Hybrid attention dominates frontier LLMs, yet Vision Transformers (ViTs) in multimodal LLMs lack a satisfactory hybrid design, with no consensus on why certain attention patterns work better. To fill this gap, we study ViT attention heads and find they differentiate into object- and background-specialist roles, a pattern most pronounced under full attention; we call this Semantic Head Specialization (SHS). We propose SHS-Index to quantify this specialization, show that it distinguishes full-attention from chunk-window ViTs, and find that it strongly tracks downstream benchmark performance. We then identify three structural factors that shape SHS---window interaction, token serialization, and local softmax allocation---and use them as design principles for hybrid attention. Guided by these factors, we design Ariadne Attention, a hybrid that matches full attention on 22 image and video tasks at 6.5x less attention compute. Our findings establish head specialization as a measurable property for diagnosing and designing principled hybrid ViT attention at the multimodal-LLM scale.
Chenhong He, Lei Li, Shicheng Li et al.· 0 citations
AIM is proposed, a two-stage method that anchors an identity-forgetting target with a universal visual prompt and then matches the vision encoder to that target under a Fisher-based constraint, which achieves competitive identity forgetting while preserving non-deleted identities, prior knowledge, and visual perception on the same images.
Wonjun Lee, Jaehyuk Jang, Kangwook Ko et al.· 1 citation
The ability of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) to read text within document images is crucial, as it enables various applications such as Document Visual Question Answering. To enhance the text-reading capabilities of LVLMs, high-quality OCR datasets are essential. This need is particularly critical for Japanese documents, which often feature vertically written text alongside horizontally written text. Current LVLMs demonstrate considerably lower performance on vertically written Japanese text than on horizontally written text, necessitating specialized OCR datasets to bridge this gap. However, manually constructing OCR datasets is expensive and difficult to scale. Alternatively, constructing datasets by extracting text from existing document images using OCR models introduces challenges, such as text recognition errors and the prerequisite of sourcing document images.
To address these issues, we construct an OCR dataset by synthesizing document images directly from text. Leveraging HTML and CSS, we generate multi-column documents that incorporate both vertical and horizontal writing styles. Furthermore, to ensure the visual realism of the documents, we embed images generated by text-to-image models within the layout. Additionally, to foster model robustness, we apply noise and degradation filters to the synthesized document images. In our experiments, we compared the performance of models fine-tuned on our synthetic dataset against baselines fine-tuned on synthetic datasets from prior work and those generated by a high-performance text-to-image model. Evaluation results demonstrate that our synthetic dataset is the most effective approach for improving LVLM performance on reading vertically written Japanese text. Our dataset and code are publicly available (https://github.com/llm-jp/synth-jdoc).
Populations of large language model agents are increasingly used as experimental societies. Three doubts shadow every such result: whether the agents behave like the humans they stand in for, whether a finding survives changes to the apparatus that leave the rules untouched, and whether apparent social dynamics are interaction at all rather than the reproduction of experiments the models have read. This article introduces SILICA, an open instrument that tests all three. Five environments carry published human anchors, each paired with perturbations that re-render the same rules and with variants whose payoffs point away from the memorised result. Twelve open-weight models were run through it on a single consumer graphics card. Agreement with human data is confined to starting points: first-round public-goods contributions fall inside the equivalence margin for eight of eleven models, while no model matches end-state contributions or the human corridor of cooperation. Merely swapping the order in which two actions are listed costs one model 58 points of cooperation. Presenting responders with a fixed schedule of offers shows that only one model, the sole reasoning-trained one, places its acceptance threshold where the incentive requires; two move theirs part of the way, two move them the wrong way, and three never acquire one. Conventions form through a shared prior over the names rather than through negotiation, though negotiation reappears once that prior is disrupted. On the certification ladder defined here, current silicon societies support exploratory claims and no more.
Raad Bin Tareaf· 0 citations
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This work forms sector-targeted CTI dissemination as a multilabel classification problem, leveraging deep field knowledge of CTI structures and sector-specific threat patterns, and applies BERT, a transformer-based model, to automate the mapping of CTI events to sectors.
Fajar Wijitrisnanto, A. Abuadbba, Yan-Song Gao et al.· 0 citations
This work presents the first fine-grained cross-lingual analysis of prosody using multilingual dubbing data across English-German, English-Spanish, and English-French language pairs and reveals inherent cross-lingual correlations in prosodic structure between certain languages.
Haopeng Xie, Ismail Rasim Ulgen, Sofia Son et al.· 0 citations
Speech and audio LLMs are often evaluated by asking whether a waveform prompt beats an automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcript. For known closed-set tasks, that comparison conflates two factors: access to acoustic evidence and the need to call a generative audio model. We evaluate this distinction as a controlled call-decision problem. For each example, a policy chooses among keeping a transcript label, using encoder evidence from Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP), Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST), or WavLM, and calling Qwen2-Audio, Qwen2.5-Omni, or MOSS-Audio; the decisive ablation removes all generative actions while keeping the selector and development protocol fixed. On VocalSound, transcripts reach 0.296 accuracy, so waveform information is needed. Yet supervised CLAP and WavLM controls reach 0.850 and 0.854 with no generative audio calls. A selector with generative actions reaches 0.925 accuracy using 12.5% calls, compared with 0.921 for the matched no-call selector (paired difference 0.004; 95% CI [-0.025,0.033]). Agreement and stacking features improve weaker selectors but do not beat the strongest no-call control. For known-task endpoint claims, the relevant quantity is the marginal value of the generative call after transcript and encoder evidence have already been used.
Speech LLMs are usually graded after they answer, although an operating system first has to decide whether a waveform should be sent to the model. We define the Speech-Unsupported Rejection Evaluation Challenge (SURE-Challenge) for this admission step. The benchmark pairs LibriSpeech-derived transcription and first-word question answering with unsupported silence, colored noise, synthetic tones, and source-ambiguous babble under disjoint source splits. Front-end ablations use Qwen2-Audio; the selected energy-plus-Whisper-score rule is then replayed before six speech/audio LLMs. On the 474-row leakage-screened SURE-Extended test set, raw Qwen2-Audio rejects 15/204 unsupported inputs, whereas the fixed rule rejects 196/204 and leaves supported accuracy unchanged. External checks delimit this number: Common Voice retention drops as the Whisper-score threshold is tightened, and no-speed babble gives 18 to 24 rejected clips out of 54 across regenerated seeds. The result identifies a pre-generation error mode missed by answer-only scoring.
Modeling language use as a joint distribution over meanings, contexts, and utterances, upper bounds are derived on the probability that a decoder recovers a speaker's intended meaning from a representation of the utterance.
Forced alignment evaluation typically requires manually annotated timestamps, limiting large-scale and multilingual analysis. We introduce two corpus-level metrics based on self-supervised (SSL) speech representations for reference-free forced alignment evaluation: Phoneme-Cluster Mutual Information (PCMI) and Word Acoustic Consistency Score (WACS). PCMI measures agreement between aligned phoneme labels and clusters induced from SSL-speech representations, while WACS measures consistency of repeated word realizations using dynamic time warping similarity between word representation sequences. Using both random and systematic perturbations, we show that PCMI and WACS degrade consistently under alignment perturbations. We further analyze the metrics across multiple alignment systems on 85 languages from FLEURS, validate them against manually annotated alignments from 45 languages in DoReCo, and evaluate them on two phonologically complex low-resource languages. The metrics effectively separate high- and low-quality alignments and correlate strongly with timestamp-based alignment quality measures. Our results demonstrate that SSL-speech representations enable scalable, reference-free forced alignment evaluation. The metrics are available as an open-source Python package at https://github.com/mahesh-ak/forced-aligner-metrics.
V. S. D. S. Mahesh Akavarapu, Michael Daniel, Gerhard J\"ager· 0 citations
Two forms of test-time scaling for Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as effective and widely adopted paradigms: sequential, in which later answer attempts depend on earlier ones, and parallel, such as i.i.d. sampling with reranking. In this study, we investigate their properties in translation. First, our study shows that sequential sampling has a higher performance ceiling, providing a more diverse and effective pool of samples, particularly under smaller sampling budgets. Second, we interrogate the nature of test-time scaling through a multidimensional manual analysis. Human analysis of the Best-of-N translations demonstrates that sequential sampling substantially improves translation fluency and naturalness, but can degrade accuracy when inference budgets are large. Finally, we suggest an explanation of the mechanism through which sequential scaling improves machine translation. Our controlled analysis partially attributes the success of sequential self-improvement to the model's access to a larger target-side context. Ablation experiments on sequential sampling demonstrate its robustness across different sampling temperatures, while also revealing sensitivity to context construction, suggesting directions for future improvement.
Factual question answering (QA) typically assumes a single canonical answer, obscuring whether large language models (LLMs) retain divergent accounts of long-tail facts. To address this gap, we introduce ElephantBench, a closed-book knowledge probe comprising 1,094 questions generated through an auditable graph-based pipeline. The pipeline retrieves related documents from a low-exposure web corpus, identifies naturally occurring disagreements, and converts them into multi-account QA records. Each answer is verified against the originating documents and authoritative public web sources and is then reviewed by human annotators. Across 32 models, even the strongest model recovers both accounts on only 52.4% of questions, while on nearly all remaining questions it recalls one account but omits the other. Scaling model size and inference-time reasoning improve recall but do not eliminate this incompleteness. Corpus analysis further shows that exposure imbalance favors the dominant account, whereas greater minority-side exposure is associated with more complete recall. These findings establish ElephantBench as a reproducible knowledge probe for diagnosing epistemic myopia in parametric memory. More broadly, our graph-based benchmark construction pipeline provides an efficient and scalable way to turn long-tail corpora into source-traceable knowledge probes, supporting efforts to evaluate and advance the epistemic rigour of next-generation LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/ElephantBench.
Zhuo-Shi Pan, Jun-Ru Lu, Yan-Fei Qian et al.· 0 citations
A new method, called CW-Net, translates the reasoning process of an autonomous vehicle’s AI system into understandable concepts that explain its behavior.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 31, 2026
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.
