic awareness of LALMs. By combining contrastive audio-text embeddings with LALM reasoning, CAF-Score effectively detects syntactic inconsistencies and subtle hallucinations. Experiments on the BRACE benchmark demonstrate that our approach achieves the highest correlation with human judgments, even outperforming reference-based baselines in challenging scenarios. These results highlight the efficacy of CAF-Score for reference-free audio captioning evaluation. Code and results are available at https://github.com/inseong00/CAF-Score.
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All authors Insung Lee, Taeyoung Jeong, Haejun Yoo, Du-Seong Chang, Myoung-Wan Koo

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.IR

All-Mem: Agentic Lifelong Memory via Dynamic Topology Evolution

Can Lv, Heng Chang, Shengyu Tao et al. (+5 more)

Lifelong interactive agents are expected to assist users over months or years, which requires continually writing long term memories while retrieving the right evidence for each new query under fixed context and latency budgets. Existing memory systems often degrade as histories grow, yielding redundant, outdated, or noisy retrieved contexts. We present All-Mem, an online/offline lifelong memory framework that maintains a topology structured memory bank via explicit, non destructive consolidation, avoiding the irreversible information loss typical of summarization based compression. In online operation, it anchors retrieval on a bounded visible surface to keep coarse search cost bounded. Periodically offline, an LLM diagnoser proposes confidence scored topology edits executed with gating using three operators: Split, Merge, and Update, while preserving immutable evidence for traceability. At query time, typed links enable hop bounded, budgeted expansion from active anchors to archived evidence when needed. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-s show improved retrieval and QA over representative baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/LvCan926/All-Mem.
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All authors Can Lv, Heng Chang, Shengyu Tao, Mingju Chen, Zhaoxin Fan, Ziwei Zhang, Yuchen Guo, Shiji Zhou

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.HC

AI Psychosis: Does Conversational AI Amplify Delusion-Related Language?

Soorya Ram Shimgekar, Vipin Gunda, Jiwon Kim et al. (+3 more)

Conversational AI systems are increasingly used for personal reflection and emotional disclosure, raising concerns about their effects on vulnerable users. Recent anecdotal reports suggest that prolonged interactions with AI may reinforce delusional thinking—a phenomenon sometimes described as AI Psychosis. However, empirical evidence on this phenomenon remains limited. In this work, we examine how delusion-related language evolves during multi-turn interactions with conversational AI. We construct simulated users (SimUsers) from Reddit users' longitudinal posting histories and generate extended conversations with three model families (GPT, LLaMA, and Qwen). We develop DelusionScore, a linguistic measure that quantifies the intensity of delusion-related language across conversational turns. We find that SimUsers derived from users with prior delusion-related discourse (Treatment) exhibit progressively increasing DelusionScore trajectories, whereas those derived from users without such discourse (Control) remain stable or decline. We further find that this amplification varies across themes, with reality skepticism and compulsive reasoning showing the strongest increases. Finally, conditioning AI responses on current DelusionScore substantially reduces these trajectories. These findings provide empirical evidence that conversational AI interactions can amplify delusion-related language over extended use and highlight the importance of state-aware safety mechanisms for mitigating such risks.
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All authors Soorya Ram Shimgekar, Vipin Gunda, Jiwon Kim, Violeta J. Rodriguez, Hari Sundaram, Koustuv Saha

Computation and Language

TextReasoningBench: Does Reasoning Really Improve Text Classification in Large Language Models?

Xinyu Guo, Yazhou Zhang and Jing Qin

Eliciting explicit, step-by-step reasoning traces from large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for enhancing model capabilities. Although such reasoning strategies were originally designed for problems requiring explicit multi-step reasoning, they have increasingly been applied to a broad range of NLP tasks. This expansion implicitly assumes that deliberative reasoning uniformly benefits heterogeneous tasks. However, whether such reasoning mechanisms truly benefit classification tasks remains largely underexplored, especially considering their substantial token and time costs. To fill this gap, we introduce TextReasoningBench, a systematic benchmark designed to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of reasoning strategies for text classification with LLMs. We compare seven reasoning strategies, namely IO, CoT, SC-CoT, ToT, GoT, BoC, and long-CoT across ten LLMs on five text classification datasets. Beyond traditional metrics such as accuracy and macro-F1, we introduce two cost-aware evaluation metrics that quantify the performance gain per reasoning token and the efficiency of performance improvement relative to token cost growth. Experimental results reveal three notable findings: (1) Reasoning does not universally improve classification performance: while moderate strategies such as CoT and SC-CoT yield consistent but limited gains (typically +1% to +3% on big models), more complex methods (e.g., ToT and GoT) often fail to outperform simpler baselines and can even degrade performance, especially on small models; (2) Reasoning is often inefficient: many reasoning strategies increase token consumption by 10$\times$ to 100$\times$ (e.g., SC-CoT and ToT) while providing only marginal performance improvements.
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Computation and Language

FDARxBench: Benchmarking Regulatory and Clinical Reasoning on FDA Generic Drug Assessment

Betty Xiong, Jillian Fisher, Benjamin Newman et al. (+5 more)

We introduce an expert curated, real-world benchmark for evaluating document-grounded question-answering (QA) motivated by generic drug assessment, using the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug label documents. Drug labels contain rich but heterogeneous clinical and regulatory information, making accurate question answering difficult for current language models. In collaboration with FDA regulatory assessors, we introduce FDARxBench, and construct a multi-stage pipeline for generating high-quality, expert curated, QA examples spanning factual, multi-hop, and refusal tasks, and design evaluation protocols to assess both open-book and closed-book reasoning. Experiments across proprietary and open-weight models reveal substantial gaps in factual grounding, long-context retrieval, and safe refusal behavior. While motivated by FDA generic drug assessment needs, this benchmark also provides a substantial foundation for challenging regulatory-grade evaluation of label comprehension. The benchmark is designed to support evaluation of LLM behavior on drug-label questions.
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All authors Betty Xiong, Jillian Fisher, Benjamin Newman, Meng Hu, Shivangi Gupta, Yejin Choi, Lanyan Fang, Russ B Altman

Computation and Language

EvidenceRL: Reinforcing Evidence Consistency for Trustworthy Language Models

J. Ben Tamo, Yuxing Lu, Benoit L. Marteau et al. (+2 more)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are fluent but prone to hallucinations, producing answers that appear plausible yet are unsupported by available evidence. This failure is especially problematic in high-stakes domains where decisions must be justified by verifiable information. We introduce EvidenceRL, a reinforcement learning framework that enforces evidence adherence during training. EvidenceRL scores candidate responses for grounding (entailment with retrieved evidence and context) and correctness (agreement with reference answers) and optimizes the generator using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We evaluate across two high-stakes domains, cardiac diagnosis and legal reasoning, where EvidenceRL consistently improves evidence grounding and faithfulness without sacrificing task accuracy. On cardiac diagnosis, F1@3 increases from 37.0 to 54.5 on Llama-3.2-3B while grounding ($G_{\max}@3$) rises from 47.6 to 78.2; hallucinations drop nearly 5$\times$ and evidence-supported diagnoses increase from 31.8% to 61.6%. On legal reasoning, EvidenceRL raises Faithfulness from 32.8% to 67.6% on Llama-3.1-8B, demonstrating consistent behavioral change across domains. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Wizaaard/EvidenceRL.git.
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All authors J. Ben Tamo, Yuxing Lu, Benoit L. Marteau, Micky C. Nnamdi, May D. Wang

Thursday 19 March

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.HC

From Seeing it to Experiencing it: Interactive Evaluation of Intersectional Voice Bias in Human-AI Speech Interaction

Shree Harsha Bokkahalli Satish, Maria Teleki, Christoph Minixhofer et al. (+3 more)

SpeechLLMs process spoken language directly from audio, but accent and vocal identity cues can lead to biased behaviour. Current bias evaluations often miss how such bias manifests in end-to-end speech interactions and how users experience it. We distinguish quality-of-service disparities (e.g., off-topic or low-effort responses) from content-level bias in coherent outputs, and examine intersectional effects of accent and perceived gender. In this work, we explore a two-part evaluation approach: (1) a controlled test cohort spanning six accents and two gender presentations, analysed with judge-free prompt-response metrics, and (2) an interactive study design using voice conversion to let users experience identical content through different vocal identities. Across two studies (Interactive, N=24; Observational, N=19), we find that voice conversion increases trust and acceptability for benign responses and encourages perspective-taking, while automated analysis in search of quality-of-service disparities, reveals {accent x gender} disparities in alignment and verbosity across SpeechLLMs. These results highlight voice conversion for probing and experiencing intersectional voice bias while our evaluation suite provides richer bias evaluations for spoken conversational AI.
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All authors Shree Harsha Bokkahalli Satish, Maria Teleki, Christoph Minixhofer, Ondrej Klejch, Peter Bell, Éva Székely

Computation and Language

Lossless Prompt Compression via Dictionary-Encoding and In-Context Learning: Enabling Cost-Effective LLM Analysis of Repetitive Data

Andresa Rodrigues de Campos, David Lee, Imry Kissos et al. (+1 more)

In-context learning has established itself as an important learning paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we demonstrate that LLMs can learn encoding keys in-context and perform analysis directly on encoded representations. This finding enables lossless prompt compression via dictionary encoding without model fine-tuning: frequently occurring subsequences are replaced with compact meta-tokens, and when provided with the compression dictionary in the system prompt, LLMs correctly interpret these meta-tokens during analysis, producing outputs equivalent to those from uncompressed inputs. We present a compression algorithm that identifies repetitive patterns at multiple length scales, incorporating a token-savings optimization criterion that ensures compression reduces costs by preventing dictionary overhead from exceeding savings. The algorithm achieves compression ratios up to 80$\%$ depending on dataset characteristics. To validate that LLM analytical accuracy is preserved under compression, we use decompression as a proxy task with unambiguous ground truth. Evaluation on the LogHub 2.0 benchmark using Claude 3.7 Sonnet demonstrates exact match rates exceeding 0.99 for template-based compression and average Levenshtein similarity scores above 0.91 for algorithmic compression, even at compression ratios of 60$\%$-80$\%$. Additionally, compression ratio explains less than 2$\%$ of variance in similarity metrics, indicating that decompression quality depends on dataset characteristics rather than compression intensity. This training-free approach works with API-based LLMs, directly addressing fundamental deployment constraints – token limits and API costs – and enabling cost-effective analysis of large-scale repetitive datasets, even as data patterns evolve over time.
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All authors Andresa Rodrigues de Campos, David Lee, Imry Kissos, Piyush Paritosh

Computation and Language

Correct Chains, Wrong Answers: Dissociating Reasoning from Output in LLM Logic

Abinav Rao, Sujan Rachuri and Nikhil Vemuri

LLMs can execute every step of chain-of-thought reasoning correctly and still produce wrong final answers. We introduce the Novel Operator Test, a benchmark that separates operator logic from operator name, enabling rigorous distinction between genuine reasoning and pattern retrieval. By evaluating Boolean operators under unfamiliar names across depths 1-10 on five models (up to 8,100 problems each), we demonstrate a reasoning-output dissociation that existing benchmarks cannot detect. At Claude Sonnet 4's depth 7, all 31 errors have verifiably correct reasoning yet wrong declared answers; 17/19 errors in mixed-operator chains exhibit the same pattern. The benchmark reveals two failure types: strategy failures at depth 2, where models attempt terse retrieval (+62pp from scaffolding), and content failures at depth 7, where models reason fully but err systematically (+8-30pp, 0/300 errors post-intervention). A Trojan operator (XOR's truth table under a novel name) confirms name alone does not gate reasoning (p >= 0.49), while Llama's novelty gap widens to 28pp at depth 8-9 with the Trojan at 92-100%, isolating genuine difficulty with novel logic from name unfamiliarity.
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Computation and Language

Red Skills or Blue Skills? A Dive Into Skills Published on ClawHub

Haichuan Hu, Ye Shang and Quanjun Zhang

Skill ecosystems have emerged as an increasingly important layer in Large Language Model (LLM) agent systems, enabling reusable task packaging, public distribution, and community-driven capability sharing. However, despite their rapid growth, the functionality, ecosystem structure, and security risks of public skill registries remain underexplored. In this paper, we present an empirical study of ClawHub, a large public registry of agent skills. We build and normalize a dataset of 26,502 skills, and conduct a systematic analysis of their language distribution, functional organization, popularity, and security signals. Our clustering results show clear cross-lingual differences: English skills are more infrastructure-oriented and centered on technical capabilities such as APIs, automation, and memory, whereas Chinese skills are more application-oriented, with clearer scenario-driven clusters such as media generation, social content production, and finance-related services. We further find that more than 30% of all crawled skills are labeled as suspicious or malicious by available platform signals, while a substantial fraction of skills still lack complete safety observability. To study early risk assessment, we formulate submission-time skill risk prediction using only information available at publication time, and construct a balanced benchmark of 11,010 skills. Across 12 classifiers, the best Logistic Regression achieves a accuracy of 72.62% and an AUROC of 78.95%, with primary documentation emerging as the most informative submission-time signal. Our findings position public skill registries as both a key enabler of agent capability reuse and a new surface for ecosystem-scale security risk.
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Computation and Language

Mathematical Reasoning Enhanced LLM for Formula Derivation: A Case Study on Fiber NLI Modellin

Yao Zhang, Yuchen Song, Xiao Luo et al. (+4 more)

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation and text synthesis, yet their potential for symbolic physical reasoning in domain-specific scientific problems remains underexplored. We present a mathematical reasoning enhanced generative AI approach for optical communication formula derivation, focusing on the fiber nonlinear interference modelling. By guiding an LLM with structured prompts, we successfully reconstructed the known closed-form ISRS GN expressions and further derived a novel approximation tailored for multi-span C and C+L band transmissions. Numerical validations show that the LLM-derived model produces central-channel GSNRs nearly identical to baseline models, with mean absolute error across all channels and spans below 0.109 dB, demonstrating both physical consistency and practical accuracy.
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All authors Yao Zhang, Yuchen Song, Xiao Luo, Shengnan Li, Xiaotian Jiang, Min Zhang, Danshi Wang

Computation and Language

HumorGen: Cognitive Synergy for Humor Generation in Large Language Models via Persona-Based Distillation

Edward Ajayi and Prasenjit Mitra

Humor generation poses a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), because their standard training objective (next-token prediction) inherently conflicts with the surprise and incongruity required for comedy. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Cognitive Synergy Framework, a methodology for generating highquality humor data inspired by psychological theories of humor. Utilizing a Mixtureof-Thought (MoT) approach, we deploy six cognitive personas (e.g., The Absurdist, The Cynic) to synthesize diverse comedic perspectives for a given prompt. This framework produces a theory-grounded dataset, which we use to fine-tune a 7B-parameter student model. We further evaluate two alignment strategies, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and an offline group-relative variant O-GRPO, finding that neither improves over SFT. However, our 7B HumorGen model variants significantly outperform larger instruction-tuned baselines and achieve top-tier open-weight performance while remaining competitive with frontier proprietary systems. These results suggest that cognitively driven data curation is more critical than alignment algorithms or model scale for humor generation.
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Computation and Language

Multi-User Large Language Model Agents

Shu Yang, Shenzhe Zhu, Hao Zhu et al. (+5 more)

Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed as assistants in planning and decision making, yet most existing systems are implicitly optimized for a single-principal interaction paradigm, in which the model is designed to satisfy the objectives of one dominant user whose instructions are treated as the sole source of authority and utility. However, as they are integrated into team workflows and organizational tools, they are increasingly required to serve multiple users simultaneously, each with distinct roles, preferences, and authority levels, leading to multi-user, multi-principal settings with unavoidable conflicts, information asymmetry, and privacy constraints. In this work, we present the first systematic study of multi-user LLM agents. We begin by formalizing multi-user interaction with LLM agents as a multi-principal decision problem, where a single agent must account for multiple users with potentially conflicting interests and associated challenges. We then introduce a unified multi-user interaction protocol and design three targeted stress-testing scenarios to evaluate current LLMs' capabilities in instruction following, privacy preservation, and coordination. Our results reveal systematic gaps: frontier LLMs frequently fail to maintain stable prioritization under conflicting user objectives, exhibit increasing privacy violations over multi-turn interactions, and suffer from efficiency bottlenecks when coordination requires iterative information gathering.
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All authors Shu Yang, Shenzhe Zhu, Hao Zhu, José Ramón Enríquez, Di Wang, Alex Pentland, Michiel A. Bakker, Jiaxin Pei

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

The Efficiency Attenuation Phenomenon: A Computational Challenge to the Language of Thought Hypothesis

Di Zhang

This paper computationally investigates whether thought requires a language-like format, as posited by the Language of Thought (LoT) hypothesis. We introduce the “AI Private Language” thought experiment: if two artificial agents develop an efficient, inscrutable communication protocol via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), and their performance declines when forced to use a human-comprehensible language, this Efficiency Attenuation Phenomenon (EAP) challenges the LoT. We formalize this in a cooperative navigation task under partial observability. Results show that agents with an emergent protocol achieve 50.5% higher efficiency than those using a pre-defined, human-like symbolic protocol, confirming the EAP. This suggests optimal collaborative cognition in these systems is not mediated by symbolic structures but is naturally coupled with sub-symbolic computations. The work bridges philosophy, cognitive science, and AI, arguing for pluralism in cognitive architectures and highlighting implications for AI ethics.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from q-bio.MN

GIP-RAG: An Evidence-Grounded Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Interpretable Gene Interaction and Pathway Impact Analysis

Fujian Jia, Jiwen Gu, Cheng Lu et al. (+5 more)

Understanding mechanistic relationships among genes and their impacts on biological pathways is essential for elucidating disease mechanisms and advancing precision medicine. Despite the availability of extensive molecular interaction and pathway data in public databases, integrating heterogeneous knowledge sources and enabling interpretable multi-step reasoning across biological networks remain challenging. We present GIP-RAG (Gene Interaction Prediction through Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a computational framework that combines biomedical knowledge graphs with large language models (LLMs) to infer and interpret gene interactions. The framework constructs a unified gene interaction knowledge graph by integrating curated data from KEGG, WikiPathways, SIGNOR, Pathway Commons, and PubChem. Given user-specified genes, a query-driven module retrieves relevant subgraphs, which are incorporated into structured prompts to guide LLM-based stepwise reasoning. This enables identification of direct and indirect regulatory relationships and generation of mechanistic explanations supported by biological evidence. Beyond pairwise interactions, GIP-RAG includes a pathway-level functional impact module that simulates propagation of gene perturbations through signaling networks and evaluates potential pathway state changes. Evaluation across diverse biological scenarios demonstrates that the framework generates consistent, interpretable, and evidence-supported insights into gene regulatory mechanisms. Overall, GIP-RAG provides a general and interpretable approach for integrating knowledge graphs with retrieval-augmented LLMs to support mechanistic reasoning in complex molecular systems.
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All authors Fujian Jia, Jiwen Gu, Cheng Lu, Dezhi Zhao, Mengjiang Huang, Yuanzhi Lu, Xin Liu, Kang Liu

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.SE

kRAIG: A Natural Language-Driven Agent for Automated DataOps Pipeline Generation

Rohan Siva, Kai Cheung, Lichi Li et al. (+1 more)

Modern machine learning systems rely on complex data engineering workflows to extract, transform, and load (ELT) data into production pipelines. However, constructing these pipelines remains time-consuming and requires substantial expertise in data infrastructure and orchestration frameworks. Recent advances in large language model (LLM) agents offer a potential path toward automating these workflows, but existing approaches struggle with under-specified user intent, unreliable tool generation, and limited guarantees of executable outputs. We introduce kRAIG, an AI agent that translates natural language specifications into production-ready Kubeflow Pipelines (KFP). To resolve ambiguity in user intent, we propose ReQuesAct (Reason, Question, Act), an interaction framework that explicitly clarifies intent prior to pipeline synthesis. The system orchestrates end-to-end data movement from diverse sources and generates task-specific transformation components through a retrieval-augmented tool synthesis process. To ensure data quality and safety, kRAIG incorporates LLM-based validation stages that verify pipeline integrity prior to execution. Our framework achieves a 3x improvement in extraction and loading success and a 25 percent increase in transformation accuracy compared to state-of-the-art agentic baselines. These improvements demonstrate that structured agent workflows with explicit intent clarification and validation significantly enhance the reliability and executability of automated data engineering pipelines.
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All authors Rohan Siva, Kai Cheung, Lichi Li, Ganesh Sundaram