论文检索

Georg Ahnert, Anna-Carolina Haensch, Barbara Plank, Markus Strohmaier

Many _in-silico_ simulations of human survey responses with large language models (LLMs) focus on generating closed-ended survey responses, whereas LLMs are typically trained to generate open-ended text instead. Previous research has used a diverse range of methods for generating closed-ended survey responses with LLMs and a standard practice remains to be identified. In this paper, we systematically investigate the impact that various **Survey Response Generation Methods** have on predicted survey responses. We present the results of 32 mio. simulated survey responses across 8 Survey Response Generation Methods, 4 political attitude surveys, and 10 open-weight language models. We find significant differences between the Survey Response Generation Methods in both individual-level and subpopulation-level alignment. Our results show that Restricted Generation Methods perform best overall, and that reasoning output does not consistently improve alignment. Our work underlines the significant impact that Survey Response Generation Methods have on simulated survey responses, and we develop practical recommendations on the application of Survey Response Generation Methods.

Alhim Adonai Vera Gonzalez, Carlos Hinojosa, Karen Sanchez, Haidar Bin Hamid, Donghoon Kim, Bernard Ghanem

Can generative agents be trusted in multimodal environments? Despite recent advances, agents remain limited in their ability to reason about safety, coherence, and trust across modalities. We introduce a reproducible simulation framework to evaluate generative agents in three aspects: (1) safety improvement over time via iterative plan revision in multimodal scenarios; (2) detection of unsafe activities across social contexts; and (3) social dynamics, measured through interaction and acceptance rates. These multimodal agents are evaluated using metrics that quantify plan revisions and unsafe-to-safe conversions. Experiments show that while agents detect direct multimodal contradictions, they often fail to align local revisions with global safety, achieving only a 55% success rate in correcting unsafe plans. We release a dataset of 1,000 multimodal plans, yielding more than 600,000 simulation steps. Notably, 45% of unsafe actions are accepted when paired with misleading visual cues, revealing a strong tendency to overtrust visual content. Code is available at https://github.com/AdonaiVera/X-CASE

Weidong Tang, Jierui Li, Yueling Hou, Zihan Mei, Can Zhang, Xinyan Wan, Zhiyuan Liang, Pengfei Zhou, Yang You, Wangbo Zhao

True general intelligence requires not only a model of the physical world but also a social world model: the capacity to infer how individual mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. Despite notable progress in individual-level Theory of Mind (ToM) reasoning, existing multimodal large language models systematically fail at this: collective behavior emerges non-linearly from social tensions, conformity dynamics, and structural constraints, and cannot be recovered by summing individual intentions. We present ***GroupToM-Bench***, the first multimodal benchmark for group-level ToM, built around a causal chain spanning micro-level BDI states (belief, desire, intention), meso-level group tension and structural constraints, and macro-level outcome prediction and mechanistic attribution. To probe this full arc, we develop a seven-level cognitive audit framework. Experiments reveal that frontier models perform significantly below human levels, exposing fundamental blind spots in modeling social structures and nonlinear collective behavior.

Zuolong Li, Pingyu Wu, Xianwen Huang, Tianyi Wei, Wenbo Zhou

Role-playing agents (RPAs) have made significant strides in mimicking static character identities. However, their personality simulations remain superficial, lacking a profound understanding of complex human psychological mechanisms. We identify a critical bottleneck termed "**Personality Inertia**"—a behavioral rigidity where RLHF-induced alignment bias traps models in a sanitized, "helpful assistant" persona. This inertia prevents models from adapting to diverse social contexts or expressing essential but negative traits under pressure. To bridge this gap, we propose **PD-LLM**, a situation-aware framework grounded in *Trait Activation Theory*. PD-LLM introduces **Bipolar Latent Decomposition**, which decouples personality traits into bidirectional LoRA adapters. These adapters are dynamically modulated by a situation-aware module based on the *DIAMONDS taxonomy*, allowing for precise behavioral regulation. Empirical results show that while baseline methods fail to synchronize multidimensional traits under pressure, PD-LLM achieves superior performance in both **static fidelity** and **dynamic adaptability**. By advancing from prompt engineering to intrinsic parameter control, PD-LLM effectively overcomes personality rigidity, facilitating the creation of vivid and psychologically consistent agents.

Changgeon Ko, Jisu Shin, Hoyun Song, Huije Lee, Eui Jun Hwang, Jong C. Park

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly acting as human delegates in multi-agent environments, where a representative agent integrates diverse peer perspectives to make a final decision. Drawing inspiration from social psychology, we investigate how the reliability of this representative agent is undermined by the social context of its network. We define four key phenomena—social conformity, perceived expertise, dominant speaker effect, and rhetorical persuasion—and systematically manipulate the number of adversaries, relative intelligence, argument length, and argumentative styles. Our experiments demonstrate that the representative agent’s accuracy consistently declines as social pressure increases: larger adversarial groups, more capable peers, and longer arguments all lead to significant performance degradation. Furthermore, rhetorical strategies emphasizing credibility or logic can further sway the agent’s judgment, depending on the context. These findings reveal that multi-agent systems are sensitive not only to individual reasoning but also to the social dynamics of their configuration, highlighting critical vulnerabilities in AI delegates that mirror the psychological biases observed in human group decision-making.

Mengyu Xiang, Tinghao Chen, Boxu Han, Qiudan Li, Shu Wu, Daniel Dajun Zeng

As social media grows, harmful information spreads rapidly across platforms and evolves over time, showing cross-platform and cross-temporal variations. Existing methods rely on fixed model parameters during training, which fail to handle substantial semantic discrepancies, leading to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) problems. While test-time tuning enables dynamic parameter adjustment, it may lead to excessive adaptation to individual samples. The key challenge is how to adapt to semantic variations during testing while preventing overfitting from continuous tuning. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes RLAT, a reinforcement learning (RL)–guided adaptive tuning method for harmful text detection. First, a tuning joint optimization module is designed to update parameters and adapt to semantic variations during testing. It tunes the model by optimizing consistency loss and applying word-level attention constraints to reduce over-reliance on local words and learn a more robust global representation. Then, to mitigate overfitting caused by continuous tuning, a RL–guided adaptive decision model is introduced to direct the tuning process. It reduces the influence of local samples by selecting data and controlling parameter updates, thereby improving overall test performance. Experimental results show that the RLAT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in cross-platform and cross-temporal scenarios across multiple public datasets.

Yeqing Teng, Jiasheng Si, Shuxia Lin, Linhai Zhang, Weiyu Zhang, Wenpeng Lu, Deyu Zhou, Xiaoming Wu

With the generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) reshaping the information ecosystem, the concern with the sociological validity of claim detection benchmarks is increasing. Current claim detection benchmarks predominantly treat claims as static textual artifacts, overlooking the sociological etiology of how information naturally emerges and mutates. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary paradigm that models claims as socially evolving entities. In specific, we introduce a socially generative framework for synthetic claim generation, a multi-agent simulation grounded in the Open Claims Model. By decomposing claims into context, utterance, and proposition, our approach enables the precise simulation of unmitigated propagation to capture truth decay, and intervened propagation with multi-auditor oversight for targeted generation. Furthermore, we propose the background-user-perspective (BUP) framework, which reformulates check-worthiness as a condition-dependent probability rooted in social environment. Experiments on our datasets verify the data quality and reveal how network topology and user attributes systematically shape veracity drift.

Santosh T.Y.S.S

Spoken language models (SpeechLMs) are increasingly real-time conversational actors. Yet many culturally consequential aspects of spoken interaction are not primarily lexical. Across sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis, meaning emerges through how talk is produced and coordinated—prosody, timing, turn-taking, overlap, backchannels, and repair—within situated speech events. A transcript can be semantically correct yet interactionally inappropriate because many culture-bearing signals are audible and sequential rather than textual. This position paper argues for a speech-first view of cultural competence as interactional competence: the ability of a spoken agent to participate appropriately in event-situated interaction with locally normative conduct, while allowing plural acceptable realizations. Here, appropriate does not imply generic human-likeness; in many applications, the desired behavior may instead be constrained, neutral, predictable, or tool-like under an application-specific interaction contract. We synthesize social-science foundations into a theory-derived taxonomy of culture-bearing signals in speech, identify interactional phenomena where transcript correctness fails to predict appropriateness, and ground the agenda in today’s SpeechLM stacks and evaluation practice. We propose an evaluation framing that complements WER/MOS and broad capability suites by making speech events and interaction contracts explicit, diagnosing where modern pipelines lose interactional cues, and treating cultural appropriateness as a norm-conditioned target rather than generic “naturalness.”

Xiaoquan Yi, Haixing Wu, Haozhao Wang, Yichen Li, Yuhua Li, Rui Zhang, Ruixuan Li

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has saturated social media platforms with hyper-realistic posts, rendering traditional detection methods that rely on low-level artifacts or unimodal statistics increasingly ineffective. In this work, we identify a fundamental semantic distinction: humans tend to complement visual content with additional context, while LLMs predominantly describe the visual information. To capture this, UMPIRE employs an orthogonal semantic decomposition mechanism that disentangles textual embeddings into redundant and complementary components. An adaptive gating module dynamically weighs these components to reflect diverse communicative styles. To enforce the desired geometric structure, we introduce a latent contrastive redundancy regularization loss that encourages LLM-generated content to exhibit high semantic redundancy, while human-written content emphasizes complementarity. Experimental results demonstrate that UMPIRE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art detection methods across multiple datasets, achieving up to a 5.38% improvement in accuracy.

Zheng Zhang, Qi Liu, Siyuan Liang, Ning Li, Zirui Hu, Weibo Gao, Rui Li, Zhenya Huang, Leszek Rutkowski, Baosheng Yu 等

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by large-scale pretraining. However, this data abundance introduces test data contamination, where benchmark datasets overlap with pretraining corpora, undermining the reliability of model evaluation by confounding memorization with genuine generalization. To mitigate this issue, existing training data detectors attempt to identify clean (unseen) samples from contaminated test sets, but often suffer from residual contamination due to the black-box nature of LLMs. As a result, contaminated data may be mistakenly retained, leading to unreliable evaluation.To address this challenge, we propose FTD (FDR-controlled Training Data detection), a principled framework that detects and filters contaminated evaluation data while providing a statistical guarantee: the proportion of contaminated samples mistakenly retained as clean, the false discovery rate (FDR), is provably controlled below a user-specified threshold. FTD combines multiple complementary detectors via an adaptive weighting strategy, and we theoretically show it achieves high statistical power under valid FDR control. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that FTD significantly reduces residual contamination compared to existing methods while preserving evaluation consistency.

Xinyi Xu, Bingguang Hao, Yongyi Xiong, Zimo Chen, Xinchen Liu, Hongxin Guo, Xuelong Wang, Silin Zhou, Shihan Dou

Self-deprecation is a prevalent communicative strategy in human society, often using image-text interplay to express emotions and intentions. Despite self-deprecation is widespread in real-world conversations, the ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to understand it remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce **JanusMM**, the first benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs’ understanding of self-deprecation in real-world conversations. JanusMM contains 2,016 bilingual memes from three types of social interactions and provides a dual-task evaluation framework with six new metrics. The first task assesses MLLMs’ abilities in self-deprecation recognition and reasoning, while the second task evaluates the consistency of their understanding by simulating the perspectives of the initiator and responder. We evaluate ten frontier MLLMs and find that they exhibit weak recognition and reasoning abilities, with their understanding of self-deprecation remaining inconsistent across both perspectives.

Eunsu Kim, Junyeong Park, Juhyun Oh, Kiwoong Park, Seyoung Song, A. Seza Doğruöz, Alice Oh, Najoung Kim

As LLMs are increasingly deployed in real-world interactions, their social reasoning in interpersonal communication becomes critical. To explore their capabilities, we introduce SCRIPTS, a 1.1k-dialogue dataset in English and Korean, sourced from movie scripts and propose a social reasoning task based on SCRIPTS that evaluates the capacity of LLMs to infer the social relationships (e.g., friends, lovers) between speakers in each dialogue. Evaluating nine models on our task, current LLMs achieve around 75–80% on the English dataset and 58–69% in Korean, and models predict an Unlikely relationship in 10–25% of responses in both languages.Furthermore, we find that thinking models and chain-of-thought prompting provide minimal benefits for social reasoning and occasionally amplify social biases.In sum, there are significant limitations in current LLMs’ social reasoning capabilities, especially for Korean, highlighting the need for efforts to develop socially-aware LLMs across languages.

Baishi Li, Ta Yu, Kelvin J.L. Koa, Ke-Wei Huang

Natural Language Processing is rapidly evolving into a primary instrument for Computational Social Science, with researchers increasingly using embeddings to measure latent constructs such as novelty, creativity, and bias. However, this transition faces a fundamental validity challenge: the “Proxy Presumption,” or the reliance on geometric properties (e.g., cosine distance) as direct measures of social concepts. We argue that without explicit validation, unsupervised representations remain entangled mixtures of the target construct (C) and confounding attributes (Z) like topic, style, and authorship. To bridge the gap between semantic embeddings and valid social measures, we introduce the Construct Validity Protocol (CVP). Drawing on causal representation learning and psychometrics, the CVP offers a rigorous pipeline from conceptualization to quantitative verification. We further propose Counterfactual Neutralization, a novel method using LLMs to reduce confounding in embedding space. By providing a standardized Validity Suite—including tests for discriminant, incremental, and predictive validity—this work offers the community a toolkit to transform heuristic proxies into robust, scientifically defensible instruments.

Weixiao Zhan, Yongcheng Jing, Leszek Rutkowski, Dacheng Tao

Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers capabilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, yet it can fail unpredictably and also underpins model leakage risks. Our analysis revealed several distillation traps: tail noise, off-policy instability, and, most fundamentally, the teacher–student gap, that distort training signals. These traps manifest as overconfident hallucinations, self-correction collapse, and local decoding degradation, causing distillation to fail. Motivated by these findings, we propose a post-hoc calibration method that, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time enables control over a teacher’s distillability via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Our objective combines task utility, KL anchor, and across-tokenizer calibration reward. This makes distillability a practical safety lever for foundation models, connecting robust teacher–student transfer with deployment-aware model protection. Experiments across math, knowledge QA, and instruction-following tasks show that students distilled from distillable calibrated teachers outperform SFT and KD baselines, while undistillable calibrated teachers retain their task performance but cause distilled students to collapse, offering a practical knob for both better KD and model IP protection.

Jie Huang, Xin Liao, Junjie Wang, Mingyang Li, Wenshuo Wang, Ziyou Jiang, Shoubin Li, Qing Wang

With the rise of short-video platforms, hate speech has evolved from static text and memes into more covert and aggressive hateful video formats, profoundly impacting social dynamics and public sentiment. Existing detection methods typically rely on multimodal feature fusion, which blurs the distinct boundaries of modality-specific information. This leads to the feature dilution problem, where dominant benign modalities often overwhelm sparse, localized hateful cues. To address this, we propose SAGE (Synergistic Adaptive Gating of Experts), a novel framework that shifts the paradigm from blind feature mixing to decision-level arbitration. Mimicking human cognitive processes, SAGE instantiates disentangled experts to rigorously preserve modality-specific semantics, facilitates global expert deliberation for context-aware refinement, and convenes an instance-level tribunal to dynamically arbitrate the final verdict based on evidentiary salience. Extensive experiments on HateMM and MultiHateClip benchmarks demonstrate that SAGE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving accuracy gains of 6.37% to 21.23% and macro-F1 score gains of 6.77% to 28.01%.

Chunkit Chan, Yauwai Yim, Hongchuan Zeng, Zhiying Zou, Xinyuan Cheng, Zhifan Sun, Zheye Deng, Kawai Chung, Yuzhuo Ao, Fan Yixiang 等

Theory of Mind (ToM)—the ability to infer mental states in others—is pivotal for human social cognition. Existing evaluations of ToM in LLMs are largely limited to English, neglecting the linguistic diversity that shapes human cognition. This limitation raises a critical question: can LLMs exhibit Multilingual Theory of Mind—the capacity to reason about mental states across diverse linguistic contexts? To address this gap, we present XToM, a rigorously validated multilingual benchmark that evaluates ToM across five languages and incorporates diverse, contextually rich task scenarios. Using XToM, we systematically evaluate LLMs (e.g., DeepSeek R1), revealing a pronounced dissonance: while models excel in multilingual language understanding, their ToM performance varies across languages. Our findings expose limitations in LLMs’ ability to replicate human-like mentalizing across linguistic contexts.

Yi Jing, Weiyun Qiu, Yihang Peng, Zhifang Sui

Language change both reflects and shapes social processes, and the semantic evolution of foundational concepts provides a measurable trace of historical and social transformation. Despite recent advances in diachronic semantics and discourse analysis, existing computational approaches often (i) concentrate on a single concept or a single corpus, making findings difficult to compare across heterogeneous sources, and (ii) remain confined to surface lexical evidence, offering insufficient computational and interpretive granularity when concepts are expressed implicitly. We propose HistLens, a unified, SAE-based framework for multi-concept, multi-corpus conceptual-history analysis. The framework decomposes concept representations into interpretable features and tracks their activation dynamics over time and across sources, yielding comparable conceptual trajectories within a shared coordinate system. Experiments on long-span press corpora show that HistLens supports cross-concept, cross-corpus computation of patterns of idea evolution and enables implicit concept computation. By bridging conceptual modeling with interpretive needs, HistLens broadens the analytical perspectives and methodological repertoire available to social science and the humanities for diachronic text analysis.

Xuan Zhou, Yanhui Sun, Hantao Yao, Allen He, Yongdong Zhang, Wu Liu

Large-scale social simulators are essential for studying complex social patterns. Prior work explores hybrid methods to scale up simulations, combining large language models (LLM)-based agents with numerical agent-based models (ABM). However, this incurs high latency due to expensive memory retrieval and sequential ABM execution. To address this challenge, we propose GASim, a graph-accelerated hybrid multi-agent framework for large-scale social simulations. For core agents driven by LLM, GASim introduces Graph-Optimized Memory (GOM) to replace intensive LLM-based retrieval pipelines with lightweight propagation over a sparse memory graph. For the majority of ordinary agents, GASim employs Graph Message Passing (GMP), substituting sequential ABM execution with parallel updates by fine-grained feature aggregation and Graph Attention Network. We further introduce Entropy-Driven Grouping (EDG) that coordinates this hybrid partitioning, leveraging information entropy to dynamically identify emergent core agents situated in information-diverse neighborhoods. Extensive experiments show that GASim not only delivers a substantial 9.94× end-to-end speedup over the traditional hybrid framework but also consumes less than 20% of baseline tokens, significantly reducing costs while preserving strong alignment with real-world public opinion trends.

Tulika Tewari, Nalin Asanka Gamagedara Arachchilage, Jagat Sesh Challa, Dhruv Kumar

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel as conversational agents. However, these capabilities can be weaponized to automate social engineering attacks that gradually build rapport to compromise the online safety of users. To understand this, researchers have simulated LLM-based attacks in controlled settings. However, the existing simulators focus on just Personal Identifiable Information (PII) requests within the chat. Thus, to represent a complete attack scenario, we introduce PhishSim, an outcome-driven LLM-based phishing simulator that verifies compromise by simulating a victim completing an external action step, such as submitting credentials on a malicious platform. This enables the generation of diverse, multi-turn attack trajectories. Building on these trajectories, we position PhishGate as a practical mitigation baseline for outcome-grounded conversational phishing: a real-time multi-agent risk scorer that detects manipulation tactics and estimates the severity of ongoing chats. For ambiguous cases, it invokes RAG-supported consistency checks. Evaluating four state-of-the-art LLM backends in a real-time setting, we find that PhishGate improves dialogue-level detection over a real-time baseline. Our results highlight both the promise and brittleness of LLM-based real-time phishing defense, providing an outcome-grounded testbed for studying conversational compromise.

Zhaopeng Feng, Yupu Liang, Shaosheng Cao, Jiayuan Su, Jiahan Ren, Zhijie Zhou, Wenxuan Huang, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu

Text Image Machine Translation (TIMT)—the task of translating textual content embedded in images—is critical for applications in accessibility, cross-lingual information access, and real-world document understanding. However, TIMT remains a complex challenge due to the need for accurate optical character recognition (OCR), robust visual-text reasoning, and high-quality translation, often requiring cascading multi-stage pipelines. Recent advances in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) have improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), but their application to end-to-end TIMT is still underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce MT^{3}, a novel Multi-Task RL framework to specialize MLLMs into end-to-end expert TIMT models. MT^{3} adopts a synergistic multi-task optimization paradigm targeting three key sub-skills: text recognition, context-aware reasoning, and translation. It is trained using a novel multi-mixed reward mechanism that provides fine-grained feedback, fostering a controllable and transparent optimization process. Furthermore, to facilitate the evaluation of TIMT in authentic cross-cultural and real-world social media contexts, we introduced XHSPost, the first social media TIMT benchmark. Our MT^{3}-7B-Zero achieves state-of-the-art results on the latest in-domain MIT-10M benchmark, outperforming strong baselines such as Qwen2.5-VL-72B and InternVL2.5-78B by notable margins across multiple metrics. Additionally, the model shows strong generalization to out-of-distribution language pairs and datasets. In-depth analyses reveal how multi-task synergy, reinforcement learning initialization, curriculum design, and reward formulation contribute to advancing MLLM-driven TIMT.