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natural language processing

9,261 papers

#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Pushback in a Haystack: Language Models Respond to Factual Errors Ambiguously and Ineffectively

The sycophancy of language models, or their failure to push back against faulty user input, is now widely studied. However, if LMs do push back, is sycophancy solved? We show that LMs vary in how they present pushback, and thus vary in how effectively they correct user beliefs. We introduce a phrase-level, human-valida...

Li Lucy, Myra Cheng, Svenja Guhr et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

The Image Still Has a Say: Final-Answer Repair for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought

Although chain-of-thought prompting has improved multimodal reasoning, it is still difficult to produce correct final answers, as the reasoning can drift away from the image. Besides, the trace is already fixed when the answer is generated, leaving no room for self-correction. Considering the image is still available a...

Yulan Pan, Xiaoyu Xu, Zhihong Shen · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Worth Their Weights? Evaluating Generative Models for Discourse Parsing

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsing has historically been dominated by discriminative models based on pretrained encoder-only language models. The recent availability of high-quality generative language models has made it unclear whether RST parsing is better approached as a generative task. In this work, we inve...

Luke Gessler, Amir Zeldes · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Oct 2026

Decouple to Forget: Semantic Mediation for Sensitive Unlearning in Large Language Models

Machine unlearning for large language models seeks to remove specified knowledge while preserving general capability, yet current methods often treat an entire response as the unit of forgetting. This coarse granularity causes unnecessary utility loss when the forget target is only a small set of sensitive facts embedd...

Jing-Yue Cong, Andy Song, Yang Yu et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

When Does an ASR Error Matter? Task-Role Diagnostics for Tool-Using Voice Agents

In cascaded voice agents, ASR errors can have markedly different downstream consequences: a small transcription error may leave a tool call unchanged or alter its intent or arguments. Conventional word error rate (WER), however, does not capture these differences. We introduce SpeechEvalX, a paired diagnostic protocol...

Xiaolong Wang, Shijie Su, Naqi Xiong · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Facts Don't Speak Louder than Words: The Behavioral Essence of Long-CoT Distillation

While long chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation significantly improves the reasoning abilities of language models, its underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. Current pipelines generally rely on rejection sampling to gather reasoning traces across diverse prompts, assuming that factual correctness and broad prob...

Yongcan Yu, Jian Liang, Lingxiao He et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

TDR: Tagalog Diacritic Restoration Dataset

Homographs are words that share identical spelling but differ in meaning and pronunciation. In Tagalog, these distinctions are disambiguated in writing through tuldik (diacritical marks), which are rarely preserved in contemporary Tagalog text. This scarcity of diacritics limits diacritic restoration, which is useful f...

Ivan Yuri De Leon, Lanz Railey Fermin, Zachary Aldridge Africa et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

EdgeWise: Bringing Long-Horizon Agents to the Edge via Selective Cloud Delegation

Complex and long-horizon agent tasks often rely on frontier models deployed in the cloud to achieve strong performance. However, using these models for every step of a long-horizon trajectory incurs substantial inference cost, even though not all steps may require the same level of model capability. In this paper, we f...

Zeru Shi, Jindong Jiang, Ryo Hachiuma et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Everyone Was Right: Lexical Representations in Language Models Are Both Abstract and Holistic

Lexical representations can encode both abstract information and information specific to particular contexts. We investigate how these forms of information are organized in language models by decomposing contextual word representations into item, class, and word-class interaction components. Across six pretrained trans...

Zachary Nicholas Houghton, Yu Zhou, Dan Pluth et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Oct 2026

Distilling Text LMs into Speech-to-Speech LMs by Matching Internal Text Predictions

Text language models (LMs) acquire broad linguistic and factual capabilities through large-scale pretraining, while comparable capabilities remain difficult to learn from speech alone. Recent work has shown that knowledge distillation from pretrained text LMs offers a promising way to transfer their linguistic and fact...

Ju-Chieh Chou, Jia-Wei Zhou, Karen Livescu · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Evaluating Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models: Event Temporal Relation Extraction with Allen's Interval Algebra, Logical Consistency, and Relative Time in Narratives

Understanding a narrative means knowing how every event relates in time to every other, yet large language models (LLMs) are mostly tested on isolated event pairs or coarse labels. We ask five LLMs to reconstruct the complete network of Allen's 13 interval relations for 360 English narratives whose events are placed re...

Adib Sakhawat, Fardeen Sadab, Tamjid Hasan Fahim et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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Microsoft Research Blog Oct 22, 2026

Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations

Flint-interactive gives AI agents a language for creating interactive visualizations. Click a chart, filter data, highlight related content, and explore beyond the view the author originally chose. The post Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations appeared first on Microsoft Research.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 15, 2026

AI model decodes the language cells use to communicate

A new computational approach reveals how cells communicate to assemble into tissues. This could accelerate stem cell engineering, improve disease models, and inform therapies.

Microsoft Research Blog Oct 15, 2026

Proof-based general-purpose computing with Magnetar

Zero-knowledge proofs can verify computing results without rerunning workloads or exposing sensitive data. Magnetar helps bring them into the mainstream with support for standard programming languages, major speed gains, and quantum-resistant security. The post Proof-based general-purpose computing with Magnetar appeared first on Microsoft Research.

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