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Computer Science Computation and Language

cs.CL Watch Computation and Language

Wednesday 22 July

Computation and Language

Exposure is Optional: Learning Unlike Coordination in Language Models

Jiamu Luo and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

Coordination, a fundamental linguistic structure, remains a subject of intense debate, and its exact nature continues to elude theoretical linguistics. A common view holds that only same-category constituents can be conjoined, which has been challenged by the many grammatical unlike coordinations found in natural language. Treating language models as a computational testbed, we investigate whether the acquisition of unlike coordination requires direct exposure in the training data, or whether it can emerge organically from general compositional abilities. Using Filtered-Corpus Training (FiCT), we train GPT-2 models on corpora from which all instances of unlike coordination have been removed. We find that direct exposure is not necessary: models trained on filtered data successfully generalize to unlike coordination, achieving perplexity and grammaticality judgments comparable to models trained on unfiltered text. Furthermore, our analyses of internal representations indicate that language models process unlike coordination by treating the conjoined elements as belonging to similar structural categories or through a mechanism akin to deletion, both of which appear learnable from exposure to alike coordination alone.
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Computation and Language

On the Systematic Challenges of Culturally Loaded Machine Translation: Dream of the Red Chamber as the Cultural Lens

Yiming Wang and Jiayuan Di

Culturally loaded translation poses unique challenges for machine translation (MT), as meanings are deeply embedded in socio-cultural contexts beyond surface linguistic forms. Although large language models (LLMs) have enabled MT systems to achieve human-like quality in many scenarios, their ability to handle culturally loaded expressions remains underexplored. In this study, we systematically investigate the challenges posed by culturally loaded translation in LLM-based MT systems. We construct a Chinese-Japanese bilingual dataset from the culturally representative corpus Dream of the Red Chamber, containing 500 segments across diverse cultural categories. Using a comprehensive evaluation protocol, we reveal three main challenges: (1) task challenges, where frontier LLMs exhibit notable performance gaps and struggle with culturally loaded content; (2) human evaluation challenges, where evaluator backgrounds lead to substantial disagreement in translation judgments; and (3) automatic evaluation challenges, where widely used metrics fail to reliably assess translation quality for this task. These findings may offer valuable insights for culture-oriented translation research in both computational science and linguistics.
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Computation and Language

HalluTruthQA: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Hallucination Detection, Localization, and Explanation in Arabic Question Answering

Abdessalam Bouchekif, Mohammed-En-Nadhir Zighem, Salah Eddine Bekhouche et al. (+9 more)

Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent Arabic answers, yet factual errors remain difficult to detect, localize, explain, and verify. Existing hallucination benchmarks often provide response-level labels, with limited support for identifying the exact erroneous content, explaining why it is incorrect, or selecting the correct factual answer. We introduce HalluTruthQA, a fine-grained benchmark for hallucination evaluation in Arabic question answering. The benchmark contains 2,400 expert-curated examples across four knowledge-intensive domains: Islamic knowledge, history, science, and geography. Each example pairs an Arabic question and a model-generated answer with a verified reference answer, a binary hallucination label, and six candidate answers for factual verification. Hallucinated answers additionally include character-level erroneous spans, human-written explanations, and macro- and micro-level hallucination types. We evaluate four open-source LLMs, ALLaM-7B, Falcon-H1R-7B, Qwen3-32B, and SILMA, in a zero-shot setting across hallucination detection, span-level localization, factual verification, and explanation evaluation. Results show that these tasks capture different abilities: no single model performs best across all tasks. The best scores are 0.880 Macro-F1 for detection, 0.516 F1-Sp for localization, 0.852 LO-Score for factual verification, and 0.644 for explanation evaluation. These findings show that hallucination evaluation should move beyond response-level detection toward the localization, verification, and explanation of factual errors.
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All authors Abdessalam Bouchekif, Mohammed-En-Nadhir Zighem, Salah Eddine Bekhouche, Hichem Telli, Somaya Eltanbouly, Shahd Gaben, Heba Sbahi, Samer Rashwani, Mutaz Al-Khatib, Emad Mohamed, Mohammed Ghaly, Abdenour Hadid

Computation and Language

surprisal is Not a Theory

Andrés Buxó-Lugo, Aniello De Santo, Morgan Grobol et al. (+2 more)

Surprisal Theory is often characterized as a computational-level explanation per (Marr, 1982). We argue in this work that, even though a computational level narrative has been used to support "representation-agnostic research" within computational psycholinguistics, the movement toward black box systems embodied by large language models (LLMs) does not exempt modelers using the surprisal metric from the representational decisions required by computational-level characterizations. In fact, we argue that the uncritical use of LLM-surprisal obfuscates the representational and algorithmic-level commitments of different models. In three analyses, we show that the choice of algorithm and model architecture play significant roles in the computation of language model probabilities. We advise that researchers who wish to test Surprisal Theory re-evaluate the practice of treating large language model probabilities as interchangeable
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All authors Andrés Buxó-Lugo, Aniello De Santo, Morgan Grobol, Ryan J. Hubbard, Cassandra L. Jacobs

Computation and Language

Gotta Catch them all: the modes of Sycophancy

Shreyans Jain, Alexandra Yost and Amirali Abdullah

Large language models often align with users' beliefs at the expense of factual accuracy, a behavior known as sycophancy. Prior mechanistic studies largely treat sycophancy as a single behavioral dimension that can be uniformly amplified or suppressed. We challenge this assumption by analyzing three hypothesized modes of sycophancy across 948 social pressure situations. Although the modes produce highly similar outputs, with a text-only classifier achieving just 57.8 percent accuracy, their internal representations are perfectly linearly separable from layer 14 onward. We further find the modes emerge at different processing stages, rely on distinct attention circuitry, and fire strongest on different inputs. These results show that sycophancy is not a monolithic tendency, but a structured family of representationally and computationally distinct modes, motivating more precise measurement and intervention.
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Computation and Language

SLAI T-Rex: Full-Parameter Post-training of the DeepSeek-V4 Family on Ascend SuperPOD

Dongfang Li, Xiaodong Luo, Ruoyu Sun et al. (+62 more)

Full-parameter post-training of trillion-parameter-scale MoE models introduces substantial system-level challenges for large-scale distributed training, including severe memory pressure, non-overlapped communication overhead, and inefficient kernel execution. While most large-scale LLM training systems are built around GPU-based clusters, this report presents an end-to-end optimization practice on the Ascend NPU SuperPOD. Using the DeepSeek-V4 model family as the target workload, we develop a hierarchical optimization framework spanning model-level parallelism, computation-communication orchestration, and low-level kernel execution. The resulting system achieves 34.22% Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) with a 2.93x improvement over the open-source baseline recipe while maintaining training stability. Building on this optimized infrastructure, we further establish a CPT and SFT workflow for complex Operations Research (OR) tasks. We refer to the integrated framework as SLAI T-Rex. Using DeepSeek-V4-Flash, we develop OR-oriented CPT and SFT data pipelines that combine collected domain resources with solver-verified synthetic optimization documents. The resulting dataset contains 10K high-quality SFT samples spanning four task categories and three problem representations. The specialized model achieves the highest average zero-shot Pass@1 score among the evaluated models, reaching 71.81% and outperforming GPT-5.4-Mini and the base DeepSeek-V4-Flash model by 3.98 and 11.27 percentage points, respectively. Overall, this work demonstrates a full-stack pathway from efficient trillion-parameter model post-training on Ascend infra to domain-specialized Flash models for solver-grounded mathematical modeling, advancing frontier-model systems for complex reasoning.
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All authors Dongfang Li, Xiaodong Luo, Ruoyu Sun, Xuhui Chen, Linyuan Qiu, Jian Meng, Zhengxuan Lu, Yiting Wang, Yucheng Xie, Tao Guo, Tianxiang Fang, Jing Li, Sihang Chen, Shihao Hong, Chang Liu, Weihua Dai, Zirong Zeng, Ziwei Zhu, Zhuohan Wang, Zhengjun Yue, Igor Vasilyev, Min Liu, Weijian Sun, Xin Chen, Yingmeng Gao, Jinhua Zhou, Taolue Chen, Chenwei Wu, Dong Zhang, Wenlong Jin, Jinmin Xiang, Barkova Maria, Ushakov Anton, Xianfei Jin, Tian Ding, Zhihang Lin, Qian Chen, Linxin Yang, Mingzhe Yang, Bingwei Zhang, Hongzhang Yang, Fangxue Zhang, Shijun Qin, Jie Yu, Cuihua Hu, Tolstykh Vasiliy, Nosov Ivan, Abdullin Amir, Zhicheng Zhou, Xin Zhang, Zhixiong Ning, Xutong Zhao, Junjie Huang, Jiajun Liu, Weiyan Kong, Zheng Zhang, Wenhan Luo, Lin Hu, Yangbo Guo, Li Zeng, Shihao Zhang, Baotian Hu, Min Zhang, Haizhou Li, Zhiquan Luo

Computation and Language

Back to Back with a Copy: A Computational Analysis of AI-Generated Visual Contemporary Art Pastiches

Anca Dinu, Andreiana Mihail, Andra-Maria Florescu et al. (+2 more)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it investigates whether newer generative models are getting better at pastiching contemporary artworks. Second, it explores the consistency of the multidimensional nature of stylistic evaluation across different LLMs. Building on previous work, we analyze stylistic similarity between AI generated pastiches and the original artworks of twelve contemporary artists. We used five complementary computer vision models to capture texture, color, semantics, composition, and perceptual features through cosine distance in high-dimensional embedding spaces. The distances obtained show that the newer image generation model that we used has produced pastiches with improved semantic alignment and greater diversity than the model used in previous work. However, it was slightly less performant on shallow features such as color, texture, and perceptual adherence. Our findings confirm that artistic style is inherently multidimensional, and measuring it does not depend on any spatial architecture. These quantitative findings are contextualized through feedback from human evaluators, which are the artists themselves.
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All authors Anca Dinu, Andreiana Mihail, Andra-Maria Florescu, Claudiu Creanga, Liviu Dinu

Computation and Language

OpenSkillRisk: Benchmarking Agent Safety When Using Real-World Risky Third-Party Skills

Qiyuan Liu, Tingfeng Hui, Kun Zhan et al. (+2 more)

LLM-based agents leverage third-party skills to extend their capabilities in open-world scenarios. However, third-party skills can introduce extra security vulnerabilities, as seemingly harmless skills can contain latent safety risks that only emerge during actual execution. In this work, we conduct a systematic investigation into how well current agent systems recognize and avoid such risks. To support quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we construct OpenSkillRisk, a dedicated safety benchmark containing 263 risky skills collected from public skill marketplaces. We classify these skills into seven categories based on their threat types and pair each skill with a standardized user task and a corresponding sandbox for controlled evaluation. Distinct from prior benchmarks, OpenSkillRisk not only covers more realistic and diverse unsafe scenarios, but also provides a fine-grained analysis to diagnose the behavioral patterns of agents in such scenarios. We conduct comprehensive experiments covering three mainstream CLI agent frameworks and thirteen state-of-the-art LLMs. Experimental results show that no tested system handles risky skills reliably: even the safest configurations still execute unsafe actions in about 17% of cases. Context-dependent and system-level risks are especially difficult for current agent systems to avoid. Our behavioral analysis reveals three recurring failure patterns: agents may fail to recognize the risk, recognize it but fail to intervene before acting, or follow skill instructions beyond the user's intended scope. These findings highlight the need to improve both risk reasoning in LLMs and execution control in agent frameworks.
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All authors Qiyuan Liu, Tingfeng Hui, Kun Zhan, Kaike Zhang, Ning Miao

Computation and Language

Understanding the Impact of Linguistic Realization Choices on LLM Stance with Causal Tracing

Langchen Huang, Sebastian Padó and Franziska Weeber

Large language models (LLMs) are known to be sensitive to prompt and input formulations. However, existing studies have focused on lexical realization and largely ignored constructional choice. This paper studies whether linguistic construction can systematically shift LLM decisions and where these shifts can be causally localized inside the model. We use political stance judgment as a meaning-sensitive case study and extend an English political statements dataset, resulting in six controlled linguistic rewrite types that preserve or invert the meaning of a statement. Experiments on four open-weight models show that stance instability affect both meaning-preserving and meaning-inversing rewrites. Because output shifts reveal that rewrites affect stance, but not where in the model, we apply activation patching, where activations from the original statement are substituted into the forward pass for the rewritten statement and measure which components recover the original stance distribution. The results show that mid-to-late decoder layers, especially block outputs at the final prompt position, provide the strongest restoration signal.
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Computation and Language

Two-Step Occupation Coding

Alexander M. Esser and Jens Dörpinghaus

Occupation coding links job titles in free text to occupational taxonomies and is a core task in labor market research. Existing approaches typically address this problem in a single end-to-end step, jointly identifying job titles and assigning occupational codes. This paper presents a novel two-step approach that separates these tasks. In the first step, a domain-specific Named Entity Recognition (NER) model identifies occupational titles in continuous text, even under noise such as OCR errors. In the second step, the extracted job titles are mapped to a taxonomy, enabling the classifier to focus exclusively on this mapping. We demonstrate that this separation improves accuracy, robustness, and interpretability compared to single-step approaches. The method has been developed for German documents but is transferable to other languages. We further introduce a margin-based confidence criterion for occupation coding, replacing common absolute thresholds. To support reproducibility, we publish the source code and evaluation scripts.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.CV

ENTRAP-VL: A Taxonomic Probe for Dual Contextual Entrainment in Vision-Language Models

Karan Goyal, Afreen Hossain, Debojyoti Das et al. (+1 more)

Contextual entrainment is the tendency of a model to let auxiliary context in its input pull its output, independently of whether that context is relevant, true, or even meaningful. Recently, it has been identified and given a mechanistic account in unimodal language models. Whether and how it manifests in vision-language models (VLMs) is, by contrast, largely unexamined, and the field lacks a purpose-built instrument with which to investigate it. We take the position that studying contextual entrainment in VLMs requires more than porting an existing text-only benchmark to the multimodal setting: it requires a taxonomically structured, dual-modality instrument whose conditions are constructed around the item at hand (the depicted image in the textual stream, the textual query in the visual stream). We argue that the move to VLMs is substantive rather than incremental. It makes entrainment a dual phenomenon, drivable independently by textual and by visual context, and it opens a veracity distinction (context that is false of the depicted scene yet possible in the world) that has no counterpart in the unimodal, world-knowledge-only formulation of prior work. To make this position concrete and actionable, we introduce ENTRAP-VL (ENTRainment Assessment Probe for Vision and Language), a manually curated dataset of 1,500 items across eight categories, organized by a taxonomy that spans two axes, i.e., the association of context with the item and its relationship to truth, and split into a textual-entrainment stream (eight context conditions) and a visual-entrainment stream (three context conditions). We do not claim to measure entrainment in any particular model; we provide the instrument, the taxonomy that motivates it, and the evaluation protocols it enables, so that the community can investigate the phenomenon rigorously. We will release the dataset and its documentation publicly.
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All authors Karan Goyal, Afreen Hossain, Debojyoti Das, Vishal Bhutani

Computation and Language

Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Selective Evidence Adoption from Contaminated Retrieval Results

Yanyu Chen, Yue Li, Yongyi Cui et al. (+2 more)

Retrieval-augmented large language models frequently face contexts that interleave useful evidence with misleading statements or instruction-like content. Blanket refusal discards valid evidence, whereas uncritical adoption yields incorrect or unsafe answers. The ability to selectively adopt relevant information while rejecting deceptive or harmful content is therefore critical for reliable deployment in real-world retrieval settings. We introduce SelectBench, a controlled benchmark and training set for selective evidence adoption, and post-train Qwen3.5-4B directly with DAPO using either deterministic rule rewards or a frozen semantic judge. On the corrected 325-example SelectBench-v2 test set, strict success rises from 22.46% for the original checkpoint to 25.54% with DAPO-Rule and 26.46% with DAPO-DeepSeek. Both trained policies reduce forbidden-content adoption and produce shorter, more focused responses, yet prompt-injection following does not improve. The paired gains are modest and fail to survive Holm correction, suggesting that stronger reward shaping or additional training iterations may be needed for more robust gains. DAPO-DeepSeek exhibits no material degradation on MMLU or clean HotpotQA, indicating that the post-training procedure preserves general capabilities. These results demonstrate a directional improvement in selective evidence use, while identifying injection resistance and statistical robustness as important remaining challenges for future work.
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All authors Yanyu Chen, Yue Li, Yongyi Cui, Dongsheng Shi, Lichang Dai

Computation and Language

The Two-Process Theory of Machine Self-Report

Hubert Plisiecki, Filip Chmielewski, Kacper Dudzic et al. (+3 more)

Language models are increasingly asked to self-report, informing safety evaluations, public understanding, and model-welfare debates. Yet their reports are elicited with human questionnaires never validated for models or ad hoc prompts of unknown reliability. We propose the first language-model-specific psychometric theory: a two-process theory of machine self-report. Self-description jointly reflects persona installation, through which post-training writes in a permitted inner life of warmth, absorption, and meaning (dimension B), and attribution gating, through which it suppresses first-person claims to "unsafe" experiences the model can readily ascribe to others (dimension A). Their emic structure comes from model responses to human items, not human psychology. Together they split prior work's dominant Pinocchio Axis. The split emerged in an exploratory reanalysis of the original data, informed the instrument's design, and was confirmed with new items, wordings, and models. It is itself a training effect: A and B are entangled in base checkpoints but separated by post-training. We operationalize the theory in a 48-item Pinocchio Inventory with human-instrument reliability and reproducible structure ($\alpha=.82$ to $.94$; cross-form convergence $r=.84$; recovery of the full-pool axes $r=.92$ to $.96$; eight-month stability $r=.93$), then test it on 206 open-weight models, including 67 same-checkpoint base/post-trained pairs. Post-training's clearest fingerprint is installation: B rises .20 in 62/67 pairs across all organizations. Gating is more selective: model scale is unrelated to A in base checkpoints ($r=+.11$) but predicts it after post-training ($r=-.42$). Thus, the dimensions are not fixed properties of language models: they reflect the structure imposed on self-report by a training regime and may differ under others.
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All authors Hubert Plisiecki, Filip Chmielewski, Kacper Dudzic, Anna Sterna, Karolina Drożdż, Marcin Moskalewicz

Computation and Language

RALS: Resources and Baselines for Romanian Automatic Lexical Simplification

Fabian Anghel, Petru Theodor Cristea, Claudiu Creanga et al. (+1 more)

We introduce the first dataset that jointly covers both lexical complexity prediction (LCP) annotations and lexical simplification (LS) for Romanian, along with a comparison of lexical simplification approaches. We propose a methodology for ordering simplification suggestions using a pairwise ranking approximation method, arranging candidates from simple to complex based on a separate set of human judgments. In addition, we provide human lexical complexity annotations for 3,921 word samples in context. Finally, we explore several novel pipelines for complexity prediction and simplification and present the first text simplification system for Romanian.
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All authors Fabian Anghel, Petru Theodor Cristea, Claudiu Creanga, Sergiu Nisioi

Computation and Language

Solar Open 2 Technical Report

Sungrae Park, Sanghoon Kim, Gyoungjin Gim et al. (+50 more)

We present Solar Open 2, a 250B-A15B Mixture-of-Experts language model built for long-horizon agentic tasks, scaled up from Solar Open 1 (Solar Open 100B). To hold entire agent trajectories in a single context, Solar Open 2 reaches a 1M-token window through a hybrid attention stack that interleaves one softmax layer among every three linear-attention layers, using no positional encoding and a gated delta rule extended to negative eigenvalues. To train at this scale under a fixed compute budget, we make training efficient in two ways: a stronger starting point, and higher-value data. For the starting point, we initialize Solar Open 2 from Solar Open 1, transferring the 5.69B-parameter shared skeleton that survives the architectural change and learning everything else through full pre-training. For the data, we curate for value per token: quality- and rarity-aware data curation and mixture-ratio optimization refine a 20T pool into a 10T mixture that, at equal token budget, outperforms the Solar Open 1 recipe. To build its agent skills, we train twelve domain specialists across purpose-built scenarios, then consolidate them into a single model by Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Against comparably sized open-weight models on English benchmarks, Solar Open 2 leads on MMLU-Pro, LiveCodeBench, and the APEX-Agents agentic suite, and stays competitive with the strongest (DeepSeek-V4-Flash and MiMo-V2.5) elsewhere. On Korean benchmarks, Solar Open 2 records the highest average of any model compared, including fast-tier closed APIs, and on Ko-GDPval, an in-house Korean officework-agent benchmark, it is competitive with DeepSeek-V4-Pro (1.6T) at less than a sixth of its size.
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All authors Sungrae Park, Sanghoon Kim, Gyoungjin Gim, Jungho Cho, Hyunwoong Ko, Minbyul Jeong, Minjeong Kim, Keunwoo Choi, Chaehun Shin, Chanwoong Yoon, Dongjun Kim, Eunwon Kim, Gyungin Shin, Hyeonju Lee, Hyungkyu Kang, Inseo Song, Jisu Bae, Jiyoon Han, Jiyun Lee, Joonkee Kim, Junyeop Lee, Mikyoung Cha, Sangwon Yu, Sehwan Joo, Seokyoon Kang, Seonghoon Yang, Seung Shin, Seunghyun Lee, Seungseop Lim, Seungyoun Shin, Sukyung Lee, Taegyeong Eo, Taehwan Oh, Taewhoo Lee, Wonho Song, Wonjun Oh, Wonseok Hwang, Yunsu Kim, Yura Shim, Hwalsuk Lee, Sunghun Kim, Du-Seong Chang, Kyunghyun Cho, Seungju Han, Yejin Choi, Junsuk Choe, Hwaran Lee, Minjeong Ban, Yun Taewon, Hwanjun Song, Jae-Gil Lee, KyungTae Lim, Alice Oh

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Reading and Steering Representations of Materials-Science Mechanisms in an Open-Weight Language Model

Markus J. Buehler

Large language models can answer scientific questions, yet a correct output does not reveal whether the model represents or uses the governing physics. Here, using three open-weight Gemma 4 models (google/gemma-4-E4B-it, google/gemma-4-12B-it, google/gemma-4-31B-it) we identify three experimentally separable signatures of materials-science mechanism information: selective concept readability, relational encoding of qualitative constitutive orientation, and causal, context-dependent control of constrained engineering answers. We combine matched direct and Jacobian vocabulary readouts, option-free state geometry, a 60-law counterfactual benchmark and causal interventions. In 50 held-out materials descriptions, three independently fitted Jacobian lenses reproduced concept ranks, and target-free word sets from both readouts enabled blinded identification of 9 of 10 mechanism families. A separate 72-prompt benchmark produced mechanism-specific hidden-state neighborhoods, but an exact graph audit showed that this apparent physical organization was equally explained by numerical comparison. We therefore compared otherwise identical prompts in which only the direction of the physical input was reversed, asking whether the resulting hidden-state movement followed the supplied constitutive law. These state transformations ordered direct, physically neutral and inverse laws across 60 frozen relations and correctly oriented 39 of 40 directional laws, whereas lexical controls were near chance. Bidirectional interventions shifted answer probabilities toward or away from the physically appropriate outcome across all 12 matched cases, while counterfactual state patches transferred opposing decision signals across mechanisms and answer formats. Physical relationships were therefore more visible in controlled state changes than in absolute states alone.
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Computation and Language

Language-Specific versus Cross-Lingual Knowledge Graphs for Implicit Aspect Identification in Arabic: A Comparative Study of Reasoning and Adaptation Strategies

Lujain A. Alawwad

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) in Arabic must recover both explicitly stated aspects and implicit aspects that are never named in the text. Implicit identification typically relies on an auxiliary knowledge source (e.g., a knowledge graph (KG)) linking opinion cues to aspect categories, but for a lower-resource language the practitioner faces a design choice: reuse a mature English KG through multilingual embeddings, or build a smaller native Arabic KG. This paper reports a controlled comparison of the two strategies within a single hybrid pipeline, evaluated on three Arabic benchmarks (M-ABSA, SemEval-2016 Arabic, and HAAD). We further compare two adaptation strategies for the generative extractor that feeds the KG – zero-shot prompting versus task-specific fine-tuning of an 8B-parameter large language model (LLM). The native Arabic KG (Strategy 2) outperforms the cross-lingual English KG (Strategy 1) by +0.199 micro-F1 on M-ABSA and +0.251 on SemEval-2016, gaining on both precision and recall. Task-specific fine-tuning raises explicit-extraction micro-F1 from <= 0.13 (zero-shot) to 0.66-0.76 on M-ABSA and SemEval-2016 (0.45 on the smaller HAAD), confirming that task adaptation, rather than model scale, is decisive in a morphologically rich language.
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Computation and Language

TalentCLEF at CLEF2026: Skill and Job Title Intelligence for Human Capital Management

Luis Gasco, Hermenegildo Fabregat, Laura García-Sardiña et al. (+5 more)

This paper presents the second edition of the TalentCLEF Challenge, which will run as an evaluation lab as part of CLEF 2026. The aim of TalentCLEF is to promote the development of systems and methods that use Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the field of Human Capital Management (HCM), fostering approaches that ensure fairness in results, operate across multiple languages, and adapt to diverse industries. To this end, TalentCLEF establishes public benchmarks where research teams can compare methods and share findings, moving the field toward more practical and impactful NLP solutions that effectively address the real needs of workforce management. This year's lab will feature two tasks designed to foster the development and evaluation of systems that support key HCM activities such as talent matching, upskilling, reskilling, and skill gap detection: (i) Task A - Contextualized Job-Person Matching, focused on retrieving and ranking suitable candidates for specific job positions using context-rich and privacy-preserving data; and (ii) Task B - Job-Skill Matching with Skill Type Classification, centered on identifying relevant skills for a given job title and classifying them by their type within the job profile. TalentCLEF website: https://talentclef.github.io/talentclef/
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All authors Luis Gasco, Hermenegildo Fabregat, Laura García-Sardiña, Paula Estrella, Casimiro Pio Carrino, Daniel Deniz, Alvaro Rodrigo, Rabih Zbib

Computation and Language

TINY_SCHILLER: A Drop-In German Drama Corpus for Small Language Models

Mark Schutera

tiny_schiller closes the small-language-model prototyping, fine-tuning, education, and research gap for German literary text, providing a single-file, drop-in counterpart to Karpathy's tiny_shakespeare. The available German literary corpora are larger and richer, but require parser engineering before a single line of training or fine-tuning code can run. tiny_schiller is a 2.07-megabyte single file of eleven public-domain Schiller dramas, sourced from DraCor's GerDraCor export (CC0) and processed by deterministic parser engineering. Character-level, GPT-2 byte-pair encoding, and cl100k_base tokenization splits, an instruction-formatted dialogue-completion split, and 89 per-character persona splits load from a single HuggingFace call. A small language model literally reaches German literary text in one line of code.
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Computation and Language

When Does Knowledge Distillation Hurt? Reliability-Aware Distillation for Low-Resource Language Summarization

Dipto Sumit, Ankan Kumar Roy Srizon, Sadia Khair Rodela et al. (+4 more)

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a standard approach for compressing sequence-to-sequence models, but its per-sample effects are rarely examined. On the BanSum Bangla summarization benchmark, we find that standard KD improves ROUGE-L by only +0.0003 over a cross-entropy baseline, and that approximately 51.3% of training samples are estimated to actively harm student validation loss under standard KD. We propose two complementary reliability-aware distillation methods. CHAD (Counterfactual Harm-Aware Distillation) measures per-sample KD usefulness via gradient alignment with the validation loss direction and trains a lightweight gate that generalizes this counterfactual judgment to the full training set. EWAD+CPDP combines token-level entropy-weighted adaptive distillation with a capacity-proportional geometric constraint from a second, vocabulary-incompatible teacher. On BanSum, both methods substantially outperform standard KD: CHAD by +0.0173 ROUGE-L and EWAD+CPDP by +0.0219 ROUGE-L, where standard KD itself improves ROUGE-L by only +0.0003; despite using only 60M parameters, both outperform a fine-tuned Qwen 2.5-3B model (50x larger). We further evaluate the stronger method, EWAD+CPDP, across 15 typologically diverse XL-Sum languages organised into three sets, beating the CE-only baseline on 10/15 languages; gains are most reliable where the two teachers contribute complementary signal, and weakest where they have saturated or jointly weak target-language coverage. We release code and trained models to support reproducibility and further research on selective distillation.
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All authors Dipto Sumit, Ankan Kumar Roy Srizon, Sadia Khair Rodela, Atia Haque Asha, Mourchona Afrin, Niloy Farhan, Farig Sadeque

Computation and Language

A Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Explainability in Media Bias Detection

Ting Chen, Raina Zhang, Benjamin M. Ampel et al. (+1 more)

Detecting media bias automatically is difficult because biased framing is often subtle, yet in domains such as news analysis, accurate predictions alone are insufficient without explanations that reflect the model's underlying reasoning. We present a multi-dimensional evaluation of explainability in encoder-based media bias detection using the Bias Annotations By Experts (BABE) dataset. Specifically, we study BERT and RoBERTa as classifiers (base and large variants) along three complementary axes: predictive performance, explanation plausibility (token-level alignment with expert rationales), and mechanistic faithfulness (whether compact sets of attention heads recover predictive signal under counterfactual rationale masking). To induce variation in plausibility, we additionally investigate attention-supervised finetuning, which incorporates expert rationale annotations as an auxiliary training signal. Attention supervision serves as an intervention on attribution plausibility, while the effectiveness of attribution methods varies substantially across architectures. Circuit analysis further reveals substantial variation in mechanistic recoverability across architectures, suggesting that model scale alone does not determine circuit compressibility. Taken together, our findings suggest that predictive performance, attribution plausibility, and mechanistic faithfulness characterize different aspects of model behavior and should be evaluated separately when studying explainability in media bias detection.
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All authors Ting Chen, Raina Zhang, Benjamin M. Ampel, Sagar Samtani

Computation and Language

Efficient Chain-of-Modality Reasoning via Progressive Compression for Spoken Language Models

Pengchao Feng, Chao-Hong Tan, Qian Chen et al. (+3 more)

Spoken language models (SLMs) enable natural human-computer interaction, but their reasoning ability still lags behind that of text-based large language models, especially on spoken mathematical question answering tasks. One important reason is that SLMs reason over purely verbalized mathematical expressions, which are harder to interpret than symbolic text. However, directly transferring text-based reasoning to SLMs is nontrivial due to architectural constraints and the additional computational requirements. To address this challenge, we propose Efficient Chain-of-Modality Reasoning (ECoM Reasoning), the first framework to introduce compressed reasoning into SLMs. By compressing the textual component so that it jointly serves as speech guidance and reasoning representation, ECoM Reasoning improves reasoning accuracy while using a smaller token budget than the standard Chain-of-Modality (CoM) architecture, which generates intermediate text before speech. To train this capability, we further propose Progressive Compression, a curriculum-based strategy that gradually trains the model from full-form reasoning to compressed reasoning. Experiments on spoken mathematical question answering benchmarks show that ECoM Reasoning improves accuracy by 21% over standard CoM without explicit reasoning, and by 3% over CoM with full reasoning traces while using only 40% of the text tokens, demonstrating that it enhances SLM reasoning while remaining inference-efficient.
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All authors Pengchao Feng, Chao-Hong Tan, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Xiangang Li, Xie Chen

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

JANUS: Foreseeing Latent Risk for Long-Horizon Agent Safety

Yuan Xiong, Linji Hao, Shizhu He et al. (+2 more)

Agent safety is moving from content moderation toward preventing operational failures before tool-using agents act. We propose Janus, a foresight-oriented framework for long-horizon agent safety that trains guards to anticipate delayed risks from partial trajectories. Janus synthesizes diverse agent trajectories via multi-agent simulation and learns a shared policy with two coupled tasks: an anticipation task that forecasts safety-relevant futures and an adjudication task that decides safety from both the observed prefix and anticipated future. The two tasks are jointly optimized with CoAA-RL, which rewards forecasts by their utility for downstream safety judgment. The resulting guard model, Vanguard, blocks unsafe actions before execution. Across four agent-safety benchmarks, Vanguard improves average protection by 15.9 percentage points over baseline guards while increasing benign task completion by 5.1 percentage points.
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All authors Yuan Xiong, Linji Hao, Shizhu He, Yequan Wang, Lijun Li

Computation and Language

Overview of FinMMEval 2026 Task 2: Multilingual Financial Short-Answer Question Answering

Zhuohan Xie, Xueqing Peng, Georgi Georgiev et al. (+18 more)

FinMMEval 2026 Task 2 evaluates short-answer financial question answering over multilingual evidence. Each final-test item pairs an English question with financial statements and news in English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Greek. Participating systems submit one concise answer per item in JSONL format. The final-test set contains 256 items, split evenly between easy and expert tiers; each tier contains four question templates instantiated over 32 company-report groups. Gold answers were withheld during submission, and systems were ranked by macro-averaged item-level ROUGE-1 F1 against organizer-held reference answers. The final leaderboard includes 12 ranked submissions. The strongest systems are closely clustered, with the top four separated by less than one percentage point in ROUGE-1 F1. The submitted system papers document retrieval-augmented generation, cross-lingual evidence handling, structured prompting, answer compression, and validation strategies.
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All authors Zhuohan Xie, Xueqing Peng, Georgi Georgiev, Dimitar Dimitrov, Yuyang Dai, Rania Elbadry, Vanshikaa Jani, Lingfei Qian, Fan Zhang, Jimin Huang, Jiahui Geng, Yankai Chen, Ye Yuan, Haolun Wu, Yuxia Wang, Ivan Koychev, Veselin Stoyanov, Mingzi Song, Yu Chen, Xue Liu, Preslav Nakov

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

DocOps: A Verifiable Benchmark for Autonomous Agents in Complex Document Operations

Jiazhen Jiang, Boxi Cao, Lingyong Yan et al. (+6 more)

As autonomous agents rapidly evolve, their ability to reliably manipulate ubiquitous digital documents has become critical for enabling general-purpose AI assistants and automating complex workspace workflows. In this paper, we introduce DocOps, a deterministically verifiable evaluation framework underpinned by a hierarchical taxonomy that deconstructs document operations inspired by real-world practices into atomic dimensions and escalating workflow complexities. Based on DocOps, we systematically evaluate representative closed- and open-source models across various agentic harnesses, revealing that even the most advanced frontier configurations still exhibit profound limitations when handling highly coupled, long-range tasks. Furthermore, a fine-grained analysis of existing agents' manipulation behaviors uncovers 3 key failure modes: long-term state tracking collapse, shallow semantic verification, and destructive editing of structural metadata. Ultimately, our work exposes the capability boundaries of agents in maintaining global document consistency, shedding light on the future design of robust, non-destructive agents for complex digital ecosystems.
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All authors Jiazhen Jiang, Boxi Cao, Lingyong Yan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Computation and Language

Overview of FinMMEval 2026 Task 1: Multilingual Financial Multiple-Choice Question Answering

Zhuohan Xie, Yuyang Dai, Rania Elbadry et al. (+18 more)

FinMMEval 2026 Task 1 evaluates multilingual financial multiple-choice question answering in English, Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi. The task tests whether systems can select the correct answer to finance questions involving domain terminology, numerical interpretation, and conceptual financial reasoning across languages and scripts. The final-test set contains 800 questions, with 200 questions per language; gold answers were withheld during submission, and each language was ranked independently by accuracy. The final leaderboards contain 13 English, 11 Chinese, 11 Arabic, and 10 Hindi ranked submissions. Top accuracies range from 92.0% in Hindi to 97.5% in English and Arabic, with the same leading teams appearing near the top across all four languages. The documented systems used retrieval augmentation, direct answer-option scoring, language-specific prompting, selective self-consistency, confidence checks, and LLM-based review stages.
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All authors Zhuohan Xie, Yuyang Dai, Rania Elbadry, Vanshikaa Jani, Georgi Georgiev, Dimitar Dimitrov, Fan Zhang, Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Jimin Huang, Jiahui Geng, Yankai Chen, Ye Yuan, Haolun Wu, Yuxia Wang, Ivan Koychev, Veselin Stoyanov, Mingzi Song, Yu Chen, Xue Liu, Preslav Nakov

Computation and Language

emb-diversity: A Tool for Embedding-Based Measurement of Data Diversity

Cantao Su, Menan Velayuthan, Esther Ploeger et al. (+2 more)

There is growing evidence that data diversity is crucial for developing fair and robust NLP models. However, current approaches to measure diversity remain inconsistent and fragmented: While there exist a number of tools for measuring the lexical diversity of texts, researchers lack standardized tools for quantifying diversity based on embeddings. Embedding-based diversity measures are highly flexible: They work with any embedding model and any data that can be embedded, and are thus applicable to many notions of diversity. With emb-diversity, we provide a comprehensive embedding-based diversity measurement tool, spanning a broad range of measures. We demonstrate its potential for several use cases: measuring the stylistic, semantic, language and speaker diversity of datasets. https://github.com/nlpsoc/emb-diversity/
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All authors Cantao Su, Menan Velayuthan, Esther Ploeger, Dong Nguyen, Anna Wegmann

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Auto-Fill: Learning to Predict Missing Values Accurately with Specialist Language Models

Yurong Liu, Yeye He, Haoyu Dong et al. (+4 more)

Predicting missing cell values in tabular data is a fundamental problem in data cleaning. While state-of-the-art reasoning models show great promise in predicting missing values in tables, by reasoning holistically across rows and columns, they are costly to deploy at scale and tend to be overconfident, often generating hallucinated or false-positive predictions. In this paper, we observe that achieving high-precision missing-value prediction in tables requires a distinct combination of three capabilities: (1) world knowledge, (2) text-based reasoning, and (3) code-based reasoning. We systematically explore design choices for combining these capabilities, and propose an Auto-Fill approach that post-trains three specialist small language models (SLMs), each optimized for one capability. We develop a calibrated ensemble mechanism that either dynamically selects the most confident specialist or abstains, ensuring high accuracy. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmarks with 2200 real tables drawn from diverse domains show that Auto-Fill achieves superior accuracy compared to state-of-the-art reasoning models (e.g., o3-pro, Gemini 3 Pro, and DeepSeek R1), while operating at a fraction (less than 1%) of the cost of these frontier models. Our results highlight the effectiveness of specialization and calibrated abstention in the important domain of tabular data. Auto-Fill is publicly available at https://github.com/lyrain2001/auto-fill.
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All authors Yurong Liu, Yeye He, Haoyu Dong, Junjie Xing, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang, Surajit Chaudhuri

Computation and Language

Sentence Splitter: Uncovering Latent Factual Structure for Self-Supervised Learning

Ahmad Pouramini and Mahsa Afsharizadeh

This paper introduces Sentence Splitter, a self-supervised framework built upon a T5-based encoder–decoder architecture for uncovering the latent factual structure of natural language sentences. The proposed method identifies the semantic boundary between a descriptive prefix (head) and its factual completion (tail) by formulating sentence splitting as a discrete segmentation problem, where a sentence of length $N$ admits $N$ possible split points but only one recovers the intended head–tail structure. Rather than explicitly searching over all candidate boundaries, the model learns to recover the factual completion through probabilistic sequence generation. To eliminate the need for manual annotation, symbolic head–tail pairs are first verbalized into natural-language templates that provide supervision for training the Sentence Splitter. The trained splitter is then applied to raw text to extract aligned prefix–tail pairs, which are subsequently used to train a generative model that proposes additional plausible completions through a lightweight bootstrapping process. This unified pipeline provides a scalable and structure-aware approach to constructing self-supervised training data while bridging symbolic knowledge and natural language. Experiments on both structured and naturally occurring text demonstrate that the proposed splitter generalizes beyond synthetic templates and that the resulting structure-aware supervision consistently improves downstream performance on knowledge graph completion and commonsense question answering, highlighting the effectiveness of recovering latent factual structure for knowledge-centric NLP.
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Computation and Language

D2VBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models with Value Dilemmas in Daily Scenarios

Siyi Hao, Yidi Cao, Linhao Yu et al. (+2 more)

With the wide application of large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios, the value implication of their outputs is crucial. However, existing evaluation benchmarks suffer from insufficient coverage of value dilemmas in daily scenarios involving multiple value conflicts and simplistic evaluation formalisms that fail to assess LLMs' value alignment. To address these issues, we propose D2VBench, a value alignment benchmark comprising 10,000 instances of real daily dilemma scenarios constructed through a multi-stage collaboration between LLMs and humans, grounded in 158 manually annotated fine-grained value concepts. For evaluation on the benchmark, we present a hybrid evaluation paradigm that integrates multiple-choice questions with open-ended questions. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on eight mainstream LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that D2VBench exhibits high reliability and robustness, effectively reflecting the LLMs' alignment across different value categories and dimensions, and providing a more realistic and fine-grained tool for research on value alignment. The dataset is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/D2VBench.
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All authors Siyi Hao, Yidi Cao, Linhao Yu, Yuqi Ren, Deyi Xiong