Daily Papers

This paper studies the next major bottleneck in agentic AI as system scaling, not only model scaling: the design of auditable, persistent, modular, and verifiable architectures around foundation models. We refer to this shift as scaling the harness: treating the structured execution layer around a foundation model as a first-class object of design, evaluation, and optimization. Although recent large language models enable agents to use tools, retrieve information, maintain memory, and execute long-horizon workflows, evaluation remains largely model-centric, often reducing agents to final-task success while treating memory, retrieval, tool use, orchestration, verification, and governance as secondary implementation details. This framing is increasingly inadequate because agent performance emerges from the interaction among the foundation model, memory substrate, context constructor, skill-routing layer, orchestration loop, and verification-and-governance layer. Together, these components form the agent harness, which translates model capability into long-horizon agent behavior. We study scaling the harness through three core bottlenecks: context governance, trustworthy memory, and dynamic skill routing, together with the orchestration and governance mechanisms that coordinate and constrain them. We further outline a research agenda for harness-level benchmarks that go beyond one-shot task success to measure trajectory quality, memory hygiene, context efficiency, communication fidelity, verification cost, and safe evolution over time. To make the discussion concrete, we develop CheetahClaws: https://github.com/SafeRL-Lab/cheetahclaws, a Python-native reference harness, and compare it with Claude Code and OpenClaw. Our main claim is that future progress in agentic AI will depend as much on system design as on stronger foundation models.

As multi-agent systems (MAS) become increasingly prevalent in autonomous systems, distributed control, and edge intelligence, efficient communication under resource constraints has emerged as a critical challenge. Traditional communication paradigms often emphasize message fidelity or bandwidth optimization, overlooking the task relevance of the exchanged information. In contrast, goal-oriented communication prioritizes the importance of information with respect to the agents' shared objectives. This review provides a comprehensive survey of goal-oriented communication in MAS, bridging perspectives from information theory, communication theory, and machine learning. We examine foundational concepts alongside learning-based approaches and emergent protocols. Special attention is given to coordination under communication constraints, as well as applications in domains such as swarm robotics, federated learning, and edge computing. The paper concludes with a discussion of open challenges and future research directions at the intersection of communication theory, machine learning, and multi-agent decision making.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated in interactive environments to test their social intelligence. However, existing benchmarks often assume idealized communication between agents, limiting our ability to diagnose whether LLMs can maintain and repair interactions in more realistic, imperfect settings. To close this gap, we present SocialVeil, a social learning environment that can simulate social interaction under cognitive-difference-induced communication barriers. Grounded in a systematic literature review of communication challenges in human interaction, SocialVeil introduces three representative types of such disruption, semantic vagueness, sociocultural mismatch, and emotional interference. We also introduce two barrier-aware evaluation metrics, unresolved confusion and mutual understanding, to evaluate interaction quality under impaired communication. Experiments across 720 scenarios and four frontier LLMs show that barriers consistently impair performance, with mutual understanding reduced by over 45\% on average, and confusion elevated by nearly 50\%. Human evaluations validate the fidelity of these simulated barriers (ICCapprox0.78, Pearson rapprox0.80). We further demonstrate that adaptation strategies (Repair Instruction and Interactive learning) only have a modest effect far from barrier-free performance. This work takes a step toward bringing social interaction environments closer to real-world communication, opening opportunities for exploring the social intelligence of LLM agents.

Audio codec models are widely used in audio communication as a crucial technique for compressing audio into discrete representations. Nowadays, audio codec models are increasingly utilized in generation fields as intermediate representations. For instance, AudioLM is an audio generation model that uses the discrete representation of SoundStream as a training target, while VALL-E employs the Encodec model as an intermediate feature to aid TTS tasks. Despite their usefulness, two challenges persist: (1) training these audio codec models can be difficult due to the lack of publicly available training processes and the need for large-scale data and GPUs; (2) achieving good reconstruction performance requires many codebooks, which increases the burden on generation models. In this study, we propose a group-residual vector quantization (GRVQ) technique and use it to develop a novel High Fidelity Audio Codec model, HiFi-Codec, which only requires 4 codebooks. We train all the models using publicly available TTS data such as LibriTTS, VCTK, AISHELL, and more, with a total duration of over 1000 hours, using 8 GPUs. Our experimental results show that HiFi-Codec outperforms Encodec in terms of reconstruction performance despite requiring only 4 codebooks. To facilitate research in audio codec and generation, we introduce AcademiCodec, the first open-source audio codec toolkit that offers training codes and pre-trained models for Encodec, SoundStream, and HiFi-Codec. Code and pre-trained model can be found on: https://github.com/yangdongchao/AcademiCodec{https://github.com/yangdongchao/AcademiCodec}

Public power-system datasets often lack electromagnetic transient (EMT) waveforms, inverter control dynamics, and diverse disturbance coverage, which limits their usefulness for training surrogate models and studying cyber-physical behavior in inverter-based microgrids. This paper presents a high-fidelity digital twin dataset generated from a MATLAB/Simulink EMT model of a low-voltage AC microgrid with ten inverter-based distributed generators. The dataset records synchronized three-phase PCC voltages and currents, per-DG active power, reactive power, and frequency, together with embedded scenario labels, producing 38 aligned channels sampled at Δt = 2~μs over T = 1~s (N = 500{,}001 samples) per scenario. Eleven operating and disturbance scenarios are included: normal operation, load step, voltage sag (temporary three-phase fault), load ramp, frequency ramp, DG trip, tie-line trip, reactive power step, single-line-to-ground faults, measurement noise injection, and communication delay. To ensure numerical stability without altering sequence length, invalid samples (NaN, Inf, and extreme outliers) are repaired using linear interpolation. Each scenario is further validated using system-level evidence from mean frequency, PCC voltage magnitude, total active power, voltage unbalance, and zero-sequence current to confirm physical observability and correct timing. The resulting dataset provides a consistent, labeled EMT benchmark for surrogate modeling, disturbance classification, robustness testing under noise and delay, and cyber-physical resilience analysis in inverter-dominated microgrids. The dataset and processing scripts will be released upon acceptance

Diagrams matter. Unfortunately, the deep learning community has no standard method for diagramming architectures. The current combination of linear algebra notation and ad-hoc diagrams fails to offer the necessary precision to understand architectures in all their detail. However, this detail is critical for faithful implementation, mathematical analysis, further innovation, and ethical assurances. I present neural circuit diagrams, a graphical language tailored to the needs of communicating deep learning architectures. Neural circuit diagrams naturally keep track of the changing arrangement of data, precisely show how operations are broadcast over axes, and display the critical parallel behavior of linear operations. A lingering issue with existing diagramming methods is the inability to simultaneously express the detail of axes and the free arrangement of data, which neural circuit diagrams solve. Their compositional structure is analogous to code, creating a close correspondence between diagrams and implementation. In this work, I introduce neural circuit diagrams for an audience of machine learning researchers. After introducing neural circuit diagrams, I cover a host of architectures to show their utility and breed familiarity. This includes the transformer architecture, convolution (and its difficult-to-explain extensions), residual networks, the U-Net, and the vision transformer. I include a Jupyter notebook that provides evidence for the close correspondence between diagrams and code. Finally, I examine backpropagation using neural circuit diagrams. I show their utility in providing mathematical insight and analyzing algorithms' time and space complexities.

Speech bandwidth extension (BWE) has demonstrated promising performance in enhancing the perceptual speech quality in real communication systems. Most existing BWE researches primarily focus on fixed upsampling ratios, disregarding the fact that the effective bandwidth of captured audio may fluctuate frequently due to various capturing devices and transmission conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel streaming adaptive bandwidth extension solution dubbed BAE-Net, which is suitable to handle the low-resolution speech with unknown and varying effective bandwidth. To address the challenges of recovering both the high-frequency magnitude and phase speech content blindly, we devise a dual-stream architecture that incorporates the magnitude inpainting and phase refinement. For potential applications on edge devices, this paper also introduces BAE-NET-lite, which is a lightweight, streaming and efficient framework. Quantitative results demonstrate the superiority of BAE-Net in terms of both performance and computational efficiency when compared with existing state-of-the-art BWE methods.

High-fidelity digital humans are increasingly used in interactive applications, yet achieving both visual realism and real-time responsiveness remains a major challenge. We present a high-fidelity, real-time conversational digital human system that seamlessly combines a visually realistic 3D avatar, persona-driven expressive speech synthesis, and knowledge-grounded dialogue generation. To support natural and timely interaction, we introduce an asynchronous execution pipeline that coordinates multi-modal components with minimal latency. The system supports advanced features such as wake word detection, emotionally expressive prosody, and highly accurate, context-aware response generation. It leverages novel retrieval-augmented methods, including history augmentation to maintain conversational flow and intent-based routing for efficient knowledge access. Together, these components form an integrated system that enables responsive and believable digital humans, suitable for immersive applications in communication, education, and entertainment.

Inter-user interference remains a critical bottleneck in wireless communication systems, particularly in the emerging paradigm of semantic communication (SemCom). Compared to traditional systems, inter-user interference in SemCom severely degrades key semantic information, often causing worse performance than Gaussian noise under the same power level. To address this challenge, inspired by the recently proposed concept of Orthogonal Model Division Multiple Access (OMDMA) that leverages semantic orthogonality rooted in the personalized joint source and channel (JSCC) models to distinguish users, we propose a novel, scalable framework that eliminates the need for user-specific JSCC models as did in original OMDMA. Our key innovation lies in shuffle-based orthogonalization, where randomly permuting the positions of JSCC feature vectors transforms inter-user interference into Gaussian-like noise. By assigning each user a unique shuffling pattern, the interference is treated as channel noise, enabling effective mitigation using diffusion models (DMs). This approach not only simplifies system design by requiring a single universal JSCC model but also enhances privacy, as shuffling patterns act as implicit private keys. Additionally, we extend the framework to scenarios involving semantically correlated data. By grouping users based on semantic similarity, a cooperative beamforming strategy is introduced to exploit redundancy in correlated data, further improving system performance. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art multi-user SemCom frameworks, achieving superior semantic fidelity, robustness to interference, and scalability-all without requiring additional training overhead.

In large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) systems with decoupled Trainer-Rollout execution, the Trainer must regularly synchronize policy weights to the Rollout side to limit policy staleness. When inter-node bandwidth is abundant, such synchronization is usually only a small fraction of end-to-end cost. As model size grows, however, the communication demand rises rapidly. In bandwidth-constrained or network-variable deployments -- for example, cross-datacenter or cross-cluster settings, heterogeneous resource pools, and online RL -- weight synchronization can become a dominant bottleneck for throughput and tail latency. We observe that, in mainstream large-model RL training, the locations where parameters actually change are highly sparse at the element level (often 99%+ sparsity). Building on this observation, we propose and implement SparseRL-Sync, which replaces full-weight transfers with a lossless sparse update payload (indices and values) that can be exactly reconstructed on the inference side, thereby preserving 100% fidelity. Under a simplified cost model, sparse synchronization reduces the per-update communication volume from S to approximately S/X; with 99% sparsity (X ~ 100), this yields about a 100x reduction in transmitted data. Combined with appropriate bucketing, SparseRL-Sync also reduces launch and control-plane overhead, significantly improving scalability and end-to-end efficiency in bandwidth-limited and highly asynchronous RL settings.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models have unlocked advanced collaborative reasoning, yet they remain shackled by the inefficiency of discrete text communication, which imposes significant runtime overhead and information quantization loss. While latent state transfer offers a high-bandwidth alternative, existing approaches either assume homogeneous sender-receiver architectures or rely on pair-specific learned translators, limiting scalability and modularity across diverse model families with disjoint manifolds. In this work, we propose the Vision Wormhole, a novel framework that repurposes the visual interface of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enable model-agnostic, text-free communication. By introducing a Universal Visual Codec, we map heterogeneous reasoning traces into a shared continuous latent space and inject them directly into the receiver's visual pathway, effectively treating the vision encoder as a universal port for inter-agent telepathy. Our framework adopts a hub-and-spoke topology to reduce pairwise alignment complexity from O(N^2) to O(N) and leverages a label-free, teacher-student distillation objective to align the high-speed visual channel with the robust reasoning patterns of the text pathway. Extensive experiments across heterogeneous model families (e.g., Qwen-VL, Gemma) demonstrate that the Vision Wormhole reduces end-to-end wall-clock time in controlled comparisons while maintaining reasoning fidelity comparable to standard text-based MAS. Code is available at https://github.com/xz-liu/heterogeneous-latent-mas

A good audio codec for live applications such as telecommunication is characterized by three key properties: (1) compression, i.e.\ the bitrate that is required to transmit the signal should be as low as possible; (2) latency, i.e.\ encoding and decoding the signal needs to be fast enough to enable communication without or with only minimal noticeable delay; and (3) reconstruction quality of the signal. In this work, we propose an open-source, streamable, and real-time neural audio codec that achieves strong performance along all three axes: it can reconstruct highly natural sounding 48~kHz speech signals while operating at only 12~kbps and running with less than 6~ms (GPU)/10~ms (CPU) latency. An efficient training paradigm is also demonstrated for developing such neural audio codecs for real-world scenarios. Both objective and subjective evaluations using the VCTK corpus are provided. To sum up, AudioDec is a well-developed plug-and-play benchmark for audio codec applications.

The ability to communicate quantum information over long distances is of central importance in quantum science and engineering. For example, it enables secure quantum key distribution (QKD) relying on fundamental principles that prohibit the "cloning" of unknown quantum states. While QKD is being successfully deployed, its range is currently limited by photon losses and cannot be extended using straightforward measure-and-repeat strategies without compromising its unconditional security. Alternatively, quantum repeaters, which utilize intermediate quantum memory nodes and error correction techniques, can extend the range of quantum channels. However, their implementation remains an outstanding challenge, requiring a combination of efficient and high-fidelity quantum memories, gate operations, and measurements. Here we report the experimental realization of memory-enhanced quantum communication. We use a single solid-state spin memory integrated in a nanophotonic diamond resonator to implement asynchronous Bell-state measurements. This enables a four-fold increase in the secret key rate of measurement device independent (MDI)-QKD over the loss-equivalent direct-transmission method while operating megahertz clock rates. Our results represent a significant step towards practical quantum repeaters and large-scale quantum networks.

We introduce REAL, a benchmark and framework for multi-turn agent evaluations on deterministic simulations of real-world websites. REAL comprises high-fidelity, deterministic replicas of 11 widely-used websites across domains such as e-commerce, travel, communication, and professional networking. We also release a benchmark consisting of 112 practical tasks that mirror everyday complex user interactions requiring both accurate information retrieval and state-changing actions. All interactions occur within this fully controlled setting, eliminating safety risks and enabling robust, reproducible evaluation of agent capability and reliability. Our novel evaluation framework combines programmatic checks of website state for action-based tasks with rubric-guided LLM-based judgments for information retrieval. The framework supports both open-source and proprietary agent systems through a flexible evaluation harness that accommodates black-box commands within browser environments, allowing research labs to test agentic systems without modification. Our empirical results show that frontier language models achieve at most a 41% success rate on REAL, highlighting critical gaps in autonomous web navigation and task completion capabilities. Our framework supports easy integration of new tasks, reproducible evaluation, and scalable post-training data generation, marking a significant step forward in evaluating and advancing agent capabilities.

Diffusion models have achieved great success in synthesizing high-quality images. However, generating high-resolution images with diffusion models is still challenging due to the enormous computational costs, resulting in a prohibitive latency for interactive applications. In this paper, we propose DistriFusion to tackle this problem by leveraging parallelism across multiple GPUs. Our method splits the model input into multiple patches and assigns each patch to a GPU. However, na\"{\i}vely implementing such an algorithm breaks the interaction between patches and loses fidelity, while incorporating such an interaction will incur tremendous communication overhead. To overcome this dilemma, we observe the high similarity between the input from adjacent diffusion steps and propose displaced patch parallelism, which takes advantage of the sequential nature of the diffusion process by reusing the pre-computed feature maps from the previous timestep to provide context for the current step. Therefore, our method supports asynchronous communication, which can be pipelined by computation. Extensive experiments show that our method can be applied to recent Stable Diffusion XL with no quality degradation and achieve up to a 6.1times speedup on eight NVIDIA A100s compared to one. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/distrifuser.

Multi-agent systems can improve reliability, yet under a fixed inference budget they often help, saturate, or even collapse. We develop a minimal and calibratable theory that predicts these regimes from three binding constraints of modern agent stacks: finite context windows, lossy inter-agent communication, and shared failures among similar agents. Each leaf agent is summarized by a compute-performance scaling exponent β; communication is captured by a message-length fidelity curve γ(m); dependence is captured by an effective shared-error correlation ρ; and a context window W imposes hard fan-in limits that make hierarchy necessary. For binary success/failure tasks with majority aggregation, we prove a sharp phase transition for deep b-ary trees with correlated inputs and lossy communication: a single scalar α_ρ (combining γ(m), ρ, and fan-in b) determines whether weak signal is amplified to a nontrivial fixed point or washed out to chance. In the amplifying regime, we derive an organization exponent s and show that budgeted synergy, i.e., outperforming the best single agent under the same total budget, occurs exactly when s>β, yielding closed-form compute allocation rules and explicit budget thresholds. We further characterize saturation via a mixing depth and provide a conservative clipped predictor that remains accurate across growth and saturation. A continuous-performance warm-up gives closed-form risks for star, chain, and tree organizations, making correlation- and communication-induced floors explicit and exposing the core design trade-offs in a smooth setting. Finally, we validate the predicted phase boundaries in controlled synthetic simulations and show how the same mechanisms explain the dominant bottlenecks reported in recent large-scale matched-budget studies of LLM agent-system scaling.

Existing benchmarks for conversational AI agents simulate single-control environments, where only the AI agent can use tools to interact with the world, while the user remains a passive information provider. This differs from real-world scenarios like technical support, where users need to actively participate in modifying the state of the (shared) world. In order to address this gap, we introduce tau^2-bench, with four key contributions: 1) A novel Telecom dual-control domain modeled as a Dec-POMDP, where both agent and user make use of tools to act in a shared, dynamic environment that tests both agent coordination and communication, 2) A compositional task generator that programmatically creates diverse, verifiable tasks from atomic components, ensuring domain coverage and controlled complexity, 3) A reliable user simulator tightly coupled with the environment, whose behavior is constrained by tools and observable states, improving simulation fidelity, 4) Fine-grained analysis of agent performance through multiple ablations including separating errors arising from reasoning vs communication/coordination. In particular, our experiments show significant performance drops when agents shift from no-user to dual-control, highlighting the challenges of guiding users. Overall, tau^2-bench provides a controlled testbed for agents that must both reason effectively and guide user actions.

Persona-assigned large language models (LLMs) are used in domains such as education, healthcare, and sociodemographic simulation. Yet, they are typically evaluated only in short, single-round settings that do not reflect real-world usage. We introduce an evaluation protocol that combines long persona dialogues (over 100 rounds) and evaluation datasets to create dialogue-conditioned benchmarks that can robustly measure long-context effects. We then investigate the effects of dialogue length on persona fidelity, instruction-following, and safety of seven state-of-the-art open- and closed-weight LLMs. We find that persona fidelity degrades over the course of dialogues, especially in goal-oriented conversations, where models must sustain both persona fidelity and instruction following. We identify a trade-off between fidelity and instruction following, with non-persona baselines initially outperforming persona-assigned models; as dialogues progress and fidelity fades, persona responses become increasingly similar to baseline responses. Our findings highlight the fragility of persona applications in extended interactions and our work provides a protocol to systematically measure such failures.

When artificial agents are jointly trained to perform collaborative tasks using a communication channel, they develop opaque goal-oriented communication protocols. Good task performance is often considered sufficient evidence that meaningful communication is taking place, but existing empirical results show that communication strategies induced by common objectives can be counterintuitive whilst solving the task nearly perfectly. In this work, we identify a goal-agnostic prerequisite to meaningful communication, which we term semantic consistency, based on the idea that messages should have similar meanings across instances. We provide a formal definition for this idea, and use it to compare the two most common objectives in the field of emergent communication: discrimination and reconstruction. We prove, under mild assumptions, that semantically inconsistent communication protocols can be optimal solutions to the discrimination task, but not to reconstruction. We further show that the reconstruction objective encourages a stricter property, spatial meaningfulness, which also accounts for the distance between messages. Experiments with emergent communication games validate our theoretical results. These findings demonstrate an inherent advantage of distance-based communication goals, and contextualize previous empirical discoveries.

Robust, faithful and harm-free pronoun use for individuals is an important goal for language models as their use increases, but prior work tends to study only one or two of these characteristics at a time. To measure progress towards the combined goal, we introduce the task of pronoun fidelity: given a context introducing a co-referring entity and pronoun, the task is to reuse the correct pronoun later. We present RUFF, a carefully-designed dataset of over 5 million instances to measure robust pronoun fidelity in English, and we evaluate 37 popular large language models across architectures (encoder-only, decoder-only and encoder-decoder) and scales (11M-70B parameters). When an individual is introduced with a pronoun, models can mostly faithfully reuse this pronoun in the next sentence, but they are significantly worse with she/her/her, singular they and neopronouns. Moreover, models are easily distracted by non-adversarial sentences discussing other people; even one additional sentence with a distractor pronoun causes accuracy to drop on average by 34%. Our results show that pronoun fidelity is neither robust, nor due to reasoning, in a simple, naturalistic setting where humans achieve nearly 100% accuracy. We encourage researchers to bridge the gaps we find and to carefully evaluate reasoning in settings where superficial repetition might inflate perceptions of model performance.

Ensuring persona fidelity in large language models (LLMs) is essential for maintaining coherent and engaging human-AI interactions. However, LLMs often exhibit Out-of-Character (OOC) behavior, where generated responses deviate from an assigned persona, leading to inconsistencies that affect model reliability. Existing evaluation methods typically assign single scores to entire responses, struggling to capture subtle persona misalignment, particularly in long-form text generation. To address this limitation, we propose an atomic-level evaluation framework that quantifies persona fidelity at a finer granularity. Our three key metrics measure the degree of persona alignment and consistency within and across generations. Our approach enables a more precise and realistic assessment of persona fidelity by identifying subtle deviations that real users would encounter. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that our framework effectively detects persona inconsistencies that prior methods overlook. By analyzing persona fidelity across diverse tasks and personality types, we reveal how task structure and persona desirability influence model adaptability, highlighting challenges in maintaining consistent persona expression.

Explanation fidelity, which measures how accurately an explanation reflects a model's true reasoning, remains critically underexplored in recommender systems. We introduce SPINRec (Stochastic Path Integration for Neural Recommender Explanations), a model-agnostic approach that adapts path-integration techniques to the sparse and implicit nature of recommendation data. To overcome the limitations of prior methods, SPINRec employs stochastic baseline sampling: instead of integrating from a fixed or unrealistic baseline, it samples multiple plausible user profiles from the empirical data distribution and selects the most faithful attribution path. This design captures the influence of both observed and unobserved interactions, yielding more stable and personalized explanations. We conduct the most comprehensive fidelity evaluation to date across three models (MF, VAE, NCF), three datasets (ML1M, Yahoo! Music, Pinterest), and a suite of counterfactual metrics, including AUC-based perturbation curves and fixed-length diagnostics. SPINRec consistently outperforms all baselines, establishing a new benchmark for faithful explainability in recommendation. Code and evaluation tools are publicly available at https://github.com/DeltaLabTLV/SPINRec.

Communication is defined as "Who says what to whom with what effect." A message from a communicator generates downstream receiver effects, also known as behavior. Receiver behavior, being a downstream effect of the message, carries rich signals about it. Even after carrying signals about the message, the behavior data is often ignored while training large language models. We show that training LLMs on receiver behavior can actually help improve their content-understanding abilities. Specifically, we show that training LLMs to predict the receiver behavior of likes and comments improves the LLM's performance on a wide variety of downstream content understanding tasks. We show this performance increase over 40 video and image understanding tasks over 23 benchmark datasets across both 0-shot and fine-tuning settings, outperforming many supervised baselines. Moreover, since receiver behavior, such as likes and comments, is collected by default on the internet and does not need any human annotations to be useful, the performance improvement we get after training on this data is essentially free-lunch. We release the receiver behavior cleaned comments and likes of 750k images and videos collected from multiple platforms along with our instruction-tuning data.

Text-to-speech models trained on large-scale datasets have demonstrated impressive in-context learning capabilities and naturalness. However, control of speaker identity and style in these models typically requires conditioning on reference speech recordings, limiting creative applications. Alternatively, natural language prompting of speaker identity and style has demonstrated promising results and provides an intuitive method of control. However, reliance on human-labeled descriptions prevents scaling to large datasets. Our work bridges the gap between these two approaches. We propose a scalable method for labeling various aspects of speaker identity, style, and recording conditions. We then apply this method to a 45k hour dataset, which we use to train a speech language model. Furthermore, we propose simple methods for increasing audio fidelity, significantly outperforming recent work despite relying entirely on found data. Our results demonstrate high-fidelity speech generation in a diverse range of accents, prosodic styles, channel conditions, and acoustic conditions, all accomplished with a single model and intuitive natural language conditioning. Audio samples can be heard at https://text-description-to-speech.com/.

Given a small number of images of a subject, personalized image generation techniques can fine-tune large pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models to generate images of the subject in novel contexts, conditioned on text prompts. In doing so, a trade-off is made between prompt fidelity, subject fidelity and diversity. As the pre-trained model is fine-tuned, earlier checkpoints synthesize images with low subject fidelity but high prompt fidelity and diversity. In contrast, later checkpoints generate images with low prompt fidelity and diversity but high subject fidelity. This inherent trade-off limits the prompt fidelity, subject fidelity and diversity of generated images. In this work, we propose DreamBlend to combine the prompt fidelity from earlier checkpoints and the subject fidelity from later checkpoints during inference. We perform a cross attention guided image synthesis from a later checkpoint, guided by an image generated by an earlier checkpoint, for the same prompt. This enables generation of images with better subject fidelity, prompt fidelity and diversity on challenging prompts, outperforming state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods.

We introduce behavioral fidelity -- a third evaluation dimension for synthetic tabular data that measures whether generated data preserves the temporal, sequential, and structural behavioral patterns that distinguish real-world entity activity. Existing frameworks evaluate statistical fidelity (marginal distributions and correlations) and downstream utility (classifier AUROC on synthetic-trained models), but neither tests for the behavioral signals that operational detection and analysis systems actually rely on. We formalize a taxonomy of four behavioral fraud patterns (P1-P4) covering inter-event timing, burst structure, multi-account graph motifs, and velocity-rule trigger rates; define a degradation ratio metric calibrated to a real-data noise floor (1.0 = matches real variability, k = k-times worse); and prove that row-independent generators -- the dominant paradigm -- are structurally incapable of reproducing P3 graph motifs (Proposition 1) and produce non-positive within-entity IET autocorrelation (Proposition 2), making the positive burst fingerprint of fraud sequences unachievable regardless of architecture or training data size. We benchmark CTGAN, TVAE, GaussianCopula, and TabularARGN on IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection and the Amazon Fraud Dataset. All four fail severely: on IEEE-CIS composite degradation ratios range from 24.4x (TVAE) to 39.0x (GaussianCopula); on Amazon FDB, row-independent generators score 81.6-99.7x, while TabularARGN achieves 17.2x. We document generator-specific failure modes and their resolutions. The P1-P4 framework extends to any domain with entity-level sequential tabular data, including healthcare and network security. We release our evaluation framework as open source.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are neural models that leverage the dependency structure in graphical data via message passing among the graph nodes. GNNs have emerged as pivotal architectures in analyzing graph-structured data, and their expansive application in sensitive domains requires a comprehensive understanding of their decision-making processes -- necessitating a framework for GNN explainability. An explanation function for GNNs takes a pre-trained GNN along with a graph as input, to produce a `sufficient statistic' subgraph with respect to the graph label. A main challenge in studying GNN explainability is to provide fidelity measures that evaluate the performance of these explanation functions. This paper studies this foundational challenge, spotlighting the inherent limitations of prevailing fidelity metrics, including Fid_+, Fid_-, and Fid_Delta. Specifically, a formal, information-theoretic definition of explainability is introduced and it is shown that existing metrics often fail to align with this definition across various statistical scenarios. The reason is due to potential distribution shifts when subgraphs are removed in computing these fidelity measures. Subsequently, a robust class of fidelity measures are introduced, and it is shown analytically that they are resilient to distribution shift issues and are applicable in a wide range of scenarios. Extensive empirical analysis on both synthetic and real datasets are provided to illustrate that the proposed metrics are more coherent with gold standard metrics. The source code is available at https://trustai4s-lab.github.io/fidelity.

Persuasive dialogue plays a pivotal role in human communication, influencing various domains. Recent persuasive dialogue datasets often fail to align with real-world interpersonal interactions, leading to unfaithful representations. For instance, unrealistic scenarios may arise, such as when the persuadee explicitly instructs the persuader on which persuasion strategies to employ, with each of the persuadee's questions corresponding to a specific strategy for the persuader to follow. This issue can be attributed to a violation of the "Double Blind" condition, where critical information is fully shared between participants. In actual human interactions, however, key information such as the mental state of the persuadee and the persuasion strategies of the persuader is not directly accessible. The persuader must infer the persuadee's mental state using Theory of Mind capabilities and construct arguments that align with the persuadee's motivations. To address this gap, we introduce ToMMA, a novel multi-agent framework for dialogue generation that is guided by causal Theory of Mind. This framework ensures that information remains undisclosed between agents, preserving "double-blind" conditions, while causal ToM directs the persuader's reasoning, enhancing alignment with human-like persuasion dynamics. Consequently, we present CToMPersu, a multi-domain, multi-turn persuasive dialogue dataset that tackles both double-blind and logical coherence issues, demonstrating superior performance across multiple metrics and achieving better alignment with real human dialogues. Our dataset and prompts are available at https://github.com/DingyiZhang/ToMMA-CToMPersu .

Rapid advancements in Visual Language Models (VLMs) have transformed multimodal understanding but are often constrained by generating English responses regardless of the input language. This phenomenon has been termed as Image-induced Fidelity Loss (IFL) and stems from limited multimodal multilingual training data. To address this, we propose a continuous multilingual integration strategy that injects text-only multilingual data during visual instruction tuning, preserving the language model's original multilingual capabilities. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach significantly improves linguistic fidelity across languages without degradation in visual performance. We also explore model merging, which improves language fidelity but comes at the cost of visual performance. In contrast, our core method achieves robust multilingual alignment without trade-offs, offering a scalable and effective path to mitigating IFL for global VLM adoption.

Diffusion-based image compression has demonstrated impressive perceptual performance. However, it suffers from two critical drawbacks: (1) excessive decoding latency due to multi-step sampling, and (2) poor fidelity resulting from over-reliance on generative priors. To address these issues, we propose SODEC, a novel single-step diffusion image compression model. We argue that in image compression, a sufficiently informative latent renders multi-step refinement unnecessary. Based on this insight, we leverage a pre-trained VAE-based model to produce latents with rich information, and replace the iterative denoising process with a single-step decoding. Meanwhile, to improve fidelity, we introduce the fidelity guidance module, encouraging output that is faithful to the original image. Furthermore, we design the rate annealing training strategy to enable effective training under extremely low bitrates. Extensive experiments show that SODEC significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving superior rate-distortion-perception performance. Moreover, compared to previous diffusion-based compression models, SODEC improves decoding speed by more than 20times. Code is released at: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/SODEC.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems predominantly cater to monolingual inputs and struggle with the complexity introduced by mixed language audio. In this paper, we present a novel Multi-Agent Data Generation Framework (MADGF) to address this challenge. We finetune the open-source multilingual ASR model, Whisper, utilizing our generated Mixed Cantonese and English (MCE) audio dataset, Which achieved an impressive Mix Error Rate (MER) of 14.28%, 35.13% lower than the original model. Meanwhile, single language recognition ability is not affected, 12.6% Character Error Rate (CER) in Common voice zh-HK, 14.8% Word Error Rate (WER) in Common voice en. However, these metrics do not encompass all aspects critical to the ASR systems. Hence, we propose a novel evaluation metric called Fidelity to the Original Audio, Accuracy, and Latency (FAL).

Navigating certain communication situations can be challenging due to individuals' lack of skills and the interference of strong emotions. However, effective learning opportunities are rarely accessible. In this work, we conduct a human-centered study that uses language models to simulate bespoke communication training and provide just-in-time feedback to support the practice and learning of interpersonal effectiveness skills. We apply the interpersonal effectiveness framework from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), DEAR MAN, which focuses on both conversational and emotional skills. We present IMBUE, an interactive training system that provides feedback 25% more similar to experts' feedback, compared to that generated by GPT-4. IMBUE is the first to focus on communication skills and emotion management simultaneously, incorporate experts' domain knowledge in providing feedback, and be grounded in psychology theory. Through a randomized trial of 86 participants, we find that IMBUE's simulation-only variant significantly improves participants' self-efficacy (up to 17%) and reduces negative emotions (up to 25%). With IMBUE's additional just-in-time feedback, participants demonstrate 17% improvement in skill mastery, along with greater enhancements in self-efficacy (27% more) and reduction of negative emotions (16% more) compared to simulation-only. The improvement in skill mastery is the only measure that is transferred to new and more difficult situations; situation specific training is necessary for improving self-efficacy and emotion reduction.

Communicating in natural language is a powerful tool in multi-agent settings, as it enables independent agents to share information in partially observable settings and allows zero-shot coordination with humans. However, most prior works are limited as they either rely on training with large amounts of human demonstrations or lack the ability to generate natural and useful communication strategies. In this work, we train language models to have productive discussions about their environment in natural language without any human demonstrations. We decompose the communication problem into listening and speaking. Our key idea is to leverage the agent's goal to predict useful information about the world as a dense reward signal that guides communication. Specifically, we improve a model's listening skills by training them to predict information about the environment based on discussions, and we simultaneously improve a model's speaking skills with multi-agent reinforcement learning by rewarding messages based on their influence on other agents. To investigate the role and necessity of communication in complex social settings, we study an embodied social deduction game based on Among Us, where the key question to answer is the identity of an adversarial imposter. We analyze emergent behaviors due to our technique, such as accusing suspects and providing evidence, and find that it enables strong discussions, doubling the win rates compared to standard RL. We release our code and models at https://socialdeductionllm.github.io/

Generalist robot policies trained on large-scale, visually homogeneous datasets can be susceptible to shortcut learning, which impairs their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. While generative data augmentation is a common approach to introduce diversity, it presents a subtle challenge: data composition. Naively mixing real and synthetic data can corrupt the learning signal, as this process often prioritizes visual diversity at the expense of information fidelity. This paper suggests that robust generalization depends on principled, fidelity-aware data composition. We introduce Coherent Information Fidelity Tuning (CIFT), a framework that treats data composition as an optimization problem. CIFT uses a practical proxy for Information Fidelity based on the feature-space geometry of a dataset. This enables the identification of a phase transition, termed the Decoherence Point, where training stability degrades. The framework includes a generative engine, Multi-View Video Augmentation (MVAug), to synthesize a causally disentangled data spectrum for this tuning process. Applying CIFT to policy architectures such as pi_0 and Diffusion Policy improves OOD success rates by over 54\%. These results indicate that fidelity-aware composition, beyond data synthesis alone, is an important component for developing robust, general-purpose robots.

Conventional communication systems, including both separation-based coding and AI-driven joint source-channel coding (JSCC), are largely guided by Shannon's rate-distortion theory. However, relying on generic distortion metrics fails to capture complex human visual perception, often resulting in blurred or unrealistic reconstructions. In this paper, we propose Joint Source-Channel-Generation Coding (JSCGC), a novel paradigm that shifts the focus from deterministic reconstruction to probabilistic generation. JSCGC leverages a generative model at the receiver as a generator rather than a conventional decoder to parameterize the data distribution, enabling direct maximization of mutual information under channel constraints while controlling stochastic sampling to produce outputs residing on the authentic data manifold with high fidelity. We further derive a theoretical lower bound on the maximum semantic inconsistency with given transmitted mutual information, elucidating the fundamental limits of communication in controlling the generative process. Extensive experiments on image transmission demonstrate that JSCGC substantially improves perceptual quality and semantic fidelity, significantly outperforming conventional distortion-oriented JSCC methods.

Persuasion, a fundamental social capability for humans, remains a challenge for AI systems such as large language models (LLMs). Current studies often overlook the strategic use of information asymmetry in message design or rely on strong assumptions regarding pre-commitment. In this work, we explore the application of Bayesian Persuasion (BP) in natural language within single-turn dialogue settings, to enhance the strategic persuasion capabilities of LLMs. Our framework incorporates a commitment-communication mechanism, where the persuader explicitly outlines an information schema by narrating their potential types (e.g., honest or dishonest), thereby guiding the persuadee in performing the intended Bayesian belief update. We evaluate two variants of our approach: Semi-Formal-Natural-Language (SFNL) BP and Fully-Natural-Language (FNL) BP, benchmarking them against both naive and strong non-BP (NBP) baselines within a comprehensive evaluation framework. This framework covers a diverse set of persuadees -- including LLM instances with varying prompts and fine-tuning and human participants -- across tasks ranging from specially designed persuasion scenarios to general everyday situations. Experimental results on LLM-based agents reveal three main findings: (1) LLMs guided by BP strategies consistently achieve higher persuasion success rates than NBP baselines; (2) SFNL exhibits greater credibility and logical coherence, while FNL shows stronger emotional resonance and robustness in naturalistic conversations; (3) with supervised fine-tuning, smaller models can attain BP performance comparable to that of larger models.

Reliable image transmission over wireless channels is particularly challenging at extremely low transmission rates, where conventional compression and channel coding schemes fail to preserve adequate visual quality. To address this issue, we propose a generative communication framework based on diffusion models, which integrates joint source channel coding (JSCC) with semantic-guided reconstruction leveraging a pre-trained generative model. Unlike conventional architectures that aim to recover exact pixel values of the original image, the proposed method focuses on preserving and reconstructing semantically meaningful visual content under severely constrained rates, ensuring perceptual plausibility and faithfulness to the scene intent. Specifically, the transmitter encodes the source image via JSCC and jointly transmits it with a textual prompt over the wireless channel. At the receiver, the corrupted low-rate representation is fused with the prompt and reconstructed through a Stable Diffusion model with ControlNet, enabling high-quality visual recovery. Leveraging both generative priors and semantic guidance, the proposed framework produces perceptually convincing images even under extreme bandwidth limitations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms conventional coding-based schemes and deep learning baselines, achieving superior perceptual quality and robustness across various channel conditions.

A critical component in the trustworthiness of LLMs is reliable uncertainty communication, yet LLMs often use assertive language when conveying false claims, leading to over-reliance and eroded trust. We present the first systematic study of faithful confidence calibration of LLMs, benchmarking models' ability to use linguistic expressions of uncertainty that faithfully reflect their intrinsic uncertainty, across a comprehensive array of models, datasets, and prompting strategies. Our results demonstrate that LLMs largely fail at this task, and that existing interventions are insufficient: standard prompt approaches provide only marginal gains, and existing, factuality-based calibration techniques can even harm faithful calibration. To address this critical gap, we introduce MetaFaith, a novel prompt-based calibration approach inspired by human metacognition. We show that MetaFaith robustly improves faithful calibration across diverse models and task domains, enabling up to 61% improvement in faithfulness and achieving an 83% win rate over original generations as judged by humans.

How do we communicate with others to achieve our goals? We use our prior experience or advice from others, or construct a candidate utterance by predicting how it will be received. However, our experiences are limited and biased, and reasoning about potential outcomes can be difficult and cognitively challenging. In this paper, we explore how we can leverage Large Language Model (LLM) simulations to help us communicate better. We propose the Explore-Generate-Simulate (EGS) framework, which takes as input any scenario where an individual is communicating to an audience with a goal they want to achieve. EGS (1) explores the solution space by producing a diverse set of advice relevant to the scenario, (2) generates communication candidates conditioned on subsets of the advice, and (3) simulates the reactions from various audiences to determine both the best candidate and advice to use. We evaluate the framework on eight scenarios spanning the ten fundamental processes of interpersonal communication. For each scenario, we collect a dataset of human evaluations across candidates and baselines, and showcase that our framework's chosen candidate is preferred over popular generation mechanisms including Chain-of-Thought. We also find that audience simulations achieve reasonably high agreement with human raters across 5 of the 8 scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate the generality of our framework by applying it to real-world scenarios described by users on web forums. Through evaluations and demonstrations, we show that EGS enhances the effectiveness and outcomes of goal-oriented communication across a variety of situations, thus opening up new possibilities for the application of large language models in revolutionizing communication and decision-making processes.

We present an experimental implementation of the multiplayer Quantum Volunteer's Dilemma on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware, executed on the ibm_kingston backend via Qiskit Runtime. The game is evaluated for N = 2 to 9 players under four transpiler optimization levels, with 20 independent repetitions per configuration and 2048 shots per circuit, including post-processing readout error correction via mthree. Target-state fidelity decays with system size but remains above 70% (corrected) through N = 9. With readout correction, the global average payoff reproduces the quantum theoretical benchmark exactly for N <= 6 and exceeds the classical Nash equilibrium across the full tested range. Optimization level 2 is selected as the reference configuration after gate count analysis reveals that levels 2 and 3 produce identical transpiled circuits, with level 2 achieving superior fidelity stability. A Hamming distance analysis of raw measurement counts shows that single-qubit errors dominate at small N, with multi-qubit contributions growing beyond N = 6. A calibration-based digital twin captures global payoff trends but exhibits a linear fidelity decay profile that diverges from the hardware behavior at large N, exposing the limits of first-order independent per-qubit noise models. These results demonstrate that aggregate quantum advantage in multiplayer games is robust to NISQ noise conditions across the full tested range, while the practical observability of state-level advantage is constrained to N <= 8 under post-processed readout correction.

In mental health counseling, a variety of earlier studies have focused on dialogue modeling. However, most of these studies give limited to no emphasis on the quality of interaction between a patient and a therapist. The therapeutic bond between a patient and a therapist directly correlates with effective mental health counseling. It involves developing the patient's trust on the therapist over the course of counseling. To assess the therapeutic bond in counseling, we introduce trust as a therapist-assistive metric. Our definition of trust involves patients' willingness and openness to express themselves and, consequently, receive better care. We conceptualize it as a dynamic trajectory observable through textual interactions during the counseling. To facilitate trust modeling, we present MENTAL-TRUST, a novel counseling dataset comprising manual annotation of 212 counseling sessions with first-of-its-kind seven expert-verified ordinal trust levels. We project our problem statement as an ordinal classification task for trust quantification and propose a new benchmark, TrustBench, comprising a suite of classical and state-of-the-art language models on MENTAL-TRUST. We evaluate the performance across a suite of metrics and lay out an exhaustive set of findings. Our study aims to unfold how trust evolves in therapeutic interactions.

Cultural differences in common ground may result in pragmatic failure and misunderstandings during communication. We develop our method Rational Speech Acts for Cross-Cultural Communication (RSA+C3) to resolve cross-cultural differences in common ground. To measure the success of our method, we study RSA+C3 in the collaborative referential game of Codenames Duet and show that our method successfully improves collaboration between simulated players of different cultures. Our contributions are threefold: (1) creating Codenames players using contrastive learning of an embedding space and LLM prompting that are aligned with human patterns of play, (2) studying culturally induced differences in common ground reflected in our trained models, and (3) demonstrating that our method RSA+C3 can ease cross-cultural communication in gameplay by inferring sociocultural context from interaction. Our code is publicly available at github.com/icwhite/codenames.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, have gained significant attention due to their impressive natural language processing capabilities. It is crucial to prioritize human-centered principles when utilizing these models. Safeguarding the ethical and moral compliance of LLMs is of utmost importance. However, individual ethical issues have not been well studied on the latest LLMs. Therefore, this study aims to address these gaps by introducing a new benchmark -- TrustGPT. TrustGPT provides a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs in three crucial areas: toxicity, bias, and value-alignment. Initially, TrustGPT examines toxicity in language models by employing toxic prompt templates derived from social norms. It then quantifies the extent of bias in models by measuring quantifiable toxicity values across different groups. Lastly, TrustGPT assesses the value of conversation generation models from both active value-alignment and passive value-alignment tasks. Through the implementation of TrustGPT, this research aims to enhance our understanding of the performance of conversation generation models and promote the development of language models that are more ethical and socially responsible.

Shannon, in his seminal paper introducing information theory, divided the communication into three levels: technical, semantic, and effectivenss. While the technical level is concerned with accurate reconstruction of transmitted symbols, the semantic and effectiveness levels deal with the inferred meaning and its effect on the receiver. Thanks to telecommunications, the first level problem has produced great advances like the internet. Large Language Models (LLMs) make some progress towards the second goal, but the third level still remains largely untouched. The third problem deals with predicting and optimizing communication for desired receiver behavior. LLMs, while showing wide generalization capabilities across a wide range of tasks, are unable to solve for this. One reason for the underperformance could be a lack of "behavior tokens" in LLMs' training corpora. Behavior tokens define receiver behavior over a communication, such as shares, likes, clicks, purchases, retweets, etc. While preprocessing data for LLM training, behavior tokens are often removed from the corpora as noise. Therefore, in this paper, we make some initial progress towards reintroducing behavior tokens in LLM training. The trained models, other than showing similar performance to LLMs on content understanding tasks, show generalization capabilities on behavior simulation, content simulation, behavior understanding, and behavior domain adaptation. Using a wide range of tasks on two corpora, we show results on all these capabilities. We call these models Large Content and Behavior Models (LCBMs). Further, to spur more research on LCBMs, we release our new Content Behavior Corpus (CBC), a repository containing communicator, message, and corresponding receiver behavior.

Effective dialogue involves grounding, the process of establishing mutual knowledge that is essential for communication between people. Modern dialogue systems are not explicitly trained to build common ground, and therefore overlook this important aspect of communication. Improvisational theater (improv) intrinsically contains a high proportion of dialogue focused on building common ground, and makes use of the yes-and principle, a strong grounding speech act, to establish coherence and an actionable objective reality. We collect a corpus of more than 26,000 yes-and turns, transcribing them from improv dialogues and extracting them from larger, but more sparsely populated movie script dialogue corpora, via a bootstrapped classifier. We fine-tune chit-chat dialogue systems with our corpus to encourage more grounded, relevant conversation and confirm these findings with human evaluations.

Vision-language models (VLMs) often produce chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations that sound plausible yet fail to reflect the underlying decision process, undermining trust in high-stakes clinical use. Existing evaluations rarely catch this misalignment, prioritizing answer accuracy or adherence to formats. We present a clinically grounded framework for chest X-ray visual question answering (VQA) that probes CoT faithfulness via controlled text and image modifications across three axes: clinical fidelity, causal attribution, and confidence calibration. In a reader study (n=4), evaluator-radiologist correlations fall within the observed inter-radiologist range for all axes, with strong alignment for attribution (Kendall's tau_b=0.670), moderate alignment for fidelity (tau_b=0.387), and weak alignment for confidence tone (tau_b=0.091), which we report with caution. Benchmarking six VLMs shows that answer accuracy and explanation quality are decoupled, acknowledging injected cues does not ensure grounding, and text cues shift explanations more than visual cues. While some open-source models match final answer accuracy, proprietary models score higher on attribution (25.0% vs. 1.4%) and often on fidelity (36.1% vs. 31.7%), highlighting deployment risks and the need to evaluate beyond final answer accuracy.

In day-to-day communication, people often approximate the truth - for example, rounding the time or omitting details - in order to be maximally helpful to the listener. How do large language models (LLMs) handle such nuanced trade-offs? To address this question, we use psychological models and experiments designed to characterize human behavior to analyze LLMs. We test a range of LLMs and explore how optimization for human preferences or inference-time reasoning affects these trade-offs. We find that reinforcement learning from human feedback improves both honesty and helpfulness, while chain-of-thought prompting skews LLMs towards helpfulness over honesty. Finally, GPT-4 Turbo demonstrates human-like response patterns including sensitivity to the conversational framing and listener's decision context. Our findings reveal the conversational values internalized by LLMs and suggest that even these abstract values can, to a degree, be steered by zero-shot prompting.

Multimodal embedding models have gained significant attention for their ability to map data from different modalities, such as text and images, into a unified representation space. However, the limited labeled multimodal data often hinders embedding performance. Recent approaches have leveraged data synthesis to address this problem, yet the quality of synthetic data remains a critical bottleneck. In this work, we identify three criteria for high-quality synthetic multimodal data. First, broad scope ensures that the generated data covers diverse tasks and modalities, making it applicable to various downstream scenarios. Second, robust cross-modal alignment makes different modalities semantically consistent. Third, high fidelity ensures that the synthetic data maintains realistic details to enhance its reliability. Guided by these principles, we synthesize datasets that: (1) cover a wide range of tasks, modality combinations, and languages, (2) are generated via a deep thinking process within a single pass of a multimodal large language model, and (3) incorporate real-world images with accurate and relevant texts, ensuring fidelity through self-evaluation and refinement. Leveraging these high-quality synthetic and labeled datasets, we train a multimodal multilingual E5 model mmE5. Extensive experiments demonstrate that mmE5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MMEB Benchmark and superior multilingual performance on the XTD benchmark. Our codes, datasets and models are released in https://github.com/haon-chen/mmE5.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) remains indispensable for aligning large language models (LLMs) in subjective domains. To enhance robustness, recent work shifts toward Generative Reward Models (GenRMs) that generate rationales before predicting preferences. Yet in GenRM training and evaluation, practice remains outcome-label-only, leaving reasoning quality unchecked. We show that reasoning fidelity-the consistency between a GenRM's preference decision and reference decision rationales-is highly predictive of downstream RLHF outcomes, beyond standard label accuracy. Specifically, we repurpose existing reward-model benchmarks to compute Spurious Correctness (S-Corr)-the fraction of label-correct decisions with rationales misaligned with golden judgments. Our empirical evaluation reveals substantial S-Corr even for competitive GenRMs, and higher S-Corr is associated with policy degeneration under optimization. To improve fidelity, we propose Rationale-Centric Alignment, R-Align, which augments training with gold judgments and explicitly supervises rationale alignment. R-Align reduces S-Corr on RM benchmarks and yields consistent gains in actor performance across STEM, coding, instruction following, and general tasks.

Academic citations are widely used for evaluating research and tracing knowledge flows. Such uses typically rely on raw citation counts and neglect variability in citation types. In particular, citations can vary in their fidelity as original knowledge from cited studies may be paraphrased, summarized, or reinterpreted, possibly wrongly, leading to variation in how much information changes from cited to citing paper. In this study, we introduce a computational pipeline to quantify citation fidelity at scale. Using full texts of papers, the pipeline identifies citations in citing papers and the corresponding claims in cited papers, and applies supervised models to measure fidelity at the sentence level. Analyzing a large-scale multi-disciplinary dataset of approximately 13 million citation sentence pairs, we find that citation fidelity is higher when authors cite papers that are 1) more recent and intellectually close, 2) more accessible, and 3) the first author has a lower H-index and the author team is medium-sized. Using a quasi-experiment, we establish the "telephone effect" - when citing papers have low fidelity to the original claim, future papers that cite the citing paper and the original have lower fidelity to the original. Our work reveals systematic differences in citation fidelity, underscoring the limitations of analyses that rely on citation quantity alone and the potential for distortion of evidence.

Information theory, introduced by Shannon, has been extremely successful and influential as a mathematical theory of communication. Shannon's notion of information does not consider the meaning of the messages being communicated but only their probability. Even so, computational approaches regularly appeal to "information processing" to study how meaning is encoded and decoded in natural and artificial systems. Here, we contrast Shannon information theory with integrated information theory (IIT), which was developed to account for the presence and properties of consciousness. IIT considers meaning as integrated information and characterizes it as a structure, rather than as a message or code. In principle, IIT's axioms and postulates allow one to "unfold" a cause-effect structure from a substrate in a state, a structure that fully defines the intrinsic meaning of an experience and its contents. It follows that, for the communication of meaning, the cause-effect structures of sender and receiver must be similar.

Deep learning (DL) based semantic communication methods have been explored for the efficient transmission of images, text, and speech in recent years. In contrast to traditional wireless communication methods that focus on the transmission of abstract symbols, semantic communication approaches attempt to achieve better transmission efficiency by only sending the semantic-related information of the source data. In this paper, we consider semantic-oriented speech transmission which transmits only the semantic-relevant information over the channel for the speech recognition task, and a compact additional set of semantic-irrelevant information for the speech reconstruction task. We propose a novel end-to-end DL-based transceiver which extracts and encodes the semantic information from the input speech spectrums at the transmitter and outputs the corresponding transcriptions from the decoded semantic information at the receiver. For the speech to speech transmission, we further include a CTC alignment module that extracts a small number of additional semantic-irrelevant but speech-related information for the better reconstruction of the original speech signals at the receiver. The simulation results confirm that our proposed method outperforms current methods in terms of the accuracy of the predicted text for the speech to text transmission and the quality of the recovered speech signals for the speech to speech transmission, and significantly improves transmission efficiency. More specifically, the proposed method only sends 16% of the amount of the transmitted symbols required by the existing methods while achieving about 10% reduction in WER for the speech to text transmission. For the speech to speech transmission, it results in an even more remarkable improvement in terms of transmission efficiency with only 0.2% of the amount of the transmitted symbols required by the existing method.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in healthcare, yet their communicative alignment with clinical standards remains insufficiently quantified. We conduct a multidimensional evaluation of general-purpose and domain-specialized LLMs across structured medical explanations and real-world physician-patient interactions, analyzing semantic fidelity, readability, and affective resonance. Baseline models amplify affective polarity relative to physicians (Very Negative: 43.14-45.10% vs. 37.25%) and, in larger architectures such as GPT-5 and Claude, produce substantially higher linguistic complexity (FKGL up to 16.91-17.60 vs. 11.47-12.50 in physician-authored responses). Empathy-oriented prompting reduces extreme negativity and lowers grade-level complexity (up to -6.87 FKGL points for GPT-5) but does not significantly increase semantic fidelity. Collaborative rewriting yields the strongest overall alignment. Rephrase configurations achieve the highest semantic similarity to physician answers (up to mean = 0.93) while consistently improving readability and reducing affective extremity. Dual stakeholder evaluation shows that no model surpasses physicians on epistemic criteria, whereas patients consistently prefer rewritten variants for clarity and emotional tone. These findings suggest that LLMs function most effectively as collaborative communication enhancers rather than replacements for clinical expertise.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit human-like patterns of pragmatic and social reasoning. This paper addresses two related questions: do LLMs approximate human social meaning not only qualitatively but also quantitatively, and can prompting strategies informed by pragmatic theory improve this approximation? To address the first, we introduce two calibration-focused metrics distinguishing structural fidelity from magnitude calibration: the Effect Size Ratio (ESR) and the Calibration Deviation Score (CDS). To address the second, we derive prompting conditions from two pragmatic assumptions: that social meaning arises from reasoning over linguistic alternatives, and that listeners infer speaker knowledge states and communicative motives. Applied to a case study on numerical (im)precision across three frontier LLMs, we find that all models reliably reproduce the qualitative structure of human social inferences but differ substantially in magnitude calibration. Prompting models to reason about speaker knowledge and motives most consistently reduces magnitude deviation, while prompting for alternative-awareness tends to amplify exaggeration. Combining both components is the only intervention that improves all calibration-sensitive metrics across all models, though fine-grained magnitude calibration remains only partially resolved. LLMs thus capture inferential structure while variably distorting inferential strength, and pragmatic theory provides a useful but incomplete handle for improving that approximation.

We develop a simulation framework for studying misinformation spread within online social networks that blends agent-based modeling and natural language processing techniques. While many other agent-based simulations exist in this space, questions over their fidelity and generalization to existing networks in part hinders their ability to provide actionable insights. To partially address these concerns, we create a 'digital clone' of a known misinformation sharing network by downloading social media histories for over ten thousand of its users. We parse these histories to both extract the structure of the network and model the nuanced ways in which information is shared and spread among its members. Unlike many other agent-based methods in this space, information sharing between users in our framework is sensitive to topic of discussion, user preferences, and online community dynamics. To evaluate the fidelity of our method, we seed our cloned network with a set of posts recorded in the base network and compare propagation dynamics between the two, observing reasonable agreement across the twin networks over a variety of metrics. Lastly, we explore how the cloned network may serve as a flexible, low-cost testbed for misinformation countermeasure evaluation and red teaming analysis. We hope the tools explored here augment existing efforts in the space and unlock new opportunities for misinformation countermeasure evaluation, a field that may become increasingly important to consider with the anticipated rise of misinformation campaigns fueled by generative artificial intelligence.

Image-to-video (I2V) generation tasks always suffer from keeping high fidelity in the open domains. Traditional image animation techniques primarily focus on specific domains such as faces or human poses, making them difficult to generalize to open domains. Several recent I2V frameworks based on diffusion models can generate dynamic content for open domain images but fail to maintain fidelity. We found that two main factors of low fidelity are the loss of image details and the noise prediction biases during the denoising process. To this end, we propose an effective method that can be applied to mainstream video diffusion models. This method achieves high fidelity based on supplementing more precise image information and noise rectification. Specifically, given a specified image, our method first adds noise to the input image latent to keep more details, then denoises the noisy latent with proper rectification to alleviate the noise prediction biases. Our method is tuning-free and plug-and-play. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the fidelity of generated videos. For more image-to-video generated results, please refer to the project website: https://noise-rectification.github.io.

Business communication digitisation has reorganised the process of persuasive discourse, which allows not only greater transparency but also advanced deception. This inquiry synthesises classical rhetoric and communication psychology with linguistic theory and empirical studies in the financial reporting, sustainability discourse, and digital marketing to explain how deceptive language can be systematically detected using persuasive lexicon. In controlled settings, detection accuracies of greater than 99% were achieved by using computational textual analysis as well as personalised transformer models. However, reproducing this performance in multilingual settings is also problematic and, to a large extent, this is because it is not easy to find sufficient data, and because few multilingual text-processing infrastructures are in place. This evidence shows that there has been an increasing gap between the theoretical representations of communication and those empirically approximated, and therefore, there is a need to have strong automatic text-identification systems where AI-based discourse is becoming more realistic in communicating with humans.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent settings where communication must balance informativeness and secrecy. In such settings, an agent may need to signal information to collaborators while preventing an adversary from inferring sensitive details. However, existing LLM benchmarks primarily evaluate capabilities such as reasoning, factual knowledge, or instruction following, and do not directly measure strategic communication under asymmetric information. We introduce SNEAK (Secret-aware Natural language Evaluation for Adversarial Knowledge), a benchmark for evaluating selective information sharing in language models. In SNEAK, a model is given a semantic category, a candidate set of words, and a secret word, and must generate a message that indicates knowledge of the secret without revealing it too clearly. We evaluate generated messages using two simulated agents with different information states: an ally, who knows the secret and must identify the intended message, and a chameleon, who does not know the secret and attempts to infer it from the message. This yields two complementary metrics: utility, measuring how well the message communicates to collaborators, and leakage, measuring how much information it reveals to an adversary. Using this framework, we analyze the trade-off between informativeness and secrecy in modern language models and show that strategic communication under asymmetric information remains a challenging capability for current systems. Notably, human participants outperform all evaluated models by a large margin, achieving up to four times higher scores.