The advent of large language models (LLMs) has sparked an evolution of autonomous web browsing agents: given a web browsing task and serialised user interface (UI) state, an LLM is expected to suggest input actions that incrementally solve the given task. The central challenge lies in serialising UI state for LLMs. Web agents have increasingly relied on grounded graphical UI (GUI) snapshots - screenshots augmented with visual cues - favoured for their modest input token footprint. Document object model (DOM) snapshots, serialised as HTML, represent a compelling alternative that leverages previously demonstrated HTML interpretation capabilities of LLMs. Their excessive token footprint, however, has precluded reliable deployment with web agents to date. We propose D2Snap, an algorithm to downsample the DOM, premised on preserving actionability and actionability-discriminating features. We evaluate D2Snap-downsampled DOM snapshots using a snapshot-variant web agent (GPT-4o) on a dataset sampled from Online-Mind2Web. Whilst 42% of raw DOM snapshots exceed the model context window (128 x 10^3 tokens), all D2Snap-downsampled DOM snapshots of our reference configuration fit, at a mean context utilisation of 16.5%. Against the 67% success rate of a grounded GUI snapshot baseline, our configuration attains 73% (+5.8%pt; 95% CI -13.6 to +26.0%pt; McNemar, p = 0.47), excluding a deficit (one-sided 95%) beyond 11%pt. Image input moreover appears to add little to snapshot utility; grounding text alone attains 62% (-5.8%pt; McNemar, p = 0.37).
Thassilo M. Schiepanski, Nicholas Pi\"el· 0 citations
In psychological counseling, effective support is not always delivered through long, information-rich responses. Minimal responses, such as backchannel cues and concise empathic statements, help convey attentive listening, express empathy, and encourage clients to continue expressing themselves. However, existing counseling dialogue systems and evaluation frameworks often favor explicit, content-rich replies, overlooking the interactional value of brief counselor utterances. This paper presents a systematic cross-lingual analysis of minimal responses across multiple counseling dialogue datasets. We develop a two-stage filtering method based on utterance length and content, followed by contextual verification using a large language model (LLM). Our analysis shows that minimal responses are common in human-collected datasets but substantially underrepresented in LLM-generated ones. We further evaluate current LLMs in manually curated dialogue contexts where human counselors used minimal responses. The results show that strong commercial LLMs are capable of generating minimal responses when explicitly instructed, but still struggle to determine when such responses are appropriate. Counseling-specific models trained on synthetic data perform particularly poorly, tending instead to produce longer and more information-rich responses. Moreover, LLM-based response-quality evaluation may undervalue minimal responses, even when they are interactionally appropriate.
Personalized text generation for authors and literary writing is essential for applications such as adaptive writing assistants, creative support tools, and computational literary analysis. However, existing approaches to author modeling and personalization often represent writing behavior as independent labels, requiring large-scale corpus collection or fine-tuning for each author or stylistic category. Such formulations are costly, difficult to interpret, and poorly suited for generalizing across authors. Inspired by the Big Five model's dimensional view of personality, we propose LiteraryBigFive, a framework that reframes authorial writing characteristics as coordinates within a unified and interpretable space. In this space, we derive each interpretable axis (e.g., Classicism, Emotionality) from activation-space contrasts between author-written and neutral passages, yielding distinct stylistic dimensions that allow texts or authors to be positioned within a five-dimensional system. Beyond localizing different authors, we further introduce an interpretable steering mechanism, which adaptively guides text generation toward target coordinates to perform author-personalized writing. Experimental results show that LiteraryBigFive improves authorial expressiveness while preserving semantic fidelity. The derived author per-axis scores strongly correlate with real-world literary consensus, offering transparent and interpretable explanations of author-specific generation behavior: https://github.com/Znull-1220/LiteraryBigFive.
Jinghui Zhang, Lang Gao, Ao Li et al.· 0 citations
As authorship attribution systems are increasingly deployed to detect ghostwritten and AI-generated papers, their errors can support accusations against legitimate authors. These systems conflate stylistic similarity with individual identity. Researchers, however, study under advisors, and inherit their stylistic quirks. We build a corpus of arXiv authors with $\geq 2$ solo papers from the Mathematics Genealogy Project graph, giving $5{,}803$ total authors and $2{,}501$ ground-truth advisor-student pairings. Using embeddings from a fine-tuned model, advisors sit $39.9\%$ closer in cosine distance to their students than a random same-field author does. Using two open models, we reproduce the effect at $12.6\%$ and $14.5\%$. Academic siblings, two students of one advisor who may never have met, sit $30.4\%$ closer across $8{,}360$ pairs, even when they studied at different institutions. Pairs who share only institution and field show negligible similarity. Given a closed-set attribution task over the same corpus, the system's errors occur on the true author's advisor, student, academic sibling, or lab mate $11$ times more often than chance.
Cameron Manzo· 0 citations
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Achieving effective self-correction, where models verify and correct their own mistakes, remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose Self-Fix Step-DPO (SFS-DPO), a reinforcement learning based, two-stage framework for step-level self-verification and self-correction. The first stage strengthens step-level reasoning via step-level preference optimization, while the second stage explicitly trains models to self-verify and self-correct. We further introduce a teacher-assisted variant, SFS-DPO-R, which incorporates explanatory rationales for error verification to provide stronger corrective signals. Comprehensive in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations across multiple LLMs demonstrate that SFS-DPO and SFS-DPO-R consistently outperform prior step-level training baselines. Our analysis further reveals improvements in self-correction frequency and effectiveness, highlighting the importance of strengthening step-level reasoning for robust performance.
Vu Duc Anh, Nhat M. Hoang, Do Xuan Long et al.· 0 citations
Emotion understanding in discourse requires reasoning beyond surface sentiment because speakers often convey affect through indirect, implicit, polite, ironic, or deliberately mismatched expressions. Existing emotion benchmarks mainly annotate surface polarity or final emotion categories, while lacking a structured account of how explicit expression, implicit affect, pragmatic intent, and fine grained emotion interact. This limitation makes current evaluations insensitive to cases where affective meaning is concealed, weakened, inverted, or pragmatically reshaped, thereby obscuring model failures in deeper emotion understanding. To address this gap, we introduce CUE Bench, a Chinese Unsaid Emotion benchmark that centers on Affective Stance and covers diverse communicative scenarios. CUE Bench constructs nine human interpretable affective stances from explicit implicit polarity interaction and further provides intent and fine grained emotion annotations for structured affective inference. Experiments show that incorporating Affective Stance improves fine grained emotion recognition by 3.1 percentage points and pragmatic intent detection by 8.1 percentage points over strong baselines.
Zhenyan Zheng, Yunyao Zhang, Junxi Sheng et al.· 0 citations
Chinese web pollution has surfaced in LLMs, motivating audits of upstream Chinese corpora. However, auditing such corpora faces three challenges: (1) their web-scale size makes full scan costly; (2) prior analyses are often too coarse to expose token-level pollution; (3) Chinese web pollution is implicit and rapidly changing. We propose Sampled-BPE, a lightweight token-level auditing pipeline that sample a small subset and train BPE tokenizer to surface polluted tokens. Experiments show that Sampled-BPE preserves usable estimates while substantially reducing runtime and memory: a 148.4 $\times$ speedup and a 35.8 $\times$ memory reduction induce only 4.25% relative error for pollution categories. We apply the pipeline to 11 open Chinese corpora and 6 Chinese Common Crawl snapshots from 2021 to 2026. The audit reveals widespread but uneven pollution across open corpora, as well as highly polluted and temporally shifting Chinese web content. We further release a hierarchical Chinese web token dataset with 660k+ token records, each with web context, category, and explanation fields, organized as trees to support review and tracing of pollution.
Qingjie Zhang, Ziqi Tang, Jie Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Large language models are increasingly used to simulate human opinions, but prior work reports conflicting results: some studies find promising alignment with human survey data, while others find persona collapse and weak demographic sensitivity. We propose that much of this conflict stems from conflating two distinct tasks. We call the first task emulation, in which models generate individual responses that aggregate into a population distribution. We call the second task estimation, in which models directly predict the population distribution. Evaluating six matched base and post-trained models on the Pew American Trends Panel, we find that base models are the stronger emulators: they produce response distributions closer to human ground truth and better preserve demographic structure. Post-trained models are generally the stronger estimators, producing more accurate distributional predictions when asked directly. We argue that model selection for human simulation should be guided by whether the task requires generating text or predicting distributions.
Seth Grief-Albert, Jessica Bo, Difan Jiao et al.· 0 citations
Large language models can answer a medical question correctly and still abandon that answer when a user pushes back. We study this failure as medical sycophancy and ask when models are most likely to give in. Across five open-weight models, 500 MedQuAD questions, and 1.2 million trials, we use a fully crossed design over four conversational factors: user role, user evidence, interaction structure, and grounding. Medical sycophancy is nearly three times more common when users challenge an answer the model has already given than when the false claim appears in the initial query. Models are also more susceptible to users presented as physicians or medical students. Most strikingly, fabricated evidence has opposite effects across interaction structures. It increases sycophancy in single-turn interactions but reduces it after the model has already answered. Grounding helps, but does not eliminate the behavior. Sycophancy varies more across medical questions than across models, making question selection an important part of benchmark design. Reasoning traces suggest that multi-turn failures are associated with models turning back toward their own prior answer, while fabricated evidence receives more scrutiny after an initial response. Together, the results show that medical sycophancy depends as much on how a model is challenged and evaluated as on which model is tested.
Kaike Ping, Buse \c{C}ar{\i}k, Caleb Wohn et al.· 0 citations
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for e-commerce attribute extraction requires labeled data representative across thousands of product types, attributes, and multiple languages. This combinatorial scale translates to millions of annotations, rendering human labeling prohibitively costly. While recent work has demonstrated synthetic label generation using LLMs, deploying such approaches at industrial scale requires integrated quality control mechanisms. We present SynthAVE, a large-scale human-validated benchmark for attribute value extraction spanning 12,726 products across 229 product types, 792 attributes, and 4 languages (Spanish, French, Italian, German). To validate synthetic labels at scale, we introduce a multi-LLM arena framework where samples are independently evaluated by 21 judge configurations (7 model families $\times$ 3 prompts), with final labels determined via majority voting. The majority vote ensemble agrees with human experts at Cohen's $\kappa = 0.92$ (95.2% agreement), while individual judges show substantial inter-model agreement (Fleiss'$\kappa = 0.76$). This demonstrates that diverse models with varying individual judgments aggregate into highly reliable predictions, enabling cost-effective validation at scale while maintaining quality parity with human review.
Andrea Scarinci, V. Negri, Brayan Impata et al.· 0 citations
The most plausible near-term role of medical LLMs is to assist rather than replace physicians, yet current evaluations often test isolated capabilities: clinical knowledge, EHR system interaction, or patient communication. Physician assistance instead requires coordinating these capabilities within the same interaction, where physicians issue underspecified requests, patients describe symptoms ambiguously, and EHR systems demand precise tool use. We introduce PhysAssistBench, a benchmark for interactive doctor-patient-EHR assistance. Built from real MIMIC-IV cases, PhysAssistBench uses a scalable pipeline to construct agentic patients: interactive, record-grounded agents that turn static EHR records into multi-turn clinical scenarios while preserving clinical factuality. PhysAssistBench provides a curated bilingual evaluation set of 1,296 manually reviewed and physician-validated turns. Experiments with leading LLMs show that current models remain unreliable in this setting, which exposes a key bottleneck for clinical LLMs: reliable assistance requires coordination across knowledge, communication, and systems, not isolated gains in any of them.
Tianming Du, Peijie Yu, Sihan Shang et al.· 0 citations
Biomedical findings often seem to conflict across studies, but many of these differences are context-dependent rather than true contradictions. Variations in cohort, geography, assay protocol, disease subtype, and clinical setting can make both claims locally valid. Existing NLI and scientific claim-verification benchmarks reduce such cases to entailment, contradiction, or neutral, failing to capture the contextual structure behind divergence. To address this, we introduce BioDivergence, an evaluation framework with a six-class conflict taxonomy, a 13-axis divergence ontology, and four structured outputs per claim pair: conflict type, divergence axes, dominant confounder, and reconciliation explanation. We release BioDivergence-Silver-v1.0, an article-disjoint silver benchmark of 11,865 claim pairs across five biomedical domains, alongside a legacy deduplicated variant for comparison. Results show notable ranking differences between the two variants, with the fine-tuned reference model dropping about 12 points under the article-disjoint setting, while Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 achieves 0.5523 accuracy and 0.3894 contextual-F1 on the 842-example primary test set. BioDivergence offers a more faithful way to distinguish contextual divergence from direct contradiction and to separate article-level memorization from genuine task learning.
Elias Hossain, Sanjeda Sara Jennifer, Sabera Akter Bushra et al.· 0 citations
