We present a generator of Thai klon pad verse, one stanza from a short topic, and evaluate it against human verse on held-out topics. The generator is a masked language model initialised from WangchanBERTa over a fixed canvas with two layers: a sound layer of pronounced syllables, where rhyme, tone and syllable count are enforced as hard masks, and a word layer of whole words, so that no word is cut into written pieces. Decoding commits one cell at a time and samples at temperature 0.4; one sample is drawn per topic, with no selection, reranking or repair. On 78 held-out topics never used in development, judged by three independent runs of a frozen LLM judge in the same pools as the human stanzas from which the topics were written, 70.5% of the generated stanzas pass form, lexical cleanness of all four lines and topic alignment together, against 76.9% for the human stanzas (difference -6.4 points, 95% CI [-19.2, +6.4]). Cleanness is level with human (85.9% vs. 87.2%), and the stanzas pass form and cleanness together slightly more often than the human ones (+3.8 points, [-6.4, +14.1]); the difference lies in alignment (84.6% vs. 91.0%), on topics that were written from the human stanzas. The low temperature matters: at higher temperatures the same model passes clearly fewer of the same topics, because lexical errors lie in the model's lower-probability choices; sharpening the sampling distribution removes most of them, at a cost in vocabulary (7.5% rare words against 16.5% in the human stanzas) and diversity. The pre-registered target, all-three within 5 points of human, is missed by 1.4 points. KlonSuphap-LM, the only public klon pad generator we know of, passes none of the 78 held-out topics when judged in separate pools together with the method's and the human stanzas (form 19.2%, cleanness 3.8%).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14980
We present HiPAD, a single fusion network submitted to all six sub-tracks of the MPDD-AVG 2026 depression-detection challenge, covering the Elder and Young cohorts and three modality sets (gait, audio-visual, and both), each combined with personality descriptions. The network encodes each available modality with a shared BiLSTM, zero-pads absent modalities, and applies cross-modal attention only when at least two of gait, audio and video are present. Personality, which dominates our results, is kept out of the attention and fused by concatenation. Because the architecture is identical in every sub-track, differences between them reflect the data rather than the model, and we use this to study three questions. Our main finding is that the personality description, roughly 150 tokens about who the subject is, carries more depression signal than audio, video, and gait combined: gait plus personality alone (TLS 0.647) beats every configuration that includes audio and video. First, a four-level ablation of the personality description (L0-L3) quantifies this: removing every personality-derived feature, including the Big Five scores that earlier MPDD ablations keep, lowers the Track-Level Score by 0.499 to 0.507 and leaves the model at chance. Second, domain-adapting the personality encoder with LoRA (7B) or QLoRA (72B) on PHQ-8/9 data raises binary Cohen's $\kappa$ by 0.13 but lowers the overall score by distorting the PHQ-9 regression; a frozen RoBERTa-large encoder does better at this sample size. Third, at fixed architecture, handcrafted clinical features (eGeMAPS, OpenFace action units) outperform generic deep features (wav2vec2, DenseNet) on the audio-visual tracks. The unified system reaches a cross-track G-Score of 0.482; with under 100 subjects per cohort, the limiting factors are the size of the representation and the calibration of the outputs, not the choice of architecture.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14961
Detecting communicative meaning in dialogue requires modeling not only lexical content but also the participant-role structures through which sentiment, emotion, politeness, and formality (SEPF) are expressed. Existing approaches rely on contextual language representations while leaving semantic roles implicit. We introduce a role-aware transformer architecture that maps the four SEPF dimensions to theory-grounded Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) configurations, incorporating these configurations directly into the transformer's self-attention mechanism. Role-aware attention models non-directional internal states (sentiment and emotion), while directional role-aware attention captures initiator-to-recipient relations for external cues (politeness and formality). The resulting role-aware representations are fused with contextual embeddings through a learned gate that adaptively weights how much role information each input contributes, rather than appending semantic roles as an auxiliary feature vector. Across four benchmark datasets, the framework yields statistically reliable gains over strong BERT-based baselines for emotion, politeness, and formality, with gains concentrated in theoretically predicted cases such as low-frequency, complex emotions and highly polite expressions; sentiment improvements are marginal and non-significant, suggesting that sentiment is conveyed more through lexical choice than participant-role structure. Additional evaluation on real-world data demonstrates that the framework improves both predictive performance and model traceability. These results demonstrate that linguistically grounded modifications to transformer self-attention improve the detection of communicative meaning, generalize beyond benchmark datasets to real-world mental-health data, and yield traceable, role-grounded explanations that extend beyond predictive performance to interpretability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13797
Recent accent classification systems can achieve high accuracy in standard in-corpus evaluations. However, when speakers overlap between the training and test sets, such results may overestimate model robustness compared with real-world deployment scenarios. This study revisits the robustness of DistilHuBERT-based accent classification by using L2-ARCTIC and multiple external English accent datasets. The comparison covers file-level and speaker-disjoint splits, along with balanced external-data training and teacher-student pseudo-labeling. The large performance gap between in-corpus and external evaluations suggests that file-level evaluation substantially overestimates performance, while speaker-disjoint evaluation can provide a more realistic estimate of the generalization to unseen speakers. In this study, models trained on external data alone do not reliably generalize to L2-ARCTIC. Among the tested configurations, balanced external-data training offers the most promising supervised setting. The pseudo-labeling experiments further indicate that confidence-based filtering alone is insufficient under domain mismatch. Overall, this study suggests that robust accent classification evaluation should simultaneously include speaker-disjoint evaluation and cross-corpus testing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13440
High-precision retrieval over external knowledge bases is essential for LLM agents to operate effectively. However, existing Information Retrieval (IR) research primarily optimizes query-side retrievers (e.g., ColBERT, BGE) and generators (e.g., Self-RAG, GraphRAG), while reducing corpus-side representation to chunking. This leaves index-side quality an underexplored lever. We propose Pre-Retrieval Index Modeling & Enhancement (PRIME), an index-side optimization framework built on two complementary tracks: an LLM-driven Semantic Restructuring (SR) track that transforms long documents into structured, information-dense sections, and a deterministic Metadata Synthesis (MS) and Hierarchical Retrieval (HR) track that extracts semantic anchors and heading structure for coarse-to-fine section retrieval. Our evaluations show that deterministic metadata matches structure-aware chunking's retrieval quality while cutting embedding computation by 45.8 $\times$ and index vector count by 22.4 $\times$. On top of these gains, Semantic Restructuring (SR) further improves Answer-F1 by 13.7% in full deployment, with characterized quality-fidelity-cost trade-offs. Across QASPER, BRIGHT, and NFCorpus, we further characterize three qualitative regimes that determine whether index-side optimization helps or degrades retrieval, while showing that these index-side effects are neutralized under a strong reranker.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13296
Over 90% of disease-associated variants from genome-wide association studies fall in noncoding regulatory regions, yet their functional interpretation remains a central open problem in genomic medicine. Large language models prompted to interpret such variants routinely hallucinate transcription factor (TF) binding changes, fabricate experimental support, and assign biological significance to statistically negligible signals. We present ARGUS (Agentic Regulatory Genomics for an Uncertainty-aware Scientist), which strictly separates deterministic biological computation from LLM-mediated reasoning. ARGUS wraps 458 DNABERT-based TF binding models in a hypothesis-directed investigation loop where a planner selects evidence sources based on current uncertainty, a verifier deterministically interprets each observation, and intermediate results change the investigation path. On variant rs6983267 at the 8q24 cancer risk locus, the same planner produces four divergent trajectories for four TFs. FOXA1 is rescued in 3 steps when real ADASTRA allele-specific binding data (15 experiments, FDR = 0.030) reveals a model false negative masked by saturation. KLF6 traverses 8 steps across ADASTRA, JASPAR motif analysis, and ENCODE cCRE regulatory annotation before abstaining due to mixed indirect evidence. RAD21 abstains in 8 steps after ADASTRA returns a coverage-qualified but nonsignificant allelic test (5 experiments, FDR = 0.65), and SP1, which shares FOXA1's saturated retained prediction, abstains because no direct experimental evidence exists at this locus. All observations come from real ADASTRA, JASPAR, and ENCODE cCRE queries; none are simulated. A comparison of fixed-priority and LLM-mediated planning shows that the LLM planner reaches identical verdicts with fewer tool calls by declining evidence that cannot resolve the claim under test.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12281
Pre-trained transformer models are increasingly being used to study scientific and technological progress. Encoders tuned to paper or patent text outperform general-purpose models on downstream classification, regression, and proximity tasks within science and technology. However, the applicability of these models for studying time-dependent or archival properties of science, technology, and their interface is limited due to lookahead and domain biases inherent to these pre-trained models. These limitations arise from training on corpora with unconstrained chronological and text source distributions. We introduce SciTBERT: a family of chronologically consistent BERT-derived language models trained on text from scientific papers, patents, and high-quality educational web text with training data cutoff dates spanning each year between 2013 and 2025. We also post-train these models in a chronologically-consistent manner using paper and patent citations, creating SciTBERT-CI model family. We find that these models generally outperform predecessor domain-specific encoder models even when training data is limited by early year restrictions in the corpus. To further investigate the extent to which this class of models can learn representations that bridge science and technology, we introduce the PatRepEval benchmark, a suite of patent-related text embedding tasks at the science-technology interface. Performance in a variety of classification, regression, and retrieval tasks spanning papers and patents highlights the importance of aligning encoder model representations with the domain distributions of their downstream tasks, and chronologically consistent encoders can match or exceed models trained without temporal constraints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12207
Spin in clinical trials includes reporting practices that distort the presentation of results. This is particularly critical in medicine, where spin is present in more than 50% of randomized controlled trials that fail to reach statistical significance. The comparison of primary and reported outcomes is crucial for detecting several types of spin, including outcome switching. We used 300 pairs of outcomes labeled with semantic similarity to develop a system for automatic detection of outcome switching. We evaluated baseline text similarity models and open-source LLMs using generated similarity scores and the Youden index to determine the classification threshold. The proposed approach involves prompt engineering, classification based on token probabilities, and majority voting for the final decision. The results on the test set of 2,496 examples with an F1 score of 0.78 and an accuracy of 0.90 outperform baseline text similarity models but trail behind fine-tuned versions of BERT. We used LLMs to generate natural language explanations for the classified instances and manually assessed their quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11845
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, while capable of producing highly fluent outputs, remain vulnerable to hallucinations, which are translations that are natural yet semantically unrelated to the source. This vulnerability is acute in low-resource settings like Sinhala-to-English, where weak cross-lingual alignment leads to hallucinations. This paper introduces a framework for reference-free hallucination detection in this language pair. We present a 45,000-sample synthetic dataset generated through a probabilistic chain of five linguistically motivated corruption strategies, with a semantic rescue mechanism that uses character-level similarity to distinguish hallucinations from morphological variants. We fine-tune mDeBERTa-v3 for token-level sequence labelling, reaching a token-level F1 of 0.841 +/- 0.001 over three seeds on a source-disjoint test set, and study a three-signal ensemble integrating neural risk scores, sequence log-probabilities, and cross-lingual semantic embeddings (LaBSE). A source-ablation control shows that the detector relies on the Sinhala source rather than on surface artefacts of the corruption process: shuffling or removing the source reduces sentence-level AUROC from 0.970 to chance. We benchmark eight NMT systems spanning five model families and find that detector firings vary by an order of magnitude across architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11389
Synergistically capturing intricate local structures and global contextual dependencies has become a critical challenge in point cloud representation learning. To address this, we introduce PointLearner, a point cloud representation learning network that closely aligns with biological vision which employs an active, foveation-inspired processing strategy, thus enabling local geometric modeling and long-range dependency interactions simultaneously. Specifically, we first design a point-focused attention, which simulates foveal vision at the visual focus through a competitive normalized attention mechanism between local neighbors and spatially downsampled features. The spatially downsampled features are extracted by a pooling method based on learnable inducing points, which can flexibly adapt to the non-uniform distribution of point clouds as the number of inducing points is controlled and they interact directly with point clouds. Second, we propose a context-scan state space that mimics eye's saccade inference, which infers the overall semantic structure and spatial content in the scene through a scan path guided by the Hilbert curve for the bidirectional S6. With this focus-then-context biomimetic design, PointLearner demonstrates remarkable robustness and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple point cloud tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11342
Image retrieval methods often rely on a single global semantic descriptor extracted from an image, e.g., the [CLS] token in vision transformers. However, trying to squeeze all the semantic information of an image into a single descriptor can hurt downstream retrieval performance, especially for fine-grained retrieval tasks. In this work, we augment the semantic tokens in the newer visual transformers, the global [CLS] token and the four register tokens, with a carefully selected collection of spatial tokens, aiming to capture the spatial region representation that characterizes the contents captured in each of the semantic tokens. We leverage the DINOv2-reg model, which includes register tokens that emergently learn object and part-based representations. For each "cue" token ([CLS] and each register token), we find a "buddy" image patch token and extract an N x N patch region to produce a set of localized ROI tokens. Our approach automatically captures important regions of interest without any external bounding boxes or saliency modules, purely by matching semantic tokens with their spatial representation regions. Furthermore, we incorporate these tokens into a multi-vector retrieval framework inspired by ColBERT, enabling fine-grained matching via a per-token alignment mechanism while avoiding the large storage cost of keeping all patch embeddings. Through extensive experiments, we find that (1) register tokens encode useful fine-grained details that can complement the [CLS] token; (2) automatically pooled ROI tokens further improve fine-grained discrimination; and (3) multi-vector retrieval with a small set of tokens improves over a DINOv2-reg single-vector baseline while remaining tractable for large-scale search. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10991
The goal of circuit discovery is to decompose a monolithic neural network into tiny modular subnetworks which are interpretable in the sense that each does an identifiable subtask. We develop a practical method for composing arbitrarily many circuits into a single model. We propose a greedy, density-scaled composition algorithm that overcomes limitations of previous attempts to compose circuits by naive union, then generalize it to $N$ circuits via CircuitTree, a new data structure built on a $\Theta(N\log N)$ tree-compose schedule. We compose circuits pruned from HuBERT for classifying individual phonemes into a syllable classifier, a capability none of the 39 phoneme circuits has individually. Chaining CircuitTrees into a hierarchy-of-circuits pipeline, we transcribe open syllables at 64.8\% accuracy, within 1.2 points of a 66.0\% ceiling that shares no circuitry at all, with 99.5\% of circuit components shared.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12520
Social media is a rich source of real-time public sentiment, but widely used sentiment analysis tools are often applied without understanding their limitations. In this study, we evaluate the inter-rater reliability of three bespoke sentiment analysis tools (TextBlob, VADER, and Twitter-roBERTa-base) and three large language models (LLMs: Qwen3-32B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama-4-Maverick-17B) against six human raters across 100 tweets. We measured agreement using two statistical measures: Cohen's kappa for pairwise comparisons and Fleiss' kappa for multiple raters. Even among the human raters, our results showed only fair agreement, highlighting the subjectivity of sentiment analysis. Higher agreement was observed under the binary sentiment classification (negative vs. non-negative and positive vs. non-positive) than under the three-class classification across both humans and automated tools. The Twitter-roBERTa-base model showed the strongest alignment with human ratings, outperforming both bespoke sentiment tools and LLMs, particularly in distinguishing negative versus non-negative sentiment. LLMs showed substantial agreement among themselves and moderate to substantial alignment with humans, performing better in positive vs. non-positive classifications. Our findings underscore that domain-specific fine-tuning remains crucial for reliable social media sentiment analysis, and human-centered evaluation remains essential for establishing gold-standard labels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10318
There are more than 2,000 listed companies on the UK's London Stock Exchange, divided into 11 sectors who are required to communicate their financial results at least twice in a single financial year. UK annual reports are very lengthy documents with around 80 pages on average. In this study, we aim to benchmark a variety of summarisation methods on a set of different pre-trained transformers with different extraction techniques. In addition, we considered multiple evaluation metrics in order to investigate their differing behaviour and applicability on a dataset from the Financial Narrative Summarisation (FNS 2020) shared task, which is composed of annual reports published by firms listed on the London Stock Exchange and their corresponding summaries. We hypothesise that some evaluation metrics do not reflect true summarisation ability and propose a novel BRUGEscore metric, as the harmonic mean of ROUGE-2 and BERTscore. Finally, we perform a statistical significance test on our results to verify whether they are statistically robust, alongside an adversarial analysis task with three different corruption methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09529
Political discourse often uses rhetorical and persuasive language to frame narratives, influence public opinion, and mobilize audiences. While Bangla natural language processing has made progress in sentiment analysis and opinion mining, systematic benchmarking of transformer models for fine-grained rhetorical and persuasion technique detection in Bangla political speech remains largely underexplored. This paper presents a benchmark study of transformer-based models for detecting rhetorical form and persuasive intent in Bangla political discourse. Using BanglaRhet, a manually annotated corpus of 30,289 Bangla political speech segments collected from publicly available political news sources, we formulate two supervised single-label classification tasks: rhetorical technique detection (contrast, repetition, exaggeration, metaphor, rhetorical questions) and persuasion technique detection (blame assignment, call to action, unity call, moral, emotional, and logical appeals). We evaluate four transformer-based models, BanglaBERT, BanglaBERT-Base, SahajBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa-Base, against classical TF-IDF baselines. BanglaBERT achieves the highest performance, with 65.40% macro-F1 for rhetorical technique detection and 66.46% for persuasion technique detection, outperforming the best tuned classical baseline by 19.2 and 13.8 macro-F1 points, respectively. Class-level analysis indicates that errors are mainly associated with semantic overlap among labels, figurative language, and class imbalance. The results provide initial benchmark baselines for Bangla rhetorical and persuasion-aware political discourse analysis and highlight the need for context-aware and multi-label modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09464
Reconstructing 3D Computed Tomography (CT) images from a few X-ray projections is a highly ill-posed inverse problem due to the loss of volumetric information. We propose PhyDiCT, a training-free framework that integrates a differentiable Physics-based forward model, grounded in the Beer-Lambert law, with a text-conditioned Diffusion as a strong prior to reconstruct 3D lung CT images. We refer to our approach as training-free since the prior model is used without fine-tuning, and our goal is to steer the denoising procedure to generate samples consistent with X-ray observations. We guide the diffusion generation using Split Gibbs sampling to jointly optimize for projection fidelity (reward) and consistency with prior knowledge. Also, we introduce a test-time refinement step that enhances image realism and anatomical coherence. We extensively evaluate our method on publicly available 3D CT datasets using both perceptual and semantic metrics, demonstrating that it surpasses existing plug-and-play diffusion and fully trained reconstruction approaches. Our findings highlight that combining a strong generative prior with the underlying physics of image formation substantially improves reconstruction quality, e.g., 7.5\% improvement on SSIM compared to full training methods. Code will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09253
Substance Use Disorder (SUD) counseling requires patient responses that reflect underlying cognitive states such as beliefs, coping strategies, and readiness for change. Although large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent text, they often fail to produce cognitively coherent and clinically realistic patient behavior, especially under ethical and data-scarce clinical settings. Moreover, deploying frontier-scale LLMs in healthcare applications presents practical challenges including high computational cost, latency, privacy concerns, and limited deployability in resource-constrained environments, motivating the need for cognitively aligned small language models (SLMs). We propose a cognitively grounded framework for SUD patient dialogue generation that explicitly models and aligns latent cognitive components with patient histories and counselor questions. Our pipeline consists of two stages: cognitive component detection and cognitive component-aligned dialogue generation. To enable effective learning with smaller models, we combine knowledge distillation from high-capacity teacher models, preference optimization from human-annotations, and attention-guided reward shaping. Extensive evaluations using automatic scores like BERTScore, ROUGE, METEOR and BLEU, and LLM-as-judge hit-metrics against both human and teacher-model references show that cognitively informed fine-tuning substantially improves cognitive realization and alignment over a generic instruction-tuned baselines and mental health domain specific SLMs, with particularly strong gains for open-ended cognitive components.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09209
Multi-label topic assignment for user-generated content (UGC) -- including product reviews and buyer-seller conversations -- poses unique scalability challenges in large-scale e-commerce due to informal language, extreme label sparsity, and rapidly evolving taxonomies. While utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) as labeling oracles to distill ground-truth data has emerged as an industry standard to bypass prohibitive manual annotation costs, determining the optimal, low-latency architecture for the resulting student models remains an open challenge. To address this, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation across Small Language Model (SLM) parameter scales (1B, 4B, and 8B) and architectural paradigms (causal generative versus bidirectional discriminative). Comparing generative text-to-label classifiers against discriminative baselines (DeBERTa-V3 and ModernBERT), our analysis reveals a crucial data-dependent trade-off: while discriminative models outperform ultra-lightweight generative models on structured product reviews, even the smallest 1B generative model surpasses discriminative baselines on complex, multi-turn conversational data. Furthermore, generative models maintain robust performance under massive label-set expansion (up to 112 topics) and severe long-tail distributions, whereas discriminative baselines suffer a 35% drop in Macro-F1 at scale. Finally, we detail the successful production deployment of these optimized models across both product review and conversational domains, demonstrating strict latency compliance and tangible business impact at a global marketplace scale.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09063
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks embedded in retrieved content. We introduce RAG-PIBench, a benchmark for RAG-style prompt-injection detection containing 4,876 contextual examples across frozen train, validation, and protected-test splits. Using a leakage-aware construction pipeline and strict evaluation protocol, we compare keyword-based, semantic-reference, TF-IDF, and transformer-based detectors. DistilBERT achieves the best protected-test performance (F1 = 0.896, PR-AUC = 0.968), while TF-IDF SVM and logistic regression remain competitive. Our results demonstrate the value of leakage-aware benchmark design and strong sparse baselines for reliable prompt-injection detection in RAG systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08571
Paired translation between quasiperiodic physiological waveforms (i.e., recovering a target oscillatory signal from the source) is central to the interpretation of cardiovascular signals derived from wearables placed at different body locations. This source-to-target mapping in these problems carries inherent geometric structure: the phase wraps around the cycle and must be treated as a circular variable, the amplitude remains strictly positive, and the beat-to-beat alignment can drift unpredictably across cycles and subjects. While deep neural networks have been used for phase estimation and complex-valued signal modeling, prior work does not explicitly learn phase transport between paired signals. Consequently, neither endpoint-supervised regression nor the standard affine path used in flow matching accounts for this phase--amplitude structure. We introduce \emph{cylindrical geodesic flow matching} for paired cardiovascular waveform translation. We show that the standard affine path used in flow matching distorts intermediate amplitude and instantaneous frequency when interpolating between quasiperiodic signals; replacing it with a closed-form geodesic on the phase--amplitude cylinder eliminates these artifacts and converts each training pair into dense, geometry-consistent velocity supervision. On zero-shot photoplethysmography and limited-support seismocardiography adaptation benchmarks, our method consistently outperforms interpolation baselines and matches or exceeds direct supervised prediction, reducing Hilbert Transform, $L_2$, and Dynamic Time Warping distance by up to ${\sim}15\%$ over the strongest competing baseline. These results suggest that bridge geometry is a critical inductive bias for flow matching on oscillatory signal translation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08510