While Large Language Model (LLM) role-playing agents have advanced rapidly, it remains unclear which profile elements genuinely drive role-playing quality. To bridge this gap, we introduce a systematic diagnostic framework that disentangles the impact of character profiles along three axes: Familiarity (Known vs. Unknown), Structure (Structured vs. Unstructured), and Disposition (Moral vs. Immoral). Utilizing a unified hierarchical schema (5 dimensions, 28 fields), we construct a controlled dataset of 211 personas and evaluate five LLMs on both single- and multi-turn interactions. Our results reveal a striking asymmetry: \textbf{Familiarity} and \textbf{Structure} show negligible impact, while \textbf{Disposition} produces large, consistent performance degradation for immoral characters across all conditions. Further analyses suggest that the Moral--Immoral gap is amplified by post-SFT alignment, and that this degradation varies substantially across profile attributes. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose Field-Aware Contrastive Decoding (FACD), a training-free strategy that amplifies suppressed disposition-sensitive signals, significantly closing the performance gap without sacrificing moral-character performance.
Yonghyun Jun, Junhyuk Choi, Jeonghyun Park et al.· 0 citations
Reliable epidemiological reasoning requires synthesizing study evidence to infer disease burden, transmission dynamics, and intervention effects at the population level. Existing medical question answering benchmarks primarily emphasize clinical knowledge or patient-level reasoning, yet few systematically evaluate evidence-grounded epidemiological inference. We present EpiQAL, to our knowledge the first diagnostic benchmark for epidemiological question answering over research literature, comprising three subsets built from open-access articles across diverse diseases. The three subsets progressively test factual recall, multi-step inference, and conclusion reconstruction under incomplete information, and are constructed through a quality-controlled pipeline combining taxonomy guidance, multi-model verification, and difficulty screening. Experiments on fifteen models spanning open-source and proprietary systems reveal that current LLMs show limited performance on epidemiological reasoning, with multi-step inference posing the greatest challenge. Model rankings shift across subsets, and scale alone does not predict success. Chain-of-Thought prompting benefits multi-step inference but yields mixed results elsewhere. EpiQAL provides fine-grained diagnostic signals for evidence-grounding, inferential reasoning, and conclusion reconstruction.
Mingyang Wei, Dehai Min, Zewen Liu et al.· 0 citations
Diffusion language models (DLMs) have shown strong potential for general natural language tasks with in-context examples. Existing In-Context Learning (ICL) approaches largely inherit the practice of autoregressive language models (ARLMs), incorporating all examples into a fixed prompt. However, applying this rigid, static-prompt paradigm to DLMs incurs substantial computational overhead, as the model must evaluate the maximum context length at every step. We address this inefficiency with a key discovery: the block-wise KV-cache mechanism inherent to DLM inference enables the \textit{low-cost dynamic adjustment of the context}. Following this intuition, our core idea is to start generation with a minimal prompt and progressively insert additional examples on the fly only when the generated tokens are of low confidence. Through rigorous empirical evaluations, we observe that average verified token confidence correlates strongly with generation accuracy, making it a reliable and computationally efficient signal of token quality. Formally, we propose \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{I}n-Context \textbf{P}lanner (DIP), a context-optimization algorithm based on average verified confidence that dynamically ranks and inserts in-context examples during generation, rather than providing all examples up front. Experimental results on math and coding benchmarks with LLaDA-1.5 and LLaDA-8B-Instruct show that DIP achieves up to $1.59\times$ and $1.36\times$ speedups, respectively, while largely preserving the generation quality of the fixed-prompt baseline. Code: https://github.com/wmd3i/DIP
Yang Li, Han Meng, Chenan Wang et al.· 0 citations
Human evaluation is the gold standard for multilingual NLP, but is often skipped in practice and substituted with automatic metrics because it is notoriously complex and slow to set up with existing tools with substantial engineering and operational overhead. We introduce Pearmut, a lightweight yet feature-rich platform that makes end-to-end human evaluation as easy to run as automatic evaluation. Pearmut removes common entry barriers and provides support for evaluating multilingual tasks, with a particular focus on machine translation. The platform implements standard evaluation protocols, including DA, ESA, and MQM, and is extensible to support new protocols. It features document-level context, absolute and contrastive evaluation, attention checks, ESAAI pre-annotations and both static and dynamic assignment strategies. Pearmut enables reliable human evaluation to become a practical, routine component of model development and diagnosis rather than an occasional effort.
Vil\'em Zouhar, Tom Kocmi· 0 citations
Reach audiences
Advertise in front of researchers, engineers, and readers.
Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose tokens and a stronger target model to verify them. However, standard SD is mainly designed for acceleration, and its output quality is typically constrained by the target model. In this work, we propose Entropy-Aware Speculative Decoding (EASD), a lightweight and training-free extension of SD that improves reasoning quality through token-level entropy-guided rejection. EASD detects cases where both draft and target models exhibit high uncertainty while strongly overlapping in their top predictions. In such uncertain-agreement cases, EASD rejects the aligned token and resamples from the target distribution, preventing low-confidence errors from propagating. Experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks show that EASD consistently improves accuracy over standard SD and reward-guided variants while maintaining comparable inference efficiency. Notably, EASD can surpass the standalone performance of the target model, suggesting that speculative decoding can serve not only as an acceleration method but also as an effective mechanism for improving reasoning quality. The code is available at https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/EASD.
Tiancheng Su, Meicong Zhang, Guoxiu He· 0 citations
We propose LLM-PeerReview, an unsupervised LLM Ensemble method that selects the most ideal response from multiple LLM-generated candidates for each query, harnessing the collective wisdom of multiple models with diverse strengths. LLM-PeerReview is built on a novel, peer-review-inspired framework that offers a transparent and interpretable mechanism, while remaining fully unsupervised for flexible adaptability and generalization. Specifically, it operates in three stages: For scoring, we use the emerging LLM-as-a-Judge technique to evaluate each response by reusing multiple LLMs at hand; For reasoning, we can apply a straightforward averaging strategy or a principled graphical model-based truth inference algorithm to aggregate multiple scores to produce a final score for each response; Finally, the highest-scoring response is selected as the best ensemble output. LLM-PeerReview is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. Our results across four datasets show that the two variants of the proposed approach outperform the advanced model Smoothie-Global by 6.9% and 7.3% points, cross diverse task types including factual recall QA, math reasoning, and instruction following.
Notably, we also establish a carefully curated benchmark suite for LLM Ensemble, integrating 12 methods across four classic datasets and three task families, all evaluated under a rigorous and consistent protocol. We hope this repository will help researchers reproduce the LLM Ensemble baselines.
Zhijun Chen, Zeyu Ji, Qianren Mao et al.· 0 citations
Subtitles are essential for video accessibility and audience engagement. Modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, built upon Encoder-Decoder neural network architectures and trained on massive amounts of data, have progressively reduced transcription errors on standard benchmark datasets. However, their performance in real-world production environments, particularly for non-English content like long-form Italian videos, remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a case study on developing a professional subtitling system for an Italian media company. To inform our system design, we evaluated four state-of-the-art ASR models (Whisper Large v2, AssemblyAI Universal, Parakeet TDT v3 0.6b, and WhisperX) on a 50-hour dataset of Italian television programs. The study highlights their strengths and limitations, benchmarking their performance against the work of professional human subtitlers. The findings indicate that, while current models cannot meet the media industry's accuracy needs for full autonomy, they can serve as highly effective tools for enhancing human productivity. We conclude that a human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach is crucial and present the production-grade, cloud-based infrastructure we designed to support this workflow.
Alessandro Lucca, Francesco Corso, Francesco Pierri· 0 citations
Streaming Speech-to-Text Translation (StreamST) requires producing translations concurrently with incoming speech under strict latency constraints, demanding models that balance low latency with high translation quality. Despite rapid progress, evaluation remains fragmented across existing frameworks, which make different assumptions about how systems operate - for example, whether they process continuous speech or short pre-segmented audio, and whether they support output revision (retranslation) or not (incremental). For instance, SimulEval, the most widely used framework, supports only incremental decoding, assumes short segmented inputs, and lacks a native support for system demonstrations. As a result, comparing systems fairly and consistently across studies remains challenging, with no unified solution for benchmarking and interactive demonstration. To address this gap, we introduce simulstream, the first open-source framework for StreamST evaluation and demonstration. It supports both incremental and re-translation decoding on long-form speech, provides fine-grained logging for quality and latency evaluation, and includes an interactive web interface for real-time visualization and comparison.
Marco Gaido, Sara Papi, Mauro Cettolo et al.· 0 citations
Disclaimer: Samples in this paper may be harmful and cause discomfort.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable multimodal understanding but inherit toxic signals from weakly curated pretraining corpora, leading to explicitly toxic outputs, especially under adversarial triggers that late, opaque training-free detoxification methods struggle to handle. We propose SGM, a white-box neuron-level multimodal intervention that acts like safety glasses for toxic neurons: it recalibrates a set of toxicity-associated neurons via expertise-weighted soft suppression, neutralizing harmful cross-modal activations without any parameter updates. We establish MM-TOXIC-QA, a multimodal toxicity data framework, and compare SGM with existing detoxification techniques. Experiments on open-source MLLMs show that SGM mitigates explicit toxicity in standard and adversarial conditions, cutting average harmful rates from 45.0% to 4.5% while preserving fluency and multimodal reasoning. SGM is extensible, and its combined defenses, denoted as SGM*, integrate with existing detoxification methods for stronger safety performance, providing an interpretable, low-cost solution for toxicity-controlled multimodal generation.
This paper presents a simple method that allows to easily enhance textual pre-trained large language models with speech information, when fine-tuned for a specific classification task. A classical issue with the fusion of many embeddings from audio with text is the large length of the audio sequence compared to the text one. Our method benefits from an existing speech tokenizer trained for Audio Speech Recognition that output long sequences of tokens from a large vocabulary, making it difficult to integrate it at low cost in a large language model. By applying a simple lasso-based feature selection on multimodal Bag-of-Words representation, we retain only the most important audio tokens for the task, and adapt the language model to them with a self-supervised language modeling objective, before fine-tuning it on the downstream task. We show this helps to improve the performances compared to an unimodal model, to a bigger SpeechLM or to integrating audio via a learned representation. We demonstrate its effectiveness on Argumentative Fallacy Detection and Classification tasks where audio was previously believed counterproductive, and affective computing tasks on a widely-used dataset. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the method, showing that even a random audio token selection helps enhancing the unimodal model. Our code is available [online](https://github.com/salocinc/EMNLP26SpeechTokLLM/).
Nicolas Calbucura, Jose Guillen, Valentin Barriere· 0 citations
The structure of naming systems in natural languages hinges on a trade-off between high informativeness and low complexity. Focusing on the domain of kinship naming, we analyze such trade-off while addressing simplifying assumptions of prior work, namely: (i) universal communicative need across languages, and (ii) optimal listeners. To that aim, we collect data from four different languages, and analyze how different communicative needs and variations in the listener model influence the informativeness--complexity trade-off. Adopting a referential game setup from emergent communication, we further show that trade-off optimality is not only theoretically achievable but also emerges empirically in learned communication systems.
Phong Le, Mees Lindeman, Raquel G. Alhama· 0 citations
Modern large language models increasingly integrate internal web-based retrieval to provide real-time answers, yet it remains unclear how effectively these systems identify information need, trigger retrieval, and use retrieved evidence. To understand these parameters better, we evaluate the necessity and effectiveness of internal web search through an external lens in closed-source LLMs, without access to model parameters or internal configuration. Our evaluation method comprises a static split of 783 temporally anchored factual queries answerable from pre-cutoff knowledge, designed to test whether retrieval is invoked based on factual uncertainty, and a dynamic split of 288 post-cutoff queries that require up-to-date information, designed to evaluate retrieval effectiveness under unavoidable information need. We experiment across four models across two model families and scales. Across models, enabling retrieval yields substantial accuracy gains on the static split, but systematically degrades confidence calibration. On the dynamic split, models frequently invoke retrieval yet remain below 70 percent accuracy, with failures dominated by query formulation and source selection errors rather than integration of retrieved content. While retrieval is inexpensive to invoke and can be selectively beneficial, repeated retrieval attempts rarely recover from early failures, and confidence becomes inflated once retrieval is available. Overall, internal web-based retrieval functions effectively as a low-latency verification mechanism, but falls short as a reliable IR pipeline, highlighting the need for improved retrieval triggering, query formulation, and evidence-aware confidence calibration in web-enabled LLMs.
With millions of users across the world, Julia has been used to conduct cutting-edge research and to design new drugs, jet engines, heat pumps, and more.
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
New MIT research could lead to better materials for a fossil-fuel-free process for making the chemical that's essential to fertilizer and other products.
