Peer Revenue Returns subject to peer review

Papers

Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.

Computer Science Computation and Language

cs.CL Watch Computation and Language

Wednesday 20 May

Computation and Language

Interpretable Discriminative Text Representations via Agreement and Label Disentanglement

Tong Wang, Yiqing Xu and Leo Yang Yang

Interpretable text representations should expose coordinates that are not only predictive, but also meaningful enough for independent auditors to apply. Existing discriminative representations often use anonymous embedding directions, while concept-bottleneck and LLM-assisted methods attach natural-language names to features without ensuring that those definitions are reproducible or distinct from the target label. We propose an operational criterion for interpretable discriminative text representations: each coordinate should satisfy conceptual clarity, measured by chance-adjusted agreement between independent annotators applying the feature definition, and label disentanglement, meaning the feature should not merely paraphrase the prediction target. We instantiate this criterion in LLM-assisted Feature Discovery (LFD), an iterative method that proposes lexical and semantic features from contrastive outcome-opposed text pairs, screens candidates using cross-LLM Cohen's $\kappa$, and selects features by residual held-out predictive gain. A stylized analysis connects the $\kappa$ screen to a per-feature annotation-noise bound, formalizing agreement as a reliability check. Across ten text-classification tasks spanning seven corpora, LFD matches the predictive performance of a strong text bottleneck baseline while producing substantially clearer and less label-entangled features. Human audits with 232 raters show that LFD features achieve higher human–human and human–LLM agreement than baseline concepts, and raters consistently judge them as less label-leaking. These results suggest that agreement-tested, label-disentangled coordinates provide a practical auditability standard for interpretable text classification.
Read the full abstract

Computation and Language

DIVE: Embedding Compression via Self-Limiting Gradient Updates

Dongfang Zhao

High-dimensional language-model embeddings increase storage and search costs, while supervised compressors can overfit when relevance labels are scarce. We present DIVE (Dimensionality reduction with Implicit View Ensembles), a residual compression adapter codesigned with a self-limiting hinge loss, geometry distillation, and head-wise NT-Xent over implicit coordinate views. The hinge stops updating satisfied ranking constraints, while the dense objectives stabilize the compressed representation; only the first head is retained at inference. Under query-disjoint evaluation with two LLM2Vec backbones, five BEIR benchmarks, 128d and 256d outputs, and six baselines, DIVE is the strongest adapter on all five primary benchmarks. It also outperforms PCA and an autoencoder in comparisons against unsupervised compressors.
Read the full abstract

Computation and Language

Beyond Semantic Similarity: A Two-Phase Non-Parametric Retrieval Workflow for Corporate Credit Underwriting

Linus Ng Junjia, Ezekiel Tee Kongquan, Kelvin Heng et al. (+2 more)

Corporate credit underwriting requires analysts to extract actionable evidence from long, heterogeneous financial documents spanning hundreds of pages and multiple languages. Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines optimize for semantic similarity, which frequently surfaces passages that are topically related but lack decision utility, a problem we term the similarity-utility gap. We propose a two-phase non-parametric retrieval architecture that separates high-recall candidate retrieval from high-precision utility ranking. The first phase combines lexical and dense multilingual retrieval to construct a broad candidate pool. The second phase applies an adaptive retrieval controller that filters candidates using query intent and document structure signals, followed by an LLM-as-a-Judge utility scoring mechanism that ranks passages by analytical usefulness rather than semantic proximity. A context-aware extraction module preserves structural fidelity across narrative text and complex financial tables. The system is deployed entirely on-premise to satisfy enterprise data governance requirements. Evaluated on a multilingual corpus of proprietary financial documents with analyst-curated relevance labels, the system significantly outperforms naive retrieval baselines. In production deployment across more than 800 credit analysts, document review time was reduced from several hours to approximately three minutes, demonstrating the practical value of utility-aware RAG architectures for document-intensive decision-support workflows.
Read the full abstract

All authors Linus Ng Junjia, Ezekiel Tee Kongquan, Kelvin Heng, Kenneth Zhu Ke, Zhao Jing Yuan

Computation and Language

On the limits and opportunities of AI reviewers: Reviewing the reviews of Nature-family papers with 45 expert scientists

Seungone Kim, Dongkeun Yoon, Kiril Gashteovski et al. (+55 more)

With the advancement of AI capabilities, AI reviewers are beginning to be deployed in scientific peer review, yet their capability and credibility remain in question: many scientists simply view them as probabilistic systems without the expertise to evaluate research, while other researchers are more optimistic about their readiness without concrete evidence. Understanding what AI reviewers do well, where they fall short, and what challenges remain is essential. However, existing evaluations of AI reviewers have focused on whether their verdicts match human verdicts (e.g., score alignment, acceptance prediction), which is insufficient to characterize their capabilities and limits. In this paper, we close this gap through a large-scale expert annotation study, in which 45 domain scientists in Physical, Biological, and Health Sciences spent 469 hours rating 2,960 individual criticisms (each targeting one specific aspect of a paper) from human-written and AI-generated reviews of 82 Nature-family papers on correctness, significance, and sufficiency of evidence. On a composite of all three dimensions, a reviewing agent powered by GPT-5.2 scores above each paper's top-rated human reviewer (60.0% vs. 48.2%, p = 0.009), while all three AI reviewers (including Gemini 3.0 Pro and Claude Opus 4.5) exceed the lowest-rated human across every dimension. AI reviewers' accurate criticisms are also more often rated significant and well-evidenced, and surface a distinct 26% of issues no human raises. However, AI reviewers overlap far more than humans do (21% vs. 3% for cross-reviewer pairs), and exhibit 16 recurring weaknesses humans do not share, such as limited subfield knowledge, lack of long context management over multiple files, and overly critical stance on minor issues. Overall, our results position current AI reviewers as complements to, not substitutes for, human reviewers.
Read the full abstract

All authors Seungone Kim, Dongkeun Yoon, Kiril Gashteovski, Juyoung Suk, Jinheon Baek, Pranjal Aggarwal, Ian Wu, Viktor Zaverkin, Spase Petkoski, Daniel R. Schrider, Ilija Dukovski, Francesco Santini, Biljana Mitreska, Yong Jeong, Kyeongha Kwon, Young Min Sim, Dragana Manasova, Arthur Porto, Biljana Mojsoska, Makoto Takamoto, Marko Shuntov, Ruoqi Liu, Hyunjoo Jenny Lee, Niyazi Ulas Dinç, Yehhyun Jo, Sunkyu Han, Chungwoo Lee, Huishan Li, Esther H. R. Tsai, Ergun Simsek, Khushboo Shafi, Yeonseung Chung, Jihye Park, Aleksandar Shulevski, Henrik Christiansen, Yoosang Son, Elly Knight, Amanda Montoya, Jeongyoun Ahn, Christian Langkammer, Heera Moon, Changwon Yoon, Nikola Stikov, Mooseok Jang, Edward Choi, Junhan Kim, Yeon Sik Jung, Woo Youn Kim, Jae Kyoung Kim, Ishraq Md Anjum, Hyun Uk Kim, Drew Bridges, Carolin Lawrence, Xiang Yue, Alice Oh, Akari Asai, Sean Welleck, Graham Neubig

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

AVSD: Adaptive-View Self-Distillation by Balancing Consensus and Teacher-Specific Privileged Signals

Duy Nguyen, Hanqi Xiao, Archiki Prasad et al. (+7 more)

Self-distillation enables language models to learn on-policy from their own trajectories by using the same model as both student and teacher, with the teacher being conditioned on privileged information unavailable to the student. Such information can come in different types or views, such as solutions, demonstrations, feedback, or final answers. This setup provides dense token-level feedback without relying on a separate external model, but creates a fundamental asymmetry: the teacher may rely on view-specific information that the student cannot access at inference time. Moreover, the best type of privileged information is often task-dependent, making it difficult to choose a single teacher view. In this work, we address both these challenges jointly by introducing AVSD (Adaptive-View Self-Distillation), a novel method of self-distillation with multiple privileged-information views, which reconstructs token-level supervision by separating stable cross-view consensus from view-specific residual signals. AVSD identifies the consensus signal shared across views, which provides a reliable update direction, and then selectively adds the view-specific residual signal to adjust the update magnitude when it both aligns with the consensus direction and remains proportionate to the consensus signal. Experiments on math competition benchmarks (AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25) show that AVSD consistently outperforms both single-view self-distillation baselines and GRPO, achieving average Avg@8 gains of 3.1% and 2.2% over the strongest baselines on Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-4B, respectively. Moreover, on code-generation benchmarks (Codeforces, LiveCodeBench v6) using Qwen3-8B, AVSD outperforms the single-view self-distillation baseline by 2.4% on average.
Read the full abstract

All authors Duy Nguyen, Hanqi Xiao, Archiki Prasad, Zaid Khan, Anirban Das, Austin Zhang, Sambit Sahu, Hyunji Lee, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal

Computation and Language

Divide-Prompt-Refine: a Training-Free, Structure-Aware Framework for Biomedical Abstract Generation

Sylvey Lin, Joe Menke, Shufan Ming et al. (+3 more)

Biomedical abstracts play a critical role in downstream NLP applications, such as information retrieval, biocuration, and biomedical knowledge discovery. However, a non-trivial number of biomedical articles do not have abstracts, diminishing the utility of these articles for downstream tasks. We propose DPR-BAG (Divide, Prompt, and Refine for Biomedical Abstract Generation), a training-free, zero-shot framework that generates coherent and factually grounded abstracts for biomedical articles with full text but no abstract. DPR-BAG decomposes full-text documents into structured rhetorical facets following the Background-Objective-Methods-Results-Conclusions (BOMRC) schema, performs parallel LLM-based summarization for each facet, and applies a final refinement stage to restore global discourse coherence. On PMC-MAD, a distribution-aligned dataset of 46,309 biomedical articles, DPR-BAG improves abstractive novelty over strong extractive and fine-tuned baselines, while maintaining factual consistency. Our ablation study reveals a counterintuitive finding: increasing prompt complexity or explicitly injecting entity-level guidance can degrade factual alignment, highlighting the importance of controlled prompting strategies. These findings underscore the potential of training-free, structure-aware frameworks for scalable biomedical abstract generation in low-resource settings. Our data and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/pmc-mad/PMC-MAD and https://github.com/ScienceNLP-Lab/MultiTagger-v2/tree/main/DPR-BAG.
Read the full abstract

All authors Sylvey Lin, Joe Menke, Shufan Ming, Dongin Nam, Neil Smalheiser, Halil Kilicoglu

Computation and Language

Retrieval-Augmented Long-Context Translation for Cultural Image Captioning: Gators submission for AmericasNLP 2026 shared task

Aashish Dhawan, Christopher Driggers-Ellis, Dzmitry Kasinets et al. (+2 more)

We present the University of Florida Gators submission to the AmericasNLP 2026 shared task on cultural image captioning for Indigenous languages. Our two-stage pipeline generates a Spanish intermediate caption with Qwen2.5-VL, then produces the target-language caption using retrieval-augmented many-shot prompting with Gemini 2.5 Flash. We achieve 164.1%, 131.7%, and 122.6% improvements over the shared task baseline for Bribri, Guaraní, and Orizaba Nahuatl captioning, respectively, in our dev set evaluation and maintain >150% improvements for the Bribri and Orizaba Nahuatl languages in the test set evaluation. We find retrieval is highly language-dependent, beneficial only for large, in-domain corpora, and that synthetic data augmentation accounts for around 28 chrF++ of the dev set Guaraní performance gain. Our submission is the overall winner of the shared task, placing second out of five finalist submissions in human evaluations of target-language captions.
Read the full abstract

All authors Aashish Dhawan, Christopher Driggers-Ellis, Dzmitry Kasinets, Daisy Zhe Wang, Christan Grant

Computation and Language

Auto-Dreamer: Learning Offline Memory Consolidation for Language Agents

Chongrui Ye, Yuxiang Liu, Yu Wang et al. (+5 more)

Language agents increasingly operate over streams of related tasks, yet existing memory systems struggle to convert accumulated experience into reusable knowledge. Retrieval-augmented and structured memory methods record per-session observations effectively, but often couple acquisition and consolidation into a single online process, leaving the agent without a global view across sessions to discover recurring patterns, abstract shared procedures, or prune redundant entries. Inspired by complementary learning systems theory, we propose Auto-Dreamer, a learned offline consolidator for language-agent memory. Auto-Dreamer decouples fast per-session memory acquisition from slow cross-session consolidation. Given a selected working region of a typed memory bank, the consolidator treats the region as read-only evidence, performs bounded tool-use to inspect entries and provenance-linked source trajectories, and synthesizes a fresh compact replacement set that abstracts across sessions and supersedes the original region. We train Auto-Dreamer via GRPO, using end-to-end agent performance as the reward signal to learn how to consolidate memories acquired through fast online experience. Trained on ScienceWorld trajectories alone, Auto-Dreamer outperforms fixed, RL-trained, and prompted memory baselines on ScienceWorld by 7 points while using an active memory bank 12$\times$ smaller than the strongest baseline, and continues to lead on held-out ALFWorld and WebArena without retraining – using 6$\times$ less memory than the strongest baseline on ALFWorld.
Read the full abstract

All authors Chongrui Ye, Yuxiang Liu, Yu Wang, Haofei Yu, Yining Zhao, Ge Liu, Julian McAuley, Jiaxuan You

Computation and Language

HRM-Text: Efficient Pretraining Beyond Scaling

Guan Wang, Changling Liu, Chenyu Wang et al. (+6 more)

The current pretraining paradigm for large language models relies on massive compute and internet-scale raw text, creating a significant barrier to foundational research. In contrast, biological systems demonstrate highly sample-efficient learning through multi-timescale processing, such as the functional organization of the frontoparietal loop. Taking this as inspiration, we introduce HRM-Text, which replaces standard Transformers with a Hierarchical Recurrent Model (HRM) that decouples computation into slow-evolving strategic and fast-evolving execution layers. To stabilize this deep recurrence for language modeling, we introduce MagicNorm and warmup deep credit assignment. Furthermore, instead of standard raw-text pretraining, we train exclusively on instruction-response pairs using a task-completion objective and PrefixLM masking. Serving as an empirical existence proof of efficient pretraining, a 1B-parameter HRM-Text model trained from scratch on only 40 billion unique tokens and $1,500 budget achieves 60.7% on MMLU, 81.9% on ARC-C, 82.2% on DROP, 84.5% on GSM8K, and 56.2% on MATH. Despite utilizing roughly 100-900x fewer training tokens and 96-432x less estimated compute than standard baselines, HRM-Text performs competitively with 2-7B parameter open models. These results demonstrate that co-designing architectures and objectives can radically reduce the compute-to-performance ratio, making pretraining from scratch accessible to the broader research community.
Read the full abstract

All authors Guan Wang, Changling Liu, Chenyu Wang, Cai Zhou, Yuhao Sun, Yifei Wu, Shuai Zhen, Luca Scimeca, Yasin Abbasi Yadkori

Computation and Language

Self-Training Doesn't Flatten Language – It Restructures It: Surface Markers Amplify While Deep Syntax Dies

Ming Liu

Successive self-training on a language model's own outputs is widely characterized as a process of flattening: diversity drops, distributions narrow, and the text becomes "more like itself." We provide evidence that this characterization is incomplete. Across eleven generations of self-training on five models (GPT-2 124M, Pythia-410M, Pythia-1.4B, OPT-1.3B, Pythia-2.8B), language is not flattened uniformly – it is restructured. Surface markers (discourse connectives, hedges, em-dashes) rise, while mid- and deep-syntactic structures (questions, parentheticals, passives, subjunctives) collapse. We formalize this asymmetric collapse as the Structural Depth Hypothesis (SDH): the per-generation decay rate of a linguistic feature is predicted primarily by its structural depth – the number of nested syntactic dependencies it requires – and only secondarily by its generation-zero output frequency. Pooling 17-feature panels from five models spanning three architecture families (N=85), the pooled Spearman correlation is rho=0.540 (p < 10^{-6}; cluster-bootstrap 95% CI [0.434, 0.634]), while frequency is a substantially weaker predictor (rho=0.225). A matched human-text fine-tuning control yields rho=0.039 (p=0.88), confirming the gradient is self-training-specific. We further document a Superficial Complexity Paradox: aggregate complexity proxies (dep-tree depth, TTR, word length) all rise as the underlying clause structure dies, with direct implications for training-data curation and LLM-text detection.
Read the full abstract

Computation and Language

Do No Harm? Hallucination and Actor-Level Abuse in Web-Deployed Medical Large Language Models

Sunday Oyinlola Ogundoyin, Muhammad Ikram and Rahat Masood

Medical large language models (LLMs), including custom medical GPTs (MedGPTs) and open-source models, are increasingly deployed on web platforms to provide clinical guidance. However, they pose risks of hallucination, policy noncompliance, and unsafe design. We conduct a large-scale assessment of 6,233 MedGPTs, evaluating a stratified sample of 1,500, together with 10 open-source LLMs. We introduce two frameworks: MedGPT-HEval for hallucination detection and an LLM-based pipeline for assessing policy violations and developer intent. Our results show that 25-30% of MedGPTs exhibit low factual accuracy, with bottom- and middle-tier models at highest risk; 33.6-54.3% violate operational thresholds, and 57.06% of Action-enabled models lack adequate privacy disclosures. Compared with open-source models, MedGPTs achieve higher factual accuracy and semantic alignment, though open-source models are more stable. These results reveal systemic gaps in hallucination and compliance, highlighting the need for multi-metric evaluation and stronger safeguards. We release HAA-MedGPT, a structured dataset that supports future research on the safety of web-facing medical LLMs.
Read the full abstract

Computation and Language

Direct Translation between Sign Languages

Zetian Wu, Bowen Xie, Wuyang Meng et al. (+3 more)

Sign language translation has made substantial progress between sign and spoken languages, while translation across sign languages remains less explored. Translating directly between sign languages could support communication across signing communities without requiring a shared written language. A cascade of sign-to-text, spoken-language translation, and text-to-sign models offers one route, but can propagate intermediate errors and requires three sequential translation stages. We develop direct sign-to-sign translation, whose training is limited by the scarcity of parallel signing across languages. To address this obstacle, we adapt back-translation to construct cross-lingual pairs from existing text-sign corpora: the source signing is synthesized through a text bridge, while the target remains the gold sign from the original corpus. Using these pairs, we jointly train a single Qwen3-based model for text-to-sign and sign-to-sign translation. The latter generates target signing directly from source signing without an intermediate transcript. Experiments cover six directions among American, Chinese, and German Sign Language, using back-translation pairs and existing cross-lingual sign pairs. On synthetic sources, direct translation improves BLEU-4 in five directions and lowers overall motion error relative to the cascade. On existing test pairs, it improves BLEU-4 over the cascade by 1.91-3.87 points across all six directions.
Read the full abstract

All authors Zetian Wu, Bowen Xie, Wuyang Meng, Milan Gautam, Stefan Lee, Liang Huang

Tuesday 19 May

Computation and Language

What the Abstention Option Measures: Refusal Loss, Sampling Churn, and Option Capture in Distilled Small Language Models

Plawan Kumar Rath

Small instruction-tuned language models reach phones, cars, and offline assistants through knowledge distillation, and whether a distilled model is fair enough to ship is often decided by a multiple-choice bias score on a benchmark that offers an abstention option. Three mechanisms move behavior around the abstention option: refusal loss, where the student stops declining on items its pre-distillation reference declined; sampling churn, the same change observed between two runs of the reference itself; and option capture, where the student takes an abstention option whenever one is offered. Injecting each mechanism into a reference's own records shows that aggregate scores see only outright loss, per-item scores see churn and remapping, and only conditioning on committed answers stops moved refusal mass from reading as fairness. Resampling a reference across inference seeds already turns 10% to 27% of its refusals into stereotype answers, so a per-item refusal metric reported without that floor overstates damage. Option capture is what corpus repair teaches: students trained with refusal exemplars take an offered abstention option on up to 95% of science questions where abstention is never correct, and the habit carries to three further benchmarks. Free-form evaluation shows that the refusals multiple choice loses are not where free-form stereotyping occurs. We distill these findings into a per-condition report anchored to the reference, with measured floors and ceilings, and apply it to four student families against a fine-tuning control: distillation keeps fewer of the reference's refusals than fine-tuning on the same prompts where the reference's refusals are reliable, by a few points, while the common metrics report improvements whenever refusal mass moves. A bias score quoted for a distilled model should say which of these it reports.
Read the full abstract

Computation and Language

Learning Stateful Predictive Knowledge From Experience

Yan Song, Xidong Feng, Bo Liu et al. (+7 more)

As large language model (LLM) agents increasingly learn from experience, they primarily rely on trajectory-level reflection to extract insights. Viewed through the lens of predictive knowledge, we argue that this approach operates on episodic hindsight rather than predictive foresight, yielding brittle, path-dependent heuristics. To address this, we propose Stateful Knowledge Learning (SKL). SKL shifts the agent's focus from trajectory-level summarization to maintaining Stateful Knowledge: explicit, declarative predictive assessments anchored to state. We first demonstrate a motivating example showing how stateful knowledge provides granularity, enhances generalization, and enables knowledge bootstrapping. To further scale up the idea, we introduce two algorithms via self-distillation (SKL-SD) and reinforcement learning (SKL-RL), training agents to autonomously extract state-grounded predictive knowledge from experience and learn to leverage it for policy making. Experiments on interactive environments (WebShop, ScienceWorld) and a complex reasoning task (ChessPuzzles) demonstrate that equipping models with the inherent ability to learn stateful predictive knowledge significantly outpaces current reflection-based training paradigms.
Read the full abstract

All authors Yan Song, Xidong Feng, Bo Liu, Xinyu Cui, Haotian Fu, Zichen Liu, Mengyue Yang, Cheng Deng, Jian Zhao, Jun Wang

Computation and Language

ZeroR@CHiPSAL 2026: Two-Stage Vision-Language Adaptation with Contrastive Learning for Nepali Meme Classification

Nitiz Khanal

This paper presents our system for the CHiPSAL 2026 shared task on multimodal hate speech and sentiment detection in Nepali memes. We address both subtasks: binary hate speech classification and three-class sentiment analysis. Our approach adapts the Robust Adaptation of Hateful Meme Detection (RA-HMD) framework using Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, a state-of-the-art vision-language model with native Devanagari support. We employ a two-stage training pipeline: (1) LoRA fine-tuning with an MLP projection head for generative classification, and (2) contrastive backbone fine-tuning with supervised InfoNCE loss. We handle class imbalance through minority oversampling, image augmentation, and focal loss. At inference, we ensemble Stage 1 token probabilities with Stage 2 classifier scores using validation-tuned weights. Our end-to-end approach eliminates error propagation from separate OCR and translation pipelines by leveraging the model's native Devanagari understanding. Our system achieved 2nd place on hate speech detection (F1: 0.797) and 4th place on sentiment analysis (F1: 0.518). We provide detailed ablations, error analysis, and insights into adapting large vision-language models for low-resource South Asian languages.
Read the full abstract

Computation and Language

Chain-of-Models: Cross-Model Auditing for Bias-Robust LLM Judges

Qian Wang, Zhanzhi Lou, Zhenheng Tang et al. (+2 more)

LLMs increasingly serve as automated judges, but their judgments remain vulnerable to cognitive biases. Existing mitigations mostly rely on prompt-driven debiasing, which is brittle across bias types, or human evaluation, which does not scale. We study Chain-of-Models (CoM), an automated audit pipeline in which a second model inspects the first model's reasoning trace before producing the final judgment. The key design question is whether the auditor should be the same model, a same-family model, or a different-family model. Across 9 models from 6 families, 4 cognitive biases, and 4 factual datasets, we find that auditor identity matters in two ways. First, standalone bias resistance does not predict audit effectiveness: Kimi-K2.5 is the strongest standalone model on several biases, yet is a weak auditor for Qwen2.5-72B's biased traces. Second, the best auditor is bias-specific: GPT-4o is strongest on bandwagon, authority, and distraction, while GLM-5 is strongest on sycophancy. We operationalize these findings with a per-bias auditor selection rule that, given the bias type, scores candidates along functional diversity, per-bias standalone resistance, and calibrated audit effectiveness. Under a calibration/test split, the selector reaches the highest accuracy across the four biased slices ($0.884$ vs.\ $0.824$ for the strongest single fixed auditor and $0.805$ for the no-audit baseline). We release data, configurations, and an LLM-agent skill at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/chain-of-models-B585 .
Read the full abstract

All authors Qian Wang, Zhanzhi Lou, Zhenheng Tang, Nuo Chen, Bingsheng He

Computation and Language

Imbalanced Data Clustering via Targeted Data Augmentation Using GMM and LLM

Noor Khalal, Abdallah Alaa-Eddine Djamai, Imed Keraghel et al. (+1 more)

In Natural Language Processing (NLP), dealing with underrepresented topics is challenging, especially in unsupervised tasks where clustering might not adequately capture minority topics. To tackle this challenge, our paper presents a novel unsupervised data augmentation method that integrates Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to their flexibility and robustness, GMMs can detect clusters corresponding to underrepresented areas in the data, while LLMs create synthetic documents to enrich these clusters and improve their representation. Experiments on various imbalanced text datasets demonstrate that our approach preserves clustering performance in all cases and often enhances cluster interpretability, offering a robust and scalable solution for improving data representation in unsupervised NLP tasks.
Read the full abstract

All authors Noor Khalal, Abdallah Alaa-Eddine Djamai, Imed Keraghel, Mohamed Nadif

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

DataPrep-Bench: Benchmarking LLMs as Training Data Preparators

Hao Liang, Qifeng Cai, Yibo Lin et al. (+11 more)

The quality of training data fundamentally determines the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet no unified benchmark exists to measure how well LLMs, agents, and data-centric workflows actually prepare training data end to end. We view LLM-driven data preparation as comprising two complementary capabilities: data construction, which transforms raw sources into supervised training data, and data quality evaluation, which predicts the training value of candidate datasets before downstream training; throughout, "quality" refers to downstream training utility rather than surface-level textual properties. We introduce DataPrep-Bench, the first unified benchmark that jointly evaluates both capabilities under a shared downstream-grounded protocol over six domains and multiple base models. For data construction, methods consume identical raw sources and are scored by fine-tuning a base model on their outputs jointly with Dolly-15k; alongside this track we release Data-Construction-Skill, a skill-guided agent that lifts the Dolly-only baseline by nearly 20 points absolute on Llama-3.1-8B Finance and is competitive with the strongest agent- and DataFlow-based methods in knowledge-extraction-dense domains. For data quality evaluation, scoring functions are scored by Pearson correlation with downstream performance on a shared candidate pool; we release the Distributional Alignment Score (DAS), a distribution-based evaluator that uses MMD between a candidate dataset and a domain proxy. DAS attains the strongest cross-model correlation in four of six domains and is the only metric clearing r > 0.70 simultaneously in Math, Science, and Medical, outperforming existing quality-, diversity-, and heuristic-based evaluators. DataPrep-Bench provides a unified, downstream-grounded framework for measuring progress on both capabilities as co-equal targets of LLM-driven data preparation.
Read the full abstract

All authors Hao Liang, Qifeng Cai, Yibo Lin, Jianzhuo Du, Qifeng Xia, Sizhe Qiu, Linzhuang Sun, Meiyi Qiang, Zhaoyang Han, Xiaochen Ma, Bohan Zeng, Ruichuan An, Conghui He, Wentao Zhang

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

MUX: Continuous Reasoning via Multiplexed Tokens

Ayhan Suleymanzade, Halil Alperen Gozeten, Michael Bronstein et al. (+2 more)

Language models solve complex problems by articulating intermediate reasoning steps in natural language. While effective, this process is computationally bottlenecked: each reasoning step conveys only a single subword, and many are spent expressing a thought instead of carrying out computation. We propose MUX, a simple method for high-bandwidth and compact reasoning based on distillation of discrete reasoning into continuous multiplexed tokens in a latent space. Here, each latent token is trained to represent a weighted linear superposition (multiplexing) of a span of discrete reasoning subwords, where this superposition is lossless by construction and the span can be fully recovered (demultiplexing). We prove that simple position-dependent weightings, such as suitable geometric decay, support lossless multiplexing, which in turn prevents shortcut behaviors caused by latent collapse. We further show that multiplexed reasoning can perform parallel exploration in problems that require search. Across 32 evaluation settings spanning four language models, MUX outperforms strong latent reasoning baselines. Ablation and probing analyses further show that the learned latent tokens encode faithful and interpretable reasoning. Our results suggest that lossless superposition as local learning targets constitutes a sufficient condition for achieving strong and efficient latent continuous reasoning.
Read the full abstract

All authors Ayhan Suleymanzade, Halil Alperen Gozeten, Michael Bronstein, İsmail İlkan Ceylan, Jinwoo Kim

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.IR

$M^3 QuestionIng$: Multi-modal Multi-span Medical Question Answering

Anisha Saha, Vaibhav Rathore, Abhisek Tiwari et al. (+3 more)

The growing adoption of AI in healthcare, particularly in preventive care, highlights the critical need for accessibility and precision in Medical Question Answering (MedQA). In recent years, significant efforts have been made to develop multi-span medical question-answering systems, where the answer to a query may span multiple sections or paragraphs of a source document. However, existing systems fall short of aligning with real-world scenarios, where source documents often include both textual and visual content, requiring answers to incorporate images for better comprehension. To address this gap, we propose $M^3QAFrame$, a multi-modal, multi-span medical question-answering framework that leverages visual cues to enhance the generation of comprehensive answers drawn from diverse textual and visual spans. The model takes the context, query, and images as input and outputs an answer containing both textual answers and relevant images. The text and image embeddings are processed using a transformer-based architecture to determine the sentence and image relevance. We curate a multi-modal, multi-span medical question-answering ($M^3 QuestionIng$) dataset containing queries, medical contexts, associated medical images, and extractive answers. Additionally, each query-answer pair is labeled with user intent and query type to enhance query and context comprehension. Extensive experiments show that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods across various evaluation metrics.
Read the full abstract

All authors Anisha Saha, Vaibhav Rathore, Abhisek Tiwari, Akash Ghosh, Sai Ruthvik Edara, Sriparna Saha

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.CY

Occupational Prompting Reveals Cultural Bias in Large Language Models

Maksim E. Eren, Andrea Brennen, Ryan C. Barron et al. (+1 more)

Social roles shape expectations, priorities, and judgments, yet it remains unclear how large language models (LLMs) associate occupational identities with broader cultural value patterns. Prior work used nationality-based cultural prompting to study how LLM responses to value-survey questions align with human cultural benchmarks. In this paper, we extend that framework by replacing cultural prompting with occupational prompting to examine how professional-role cues influence value-survey responses in open-weight LLMs. Using a survey-grounded evaluation pipeline based on questions from the Integrated Values Surveys, we project model responses into the two-dimensional Inglehart–Welzel cultural space. We prompt open-weight LLMs to answer questions under occupational identities such as accountant, teacher, engineer, and nurse, and then analyze how these occupation-conditioned responses are positioned on the cultural map. Our results show that when open-weight LLMs are prompted with occupations rather than national identities, their responses remain within a broadly Western-leaning region of the cultural map. However, different occupations introduce shifts within this region, producing distinct occupational skews. This indicates that occupational prompts are not treated as neutral role labels, but instead elicit structured value patterns. These findings extend survey-based evaluation of cultural bias beyond nationality-based prompting and provide a framework for studying how occupational personas shape value expression in LLMs.
Read the full abstract

All authors Maksim E. Eren, Andrea Brennen, Ryan C. Barron, Eric Michalak

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.IR

Beyond Text and Tables: Vision-Language Model Integration in ComProScanner for Extracting Materials Data from Scientific Figures with High Accuracy

Aritra Roy, Enrico Grisan, Chiara Gattinoni et al. (+1 more)

Automated extraction of materials composition-property data from scientific literature has advanced considerably with the development of large language model-based pipelines; however, existing frameworks remain limited to textual and tabular content, overlooking the substantial proportion of quantitative property data reported exclusively in scientific figures. Here, we extend ComProScanner, a fully end-to-end multi-agent framework for automated composition-property database construction, with a native vision-language model (VLM) based figure extraction capability. The extension introduces a FigureExtractor utility for caption-keyword-based figure filtering across all supported publishers, and a GraphExtractorTool agent that passes extracted figures to a configurable VLM to recover composition-property pairs from scientific charts and plots. Four VLMs are selected for evaluation on the basis of the LMArena Diagram leaderboard with an input cost criterion of less than \$1.50 per million tokens. Benchmarking on 50 piezoelectric ceramic articles from the established $d_{33}$ test corpus demonstrates that Gemini-3-Flash-Preview achieves the highest performance with a composition accuracy of 0.97 and a normalised F1 score of 0.97, whilst remaining the most cost-effective model among the four evaluated. We additionally introduce a range-based value error threshold parameter into the evaluation framework, providing a more physically meaningful assessment of numeric property values extracted from figures than exact value matching. These contributions establish VLM-integrated ComProScanner as the first materials-specific, fully automated, multimodal literature mining platform capable of extracting structured composition-property data from text, tables, and figures within a single unified pipeline.
Read the full abstract

All authors Aritra Roy, Enrico Grisan, Chiara Gattinoni, John Buckeridge

Computation and Language

Graph-Augmented Retrieval for Cross-Entity Financial Sentiment Analysis: A Comparative Study

Rajan Bastakoti, Sagar Bhetwal, Nirajan Acharya et al. (+1 more)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become foundational for grounding large language models in domain-specific corpora, yet conventional vector-based RAG systems are fundamentally limited in their ability to capture the structured, multi-entity relationships that underpin financial market analysis. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative study of a novel two-hop Graph-RAG architecture versus a standard vector-only baseline for cross-entity financial sentiment analysis. Our system constructs a sentiment-weighted knowledge graph of 59 equity entities from 255 news articles covering 10 major technology stocks, then augments dense retrieval with intensity-filtered graph traversal over INFLUENCES edges to surface relational evidence inaccessible to vector search alone. We evaluate both architectures on 100 grounded queries (30 Direct, 70 Relational) using semantic similarity, entity recall, RAGAS metrics, latency benchmarks, and ablation studies. Graph-RAG achieves a statistically significant improvement in entity recall (+6.4%, p < 0.001, Wilcoxon signed-rank) and delivers substantially more relevant answers for complex multi-entity queries (+11.7% Answer Relevancy), with gains concentrating in relational question types (+16.1%). Critically, these improvements come at no measurable cost to answer quality (delta = +0.001 semantic similarity, Cohen's d = 0.078), with a modest 22.6% increase in mean latency offset by an 80% reduction in latency variance. An ablation study on the graph traversal intensity threshold reveals an inverted-U relationship with answer quality, identifying tau = 0.5 as optimal over the production default of tau = 0.7. These findings characterize a precision-for-coverage trade-off inherent to graph-augmented retrieval and provide actionable architectural guidance for practitioners building RAG systems for multi-entity financial analysis.
Read the full abstract

All authors Rajan Bastakoti, Sagar Bhetwal, Nirajan Acharya, Gaurav Kumar Gupta

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

LC-ERD: Mining Latent Logic for Self-Evolving Reasoning via Consistency-Regulated Reward Decomposition

Yanyu Chen, Jiyue Jiang, Dianzhi Yu et al. (+8 more)

The evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning is bottlenecked by the scarcity of high-quality process data. While self-alignment via endogenous rewards offers a solution, mining valid supervision faces three challenges: (1) Label Noise via Mimetic Bias, where rewards prioritize statistical likelihood over logical truth, creating a "correctness illusion" that masks compounding errors; (2) Coarse-Grained Supervision, where sparse global outcomes (e.g., in GRPO) fail to provide granular guidance, treating reasoning chains as monolithic; and (3) Distributional Collapse, where signals fail to generalize without amplifying pre-training biases. To address these, we introduce LC-ERD (Logic-Consistent Endogenous Reward Decomposition), a framework framing self-alignment as latent structure mining. We derive a Variational Logic Potential by aggregating consensus from the model's Latent Logic Expertise (LLE) to denoise the reasoning manifold, and introduce a Multi-Agent Value Decomposition protocol based on the IGM principle to quantify individual step utility. Experiments show LC-ERD delivers a robust self-evolution path, uncovering trade-offs between logic consistency and accuracy while identifying high-value reasoning patterns missed by standard rewards. Our code is available at https://github.com/LC-ERD-repo/LC-ERD.
Read the full abstract

All authors Yanyu Chen, Jiyue Jiang, Dianzhi Yu, Zheng Wu, Jiahong Liu, Jiaming Han, Xiao Guo, Jinhu Qi, Yu Li, Yifei Zhang, Irwin King

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.GT

PrefBench: Evaluating Zero-Shot LLM Agents in Hidden-Preference Personalized Pricing Negotiations

Yingjie Lei

Personalized pricing negotiations are a challenging testbed for LLM agents because successful interaction does not guarantee profitable decision making. A seller may produce valid actions and close many deals while still pricing poorly when buyer willingness to pay and bargaining traits remain hidden. This paper presents PrefBench, a simulator-based benchmark for hidden-preference personalized pricing negotiations. Each episode pairs a simulated buyer with a fixed vehicle-customization bundle; the seller observes public persona descriptors, bundle information, and negotiation history, while latent buyer variables govern valuation, patience, counter-offer behavior, and walkaway decisions. PrefBench evaluates this setting through an LLM-facing state-summary protocol that constrains agents to return strict JSON actions under a fixed hidden-information boundary. We evaluate zero-shot LLM sellers against heuristic references over 7,500 episodes. The tested LLMs follow the protocol reliably and achieve deal rates above 0.99, but their seller-profit outcomes remain weak: the best LLM average profit is only slightly above the random baseline and far below a simple concession heuristic under the same episode stream. These results show that structured action compliance and agreement-seeking behavior can coexist with weak profit-sensitive bargaining. PrefBench provides a controlled benchmark for evaluating pricing-agent behavior under hidden buyer preferences.
Read the full abstract

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.MA

Multi-agent Collaboration with State Management

Mengyang Liu, Taozhi Chen, Zhenhua Xu et al. (+2 more)

Recent advances in multi-agent systems have shown great potential for solving complex tasks. However, when multiple agents edit a shared codebase concurrently, their changes can silently conflict and inconsistent views lead to integration failures. Existing multi-agent systems address this through workspace isolation (e.g., one git worktree per agent), but this defers conflict resolution to a post-hoc merge step where recovery is expensive. In this paper, we propose STORM, i.e., STate-ORiented Management for multi-agent collaboration. Specifically, STORM manages agent states by mediating their interactions with the shared workspace, ensuring that each agent operates on a consistent view of the codebase and that conflicting edits are detected and resolved at write time. We evaluate STORM on Commit0 and PaperBench across multiple LLMs. STORM outperforms the git-worktree-based multi-agent baseline by +18.7 on Commit0-Lite and +1.4 on PaperBench, while achieving comparable or better cost efficiency. Combined with single-agent runs, STORM reaches highest scores of 87.6 and 78.2 on the two benchmarks respectively, suggesting that explicit state management is a more effective foundation for multi-agent collaboration than workspace isolation. STORM can also be plugged into any multi-agent system seamlessly.
Read the full abstract

All authors Mengyang Liu, Taozhi Chen, Zhenhua Xu, Xue Jiang, Yihong Dong

Computation and Language

When Irregularity Helps: A Subclass Analysis of Inductive Bias in Neural Morphology

Wen Zhang

Neural morphological generation systems often achieve high aggregate accuracy on benchmark datasets, yet such performance can conceal systematic errors concentrated in rare morphological subclasses. We examine Japanese past-tense verb inflection and show that a very small, structurally specific irregular subtype (<1% of data) accounts for a disproportionate share of model errors. Controlled ablation experiments demonstrate that removing this subtype yields larger improvements in generalization than removing all irregular verbs, indicating that not all irregularity contributes equally to model instability. These findings suggest that error concentration is driven by the interaction between extreme low-frequency morphological patterns and specific morphophonological processes, particularly gemination. We argue that morphological evaluation should incorporate finer-grained subclass analysis beyond standard conjugation categories.
Read the full abstract

Computation and Language

What Do Biomedical NER and Entity Linking Benchmarks Measure? A Corpus-Centric Diagnostic Framework

Robert Leaman, Rezarta Islamaj and Zhiyong Lu

Biomedical named entity recognition (NER) and entity linking (EL) strongly depend on annotated corpora, but the utility of these resources for benchmarking is often assumed rather than characterized. We present a corpus-centric framework for diagnosing benchmark-relevant properties directly from corpus annotations, concept links, train-test splits, document metadata, and terminology mappings. The framework organizes standardized statistics into five families: (1) scale, density and label distribution, (2) lexical and conceptual structure, (3) train-test overlap, (4) metadata composition, and (5) terminology coverage where applicable. Applying the framework to nine corpora spanning diseases, chemicals, and cell types, we find that corpus properties can differ substantially, even when they address the same apparent task. We find differences in the evaluation signal they provide, the generalization demands they impose, the degree of train-test reuse they permit, and the regions of biomedical literature and concept space they represent. These differences suggest that commonly reported corpus statistics can be insufficient to characterize what biomedical NER and EL benchmarks evaluate. We argue that corpus-centric diagnostics provide a practical framework for analyzing corpora beyond surface descriptors such as corpus size and entity type, for identifying potential transfer risks, and for interpreting the scope of benchmarking conclusions. We release the framework as open-source code with an interactive dashboard to support reproducing our analyses and characterizing additional corpora.
Read the full abstract

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

AgentAtlas: Beyond Outcome Leaderboards for LLM Agents

Parsa Mazaheri and Kasra Mazaheri

Large language model agents now act on codebases, browsers, operating systems, calendars, files, and tool ecosystems, but their evaluations often collapse behavior into final task success. AgentAtlas reframes agent evaluation as a diagnostic vocabulary and audit protocol for separating outcome success from control-decision quality and trajectory quality. The paper contributes: (i) a six-state control-decision taxonomy (Act / Ask / Refuse / Stop / Confirm / Recover); (ii) a trajectory-failure vocabulary with primary error source and downstream impact; (iii) a 0/1/2 benchmark-coverage audit over fifteen agent benchmarks; and (iv) an illustrative protocol study on a synthetic 1,342-item set evaluated with eight models under taxonomy-aware and taxonomy-blind prompt formats. The synthetic demonstration is not a public benchmark release and should not be read as a definitive model comparison. Instead, it illustrates two measurement risks: mapped label agreement can change substantially when the explicit label menu is removed, and axis choice can change apparent rankings. AgentAtlas is intended to help benchmark designers state what behavior they cover, and to help evaluators diagnose failures that outcome-only leaderboards hide.
Read the full abstract

Computation and Language

Collocational bootstrapping: A hypothesis about the learning of subject-verb agreement in humans and neural networks

Claire Hobbs and R. Thomas McCoy

In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to syntactic dependencies. We investigate whether this mechanism can support the acquisition of English subject-verb agreement. First, we simulate language acquisition by training neural networks on synthetic datasets that vary in how predictable their subject-verb pairings are. We find that there is a range of variability levels at which these statistical learners robustly learn subject-verb agreement. We then analyze the variability of subject-verb pairings in child-directed language, and we find that the variability in such data falls within the range that supported robust generalization in our computational simulations. Taken together, these results suggest that collocational bootstrapping is a viable learning strategy for the type of input that children receive.
Read the full abstract