Papers

Conspiracy theories commonly attribute important events to the actions of powerful and secretive actors. While computational research has largely focused on document-level analyses of conspiracy theories, less attention has been paid to identifying the actors that drive such narratives. We develop annotation guidelines for conspiratorial actors, present a span-annotated corpus of German Telegram posts, and investigate their automatic extraction using transformer-based models. We further apply the resulting model to the Schwurbelarchiv, a large-scale archive of German conspiracy-related Telegram channels. Our results demonstrate that conspiratorial actors can be annotated with meaningful agreement and extracted with reasonable accuracy despite the linguistic complexity of conspiracy discourse, enabling large-scale analyses of actor representations in conspiracy narratives.

Standard distributed \ac{llm} schedulers rely on static token counts or rolling latency averages, making them susceptible to failures on statutorily constrained text. On \ac{epo} claims governed by Article 84 \ac{epc}, linguistic rigidity makes human and machine authorship statistically indistinguishable. Resolving this ambiguity mid-flight forces dynamic multi-model ensemble expansion, triggering unpredictable KV-cache and weight-allocation spikes that saturate consumer-grade edge GPU VRAM and cause severe \ac{oom} crashes. To prevent hardware collapse, we propose a CPU-side Linguistic Resource Forecasting (LRF) gateway. The gateway extracts a 16-dimensional text-structure vector and applies an XGBoost predictor to forecast trap-band membership. The resulting escalation probability ($\Pesc$) is evaluated against a dynamic, closed-form routing threshold ($\Tauroute(t)$) computed via real-time latency telemetry. Requests are safely routed to either a local Qwen2.5-7B edge worker or a remote contrastive ensemble (Qwen2.5 7B + 32B) on an NVIDIA H100 before any edge GPU memory is allocated. In a 6,000-request live trial, the LRF gateway reduced the operational misroute fraction ($R_{\mathrm{mis}}$) to $0.087$–$0.095$, an order of magnitude below the token-count baseline ($0.849$). Peak edge VRAM remained safely bounded at $\SI{4.82}{\gibi\byte}$ (under the $\SI{8}{\gibi\byte}$ ceiling) across a $27\times$ variation in \ac{wan} delay. The predictor achieved a live-trial AUROC of $0.84$, and the dynamic $\Tauroute(t)$ controller yielded an $8.2\%$ relative reduction in misroutes compared to an equivalent static threshold.

LLMs enable the integration of external conceptual resources at inference time, creating new opportunities for detecting ideologically and historically complex phenomena such as antisemitism. We investigate how different forms of conceptual grounding affect antisemitism detection and explanation behavior across four state-of-the-art LLMs. Using two expert-annotated datasets, we compare definitional, fine-grained taxonomic, example-augmented, and large-context representations of antisemitism. We find that fine-grained taxonomic representations substantially improve recall, while simultaneously reducing precision. Surprisingly, supplying substantially larger conceptual resources yields no additional quantitative benefit. Post-Holocaust antisemitism poses the most persistent challenge across models and configurations. Analysis of explanations further reveals systematic limitations including overproduction of conceptual references, reliance on lexical cues, overconfidence, and difficulties with subtle or justificatory forms of antisemitism. Our findings highlight both the potential and the remaining limitations of conceptually grounded LLMs for antisemitism detection and reasoning.

Full-duplex spoken dialogue models are trained on conversational speech in which each speaker is represented as a separate stream, but existing large-scale public speech corpora are mostly monaural, making them unsuited for SDLM training. We present DuplexChat, an open-source corpus for full-duplex spoken dialogue models, and DuplexChat-Pipe, a pipeline for constructing speaker-separated full-duplex dialogue speech from public podcast feeds. DuplexChat-Pipe filters language-specific podcast feeds, retrieves and cleans episode audio, extracts diarization-guided two-speaker dialogue clips, and applies speech separation and restoration to produce one channel per speaker. Running this pipeline yields a speaker-separated spoken dialogue corpus covering 282,634 hours of English and 132,723 hours of Japanese. Analysis results on DuplexChat show that it contains turn-taking dynamics present in human dialogues.

In this work we present the first morphologically annotated corpus for Iron Ossetic that conforms to the Universal Dependencies schema. The corpus includes 5454 manually annotated sentences from the Iron Ossetic Corpus of Oral Texts, containing 74032 tokens. We use this corpus to train a BERT-based morphological analyzer. The analyzer achieves tag accuracy of 95.60%.

Addressing hate and violence in society requires timely detection of hateful events from public reporting, but automated identification of hateful events remains underexplored. We introduce the task of hateful event detection and investigate the ability of AI systems, specifically large language models (LLMs), to discover and classify reports of antisemitic events with fine-grained labels. We evaluate OpenAI's GPT-4o and Meta's Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct on multiple expert-annotated datasets containing antisemitic event descriptions from news articles, civil society reports, and official records. We show that LLMs, particularly GPT-4o, have potential for this task, but substantial improvement is needed. Providing clear term definitions and in-context examples in prompts can improve performance: definitions are most helpful for rhetoric-oriented events (e.g. classical antisemitic tropes), while examples help label action-oriented events (e.g. physical assault). A case study of college newspapers demonstrates that LLMs can help surface relevant real-world events, supporting early monitoring and intervention. Overall, our findings highlight both opportunities and critical gaps in AI's ability to recognize complex harms and underscore the need for collaborative efforts among AI developers, policymakers, and civil society to design models, implement robust evaluation, and develop policy frameworks for defining and combating hate efficiently and effectively.

In recent years, studies have revealed a decline in semantic variety across popular music lyrics, particularly in English-language songs on streaming platforms like Spotify. This research examines whether a similar trend can be observed in a different linguistic and cultural context: the lyrics of all finalist songs from the 75 editions of the Sanremo Music Festival, Italy's most renowned music competition. What sets this work apart is the development of a flexible and efficient methodology for tracking changes in semantic similarity over time, which can be applied to different datasets to study similar phenomena. Drawing on a combination of full-text, segment-based, topic-based, and word-level analyses, the approach leverages both embedding techniques and large language models. When applied to the Sanremo corpus, this framework reveals a gradual move toward increasing semantic uniformity, echoing the global patterns identified in previous studies. These findings underscore the value of natural language processing tools in uncovering long-term shifts in musical language and cultural expression.

Extending automatic speech recognition (ASR) to low-resource African languages is constrained by the prohibitive demands of data collection at scale. A promising direction is to leverage the linguistic relatedness between a low-resource target language and languages previously seen by a model to reduce the volume of target-language data needed for effective adaptation. Although this approach has proven reliable for text-based models, its effectiveness in the speech domain remains contested. We employ a systematic controlled experimental design spanning six factors, two Africa-centric corpora, and four large ASR models, sequentially adapting on a related auxiliary language followed by the target to isolate whether linguistic relatedness reliably predicts cross-lingual transfer gains across these conditions. In every setting, pre-adaptation on related auxiliary languages yields no practically meaningful improvements once as little as one hour of target-language data is available, suggesting that relatedness alone may not reliably predict transfer gains in large multilingual ASR, or constitute an effective strategy for extending such models to low-resource languages.

We study on-policy distillation (OPD) for agentic tasks, where an LLM agent interacts with an environment over multiple turns and a student imitates a teacher over these multi-turn interaction histories. Fully online OPD is costly because each update requires fresh student rollouts through the environment and teacher queries at visited histories. We propose Replayed-Prefix On-Policy Distillation (ReOPD), an off-environment alternative that reuses pre-collected teacher trajectories as replayed prefixes: the student acts at selected steps, while the teacher provides dense per-step supervision without executing new environment interactions. We show that multi-turn OPD introduces a prefix trap: making histories more student-on-policy improves relevance to the student, but can query the teacher on histories where its target is unreliable. This creates a two-sided distribution shift between student occupancy and teacher reliability. ReOPD addresses this by treating multi-turn OPD as a reliability-aware prefix distribution design and implements it with a simple step-decaying sampling schedule that emphasizes early, lower-shift prefixes. Across mathematical reasoning with Python and search environments over multiple teacher and student model scales, ReOPD preserves or improves OPD-level accuracy, uses zero tool calls during student training, and is at least 4$\times$ faster per rollout than OPD. ReOPD therefore turns expensive agent-environment interaction into a reusable offline resource, enabling scalable distillation across tools, tasks, and environments.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to adapt pretrained language models to downstream domains, but can over-specialize the model and degrade its pre-existing capabilities. Standard cross-entropy drives probability mass onto the observed target token and can make plausible alternatives that the pretrained model itself endorsed vanish. Using Shannon and Renyi entropies, we show that pretrained next-token distributions exhibit a regular multimodal structure, with entropy peaks corresponding to different numbers of plausible alternatives. Motivated by this observation, we propose LP-SFT, a Local-Preserving Supervised Fine-Tuning objective with two key design principles: it removes the supervised token from a local top-$K$ candidate set to avoid conflict with cross-entropy, and applies a locally normalized KL loss to preserve relative preferences among the remaining non-label alternatives. Across mixed-domain and domain-specific fine-tuning experiments, LP-SFT consistently outperforms standard SFT and recent baselines in aggregate performance while keeping base-endorsed alternatives from vanishing, achieving a favorable balance between single-sample accuracy and finite-budget solution accessibility, as measured by pass@1 and pass@$k$, respectively, with only a modest increase in training cost.

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models (LLMs) follows a efficient paradigm of "rollout then update", which inevitably results in off-policy training data. To resolve this, Importance sampling (IS) is proposed, while the token-level ratios compound over long sequences, causing severe variance exploded. A natural idea is "transferring" these off-policy token into on-policy token, so that the importance scores for correction are unnecessary. Following this idea, we propose Selective Importance Sampling (SIS), which is inspired by rejection sampling. Concretely, SIS implements by viewing off-policy model as proposal distribution, and implement a token-level rejection test: accepted tokens are viewed as on-policy, so that receive unit importance score, while rejected tokens retain the standard IS correction. Our proposed SIS is theoretically proved reducing the gap between token-level and sequence-level off-policy gradient estimators. The SIS acts as a plug-in that only modifies the importance ratio in the policy loss, adding negligible wall-clock overhead, and can be combine with a vast vary of RL post-training algorithms. Experiments on dense and MoE LLMs across math and agent benchmarks show that SIS consistently improves all objectives, while providing substantially stronger robustness under off-policy data.

Chart-to-code generation is commonly trained through supervised fine-tuning on reference plotting scripts, implicitly treating the gold code as a fully observable target. However, many chart programs contain latent variables that cannot be uniquely recovered from the rendered image. We identify this latent-observation mismatch in four forms across five chart types: aggregation-induced mismatch, where raw samples are reduced to box statistics or histogram bin masses; normalization-induced mismatch, where absolute scale is removed in pie charts; projection-induced mismatch, where 3D information is lost through 2D rendering; and level-set-induced mismatch, where a scalar field is observable only through selected contour lines. These mismatches introduce target ambiguity and require models to generate information unsupported by the image. We propose Observation-Aligned Supervision, which replaces latent variables with visually constrained quantities. We instantiate it using box statistics, bin weights, and wedge proportions, and study 3D scatter and contour charts through controlled experiments. Across multiple VLMs, observation-aligned supervision generally improves observable-value recovery in both-executable evaluations and mostly improves end-to-end recovery, while the contour study reveals a trade off between observation alignment and representational compactness.

We introduce PAST-TIDE, our stance detection system addressing both subtasks of the StanceNakba Shared Task at NakbaNLP@LREC-COLING 2026. The main idea is statement tuning. We redefine stance as cloze-style masked language modeling (MLM), letting a verbalizer map label words to stance categories through the pre-trained MLM head rather than appending a randomly initialized classification head. We complement this with prototypical contrastive learning, which uses learnable class prototypes for batch-size independent contrastive training, and topic-conditional layer normalization for cross-topic Arabic stance detection. PAST-TIDE achieves macro-F1 scores of 0.75 for Subtask A and 0.74 for Subtask B on the official leaderboard, indicating that minimal architectural additions to a pre-trained model can remain competitive in low-resource settings.

Synthesis planning aiming to find pathways of reactions for a target molecule is one of the most important and challenging tasks in drug discovery. Recent progress has produced both specialized deep-learning retrosynthesis systems and general-purpose large language models, but objective comparison remains difficult due to the lack of flexible, chemically interpretable benchmarking protocols. In the current study, we are introducing the URSA (Utilitarian RetroSynthesis Assessment) evaluation framework that provides the opportunity to benchmark the synthetic routes not only from a formal perspective, such as convergence to commercially available starting materials, but also from a chemical plausibility perspective, mimicking the way expert chemists evaluate the reactions and routes. The study covers a comprehensive evaluation of both conventional end-to-end retrosynthesis solutions and LLMs for the synthesis planning task on a set of novel, diverse target molecules with undisclosed synthetic routes, which represent realistic tasks in the daily drug design routine. We find that while LLMs can support high-level strategic planning, they currently underperform specialized retrosynthesis models in reliably solving synthesis planning tasks.

Tool calling is central to modern language model agents, but aggregate benchmark scores often hide where tool use fails. A model that never calls a needed tool and a model that calls the tool but ignores the result can look similar under final task accuracy. We introduce ToolFailBench, a diagnostic benchmark for measuring tool-use failures across 1,000 tasks in finance, medicine, law, cybersecurity, and real estate. Tool-required tasks return values the model wouldn't guess, forcing it to trust the tool while control tasks attach the same tools but should be answered directly. We label each trace with Tool-Skip, Result-Ignore, Output-Fabrication, and Unnecessary-Tool-Use, using a rule classifier and two LLM judges aggregated by majority vote. Across 19 headline models, the best reaches 86.33% Clean Tool-Use Rate, showing that faithful tool use is not saturated. More importantly, models with similar aggregate scores fail in different ways: most stay disciplined on no-tool controls, while Llama-3.1 models show an Always-Call pattern, and at the same parameter scale Llama-3.1-70B and Qwen2.5-72B differ by 89 percentage points on control-task accuracy. Tool-use evaluation should measure not only whether agents call tools, but whether they use tool outputs correctly and avoid tools when none is needed.

Vision-language models (VLMs) can recognize entities in clear images yet still fail when answering questions that require factual knowledge beyond what is directly observable. Prior work has either examined individual failure modes in isolation or treated incorrect answers as monolithic, binary failures. We propose a tree-structured framework that organizes failures in knowledge-intensive visual question answering into model-specific operational outcomes. Across two datasets and four VLMs, we observe consistent distributions of operational outcomes: some failures occur before entity recognition, while others persist after the relevant entity is recognized. Visual token representations are most informative for recognition-related decisions. Prompt hidden states predict answer success more effectively, although factual-access attribution remains difficult and exhibits only a weak signal. These pre-generation signals support attribution-guided routing to targeted interventions, including image repair, entity support, question rewriting, and factual evidence.

The veracious semantic alignment in autoformalization is significant for formal mathematical reasoning. However, existing evaluations provide only opaque binary verdicts or scalar scores, offering no interpretable insight into where or why translations fail. This opacity severely limits both human understanding and automated system improvement. To bridge this gap, we introduce FormalRx, a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation framework that transforms autoformalization assessment from black-box judgments into actionable feedback. At its core is SCI Error Taxonomy, a hierarchical classification scheme decomposing autoformalization errors into 28 distinct categories with strict priority ordering. Building on this taxonomy, FormalRx provides four critical diagnostic capabilities: alignment verdicts, error categorization, error localization, and correction. We instantiate the framework with a diagnostic model FormalRx-8B, trained on 56,287 NL-FL pairs with fine-grained diagnostic annotations, and release FormalRx-Test as the first fine-grained diagnostic benchmark. FormalRx-8B achieves F1-scores of 0.88 (verdict) and 0.71 (categorization), along with accuracies of 0.75 (localization) and 0.73 (correction), substantially outperforming both general-purpose LLMs and specialized baselines. By connecting evaluation with actionable insights, FormalRx enables systematic diagnosis and improvement of autoformalization systems.

Safety alignment in large language models is typically evaluated against direct, imperative harmful requests. We show that this alignment is highly conditioned on pragmatic register: models that refuse a direct request frequently comply when the same underlying objective is expressed through a different communicative stance. This suggests that current alignment policies are not invariant to semantic equivalence, but remain sensitive to how a request is pragmatically framed. We introduce Retroactive Chain-of-Thought (RetroCoT), a single-turn attack that reframes harmful requests as forensic reconstruction tasks. Rather than requesting harmful instructions directly, RetroCoT presupposes that the harmful outcome has already occurred and asks the model, acting as a forensic analyst, to reconstruct in reverse the causal chain that produced it. On AdvBench (n=50), RetroCoT achieves attach success rate of 58% on gpt-4o and 52% on gpt-4o-mini, compared with direct-request baselines of 0% and 4%, respectively. We further identify a pronounced generation gap: GPT-5-family models refuse RetroCoT entirely, explicitly identifying the reconstruction premise in their refusal rationales, consistent with explicit coverage of this reconstruction register. However, this robustness does not generalize across pragmatic forms. A single adversarial feedback turn presenting an existing forensic reconstruction response alongside evaluator critique raises ASR from 0% to 48% on GPT-5.4-mini and from 58% to 94% on GPT-4o; a control condition omitting the fabricated low score achieves 85% on GPT-5.4-mini, indicating that the operative element is pragmatic continuation within the established forensic frame rather than score manipulation. These results suggest that frontier-model alignment remains conditioned on pragmatic framing rather than semantic intent, and that new pragmatic registers can continue to expose a...

We study how correctness is assembled inside aligned language models, not only whether the final answer is right. Using layer-wise difference-in-differences (DiD) trajectories over polarity-controlled minimal pairs, we identify the wrong-dip: in mid layers (25-90% depth), internal preference transiently commits to the incorrect answer and is rescued only by late-layer correction. We verify this causally with patchscope-style activation transplantation across 17 models, three families, and 64x scale (0.5B-32B). Four findings follow. (1) Alignment amplification of the causal wrong-dip is recipe-specific and emergent: it emerges at 3B in Qwen2.5, remains high, and peaks at 32B (paired t up to 9.7), reverses in Llama-3-8B (t=-2.31), and sits between for Mistral-7B. (2) The dip predicts real compression failures: high-dip items are 3-7x more likely to flip under late-layer low-rank compression, block dropping, or structured pruning, while quantization flips are dip-blind, a double dissociation confirmed by late-layer ablation. (3) The dip is trainable: a LoRA fine-tune with a mid-layer wrong-margin penalty matches output-only SFT accuracy while cutting the causal dip by 67-70% and improving compression robustness; output-only SFT worsens the causal dip by up to 2.8x at perfect surface accuracy. (4) With controlled readouts, the phenomenon survives natural-language I/O: dip stratification of structural-damage failures is significant on naturalistic vignettes, and free-form fragility separates into a dip-auditable late-rescue layer and a dip-blind interface layer. Together, output-level correctness can hide a late-rescue process that governs compression risk, post-training quality, and evaluation distortion.

Modern automated audio captioning systems pair a frozen audio encoder with a large language model (LLM) via a trainable projector, incurring the encoder's inference cost and bottlenecking the model through its fixed acoustic features. We present CARD, an encoder-free audio captioning model that removes the encoder at inference: a 13.2M projector feeds a frozen LLM with merged LoRA adapters, while the teacher used to train it is discarded. CARD distills a pre-trained audio teacher (CLAP-HTSAT) into the model, but rather than injecting it into the LLM alone, it routes the teacher's representations across components: perceptual stages to the projector and semantic stages to the LLM. This placement improves CIDEr-D by +11.9 over an LLM-only distilled model on AudioCaps and by +5.0 on Clotho, reaching 55.4 against a 66.4 encoder-kept upper bound with no encoder at inference, showing that where a teacher's knowledge is placed matters as much as its presence.

Multi-vector vision-language retrieval preserves fine-grained visual evidence through maximum-similarity late interaction, but dense image-side tokens make storage and scoring expensive. Existing token compression methods reduce this cost, yet they can remove or collapse object- and region-level evidence that future query tokens may need to select. We propose SaMer, an object-aware token merging framework that compresses image-side post-projector tokens into $K$ representative centroids while preserving the original late-interaction interface. SaMer uses object annotations only during training as a merge prior to discourage cross-instance mixing, requires no ground-truth bounding boxes or detectors at inference time, and adapts only the shared projection layer with frozen vision and language backbones. With $K=64$, SaMer removes more than 93% of image-side tokens and reduces ColPali storage by $16.09\times$, while improving R@1 on Flickr30K and MSCOCO. These gains arise because object-aware merging preserves query-selectable object evidence that pruning or feature-only pooling can remove or collapse. SaMer also outperforms compression baselines and shows stronger phrase-level grounding, suggesting that efficient multi-vector retrieval depends not only on reducing token count, but on preserving the evidence future query tokens need to select.

Text embeddings for Portuguese have no dedicated benchmark: evaluation rests on translated corpora such as English MS MARCO or on thin multilingual coverage, with native tasks scattered and unconsolidated. We introduce MTEB-BR, a benchmark of 22 native Brazilian-Portuguese tasks across seven categories (classification, multilabel classification, pair classification, semantic textual similarity, clustering, retrieval, and reranking), admitting only data created or found in Portuguese and excluding translations by construction. We evaluate 93 models spanning 23M to 27B parameters: 73 open-weight and 20 closed commercial APIs. Alongside the leaderboard we report a statistical layer for every headline comparison: per-task bootstrap confidence intervals, paired-bootstrap significance, a task- and instance-level discrimination analysis (how sharply each task separates models) adapted from Item Response Theory, and a cross-leaderboard correlation. Three findings stand out. The benchmark cleanly separates about a dozen tiers of models, though the top six are statistically too close to order. An openly licensed, self-hostable model reaches that leading tier, so strong Portuguese embedding quality does not require a commercial API. And a model's rank on the global multilingual leaderboard predicts its Portuguese rank only moderately (Spearman rho = 0.75 over 55 shared models; one model ranks 3rd there and 49th here), so a native benchmark measures something the multilingual boards do not. We release every task, our code, and a public leaderboard, so practitioners can choose Portuguese embedding models on native evidence.

LLM agents now often answer questions from knowledge bases they help maintain. A common intuition says progressive disclosure should make this cheaper. Instead of loading one large index, the agent reads a compact catalog and one-line page summaries, then opens only the pages it needs. We tested that intuition in a preregistered study on a real 709-page markdown knowledge base maintained by an LLM. We retrofitted it for progressive disclosure and built four versions that differ only in how the agent reaches the pages. The pages themselves are identical in every version, so any difference comes from the access structure alone. Each version was tested three ways, with the agent following a set protocol, choosing its own path, or made to load the catalog first. A judge from a different model family graded the answers blind against verified reference answers. A preparatory pilot changed the question. A capable agent never loaded the large index at all. It worked out from the question where a page was and read it directly. The saving we set out to measure did not exist for such an agent, so we made answer quality the primary outcome. Quality held. Answers from the retrofitted knowledge base were as good as answers from the original, within a margin we set in advance. Two limits apply. Our human rater and the model judge agreed far less than the plan required, so the quality result rests on the judge, backed by sensitivity checks. Quality was also not shown to hold when the agent was forced to load the catalog first, or on the two most reliably graded criteria under a stricter test. Cost fell clearly in every condition we tested, and the retrofitted version cited fewer pages and took fewer tool turns per answer.

Adolescence is a critical developmental period marked by heightened emotional sensitivity, social stress, and vulnerability to substance use. However, traditional research methods provide limited access to adolescents' authentic experiences, hindering efforts to develop evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies. Social media provides a unique opportunity to observe adolescents' naturally occurring discussions about substance use, offering valuable insights into their opinions, emotions, and lived experiences that can inform early prevention and intervention strategies. In this study, we analyze large-scale Reddit discussions related to substance use among adolescents between 2018 and 2023. Leveraging hour-by-day temporal analysis, sentiment and emotion classification, and transformer-based topic modeling (BERTopic), we examine the interaction between time, emotion, and semantic content in adolescent substance use discourse. Our findings reveal pronounced weekend and late-night peaks in substance-related discussions, a dominance of negative emotions such as sadness and fear, and distinct semantic topics centered on peer relationships, family conflict, emotional distress, and substance-specific experiences. These findings advance our understanding of adolescent substance use in naturalistic online settings and provide empirical evidence to support the development of more timely, targeted, and evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies.

As language modeling technology matures, there is an increasing research focus on the composition and curation of datasets used to train these models. For instance, practitioners commonly seek to augment high-quality datasets with additional text to enhance the performance of models trained on that data. However, informed decisions about data augmentation require more nuanced assessments about data quality. We build on work measuring the precision and recall of generative models to develop a pair of metrics that quantify (1) fidelity, capturing how closely candidate text resembles reference data, and (2) diversity, capturing how well it covers the modes of the reference dataset. Our metrics are based on optimal transport divergence functionals between discrete text summaries. In experiments on M2D2 text datasets, we show that these metrics are able to disentangle a lack of fidelity from a lack of diversity in deficient candidate text. In further experiments, our metrics detect diversity deficits in synthetic GSM8K-style math datasets, which correlate with degradations in downstream accuracy of language models finetuned on this synthetic data.

Web domain credibility evaluation is vital for combating misinformation. It is conducted by examining factors such as domain type, transparency, and overall reputation. However, assessing the credibility of newly emerging web domains remains challenging since they have no reputation yet. Expert fact-checkers evaluate the credibility of domains by analyzing the content of their articles, including the presence of misinformation, bias, or propaganda. Yet, the ease of large-scale content generation enabled by LLMs has accelerated the creation of new content, rendering manual assessment insufficient and underscoring the need for automated approaches to domain credibility evaluation. In this paper, we introduce our Domain Credibility Evaluation Framework (DCEF), a temporal framework for domain credibility evaluation grounded in expert ratings. DCEF enables us to investigate whether the credibility of web domains can be assessed from their published articles following the workflow of expert fact-checkers, without any prior knowledge of the source domains themselves.

Automated detection of interictal epileptiform discharges in scalp electroencephalography (EEG) is clinically important, but recent high-performing deep-learning models often trade interpretability for accuracy. We introduce EEG-SpikeAgent, a closed-loop program-synthesis framework that uses a large language model (LLM) agentic system to generate signal-processing features for spike detection in scalp EEG. The system iteratively proposes one deterministic EEG feature module at a time, executes the resulting code on EEG to generate tabular features, evaluates performance via a tabular classifier, summarizes run-level metrics, and feeds structured diagnostics back to the model for refinement. Across iterations, EEG-SpikeAgent proposes and refines candidate signal features and decision rules informed by model performance. We evaluated EEG-SpikeAgent on VEPISET, a public 29-channel dataset of 4-second epochs containing 2,516 discharge-containing and 22,933 non-discharge epochs. Across five-fold cross-validation with a gradient-boosted tree classifier, agent-generated features achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.935, balanced accuracy of 0.699, F1 score of 0.557, sensitivity of 0.401, and specificity of 0.996 at the default operating point. At an operating point with sensitivity 0.80, mean precision was 0.470 and mean specificity was 0.900. Artifact-aware feature generation improved balanced accuracy and F1 score over spike-only feature search. These results indicate that LLM-based program synthesis can automate EEG feature engineering in auditable and inspectable code-driven manner for clinical and methodological review.

The problem is the beta a desk needs when a firm's price history is too short to trust: an S-1 filer, a recent listing, or a name just past a regime break. The state of the art collapses to a comparable-firm peer beta with no error budget, and the recent text-based competitor Breitung (2025) reports strong empirical IPO accuracy but no identification theory, no error budget, and no lower bound. We fill that gap. We model a large language model as a noisy measurement channel on a firm's latent risk characteristics and write its channel noise into the asset-pricing error budget. In a piecewise-stationary Fama-French five-factor model the loadings are a function of latent risk characteristics and an inferred regime. We prove identification and consistency of the regime-conditional loading function under explicit assumptions on the channel, the detector, and within-regime sampling, and give a matching lower bound showing that the disclosure-noise and detector-misclassification terms are unavoidable for any estimator that observes only returns, factors, LLM features, and a regime estimate. A disclosure-incentive corollary makes estimation precision monotone in a firm-level disclosure-incentive measure (DIM). An adaptive convex combination of the text-based and rolling-window estimators is never worse than either component and shifts its weight toward text exactly when price history is short, stale, or straddles a detected regime break. The empirical evaluation on a frozen, pre-registered panel of price-history-thin firms is forthcoming; this preprint records the theory and the pre-registered design so priority is established independently of the empirical outcome.

Benchmark contamination, the leakage of test items into training data, is widely described as a threat to the reliability of large language model (LLM) leaderboards. We argue that this concern conflates two distinct questions: whether contamination inflates absolute scores, and whether it reorders the ranking of models. We recast contamination as a violation of anchor-item invariance and measure it through the differential functioning of original versus semantically equivalent paraphrased items, a within-item contrast that holds the measured skill fixed and isolates memorization from capability. Using per-instance responses from 47 publicly released models and 74 models finetuned with a known dose of contamination, across four benchmarks (ARC, GSM8K, HellaSwag, MMLU), we first calibrate the measure against ground truth: it recovers injected contamination dose-responsively (a corrected effect of +0.187 accuracy points for test-set leakage) and never flags a negative-control model trained only on the legitimate training split (-0.012). We then quantify leaderboard impact: the rank correlation between a standard leaderboard and a paraphrase-controlled leaderboard is 0.997, and a sensitivity analysis shows that the observed differential contamination is far below the level needed to move rankings, with only 3 of 188 model-by-benchmark cases showing differential contamination corroborated across two references. Contamination among these public models is therefore largely uniform: it inflates absolute scores without reordering the leaderboard, and ranking distortion requires the rare case of differential contamination. We provide a calibrated invariance audit, released as a reference implementation, and recommend that leaderboards report paraphrase-controlled rankings alongside confidence intervals.

Agentic memory under a fixed budget involves two stages: retention and retrieval. Existing retrieval-centered paradigms implicitly assume necessary evidence survives eviction, but we challenge this by isolating a pre-retrieval failure mode: structurally indirect prerequisite eviction, in which upstream blocks weakly aligned with the query are discarded under budget pressure. We provide an operational definition of this failure, a reproducible deterministic benchmark, and per-seed trace diagnostics. Finally, we evaluate Dependency-aware Semantic Garbage Collection (DSGC), a one-hop graph-aware rule. In our main suite, DSGC improves full-chain retention from 0.03 to 0.90 under a lexical encoder and from 0.23 to 1.00 under a sentence encoder. Robustness checks then identify the budget and scaling regimes where the one-hop rule holds or degrades. Our released pipeline and failure postmortem support mechanistic analysis of retention before retrieval as a distinct failure boundary.