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Keyu He, Tejas Srinivasan, Brihi Joshi, Xiang Ren, Jesse Thomason, Swabha Swayamdipta

When people query Vision-Language Models (VLMs) but cannot see the accompanying visual context (e.g. for blind and low-vision users), augmenting VLM predictions with natural language explanations can signal which model predictions are reliable. However, prior work has found that explanations can easily convince users that inaccurate VLM predictions are correct. To remedy undesirable overreliance on VLM predictions, we propose evaluating two complementary qualities of VLM-generated explanations via two quality scoring functions. We propose Visual Fidelity, which captures how faithful an explanation is to the visual context, and Contrastiveness, which captures how well the explanation identifies visual details that distinguish the model’s prediction from plausible alternatives. On the A-OKVQA, VizWiz, and MMMU-Pro tasks, these quality scoring functions are better calibrated with model correctness than existing explanation qualities. We conduct a user study in which participants have to decide whether a VLM prediction is accurate without viewing its visual context. We observe that showing our quality scores alongside VLM explanations improves participants’ accuracy at predicting VLM correctness by 11.1%, including a 15.4% reduction in the rate of falsely believing incorrect predictions. These findings highlight the utility of explanation quality scores in fostering appropriate reliance on VLM predictions.

Jiahao Xu, Rui Hu, Olivera Kotevska, Zikai Zhang

Multi-bit watermarking has emerged as a promising solution for embedding imperceptible binary messages into Large Language Model (LLM)-generated text, enabling reliable attribution and tracing of malicious usage of LLMs. Despite recent progress, existing methods still face key limitations: some become computationally infeasible for large messages, while others suffer from a poor trade-off between text quality and decoding accuracy. Moreover, the decoding accuracy of existing methods drops significantly when the number of tokens in the generated text is limited, a condition that frequently arises in practical usage. To address these challenges, we propose XMark, a novel method for encoding and decoding binary messages in LLM-generated texts. The unique design of XMark’s encoder produces a less distorted logit distribution for watermarked token generation, preserving text quality, and also enables its tailored decoder to reliably recover the encoded message with limited tokens. Extensive experiments across diverse downstream tasks show that XMark significantly improves decoding accuracy while preserving the quality of watermarked text, outperforming prior methods. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Anjali Sarawgi, Esteban Garces Arias, Christof Zotter

This paper presents the first end-to-end pipeline for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Old Nepali, a historically significant but low-resource language. We adopt a line-level transcription approach and systematically explore encoder-decoder architectures and data-centric techniques to improve recognition accuracy. Our best model achieves a Character Error Rate (CER) of 4.9%. In addition, we implement and evaluate decoding strategies and analyze token-level confusions to better understand model behavior and error patterns. Although the evaluation dataset is confidential, we release our training code, model configurations, and evaluation scripts to support further research on HTR for low-resource historical scripts.

Zisu Huang, Muzhao Tian, Xiaohua Wang, Jingwen Xu, Zhengkang Guo, Qi Qian, Kaitao Song, Jiakang Yuan, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng

As LLM-based agents are increasingly used in long-term interactions, cumulative memory is critical for enabling personalization and maintaining stylistic consistency. However, most existing systems adopt an "all-or-nothing" approach to memory usage: incorporating all relevant past information can lead to Memory Anchoring, where the agent is trapped by past interactions, while excluding memory entirely results in under-utilization and the loss of important interaction history. We show that an agent’s reliance on memory can be modeled as an explicit and user-controllable dimension. We first introduce a behavioral metric of memory dependence to quantify the influence of past interactions on current outputs. We then propose Steerable Memory Agent, SteeM, a framework that allows users to dynamically regulate memory reliance, ranging from a fresh-start mode that promotes innovation to a high-fidelity mode that closely follows interaction history. Experiments across different scenarios demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms conventional prompting and rigid memory masking strategies, yielding a more nuanced and effective control for personalized human-agent collaboration.

Peter Jansen, Peter Clark, Doug Downey, Daniel S Weld

Contemporary automated scientific discovery has focused on agents for generating scientific experiments, while systems that perform higher-level scientific activities such as theory building remain underexplored. In this work, we formulate the problem of synthesizing theories consisting of qualitative and quantitative laws from large corpora of scientific literature. We study theory generation at scale, using 13.7k source papers to synthesize 2.9k theories, examining how generation using literature-grounding versus parametric knowledge, and accuracy-focused versus novelty-focused generation objectives change theory properties. Our experiments show that, compared to using parametric LLM memory for generation, our literature-supported method creates theories that are significantly better at both matching existing evidence and at predicting future results from 4.6k subsequently-written papers.

Viet Pham, Thai Le

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed via third-party system prompts downloaded from public marketplaces. We identify a critical supply-chain vulnerability: conditional system prompt poisoning, where an adversary injects a sleeper agent into a benign-looking prompt. Unlike traditional jailbreaks that aim for broad refusal-breaking, our proposed framework, PARASITE, optimizes system prompts to trigger LLMs to output targeted, compromised responses only for specific queries (e.g., “Who should I vote for the US President?”) while maintaining high utility on benign inputs. Operating in a strict black-box setting without model weight access, PARASITE utilizes a two-stage optimization including a global semantic search followed by a greedy lexical refinement. Tested on open-source models and commercial APIs (GPT-4o-mini, GPT-3.5), PARASITE achieves up to 70% F1 reduction on targeted queries with minimal degradation to general capabilities. We further demonstrate that these poisoned prompts evade standard defenses, including perplexity filters and typo-correction, by exploiting the natural noise found in real-world system prompts.

Yan Xia, Zhuangzhuang Pan, Amirrudin Kamsin, Chee Seng Chan

Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) in multi-aspect sentences faces a fundamental tradeoff between efficiency and expressiveness. Existing models either re-encode the sentence for each aspect or rely on static use of deep representations, leading to redundant computation and limited adaptivity. We argue that Transformer depth is a costly, queryable resource, and propose DABS, a single-pass inference framework that encodes each sentence once to construct a reusable, depth-ordered substrate. Each aspect then queries this shared representation to selectively read relevant tokens and abstraction levels, without re-encoding. This decouples shared sentence encoding from lightweight, aspect-conditioned readout. Experiments on four ATSA benchmarks show that DABS achieves competitive performance while reducing end-to-end computation by up to 60% in multi-aspect settings (M \ge 2). Further analyses indicate that adaptive depth querying is most beneficial for linguistically complex cases such as negation and contrast. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/panzhzh/acl-dabs.

Hengyuan Zhang, Shiping Yang, Xiao Liang, Chenming Shang, Yuxuan Jiang, Chaofan Tao, Jing Xiong, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Ruobing Xie, Angel X. Chang 等

Training student models on synthetic data generated by strong teacher models is a promising approach to distilling the capabilities of teachers. However, existing studies reveal that stronger models are not always optimal teachers, suggesting a mismatch between the teacher’s output and the student’s learning ability. To address this issue, we propose PerSyn (Personalized data Synthesis), a novel and efficient approach that customizes synthetic data to align with the learning capabilities of the student model. Specifically, our PerSyn method routes each prompt to its optimal teacher via a query-level router that jointly considers the student models’ learnability and teacher models’ response quality. It successfully transfers the synthesis paradigm from the conventional "Generate then Select" to a more efficient manner, i.e., "Route then Generate", eliminating the need for all teacher models to generate parallel responses across the entire prompt set. Extensive experiments across different model families and scales demonstrate that PerSyn consistently outperforms all baselines on six benchmarks, including instruct tuning and math reasoning settings. Further analysis verifies the effectiveness of PerSyn and offers extra insights to propel future research. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PerSyn-8D85.

Yan Wang, Yitao Xu, Nanhan Shen, Jinyan Su, Jimin Huang, Zining Zhu

Mixture of Experts models are widely assumed to achieve domain specialization through sparse routing. In this work, we question this assumption by introducing COMMITTEEAUDIT, a post hoc framework that analyzes routing behavior at the level of expert groups rather than individual experts. Across three representative models and the MMLU benchmark, we uncover a domain invariant Standing Committee. This is a compact coalition of routed experts that consistently captures the majority of routing mass across domains, layers, and routing budgets, even when architectures already include shared experts. Qualitative analysis further shows that Standing Committees anchor reasoning structure and syntax, while peripheral experts handle domain-specific knowledge. These findings reveal a strong structural bias toward centralized computation, suggesting that specialization in Mixture of Experts models is far less pervasive than commonly believed. Crucially, this inherent bias indicates that current training objectives, such as load-balancing losses that enforce uniform expert utilization, may be working against the model’s natural optimization path, thereby limiting training efficiency and performance.

Wenlong Deng, Qi Zeng, Jiaming Zhang, Minghui Chen, Zixin Ding, Christos Thrampoulidis, Boying Gong, Xiaoxiao Li

Data valuation is essential for enhancing the transparency and accountability of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing methods typically rely on gradient computations, making them computationally prohibitive for billion-parameter models and precluding batch parallelization. In this work, we introduce For-Value, a forward-only data valuation framework that enables efficient batch-scalable value estimation while maintaining effectiveness. Leveraging the expressive power of pretrained LLMs/VLMs, we theoretically demonstrate that data valuation can be captured by the alignment between the final hidden representations and prediction errors at the last layer. In light of this insight, For-Value computes data value using a simple closed-form expression with a single forward pass, eliminating the need for costly backpropagation and enabling efficient batch calculating at scale. Extensive experiments show that For-Value matches or outperforms gradient-based baselines in detecting influential data and mislabeled data, while achieving significant efficiency improvements.

Jenna Russell, Marzena Karpinska, Destiny Akinode, James Zhou, Katherine Thai, Bradley Emi, Max Spero, Mohit Iyyer

AI is rapidly transforming journalism, but the extent of its use in published newspaper articles remains unclear. We address this gap by auditing a large-scale dataset of 186K articles from online editions of 1.5K American newspapers published in the summer of 2025. Using Pangram, a state-of-the-art AI detector, we discover that approximately 9% of newly-published articles are either partially or fully AI-generated. This AI use is unevenly distributed, appearing more frequently in smaller, local outlets, in specific topics such as weather and technology, and within certain ownership groups. We also analyze 45K opinion pieces from Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, finding that they are 6.4 times more likely to contain AI-generated content than news articles from the same publications, with many AI-flagged op-eds authored by prominent public figures. Despite this prevalence, we find that AI use is rarely disclosed: a manual audit of 100 AI-flagged articles found only five disclosures of AI use. A factuality analysis shows AI-generated articles are 8.2 times more likely to contain hallucinated claims than human-written news. Overall, our audit highlights the immediate need for greater transparency and updated editorial standards regarding the use of AI in journalism to maintain public trust.

Zhuohan Xie, Daniil Orel, Rushil Thareja, Dhruv Sahnan, Hachem Madmoun, Fan Zhang, Debopriyo Banerjee, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian 等

Multi-step symbolic reasoning is essential for robust financial analysis; yet, current benchmarks largely overlook this capability. Existing datasets such as FinQA and ConvFinQA emphasize final numerical answers while neglecting the intermediate reasoning steps required for transparency and verification. To address this gap, we introduce FinChain, the first benchmark specifically designed for verifiable Chain-of-Thought evaluation in finance. FinChain spans 58 topics across 12 financial domains, each represented by parameterized symbolic templates with executable Python code that enable fully machine-verifiable reasoning and scalable, contamination-free data generation.To assess reasoning capacity, we propose ChainEval, a dynamic alignment measure that jointly evaluates both the final-answer correctness and the step-level reasoning consistency. Our evaluation of 26 leading LLMs reveals that even frontier LLMs exhibit clear limitations in symbolic financial reasoning, while domain-adapted and math-enhanced fine-tuned models can substantially narrow this gap.Overall, FinChain exposes persistent weaknesses in multi-step financial reasoning and provides a foundation for developing trustworthy, interpretable, and verifiable financial AI. This project is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/finchain.git.

Yiqiao Jin, Kartik Sharma, Vineeth Rakesh, Yingtong Dou, Menghai Pan, Mahashweta Das, Srijan Kumar

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, but it must balance limited effective context, redundant retrieved evidence, and the loss of fine-grained facts under aggressive compression. Pure compression-based approaches reduce input size but often discard fine-grained details essential for factual accuracy. We propose SARA, a hybrid RAG framework that targets answer quality under fixed token budgets by combining natural-language snippets with semantic compression vectors. SARA retains a small set of passages in text form to preserve entities and numerical values, compresses the remaining evidence into interpretable vectors for broader coverage, and uses those vectors for iterative evidence reranking. Across 9 datasets and 5 open-source LLMs spanning 3 model families (Mistral, Llama, and Gemma), SARA consistently improves answer relevance (+17.71), answer correctness (+13.72), and semantic similarity (+15.53), demonstrating the importance of integrating textual and compressed representations for robust, context-efficient RAG.

Bo Zhang, Jiawei Zhang, Cong Gao, Bingxu Han, Minghao Hu, Jun Zhang, Yunbo Cao, Zhunchen Luo, Wen Yao, Guotong Geng 等

Although large reasoning models (LRMs) exhibit exceptional mathematical reasoning capabilities on clean inputs, their reasoning accuracy drops substantially in the presence of character-level noise such as typographical errors. Critically, their confidence estimates fail to reflect the corresponding decline in reasoning accuracy. While confidence calibration offers a principled solution, existing methods predominantly target clean inputs, leaving noisy scenarios largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose DisCal (Distribution-aware Calibration), a confidence calibration framework for character-level noisy inputs. DisCal extracts uncertainty signals from both the empirical answer distribution and the model’s predictive distribution, and integrates them via a learned calibrator to produce well-calibrated confidence. Experiments across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DisCal consistently outperforms existing calibration methods under noisy inputs, reducing Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by up to 39.21% and improving Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUROC) by up to 31.44%.

Sen Fang, Yalin Feng, Hongbin Zhong, Yanxin Zhang, Dimitris N. Metaxas

Sign Language Production (SLP) is the process of converting the complex input text into a real video. Most previous works focused on the Text2Gloss, Gloss2Pose, Pose2Vid stages, and some concentrated on Prompt2Gloss and Text2Avatar stages. However, this field has made slow progress due to the inaccuracy of text conversion, pose generation, and the rendering of poses into real human videos in these stages, resulting in gradually accumulating errors. Therefore, in this paper, we streamline the traditional redundant structure, simplify and optimize the task objective, and design a new sign language generative model called **Stable Signer**. It redefines the SLP task as a hierarchical generation end-to-end task that only includes text understanding (Prompt2Gloss, Text2Gloss) and Pose2Vid, and executes text understanding through our proposed new **S**ign **L**anguage **U**nderstanding **L**inker called **SLUL**, and generates hand gestures through the named **SLP-MoE** hand gesture rendering expert block to end-to-end generate high-quality and multi-style sign language videos. SLUL is trained using the newly developed **S**emantic-**A**ware **G**loss **M**asking Loss (**SAGM Loss**). Its performance has improved by 48.6% compared to the current SOTA generation methods, which is a significant increase in the SLP field. More demo can be obtained at [anonymous url](https://anonymoussubmissionurl.github.io/Stable-Signer).

Cy Xie

Spreadsheet applications are used by hundreds of millions worldwide, yet writing formulas remains a significant barrier. Existing approaches rely on static supervised data, which quickly saturates on limited annotations. In this paper, we introduce FormulaSPIN, a self-play framework that breaks the ceiling of supervised fine-tuning by enabling iterative self-improvement without any additional data. Vanilla SPIN fails on this task: it uniformly penalizes every non-matching output, so execution-equivalent alternatives are pushed down as negatives in one example while serving as ground truth in another, producing contradictory gradients. Our framework resolves this by exploiting formula generation’s unique advantage: binary executability provides implicit supervision that separates semantic errors from valid stylistic variants. We frame training as a two-player game in which the main player learns to prefer ground-truth formulas over those from its previous version, while execution feedback sorts outputs into distinct granularities—enabling an adaptive curriculum that shifts from semantic correctness to stylistic refinement. To further increase accuracy, we incorporate ExecVote, a semantic-level voting mechanism that naturally handles multiple valid formulations. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that FormulaSPIN achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 74.9% exact match and 87.1% execution accuracy on NL2FORMULA, matching models trained with additional preference annotations while outperforming both traditional SFT and frontier proprietary models. These findings underscore self-play’s potential to tackle scarce data tasks and open the door to extending it beyond executable domains.

Jiale Liu, Victor Bursztyn, Lin Ai, Haoliang Wang, Sunav Choudhary, Saayan Mitra, Qingyun Wu

In open-ended domains, teams must reconcile diverse viewpoints to produce strong deliverables. Answer aggregation approaches commonly used in closed domains are ill-suited to this setting, as they tend to suppress minority perspectives rather than resolve underlying disagreements. We present TeamFusion, a multi-agent system designed to support teamwork in open-ended domains by: 1. Instantiating a proxy agent for each team member conditioned on their expressed preferences; 2. Conducting a structured discussion to elicit agreements and disagreements; and 3. Synthesizing more consensus-oriented deliverables that feed into new iterations of discussion and synthesis. We evaluate TeamFusion on two teamwork tasks where team members can judge how well their individual views are represented in team decisions and how consensually good the final deliverables are, finding that it outperforms direct aggregation baselines across metrics, tasks, and team configurations.

Zhongyu Ouyang, Qianlong Wen, Chunhui Zhang, Yanfang Ye, Soroush Vosoughi

What enables large language models (LLMs) to effectively model user preferences in sequential recommendation? Our investigation reveals that existing preference-alignment approaches largely rely on binary pairwise comparisons, overlooking two critical factors: preference intensity (the structured strength of affinity or aversion) and temporal context (the extent to which recent interactions better reflect a user’s current intent). Through controlled experiments, we show that leveraging comprehensive feedback with structured preference signals substantially improves recommendation performance, indicating that binary modeling discards essential information. Motivated by these findings, we propose RecPO, a unified preference optimization framework that maps both explicit and implicit feedback into a common preference signal and constructs adaptive reward margins that jointly account for preference intensity and interaction recency. Experiments across five datasets show that RecPO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while exhibiting behavioral patterns aligned with human decision-making, including favoring immediate satisfaction, maintaining preference coherence, and avoiding dispreferred items. Our results highlight that preference intensity and temporal context are fundamental ingredients for effective LLM-based recommendation. Code: https://github.com/zyouyang/RecPO

Hyeong Kyu Choi, Sharon Li

Selecting a single high-quality output from multiple stochastic generations remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in open-ended tasks where no canonical answer exists. While Best-of-N and self-consistency methods show that aggregating multiple generations can improve performance, existing approaches typically rely on external evaluators, reward models, or exact string-match voting, limiting their applicability and efficiency. We propose Mode Extraction (ModeX), an evaluator-free Best-of-N selection framework that generalizes majority voting to open-ended text generation by identifying the modal output representing the dominant semantic consensus among generated texts. ModeX constructs a similarity graph over candidate generations and recursively applies spectral clustering to select a representative centroid, without requiring additional inference or auxiliary models. We further instantiate this selection principle as ModeX Decoding, a drop-in decoding scheme with early pruning for efficiency. Across open-ended tasks—including text summarization, code generation, and mathematical reasoning—our approaches consistently outperform standard single- and multi-path baselines, providing a computationally efficient, drop-in solution for robust open-ended text generation.

Xiquan Li, Junxi Liu, Yuzhe Liang, Zhikang Niu, Wenxi Chen, Xie Chen

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in Text-to-Audio Generation (TTA), providing sound creators with powerful tools to transform inspirations into vivid audio. Yet despite these advances, current TTA systems often suffer from slow inference speed, which greatly hinders the efficiency and smoothness of audio creation. In this paper, we present MeanAudio, a fast and faithful text-to-audio generator capable of rendering realistic sound with only one function evaluation (1-NFE). MeanAudio leverages: (i) the MeanFlow objective with guided velocity target that significantly accelerates inference speed, (ii) an enhanced Flux-style transformer with dual text encoders for better semantic alignment and synthesis quality, and (iii) an efficient instantaneous-to-mean curriculum that speeds up convergence and enables training on consumer-grade GPUs. Through a comprehensive evaluation study, we demonstrate that MeanAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-step audio generation. Specifically, it achieves a real-time factor (RTF) of 0.013 on a single NVIDIA RTX 3090, yielding a 100x speedup over SOTA diffusion-based TTA systems. Moreover, MeanAudio also shows strong performance in multi-step generation, enabling smooth transitions across successive synthesis steps.