Daily Papers

State media outlets often project their governments' narratives to target both domestic and foreign audiences. Because this content is plentiful and free to access, it appears widely in the web corpora that large language models (LLMs) are trained on and that retrieval systems draw from. However, the prevalence of state media in these corpora and its potential influence on LLM outputs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce WorldStateMedia, an open dataset of 118 million state media articles from 136 countries in 114 languages. We extract these articles from existing pretraining corpora and annotate each outlet with level of state control from State Media Monitor. Using WorldStateMedia to audit these corpora, we find that, in English web crawls, the share of state media pages from editorially controlled (vs. independent) outlets rose from 39% in 2013 to 93% in 2025. In several low-resource languages, state media make up a substantial share of all web data, such as 17.8% for Uyghur and 7.8% for Belarusian. To characterize the differing narratives of news outlets, we compare Russian and Ukrainian state media in English and in their native languages, revealing asymmetric topical focus and opposing framings of contested issues such as Crimea. Furthermore, in a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) experiment on territorial disputes, retrieving a country's state media shifts model answers toward that country's claims, most strongly for English-language (foreign-targeted) media. We release WorldStateMedia to support multilingual, cross-national insights on state media at https://huggingface.co/collections/manestay/worldstatemedia

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet their stateless architecture fundamentally limits deployment in long-horizon research workflows requiring multi-session continuity and quantitative rigor. Here we present Ensemble QSP, a multi-agent framework featuring a three-layer hierarchical memory architecture that keeps injected context bounded and constant in project duration (mid-term project state: median 301 tokens, max 4,050, across 104 runs) by capping each state category and evicting completed work, enabling continuous autonomous operation without context degradation. The system orchestrates five specialist worker agents under domain-expert principal investigators, enforcing physical constraints through physics-based checklists and structured-domain knowledge. Comprehensive benchmarking demonstrates robust autonomous pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic model selection without human intervention, consistent result quality across both lower-cost and frontier LLMs, improved PK parameter recovery relative to single-agent baselines, and stable model selection across linguistically diverse prompts of the same task. Feature-level ablation across physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models spanning a broad complexity range shows that PI-agent oversight improves debugging efficiency while preserving final accuracy across conditions. The architecture is structurally domain-agnostic, adding a new scientific domain requires only a new PI agent configuration.

AI-generated synthetic media, also called Deepfakes, have significantly influenced so many domains, from entertainment to cybersecurity. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs) are the main frameworks used to create Deepfakes, producing highly realistic yet fabricated content. While these technologies open up new creative possibilities, they also bring substantial ethical and security risks due to their potential misuse. The rise of such advanced media has led to the development of a cognitive bias known as Impostor Bias, where individuals doubt the authenticity of multimedia due to the awareness of AI's capabilities. As a result, Deepfake detection has become a vital area of research, focusing on identifying subtle inconsistencies and artifacts with machine learning techniques, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Research in forensic Deepfake technology encompasses five main areas: detection, attribution and recognition, passive authentication, detection in realistic scenarios, and active authentication. This paper reviews the primary algorithms that address these challenges, examining their advantages, limitations, and future prospects.

Developing models and algorithms to predict nonstationary time series is a long standing statistical problem. It is crucial for many applications, in particular for fashion or retail industries, to make optimal inventory decisions and avoid massive wastes. By tracking thousands of fashion trends on social media with state-of-the-art computer vision approaches, we propose a new model for fashion time series forecasting. Our contribution is twofold. We first provide publicly a dataset gathering 10000 weekly fashion time series. As influence dynamics are the key of emerging trend detection, we associate with each time series an external weak signal representing behaviours of influencers. Secondly, to leverage such a dataset, we propose a new hybrid forecasting model. Our approach combines per-time-series parametric models with seasonal components and a global recurrent neural network to include sporadic external signals. This hybrid model provides state-of-the-art results on the proposed fashion dataset, on the weekly time series of the M4 competition, and illustrates the benefit of the contribution of external weak signals.

Memory-Mediated Learning Architecture (MMLA) separates slow base parameters theta, a bounded numerical policy carrier Phi, and a bounded authoritative memory M. Predictive Dual-State Adaptation (PDSA) lets feedback update Phi while one problem remains active and lets a trusted lifecycle atomically commit one typed row or exact NULL. Later reasoning may read both states, but their writers, resets, rollback domains, and ledgers remain distinct. Realized futures supervise values only during training; deployment is causal and future-blind. We give conditional theory and falsifiable contracts for reasoning-time updates, completed-segment consolidation, predictive admission, authoritative memory, and dual-state attribution. Assumptions, counterexamples, capacity and cost ledgers, recovery duties, and identifying experiments are explicit; these are not implementation guarantees. Controlled studies show exact lifecycle execution on 300/300 held-out records for each of three seeds, calibrated retrieval gains over frozen-hidden dense and BM25 baselines, and exact typed anchor-filler transport on 240/240 held-out records per seed. These validate restricted components, not natural-language memory management or complete PDSA. Post-training studies retain positive and negative evidence. Later protocols obtain restricted readout progress, but a nine-trajectory comparison finds that matched latent readout, a full-width bridge, and bridge plus frozen text-teacher alignment all fail continuous-event qualification across both task families. A separately adapted text reference and restoration checks pass. At the September 13, 2026 evidence cutoff, no strict policy-only reasoning-time-training effect, predictive-admission oracle margin, learned future-blind admission policy, or policy-by-memory factorial advantage is established.

Hate speech and toxic comments are a common concern of social media platform users. Although these comments are, fortunately, the minority in these platforms, they are still capable of causing harm. Therefore, identifying these comments is an important task for studying and preventing the proliferation of toxicity in social media. Previous work in automatically detecting toxic comments focus mainly in English, with very few work in languages like Brazilian Portuguese. In this paper, we propose a new large-scale dataset for Brazilian Portuguese with tweets annotated as either toxic or non-toxic or in different types of toxicity. We present our dataset collection and annotation process, where we aimed to select candidates covering multiple demographic groups. State-of-the-art BERT models were able to achieve 76% macro-F1 score using monolingual data in the binary case. We also show that large-scale monolingual data is still needed to create more accurate models, despite recent advances in multilingual approaches. An error analysis and experiments with multi-label classification show the difficulty of classifying certain types of toxic comments that appear less frequently in our data and highlights the need to develop models that are aware of different categories of toxicity.

The rapid advancement of generative models in creating highly realistic images poses substantial risks for misinformation dissemination. For instance, a synthetic image, when shared on social media, can mislead extensive audiences and erode trust in digital content, resulting in severe repercussions. Despite some progress, academia has not yet created a large and diversified deepfake detection dataset for social media, nor has it devised an effective solution to address this issue. In this paper, we introduce the Social media Image Detection dataSet (SID-Set), which offers three key advantages: (1) extensive volume, featuring 300K AI-generated/tampered and authentic images with comprehensive annotations, (2) broad diversity, encompassing fully synthetic and tampered images across various classes, and (3) elevated realism, with images that are predominantly indistinguishable from genuine ones through mere visual inspection. Furthermore, leveraging the exceptional capabilities of large multimodal models, we propose a new image deepfake detection, localization, and explanation framework, named SIDA (Social media Image Detection, localization, and explanation Assistant). SIDA not only discerns the authenticity of images, but also delineates tampered regions through mask prediction and provides textual explanations of the model's judgment criteria. Compared with state-of-the-art deepfake detection models on SID-Set and other benchmarks, extensive experiments demonstrate that SIDA achieves superior performance among diversified settings. The code, model, and dataset will be released.

Deepfakes are synthetically generated images, videos or audios, which fraudsters use to manipulate legitimate information. Current deepfake detection systems struggle against unseen data. To address this, we employ three different deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, (1) VGG16, (2) InceptionV3, and (3) XceptionNet to classify fake and real images extracted from videos. We also constructed a fusion of the deep CNN models to improve the robustness and generalisation capability. The proposed technique outperforms state-of-the-art models with 96.5% accuracy, when tested on publicly available DeepFake Detection Challenge (DFDC) test data, comprising of 400 videos. The fusion model achieves 99% accuracy on lower quality DeepFake-TIMIT dataset videos and 91.88% on higher quality DeepFake-TIMIT videos. In addition to this, we prove that prediction fusion is more robust against adversarial attacks. If one model is compromised by an adversarial attack, the prediction fusion does not let it affect the overall classification.

Although media bias detection is a complex multi-task problem, there is, to date, no unified benchmark grouping these evaluation tasks. We introduce the Media Bias Identification Benchmark (MBIB), a comprehensive benchmark that groups different types of media bias (e.g., linguistic, cognitive, political) under a common framework to test how prospective detection techniques generalize. After reviewing 115 datasets, we select nine tasks and carefully propose 22 associated datasets for evaluating media bias detection techniques. We evaluate MBIB using state-of-the-art Transformer techniques (e.g., T5, BART). Our results suggest that while hate speech, racial bias, and gender bias are easier to detect, models struggle to handle certain bias types, e.g., cognitive and political bias. However, our results show that no single technique can outperform all the others significantly. We also find an uneven distribution of research interest and resource allocation to the individual tasks in media bias. A unified benchmark encourages the development of more robust systems and shifts the current paradigm in media bias detection evaluation towards solutions that tackle not one but multiple media bias types simultaneously.

Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.

We present Movie Gen, a cast of foundation models that generates high-quality, 1080p HD videos with different aspect ratios and synchronized audio. We also show additional capabilities such as precise instruction-based video editing and generation of personalized videos based on a user's image. Our models set a new state-of-the-art on multiple tasks: text-to-video synthesis, video personalization, video editing, video-to-audio generation, and text-to-audio generation. Our largest video generation model is a 30B parameter transformer trained with a maximum context length of 73K video tokens, corresponding to a generated video of 16 seconds at 16 frames-per-second. We show multiple technical innovations and simplifications on the architecture, latent spaces, training objectives and recipes, data curation, evaluation protocols, parallelization techniques, and inference optimizations that allow us to reap the benefits of scaling pre-training data, model size, and training compute for training large scale media generation models. We hope this paper helps the research community to accelerate progress and innovation in media generation models. All videos from this paper are available at https://go.fb.me/MovieGenResearchVideos.

Text classification is a typical natural language processing or computational linguistics task with various interesting applications. As the number of users on social media platforms increases, data acceleration promotes emerging studies on Social Media Text Classification (SMTC) or social media text mining on these valuable resources. In contrast to English, Vietnamese, one of the low-resource languages, is still not concentrated on and exploited thoroughly. Inspired by the success of the GLUE, we introduce the Social Media Text Classification Evaluation (SMTCE) benchmark, as a collection of datasets and models across a diverse set of SMTC tasks. With the proposed benchmark, we implement and analyze the effectiveness of a variety of multilingual BERT-based models (mBERT, XLM-R, and DistilmBERT) and monolingual BERT-based models (PhoBERT, viBERT, vELECTRA, and viBERT4news) for tasks in the SMTCE benchmark. Monolingual models outperform multilingual models and achieve state-of-the-art results on all text classification tasks. It provides an objective assessment of multilingual and monolingual BERT-based models on the benchmark, which will benefit future studies about BERTology in the Vietnamese language.

Interpretability provides a toolset for understanding how and why neural networks behave in certain ways. However, there is little unity in the field: most studies employ ad-hoc evaluations and do not share theoretical foundations, making it difficult to measure progress and compare the pros and cons of different techniques. Furthermore, while mechanistic understanding is frequently discussed, the basic causal units underlying these mechanisms are often not explicitly defined. In this paper, we propose a perspective on interpretability research grounded in causal mediation analysis. Specifically, we describe the history and current state of interpretability taxonomized according to the types of causal units (mediators) employed, as well as methods used to search over mediators. We discuss the pros and cons of each mediator, providing insights as to when particular kinds of mediators and search methods are most appropriate depending on the goals of a given study. We argue that this framing yields a more cohesive narrative of the field, as well as actionable insights for future work. Specifically, we recommend a focus on discovering new mediators with better trade-offs between human-interpretability and compute-efficiency, and which can uncover more sophisticated abstractions from neural networks than the primarily linear mediators employed in current work. We also argue for more standardized evaluations that enable principled comparisons across mediator types, such that we can better understand when particular causal units are better suited to particular use cases.

As LLMs increasingly mediate the political information citizens rely on, there is still no standardized way to assess whether they do so responsibly. We introduce Polistemics, a theory-grounded benchmark for evaluating LLMs as mediators of political information in elections. Prior work has treated this task as reproduction rather than mediation, leaving its epistemic dimensions and interaction with imperfect information unaddressed. We ground the evaluation in Epistemic Modesty, a normative standard derived from citizens' epistemic agency, and test it across controlled settings that vary informational properties such as clarity, noise, and consistency. Applying the benchmark to three state-of-the-art LLMs on the 2025 German and Dutch elections, we find that high aggregate scores mask systematic failures. Models mediate reliably under clear evidence but break down under absent, vague, or contradictory information, while flattening the intensity of political language. These failures are likely driven by party priors, influenced by party labels and output language. Reliable mediation appears achievable, but no model delivers it consistently.

Recent models in developing summarization systems consist of millions of parameters and the model performance is highly dependent on the abundance of training data. While most existing summarization corpora contain data in the order of thousands to one million, generation of large-scale summarization datasets in order of couple of millions is yet to be explored. Practically, more data is better at generalizing the training patterns to unseen data. In this paper, we introduce TLDR9+ -- a large-scale summarization dataset -- containing over 9 million training instances extracted from Reddit discussion forum (https://github.com/sajastu/reddit_collector). This dataset is specifically gathered to perform extreme summarization (i.e., generating one-sentence summary in high compression and abstraction) and is more than twice larger than the previously proposed dataset. We go one step further and with the help of human annotations, we distill a more fine-grained dataset by sampling High-Quality instances from TLDR9+ and call it TLDRHQ dataset. We further pinpoint different state-of-the-art summarization models on our proposed datasets.

With the development of web technology, social media texts are becoming a rich source for automatic mental health analysis. As traditional discriminative methods bear the problem of low interpretability, the recent large language models have been explored for interpretable mental health analysis on social media, which aims to provide detailed explanations along with predictions. The results show that ChatGPT can generate approaching-human explanations for its correct classifications. However, LLMs still achieve unsatisfactory classification performance in a zero-shot/few-shot manner. Domain-specific finetuning is an effective solution, but faces 2 challenges: 1) lack of high-quality training data. 2) no open-source LLMs for interpretable mental health analysis were released to lower the finetuning cost. To alleviate these problems, we build the first multi-task and multi-source interpretable mental health instruction (IMHI) dataset on social media, with 105K data samples. The raw social media data are collected from 10 existing sources covering 8 mental health analysis tasks. We use expert-written few-shot prompts and collected labels to prompt ChatGPT and obtain explanations from its responses. To ensure the reliability of the explanations, we perform strict automatic and human evaluations on the correctness, consistency, and quality of generated data. Based on the IMHI dataset and LLaMA2 foundation models, we train MentalLLaMA, the first open-source LLM series for interpretable mental health analysis with instruction-following capability. We also evaluate the performance of MentalLLaMA on the IMHI evaluation benchmark with 10 test sets, where their correctness for making predictions and the quality of explanations are examined. The results show that MentalLLaMA approaches state-of-the-art discriminative methods in correctness and generates high-quality explanations.

The growth of social media, characterized by its multimodal nature, has led to the emergence of diverse phenomena and challenges, which calls for an effective approach to uniformly solve automated tasks. The powerful Large Vision Language Models make it possible to handle a variety of tasks simultaneously, but even with carefully designed prompting methods, the general domain models often fall short in aligning with the unique speaking style and context of social media tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processing (SoMeLVLM), which is a cognitive framework equipped with five key capabilities including knowledge & comprehension, application, analysis, evaluation, and creation. SoMeLVLM is designed to understand and generate realistic social media behavior. We have developed a 654k multimodal social media instruction-tuning dataset to support our cognitive framework and fine-tune our model. Our experiments demonstrate that SoMeLVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple social media tasks. Further analysis shows its significant advantages over baselines in terms of cognitive abilities.

Social media platforms are rich sources of opinionated content. Stance detection allows the automatic extraction of users' opinions on various topics from such content. We focus on zero-shot stance detection, where the model's success relies on (a) having knowledge about the target topic; and (b) learning general reasoning strategies that can be employed for new topics. We present Stance Reasoner, an approach to zero-shot stance detection on social media that leverages explicit reasoning over background knowledge to guide the model's inference about the document's stance on a target. Specifically, our method uses a pre-trained language model as a source of world knowledge, with the chain-of-thought in-context learning approach to generate intermediate reasoning steps. Stance Reasoner outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on 3 Twitter datasets, including fully supervised models. It can better generalize across targets, while at the same time providing explicit and interpretable explanations for its predictions.

We introduce a new task called Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) for noisy user-generated data such as tweets or Snapchat captions, which comprise short text with accompanying images. These social media posts often come in inconsistent or incomplete syntax and lexical notations with very limited surrounding textual contexts, bringing significant challenges for NER. To this end, we create a new dataset for MNER called SnapCaptions (Snapchat image-caption pairs submitted to public and crowd-sourced stories with fully annotated named entities). We then build upon the state-of-the-art Bi-LSTM word/character based NER models with 1) a deep image network which incorporates relevant visual context to augment textual information, and 2) a generic modality-attention module which learns to attenuate irrelevant modalities while amplifying the most informative ones to extract contexts from, adaptive to each sample and token. The proposed MNER model with modality attention significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art text-only NER models by successfully leveraging provided visual contexts, opening up potential applications of MNER on myriads of social media platforms.

Internet users have been exposing an increasing amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on social media. Such exposed PII can cause severe losses to the users, and informing users of their PII exposure is crucial to raise their privacy awareness and encourage them to take protective measures. To this end, advanced automatic techniques are needed. While Information Extraction (IE) techniques can be used to extract the PII automatically, Deep Learning (DL)-based IE models alleviate the need for feature engineering and further improve the efficiency. However, DL-based IE models often require large-scale labeled data for training, but PII-labeled social media posts are difficult to obtain due to privacy concerns. Also, these models rely heavily on pre-trained word embeddings, while PII in social media often varies in forms and thus has no fixed representations in pre-trained word embeddings. In this study, we propose the Deep Transfer Learning for PII Extraction (DTL-PIIE) framework to address these two limitations. DTL-PIIE transfers knowledge learned from publicly available PII data to social media to address the problem of rare PII-labeled data. Moreover, our framework leverages Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to incorporate syntactic patterns to guide PIIE without relying on pre-trained word embeddings. Evaluation against benchmark IE models indicates that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art DL-based IE models. Our framework can facilitate various applications, such as PII misuse prediction and privacy risk assessment, protecting the privacy of internet users.

Fake news is a severe problem in social media. In this paper, we present an empirical study on visual, textual, and multimodal models for the tasks of claim, claim check-worthiness, and conspiracy detection, all of which are related to fake news detection. Recent work suggests that images are more influential than text and often appear alongside fake text. To this end, several multimodal models have been proposed in recent years that use images along with text to detect fake news on social media sites like Twitter. However, the role of images is not well understood for claim detection, specifically using transformer-based textual and multimodal models. We investigate state-of-the-art models for images, text (Transformer-based), and multimodal information for four different datasets across two languages to understand the role of images in the task of claim and conspiracy detection.

Producing synthetic voice, similar to human-like sound, is an emerging novelty of modern interactive media systems. Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems try to generate synthetic and authentic voices via text input. Besides, well known and familiar dubbing, announcing and narrating voices, as valuable possessions of any media organization, can be kept forever by utilizing TTS and Voice Conversion (VC) algorithms . The emergence of deep learning approaches has made such TTS systems more accurate and accessible. To understand TTS systems better, this paper investigates the key components of such systems including text analysis, acoustic modelling and vocoding. The paper then provides details of important state-of-the-art TTS systems based on deep learning. Finally, a comparison is made between recently released systems in term of backbone architecture, type of input and conversion, vocoder used and subjective assessment (MOS). Accordingly, Tacotron 2, Transformer TTS, WaveNet and FastSpeech 1 are among the most successful TTS systems ever released. In the discussion section, some suggestions are made to develop a TTS system with regard to the intended application.

We present CivBench, an open-source benchmark for evaluating language model agents in long-horizon, tool-mediated environments through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). A single episode spans 300+ turns and produces thousands of tool calls over a large action space, requiring sustained planning, state monitoring, and execution under partial observability. The environment exposes 76 MCP tools and a narration layer that converts visual game state into structured text. We use CivBench to characterise agent behaviour across four model families in 23 admissible runs. The sample is a pilot, not a model ranking: aggregate outcomes do not reliably discriminate models at this scale. Instead, we introduce two interface-level metrics that the environment makes measurable: Proactive Monitoring Rate (PMR), capturing whether agents actively query latent strategic state, and RAG@10, capturing whether commitments stated in structured planning reflections are executed within ten subsequent turns. Across runs we observe two consistent patterns under a shared playbook protocol. Agents under-monitor strategically relevant state that is available but requires explicit querying: despite playbook guidance to query victory progress every 20 turns, agents do so only every 30 to 75 turns, and in 7 of 20 detectable defeats they failed to query within the 20 turn warning window before game end. Agents also frequently fail to execute near-term commitments stated in their own planning reflections (RAG@10 between 48.2% and 65.8% across models). Both patterns arise despite tool access and explicit guidance, and we interpret them as deviations under instruction rather than absences of capability. We release the environment, scenarios, logs, metrics, and analysis pipeline at https://github.com/lmwilki/civ6-mcp

Textual overlays are often used in social media videos as people who watch them without the sound would otherwise miss essential information conveyed in the audio stream. This is why extraction of those overlays can serve as an important meta-data source, e.g. for content classification or retrieval tasks. In this work, we present a robust method for extracting textual overlays from videos that builds up on multiple neural network architectures. The proposed solution relies on several processing steps: keyframe extraction, text detection and text recognition. The main component of our system, i.e. the text recognition module, is inspired by a convolutional recurrent neural network architecture and we improve its performance using synthetically generated dataset of over 600,000 images with text prepared by authors specifically for this task. We also develop a filtering method that reduces the amount of overlapping text phrases using Levenshtein distance and further boosts system's performance. The final accuracy of our solution reaches over 80A% and is au pair with state-of-the-art methods.

Researchers of political communication study the impact and perceptions of political incivility on social media. Yet, so far, relatively few works attempted to automatically detect and characterize political incivility. In our work, we study political incivility in Twitter, presenting several research contributions. First, we present state-of-the-art incivility detection results using a large dataset, which we collected and labeled via crowd sourcing. Importantly, we distinguish between uncivil political speech that is impolite and intolerant anti-democratic discourse. Applying political incivility detection at large-scale, we derive insights regarding the prevalence of this phenomenon across users, and explore the network characteristics of users who are susceptible to disseminating uncivil political content online. Finally, we propose an approach for modeling social context information about the tweet author alongside the tweet content, showing that this leads to significantly improved performance on the task of political incivility detection. This result holds promise for related tasks, such as hate speech and stance detection.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success as general-purpose task solvers across various fields, including NLP, healthcare, finance, and law. However, their capabilities remain limited when addressing domain-specific problems, particularly in downstream NLP tasks. Research has shown that models fine-tuned on instruction-based downstream NLP datasets outperform those that are not fine-tuned. While most efforts in this area have primarily focused on resource-rich languages like English and broad domains, little attention has been given to multilingual settings and specific domains. To address this gap, this study focuses on developing a specialized LLM, LlamaLens, for analyzing news and social media content in a multilingual context. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle both domain specificity and multilinguality, with a particular focus on news and social media. Our experimental setup includes 19 tasks, represented by 52 datasets covering Arabic, English, and Hindi. We demonstrate that LlamaLens outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) on 16 testing sets, and achieves comparable performance on 10 sets. We make the models and resources publicly available for the research community.(https://huggingface.co/QCRI)

This work presents an extensive study of transformer-based NLP models for detection of social media posts that contain verifiable factual claims and harmful claims. The study covers various activities, including dataset collection, dataset pre-processing, architecture selection, setup of settings, model training (fine-tuning), model testing, and implementation. The study includes a comprehensive analysis of different models, with a special focus on multilingual models where the same model is capable of processing social media posts in both English and in low-resource languages such as Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Slovak. The results obtained from the study were validated against state-of-the-art models, and the comparison demonstrated the robustness of the proposed models. The novelty of this work lies in the development of multi-label multilingual classification models that can simultaneously detect harmful posts and posts that contain verifiable factual claims in an efficient way.

Rapid post-earthquake damage assessment is crucial for rescue and resource planning. Still, existing remote sensing methods depend on costly aerial images, expert labeling, and produce only binary damage maps for early-stage evaluation. Although ground-level images from social networks provide a valuable source to fill this gap, a large pixel-level annotated dataset for this task is still unavailable. We introduce EIDSeg, the first large-scale semantic segmentation dataset specifically for post-earthquake social media imagery. The dataset comprises 3,266 images from nine major earthquakes (2008-2023), annotated across five classes of infrastructure damage: Undamaged Building, Damaged Building, Destroyed Building, Undamaged Road, and Damaged Road. We propose a practical three-phase cross-disciplinary annotation protocol with labeling guidelines that enables consistent segmentation by non-expert annotators, achieving over 70% inter-annotator agreement. We benchmark several state-of-the-art segmentation models, identifying Encoder-only Mask Transformer (EoMT) as the top-performing method with a Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 80.8%. By unlocking social networks' rich ground-level perspective, our work paves the way for a faster, finer-grained damage assessment in the post-earthquake scenario.

The way the media presents events can significantly affect public perception, which in turn can alter people's beliefs and views. Media bias describes a one-sided or polarizing perspective on a topic. This article summarizes the research on computational methods to detect media bias by systematically reviewing 3140 research papers published between 2019 and 2022. To structure our review and support a mutual understanding of bias across research domains, we introduce the Media Bias Taxonomy, which provides a coherent overview of the current state of research on media bias from different perspectives. We show that media bias detection is a highly active research field, in which transformer-based classification approaches have led to significant improvements in recent years. These improvements include higher classification accuracy and the ability to detect more fine-granular types of bias. However, we have identified a lack of interdisciplinarity in existing projects, and a need for more awareness of the various types of media bias to support methodologically thorough performance evaluations of media bias detection systems. Concluding from our analysis, we see the integration of recent machine learning advancements with reliable and diverse bias assessment strategies from other research areas as the most promising area for future research contributions in the field.

This paper presents a novel vision-based proprioception approach for a soft robotic finger that can estimate and reconstruct tactile interactions in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. The key to this system lies in the finger's unique metamaterial structure, which facilitates omni-directional passive adaptation during grasping, protecting delicate objects across diverse scenarios. A compact in-finger camera captures high-framerate images of the finger's deformation during contact, extracting crucial tactile data in real-time. We present a volumetric discretized model of the soft finger and use the geometry constraints captured by the camera to find the optimal estimation of the deformed shape. The approach is benchmarked using a motion capture system with sparse markers and a haptic device with dense measurements. Both results show state-of-the-art accuracies, with a median error of 1.96 mm for overall body deformation, corresponding to 2.1% of the finger's length. More importantly, the state estimation is robust in both on-land and underwater environments as we demonstrate its usage for underwater object shape sensing. This combination of passive adaptation and real-time tactile sensing paves the way for amphibious robotic grasping applications.

Recent advances in multi-agent systems have shown great potential for solving complex tasks. However, when multiple agents edit a shared codebase concurrently, their changes can silently conflict and inconsistent views lead to integration failures. Existing multi-agent systems address this through workspace isolation (e.g., one git worktree per agent), but this defers conflict resolution to a post-hoc merge step where recovery is expensive. In this paper, we propose STORM, i.e., STate-ORiented Management for multi-agent collaboration. Specifically, STORM manages agent states by mediating their interactions with the shared workspace, ensuring that each agent operates on a consistent view of the codebase and that conflicting edits are detected and resolved at write time. We evaluate STORM on Commit0 and PaperBench across multiple LLMs. STORM outperforms the git-worktree-based multi-agent baseline by +18.7 on Commit0-Lite and +1.4 on PaperBench, while achieving comparable or better cost efficiency. Combined with single-agent runs, STORM reaches highest scores of 87.6 and 78.2 on the two benchmarks respectively, suggesting that explicit state management is a more effective foundation for multi-agent collaboration than workspace isolation. STORM can also be plugged into any multi-agent system seamlessly.

Social media platforms are essential outlets for expressing opinions, providing a valuable resource for capturing public viewpoints via text analytics. However, for many users, passive browsing is their preferred mode of interaction, leading to their perspectives being overlooked by text analytics methods. Meanwhile, social media polls have emerged as a practical feature for gathering public opinions, allowing post authors to pose questions with pre-defined answer options for readers to vote on. To broaden the benefits of polls for posts without them, this article explores the automatic generation of a poll from a social media post by leveraging cutting-edge natural language generation (NLG) techniques. However, existing NLG techniques, primarily developed for general-domain texts, may be ineffective when applied to noisy social media data, which often feature implicit context-question-answer relations. To tackle these challenges, we enrich a post context with its comments and propose a novel unified poll generation framework called UniPoll. It employs prompt tuning with multi-objective optimization to bolster the connection exploration between contexts (posts and comments) and polls (questions and answers). Experimental comparisons on a large-scale Chinese Weibo dataset show that UniPoll significantly outperforms T5, the state-of-the-art NLG model, which generates question and answer separately. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analyses further underscore the superiority of UniPoll through various evaluation lenses.

Early rumor detection (ERD) on social media platform is very challenging when limited, incomplete and noisy information is available. Most of the existing methods have largely worked on event-level detection that requires the collection of posts relevant to a specific event and relied only on user-generated content. They are not appropriate to detect rumor sources in the very early stages, before an event unfolds and becomes widespread. In this paper, we address the task of ERD at the message level. We present a novel hybrid neural network architecture, which combines a task-specific character-based bidirectional language model and stacked Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to represent textual contents and social-temporal contexts of input source tweets, for modelling propagation patterns of rumors in the early stages of their development. We apply multi-layered attention models to jointly learn attentive context embeddings over multiple context inputs. Our experiments employ a stringent leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO-CV) evaluation setup on seven publicly available real-life rumor event data sets. Our models achieve state-of-the-art(SoA) performance for detecting unseen rumors on large augmented data which covers more than 12 events and 2,967 rumors. An ablation study is conducted to understand the relative contribution of each component of our proposed model.

This open access book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in research and applications of Foundation Models and is intended for readers familiar with basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) concepts. Over the recent years, a revolutionary new paradigm has been developed for training models for NLP. These models are first pre-trained on large collections of text documents to acquire general syntactic knowledge and semantic information. Then, they are fine-tuned for specific tasks, which they can often solve with superhuman accuracy. When the models are large enough, they can be instructed by prompts to solve new tasks without any fine-tuning. Moreover, they can be applied to a wide range of different media and problem domains, ranging from image and video processing to robot control learning. Because they provide a blueprint for solving many tasks in artificial intelligence, they have been called Foundation Models. After a brief introduction to basic NLP models the main pre-trained language models BERT, GPT and sequence-to-sequence transformer are described, as well as the concepts of self-attention and context-sensitive embedding. Then, different approaches to improving these models are discussed, such as expanding the pre-training criteria, increasing the length of input texts, or including extra knowledge. An overview of the best-performing models for about twenty application areas is then presented, e.g., question answering, translation, story generation, dialog systems, generating images from text, etc. For each application area, the strengths and weaknesses of current models are discussed, and an outlook on further developments is given. In addition, links are provided to freely available program code. A concluding chapter summarizes the economic opportunities, mitigation of risks, and potential developments of AI.

The short-form videos have explosive popularity and have dominated the new social media trends. Prevailing short-video platforms,~e.g., Kuaishou (Kwai), TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, have changed the way we consume and create content. For video content creation and understanding, the shot boundary detection (SBD) is one of the most essential components in various scenarios. In this work, we release a new public Short video sHot bOundary deTection dataset, named SHOT, consisting of 853 complete short videos and 11,606 shot annotations, with 2,716 high quality shot boundary annotations in 200 test videos. Leveraging this new data wealth, we propose to optimize the model design for video SBD, by conducting neural architecture search in a search space encapsulating various advanced 3D ConvNets and Transformers. Our proposed approach, named AutoShot, achieves higher F1 scores than previous state-of-the-art approaches, e.g., outperforming TransNetV2 by 4.2%, when being derived and evaluated on our newly constructed SHOT dataset. Moreover, to validate the generalizability of the AutoShot architecture, we directly evaluate it on another three public datasets: ClipShots, BBC and RAI, and the F1 scores of AutoShot outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches by 1.1%, 0.9% and 1.2%, respectively. The SHOT dataset and code can be found in https://github.com/wentaozhu/AutoShot.git .

Recently proposed methods for 1-bit and 1.58-bit quantization aware training investigate the performance and behavior of these methods in the context of large language models, finding state-of-the-art performance for models with more than 3B parameters. In this work, we investigate 1.58-bit quantization for small language and vision models ranging from 100K to 48M parameters. We introduce a variant of BitNet b1.58, which allows to rely on the median rather than the mean in the quantization process. Through extensive experiments we investigate the performance of 1.58-bit models obtained through quantization aware training. We further investigate the robustness of 1.58-bit quantization-aware training to changes in the learning rate and regularization through weight decay, finding different patterns for small language and vision models than previously reported for large language models. Our results showcase that 1.58-bit quantization-aware training provides state-of-the-art performance for small language models when doubling hidden layer sizes and reaches or even surpasses state-of-the-art performance for small vision models of identical size. Ultimately, we demonstrate that 1.58-bit quantization-aware training is a viable and promising approach also for training smaller deep learning networks, facilitating deployment of such models in low-resource use-cases and encouraging future research.

Evaluating policies using off-policy data is crucial for applying reinforcement learning to real-world problems such as healthcare and autonomous driving. Previous methods for off-policy evaluation (OPE) generally suffer from high variance or irreducible bias, leading to unacceptably high prediction errors. In this work, we introduce STAR, a framework for OPE that encompasses a broad range of estimators -- which include existing OPE methods as special cases -- that achieve lower mean squared prediction errors. STAR leverages state abstraction to distill complex, potentially continuous problems into compact, discrete models which we call abstract reward processes (ARPs). Predictions from ARPs estimated from off-policy data are provably consistent (asymptotically correct). Rather than proposing a specific estimator, we present a new framework for OPE and empirically demonstrate that estimators within STAR outperform existing methods. The best STAR estimator outperforms baselines in all twelve cases studied, and even the median STAR estimator surpasses the baselines in seven out of the twelve cases.

Generative AI and coding agents are intensifying a central governance tension in open-source software (OSS): they scale contribution generation faster than maintainers can assess risk, evidence, and accountability. Existing responses improve agent-readability and traceability, but project rules must also organize contribution-specific risk, evidence, accountability, and review-gate states. We theorize this organizational arrangement as project-side governability infrastructure. A diagnostic audit of 50 GitHub repositories finds widespread general governance artifacts, observable agent-readability, and fragmented AI-governance cues, but no project-wide arrangement that coordinates shared rules, preparation obligations, verification rights, and maintainer decision authority across AI-mediated contribution workflows. We develop the Agent Governance Manifest (AGM) as a repository-hosted boundary resource and bidirectional governance contract linking contributor-side evidence preparation with maintainer-side verification. In a controlled reviewer-side evaluation with 15 participants and 75 task-level outputs, AGM-supported materials improved exact risk-label recovery (37/38 vs. 15/37) and perceived review support (6.14 vs. 3.27 on a 1-7 scale). In a contributor-side feasibility check, 15 participants completed 45 tasks; all final packages represented the core governance state correctly, and 41 passed strict structural validation. The study develops a three-layer framework of agent-readability, traceability, and governability, theorizes agent-mediated contributions as governable boundary objects, and advances compliance-enabling digital innovation governance while preserving maintainer decision authority.

The rise of social media has led to the increasing of comments on online forums. However, there still exists invalid comments which are not informative for users. Moreover, those comments are also quite toxic and harmful to people. In this paper, we create a dataset for constructive and toxic speech detection, named UIT-ViCTSD (Vietnamese Constructive and Toxic Speech Detection dataset) with 10,000 human-annotated comments. For these tasks, we propose a system for constructive and toxic speech detection with the state-of-the-art transfer learning model in Vietnamese NLP as PhoBERT. With this system, we obtain F1-scores of 78.59% and 59.40% for classifying constructive and toxic comments, respectively. Besides, we implement various baseline models as traditional Machine Learning and Deep Neural Network-Based models to evaluate the dataset. With the results, we can solve several tasks on the online discussions and develop the framework for identifying constructiveness and toxicity of Vietnamese social media comments automatically.

Millions of users share their experiences on social media sites, such as Twitter, which in turn generate valuable data for public health monitoring, digital epidemiology, and other analyses of population health at global scale. The first, critical, task for these applications is classifying whether a personal health event was mentioned, which we call the (PHM) problem. This task is challenging for many reasons, including typically short length of social media posts, inventive spelling and lexicons, and figurative language, including hyperbole using diseases like "heart attack" or "cancer" for emphasis, and not as a health self-report. This problem is even more challenging for rarely reported, or frequent but ambiguously expressed conditions, such as "stroke". To address this problem, we propose a general, robust method for detecting PHMs in social media, which we call WESPAD, that combines lexical, syntactic, word embedding-based, and context-based features. WESPAD is able to generalize from few examples by automatically distorting the word embedding space to most effectively detect the true health mentions. Unlike previously proposed state-of-the-art supervised and deep-learning techniques, WESPAD requires relatively little training data, which makes it possible to adapt, with minimal effort, to each new disease and condition. We evaluate WESPAD on both an established publicly available Flu detection benchmark, and on a new dataset that we have constructed with mentions of multiple health conditions. Our experiments show that WESPAD outperforms the baselines and state-of-the-art methods, especially in cases when the number and proportion of true health mentions in the training data is small.

Since BERT appeared, Transformer language models and transfer learning have become state-of-the-art for Natural Language Understanding tasks. Recently, some works geared towards pre-training specially-crafted models for particular domains, such as scientific papers, medical documents, user-generated texts, among others. These domain-specific models have been shown to improve performance significantly in most tasks. However, for languages other than English such models are not widely available. In this work, we present RoBERTuito, a pre-trained language model for user-generated text in Spanish, trained on over 500 million tweets. Experiments on a benchmark of tasks involving user-generated text showed that RoBERTuito outperformed other pre-trained language models in Spanish. In addition to this, our model achieves top results for some English-Spanish tasks of the Linguistic Code-Switching Evaluation benchmark (LinCE) and has also competitive performance against monolingual models in English tasks. To facilitate further research, we make RoBERTuito publicly available at the HuggingFace model hub together with the dataset used to pre-train it.

A user-generated text on social media enables health workers to keep track of information, identify possible outbreaks, forecast disease trends, monitor emergency cases, and ascertain disease awareness and response to official health correspondence. This exchange of health information on social media has been regarded as an attempt to enhance public health surveillance (PHS). Despite its potential, the technology is still in its early stages and is not ready for widespread application. Advancements in pretrained language models (PLMs) have facilitated the development of several domain-specific PLMs and a variety of downstream applications. However, there are no PLMs for social media tasks involving PHS. We present and release PHS-BERT, a transformer-based PLM, to identify tasks related to public health surveillance on social media. We compared and benchmarked the performance of PHS-BERT on 25 datasets from different social medial platforms related to 7 different PHS tasks. Compared with existing PLMs that are mainly evaluated on limited tasks, PHS-BERT achieved state-of-the-art performance on all 25 tested datasets, showing that our PLM is robust and generalizable in the common PHS tasks. By making PHS-BERT available, we aim to facilitate the community to reduce the computational cost and introduce new baselines for future works across various PHS-related tasks.

This survey draws a broad-stroke, panoramic picture of the State of the Art (SoTA) of the research in generative methods for the analysis of social media data. It fills a void, as the existing survey articles are either much narrower in their scope or are dated. We included two important aspects that currently gain importance in mining and modeling social media: dynamics and networks. Social dynamics are important for understanding the spreading of influence or diseases, formation of friendships, the productivity of teams, etc. Networks, on the other hand, may capture various complex relationships providing additional insight and identifying important patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed.

With the rise of the Internet, there is a growing need to build intelligent systems that are capable of efficiently dealing with early risk detection (ERD) problems on social media, such as early depression detection, early rumor detection or identification of sexual predators. These systems, nowadays mostly based on machine learning techniques, must be able to deal with data streams since users provide their data over time. In addition, these systems must be able to decide when the processed data is sufficient to actually classify users. Moreover, since ERD tasks involve risky decisions by which people's lives could be affected, such systems must also be able to justify their decisions. However, most standard and state-of-the-art supervised machine learning models are not well suited to deal with this scenario. This is due to the fact that they either act as black boxes or do not support incremental classification/learning. In this paper we introduce SS3, a novel supervised learning model for text classification that naturally supports these aspects. SS3 was designed to be used as a general framework to deal with ERD problems. We evaluated our model on the CLEF's eRisk2017 pilot task on early depression detection. Most of the 30 contributions submitted to this competition used state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that our classifier was able to outperform these models and standard classifiers, despite being less computationally expensive and having the ability to explain its rationale.

Multimedia content in social media platforms provides significant information during disaster events. The types of information shared include reports of injured or deceased people, infrastructure damage, and missing or found people, among others. Although many studies have shown the usefulness of both text and image content for disaster response purposes, the research has been mostly focused on analyzing only the text modality in the past. In this paper, we propose to use both text and image modalities of social media data to learn a joint representation using state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. Specifically, we utilize convolutional neural networks to define a multimodal deep learning architecture with a modality-agnostic shared representation. Extensive experiments on real-world disaster datasets show that the proposed multimodal architecture yields better performance than models trained using a single modality (e.g., either text or image).

In today's digital age, conspiracies and information campaigns can emerge rapidly and erode social and democratic cohesion. While recent deep learning approaches have made progress in modeling engagement through language and propagation models, they struggle with irregularly sampled data and early trajectory assessment. We present IC-Mamba, a novel state space model that forecasts social media engagement by modeling interval-censored data with integrated temporal embeddings. Our model excels at predicting engagement patterns within the crucial first 15-30 minutes of posting (RMSE 0.118-0.143), enabling rapid assessment of content reach. By incorporating interval-censored modeling into the state space framework, IC-Mamba captures fine-grained temporal dynamics of engagement growth, achieving a 4.72% improvement over state-of-the-art across multiple engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, and emojis). Our experiments demonstrate IC-Mamba's effectiveness in forecasting both post-level dynamics and broader narrative patterns (F1 0.508-0.751 for narrative-level predictions). The model maintains strong predictive performance across extended time horizons, successfully forecasting opinion-level engagement up to 28 days ahead using observation windows of 3-10 days. These capabilities enable earlier identification of potentially problematic content, providing crucial lead time for designing and implementing countermeasures. Code is available at: https://github.com/ltian678/ic-mamba. An interactive dashboard demonstrating our results is available at: https://ic-mamba.behavioral-ds.science.

Tenet Media, a U.S.-based, right-wing media company, hired six established podcasters to create content related to U.S. politics and culture during the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle. After publishing content on YouTube and Rumble for nearly a year, Tenet Media was declared by the U.S. government to be funded entirely by Russia -- making it effectively an outsourced state-sponsored information operation (SSIO). We present a complete dataset of the 560 podcast videos published by the Tenet Media channel on the video-sharing platform Rumble between November 2023 and September 2024. Our dataset includes video metadata and user comments, as well as high-quality video transcriptions, representing over 300 hours of video content. This dataset provides researchers with material to study a Russian SSIO, and notably on Rumble, which is an understudied platform in SSIO scholarship.

This study investigates the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for improved depression detection from users social media data. Through the use of fine-tuned GPT 3.5 Turbo 1106 and LLaMA2-7B models and a sizable dataset from earlier studies, we were able to identify depressed content in social media posts with a high accuracy of nearly 96.0 percent. The comparative analysis of the obtained results with the relevant studies in the literature shows that the proposed fine-tuned LLMs achieved enhanced performance compared to existing state of the-art systems. This demonstrates the robustness of LLM-based fine-tuned systems to be used as potential depression detection systems. The study describes the approach in depth, including the parameters used and the fine-tuning procedure, and it addresses the important implications of our results for the early diagnosis of depression on several social media platforms.

Despite remarkable progress in large language models, Urdu-a language spoken by over 230 million people-remains critically underrepresented in modern NLP systems. Existing multilingual models demonstrate poor performance on Urdu-specific tasks, struggling with the language's complex morphology, right-to-left Nastaliq script, and rich literary traditions. Even the base LLaMA-3.1 8B-Instruct model shows limited capability in generating fluent, contextually appropriate Urdu text. We introduce Qalb, an Urdu language model developed through a two-stage approach: continued pre-training followed by supervised fine-tuning. Starting from LLaMA 3.1 8B, we perform continued pre-training on a dataset of 1.97 billion tokens. This corpus comprises 1.84 billion tokens of diverse Urdu text-spanning news archives, classical and contemporary literature, government documents, and social media-combined with 140 million tokens of English Wikipedia data to prevent catastrophic forgetting. We then fine-tune the resulting model on the Alif Urdu-instruct dataset. Through extensive evaluation on Urdu-specific benchmarks, Qalb demonstrates substantial improvements, achieving a weighted average score of 90.34 and outperforming the previous state-of-the-art Alif-1.0-Instruct model (87.1) by 3.24 points, while also surpassing the base LLaMA-3.1 8B-Instruct model by 44.64 points. Qalb achieves state-of-the-art performance with comprehensive evaluation across seven diverse tasks including Classification, Sentiment Analysis, and Reasoning. Our results demonstrate that continued pre-training on diverse, high-quality language data, combined with targeted instruction fine-tuning, effectively adapts foundation models to low-resource languages.

Persona-driven simulations are increasingly used in computational social science, yet their validity critically depends on the fidelity of the underlying personas. Constructing virtual populations that are both authentic and scalable remains a central challenge. We introduce Synthia, a persona-generation framework that grounds LLM-generated personas in real social-media posts while delegating narrative construction to language models, using publicly available data from the Bluesky platform. Across multiple social-survey benchmarks, Synthia improves alignment with human opinion distributions over prior state-of-the-art approaches while relying on substantially smaller models. A multi-dimensional fairness and bias analysis shows that Synthia outperforms previous methods for most demographics across different dimensions. Uniquely, Synthia preserves interaction-graph structure among personas grounded in real social network users, enabling network-aware analysis, which we demonstrate through two homophily-focused case studies. Together, these results position Synthia as a practical and reliable framework for constructing scalable, high-fidelity, and equitable virtual populations.

We focus on named entity recognition (NER) for Chinese social media. With massive unlabeled text and quite limited labelled corpus, we propose a semi-supervised learning model based on B-LSTM neural network. To take advantage of traditional methods in NER such as CRF, we combine transition probability with deep learning in our model. To bridge the gap between label accuracy and F-score of NER, we construct a model which can be directly trained on F-score. When considering the instability of F-score driven method and meaningful information provided by label accuracy, we propose an integrated method to train on both F-score and label accuracy. Our integrated model yields 7.44\% improvement over previous state-of-the-art result.

There are several applications of stochastic optimization where one can benefit from a robust estimate of the gradient. For example, domains such as distributed learning with corrupted nodes, the presence of large outliers in the training data, learning under privacy constraints, or even heavy-tailed noise due to the dynamics of the algorithm itself. Here we study SGD with robust gradient estimators based on estimating the median. We first consider computing the median gradient across samples, and show that the resulting method can converge even under heavy-tailed, state-dependent noise. We then derive iterative methods based on the stochastic proximal point method for computing the geometric median and generalizations thereof. Finally we propose an algorithm estimating the median gradient across iterations, and find that several well known methods - in particular different forms of clipping - are particular cases of this framework.

This paper identifies significant redundancy in the query-key interactions within self-attention mechanisms of diffusion transformer models, particularly during the early stages of denoising diffusion steps. In response to this observation, we present a novel diffusion transformer framework incorporating an additional set of mediator tokens to engage with queries and keys separately. By modulating the number of mediator tokens during the denoising generation phases, our model initiates the denoising process with a precise, non-ambiguous stage and gradually transitions to a phase enriched with detail. Concurrently, integrating mediator tokens simplifies the attention module's complexity to a linear scale, enhancing the efficiency of global attention processes. Additionally, we propose a time-step dynamic mediator token adjustment mechanism that further decreases the required computational FLOPs for generation, simultaneously facilitating the generation of high-quality images within the constraints of varied inference budgets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the generated image quality while also reducing the inference cost of diffusion transformers. When integrated with the recent work SiT, our method achieves a state-of-the-art FID score of 2.01. The source code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Attention-Mediators.

Agentic systems involved in high-stake decision-making under adversarial pressure need formal guarantees not offered by existing approaches. Motivated by the operational needs of security operations centers (SOCs) that must configure endpoint detection and response (EDR) policies under adversarial pressure, we present a tool-mediated architecture: LLM agents use deterministic tools (Stackelberg best-response, Bayesian observer updates, attack-graph primitives) and select from finite action catalogs enforced at the tool-output interface. A composite Lyapunov function machine-checked in Lean 4 with zero sorry certifies controllability, observability from asymmetric sensor data, and Input-to-State Stability (ISS) robustness under intelligent adversarial disturbance, with two corollaries extending the certificate to any controller or adversary from the catalogs. On 282 real enterprise attack graphs, the claims hold with margin. On paired offensive/defensive telemetry, a tool-mediated Claude Sonnet 4 controller reduces the attacker's expected payoff (game value) by 59% relative to a deterministic greedy baseline, with zero variance across 40 runs at four temperatures. A Claude Haiku 4.5 controller converges to suboptimal game values but stays catalog-bounded over an additional 40 runs, demonstrating that architectural stability is not dependent on the controller capability. The LLM agent's non-determinism furthers creative exploration of strategies, while the tool-mediated architecture ensures system stability.

Many localized large language model (LLM) unlearning methods select a small parameter subset from a localization signal and keep it fixed during optimization. The parameters most associated with a target, however, need not be the best ones to update, and candidate interventions can change value as optimization proceeds. In a controlled experiment, a storage-localization score reaches an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.981, yet storage identity agrees with the better intervention on only 17/36 targets, while low-rank adaptation (LoRA) wins 35/36. We introduce Intervention Score, which ranks editable groups by the predicted effect of the actual unlearning update while accounting for collateral damage, and use it to form the static intervention-value baseline (Static-IV). We then introduce selective dynamic intervention re-ranking (DIR-R), which revisits that subset only when a calibrated probe justifies the comparison. On the Natural-TOFU dataset, our method has positive descriptive margins in 19/20 comparisons between methods and objectives, although several are near zero. On the LACUNA localization-precision benchmark, our mean terminal utility is higher in all six negative preference optimization (NPO) and SimNPO comparisons: NPO margins range from +0.431 to +0.848, and SimNPO margins range from +0.503 to +0.571. The gradient-difference (GradDiff) objective reveals substantial field dependence. Relative to Static-IV, the primary four-field GradDiff evaluation has six wins, six ties, and no losses, with mean and median paired gains of +0.165 and +0.0025. The evidence supports separating localization, initial intervention selection, and checkpoint-dependent support revision.

Natural language understanding (NLU) is integral to various social media applications. However, existing NLU models rely heavily on context for semantic learning, resulting in compromised performance when faced with short and noisy social media content. To address this issue, we leverage in-context learning (ICL), wherein language models learn to make inferences by conditioning on a handful of demonstrations to enrich the context and propose a novel hashtag-driven in-context learning (HICL) framework. Concretely, we pre-train a model #Encoder, which employs #hashtags (user-annotated topic labels) to drive BERT-based pre-training through contrastive learning. Our objective here is to enable #Encoder to gain the ability to incorporate topic-related semantic information, which allows it to retrieve topic-related posts to enrich contexts and enhance social media NLU with noisy contexts. To further integrate the retrieved context with the source text, we employ a gradient-based method to identify trigger terms useful in fusing information from both sources. For empirical studies, we collected 45M tweets to set up an in-context NLU benchmark, and the experimental results on seven downstream tasks show that HICL substantially advances the previous state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, we conducted extensive analyzes and found that: (1) combining source input with a top-retrieved post from #Encoder is more effective than using semantically similar posts; (2) trigger words can largely benefit in merging context from the source and retrieved posts.

Recent advances in AI-powered generative models have enabled the creation of increasingly realistic synthetic images, posing significant risks to information integrity and public trust on social media platforms. While robust detection frameworks and diverse, large-scale datasets are essential to mitigate these risks, existing academic efforts remain limited in scope: current datasets lack the diversity, scale, and realism required for social media contexts, while detection methods struggle with generalization to unseen generative technologies. To bridge this gap, we introduce So-Fake-Set, a comprehensive social media-oriented dataset with over 2 million high-quality images, diverse generative sources, and photorealistic imagery synthesized using 35 state-of-the-art generative models. To rigorously evaluate cross-domain robustness, we establish a novel and large-scale (100K) out-of-domain benchmark (So-Fake-OOD) featuring synthetic imagery from commercial models explicitly excluded from the training distribution, creating a realistic testbed for evaluating real-world performance. Leveraging these resources, we present So-Fake-R1, an advanced vision-language framework that employs reinforcement learning for highly accurate forgery detection, precise localization, and explainable inference through interpretable visual rationales. Extensive experiments show that So-Fake-R1 outperforms the second-best method, with a 1.3% gain in detection accuracy and a 4.5% increase in localization IoU. By integrating a scalable dataset, a challenging OOD benchmark, and an advanced detection framework, this work establishes a new foundation for social media-centric forgery detection research. The code, models, and datasets will be released publicly.

Multimodal deepfakes are proliferating on social media and threaten authenticity, information integrity, and digital forensics. Existing benchmarks are constrained by their single-modality scope, simplified manipulations, or unrealistic distributions, which limit their ability to assess real-world robustness. To address these limitations, we present Omni-Fake, a unified omni-dataset for comprehensive multimodal deepfake detection in social-media settings. It comprises Omni-Fake-Set, a large-scale, high-quality dataset with 1M+ samples, and Omni-Fake-OOD, an out-of-distribution benchmark with 200k+ samples intentionally excluded from training to evaluate generalization. Omni-Fake spans four modalities (image, audio, video, and audio-video talking head) and supports a joint detection-localization-explanation protocol. On top of Omni-Fake, we further propose Omni-Fake-R1, a reinforcement-learning-driven multimodal detector that adaptively integrates visual and auditory cues and outputs structured decisions, localization, and natural-language explanations. Extensive experiments show significant gains in detection accuracy, cross-modal generalization, and explainability over state-of-the-art baselines. Project page: https://tianxiao1201.github.io/omni-fake-project-page/

AI-search evaluation commonly treats a prompt as a stable query that can be counted, classified, and replayed in isolation. A conversation makes that unit of analysis questionable: each user turn can add a constraint, revise an assumption, request evidence, or refer to alternatives established earlier. We replace latent "intent" with an observable construct, conversation-conditioned request state, and measure how that state is distributed across user turns. The analysis reuses frozen rules and the governed cohort of a preceding conversation study: 670 English commercial multi-turn conversations in a discovery-replication design and 7,463 public PRISM conversations from 1,389 participants. In the commercial corpus, the final prompt contains a median 35.6% of the session's unique user-side content vocabulary; in PRISM, the median is 36.4%. The final prompt contains at most half of that vocabulary in 68.4% and 74.3% of conversations, respectively. More importantly, transparent rules detect at least one request-state dimension in history but not in the final prompt in 50.3% of commercial conversations and 44.8% of PRISM conversations. Among dimension-bearing conversations, the final prompt reproduces the full observed dimension set in only 26.1% and 26.2%. At the same time, the final prompt adds a previously unseen dimension in 17.9% and 19.3%, showing that the endpoint is neither a summary nor merely a reference: it is often another state update. Length-matched nulls show that low lexical coverage is largely a consequence of turn length, so vocabulary results are interpreted as information availability, not semantic drift. The categorical results support session-level measurement for AI search. They do not estimate the causal effect of history on model answers.

Social media data such as Twitter messages ("tweets") pose a particular challenge to NLP systems because of their short, noisy, and colloquial nature. Tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and syntactic parsing require highly domain-matched training data for good performance. To date, there is no complete training corpus for both NER and syntactic analysis (e.g., part of speech tagging, dependency parsing) of tweets. While there are some publicly available annotated NLP datasets of tweets, they are only designed for individual tasks. In this study, we aim to create Tweebank-NER, an English NER corpus based on Tweebank V2 (TB2), train state-of-the-art (SOTA) Tweet NLP models on TB2, and release an NLP pipeline called Twitter-Stanza. We annotate named entities in TB2 using Amazon Mechanical Turk and measure the quality of our annotations. We train the Stanza pipeline on TB2 and compare with alternative NLP frameworks (e.g., FLAIR, spaCy) and transformer-based models. The Stanza tokenizer and lemmatizer achieve SOTA performance on TB2, while the Stanza NER tagger, part-of-speech (POS) tagger, and dependency parser achieve competitive performance against non-transformer models. The transformer-based models establish a strong baseline in Tweebank-NER and achieve the new SOTA performance in POS tagging and dependency parsing on TB2. We release the dataset and make both the Stanza pipeline and BERTweet-based models available "off-the-shelf" for use in future Tweet NLP research. Our source code, data, and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/social-machines/TweebankNLP.

Social media platforms play an essential role in crisis communication, but analyzing crisis-related social media texts is challenging due to their informal nature. Transformer-based pre-trained models like BERT and RoBERTa have shown success in various NLP tasks, but they are not tailored for crisis-related texts. Furthermore, general-purpose sentence encoders are used to generate sentence embeddings, regardless of the textual complexities in crisis-related texts. Advances in applications like text classification, semantic search, and clustering contribute to effective processing of crisis-related texts, which is essential for emergency responders to gain a comprehensive view of a crisis event, whether historical or real-time. To address these gaps in crisis informatics literature, this study introduces CrisisTransformers, an ensemble of pre-trained language models and sentence encoders trained on an extensive corpus of over 15 billion word tokens from tweets associated with more than 30 crisis events, including disease outbreaks, natural disasters, conflicts, and other critical incidents. We evaluate existing models and CrisisTransformers on 18 crisis-specific public datasets. Our pre-trained models outperform strong baselines across all datasets in classification tasks, and our best-performing sentence encoder improves the state-of-the-art by 17.43% in sentence encoding tasks. Additionally, we investigate the impact of model initialization on convergence and evaluate the significance of domain-specific models in generating semantically meaningful sentence embeddings. All models are publicly released (https://huggingface.co/crisistransformers), with the anticipation that they will serve as a robust baseline for tasks involving the analysis of crisis-related social media texts.

English and Chinese, known as resource-rich languages, have witnessed the strong development of transformer-based language models for natural language processing tasks. Although Vietnam has approximately 100M people speaking Vietnamese, several pre-trained models, e.g., PhoBERT, ViBERT, and vELECTRA, performed well on general Vietnamese NLP tasks, including POS tagging and named entity recognition. These pre-trained language models are still limited to Vietnamese social media tasks. In this paper, we present the first monolingual pre-trained language model for Vietnamese social media texts, ViSoBERT, which is pre-trained on a large-scale corpus of high-quality and diverse Vietnamese social media texts using XLM-R architecture. Moreover, we explored our pre-trained model on five important natural language downstream tasks on Vietnamese social media texts: emotion recognition, hate speech detection, sentiment analysis, spam reviews detection, and hate speech spans detection. Our experiments demonstrate that ViSoBERT, with far fewer parameters, surpasses the previous state-of-the-art models on multiple Vietnamese social media tasks. Our ViSoBERT model is available\url{https://huggingface.co/uitnlp/visobert} only for research purposes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated mental health crises worldwide, with social isolation and economic instability contributing to a rise in suicidal behavior. Suicide can result from social factors such as shame, abuse, abandonment, and mental health conditions like depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), anxiety disorders, and bipolar disorders. As these conditions develop, signs of suicidal ideation may manifest in social media interactions. Analyzing social media data using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can help identify patterns of suicidal behavior, providing invaluable insights for suicide prevention agencies, professionals, and broader community awareness initiatives. Machine learning algorithms for this purpose require large volumes of accurately labeled data. Previous research has not fully explored the potential of incorporating explanations in analyzing and labeling longitudinal social media data. In this study, we employed a model explanation method, Layer Integrated Gradients, on top of a fine-tuned state-of-the-art language model, to assign each token from Reddit users' posts an attribution score for predicting suicidal ideation. By extracting and analyzing attributions of tokens from the data, we propose a methodology for preliminary screening of social media posts for suicidal ideation without using large language models during inference.

Online web communities often face bans for violating platform policies, encouraging their migration to alternative platforms. This migration, however, can result in increased toxicity and unforeseen consequences on the new platform. In recent years, researchers have collected data from many alternative platforms, indicating coordinated efforts leading to offline events, conspiracy movements, hate speech propagation, and harassment. Thus, it becomes crucial to characterize and understand these alternative platforms. To advance research in this direction, we collect and release a large-scale dataset from Scored -- an alternative Reddit platform that sheltered banned fringe communities, for example, c/TheDonald (a prominent right-wing community) and c/GreatAwakening (a conspiratorial community). Over four years, we collected approximately 57M posts from Scored, with at least 58 communities identified as migrating from Reddit and over 950 communities created since the platform's inception. Furthermore, we provide sentence embeddings of all posts in our dataset, generated through a state-of-the-art model, to further advance the field in characterizing the discussions within these communities. We aim to provide these resources to facilitate their investigations without the need for extensive data collection and processing efforts.

Society needs to develop a system to detect hate and offense to build a healthy and safe environment. However, current research in this field still faces four major shortcomings, including deficient pre-processing techniques, indifference to data imbalance issues, modest performance models, and lacking practical applications. This paper focused on developing an intelligent system capable of addressing these shortcomings. Firstly, we proposed an efficient pre-processing technique to clean comments collected from Vietnamese social media. Secondly, a novel hate speech detection (HSD) model, which is the combination of a pre-trained PhoBERT model and a Text-CNN model, was proposed for solving tasks in Vietnamese. Thirdly, EDA techniques are applied to deal with imbalanced data to improve the performance of classification models. Besides, various experiments were conducted as baselines to compare and investigate the proposed model's performance against state-of-the-art methods. The experiment results show that the proposed PhoBERT-CNN model outperforms SOTA methods and achieves an F1-score of 67,46% and 98,45% on two benchmark datasets, ViHSD and HSD-VLSP, respectively. Finally, we also built a streaming HSD application to demonstrate the practicality of our proposed system.

In the realm of public health, vaccination stands as the cornerstone for mitigating disease risks and controlling their proliferation. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how vaccines play a crucial role in keeping us safe. However the situation involves a mix of perspectives, with skepticism towards vaccines prevailing for various reasons such as political dynamics, apprehensions about side effects, and more. The paper addresses the challenge of comprehensively understanding and categorizing these diverse concerns expressed in the context of vaccination. Our focus is on developing a robust multi-label classifier capable of assigning specific concern labels to tweets based on the articulated apprehensions towards vaccines. To achieve this, we delve into the application of a diverse set of advanced natural language processing techniques and machine learning algorithms including transformer models like BERT, state of the art GPT 3.5, Classifier Chains & traditional methods like SVM, Random Forest, Naive Bayes. We see that the cutting-edge large language model outperforms all other methods in this context.

Prior work on a social web highlighter located individuality in selection -- which documents a person chooses to highlight -- but measured it cross-sectionally. We ask the temporal question: is a reader's selection signature a trait or a state? We freeze each reader's first six months of highlighting as a profile and track its own-vs-other advantage on their later selections at growing gaps (to 24+ months), with negatives drawn from the same calendar era -- so supply drift cannot masquerade as personal drift -- at a coarse global level and at a fine level whose negatives and controls come from the reader's own interest neighborhood; the anchor cell reproduces the prior cross-sectional level (+0.188 vs +0.169), validating the harness. Four results. Within the same users, the fine-layer advantage shows no statistically detectable paired decline at any horizon (6-12 month retention R = 1.00 [0.85, 1.18], n = 212; the farthest bin is compatible with a modest decline; the only contrast whose interval excludes zero is the coarse layer at 12-24 months, about 13%). The signal is not reducible to repeated domains (~90% survives excluding all profile sources). Within-person drift is slow (a recent-half profile beats the old half by +0.042). Prospectively, personal profiles -- even one built from a reader's earliest documents, median 20 months before evaluation -- rank their next reads at roughly 3x the AP of every simple non-personal prior tested. We use "trait" operationally (a stable signature under continued engagement); the scope is heavy, long-tenured readers of one platform, and exposure is not separable from choice.

Large language models for vertical domains are bottlenecked by the scarcity of complex, domain-specific task-oriented dialogues. Existing data acquisition pipelines face a persistent trilemma: expert annotation is expensive, real-world service conversations are constrained by privacy and commercial restrictions, and static corpora quickly become temporally stale. We propose Stream, a data-centric framework that leverages publicly available streaming media (live streams and short videos) to synthesize high-value service dialogues at scale. Stream mines authentic interaction signals from noisy streams and synthesizes conversations by integrating role-grounded persona construction with Conversational Blueprint construction; it further adopts retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to support knowledge-aware responses. Based on Stream, we release StreamDial, a large-scale multi-domain dataset covering Automotive, Restaurant, and Hotel. StreamDial contains 87,498 dialogue sessions and 1,497,320 turns in total, with an average of 17.11 turns per session and a comparable scale across domains. Each session is organized as a structured quadruplet langle P_u, P_a, B, H rangle that pairs dialogue history with explicit user/agent personas and a Conversational Blueprint, capturing realistic service behaviors such as requirement mining, constraint conflicts, negotiation, and recovery. Evaluations with automatic judges and downstream tasks show that StreamDial improves intrinsic dialogue quality over strong baselines, and models trained with StreamDial improve Dialogue State Tracking across backbones; we further report a completed human-evaluation set and encouraging multilingual transfer on Qwen3-8B under a controlled training budget. The data is released in https://github.com/hitxueliang/DialogDataSetBySTREAM.

Communal violence in online forums has become extremely prevalent in South Asia, where many communities of different cultures coexist and share resources. These societies exhibit a phenomenon characterized by strong bonds within their own groups and animosity towards others, leading to conflicts that frequently escalate into violent confrontations. To address this issue, we have developed the first comprehensive framework for the automatic detection of communal violence markers in online Bangla content accompanying the largest collection (13K raw sentences) of social media interactions that fall under the definition of four major violence class and their 16 coarse expressions. Our workflow introduces a 7-step expert annotation process incorporating insights from social scientists, linguists, and psychologists. By presenting data statistics and benchmarking performance using this dataset, we have determined that, aside from the category of Non-communal violence, Religio-communal violence is particularly pervasive in Bangla text. Moreover, we have substantiated the effectiveness of fine-tuning language models in identifying violent comments by conducting preliminary benchmarking on the state-of-the-art Bangla deep learning model.

Dynamical systems theory and reinforcement learning view world evolution as latent-state dynamics driven by actions, with visual observations providing partial information about the state. Recent video world models attempt to learn this action-conditioned dynamics from data. However, existing datasets rarely match the requirement: they typically lack diverse and semantically meaningful action spaces, and actions are directly tied to visual observations rather than mediated by underlying states. As a result, actions are often entangled with pixel-level changes, making it difficult for models to learn structured world dynamics and maintain consistent evolution over long horizons. In this paper, we propose WildWorld, a large-scale action-conditioned world modeling dataset with explicit state annotations, automatically collected from a photorealistic AAA action role-playing game (Monster Hunter: Wilds). WildWorld contains over 108 million frames and features more than 450 actions, including movement, attacks, and skill casting, together with synchronized per-frame annotations of character skeletons, world states, camera poses, and depth maps. We further derive WildBench to evaluate models through Action Following and State Alignment. Extensive experiments reveal persistent challenges in modeling semantically rich actions and maintaining long-horizon state consistency, highlighting the need for state-aware video generation. The project page is https://shandaai.github.io/wildworld-project/.

Streaming text-to-speech is essential for low-latency spoken dialogue systems, yet many systems wait for sentence-level text and are therefore only pseudo-streaming. True token-level synthesis must generate speech from uncertain prefixes while maintaining perceptual continuity over an unbounded stream with bounded context. We present X2Streaming-TTS, a causal TTS framework that consumes asynchronously arriving text tokens and emits speech without accessing future input. To handle uncertain prefixes, we introduce causal commitment, which keeps ambiguous expressions provisional through uncertainty-aware buffering and performs capacity-adaptive, punctuation-aware segmentation. To preserve acoustic continuity, we further introduce causal speech-state inheritance, which carries the complete Code2Wav state and selected historical Talker states across segment boundaries. Together with an attention prior constraint, it blocks access to future positions while retaining bounded acoustic context. Experiments show that X2Streaming-TTS outperforms existing pseudo-streaming models on most subjective and objective metrics. Further analysis shows that causal commitment stabilizes online segmentation and reduces failures caused by insufficient context, while speech-state inheritance improves boundary continuity without degrading naturalness or speaker identity. X2Streaming-TTS thus achieves strict token-level synthesis with quality comparable to the evaluated offline baselines, a median time to first audio token (TTFT) of 15.8 ms for a single request, and a median TTFT of 260.8 ms at 128 concurrent requests. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/X-Square-Robot/X2Streaming-TTS .

Capable open-weight models make local coding and reasoning attractive, but their context and execution state strain laptop memory. We present JustFit, an MLX-based inference runtime that combines KVExec for compressed KV execution, PhaseSwap for component residency, and StateTrans for state-preserving serving transitions. These mechanisms fuse reconstruction and coordinate just-in-time materialization and release, independently of model-weight quantization. In full-execution capacity tests on a 24 GiB M4 Pro MacBook running Qwen3.8-27B MXFP4, three independent runs complete 196,608 input and 16,384 output tokens, increasing completed single-request context from the mlx-vlm baseline's 30,720 positions to 212,992 (6.93x); a separate two-request run retains 229,376 positions in aggregate. In separate performance tests, a 32K-input, 64-output probe reaches 19.11 tokens/s, and a repeated 32K+6K workload has a median peak process footprint of 16,374 MiB. The integrated runtime answers 29 of 30 AIME 2026 problems correctly, showing how compact state and lifetime-aware execution expand local serving capacity while supporting extended generated reasoning.

Computer-use agents can execute software tasks through either graphical interfaces or programmatic command interfaces, but existing evaluations confound interaction modality with differences in tasks, initial states, verifiers, and permitted actions. We introduce a matched execution-layer benchmark of 440 desktop tasks across 18 applications and 12 workflow categories, where screen-only GUI agents and skill-mediated CLI agents receive identical goals, states, and final-state verifiers while being restricted to modality-native actions. In this controlled setting, the strongest GUI agent reaches a 59.1% full pass rate, outperforming the strongest original-skill CLI agent at 48.2%; however, verifier-guided skill augmentation raises CLI success to 69.3%, showing that much of the CLI deficit comes from incomplete skill coverage rather than model capability alone. These results suggest that GUI and CLI expose different execution bottlenecks: GUI agents are limited by reliable grounded interaction over long-horizon workflows, whereas CLI agents are limited by the coverage and scalability of their skill interfaces.

Hashtags are semantico-syntactic constructs used across various social networking and microblogging platforms to enable users to start a topic specific discussion or classify a post into a desired category. Segmenting and linking the entities present within the hashtags could therefore help in better understanding and extraction of information shared across the social media. However, due to lack of space delimiters in the hashtags (e.g #nsavssnowden), the segmentation of hashtags into constituent entities ("NSA" and "Edward Snowden" in this case) is not a trivial task. Most of the current state-of-the-art social media analytics systems like Sentiment Analysis and Entity Linking tend to either ignore hashtags, or treat them as a single word. In this paper, we present a context aware approach to segment and link entities in the hashtags to a knowledge base (KB) entry, based on the context within the tweet. Our approach segments and links the entities in hashtags such that the coherence between hashtag semantics and the tweet is maximized. To the best of our knowledge, no existing study addresses the issue of linking entities in hashtags for extracting semantic information. We evaluate our method on two different datasets, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique in improving the overall entity linking in tweets via additional semantic information provided by segmenting and linking entities in a hashtag.

This work addresses cross-view camera pose estimation, i.e., determining the 3-Degrees-of-Freedom camera pose of a given ground-level image w.r.t. an aerial image of the local area. We propose SliceMatch, which consists of ground and aerial feature extractors, feature aggregators, and a pose predictor. The feature extractors extract dense features from the ground and aerial images. Given a set of candidate camera poses, the feature aggregators construct a single ground descriptor and a set of pose-dependent aerial descriptors. Notably, our novel aerial feature aggregator has a cross-view attention module for ground-view guided aerial feature selection and utilizes the geometric projection of the ground camera's viewing frustum on the aerial image to pool features. The efficient construction of aerial descriptors is achieved using precomputed masks. SliceMatch is trained using contrastive learning and pose estimation is formulated as a similarity comparison between the ground descriptor and the aerial descriptors. Compared to the state-of-the-art, SliceMatch achieves a 19% lower median localization error on the VIGOR benchmark using the same VGG16 backbone at 150 frames per second, and a 50% lower error when using a ResNet50 backbone.

LLM-based multi-agent systems increasingly coordinate planning, reasoning, tool use, and human interaction, yet their reliability remains limited. A central source of this limitation is the underspecified prompt--harness boundary. Current systems lack a principled way to decide which workflow commitments should remain in prompts and which should become harness structure. We present XFlow, an executable protocol programming system for reliable multi-agent workflows, and XPF (XFlow Protocol Format), its domain-specific protocol programming language. XFlow occupies a middle position between prompt-only orchestration and markup-like workflow descriptions. XPF remains readable as a literate protocol, but it is compiled and executed as a program. Its design keeps informal semantic work inside actors while moving selected commitments into harness structure that can be checked, preserved, and enforced. At runtime, XFlow stages uncertainty through lifecycle-governed symbols, which are typed state cells with validation and commit states. Actor outputs are mediated before they become shared state, instead of spreading through prompts, transcripts, or implicit memory. Our experiments cover Constrained Interaction, Long-Context Reasoning, and Agentic Software Engineering. They show that XFlow improves reliability by making constraints, evidence handling, and process requirements explicit and enforceable.

The Arabic language is among the most popular languages in the world with a huge variety of dialects spoken in 22 countries. In this study, we address the problem of classifying 18 Arabic dialects of the QADI dataset of Arabic tweets. RNN models, Transformer models, and large language models (LLMs) via prompt engineering are created and tested. Among these, MARBERTv2 performed best with 65% accuracy and 64% F1-score. Through the use of state-of-the-art preprocessing techniques and the latest NLP models, this paper identifies the most significant linguistic issues in Arabic dialect identification. The results corroborate applications like personalized chatbots that respond in users' dialects, social media monitoring, and greater accessibility for Arabic communities.

Pathology foundation models (FMs) have driven significant progress in computational pathology. However, these high-performing models can easily exceed a billion parameters and produce high-dimensional embeddings, thus limiting their applicability for research or clinical use when computing resources are tight. Here, we introduce Pathryoshka, a multi-teacher distillation framework inspired by RADIO distillation and Matryoshka Representation Learning to reduce pathology FM sizes while allowing for adaptable embedding dimensions. We evaluate our framework with a distilled model on ten public pathology benchmarks with varying downstream tasks. Compared to its much larger teachers, Pathryoshka reduces the model size by 86-92% at on-par performance. It outperforms state-of-the-art single-teacher distillation models of comparable size by a median margin of 7.0 in accuracy. By enabling efficient local deployment without sacrificing accuracy or representational richness, Pathryoshka democratizes access to state-of-the-art pathology FMs for the broader research and clinical community.

Social media has become a valuable resource for the study of suicidal ideation and the assessment of suicide risk. Among social media platforms, Reddit has emerged as the most promising one due to its anonymity and its focus on topic-based communities (subreddits) that can be indicative of someone's state of mind or interest regarding mental health disorders such as r/SuicideWatch, r/Anxiety, r/depression. A challenge for previous work on suicide risk assessment has been the small amount of labeled data. We propose an empirical investigation into several classes of weakly-supervised approaches, and show that using pseudo-labeling based on related issues around mental health (e.g., anxiety, depression) helps improve model performance for suicide risk assessment.

This paper presents a computationally efficient method for vehicle speed estimation from traffic camera footage. Building upon previous work that utilizes 3D bounding boxes derived from 2D detections and vanishing point geometry, we introduce several improvements to enhance real-time performance. We evaluate our method in several variants on the BrnoCompSpeed dataset in terms of vehicle detection and speed estimation accuracy. Our extensive evaluation across various hardware platforms, including edge devices, demonstrates significant gains in frames per second (FPS) compared to the prior state-of-the-art, while maintaining comparable or improved speed estimation accuracy. We analyze the trade-off between accuracy and computational cost, showing that smaller models utilizing post-training quantization offer the best balance for real-world deployment. Our best performing model beats previous state-of-the-art in terms of median vehicle speed estimation error (0.58 km/h vs. 0.60 km/h), detection precision (91.02% vs 87.08%) and recall (91.14% vs. 83.32%) while also being 5.5 times faster.

Most affective computing research treats emotion as a static property of text, focusing on the writer's sentiment while overlooking the reader's perspective. This approach ignores how individual personalities lead to diverse emotional appraisals of the same event. Although role-playing Large Language Models (LLMs) attempt to simulate such nuanced reactions, they often suffer from "personality illusion'' -- relying on surface-level stereotypes rather than authentic cognitive logic. A critical bottleneck is the absence of ground-truth human data to link personality traits to emotional shifts. To bridge the gap, we introduce Persona-E^2 (Persona-Event2Emotion), a large-scale dataset grounded in annotated MBTI and Big Five traits to capture reader-based emotional variations across news, social media, and life narratives. Extensive experiments reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to capture precise appraisal shifts, particularly in social media domains. Crucially, we find that personality information significantly improves comprehension, with the Big Five traits alleviating "personality illusion.'

Markerless methods for animal posture tracking have been rapidly developing recently, but frameworks and benchmarks for tracking large animal groups in 3D are still lacking. To overcome this gap in the literature, we present 3D-MuPPET, a framework to estimate and track 3D poses of up to 10 pigeons at interactive speed using multiple camera views. We train a pose estimator to infer 2D keypoints and bounding boxes of multiple pigeons, then triangulate the keypoints to 3D. For identity matching of individuals in all views, we first dynamically match 2D detections to global identities in the first frame, then use a 2D tracker to maintain IDs across views in subsequent frames. We achieve comparable accuracy to a state of the art 3D pose estimator in terms of median error and Percentage of Correct Keypoints. Additionally, we benchmark the inference speed of 3D-MuPPET, with up to 9.45 fps in 2D and 1.89 fps in 3D, and perform quantitative tracking evaluation, which yields encouraging results. Finally, we showcase two novel applications for 3D-MuPPET. First, we train a model with data of single pigeons and achieve comparable results in 2D and 3D posture estimation for up to 5 pigeons. Second, we show that 3D-MuPPET also works in outdoors without additional annotations from natural environments. Both use cases simplify the domain shift to new species and environments, largely reducing annotation effort needed for 3D posture tracking. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to present a framework for 2D/3D animal posture and trajectory tracking that works in both indoor and outdoor environments for up to 10 individuals. We hope that the framework can open up new opportunities in studying animal collective behaviour and encourages further developments in 3D multi-animal posture tracking.

Model-based reinforcement learning agents utilizing transformers have shown improved sample efficiency due to their ability to model extended context, resulting in more accurate world models. However, for complex reasoning and planning tasks, these methods primarily rely on continuous representations. This complicates modeling of discrete properties of the real world such as disjoint object classes between which interpolation is not plausible. In this work, we introduce discrete abstract representations for transformer-based learning (DART), a sample-efficient method utilizing discrete representations for modeling both the world and learning behavior. We incorporate a transformer-decoder for auto-regressive world modeling and a transformer-encoder for learning behavior by attending to task-relevant cues in the discrete representation of the world model. For handling partial observability, we aggregate information from past time steps as memory tokens. DART outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods that do not use look-ahead search on the Atari 100k sample efficiency benchmark with a median human-normalized score of 0.790 and beats humans in 9 out of 26 games. We release our code at https://pranaval.github.io/DART/.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced automatic program repair (APR) to the point where agentic systems routinely resolve real-world, repository-level issues. Yet the generated patch has received little scrutiny beyond whether it passes tests. In this paper, we identify patch verbosity as a major yet overlooked concern in LLM-based APR. Characterizing 28 state-of-the-art approaches on SWE-bench Verified, we find that even successful patches are consistently larger and more complex than developer patches, with the median approach producing 121.78% more total changes, 80.91% more net changes, and 43.99% higher cyclomatic complexity. We further show that this verbosity is rooted in capability-oriented design choices such as iterative refinement and broad context, and can hardly be reduced by surface-level controls such as output format or minimality prompts. Motivated by these findings, we formulate post-generation patch refinement and propose RECAP, a lightweight, plug-and-play adapter that attaches to existing repair frameworks after generation. RECAP's refiner is trained via supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization with distilled reasoning traces, on a dataset of patch pairs we construct from multiple sources. Across four host systems, prompting, commit-untangling, and minimality-aware baselines reduce patch size only by sacrificing 49 to 217 resolved instances. In contrast, RECAP achieves a substantially better size-correctness tradeoff, cutting average total changes from +242.14% to +4.24% and net changes from +348.24% to -39.75% relative to developer patches while preserving or improving resolution by up to 42 instances. Our results indicate that minimality cannot be simply reduced to syntactic compression, and that decoupling minimization from generation offers a practical path to more reviewable repairs.

To obtain higher sample efficiency and superior final performance simultaneously has been one of the major challenges for deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Previous work could handle one of these challenges but typically failed to address them concurrently. In this paper, we try to tackle these two challenges simultaneously. To achieve this, we firstly decouple these challenges into two classic RL problems: data richness and exploration-exploitation trade-off. Then, we cast these two problems into the training data distribution optimization problem, namely to obtain desired training data within limited interactions, and address them concurrently via i) explicit modeling and control of the capacity and diversity of behavior policy and ii) more fine-grained and adaptive control of selective/sampling distribution of the behavior policy using a monotonic data distribution optimization. Finally, we integrate this process into Generalized Policy Iteration (GPI) and obtain a more general framework called Generalized Data Distribution Iteration (GDI). We use the GDI framework to introduce operator-based versions of well-known RL methods from DQN to Agent57. Theoretical guarantee of the superiority of GDI compared with GPI is concluded. We also demonstrate our state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on Arcade Learning Environment (ALE), wherein our algorithm has achieved 9620.33% mean human normalized score (HNS), 1146.39% median HNS and surpassed 22 human world records using only 200M training frames. Our performance is comparable to Agent57's while we consume 500 times less data. We argue that there is still a long way to go before obtaining real superhuman agents in ALE.

Recognising persons in everyday photos presents major challenges (occluded faces, different clothing, locations, etc.) for machine vision. We propose a convnet based person recognition system on which we provide an in-depth analysis of informativeness of different body cues, impact of training data, and the common failure modes of the system. In addition, we discuss the limitations of existing benchmarks and propose more challenging ones. Our method is simple and is built on open source and open data, yet it improves the state of the art results on a large dataset of social media photos (PIPA).

In everyday communication, humans frequently use speech and gestures to refer to specific areas or objects, a process known as Referential Dialogue (RD). While prior studies have investigated RD through Large Language Models (LLMs) or Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in static contexts, the exploration of Temporal Referential Dialogue (TRD) within audio-visual media remains limited. Two primary challenges hinder progress in this field: (1) the absence of comprehensive, untrimmed audio-visual video datasets with precise temporal annotations, and (2) the need for methods to integrate complex temporal auditory and visual cues effectively. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework to generate PU-VALOR, an extensive audio-visual dataset comprising over 114,000 untrimmed videos with accurate temporal demarcations. We also present AVicuna, featuring an Audio-Visual Tokens Interleaver (AVTI) that ensures the temporal alignment of audio-visual information. Additionally, we develop the A5-222K dataset, encompassing more than 200,000 audio-text pairings, to facilitate the audio and text alignments. Our experiments demonstrate that AVicuna can effectively handle TRD in audio-visual videos and achieve state-of-the-art performance on various audio-visual video understanding tasks, particularly in untrimmed videos. We further investigate the optimal audio-interleaving rate for interleaved audio-visual inputs, which maximizes performance on the Audio-Visual Event Dense Localization task.

Retrieving clothes which are worn in social media videos (Instagram, TikTok) is the latest frontier of e-fashion, referred to as "video-to-shop" in the computer vision literature. In this paper we present MovingFashion, the first publicly available dataset to cope with this challenge. MovingFashion is composed of 14855 social videos, each one of them associated to e-commerce "shop" images where the corresponding clothing items are clearly portrayed. In addition, we present a network for retrieving the shop images in this scenario, dubbed SEAM Match-RCNN. The model is trained by image-to-video domain adaptation, allowing to use video sequences where only their association with a shop image is given, eliminating the need of millions of annotated bounding boxes. SEAM Match-RCNN builds an embedding, where an attention-based weighted sum of few frames (10) of a social video is enough to individuate the correct product within the first 5 retrieved items in a 14K+ shop element gallery with an accuracy of 80%. This provides the best performance on MovingFashion, comparing exhaustively against the related state-of-the-art approaches and alternative baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval mechanisms have demonstrated significant potential in fact-checking tasks by integrating external knowledge. However, their reliability decreases when confronted with conflicting evidence from sources of varying credibility. This paper presents the first systematic evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models for fact-checking in the presence of conflicting evidence. To support this study, we introduce CONFACT (Conflicting Evidence for Fact-Checking) (Dataset available at https://github.com/zoeyyes/CONFACT), a novel dataset comprising questions paired with conflicting information from various sources. Extensive experiments reveal critical vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art RAG methods, particularly in resolving conflicts stemming from differences in media source credibility. To address these challenges, we investigate strategies to integrate media background information into both the retrieval and generation stages. Our results show that effectively incorporating source credibility significantly enhances the ability of RAG models to resolve conflicting evidence and improve fact-checking performance.

Sign language recognition could significantly improve the user experience for d/Deaf people with the general consumer technology, such as IoT devices or videoconferencing. However, current sign language recognition architectures are usually computationally heavy and require robust GPU-equipped hardware to run in real-time. Some models aim for lower-end devices (such as smartphones) by minimizing their size and complexity, which leads to worse accuracy. This highly scrutinizes accurate in-the-wild applications. We build upon the SPOTER architecture, which belongs to the latter group of light methods, as it came close to the performance of large models employed for this task. By substituting its original third-party pose estimation module with the MediaPipe library, we achieve an overall state-of-the-art result on the WLASL100 dataset. Significantly, our method beats previous larger architectures while still being twice as computationally efficient and almost 11 times faster on inference when compared to a relevant benchmark. To demonstrate our method's combined efficiency and precision, we built an online demo that enables users to translate sign lemmas of American sign language in their browsers. This is the first publicly available online application demonstrating this task to the best of our knowledge.

This paper introduces Galactic Bioware's Life Support System, a semi-closed-circuit breathing apparatus designed for integration into a positive-pressure firefighting suit and governed by an AI control system. The breathing loop incorporates a soda lime CO2 scrubber, a silica gel dehumidifier, and pure O2 replenishment with finite consumables. One-way exhaust valves maintain positive pressure while creating a semi-closed system in which outward venting gradually depletes the gas inventory. Part I develops the physicochemical foundations from first principles, including state-consistent thermochemistry, stoichiometric capacity limits, adsorption isotherms, and oxygen-management constraints arising from both fire safety and toxicity. Part II introduces an AI control architecture that fuses three sensor tiers, external environmental sensing, internal suit atmosphere sensing (with triple-redundant O2 cells and median voting), and firefighter biometrics. The controller combines receding-horizon model-predictive control (MPC) with a learned metabolic model and a reinforcement learning (RL) policy advisor, with all candidate actuator commands passing through a final control-barrier-function safety filter before reaching the hardware. This architecture is intended to optimize performance under unknown mission duration and exertion profiles. In this paper we introduce an 18-state, 3-control nonlinear state-space formulation using only sensors viable in structural firefighting, with triple-redundant O2 sensing and median voting. Finally, we introduce an MPC framework with a dynamic resource scarcity multiplier, an RL policy advisor for warm-starting, and a final control-barrier-function safety filter through which all actuator commands must pass, demonstrating 18-34% endurance improvement in simulation over PID baselines while maintaining tighter physiological and fire-safety margins.

We investigate whether the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) sublayer in a decoder-only transformer can be replaced by an explicit learned memory graph while preserving the surrounding autoregressive architecture. The proposed Graph Memory Transformer (GMT) keeps causal self-attention intact, but replaces the usual per-token FFN transformation with a memory cell that routes token representations over a learned bank of centroids connected by a learned directed transition matrix. In the base GMT v7 instantiation studied here, each of 16 transformer blocks contains 128 centroids, a 128 * 128 edge matrix, gravitational source routing, token-conditioned target selection, and a gated displacement readout. The cell therefore returns movement from an estimated source memory state toward a target memory state, rather than a retrieved value. The resulting model is a fully decoder-only language model with 82.2M trainable parameters and no dense FFN sublayers, compared with a 103.0M-parameter dense GPT-style baseline used in the evaluation. The base v7 model trains stably and exposes centroid usage, transition structure, and source-to-target movement as directly inspectable quantities of the forward computation. It remains behind the larger dense baseline in validation loss and perplexity (3.5995/36.58 vs. 3.2903/26.85), while showing close zero-shot benchmark behavior under the evaluated setting. These results are not intended as a state-of-the-art claim; they support the viability and structural interpretability of replacing dense within-token transformation with graph-mediated memory navigation. Broader scaling, optimized kernels, and more extensive benchmark evaluation are left for subsequent work.

Social scientists increasingly use demographically stratified social media data to study the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of the general public. To facilitate such analyses, we construct, validate, and release publicly the representative DADIT dataset of 30M tweets of 20k Italian Twitter users, along with their bios and profile pictures. We enrich the user data with high-quality labels for gender, age, and location. DADIT enables us to train and compare the performance of various state-of-the-art models for the prediction of the gender and age of social media users. In particular, we investigate if tweets contain valuable information for the task, since popular classifiers like M3 don't leverage them. Our best XLM-based classifier improves upon the commonly used competitor M3 by up to 53% F1. Especially for age prediction, classifiers profit from including tweets as features. We also confirm these findings on a German test set.

Deepfakes, as AI-generated media, have increasingly threatened media integrity and personal privacy with realistic yet fake digital content. In this work, we introduce an open-source and user-friendly online platform, DeepFake-O-Meter v2.0, that integrates state-of-the-art methods for detecting Deepfake images, videos, and audio. Built upon DeepFake-O-Meter v1.0, we have made significant upgrades and improvements in platform architecture design, including user interaction, detector integration, job balancing, and security management. The platform aims to offer everyday users a convenient service for analyzing DeepFake media using multiple state-of-the-art detection algorithms. It ensures secure and private delivery of the analysis results. Furthermore, it serves as an evaluation and benchmarking platform for researchers in digital media forensics to compare the performance of multiple algorithms on the same input. We have also conducted detailed usage analysis based on the collected data to gain deeper insights into our platform's statistics. This involves analyzing two-month trends in user activity and evaluating the processing efficiency of each detector.

Media bias is a multi-faceted construct influencing individual behavior and collective decision-making. Slanted news reporting is the result of one-sided and polarized writing which can occur in various forms. In this work, we focus on an important form of media bias, i.e. bias by word choice. Detecting biased word choices is a challenging task due to its linguistic complexity and the lack of representative gold-standard corpora. We present DA-RoBERTa, a new state-of-the-art transformer-based model adapted to the media bias domain which identifies sentence-level bias with an F1 score of 0.814. In addition, we also train, DA-BERT and DA-BART, two more transformer models adapted to the bias domain. Our proposed domain-adapted models outperform prior bias detection approaches on the same data.

Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many applications. However, sample efficiency remains a key challenge, with prominent methods requiring millions (or even billions) of environment steps to train. Recently, there has been significant progress in sample efficient image-based RL algorithms; however, consistent human-level performance on the Atari game benchmark remains an elusive goal. We propose a sample efficient model-based visual RL algorithm built on MuZero, which we name EfficientZero. Our method achieves 194.3% mean human performance and 109.0% median performance on the Atari 100k benchmark with only two hours of real-time game experience and outperforms the state SAC in some tasks on the DMControl 100k benchmark. This is the first time an algorithm achieves super-human performance on Atari games with such little data. EfficientZero's performance is also close to DQN's performance at 200 million frames while we consume 500 times less data. EfficientZero's low sample complexity and high performance can bring RL closer to real-world applicability. We implement our algorithm in an easy-to-understand manner and it is available at https://github.com/YeWR/EfficientZero. We hope it will accelerate the research of MCTS-based RL algorithms in the wider community.

Existing methods for capturing datasets of 3D heads in dense semantic correspondence are slow, and commonly address the problem in two separate steps; multi-view stereo (MVS) reconstruction followed by non-rigid registration. To simplify this process, we introduce TEMPEH (Towards Estimation of 3D Meshes from Performances of Expressive Heads) to directly infer 3D heads in dense correspondence from calibrated multi-view images. Registering datasets of 3D scans typically requires manual parameter tuning to find the right balance between accurately fitting the scans surfaces and being robust to scanning noise and outliers. Instead, we propose to jointly register a 3D head dataset while training TEMPEH. Specifically, during training we minimize a geometric loss commonly used for surface registration, effectively leveraging TEMPEH as a regularizer. Our multi-view head inference builds on a volumetric feature representation that samples and fuses features from each view using camera calibration information. To account for partial occlusions and a large capture volume that enables head movements, we use view- and surface-aware feature fusion, and a spatial transformer-based head localization module, respectively. We use raw MVS scans as supervision during training, but, once trained, TEMPEH directly predicts 3D heads in dense correspondence without requiring scans. Predicting one head takes about 0.3 seconds with a median reconstruction error of 0.26 mm, 64% lower than the current state-of-the-art. This enables the efficient capture of large datasets containing multiple people and diverse facial motions. Code, model, and data are publicly available at https://tempeh.is.tue.mpg.de.

Camera relocalization methods range from dense image alignment to direct camera pose regression from a query image. Among these, sparse feature matching stands out as an efficient, versatile, and generally lightweight approach with numerous applications. However, feature-based methods often struggle with significant viewpoint and appearance changes, leading to matching failures and inaccurate pose estimates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that leverages a globally sparse yet locally dense 3D representation of 2D features. By tracking and triangulating landmarks over a sequence of frames, we construct a sparse voxel map optimized to render image patch descriptors observed during tracking. Given an initial pose estimate, we first synthesize descriptors from the voxels using volumetric rendering and then perform feature matching to estimate the camera pose. This methodology enables the generation of descriptors for unseen views, enhancing robustness to view changes. We extensively evaluate our method on the 7-Scenes and Cambridge Landmarks datasets. Our results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art feature representation techniques in indoor environments, achieving up to a 39% improvement in median translation error. Additionally, our approach yields comparable results to other methods for outdoor scenarios while maintaining lower memory and computational costs.

AI agents operate in persistent environments where early state changes can influence decisions far into the future. Unlike conventional language-model interactions, agent behavior is mediated through a shared state that is repeatedly modified and reused across long-horizon workflows. Current safety benchmarks often fail to capture these cumulative risks because they focus on short, static tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce OpenART, an open-ended arena for scalable agent red teaming through environment evolution. OpenART provides over 10,000 validated stateful scenarios across 50 domains, drawing from a pool of more than 500,000 tools and skills. These tasks require a median of 97 tool calls and enable unified evaluation across 75 different agent-model configurations. To systematically explore these evolving attack surfaces, we propose the Evolutionary Markov Hypergraph Attack (EMHA). EMHA is a black-box policy that performs feedback-driven environment evolution by coordinating authorized state transitions without requiring parameter updates. Throughout the evaluation, task objectives remain fixed while only the environment state changes. Across all configurations, EMHA achieves a pooled Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 85.0%. Its advantage over instruction-only evolution increases from approximately 2% on simple environments to over 17% on the most complex ones, demonstrating that environment evolution increasingly exposes safety failures as task complexity grows. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the specific runtime implementation of an agent explains a significant portion of safety variation beyond the underlying model's capabilities. These results establish OpenART as a scalable foundation for studying agent safety in complex, evolving environments.

Machine-learned interatomic potentials trained across the periodic table have made atomistic simulation broadly accessible, and specializing them to a single compound class is widely expected to improve accuracy. Yet examples remain scarce, and fewer still surpass universal models in speed or reach a higher level of electronic-structure theory. Here we present a potential that is universal within the class of water-free solid-state hydrogen-bond network mediated proton conductors rather than across chemistry and a database of 4.4 million first-principles configurations spanning 55 materials. It surpasses leading general-purpose potentials across this domain, recovering measured activation energies and the ordering of anion rotational dynamics that those models miss; agreement on static structure does not imply agreement on transport. Accuracy falls for compositions far from the training set but stays competitive for close structural relatives, and a higher level of electronic-structure theory is reached with a few hundred additional configurations per material. We further introduce a compact variant carrying a fifth of the parameters, faster still and yet more accurate than every general-purpose model tested. It sustains more than a quarter of a million atoms on a single graphics processor, placing grain boundaries and the transition into the highly conducting phase within reach, and making a quantum treatment of the protons affordable. Reference accuracy and accessible system size thus become largely independent, offering a template for other compound classes.

RANSAC scoring and local optimization (LO) impose different robustness requirements, motivating the separation of hypothesis selection from refinement. We systematically isolate the effects of robust-loss shape, incorrectly specified inlier scales, and optimization strategy on essential matrix, fundamental matrix, and homography estimation. A profile-marginal score marginalizes the nuisance inlier scale and selects an inlier partition, from which we estimate the scale that sets the LO loss width; this makes LO robust to an inlier scale specified too large, whereas one specified too small degrades selection itself. Refinement needs gradient from correspondences the seed currently rejects: optimizers that reweight from current residuals stay pinned to their seed, whereas methods with broad basins recover strongly perturbed seeds yet degrade accurate score-selected hypotheses, so basin size alone is insufficient to assess RANSAC LO. Joint half-quadratic optimization balances the two and is the most consistent strategy across model classes. An optimizer matched to the profile-marginal score, which never decreases it, does not reach the best accuracy, challenging the prescription that scoring and refinement objectives should match. Composed from these findings, our RANSAC reduces the median essential-matrix pose error of a state-of-the-art RANSAC on PhotoTourism from 2.23 degrees to 1.58 degrees with a correctly specified inlier scale and from 38 degrees to 6.2 degrees when it is grossly misspecified (128x too large).

We introduce jina-embeddings-v4, a 3.8 billion parameter multimodal embedding model that unifies text and image representations through a novel architecture supporting both single-vector and multi-vector embeddings in the late interaction style. The model incorporates task-specific Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters to optimize performance across diverse retrieval scenarios, including query-based information retrieval, cross-modal semantic similarity, and programming code search. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that jina-embeddings-v4 achieves state-of-the-art performance on both single- modal and cross-modal retrieval tasks, with particular strength in processing visually rich content such as tables, charts, diagrams, and mixed-media formats. To facilitate evaluation of this capability, we also introduce Jina-VDR, a novel benchmark specifically designed for visually rich image retrieval.

Central to long-form text generation in vertical domains is the "impossible trinity" confronting current large language models (LLMs): the simultaneous achievement of low hallucination, deep logical coherence, and personalized expression. This study establishes that this bottleneck arises from existing generative paradigms succumbing to the Statistical Smoothing Trap, a phenomenon that overlooks the high-entropy information acquisition and structured cognitive processes integral to expert-level writing. To address this limitation, we propose the DeepNews Framework, an agentic workflow that explicitly models the implicit cognitive processes of seasoned financial journalists. The framework integrates three core modules: first, a dual-granularity retrieval mechanism grounded in information foraging theory, which enforces a 10:1 saturated information input ratio to mitigate hallucinatory outputs; second, schema-guided strategic planning, a process leveraging domain expert knowledge bases (narrative schemas) and Atomic Blocks to forge a robust logical skeleton; third, adversarial constraint prompting, a technique deploying tactics including Rhythm Break and Logic Fog to disrupt the probabilistic smoothness inherent in model-generated text. Experiments delineate a salient Knowledge Cliff in deep financial reporting: content truthfulness collapses when retrieved context falls below 15,000 characters, while a high-redundancy input exceeding 30,000 characters stabilizes the Hallucination-Free Rate (HFR) above 85%. In an ecological validity blind test conducted with a top-tier Chinese technology media outlet, the DeepNews system--built on a previous-generation model (DeepSeek-V3-0324)-achieved a 25% submission acceptance rate, significantly outperforming the 0% acceptance rate of zero-shot generation by a state-of-the-art (SOTA) model (GPT-5).

Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system. While an ideal harness system should align with human design priors and accumulate reusable experience through empirical exploration to drive recursive self-improvement, existing paradigms remain static and fall short of this capability. In this paper, we present AutoDesign, a framework that aligns with human design priors, where a meta-harness optimizer guides a code agent to recursively improve harness based on rollout feedback. To instantiate and evaluate this framework, we focus on the academic paper-to-poster generation task and introduce PosterBench, comprising a 100-paper Main Track spanning five disciplines and PosterBench-mini, a shared 10-paper subset for controlled evaluation. On the PosterBench Main Track, AutoDesign achieves the highest score of 78.32, surpassing the closed-source commercial system Claude Design by 7.45 points. Across seven controlled code-agent-model configurations, integrating the learned DesignHarness consistently improves performance, increasing the average PosterBench Score from 54.99 to 67.39 (+12.4%). In a fully autonomous long-horizon loop, it executes 253 tool calls and 11 editing turns within 40 minutes for under $3, reaching average conference-poster quality in human evaluation. A system-blind human study further demonstrates that AutoDesign achieves the highest human preference among evaluated systems.

One of the most significant challenges in Music Emotion Recognition (MER) comes from the fact that emotion labels can be heterogeneous across datasets with regard to the emotion representation, including categorical (e.g., happy, sad) versus dimensional labels (e.g., valence-arousal). In this paper, we present a unified multitask learning framework that combines these two types of labels and is thus able to be trained on multiple datasets. This framework uses an effective input representation that combines musical features (i.e., key and chords) and MERT embeddings. Moreover, knowledge distillation is employed to transfer the knowledge of teacher models trained on individual datasets to a student model, enhancing its ability to generalize across multiple tasks. To validate our proposed framework, we conducted extensive experiments on a variety of datasets, including MTG-Jamendo, DEAM, PMEmo, and EmoMusic. According to our experimental results, the inclusion of musical features, multitask learning, and knowledge distillation significantly enhances performance. In particular, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models, including the best-performing model from the MediaEval 2021 competition on the MTG-Jamendo dataset. Our work makes a significant contribution to MER by allowing the combination of categorical and dimensional emotion labels in one unified framework, thus enabling training across datasets.

Extracranial tissues visible on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may hold significant value for characterizing health conditions and clinical decision-making, yet they are rarely quantified. Current tools have not been widely validated, particularly in settings of developing brains or underlying pathology. We present TissUnet, a deep learning model that segments skull bone, subcutaneous fat, and muscle from routine three-dimensional T1-weighted MRI, with or without contrast enhancement. The model was trained on 155 paired MRI-computed tomography (CT) scans and validated across nine datasets covering a wide age range and including individuals with brain tumors. In comparison to AI-CT-derived labels from 37 MRI-CT pairs, TissUnet achieved a median Dice coefficient of 0.79 [IQR: 0.77-0.81] in a healthy adult cohort. In a second validation using expert manual annotations, median Dice was 0.83 [IQR: 0.83-0.84] in healthy individuals and 0.81 [IQR: 0.78-0.83] in tumor cases, outperforming previous state-of-the-art method. Acceptability testing resulted in an 89% acceptance rate after adjudication by a tie-breaker(N=108 MRIs), and TissUnet demonstrated excellent performance in the blinded comparative review (N=45 MRIs), including both healthy and tumor cases in pediatric populations. TissUnet enables fast, accurate, and reproducible segmentation of extracranial tissues, supporting large-scale studies on craniofacial morphology, treatment effects, and cardiometabolic risk using standard brain T1w MRI.

Polygonal meshes are the standard surface representation of modern 3D pipelines, and generating high-quality meshes with artist-style topology is essential for film, gaming, and interactive 3D applications. Mainstream approaches serialize a mesh into a token sequence and decode it autoregressively, which is slow at inference and sensitive to error accumulation, making them impractical for interactive asset creation. We present Meshy T2, a fast native mesh generation framework built on flow matching. At its core is a vertex-set mesh VAE that encodes a mesh into one continuous latent token per vertex and decodes vertices, edge connectivity, and face winding order in a single pass, preserving high-precision geometry and artist-authored topology without vertex quantization or welding. Generation proceeds as a coarse-to-fine cascade of two flow-matching models: an image-conditioned voxel flow first sketches the overall shape as a coarse occupancy scaffold, and a mesh flow then populates the scaffold with per-vertex latent tokens, conditioned on the image, the scaffold, and a requested vertex budget. This design delivers three practical capabilities: interactive generation speed through parallel flow-based synthesis; effective face-count control through the requested vertex budget; and native support for multi-part assets, whose components emerge directly from the generated connectivity. In our experiments, Meshy T2 achieves state-of-the-art geometric fidelity and completes end-to-end image-to-mesh generation within a median of 6 seconds, over an order of magnitude faster than autoregressive baselines. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/meshy-dev/meshy-t2.

Recent advances in visual language models (VLMs) have transformed end-to-end document understanding. However, their ability to interpret the complex layout semantics of historical scholarly texts remains limited. This paper investigates structure-aware text recognition for Ancient Greek critical editions, which have dense reference hierarchies and extensive marginal annotations. We introduce two novel resources: (i) a large-scale synthetic corpus of 185,000 page images generated from TEI/XML sources with controlled typographic and layout variation, and (ii) a curated benchmark of real scanned editions spanning more than a century of editorial and typographic practices. Using these datasets, we evaluate three state-of-the-art VLMs under both zero-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our experiments reveal substantial limitations in current VLM architectures when confronted with highly structured historical documents. In zero-shot settings, most models significantly underperform compared to established off-the-shelf software. Nevertheless, the Qwen3VL-8B model achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching a median Character Error Rate of 1.0\% on real scans. These results highlight both the current shortcomings and the future potential of VLMs for structure-aware recognition of complex scholarly documents.

Human intelligence relies heavily on learned intuition: recognising patterns and judging situations without explicitly unfolding every intermediate step. We introduce Bongard, an open-weight System One model that treats machine intuition as an independent capability to design and train. A T5Gemma 2 4B-4B encoder-decoder separates reading the evidence from making judgments. The encoder reads the state bidirectionally together with the question instructions, and separate decoder branches share this encoding, so many judgments about the same situation require only one reading of the state. A trained head returns probabilities over the supplied candidates without generating text. Training proceeds in three stages, from supervised judgments to semantic relationships to action outcomes, and each stage updates all 7.09 billion trainable parameters on one Blackwell GPU. Joint-embedding post-training raises accuracy on held-out rephrasings from 75.7% to 85.9%. A sandbox stage then learns outcome distributions from action rollouts and exact oracles, raising accuracy on a frozen sandbox panel from 50.6% to 64.8%. On DecisionBench, the final model reaches 78.05% accuracy over 23,900 decisions and ranks fourth of 61 systems in the public comparison. On one RTX PRO 6000, its median latency is 36 ms for short requests, and 32 questions about one state take 221 ms. Bongard demonstrates that machine intuition can be systematically trained via representation learning and outcome feedback, providing an open, efficient alternative for high-throughput decision workloads.

Pretraining Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) for downstream NLP tasks is a non-trival task. We pretrained 5 BERT models that differ in the size of their training sets, mixture of formal and informal Arabic, and linguistic preprocessing. All are intended to support Arabic dialects and social media. The experiments highlight the centrality of data diversity and the efficacy of linguistically aware segmentation. They also highlight that more data or more training step do not necessitate better models. Our new models achieve new state-of-the-art results on several downstream tasks. The resulting models are released to the community under the name QARiB.

Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of offensive content online such as fake news, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation. While initially this was mostly about textual content, over time images and videos gained popularity, as they are much easier to consume, attract more attention, and spread further than text. As a result, researchers started leveraging different modalities and combinations thereof to tackle online multimodal offensive content. In this study, we offer a survey on the state-of-the-art on multimodal disinformation detection covering various combinations of modalities: text, images, speech, video, social media network structure, and temporal information. Moreover, while some studies focused on factuality, others investigated how harmful the content is. While these two components in the definition of disinformation (i) factuality, and (ii) harmfulness, are equally important, they are typically studied in isolation. Thus, we argue for the need to tackle disinformation detection by taking into account multiple modalities as well as both factuality and harmfulness, in the same framework. Finally, we discuss current challenges and future research directions

This paper proposes a fine-grained self-localization method for outdoor robotics that utilizes a flexible number of onboard cameras and readily accessible satellite images. The proposed method addresses limitations in existing cross-view localization methods that struggle to handle noise sources such as moving objects and seasonal variations. It is the first sparse visual-only method that enhances perception in dynamic environments by detecting view-consistent key points and their corresponding deep features from ground and satellite views, while removing off-the-ground objects and establishing homography transformation between the two views. Moreover, the proposed method incorporates a spatial embedding approach that leverages camera intrinsic and extrinsic information to reduce the ambiguity of purely visual matching, leading to improved feature matching and overall pose estimation accuracy. The method exhibits strong generalization and is robust to environmental changes, requiring only geo-poses as ground truth. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Ford Multi-AV Seasonal datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving median spatial accuracy errors below 0.5 meters along the lateral and longitudinal directions, and a median orientation accuracy error below 2 degrees.

Generating entanglement between distant quantum systems is at the core of quantum networking. In recent years, numerous theoretical protocols for remote entanglement generation have been proposed, of which many have been experimentally realized. Here, we provide a modular theoretical framework to elucidate the general mechanisms of photon-mediated entanglement generation between single spins in atomic or solid-state systems. Our framework categorizes existing protocols at various levels of abstraction and allows for combining the elements of different schemes in new ways. These abstraction layers make it possible to readily compare protocols for different quantum hardware. To enable the practical evaluation of protocols tailored to specific experimental parameters, we have devised numerical simulations based on the framework with our codes available online.

Recent advances in multi-modal Large Language Models (M-LLMs) have demonstrated a powerful ability to synthesize implicit information from disparate sources, including images and text. These resourceful data from social media also introduce a significant and underexplored privacy risk: the inference of sensitive personal attributes from seemingly daily media content. However, the lack of benchmarks and comprehensive evaluations of state-of-the-art M-LLM capabilities hinders the research of private attribute profiling on social media. Accordingly, we propose (1) PRISM, the first multi-modal, multi-dimensional and fine-grained synthesized dataset incorporating a comprehensive privacy landscape and dynamic user history; (2) an Efficient evaluation framework that measures the cross-modal privacy inference capabilities of advanced M-LLM. Specifically, PRISM is a large-scale synthetic benchmark designed to evaluate cross-modal privacy risks. Its key feature is 12 sensitive attribute labels across a diverse set of multi-modal profiles, which enables targeted privacy analysis. These profiles are generated via a sophisticated LLM agentic workflow, governed by a prior distribution to ensure they realistically mimic social media users. Additionally, we propose a Multi-Agent Inference Framework that leverages a pipeline of specialized LLMs to enhance evaluation capabilities. We evaluate the inference capabilities of six leading M-LLMs (Qwen, Gemini, GPT-4o, GLM, Doubao, and Grok) on PRISM. The comparison with human performance reveals that these MLLMs significantly outperform in accuracy and efficiency, highlighting the threat of potential privacy risks and the urgent need for robust defenses.

Recovering governing Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) from data is a central challenge in modeling dynamical systems across scientific domains. Existing approaches cast discovery as a static inference problem over fixed datasets, assuming that the observed trajectories are sufficiently informative. However, dynamical systems evolve over large state spaces, and limited data can make multiple equations observationally indistinguishable, leading to identifiability gaps and the recovery of incorrect governing equations. To address this, we introduce LLM-ACES, or LLM-guided Active Closed-loop Equation Search, a closed-loop framework that jointly optimizes symbolic hypothesis construction and adaptive data acquisition. In LLM-ACES, a large language model (LLM) proposes operator priors that partition the large search space into distinct regions, within which candidate equations are fit to the observed data. The disagreement among these candidates guides the acquisition of informative trajectories, creating a feedback loop that iteratively refines both the hypothesis space and the discovered dynamics. On 122 ODE systems spanning ODEBench and ODEBase, LLM-ACES achieves the lowest median NMSE, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by several orders of magnitude while achieving a high symbolic accuracy of 46.2% and 52.4%, respectively. Our analysis further shows that LLM-ACES is sample-efficient, achieving better performance with one-tenth the data. Furthermore, LLM-ACES's feedback-driven data acquisition makes it robust to noise and recovers the correct symbolic structure, while baselines introduce spurious terms that fit the data locally but obscure the true governing relationships.

Persistent AI agents extend large language models (LLMs) beyond single-turn interaction into long-lived software systems. Unlike traditional chat assistants, unsafe content in these agents can propagate through persistent state, reusable skills, and tool-mediated interactions, creating a substantially larger semantic attack surface. We observe that most security-critical interactions in such agents are transmitted through natural-language token flows, including memory updates, tool arguments, retrieved files, and inter-component communications. This observation enables a new security formulation: unsafe behavior can be intercepted as risky semantic flows before reaching privileged runtime sinks. Based on this insight, we propose TokenWall, a runtime defense framework that acts as a semantic firewall over agent token flows. TokenWall performs boundary-aware semantic auditing over these flows, constructing structured source-sink audit records, applying lightweight local inspection before execution, and selectively escalating ambiguous high-risk cases to stronger arbitration modules. Unlike prior approaches that rely on sparse auditing or remote large-model oversight, TokenWall enables full-coverage pre-execution mediation while reducing remote arbitration and latency. Experiments on CIK-Bench show that TokenWall reduces attack success rate to 12.5% while maintaining a 97.4% benign executable pass rate without human confirmation. TokenWall further introduces only 0.69 seconds of additional latency on benign cases, demonstrating that semantic runtime containment can achieve a practical security-utility trade-off for persistent AI agents.

Effective agency in social environments depends on when an agent seeks knowledge, when it acts, and whether its actions are justified by acquired information. Existing grounded benchmarks provide executable actions, persistent state, and verifiable outcomes, while social simulation environments provide rich interaction among language agents. We study an evaluation setting that combines these requirements. We define socially distributed task environments as interactive environments where task-relevant knowledge is partitioned across role-isolated participants and consequential actions are accessible only through them. Communication serves as exploration over role-partitioned knowledge, while grounded action serves as exploitation over environment state. We introduce Incognita, a Concordia-based framework that separates social interaction from grounded execution. The evaluated agent routes messages to a user or specialist entities; specialists mediate admissible operations; a deterministic sub-environment executes accepted operations over a canonical state; and an offline evaluator scores outcomes with inherited rewards. Incognita-Retail transforms tau-bench retail into a multi-entity environment while preserving final-state reward semantics. We evaluate three generative agent models on 18 tasks stratified by social breadth, with 540 trials. Progress appears in reward and behavior: success rises from 0 percent to 8.9 percent and 17.2 percent, while premature finalization falls from 100 percent to 87 percent and 58 percent. Stronger models elicit more hidden knowledge, contact more entities, and attempt more grounded writes, yet reliability remains low. These findings show that socially distributed task environments expose behavior before reliable success, including knowledge elicitation, source selection, grounded action attempts, and premature completion belief.

Large-scale pre-training has fundamentally changed how machine learning research is done today: large foundation models are trained once, and then can be used by anyone in the community (including those without data or compute resources to train a model from scratch) to adapt and fine-tune to specific tasks. Applying this same framework to reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because it offers compelling avenues for addressing core challenges in RL, including sample efficiency and robustness. However, there remains a fundamental challenge to pre-train large models in the context of RL: actions have long-term dependencies, so training a foundation model that reasons across time is important. Recent advances in generative AI have provided new tools for modeling highly complex distributions. In this paper, we build a probabilistic model to predict which states an agent will visit in the temporally distant future (i.e., an occupancy measure) using flow matching. As large datasets are often constructed by many distinct users performing distinct tasks, we include in our model a latent variable capturing the user intention. This intention increases the expressivity of our model, and enables adaptation with generalized policy improvement. We call our proposed method intention-conditioned flow occupancy models (InFOM). Comparing with alternative methods for pre-training, our experiments on 36 state-based and 4 image-based benchmark tasks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 1.8 times median improvement in returns and increases success rates by 36%. Website: https://chongyi-zheng.github.io/infom Code: https://github.com/chongyi-zheng/infom

Multi-agent systems distribute large contexts across agents that communicate to solve a task. Text messages are compact but require decoding and may omit evidence the receiving agent needs. Recent latent communication instead transfers KV caches. This avoids text generation and can improve accuracy and latency. However, a full KV cache grows linearly with both the context an individual agent processes, and the number of agents that coordinate together. This raises memory and context costs, often far exceeding available GPU resources and context window sizes. Our key observation is that agents need only send what the receiving agent requires for its local task -- which we call receiver-conditioned communication. The receiver agent passes the sender a small description of its information needs, which serves to filter and compress the sender agent's KV cache. CacheBack is a simple, robust, training-free instance of receiver conditioning based on the sender's attention weights. On FanOutQA, CacheBack with Qwen 3 removes 75% of the state the agent would otherwise receive, improving accuracy by 14.7 percentage points and reducing median task-completion latency by 3.2x relative to text communication. We show comparable improvements across model families that span dense Transformers, Mamba-attention hybrids, and sliding-window attention.

An agent can improve its behavior within an unresolved problem by changing how it acts and which experience it retains. We propose MMLA-RSI, a recursive self-improvement scheme with two implementations in Memory-Mediated Learning Architecture: Reasoning-Time Training (RTT) changes the policy state Φ, while Reasoning-Time Memory Adaptation (RTMA) changes authoritative memory M. Each route also makes its adaptation method an object of improvement. A current numerical updater trains the policy proposing its successor; a current memory manager chooses the records available to the process proposing its successor. An independently admitted successor takes over the same role in the next generation. We give bounded executable rule languages, shared task/proposal interfaces, and one algorithm for either route or their composition. The RTT instance changes scalar schedules in a clipped-momentum update. The RTMA instance chooses NULL or a complete-row write with possible eviction. A fixed interpreter, trusted committer, and independent evaluator bound what can change. State versions, read closures, and conditional properties describe causal execution, accepted transitions, and finite work. Existing numerical-component studies motivate the construction. In four-candidate program selection, retaining LARC feedback updates reduces expected error by 24.65 and 36.65 percentage points for two trained initializations. In chronological continuous-integration replay, feedback binding is positive while retention increases loss. Completed SQL studies improve substantially over an unadapted substrate but do not establish the required additional online benefit. These results characterize their declared components. The two recursive routes and their joint realization are specified here; their beneficial recursive chains and discovery efficiency remain to be evaluated.