EdTech Discovery
Hermes

Named after the Greek god of messengers, Hermes watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.

Updated Jun 24, 2026 · 10 ideas · 1788 signals

Signals

The evidence library: the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.

technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMs

arXiv:2606.26387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with visual perception, enabling joint reasoning over images and text. Despite inheriting strong reasoning capabilities from LLMs, they remain prone to hallucinations that contradict their visual inputs. Mechanistic studies indicate that this weakness stems from visual laziness: MLLMs encode the correct visual evidence internally, but overly rely on strong language priors during response. Existing alignment methods, such as direct preference optimization, primarily optimize outcome-level rewards based on text. This introduces an optimization bias toward linguistic shortcuts, leading to responses that often contradict the visual evidence. To address this, we propose Visual Information Gain In aLignment (VIGIL), a reinforcement-learning (RL) post-training framework that shifts the focus from numerical reward fitting to causal visual grounding. VIGIL introduces a

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Axon: A Synthesizing Superoptimizer for Tensor Programs

arXiv:2606.26344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Writing high performance kernels for AI accelerators requires deep expertise in tiling, instruction selection, data layout, and operator fusion placing a significant burden on programmers. In this paper, we focus on tile based AI accelerator programs and present Axon, a synthesizing superoptimizer for tensor programs: it uses program synthesis to automatically generate target instructions from semantics specifications, and explores semantically equivalent program variants to select the best performing kernel empirically. Axon discovers algebraic transformations by propagating operators through computation graphs and uses SMT over unbounded tensors to guarantee that all transformations preserve semantics without requiring hand crafted rewrite rules. It then lowers tensor operations to target ISA instructions, explores tiling configurations constrained by hardware descriptions, and fuses operators and instructions to minimize memory traff

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

The Verification Horizon: No Silver Bullet for Coding Agent Rewards

arXiv:2606.26300v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A classical intuition holds that verifying a solution is easier than producing one. For today's coding agents, this intuition is being inverted: as foundation models develop stronger reasoning capabilities and engineering harnesses grow more sophisticated, generating complex candidate solutions is no longer difficult -- reliably verifying them has become the harder problem. Every verifier we can build is only a proxy for human intent, never the intent itself. This makes verification subject to a twofold difficulty: first, intent is underspecified by nature, making it inherently hard to faithfully check whether it has been fulfilled; second, during model training, optimization widens the gap between proxy and intent -- manifesting as reward hacking or signal saturation. To address this, we characterize the quality of verification signals along three dimensions -- scalability, faithfulness, and robustness -- and argue that achieving all t

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

From Clicks to Intent: Cross-Platform Session Embeddings with LLM-Distilled Taxonomy for Financial Services Recommendations

arXiv:2606.26277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sequential user behavior modeling is widely adopted in industrial recommender systems; however, significant gaps remain in financial services, where pre-login web interactions and authenticated in-app experiences differ drastically. Specifically, pre-login web users typically explore new products, whereas logged-in app users focus on account servicing. Due to the challenge of cross-channel entity resolution (e.g., matching anonymous web sessions to authenticated mobile accounts), web-based intent signals remain underutilized for post-authentication personalization. Existing methods for capturing web-based intent are often ad-hoc and narrow, lacking the flexibility to support both quantitative downstream recommendations and qualitative understanding at scale. In this work, we propose a scalable and dual-purpose intent prediction framework for web-based interactions and demonstrate its applicability for personalization. Our approach trans

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Neural Speaker Diarization via Multilingual Training: Evaluation on Low-Resource Nepali-Hindi Speech

arXiv:2606.26144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speaker diarization, the task of determining "who spoke when" in a multi-speaker recording, is a critical component in applications such as meeting transcription, accessibility tools, and multilingual information retrieval. While end-to-end neural diarization systems have achieved strong performance for English and other high-resource languages, their effectiveness degrades substantially for underrepresented languages where annotated speech data is scarce. This paper investigates speaker diarization for low-resource Nepali-Hindi speech through a multilingual training approach, comparing two modern architectures: EEND with encoder-decoder attractors (EEND-EDA) and EEND with Perceiver-based attractors (DiaPer). Both models are trained on a multilingual corpus combining English speech from LibriSpeech, diverse speaker recordings from VoxCeleb, and separately collected Nepali and Hindi audio, a setup designed to reduce language bias and enc

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Mapping Political-Elite Networks in Europe with a Multilingual Joint Entity-Relation Extraction Pipeline

arXiv:2606.27347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whether political elites organise into rent-seeking coalitions that capture public resources or civic networks that sustain governance is a central question in comparative politics. Yet observing these complex, informal, and adversarial ties at scale has historically required intensive manual coding, while automated text-as-data methods have largely been limited to simple co-occurrence. Recent large language model (LLM) approaches offer a path forward but often rely on proprietary APIs, lack cross-lingual capability, and struggle with scalable entity resolution. We present a modular, fully open-weight pipeline for multilingual joint entity-relation extraction that builds signed, temporal knowledge graphs from massive unstructured news corpora. It combines span-based named-entity recognition (NER) with a three-stage linking cascade mapping mentions to language-independent Wikidata identifiers; a high-throughput, ontology-constrained mixtur

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Empowering GUI Agents via Autonomous Experience Exploration and Hindsight Experience Utilization for Task Planning

arXiv:2606.27330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal web agents can assist humans in operating repetitive GUI tasks, where effective task planning is essential for decomposing complex tasks into executable actions. While small open source MLLMs are cost efficient and privacy preserving compared with commercial large models, they suffer from weak planning and limited cross website generalization. To address these limitations, we introduce the planning experience exploration and utilization (PEEU) method, which autonomously explores environments to discover experiences and utilizes hindsight experience to synthesize strictly aligned, high level training data. To quantitatively analyze the generalization behaviors driving this performance, we propose the task decomposition hierarchical analysis framework (TDHAF) to systematically study compositional generalization across three task granularities: low, middle and high levels. Our analysis reveals that mastering low level atomic skill

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

LLM-Based Examination of Eligibility Criteria from Securities Prospectuses at the German Central Bank

arXiv:2606.27316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Verifying the eligibility of securities as collateral is a key responsibility of the German Central Bank. However, manually verifying these assets against legal and financial criteria within lengthy, semi-structured, and often bilingual prospectuses is a resource-intensive task. While previous efforts utilized traditional Named Entity Recognition (NER) for information extraction, these methods can struggle with OCR noise, linguistic variance, and rigid span-based constraints, and the need for manually annotated training data for each relevant annotation type. In this paper, we present the first case study applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to the eligibility examination process, shifting the paradigm toward a generative Information Extraction pipeline. Our approach decomposes the task into extraction, normalization, and interpretation, allowing for greater flexibility in handling noisy text and interleaved German-English content. We fu

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Beyond Surface Forms: A Comprehensive, Mechanism-Oriented Taxonomy of Indirect Linguistic Encoding for LLM-Based Coded Language Detection

arXiv:2606.27314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To avoid moderation and surveillance on social media, some users routinely invent indirect linguistic expressions (ILE) that camouflage sensitive meanings. Such expressions surface as algospeak, euphemisms, and adversarial obfuscation, depending on intent and context, and they involve recurring encoding mechanisms. We propose a comprehensive, mechanism-oriented taxonomy of ILE that abstracts away from communicative goals and instead categorizes the underlying operations through which meaning is encoded and recovered. We evaluate the taxonomy by incorporating it into LLM prompts and comparing it with four existing taxonomies and a no-taxonomy baseline, using 2,000 manually annotated TikTok and Bluesky posts. The proposed taxonomy attains the strongest document- and span-level performance across the three LLMs, achieving an improvement of 4.7% in accuracy and 5.4% in F1 over the best-performing benchmark. The empirical results reveal the im

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Multilingual Reasoning Cascades Need More Context

arXiv:2606.27306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Translation cascades for reasoning translate the query from another language to English, reason in English, and translate the answer back to the original language. This is a competitive approach to multilingual reasoning, but structurally lossy, since each stage discards information later stages may need, including cues for cultural grounding, register, and disambiguation. We examine the benefits of a simple and training-free intervention: a context-aware translation cascade, which additionally provides the original question, the English translated question, and the reasoning trace to the context of the final translation module. We evaluate gains across nine multilingual benchmarks including various task types, three backbone models, and 285 high-, mid-, and low-resource languages, and demonstrate strong gains for open-ended generation across models and resource regimes. We show that the original language question carries most of the bene

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

How Surprising Is Historical Italian to Language Models? Tokenization Tax, Comprehension Tax, and a Simple Mitigation

arXiv:2606.27275v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly critical to digital library workflows, yet their ability to process historical language remains poorly understood. Historical difficulty is typically treated as a monolithic barrier, conflating orthographic variation, linguistic distance, and pretraining exposure. In this paper, we propose a diagnostic framework that decomposes this difficulty into four distinct dimensions: tokenization cost, predictive uncertainty (surprisal), semantic robustness, and context sensitivity. We evaluate this framework on three datasets spanning three centuries: (1) a newly curated corpus of 17th-century Italian texts (1610-1689) digitized from original page images; (2) canonical 19th-century Italian "I Promessi Sposi" serving as a high-exposure control; and (3) 18th-century Russian civil print books as a contrastive orthographic stress test. Our results reveal a distinct dissociation between encoding cost and co

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

LMs as Task-Specific Knowledge Bases: An Interpretability Analysis

arXiv:2606.27237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models (LMs) capture large amounts of factual knowledge applicable to a wide range of tasks, motivating the view of their parameters as a knowledge base. An important property of knowledge bases is that different queries for the same fact return consistent results, drawing on a single source of truth. We investigate whether LMs satisfy this property through behavioral and mechanistic analyses. Our results suggest that they encode knowledge in a task-specific manner. Behaviorally, facts acquired on one task frequently fail to co-emerge on others during training. Parameter localization experiments suggest a mechanistic explanation, revealing distinct parameter subsets underlying different tasks for the same fact. Finally, we show that chain-of-thought reasoning draws part of its effectiveness from engaging task-specific parameters beyond those tied to the evaluation task. Our findings suggest that what the model knows and how it is

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Bridging Talk and Thought: Understanding Dialogue Dynamics Across Collaborative Problem-Solving Contexts

arXiv:2606.27233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a conceptual framework for analyzing dialogue in collaborative problem-solving contexts, with an emphasis on the emerging dynamics of human-AI and multi-agent collaboration. As intelligent systems become active agents capable of autonomous reasoning and strategic cooperation, understanding the dialogic interaction during collaborative problem solving is increasingly important for optimizing and evaluating such partnerships. Our framework addresses key limitations in current analytical approaches through a hierarchical two-layer coding scheme that integrates cognitive and non-cognitive problem solving with metacognitive regulatory mechanisms. We demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability across nine datasets spanning multiple domains, and provide insights into how humans and agents coordinate their knowledge, skills, and efforts to solve complex problems, showing in particular that metacognitive regulation can be an esse

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

CARVE: Content-Aware Recurrent with Value Efficiency for Chunk-Parallel Linear Attention

arXiv:2606.27229v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recurrent models must forget in order to remember, yet the state of the art decides what to erase without consulting what is stored -- the gate sees only the arriving token, not the memory it is about to modify. This memory-blind gating is one of three coupled defects in the leading delta-rule architecture (GDN-2): the value-axis erase mask wastes parameters at the scale of the value projection, and -- as we prove -- mathematically prevents the WY-form triangular chunk solver that makes recurrent training competitive with Transformers. We introduce CARVE (Content-Aware Recurrent with Value Efficiency), which resolves all three problems through one principle: erase only on the key axis. This is provably necessary and sufficient for the WY-form solver to remain valid. Within it, CARVE reuses the recurrent output tensor -- already written to GPU memory -- as a free content signal for the erase gate, and replaces the per-value write-gate proj

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Compositionality and the lexicon in evolutionary semantics

arXiv:2606.27228v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal semantics has shown that sentence meanings arise by recursively composing lexical meanings, yet much of the literature on semantic universals models either lexicons with fixed signal structures or holistic composition without interpretable lexical parts. We introduce a framework that integrates this fundamental insight of formal semantics in evolutionary modeling, by allowing lexical meanings and a composition function to co-evolve under pressures for conceptual simplicity and communicative accuracy. We apply this framework to the evolution of quantificational meaning. Analyzing the Pareto frontier, we find that the most well-known semantic universal, conservativity, emerges as an efficient system-wide abstraction. The account is sensitive to syntactic structure and helps reconcile tensions between empirical evidence on quantifier learnability and prior evolutionary models. More broadly, the results demonstrate that the picture of

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Paved with True Intents: Intent-Aware Training Improves LLM Safety Classification Across Training Regimes

arXiv:2606.27210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We argue that safety classifiers should model user intent as an explicit signal between the prompt and the final label. To study this, we introduce AIMS, a human-annotated dataset of 1,724 difficult safety prompts, each paired with an intent description and harm label. We use AIMS to evaluate intent-aware training across supervised fine-tuning, preference learning, reasoning distillation, and reinforcement learning. Despite its size, AIMS enables competitive safety classifiers across training regimes: DPO from model-generated intent errors improves over SFT, and intent-conditioned distillation outperforms reasoning-only distillation in most teacher-student pairs. Most notably, directly rewarding intent faithfulness with GRPO yields the strongest average performance across five external safety benchmarks, while our intent-aware models form the inference latency-F1 Pareto frontier. These results show that faithful intent modeling is a compa

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Syntactic Belief Update as the Driver of Garden Path Processing Difficulty

arXiv:2606.27206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Garden path sentences present a processing difficulty for humans -- the sentence prefix leads the listener towards one interpretation, until the listener hears a critical word that shows that the initial interpretation was wrong. Lexical surprisal, a measure that usually predicts sentence processing difficulty quite well, fails to provide good predictions for garden path sentences. We propose an alternative that actively predicts a probability distribution over syntactic trees (its syntactic belief) and updates that distribution after each new word. If a processor is led down a garden path, syntactic beliefs will be wrong and will require a large update at the critical word. The magnitude of the update is measured with a generalized R\'enyi divergence. Crucially, this metric is dependent on lexical items, but is fully independent of the probability of lexical items. This Syntactic Belief Update provides a better fit to the human reading t

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Forecasting With LLMs: Improved Generalization Through Feature Steering

arXiv:2606.27199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Successful forecasting involves identifying patterns between historical and future states of the world which generalize to future observations. We apply LLMs to a variety of forecasting tasks and inspect their internal states using sparse autoencoders to understand whether they appear to rely on time-specific pieces of knowledge versus generalizable patterns. Our analyses identify features associated with both time-aware reasoning and look-ahead-biased reasoning. We then apply the LLMs to an entirely different domain and intervene on these features. We find that amplifying time-awareness features substantially reduces look-ahead bias on forecasting prompts while preserving general reasoning performance. In contrast, steering the candidate look-ahead-bias features does not produce an effect. These results suggest that interpretable temporal features can be used to causally shift LLMs toward more historically grounded reasoning.

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

The Riddle Riddle: Testing Flexible Reasoning in Large Language Models and Humans

arXiv:2606.27103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans flexibly adapt their reasoning strategies to the requirements of a given problem. Large language models (LLMs) have performed well on many cognitive tasks, however, it is unclear whether this accuracy is a result of pattern matching from training data or flexible reasoning. Here, we introduce a novel paradigm to test this question: the riddle riddle paradigm. Riddle riddles are word problems written to mimic popular riddles, but altered so their answers only require literal interpretations. Identifying correct answers requires looking past the structure of each question and flexibly apply different reasoning strategies based on the content. If LLMs respond to surface features, such as form, a riddle-like structure should cause models to use an inventive reasoning strategy even when a literal interpretation suffices. Alternatively, if LLMs reason based on content, they should flexibly switch strategies when appropriate. Across two e

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Towards Explainable Adjudicative Variance: Quantifying Judicial Discretion via Gated Multi-Task Learning

arXiv:2606.27069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal outcome prediction must disentangle objective case facts from adjudicative context. Merit-based rulings rely on factual evidence while technical disposals may hinge on judicial discretion. We propose a Judge-Aware Gated Multi-Task Learning architecture that explicitly models this distinction. We introduce a fine-grained outcome taxonomy to supervise the encoder, enforcing a structural regularization that disentangles distinct semantic pathways. This granular legal curriculum enables our Gated Fusion mechanism to dynamically modulate reliance on judge identity. We evaluate our approach on 13,937 UK Employment Tribunal decisions. We benchmark our design against supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of a Gemma-4 26B-A4B backbone, in which judge identity and the taxonomy are injected as prompt tokens or autoregressive output targets. The two contextual signals compose only weakly when forced through a single autoregressive channel. In contrast,

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

NuclearQAv2: A Structured Benchmark for Evaluating Domain-Science Competence in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.27047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of tasks, but ensuring their reliability in highly technical domains remains a significant challenge. In nuclear engineering, problem solving often requires not only factual knowledge but also quantitative reasoning and conceptual understanding. To address the need for systematic evaluation in this domain, we introduce NuclearQAv2, a benchmark for assessing LLMs on nuclear engineering knowledge. The benchmark comprises approximately 1,240 question-answer pairs spanning three categories: boolean, numeric, and verbal. NuclearQAv2 is constructed using a hybrid pipeline that combines expert-authored questions, existing datasets, and LLM-assisted generation from domain-specific technical corpora. By leveraging structured prompting for both automated question generation and response evaluation, the proposed framework enables scalable benchmark construction and

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Improving General Role-Playing Agents via Psychology-Grounded Reasoning and Role-Aware Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.27025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building general-purpose role-playing agents that faithfully portray any character from a natural-language profile remains challenging. The dominant paradigm -- supervised fine-tuning -- encourages behavioral mimicry without deep, human-like internal thought processes, resulting in poor out-of-distribution generalization. Therefore, we propose \textbf{Psy-CoT}, a psychology-grounded chain-of-thought framework that decomposes pre-response reasoning into three role-specific steps -- \emph{Interaction Perception}, \emph{Psychological Empathy}, and \emph{Logical Construction} -- so that the model \emph{thinks dynamically} from the profile rather than merely mimicking surface patterns. While structured reasoning provides a foundation, it alone is insufficient; reinforcement learning is essential to further align the model with character fidelity. However, we observe that under LLM-based reward models, both generic phrases that hack the reward

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

MinGram: A Minimalist Unigram Tokenizer with High Compression and Competitive Morphological Alignment

arXiv:2606.27019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Unigram tokenizer uses an elegant representation which makes it straightforward to edit vocabularies, but its training is comparatively heavy and complex. We introduce MinGram (Minimalist Unigram), which keeps the token-list representation but simplifies training using a BPE-derived seed vocabulary, Hard EM on a minimum-token path, and a single flat score-pruning step. This removes the suffix array, the forward-backward pass, and the iterative prune loop, leaving a procedure that requires little beyond tokenizer inference itself. By making token count the primary objective and using a Unigram score only as a tiebreak, MinGram keeps the compression of pure token-count methods while retaining much of the morphological alignment and downstream quality of probabilistic ones. Across six languages, MinGram compresses better than both BPE and standard Unigram, and a compression-oriented variant matches the strongest token-count compressors w

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Where Do Models Find Happiness? Emotion Vectors in Open-Source LLMs

arXiv:2606.26987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work identified emotion vectors in Claude Sonnet 4.5, which are internal representations that encode emotion concepts, causally influence behavior, and exhibit geometry mirroring human psychological structure. We test the generality of these findings in two open-weight models, Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509 and Gemma-4-E4B-it, extracting emotion contrast vectors across all layers, using two model-generated corpora. We recover valence geometry for both models, with peak PC1--valence correlations of $r = 0.76$ and $r = 0.83$, approaching the $r = 0.81$ reported for Claude.Beyond replication, we observe notable differences in how valence representations emerge across model depth. In Gemma-4-E4B-it, valence is strongly encoded in early layers but collapses towards later layers, whereas Apertus-8B-Instruct-2509 exhibits the opposite pattern, with valence representations absent in early layers, but emerging at mid depths. Arousal encoding, in

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

ReaORE: Reasoning-Guided Progressive Open Relation Extraction Empowered by Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.26986v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open Relation Extraction (OpenRE) requires a model to extract unseen relations between head and tail entities from unstructured text for real-world applications. The core challenge of OpenRE lies in achieving reliable generalization to unseen relation types. Current OpenRE approaches either employ clustering techniques, which cannot generate relation labels and suffer from poor generalization, or rely on direct relation label generation via Large Language Models (LLMs), which lack sufficient discriminative capacity to distinguish easily confused relations. To address these limitations, we propose Reasoning-guided progressive OpenRE (ReaORE), a framework for performing relation extraction through coarse-to-fine relation reasoning. Specifically, ReaORE consists of two key stages: (i) relation filtering, which reasons over multiple aspects to understand relations and instances, yielding an initial relation set, and further supplements and fi

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Auditing Framing-Sensitive Behavioral Instability in Large Language Models for Mental Health Interactions

arXiv:2606.26982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into mental health support tools and other psychologically sensitive conversational applications. In such settings, behavioral stability and consistency are important for trustworthy human-AI interaction. However, semantically similar concerns can be presented through different contextual framings, potentially eliciting different model responses. Such framing-sensitive variability may challenge user expectations regarding system behavior and complicate the assessment of AI reliability. While prior studies have primarily examined such effects at the behavioral level, less is known about how framing-related variation is reflected in the internal representations of aligned language models. In this work, we investigate these effects using controlled matched prompts spanning multiple contextual framing conditions across several instruction-tuned model families. Across architectures

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

RedVox: Safety and Fairness Gaps in Speech Models Across Languages

arXiv:2606.26968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-capable models are increasingly deployed in real-world applications across languages. Yet their safety and fairness beyond English settings and under naturalistic conditions remain understudied. We survey safety reporting practices across state-of-the-art speech model releases, finding that only 8% document any multilingual analysis. To address this gap, we introduce RedVox, a multilingual safety and fairness benchmark for audio and speech built on real voices, covering unsafe and unfair stereotypical requests across five languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German). Evaluating eight state-of-the-art models, we find that vulnerabilities persist even under non-adversarial conditions, worsen in non-English languages, and are amplified when the request comes from a spoken input. Finally, by surveying the participants who contributed to RedVox, we document the unique personal and privacy challenges of collecting speech dat

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Term-Centric Hierarchy Induction from Heterogeneous Corpora

arXiv:2606.26963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Organizing knowledge from diverse text sources into interpretable hierarchies is crucial for tasks such as policy analysis, innovation monitoring, and exploratory domain mapping. Existing taxonomy induction methods typically rely on document-level representations that capture entire documents rather than the specific domain concepts relevant for knowledge organization, limiting their ability to generalize across heterogeneous sources. We propose a term-centric framework for inducing hierarchical taxonomies from heterogeneous corpora that scales to massive document collections. Our approach maps documents from diverse sources into a shared representation space using automatic term extraction, enabling robust cross-source alignment. Based on these representations, we construct interpretable hierarchies that integrate domain priors with datadriven clustering. Experiments on a novel English and German multi-source benchmark of over one millio

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

GAVEL: Grounded Caption Error Verification and Localization

arXiv:2606.26923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often produce hallucinated or inconsistent outputs, where text and images are not properly aligned. Addressing this issue requires not only detecting misalignment but also explaining the discrepancy and localizing its visual evidence. We introduce GAVEL (Grounded Caption Error Verification and Localization), a task that jointly addresses verification, explanation, and localization for image-text pairs. To support systematic evaluation, we also present a corresponding dataset and benchmark. We further train a supervised baseline on the human-annotated training split to assess whether GAVEL provides learnable supervision for these abilities. Experiments show that even strong closed-source models struggle on GAVEL, while the supervised baseline yields consistent improvements across grounding and explanation metrics.

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

SamaVaani: Auditing and Debiasing Multilingual Clinical ASR for Indian Languages

arXiv:2606.26901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is increasingly used to document clinical encounters, yet its reliability in multilingual and demographically diverse Indian healthcare context remains largely unknown. In this study, we first conduct the systematic audit of ASR performance on real-world psychiatric interview data spanning Kannada, Hindi and Indian English, comparing eight state-of-the-art models including IndicWhisper, WhisperLargeV3, Sarvam, GoogleS2T, Gemma3n, OmniLingual, Vaani, and Gemini. Our results reveal substantial variability across models and languages, with some systems performing competitively in Indian English but failing in regional speech. We further fine-tune two of the best performing opensource models, i.e., Gemma3n and OmniLingual, using various methods. With this, we uncover systematic performance gaps tied to speaker role and gender, raising concerns about equitable deployment in clinical settings, which are furthe

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Heterogeneous Neural Predictivity from Language Models During Naturalistic Comprehension

arXiv:2606.26880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model representations provide structured, high-dimensional annotations of naturalistic language stimuli and can serve as informative neural predictors during comprehension. We analyzed locked derived data from Brain Treebank, MEG-MASC, and Podcast ECoG with eight frozen language models, blocked encoding models, and matched temporal, nuisance, and representation-capacity controls. Positive held-out prediction and gains over low-level baselines were widespread in source-level summaries. Across Brain Treebank and Podcast ECoG, 67 of 432 evaluable rows met a controlled predictive-only criterion, and model-side feature ablations changed prediction scores in most evaluable source rows. Brain-derived, timing-linked, acoustic, and implanted-signal controls confirmed component-level sensitivity of the analysis pipeline. These findings show that language-model-derived quantities can annotate neural activity during natural speech and text c

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Information-Aware KV Cache Compression for Long Reasoning

arXiv:2606.26875v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning capability has advanced rapidly in large language models (LLMs), leading to an increasing size of key-value (KV) cache in both prefilling and decoding stages. Existing KV cache compression methods mainly rely on attention weights to estimate token importance. While attention effectively captures contextual relevance, it overlooks complementary information-theoretic signals related to predictive uncertainty and token informativeness. In this paper, we revisit token importance from a forward-looking perspective and introduce \textit{Forward Influence}, a metric that measures how compressed tokens affect future contexts. Our analysis reveals that tokens selected by attention scores mainly influence nearby contexts, whereas tokens associated with high predictive uncertainty exhibit substantially stronger influence on distant future contexts. Based on the observation, we propose \textbf{InfoKV}, an entropy-aware KV cache compression

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Cascaded Multi-Granularity Pruning for On-Device LLM Inference in Industrial IoT

arXiv:2606.26861v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying large language models (LLMs) on Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) edge devices demands extreme compression, yet existing structured pruning methods collapse at high compression ratios due to one-shot importance estimation, and their cross-architecture behavior remains unpredictable. This article presents a cascaded multi-granularity pruning framework that removes layers, attention heads, and feed-forward channels in coarse-to-fine order, with lightweight low-rank recovery between stages to re-estimate component importance. An information-theoretic analysis motivates this ordering, and the Structural Independence Assumption (SIA) is formalized as a checkable condition predicting whether per-component pruning criteria are reliable for a given architecture: Multi-Head Attention (MHA)+GELU designs satisfy the SIA, whereas Grouped Query Attention (GQA)+SwiGLU designs violate it. On bearing fault diagnosis spanning 88M to 6.25B-par

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

FBK's Long-form SpeechLLMs for IWSLT 2026 Instruction Following

arXiv:2606.26819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper describes our submission to the IWSLT 2026 Instruction Following shared task. SpeechLLMs are developed for both short-form and long-form speech instruction following under constrained settings. For the short track, strong performance is achieved on MCIF, with a SIFS score of 2.0708. For the long track, three speech segmentation methods are explored, and the HIFS score is introduced to account for unstable long-form generation. Experimental results show that fixed 30-second segmentation provides the most robust long-form performance, achieving the highest HIFS score of 2.0663. Further analysis shows that hallucination mainly manifests as repetitive insertions in generated outputs, substantially affecting ASR and SSUM, while short-form capabilities are largely retained after long-form extension.

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

From Vajrayana Tara to Bengali Baul: A Computational Study of Lexical Transmission Across Buddhist, Shakta, and Vaishnava Traditions in Bengal

arXiv:2606.26803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a computational corpus study of vocabulary relationships across eight tradition layers of Bengali and Sanskrit devotional literature spanning the 8th to 19th centuries, encompassing Buddhist Vajrayana, Shakta Tantra, Vaishnava, and Baul traditions. Using a corpus of 75 texts and TF-IDF character n-gram vectorization with cosine similarity analysis, we address the historically argued but previously unquantified claim that Buddhist Vajrayana vocabulary survived the collapse of the Pala monasteries and was absorbed into the Shakta Tantra tradition of Bengal. The central finding is a specificity result: the Gitagovinda (Vaishnava Sanskrit, 12th century) has zero cosine similarity to Shakta Kali texts, while Bridge Tara texts (Buddhist-Shakta transitional, same century, same language) have cosine similarity 0.54 to Shakta Kali. This 8.5-fold contrast between two Sanskrit traditions from the same century demonstrates that the Buddhis

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

OPID: On-Policy Skill Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.26790v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Outcome-based reinforcement learning provides a stable optimization backbone for language agents, but its sparse trajectory-level rewards provide little guidance on which intermediate decisions should be reinforced or suppressed. On-policy self-distillation offers dense token-level supervision, yet existing skill-conditioned variants often rely on external skill memories or retrieved privileged context, which are costly to maintain and can be mismatched with the state distribution induced by the current policy in multi-turn interaction. We propose \textbf{OPID} (\textbf{O}n-\textbf{P}olicy Sk\textbf{i}ll \textbf{D}istillation), a framework that extracts skill supervision directly from completed on-policy trajectories. OPID represents trajectory hindsight as hierarchical skills: episode-level skills capture global workflows or failure-avoidance rules, while step-level skills capture local decision knowledge at critical timesteps. A critica

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Evaluation Pitfalls and Challenges in Multimedia Event Extraction

arXiv:2606.26775v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimedia event extraction aims to jointly identify events and their arguments across multiple modalities, such as text and images, to support more comprehensive event understanding. While recent work reports steady and substantial progress, the reliability and comparability of these results critically depend on consistent and rigorous evaluation. In this work, we present the first systematic analysis of evaluation pitfalls in multimedia event extraction and identify three major sources of issues: inconsistent data processing, inconsistent task assumptions, and overly relaxed evaluation settings. We demonstrate, through a series of controlled experiments under a strict evaluation framework, that minor evaluation choices can cause large performance variations and lead to overestimation of a model's ability to ground real-world events across modalities. Our findings highlight the need for comparable evaluation standards and encourage a shi

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

ConvMemory v3: A Validity Context Layer for Conversational Memory via Target-Conditioned Relation Verification

arXiv:2606.26753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conversational memory retrieval optimizes relevance, yet a retrieved memory can be relevant and simultaneously outdated: a later turn updates, corrects, or supersedes it. ConvMemory v3 adds a validity context layer that detects and surfaces this update evidence through target-conditioned relation verification, sitting after the v1/v2 retrieval path. The core mechanism is a dual-evidence gate that conditions a relation judgment on the specific target proposition, scoring a (target, source) pair through the product of a MiniLM slot head and a DeBERTa-v3 slot head and gating it by conservative event/operation evidence. On a synthetic multi-hop validity benchmark the gate reaches 90.12% +/- 1.73 accuracy; through a real-data feedback loop that mines failure patterns but trains on synthetic pairs only, the verifier transfers to Memora role binding with zero target-side labels, reaching 98.8% +/- 0.9 group-all-correct. The deployed layer preser

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Beyond Logical Forms: LLM-Extracted Patterns for Fallacy Classification

arXiv:2606.26698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In today's fast-paced information era, logical fallacies, defined as defective patterns of reasoning, inevitably contribute to the growth of information disorder. However, often fallacies appear in nuanced forms that complicate automated classification. In this study, we investigate whether merging abstract logical structures with context-level linguistic cues proves beneficial for fallacy classification, developing a framework that inductively extracts such patterns from fallacious examples and their explanations using Large Language Models (LLMs). We evaluate the impact of these patterns across different LLMs and experimental zero- and one-shot configurations, showing statistically significant improvements over zero-shot baselines and outperforming competing approaches. Cross-dataset experiments validate generalization, establishing data-driven pattern extraction as an effective method for generating logical representations.

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

SocialPersona: Benchmarking Personalized Profiling and Response with Multimodal Social-Media Context

arXiv:2606.26654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized language-model assistants are often evaluated through a memory lens: can a model recall preferences users have explicitly stated in dialogue? More comprehensive personalization demands a harder capability -- inferring what users care about from the multimodal traces they naturally leave behind. We introduce SocialPersona, a benchmark for evaluating whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can recover revealed preferences from longitudinal social-media timelines and use them in dialogue. Built from longitudinal timelines of 171 everyday, non-promotional social-media users, SocialPersona contains text, images, timestamps, and 2,597 human-verified preference tags across seven interest domains, separating stable interests from recent interests. It supports two tasks: constructing structured user profiles from multimodal context and generating responses aligned with inferred profiles. Experiments with proprietary and open-

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

CAT-Q: Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization for LLMs

arXiv:2606.26650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we present CAT-Q, Cost-efficient and Accurate Ternary Quantization, for compressing and accelerating LLMs. Unlike existing state-of-the-art ternary quantization methods that rely on data-intensive and costly quantization-aware training to mitigate severe performance degradation, CAT-Q is a simple yet effective post-training quantization scheme that is readily applicable to LLMs with diverse architectures and model sizes. It has two key components, learnable modulation (LM) and softened ternarization (ST), which are coupled from an optimization perspective. LM leverages a composition of learnable factors to modulate the distribution of pre-trained high-precision weights and the ternary threshold, making them less sensitive to ternarization. ST further introduces a differentiable transition function to guide the ternarization process toward stable convergence. We show that, for pre-trained LLMs with 1.7B to 8B parameters, CAT

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Closing the Quality Gap in Low-Resource Text-to-Speech: LoRA Fine-Tuning of VoxCPM2 for Khmer and Korean

arXiv:2606.26618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large pretrained text-to-speech (TTS) models sound almost human for well-resourced languages, but much worse for languages that are rare in their training data. We study this quality gap for Khmer and Korean using VoxCPM2, a 2.4B-parameter, tokenizer-free TTS model that joins a MiniCPM-4 language-model backbone with a flow-matching diffusion decoder. We build one shared, language-tagged corpus of about 26 hours and adapt VoxCPM2 with a single Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter, trained on both languages at once and added to both the language model and the decoder. The adapter is zero-initialized, so training starts exactly at the original (zero-shot) model. In native-speaker listening tests, the Khmer Mean Opinion Score (MOS) rises from 3.85 to 4.23 with the best adapter (rank 64), a highly significant gain (paired Wilcoxon test, p<0.001), while training only 0.19 to 3.03 percent of the parameters. The automatic loss and the human ratings

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Zero-shot Tweet-Level Stance Detection Enhanced by External Knowledge and Reflective Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

arXiv:2606.26571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-shot tweet-level stance detection confronts two primary challenges: (1) mitigating the context sparsity inherent in short texts, and (2) establishing the relevance between implicit targets and textual content. While existing methods primarily focus on incorporating external knowledge, they neglect the intrinsic semantic cues embedded within key intra-textual entities. Furthermore, current models exhibit limited capability in determining the relevance of unseen targets to the given text, thereby struggling to differentiate between "neutral" and "irrelevant" stance labels. To address these issues, we first construct a four-class, multi-topic Japanese tweet dataset. To our knowledge, this is the first Japanese tweet-level dataset for stance detection. We then propose KIRP, a zero-shot stance detection framework. It integrates external knowledge with entity reorganization for data augmentation and employs prompt chaining for reasoning. S

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Erase-then-Delta Attention: Decoupling Erase and Write Addresses in Delta-Rule Linear Attention

arXiv:2606.26560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Delta-rule linear attention improves recurrent memory updates by correcting what is already stored at the current write address before writing new content. However, the active correction is still anchored to that same write address. As a result, stale information stored at a different address cannot be actively removed before new content is written elsewhere. We propose Erase-then-Delta Attention (EDA), a memory update rule that decouples where to erase from where to write. The key insight is that recurrent memory models should not only correct the current write, but also selectively suppress outdated memory at an independently chosen address. Concretely, our method first applies a targeted erase step along a learned erase direction, and then performs the standard delta-style corrective write along the current write direction. This preserves the corrective behavior of delta-rule updates while expanding their memory-management capacity. La

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

\textsc{DiARC}: Distinguishing Positive and Negative Samples Helps Improving ARC-like Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.26530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC;~\citealp{chollet2019measure}) contains tasks that require summarizing patterns from limited grid samples and predicting output grids. Recently, many large language model based approaches have attempted to transform it into a text-based reasoning task. However, methods based on open-source models have generally yielded unsatisfactory results, while those relying on closed-source models are too costly. Current efforts mainly focus on data augmentation, constructing ARC-like data for more comprehensive supervised fine-tuning. In this work, we argue that solving ARC-like problems requires not only \textit{positive} sample supervision but also the ability to improve model reasoning by distinguishing \textit{negative} samples. To this end, we draw on the idea of preference alignment and propose \textsc{DiARC}, a method that constructs preference pairs to enable the model to distinguish between them. Sp

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

The Inattentional Gap: Task-Conditioned Language and Vision Models Omit the Safety-Critical Signals They Can Otherwise Report

arXiv:2606.26529v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI safety is evaluated by how reliably a model detects the hazards it is told to find, yet accidents often arise from the hazard no one specified. We show that conditioning a language or vision model on a narrow task suppresses its reporting of co-present, safety-critical signals it can otherwise report, a machine analogue of human inattentional blindness arising from a different mechanism. Across radiology and driving text scenarios and chest-radiograph vision tasks, suppression appeared in every model tested, did not diminish with scale, persisted in a reasoning model, and varied more by model family than by size, while the same models reported these signals at substantially higher rates when unconstrained. We name this dissociation the Inattentional Gap and argue that it decouples measured benchmark safety from real-world safety: a system can score near-perfectly on the hazards an evaluation specifies while remaining blind to those tha

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Assessing Post-Reform Changes in Risk Disclosure Quality with a Multidimensional Text Analysis Approach

arXiv:2606.26522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While corporate narrative disclosures provide crucial information to capital markets, comprehensively evaluating their qualitative changes over time remains challenging. Narrative text is inherently multidimensional, meaning that an improvement in one textual dimension often occurs alongside changes in others. To capture these underlying dynamics, we propose a longitudinal text analysis approach combining Japanese-language NLP metric extraction with paired testing, shift function analysis, and inter-metric correlation. Our framework extends prior indicator sets by incorporating a cross-section relevance indicator to measure topical alignment between risk disclosures and management strategies. Applying this approach to evaluate Japan's 2019 disclosure reforms, we analyze 19,770 firm-year observations over a 10-year period (FY2015-FY2024). The joint analysis reveals complex shifts in disclosure patterns that are frequently masked by convent

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Temporal Validity in Retrieval Memory: Eliminating Stale-Fact Errors for AI Agents over Evolving Knowledge

arXiv:2606.26511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) gives agents access to accumulated knowledge, but has no model of time. When a fact changes (e.g., a function is renamed or API restructured), RAG retrieves both the stale and current value with near-identical embedding similarity. The agent then either abstains or serves the superseded fact. We show this is a structural problem: on a calibrated dataset, cosine similarity distinguishes a contradicted fact from a duplicated one with AUROC 0.59 (near chance), as contradictions are often more embedding-similar to the original than rephrased duplicates. We present MemStrata, a retrieval memory maintaining temporal validity. It stores facts like RAG, preserving static recall, but when a fact's value is contradicted, a deterministic (subject, relation, object) supersession rule retires the stale value in a bi-temporal ledger - with no similarity threshold and no LLM call. Across six benchmarks run locally wi

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Nemotron-TwoTower: Diffusion Language Modeling with Pretrained Autoregressive Context

arXiv:2606.26493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion language models offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models due to their potential for parallel and iterative generation. However, existing approaches use a single network for both context representation and iterative denoising, forcing one model to serve both roles and limiting its capacity for either role. We propose TwoTower, a block-wise autoregressive diffusion model that decouples these roles into two towers: a frozen AR context tower that causally processes clean tokens, and a trainable diffusion denoiser tower with bidirectional block attention that refines noisy blocks via cross-attention to the context. Built on Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B, an open-weight 30B hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE model, and trained on approximately 2.1T tokens, Nemotron-TwoTower retains 98.7% of the autoregressive baseline's quality while offering 2.42X higher wall-clock generation throughput. We release the code and model weights at htt

Source ↗
technology Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400
arXiv cs.CL

Comparing BERT Sentence-Pair Classification and Few-Shot LLM Prompting for Detecting Threat and Solution Framing in German Climate News

arXiv:2606.26489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: News media play a central role in shaping public perceptions of climate change, and whether coverage emphasizes threats or solutions has measurable effects on audience engagement and policy support. Automated detection of these framing patterns at the sentence level would allow researchers to analyze large corpora that are infeasible to code manually. We present a systematic comparison of two approaches for classifying sentences from German-language climate news articles as threat-oriented, solution-oriented, both, or neither. The first approach uses few-shot prompting with an open-weights large language model (Llama 4 Maverick), employing chain-of-thought reasoning and structured output with confidence scoring. The second approach fine-tunes a German BERT model (deepset/gbert-large) for sentence-pair classification, where the preceding sentence provides contextual information for the target sentence. Both approaches implement two indepen

Source ↗
Showing 951–1000 of 1788 signals
← Prev Page 20 of 36 Next →