To address data locality and privacy restrictions, Federated Learning (FL) has recently been adopted to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), enabling improved performance on various downstream tasks without requiring aggregated data. However, the repeated exchange of model updates in FL can result in prohibitively high communication costs, hindering the distributed learning process. To address this challenge, we propose EcoLoRA, a novel communication-efficient federated fine-tuning framework for LLMs. Leveraging the modular structure, we propose a round-robin segment sharing scheme, where each client uploads only a complementary LoRA segment per round to reduce network bandwidth. It is further combined with adaptive sparsification methods tailored to LoRA’s training dynamics and lossless encoding techniques. We conduct extensive evaluations on both question-answering and value-alignment tasks across multiple datasets and models. The results show that EcoLoRA significantly reduces communication overhead without compromising performance. For instance, it reduces communication time by up to 79% and total training time by up to 65%.
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This study presents a novel approach to assessing French text readability for adults with low literacy skills, addressing both global (full-text) and local (segment-level) difficulty. We introduce a dataset of 461 texts annotated using a difficulty scale developed specifically for this population. Using this corpus, we conducted a systematic comparison of key readability modeling approaches, including machine learning techniques based on linguistic variables, fine-tuning of CamemBERT, a hybrid approach combining CamemBERT with linguistic variables, and the use of generative language models (LLMs) to carry out readability assessment at both global and local levels.
Thread: A Logic-Based Data Organization Paradigm for How-To Question Answering with Retrieval Augmented Generation
PDF ↗Recent advances in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have substantially improved question-answering systems, particularly for factoid ‘5Ws’ questions. However, significant challenges remain when addressing ‘1H’ questions, specifically how-to questions, which are integral for decision-making and require dynamic, step-by-step responses. The key limitation lies in the prevalent data organization paradigm, chunk, which commonly divides documents into fixed-size segments, and disrupts the logical coherence and connections within the context. To address this, we propose THREAD, a novel data organization paradigm enabling systems to handle how-to questions more effectively. Specifically, we introduce a new knowledge granularity, ‘logic unit’ (LU), where large language models transform documents into more structured and loosely interconnected LUs. Extensive experiments across both open-domain and industrial settings show that THREAD outperforms existing paradigms significantly, improving the success rate of handling how-to questions by 21% to 33%. Additionally, THREAD demonstrates high adaptability across diverse document formats, reducing retrieval information by up to 75% compared to chunk, and also shows better generalizability to ‘5Ws’ questions, such as multi-hop questions, outperforming other paradigms.
Scientific information extraction (SciIE) has primarily relied on entity-relation extraction in narrow domains, limiting its applicability to interdisciplinary research and struggling to capture the necessary context of scientific information, often resulting in fragmented or conflicting statements. In this paper, we introduce SciEvent, a novel multi-domain benchmark of scientific abstracts annotated via a unified event extraction (EE) schema designed to enable structured and context-aware understanding of scientific content. It includes 500 abstracts across five research domains, with manual annotations of event segments, triggers, and fine-grained arguments. We define SciIE as a multi-stage EE pipeline: (1) segmenting abstracts into core scientific activities—\textit{Background}, \textit{Method}, \textit{Result}, and \textit{Conclusion}; and (2) extracting the corresponding triggers and arguments. Experiments with fine-tuned EE models, large language models (LLMs), and human annotators reveal a performance gap, with current models struggling in domains such as sociology and humanities. SciEvent serves as a challenging benchmark and a step toward generalizable, multi-domain SciIE.
We present Speech Vecalign, a parallel speech document alignment method that monotonically aligns speech segment embeddings and does not depend on text transcriptions. Compared to the baseline method Global Mining, a variant of speech mining, Speech Vecalign produces longer speech-to-speech alignments. It also demonstrates greater robustness than Local Mining, another speech mining variant, as it produces less noise. We applied Speech Vecalign to 3,000 hours of unlabeled parallel English-German (En-De) speech documents from VoxPopuli, yielding about 1,000 hours of high-quality alignments. We then trained En-De speech-to-speech translation models on the aligned data. Speech Vecalign improves the En-to-De and De-to-En performance over Global Mining by 0.37 and 0.18 ASR-BLEU, respectively. Moreover, our models match or outperform SpeechMatrix model performance, despite using 8 times fewer raw speech documents.
OntologyRAG-Q: Resource Development and Benchmarking for Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering in Qur’anic Tafsir
PDF ↗This paper introduces essential resources for Qur’anic studies: an annotated Tafsir ontology, a dataset of approximately 4,200 question-answer pairs, and a collection of 15 structured Tafsir books available in two formats. We present a comprehensive framework for handling sensitive Qur’anic Tafsir data that spans the entire pipeline from dataset construction through evaluation and error analysis. Our work establishes new benchmarks for retrieval and question-answering tasks on Qur’anic content, comparing performance across state-of-the-art embedding models and large language models (LLMs).We introduce OntologyRAG-Q, a novel retrieval-augmented generation approach featuring our custom Ayat-Ontology chunking method that segments Tafsir content at the verse level using ontology-driven structure. Benchmarking reveals strong performance across various LLMs, with GPT-4 achieving the highest results, followed closely by ALLaM. Expert evaluations show our system achieves 69.52% accuracy and 74.36% correctness overall, though multi-hop and context-dependent questions remain challenging. Our analysis demonstrates that answer position within documents significantly impacts retrieval performance, and among the evaluation metrics tested, BERT-recall and BERT-F1 correlate most strongly with expert assessments. The resources developed in this study are publicly available at https://github.com/sazani/OntologyRAG-Q.git.
As online news consumption grows, personalized recommendation systems have become integral to digital journalism. However, these systems risk reinforcing filter bubbles and political polarization by failing to incorporate diverse perspectives. Stance detection—identifying a text’s position on a target—can help mitigate this by enabling viewpoint-aware recommendations and data-driven analyses of media bias. Yet, existing stance detection research remains largely limited to short texts and high-resource languages. To address these gaps, we introduce K-News-Stance, the first Korean dataset for article-level stance detection, comprising 2,000 news articles with article-level and 21,650 segment-level stance annotations across 47 societal issues. We also propose JoA-ICL, a Journalism-guided Agentic In-Context Learning framework that employs a language model agent to predict the stances of key structural segments (e.g., leads, quotes), which are then aggregated to infer the overall article stance. Experiments showed that JoA-ICL outperforms existing stance detection methods, highlighting the benefits of segment-level agency in capturing the overall position of long-form news articles. Two case studies further demonstrate its broader utility in promoting viewpoint diversity in news recommendations and uncovering patterns of media bias.
Astra: Efficient Transformer Architecture and Contrastive Dynamics Learning for Embodied Instruction Following
PDF ↗Vision-language-action models have gained significant attention for their ability to model multimodal sequences in embodied instruction following tasks. However, most existing models rely on causal attention, which we find suboptimal for processing sequences composed of interleaved segments from different modalities. In this paper, we introduce Astra, a novel Transformer architecture featuring trajectory attention and learnable action queries, designed to efficiently process segmented multimodal trajectories and predict actions for imitation learning. Furthermore, we propose a contrastive dynamics learning objective to enhance the model’s understanding of environment dynamics and multimodal alignment, complementing the primary behavior cloning objective. Through extensive experiments on three large-scale robot manipulation benchmarks, Astra demonstrates substantial performance improvements over previous models.
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized text generation but also raised concerns about potential misuse, making detecting LLM-generated text (AI text) increasingly essential. While prior work has focused on identifying AI text and effectively checkmating it, our study investigates a less-explored territory: portraying the nuanced distinctions between human and AI texts across text segments (introduction, body, and conclusion). Whether LLMs excel or falter in incorporating linguistic ingenuity across text segments, the results will critically inform their viability and boundaries as effective creative assistants to humans. Through an analogy with the structure of chess games, comprising opening, middle, and end games, we analyze segment-specific patterns to reveal where the most striking differences lie. Although AI texts closely resemble human writing in the body segment due to its length, deeper analysis shows a higher divergence in features dependent on the continuous flow of language, making it the most informative segment for detection. Additionally, human texts exhibit greater stylistic variation across segments, offering a new lens for distinguishing them from AI. Overall, our findings provide fresh insights into human-AI text differences and pave the way for more effective and interpretable detection strategies. Codes available at https://github.com/tripto03/chess_inspired_human_ai_text_distinction.
Interdisciplinary Research in Conversation: A Case Study in Computational Morphology for Language Documentation
PDF ↗Computational morphology has the potential to support language documentation through tasks like morphological segmentation and the generation of Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT). However, our research outputs have seen limited use in real-world language documentation settings. This position paper situates the disconnect between computational morphology and language documentation within a broader misalignment between research and practice in NLP and argues that the field risks becoming decontextualized and ineffectual without systematic integration of User-Centered Design (UCD). To demonstrate how principles from UCD can reshape the research agenda, we present a case study of GlossLM, a state-of-the-art multilingual IGT generation model. Through a small-scale user study with three documentary linguists, we find that despite strong metric-based performance, the system fails to meet core usability needs in real documentation contexts. These insights raise new research questions around model constraints, label standardization, segmentation, and personalization. We argue that centering users not only produces more effective tools, but surfaces richer, more relevant research directions.
Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new avenues for solving complex optimization problems, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS). However, existing LLM-driven NAS approaches rely heavily on prompt engineering and domain-specific tuning, limiting their practicality and scalability across diverse tasks. In this work, we propose LM-Searcher, a novel framework that leverages LLMs for cross-domain neural architecture optimization without the need for extensive domain-specific adaptation. Central to our approach is NCode, a universal numerical string representation for neural architectures, which enables cross-domain architecture encoding and search. We also reformulate the NAS problem as a ranking task, training LLMs to select high-performing architectures from candidate pools using instruction-tuning samples derived from a novel pruning-based subspace sampling strategy. Our curated dataset, encompassing a wide range of architecture-performance pairs, encourages robust and transferable learning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LM-Searcher achieves competitive performance in both in-domain (e.g., CNNs for image classification) and out-of-domain (e.g., LoRA configurations for segmentation and generation) tasks, establishing a new paradigm for flexible and generalizable LLM-based architecture search.
Manual slide creation is labor-intensive and requires expert prior knowledge. Existing natural language-based LLM generation methods struggle to capture the visual and structural nuances of slide designs. To address this, we formalize the Reference Image to Slide Generation task and propose Slide2Code, the first benchmark with difficulty-tiered samples based on a novel Slide Complexity Metric. We introduce SlideCoder, a layout-aware, retrieval-augmented framework for generating editable slides from reference images. SlideCoder integrates a Color Gradient-based Segmentation algorithm and a Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation method to decompose complex tasks and enhance code generation. We also release SlideMaster, a 7B open-source model fine-tuned with improved reverse-engineered data. Experiments show that SlideCoder outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 40.5 points, demonstrating strong performance across layout fidelity, execution accuracy, and visual consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/vinsontang1/SlideCoder.
Vision Language Models (VLMs) struggle with long-form videos due to the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms. We propose Language-Guided Temporal Token Pruning (LGTTP), which leverages temporal cues from queries to adaptively prune video tokens, preserving contextual continuity while reducing computational overhead. Unlike uniform pruning or keyframe selection, LGTTP retains higher token density in temporally relevant segments. Our model-agnostic framework integrates with TimeChat and LLaVA-Video, achieving a 65% reduction in computation while preserving 97-99% of the original performance. On QVHighlights, LGTTP improves HIT@1 by +9.5%, and on Charades-STA, it retains 99.6% of R@1. It excels on queries with explicit temporal markers and remains effective across general video understanding tasks.
Understanding the underlying argumentative flow in analytic argumentative writing is essential for discourse comprehension, especially in complex argumentative discourse such as think-tank commentary. However, existing structure modeling approaches often rely on surface-level topic segmentation, failing to capture the author’s rhetorical intent and reasoning process. To address this limitation, we propose a Question-Focus discourse structuring framework that explicitly models the underlying argumentative flow by anchoring each argumentative unit to a guiding question (reflecting the author’s intent) and a set of attentional foci (highlighting analytical pathways). To assess its effectiveness, we introduce an argument reconstruction task in which the modeled discourse structure guides both evidence retrieval and argument generation. We construct a high-quality dataset comprising 600 authoritative Chinese think-tank articles for experimental analysis. To quantitatively evaluate performance, we propose two novel metrics: (1) Claim Coverage, measuring the proportion of original claims preserved or similarly expressed in reconstructions, and (2) Evidence Coverage, assessing the completeness of retrieved supporting evidences. Experimental results show that our framework uncovers the author’s argumentative logic more effectively and offers better structural guidance for reconstruction, yielding up to a 10% gain in claim coverage and outperforming strong baselines across both curated and LLM-based metrics.
In-Context derived Vector (ICV) methods extract task-relevant representations from large language models (LLMs) and reinject them during inference, achieving comparable performance to few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL) without repeated demonstration processing. However, existing ICV methods remain sensitive to ICL-specific factors, often use coarse or semantically fragmented representations as the source of the vector, and rely on heuristic-based injection positions, limiting their applicability.To address these issues, we propose Dynamic Vector (DyVec), which incorporates an Exhaustive Query Rotation (EQR) strategy to extract robust semantically aggregated latent representations by mitigating variance introduced by ICL. It then applies Dynamic Latent Segmentation and Injection to adaptively partition representations based on task complexity and leverages REINFORCE-based optimization to learn optimal injection positions for each segment.Experiments results show that DyVec outperforms few-shot ICL, LoRA, and prior ICV baselines. Further analysis highlights the effectiveness of dynamically segmenting and injecting semantically aggregated latent representations. DyVec provides a lightweight and data-efficient solution for inference-time task adaptation.
CYCLE-INSTRUCT: Fully Seed-Free Instruction Tuning via Dual Self-Training and Cycle Consistency
PDF ↗Instruction tuning is vital for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intent, but current methods typically rely on costly human-annotated seed data or powerful external teacher models. While instruction back-translation techniques reduce this dependency, they remain fundamentally tethered to an initial seed set, which limits full automation, introduces biases, and can lead to inefficient use of unlabeled corpora. In this paper, we propose Cycle-Instruct, a novel framework that achieves fully seed-free instruction tuning. Inspired by cycle consistency, Cycle-Instruct employs a dual self-training loop where two models—an answer generator and a question generator—are bootstrapped solely from raw, unlabeled text. These models mutually supervise each other by reconstructing original text segments from their counterpart’s generated pseudo-labels, effectively learning from the intrinsic structure of the data without any human-provided seeds. We demonstrate Cycle-Instruct’s efficacy across four diverse data tracks, including general instruction-following, domain-specific tasks, dialogue logs, and plain text. Our extensive experiments show that Cycle-Instruct not only outperforms seed-driven back-translation baselines but also achieves performance comparable to strongly supervised methods.
DASA-Trans-STM: Adaptive Efficient Transformer for Short Text Matching using Data Augmentation and Semantic Awareness
PDF ↗Rencent advancements in large language models (LLM) have shown impressive versatility across various tasks. Short text matching is one of the fundamental technologies in natural language processing. In previous studies, the common approach to applying them to Chinese is segmenting each sentence into words, and then taking these words as input. However, existing approaches have three limitations: 1) Some Chinese words are polysemous, and semantic information is not fully utilized. 2) Some models suffer potential issues caused by word segmentation and incorrect recognition of negative words affects the semantic understanding of the whole sentence. 3) Fuzzy negation words in ancient Chinese are difficult to recognize and match. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive Transformer for Chinese short text matching using Data Augmentation and Semantic Awareness (DASA), which can fully mine the information expressed in Chinese text to deal with word ambiguity. DASA is based on a Graph Attention Transformer Encoder that takes two word lattice graphs as input and integrates sense information from N-HowNet to moderate word ambiguity. Specially, we use an LLM to generate similar sentences for the optimal text representation. Experimental results show that the augmentation done using DASA can considerably boost the performance of our system and achieve significantly better results than previous state-of-the-art methods on four available datasets, namely MNS, LCQMC, AFQMC, and BQ.
A key challenge in MT evaluation is the inherent noise and inconsistency of human ratings. Regression-based neural metrics struggle with this noise, while prompting LLMs shows promise at system-level evaluation but performs poorly at segment level. In this work, we propose ReMedy, a novel MT metric framework that reformulates translation evaluation as a reward modeling task. Instead of regressing on imperfect human ratings directly, ReMedy learns relative translation quality using pairwise preference data, resulting in a more reliable evaluation. In extensive experiments across WMT22-24 shared tasks (39 language pairs, 111 MT systems), ReMedy achieves state-of-the-art performance at both segment- and system-level evaluation. Specifically, ReMedy-9B surpasses larger WMT winners and massive closed LLMs such as MetricX-13B, XCOMET-Ensemble, GEMBA-GPT-4, PaLM-540B, and finetuned PaLM2. Further analyses demonstrate that ReMedy delivers superior capability in detecting translation errors and evaluating low-quality translations.
Advertising banners are critical for capturing user attention and enhancing advertising campaign effectiveness. Creating aesthetically pleasing banner designs while conveying the campaign messages is challenging due to the large search space involving multiple design elements. Additionally, advertisers need multiple sizes for different displays and various versions to target different sectors of audiences. Since design is intrinsically an iterative and subjective process, flexible editability is also in high demand for practical usage. While current models have served as assistants to human designers in various design tasks, they typically handle only segments of the creative design process or produce pixel-based outputs that limit editability. This paper introduces a training-free framework for fully automated banner ad design creation, enabling frontier multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to streamline the production of effective banners with minimal manual effort across diverse marketing contexts. We present BannerAgency, an MLLM agent system that collaborates with advertisers to understand their brand identity and banner objectives, generates matching background images, creates blueprints for foreground design elements, and renders the final creatives as editable components in Figma or SVG formats rather than static pixels. To facilitate evaluation and future research, we introduce BannerRequest400, a benchmark featuring 100 unique logos paired with 400 diverse banner requests. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness, emphasizing the quality of the generated banner designs, their adaptability to various banner requests, and their strong editability enabled by this component-based approach.
A Comprehensive Literary Chinese Reading Comprehension Dataset with an Evidence Curation Based Solution
PDF ↗Low-resource language understanding is challenging, even for large language models (LLMs). An epitome of this problem is the CompRehensive lIterary chineSe readIng comprehenSion (CRISIS), whose difficulties include limited linguistic data, long input, and insight-required questions. Besides the compelling necessity of providing a larger dataset for CRISIS, excessive information, order bias, and entangled conundrums still haunt the CRISIS solutions. Thus, we present the eVIdence cuRation with opTion shUffling and Abstract meaning representation-based cLauses segmenting (VIRTUAL) procedure for CRISIS, with the largest dataset. While the dataset is also named CRISIS, it results from a three-phase construction process, including question selection, data cleaning, and a silver-standard data augmentation step, which augments translations, celebrity profiles, government jobs, reign mottos, and dynasty to CRISIS. The six steps of VIRTUAL include embedding, shuffling, abstract beaning representation based option segmenting, evidence extracting, solving, and voting. Notably, the evidence extraction algorithm facilitates literary Chinese evidence sentences, translated evidence sentences, and annotations of keywords with a similarity-based ranking strategy. While CRISIS congregates understanding-required questions from seven sources, the experiments on CRISIS substantiate the effectiveness of VIRTUAL, with a 7 percent hike in accuracy compared with the baseline. Interestingly, both non-LLMs and LLMs have order bias, and abstract beaning representation based option segmenting is constructive for CRISIS.