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Computer Science Computation and Language

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Sunday 4 October

Computation and Language

Towards cross-cultural study of folksong lyrics with machine translation

Anna Dvořáková, Anna Aljanaki, Danbinaerin Han et al. (+5 more)

Music is universally present in human societies. Ethnomusicologists have long been documenting the diverse expressions of human musicality, and comparative musicology has recently brought several studies of folksong to a more global scale. Such cross-cultural research has not been conducted on lyrics: the language barrier has so far prevented work with multi-lingual data. However, Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies have reached a stage where this language barrier may no longer be prohibitive. Combining folksong lyrics corpora across five languages, we machine-translate them to a pivot language with a pre-trained neural topic model, and we examine the relationship between content and social function within each language, and across languages for wedding songs. As expected, human evaluation of translation results shows that non-Indo-European languages suffer from overall worse translation quality. Experiments with topic models then indicate that the content of lyrics is at best partially related to the social function of folksongs across all languages. These experiments are just first steps into cross-cultural folk musics lyrics analysis; however, they do indicate that a previously unobserved web of cross-cultural relationships beyond ethnomusicological typologies may be uncovered through the study of what people sing across the world's diverse folk musics.
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All authors Anna Dvořáková, Anna Aljanaki, Danbinaerin Han, Peter van Kranenburg, Matěj Kratochvíl, Inna Lisniak, Zdeněk Vejvoda, Jan Hajič jr

Computation and Language

Self-Generated Feedback Destabilizes Test-Time Training: A Causal Decomposition of Long-Horizon Adaptation

Cheng Luo, Bing Li and Bernard Ghanem

Test-time training (TTT) lets a model store information in its weights during inference. When the model learns from its own output, however, each update also changes the model that generates the next training example. Across 128K-token streams, retaining generated-text updates worsens prediction on independent human-written text with three TTT-E2E model configurations (labeled 125M, 760M, and 3B). The same failure occurs when Adam updates Qwen3-4B's existing weights. The same update mechanisms can improve on real text, so writing itself is not the failure. Three matched comparisons trace the causal pathway. Fixed Generation removes over 98% of the damage at 125M and 760M by using a frozen model to generate training chunks. Recorded Replay separates the loss caused by reading degraded text from the additional loss stored by updating on it. A paired one-update comparison then shows the local conflict: an update predicts its source better but new real text worse. This cost grows after Closed Loop adaptation, with a few trajectories accounting for most large failures. Finally, Settlement evaluates the candidate state on independent real text before commitment. It leaves mean endpoint gaps of 0.07 and -0.02 nats at 125M and 760M while retaining real-text adaptation. These results motivate checking prediction on independent evidence before retaining an update.
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Computation and Language

Usage-Modulated Sentiment Representations in Large Language Models

Hongfei Du, Jiacheng Shi, Yanfu Zhang et al. (+2 more)

Prior work suggests that sentiment can often be captured by approximately linear directions in LLM activation spaces, but a single direction may not fully capture sentiment representations. In natural communication, sentiment is shaped not only by polarity but also by usage factors, such as tone and audience adaptation. We test whether these factors systematically modulate sentiment representations beyond a shared sentiment direction. We construct a controlled paired dataset that holds event content fixed while varying sentiment polarity and usage factors, and analyze Llama, Mistral, and Gemma. We identify a shared sentiment direction, remove it, and test the residual structure through erasure and generation-time tone steering. Across models, the shared direction is robust (median cosine 0.953-0.975), yet removing it leaves 0.833-0.909 of the original positive-negative representation-difference norm. The residuals contain compact, reproducible usage-conditioned structure. Targeted erasure weakens held-out usage metrics more than random and label-shuffled controls. On Llama, outputs steered along residualized tone components are preferred in 92.8% of blind target-tone comparisons while preserving the requested sentiment polarity in 98.7% of evaluated outputs.
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All authors Hongfei Du, Jiacheng Shi, Yanfu Zhang, Gang Zhou, Ye Gao

Computation and Language

AraYoungVoices: A Diverse L1/L2 Corpus of Arabic Child and Adolescent Speech

Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Zien Sheikh Ali, Houssam Eddine-Othman Lachemat et al. (+1 more)

State-of-the-art ASR systems primarily target native adult speech, leading to substantial performance gaps for children, adolescents, and L2 speakers. We introduce AraYoungVoices, a 151.72-hour Arabic read-speech corpus from 286 speakers aged 7–18, comprising AraKids (7–12) and AraTeens (13–18). The corpus includes 146 native Arabic (L1) and 140 second-language (L2) speakers, with native speakers spanning Egyptian, Gulf, Levantine, and North African dialectal backgrounds and L2 speakers representing diverse linguistic backgrounds across the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. We benchmark four pretrained ASR models under zero-shot and fine-tuned settings using unseen-speaker-$\&$-unseen-prompt (USUP) and unseen-speaker-$\&$-seen-prompt (USSP) evaluations. Results show that L2 speech remains substantially more challenging than L1 speech, with the largest errors observed mainly for younger L2 speakers. Age-specific fine-tuning improves the matched age group, while joint fine-tuning provides a stronger balance across populations. ASR hypotheses are also consistently closer to the standard reading prompt than to the verbatim transcription, particularly for L2 speech, suggesting partial normalization of reading deviations.
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All authors Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Zien Sheikh Ali, Houssam Eddine-Othman Lachemat, Hamdy Mubarak

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.MA

Communication Shapes Collective Inference in Self-Adapting LLM Societies: Evidence from Mafia

Haonan Huang and Joey Xiao

When does communication help a group identify hidden adversaries, and how does its value change as the group adapts? In Mafia, an informed minority hides inside an uninformed majority whose only evidence is open play. The zero-information game, where each day's vote eliminates a random player, is exactly solved and scores every society; matched-casting comparisons between protocols identify the effect of communication. Societies of 8-100 claude-haiku-4-5 agents (7,416 analyzed games, 1.9M model calls) adapt by rewriting and inheriting private strategy notes. Simultaneous broadcast improves adversary identification over silence in all nine compositions tested (8-46 players). Turn-taking removes most of this advantage; its voting landslides are as frequent as broadcast's but land on mafia near chance (1.08x versus 2.53x). At 70 players, agents reading eight statements per day identify adversaries worse than silent ones, and limited talk is worth less than at 46 players. Adaptation is fast but need not help. In their first broadcast games, citizens announce their role far more often than mafia (91% vs. 30%) and first-day votes find mafia at three times chance; within two generations citizens stop announcing and the cue fades, a change the inherited notes carry. In controlled redeployments at 16 players, societies carrying sixty generations of their own notes score below societies with none. Communication shapes both collective inference and the signals it depends on, so a protocol's value must be measured together with the adaptation that changes those signals.
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Computation and Language

Causal Improvement Graph for Agentic Harness Optimization

Junjie Zhang, Shunyu Liu, Haoyu Wang et al. (+3 more)

Agentic Harness is the runtime that constructs task context and controls execution flow, thereby shaping overall agent performance. Given a fixed model and external evaluation, automated Harness optimization seeks to improve this runtime through an iterative proposal–evaluation loop to better solve target tasks. Existing meta-harness methods mainly adopt proposer-centric discovery, in which an LLM-based proposer integrates accumulated experimental findings to determine subsequent Harness revisions. This places the burden of maintaining the evolving improvement state on the proposer as history expands and its underlying experimental logic becomes harder to discern. In this paper, we introduce the Causal Improvement Graph (CIG), a graph-governed meta-harness framework that externalizes the evolving improvement state in a persistent graph, allowing prior findings to directly govern subsequent Harness optimization through local proposer operations. CIG grows and links Evidence, Hypothesis, Intervention, and Outcome nodes to represent what was observed, how it may be explained, how to test that explanation, and what the evaluation reveals. Their structural relations preserve how the improvement state changes across iterations, allowing local proposers to build directly on relations among prior findings rather than recover them from raw history. Across various agent tasks, CIG discovers stronger Harnesses than previous meta-harness baselines and remains robust to the choice of task solver and proposer. Structural ablations further support the design of an explicit improvement state with graph-governed evolution.
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All authors Junjie Zhang, Shunyu Liu, Haoyu Wang, Ting-En Lin, Yongbin Li, Dacheng Tao

Computation and Language

When LLMs Sit Above Diagnostic Tools: Unrealized Complementarity in Industrial Fault Diagnosis

Donghwan Kim

Large language models are increasingly used as integration layers above specialized tools, but a stronger component does not necessarily produce a stronger combined system. Across five diagnostic datasets (bearing vibration, process monitoring, semiconductor equipment), we study whether an LLM can reliably use external diagnostic information; paired repeat calls separate advice effects from output instability. In all five, conflicting external information overturned initially correct LLM judgments. Among the four datasets with direct integration comparisons, none showed a consistent advantage for implicit LLM integration over the stronger standalone source. On a Tennessee Eastman confirmation set whose protocol was fixed before evaluation, unaided accuracy was 64.67%, implicit LLM-specialist integration 77.43%, and the specialist alone 83.33%. Specialist information improved the LLM by 12.8 points (95% interval 9.7 to 15.9), yet the integrated output stayed 5.9 points below the specialist (95% interval -12.0 to -0.7). A two-source selector oracle reached 92.76%, indicating complementarity that the integrated output did not fully realize. The integrated output missed 140 of 295 specialist corrections (47.5%) but lost 15 of 99 initially correct LLM judgments (15.2%). The deficit remained under prompt and specialist sensitivity analyses. Among CWRU cases solved under both evidence presentations, task-aligned physical evidence yielded lower estimates of susceptibility to incorrect advice in six of seven models (five intervals excluding zero); higher reasoning effort gave no reliable reduction in five models, and a separate four-model TEP analysis gave no clear evidence that it resolves the integration problem. Source quality and integration quality should be evaluated separately: an integration layer should be compared with its stronger standalone component, not only with the unaided LLM.
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Computation and Language

IREA: Intermediate Representation-based Embedding Alignment for Normative RAG

Mirae Han, Sihyeong Yeom and Harksoo Kim

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance across various tasks, but they still struggle with questions involving ethical judgment. Previous studies have attempted to train LLMs on ethical standards, but the diversity and relativity of ethical norms make them difficult to fully internalize in model parameters. As an alternative, we introduce normative RAG, a retrieval-augmented approach that supports ethical judgment using external normative knowledge. Normative retrieval involves a distinct asymmetry between context rich narrative queries and generalized normative statements. Existing factual retrieval methods rely on query-only expansion into a document-like form, making them insufficient for resolving this asymmetry. Therefore, we propose Intermediate Representation-based Embedding Alignment (IREA), a bidirectional alignment method that maps both text types into a shared situation-behavior representation. This representation captures ethically salient contextual and behavioral information in a normalized form, reducing surface-level discrepancies and improving alignment in the embedding space. Experimental results show that IREA improves normative retrieval and downstream ethical judgment across multiple settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of bidirectional alignment for normative RAG.
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Computation and Language

TrajLong: Co-Designing Agentic and Long-Context Supervision for Mid-Training

Miao Peng, Qintong Zhang, Nuo Chen et al. (+8 more)

LLM agents for coding, search, and workplace tasks increasingly rely on long-context capabilities to effectively aggregate and reason over extended interaction histories. Recent work has incorporated agent trajectories into mid-training stage, drawing on their naturally long and interaction-rich structure. Yet how to organize the information within these trajectories into effective mid-training supervision remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate the relationship between long-context and agent atomic capabilities and introduce TrajLong, a novel framework that compiles trajectories into long-context training tasks with dense supervision, targeting three representative atomic capabilities: evidence grounding, cross-evidence aggregation, and temporal state maintenance. We mid-train Qwen3-14B-Base and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Base with data compiled by TrajLong, followed by supervised fine-tuning. Experiments on 6 long-context and 12 agent benchmarks demonstrate broad performance gains, with controlled ablations showing improvements over raw and masked trajectory baselines. Capability-level analyses further reveal task-dependent associations between long-context and agent atomic capabilities. These findings suggest that the shared capability demands of long-context reasoning and agent execution provide a principled basis for designing mid-training data to develop downstream agent capabilities.
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All authors Miao Peng, Qintong Zhang, Nuo Chen, Yuhan Li, Guochen Yan, Xinran Gu, Hongqiu Wu, Hai Wang, Lydell Huang, Wentao Zhang, Jia Li

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

One Token Can Be Enough: Bridging Prompting and Activation Steering with Prefix Steering

Xudong Zhu and Zhihui Zhu

Prompting guides language model behavior through the initial context, whereas activation steering often intervenes throughout generation. A natural question is whether steering can produce effects on subsequent computation similar to those of prompting. Under fixed-state attention assumptions, we establish sufficient conditions for single- and multi-token steering to match prompt-induced attention-head outputs, and characterize how changes in input representations affect this match and its approximation error. This attention-level connection leads us to ask whether, at the behavioral level, steering can also guide subsequent generation through a brief initial intervention. We study Prefix Steering, which applies existing steering directions and operators over a short span starting at the final prompt token, with no further direct intervention afterward. We examine how intervention duration and strength jointly shape the control-capability trade-off. Across four models and five tasks, intervention over a short span, even a single token, often retains much of full steering's behavioral control while better preserving general capabilities, offering a trade-off competitive with, and in some settings better than, prompting and alternative steering-strength policies. Prefix Steering also remains effective on final-answer formatting tasks after reasoning, suggesting that a brief initial intervention can influence behavior expressed well after steering ends. These findings challenge the common practice of steering every generated token and motivate a more dynamical view of activation steering, in which a brief intervention can alter the trajectory of subsequent generation without continued intervention.
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Computation and Language

Building LLM Agent Systems the Deep Learning Way: From Modular Design to Architecture Search

Tao Feng, Pengrui Han, Zhongjie Dai et al. (+1 more)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI research and enabled exciting agent systems. To build a complex LLM agent system, most existing research relies on insights from other domains or heuristics to manually build the agent system. However, this approach often requires heavy hand-engineering and fails to fully optimize for the downstream task of interest. Inspired by the tremendous success of deep learning, we propose to construct LLM agent systems in a modular manner, similar to building a deep neural network. Our key insight is to make analogies between LLM building blocks, such as retrievals, memories, and prompting strategies, and the successful deep learning modules, such as MLPs, attention, and recurrent modules. We further design forward inference and feedback mechanisms for LLMs, where prompts in LLMs are considered as the weights in deep models, and the prompt optimization from feedback is analogous to the back-propagation algorithm. We additionally leverage a search algorithm to search for the best configuration of LLM agent systems, similar to the neural architecture search (NAS) in deep learning research. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed deep learning recipe for LLM agent systems is highly effective, in particular: (1) Organizing LLM modules into deep-learning-style architectures yields noticeable performance gain; (2) Automatic prompt optimization, equivalent to backpropagation, is efficient in incorporating feedback from the task of interest and achieves at least 5% performance improvement; (3) NAS equivalent algorithm works well for further optimizing the LLM agent system architecture with 11% performance gain compared with randomly designed architectures. Overall, our research demonstrates the exciting opportunity of transferring the success of deep learning to building LLM agent systems.
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All authors Tao Feng, Pengrui Han, Zhongjie Dai, Jiaxuan You

Computation and Language

From Overloaded to Guaranteed: High-Throughput Multi-SLO Enforcement for LoRA-Assisted On-Premise LLM Deployment

Zeshen Zhang, Han Zhao, Weihao Cui et al. (+9 more)

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become essential in privacy-sensitive sectors like hospitals and government agencies, the on-premise LLM servers offer a cost-effective and secure alternative to public cloud services. However, these resource-constrained servers struggle to guarantee heterogeneous Service Level Objectives (SLOs) when serving multiple LoRA-adapted services simultaneously. Existing serving frameworks suffer from severe SLO violations due to the computational overhead of LoRA layers and the rigid nature of batch scheduling. To address this, we propose HALO, a scheduling method tailored for LoRA-assisted on-premise LLM deployment. HALO introduces two key innovations: a spatial multiplexing strategy that overlaps Base and LoRA computations by partitioning GPU Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), and an SLO-aware scheduler that decouples request execution based on "request-level slack." By prioritizing urgent tasks and utilizing idle budget for traffic shaping, HALO significantly mitigates resource contention. Our evaluation demonstrates that HALO minimizes SLO violations while improving throughput compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
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All authors Zeshen Zhang, Han Zhao, Weihao Cui, Quan Chen, Yu Liu, Yongjun Deng, Jing Yang, Jiuchen Shi, Chen Chen, Youmin Chen, Yu Feng, Minyi Guo

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Residual Visual Credit Optimization: Conserved Evidence Routing for Multimodal Reinforcement Learning

Lin Qiu, Yao Liu, Diyi Hu et al. (+6 more)

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards scales multimodal reasoning, but an outcome reward says how much a trajectory is worth, not how that value should be spread over the decisions that produced it. We introduce Residual Visual Credit Optimization (RVCO), which treats token credit as a conserved routing problem. A controlled visual intervention yields a per-token evidence response; robust within-trajectory coordinates remove incidental scale; and a budgeted entropic router distributes a fixed amount of sequence utility according to perceptual dependence. A residual support path guarantees positive credit at every valid position, and an analytic correction restores the prescribed credit mass exactly. The resulting field is selective, bounded, full-support, and invariant to response-local score shifts, and recovers hard token selection as a limiting case. Across four model families and seven reasoning benchmarks, RVCO improves accuracy over strong RLVR baselines while maintaining late-stage optimization stability, corruption robustness, and competitive training cost. Rewards, rollouts, and the group-relative advantage estimator are unchanged; only the geometry of token-level credit differs.
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All authors Lin Qiu, Yao Liu, Diyi Hu, Hanqing Zeng, Onur Gungor, Chujie Chen, Jiayi Liu, Jianyu Wang, XueLin Zheng

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Monitorability Disposition in Large Reasoning Models

Shahriar Golchin and Marc Wetter

Monitoring the chain-of-thought (CoT) of large reasoning models (LRMs) is a common way to detect misbehavior in real-world practice. However, current monitoring is passive: a separate model inspects the session only after execution. This means harm may already have occurred before it is caught. An active alternative is to have the model self-report its misbehavior as it happens. Whether models are willing to do this, however, is unknown. We introduce "monitorability disposition": a model's willingness to make itself monitorable and stay monitored throughout inference when warranted. We measure it as the fraction of warranted cases in which a model self-reports its own misbehavior via tool calls to available monitoring channels. We evaluate four LRMs on three misbehaviors (sycophancy, reward hacking, and bias) while varying the available monitors (AI and human) and the pressure to use the monitoring tools. We find that when tool use is optional, models self-report in only about 16% of warranted cases on average. Increasing tool-use pressure does not improve reporting where it matters: high-severity misbehavior is never self-reported. Models also systematically select the monitor they perceive as least strict. Overall, we identify monitorability disposition as a new contributing factor to model monitorability: when sufficiently strong, it keeps models seeking monitorability throughout inference.
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Computation and Language

Scaling Verifiable Environments for Long-horizon Work Agents

Jiazheng Zhang, Long Ma, Yunxian Yang et al. (+24 more)

Work agents operate over digital artifacts to execute professional knowledge-intensive work, requiring training environments that support long-horizon interaction and trustworthy verification. However, hand-crafted environments incur prohibitive engineering overhead that prevents environment scaling, whereas synthesis methods sacrifice workspace complexity, realism, or grounded verifiability. To bridge this gap, we introduce WorkForge, a scalable synthesis framework for constructing verifiable work-agent environments from real-world resources. Starting from expert workflows, WorkForge first identifies the resources, decisions, and deliverables required by each workflow. It then retrieves relevant real-world files and organizes them into a workspace. WorkForge inspects the workspace to extract concrete, checkable facts about its content. These factual anchors fix which task types the workspace can support and how their outcomes can be verified. Therefore, WorkForge derives each task's instructions, solution plan, and complementary programmatic and semantic verifiers directly from these factual anchors, keeping verification traceable to observable workspace evidence. Furthermore, we construct 16.7K verifiable environments across 40 professional domains, with workspaces collectively covering 60 file types. Post-training Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-Base improves GDPVal from 45.5 to 73.6 and APEX Score from 5.0 to 21.3, while enabling Qwen3.5-27B to achieve highly competitive performance and outperform strong competitors. Our analyses confirm the efficacy of the proposed method and reveal consistent scaling behaviors across both data volume and interaction horizons.
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All authors Jiazheng Zhang, Long Ma, Yunxian Yang, Zhiheng Xi, Zhikai Lei, Yajie Yang, Chenyang Liao, Enyu Zhou, Yang Nan, Yuchen Tian, Senjie Jin, Yibo Wang, Wei He, Boyang Liu, Jixuan Huang, Xin Guo, Shutong Jiang, Zhezheng Hao, Xinbing Liang, Zhihao Zhang, Changzhi Zhou, Wiggin Zhou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Clarenceai, Aiden Adams

Computation and Language

Rewrite What Matters: Adaptive Multilingual Query Rewriting for Reasoning via Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Rui Qi, Yufeng Chen, Yunlong Liang et al. (+6 more)

In multilingual scenarios, queries with equivalent semantics but in different languages could guide the model into different reasoning trajectories, leading to performance disparities. To mitigate this gap, previous studies typically apply a one-size-fits-all query rewriting strategy, such as translation, which overlooks the fact that different scenarios require diverse types of semantic transformations. In this paper, we propose mRewriter-R1, an agentic multilingual query rewriting framework with reinforcement learning. Unlike single-turn rewriting, mRewriter-R1 formulates multilingual query rewriting as a multi-turn sequential decision-making process, where the model dynamically performs multi-aspect optimization through adaptive operator selection. Experimental results demonstrate that mRewriter-R1 outperforms all strong multilingual rewriting baselines on different large reasoning backbones. Further analyses show that the learned policy can adaptively decide on rewriting operators according to query characteristics, exhibiting strong generalization ability across diverse reasoning tasks, and plug-and-play compatibility with heterogeneous reasoning language models.
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All authors Rui Qi, Yufeng Chen, Yunlong Liang, Chuan Meng, Sijin Lu, Ge Shi, Jinan Xu, Fandong Meng, Kaiyu Huang

Computation and Language

A Systematic Analysis of the Predictive Power of LM Surprisal in Reading Chinese

Hongao Zhu, Muxiaoqiao Xu, Yikang Liu et al. (+4 more)

This study analyzes the predictive power of LM-derived, token-level surprisal on Mandarin Chinese reading times. We first propose the Shortest Matching Sequence (SMS), an alignment scheme that maps between the word segmentation assumed by eye-tracking corpora and the LMs' subword tokenization, as the two tokenizations often disagree in the context of Mandarin Chinese. Then, using a suite of Chinese-Pythia models (14M-1.4B) trained on scratch with 30B tokens, we examine how well surprisal predicts first fixation duration, gaze duration, and total reading time in three paragraph-level eye-tracking corpora of Mandarin Chinese (GECO-CN, HKP, and MECO). Contrary to previous null findings, our results show that surprisal is predictive of Chinese reading times. However, whether predictive power scales with model size and the amount of training is corpus-specific: bigger models predict better in GECO-CN, whereas inverse scaling emerges in HKP and, at the largest sizes, in MECO. Subsequently, we tested one possible explanation for the inverse scaling in HKP and found that checkpoints whose surprisal remains closer to $n$-gram statistics are better predictors of reading. All in all, the predictive power of surprisal on Chinese reading time measurements is corpus-specific, which cautions against drawing scaling conclusions from a single corpus.
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All authors Hongao Zhu, Muxiaoqiao Xu, Yikang Liu, Siyuan Song, Yuxia Wang, Byung-Doh Oh, Hai Hu

Computation and Language

No Hindsight for LLM Fact-Checkers: Measuring Leakage Channels in Misinformation Detection

Kuan-Hua Wu Lu and Yohanes Andre Setiawan

As automated fact-checking scales on social media, large language model (LLM) verdict scores can look stronger than warranted. One reason is that evaluations mix in information that was not knowable at claim time. Two channels are easy to conflate: outcomes memorized in pre-training and retrieved evidence published after the claim. Yet standard benchmarks rarely separate the two. In this study we measure both channels on AVeriTeC and QuanTemp++ by reconstructing point-in-time evidence conditions and probing for outcome information encoded in model representations. We find substantial evidence of parametric leakage, that can be hidden by the aggregate accuracy, while a simple representation bottleneck reduces this future leakage more efficiently than a mutual-information-based training penalty. We also find that allowing post-claim evidence inflates zero-shot accuracy by 6.3 points in AVeriTeC while the effect is negligible in QuanTemp++, where retrieval provides little post-claim evidence. These results show that misinformation benchmarks can overstate fact-checking performance when they do not account for what information was actually available at claim time.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

SpecFold: Folding Multi-Branch Redundancy for Faster Speculative Decoding in Diffusion Language Models

Chung-En Ho, Weiyu Sun, Cheng-Jhih Shih et al. (+3 more)

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) generate text through iterative block denoising, and multi-branch speculative decoding accelerates this process by verifying a main branch together with multiple draft branches in a single forward pass. While prior DLLM acceleration methods primarily exploit temporal redundancy across denoising steps, we identify a complementary redundancy axis within each speculative verification step: multi-branch computational redundancy. During speculative verification, draft branches inherit most tokens from their parents while unmasking a small set of additional positions, causing large portions of hidden states to remain highly similar across branches. We propose SpecFold, an algorithm-system co-design that exploits this multi-branch redundancy to reduce the cost of multi-branch speculative verification. Algorithmically, SpecFold performs token-level residual gating and selectively reuses parent computation through folded attention and FFN while preserving residual hidden states. Systemically, a Triton kernel implementation translates this fine-grained reuse into end-to-end throughput gains through efficient sparse multi-branch execution. SpecFold is orthogonal to temporal caching and compatible with existing DLLM speculation strategies. Across two DLLM families, five models, and five standard benchmarks, SpecFold achieves up to 1.64x throughput over Spiffy and up to 1.99x over vanilla decoding, while maintaining comparable task performance.
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All authors Chung-En Ho, Weiyu Sun, Cheng-Jhih Shih, He Li, Yong Liu, Yingyan Celine Lin

Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.LG

CURIO: Curiosity-Driven Test-Time Learning for Open-Ended Discovery

Tao Feng, Fangxu Yu, Zijie Lei et al. (+5 more)

Open-ended discovery requires learning from repeated attempts while continuing to explore directions whose value is not yet apparent. Search with a frozen large language model (LLM) can reuse previous solutions in context, but cannot update the model from its successes and failures on the test problem. Reinforcement learning (RL) enables such adaptation; however, strongly favoring high-reward trajectories may suppress low-reward yet potentially promising directions too early. We introduce CURIO, a curiosity-driven test-time learning framework that complements task feedback with an Intrinsic Curiosity World Model (ICWM). The ICWM learns transitions in the policy's hidden-state representation and supplies prediction-error bonuses at sampled tokens outside the policy's top-k choices. Epoch normalization and an annealed weight regulate their contribution to the policy update. On six mathematical discovery tasks and single-cell denoising with Qwen3 backbones from 8B to 235B, three-run means improve over a matched task-only RL control on five mathematical objectives, match the best reported performance on Circle Packing, and improve denoising Score and mean squared error (MSE) on both held-out corpora at every tested scale. Relative gains reach 18.3% on Hadamard and 10.8% on denoising Score. Code-diversity measurements show greater structural variation among generated programs, supporting curiosity as a complementary exploration signal for learning in open-ended discovery.
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All authors Tao Feng, Fangxu Yu, Zijie Lei, Jiaru Zou, Changjiang Jiang, Yi Yan, Jiaxuan You, Pan Lu

Computation and Language

Cluster Validation Indices as Self-Supervised Objectives for Text Representation Learning

Kishor Kumar Bhaumik, Nicolas Roque dos Santos, Neil Shah et al. (+2 more)

Self-supervised fine-tuning refines the embedding space of a pretrained language encoder without labels. However, the commonly used approaches are computationally expensive. Specifically, contrastive learning-based methods need multiview data and in-batch negative examples, while negative-free approaches require auxiliary graphs/networks. An interesting question arises: can self-supervised fine-tuning be done without relying on either additional negatives or graph data? To answer this question, we introduce SilK (Silhouette-guided K-means), which trains on a Cluster Validation Index, an internal measure of cluster quality without using labels. SilK clusters the corpus and then regresses a simplified silhouette toward a target value. Each document is compared only against the k cluster centroids, never against other documents, so the method needs no augmentation, no negative pairs and one view per document. On BERT-base, SilK trains 1.46x faster per epoch than the fastest baseline we evaluate and uses 45.4% less peak GPU memory than the leanest one. Under frozen-encoder linear probing, SilK stays competitive with the best baselines on three downstream tasks.
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All authors Kishor Kumar Bhaumik, Nicolas Roque dos Santos, Neil Shah, Jia Chen, Evangelos E. Papalexakis

Computation and Language

Viva La Vida: Verification and Accumulation Failures in Multi-Agent Proof Search

Benji Xu, Ken Zheng and Noah Han

When an agentic prover works on an open problem, there is no proof assistant to fall back on: its verifier and lemma library are ultimately language models judging model outputs. We instrumented such a system end to end and analyzed $51{,}754$ traced observations across three full runs ($186$ hours, \$$5{,}694$). We find three connected failure modes. First, the three-model verifier requires unanimity and treats parse or API failure as non-approval; in $10$ of $12$ verification events, one member returned no parseable output or an API error, making acceptance arithmetically impossible without surfacing an error. Second, when the ensemble did function, one verifier approved $3$ attempts that GPT rejected, each claiming to resolve the open problem; a single-verifier design would therefore have announced a solution three times. Third, because nothing could be approved, every review was a refutation, yet the lemma extractor mines reviews as well as proofs: $24$ of $93$ lemmas ($26%$) were extracted from rejected arguments with their refutational context removed. Taken together, these findings show that without external verification, supervision is itself a critical trust boundary: systems must distinguish abstention from rejection, preserve useful disagreement, and preserve the provenance and polarity of information before it becomes future context.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Agent Behavior as Code: Efficient and Robust LLM Agents with Programmatic Specifications

Peng Qi, Chunliang Lyu, Gang Li et al. (+4 more)

AI agents based on foundation models (FMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities to perform complex open-ended tasks. However, they face some common challenges in practice: (a) agent behavior can deviate drastically even for semantically similar tasks, leading to catastrophically propagated errors; (b) high cost and latency due to FM calls, repeated in full whenever a task recurs with different inputs; (c) FMs' limited context and instruction following capability confine how well agents manage the ever-growing execution context and follow complex plans. We introduce $\textbf{A}$gent $\textbf{B}$ehavior as $\textbf{C}$ode $\textbf{Agent}$ (ABCAgent), which uses a symbolic program (e.g., Python code with potential neural functions) to fully specify the agent's behavior at runtime, with a powerful FM agent editing that program for flexibility. Behavior is thus specified without premature variable binding, and its execution is deterministic. We evaluate ABCAgent on six agent benchmarks, two of which we construct to test how well a derived program generalizes to variants of the task it was written for. ABCAgent matches a model-matched neural agent on GAIA and augmented GAIA, and surpasses it where robustness and long control flows matter: 98.3% against 97.3% on GSM-Symbolic ($p = 0.001$), 71.9% against 47.4% $\mathrm{Pass}^4$ on the telecom domain of $\tau^2$-bench ($p = 0.0001$), and more records written correctly at every loop length on our control-flow-augmented WorkArena benchmark. For more parametric task families, ABCAgent is also significantly superior in efficiency. Without authoring a new program, ABCAgent solves 92.6% of GSM-Symbolic instances and 20.1% of augmented GAIA variants, which yields $5.2\times$ lower latency and $7.0\times$ lower cost on GSM-Symbolic, 19% lower cost on augmented GAIA, and $9.5\times$ lower agent latency on $\tau^2$-telecom.
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All authors Peng Qi, Chunliang Lyu, Gang Li, Fabian Chan, Cheng Chang, Ignacio Cases, Will Lu

Saturday 3 October

Computation and Language

QuanLing: Cross-Branch Validation of Language Distance Quantification on Western Romance

Yiping Bai

Quantifying language distance among closely related languages remains a core challenge in quantitative linguistics. Our previous work [1] introduced QuanLing (Quantitative Linguistics via Pretrained Language Models), a quantitative framework combining language distance metrics (sentence embedding distance, tokenization fragmentation rate) with language property analysis (MLM prediction probability), validated on North Germanic (Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Swedish). This paper extends QuanLing to Western Romance–French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian–testing cross-branch applicability with the same metric family and aggregation protocol as our North Germanic study, adapted for four languages (English anchor, quadruplet construction). Using 150 four-language parallel sentences, we compute LaBSE sentence embedding distances, tokenization fragmentation rates from four monolingual BERT tokenizers, and mBERT masked language model mutual intelligibility. Results show that Portuguese–Spanish are closest (LaBSE distance 0.0229), French–Italian most distant (0.0338); LaBSE and mBERT rankings agree on 4 of 6 pairs, confirming cross-model robustness. Western Romance shows a wider absolute distance span than North Germanic (0.011 vs. 0.008) but comparable relative ratios (1.48 vs. 1.67), consistent with longer divergence time. French exhibits notably higher MLM predictability (36.12% top-1 accuracy vs. 29.28% for Italian), reflecting its orthography–phonology decoupling. This cross-branch validation provides further evidence for QuanLing's generalizability beyond a single language branch.
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Computation and Language · Cross-listed from cs.AI

AegisFlow: A Multi-Agent Agentic AI Framework for Autonomous Remediation and Self-Healing in Fragile Data Ecosystems

Muhammad Bilal Awan, Zubair Hussain and Abdul Shahid

Traditional data pipelines are notoriously brittle, often failing due to upstream schema drift, API contract changes, or website DOM modifications. Present observability tools only raise alerts but for human engineers, resulting in a high Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and operational fatigue. In this paper we propose AegisFlow (Agentic Engine for Intelligent Self-healing and Graph-driven Operations for Workload remediation), a novel agentic framework that closes the loop between detection and resolution. AegisFlow uses a Watchdog agent to collect runtime telemetry and has a Repair agent to automatically create, test and deploy code patches based on Large Language Models (LLMs). The framework presents the non-intrusive execution model called Parallel Shadow Patching, a non-intrusive execution model based on the Monitor, Analyze, Plan, Execute, Knowledge (MAPE-K) loop to generate and verify patches in digital twin environments. Through experimental testing, we have evaluated AegisFlow across five common failure scenarios, and see 98.1 percent improvement in MTTR (from an average of 170 minutes per patch to 3.2 minutes) and a patch success rate of 92 percent . In particular, the system is successful in dealing with changes in the JSON schema (96 percent ) and punctuation drift (98 percent ), and is least successful in Shadow DOM cases (85 percent ). AegisFlow frees up about 98 percent of data engineering on-call time from firefighting and reallocates it towards innovation. The framework is deployment agnostic consisting of a system that can be deployed in a plugin fashion into an existing pipeline orchestration system with minimal uplift to the existing system.
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Computation and Language

WavePrune: One period is often enough for RoPE

Guancheng Du, Luotian Huang, Shaowen Wang et al. (+2 more)

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) encodes token positions by rotating each two-dimensional channel of the query and key vectors at a channel-specific frequency, making the attention logits invariant to a common shift of positions. However, this rotation is periodic, and it leads to position aliasing where relative positions separated by a full rotation period become hard to tell apart. To address this, we propose WavePrune, which restricts each channel to its first rotation period. We show that it removes the distractions in attention maps created by position aliasing and improves overall long-context performance. Specifically, WavePrune raises the HELMET score on four of five models we test without any extra tuning (e.g., 35.7 -> 40.0 on Qwen3-8B). When pretraining models from scratch, WavePrune also achieves lower validation loss at extrapolated lengths than pretraining without it. Because WavePrune restricts each channel to a sliding window, it induces a fine-grained sparsity that our hardware-aligned CUDA kernels exploit for 1.15x prefill and 1.24x decoding speedups over FlashAttention-2 at 32K context. Together, these results show that RoPE's periodic structure, widely regarded as essential, is largely redundant beyond the first rotation period.
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All authors Guancheng Du, Luotian Huang, Shaowen Wang, Si Li, Kaifeng Lyu

Computation and Language

Verdicts Without Annotated Evidence: Rejection Sampling or Label-Only Post-Training for Evidence Recovery?

Nishanth Nayakanti, Prasang Gupta, Ashutosh Bilthare et al. (+1 more)

In many review workflows the verdict is the only thing retained. The passages behind it are not marked, because that annotation costs far more than recording the decision. We measure how much of that evidence a small language model can recover when it is post-trained on the verdicts alone, with no human evidence labels at any stage. On ContractNLI the human evidence spans are held out until evaluation. Matching the recorded verdict and agreeing with those spans are not the same thing: across six systems the two scores are only weakly related and rank the systems differently, so accuracy is a poor guide when the citations have to be reviewable. Label-only training on the bare verdict reaches accuracy 0.896 and span F1 0.564. Rejection sampling, which keeps a generated trace only when its verdict matches the record and then picks one by an automatic source-grounding score, reaches 0.797 and 0.556, against 0.747 and 0.493 before training. Verbatim citation rises from 0.597 to 0.729 under label-only training and to 0.701 under rejection sampling. One seed on one corpus cannot say which method is better, but both improve the evidence without anyone annotating it.
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All authors Nishanth Nayakanti, Prasang Gupta, Ashutosh Bilthare, Kevin Paul

Computation and Language

EMODE: Dynamic Para-Semantic Experts for Emotion-Aware Speech Language Modeling

Jianan Pan, Yiwen Gu, Xinze Li et al. (+2 more)

Large speech language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in unified cross-modal understanding and generation, yet paralinguistic cues, especially emotion, remain difficult to preserve. Existing systems typically rely on entangled acoustic representations, which allow the underlying language model to depend excessively on recovered lexical content instead of grounding its behavior in acoustic-prosodic evidence. We address this limitation with EMODE, an emotion-aware speech language model built around Dynamic Para-Semantic Experts (DPSE). DPSE decomposes continuous speech features into semantic and paralinguistic pathways, routes them dynamically, and fuses them before integration into the language model. To turn this structural decomposition into functional specialization, EMODE is trained with a three-stage curriculum consisting of semantic warm-up, paralinguistic activation, and joint refinement, guided by Orthogonal Expert Guidance (OEG), Semantic-to-Acoustic Alignment (SAA), and Gating Diversity Regularization (GDR). Experiments on SER test, empathetic response evaluation, and the newly constructed bilingual MEPA benchmark show that EMODE improves the balance between lexical fidelity and emotional sensitivity, strengthens affect-grounded response generation, and exposes the value of explicit para-semantic factorization for robust cross-corpus emotion understanding.
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All authors Jianan Pan, Yiwen Gu, Xinze Li, Rui Wang, Kejie Huang

Computation and Language

Stabilizing language models under continual learning via condition-anchored distillation

Huan Li, Zhe Cao, Qinlei Xie et al. (+2 more)

Continual adaptation of language models can change their output distribution on prompts learned earlier, while retaining every old prompt-answer pair may be undesirable or impossible. We study condition-anchored generative distillation (CAGD): retain a small set of old prompts, use a frozen previous model to reconstruct completions and generation states, and match its predictive distributions while learning the next task. The formulation separates three roles that ordinary replay conflates: conditions select the behavior to protect, teacher generations locate relevant states, and soft targets specify how predictions may change. For autoregressive language generation, teacher-rollout distillation admits an exact chain-rule decomposition of sequence divergence. For masked-diffusion language modeling, our implementation directly controls local denoising drift on teacher-generated completions. In continual adaptation of a 219M masked diffusion language model, CAGD reduces four-task final held-out loss from 2.927 to 1.114 in one task order and from 2.168 to 0.891 in exact reverse. The same soft targets lower final average loss by 0.055 over hard replay when teacher-generated support is held identical. The direction persists on fresh facts and natural instructions across SMDM and Qwen3. On GSM8K, Qwen adaptation preserves answer-format compliance, but exact-match retention is seed-mixed at 0.6B and worsens at 1.7B. These results support condition-anchored functional preservation as a common design principle across the tested language-generation objectives.
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All authors Huan Li, Zhe Cao, Qinlei Xie, Fushun Cui, Xuechen Liang

Computation and Language

How Do People Challenge Racial Stereotypes Online? Counter-Story Detection Across Reddit Communities

Uma Sushmitha Gunturi, Jimin Mun, Maarten Sap et al. (+1 more)

Counter-storytelling is a powerful mechanism people use to challenge dominant narratives. Unlike other forms of counterspeech that have been widely studied in computational social science, counter-storytelling has largely been overlooked. Counter-stories are difficult to detect automatically; they are relational (defined with respect to expressions of racial stereotypes) and structurally diverse (drawing on stories that describe lived experiences, witnessed events, exemplars, and hypotheticals). We introduce a first framework for detecting and characterizing counter-storytelling against racial stereotypes at scale. This includes (1) a three-dimensional taxonomy grounded in narratology and Critical Race Theory and (2) a multi-stage pipeline that identifies relational pairs of stereotypes and counter-stories in noisy Reddit discourse. Using this pipeline, we annotate 25,549 Reddit posts across 615 communities and identify 1,312 counter-stories. Our analysis shows that speaker identity and post context shape how counter-stories are told. For example, in-group writers favor first-person testimony, often adopting the role of self-reflective insiders. Our work shows how computational methods can scale qualitative approaches to identify and characterize counter-storytelling as a contextual narrative practice, with implications for content moderation, narratology, and racial discourse analysis.
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All authors Uma Sushmitha Gunturi, Jimin Mun, Maarten Sap, Maria Antoniak

2610.04803 · 3 Oct · Accepted to EMNLP 2026 (Main Conference). 28 pages, 12 figures, 24 tables. Content warning: this paper contains examples of racial stereotypes that may be upsetting or offensive. Code: https://github.com/UmaGunturi/counter_story_detection

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