Improving Access to Historical Archives with Real-time RAG-based Systems

Digitized historical archives are large, heterogeneous cultural heritage repositories, but access methods for such archives face challenges such as noisy optical character recognition (OCR) output and rigid keyword-based retrieval, which limit retrieval quality. In this work, we present an end-to-end archival processing and retrieval framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) into the archival pipeline. Our system introduces two core components: (i) an LLM-based OCR refinement module that improves text quality, and (ii) a semantic retrieval and cross-encoder reranking pipeline supporting natural-language question answering via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our evaluations are done on a historical archival dataset of 500,000 Swiss newspaper segments spanning over three centuries (1762 to 2001). Experiments are conducted across 384 natural-language test queries. Our results highlight that LLM refinements reduce OCR errors by up to 44.52% (CER) and 60.95% (WER). More importantly, this is accompanied by downstream information retrieval improvements. Compared to traditional keyword baselines, our reranking pipeline increases NDCG@10 by 31.9% (from 65.99% to 87.05%) and achieves statistically significant gains in both answer correctness and context relevance. These results demonstrate that integrating LLMs with established document processing and retrieval pipelines can elevate digital libraries from static repositories to interactive, semantically searchable archival systems.

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

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 essential discriminator of deeper collaboration.

When Does Mixing Help? Analyzing Query Embedding Interpolation in Multilingual Dense Retrieval

While mixed-language querying is ubiquitous in multilingual communities, the sensitivity of dense retrievers to such queries remains poorly understood. We present a ratio-controlled study on mMARCO that systematically evaluates retrieval performance by varying the mixing proportion of parallel query translations via embedding-level mixing -- constructing mixed queries as an interpolation of monolingual embeddings. Experiments with BGE-M3 demonstrate that an optimal mixing ratio outperforms the best monolingual endpoint in 88/105 cases. We uncover a distinct asymmetry driven by English dominance: mixing is uniformly beneficial when retrieving from non-English document indices, whereas indices containing English are best served by pure English queries. Furthermore, English acts as the strongest mixing partner for every non-English document language. Finally, when controlling for English dominance, mixing gains correlate negatively with typological distance. We conclude that language-mix sensitivity is structured and predictable, and we validate the robustness of these patterns across model families and scales.

The Deliberative Illusion: Diagnosing Factual Attrition and Stance Homogenization in Multi-Agent LLM Deliberation

Multi-agent LLM systems often treat consensus as evidence of successful interaction. For deliberative problems, however, reliability depends on whether agents preserve the facts and viewpoints needed to interpret an issue. We identify the deliberative illusion: discussion produces (1) factual attrition, the progressive loss of issue-critical facts, alongside (2) stance homogenization, the collapse of diverse positions toward consensus. To measure this process, we introduce DelibTrace, a framework that decomposes each issue into atomic facts, labels issue-critical ones, distributes them across agents, and tracks their survival across discussion rounds. Across ethical and news-based deliberation with three representative LLM families, multi-agent discussion erases up to 72% of issue-critical facts. This loss is consequential: retained evidence can reconstruct the issue misleadingly, final stances remain anchored in base-model priors, and a single malicious agent can inject misinformation into the shrinking shared context. These results reveal a sharper risk: agents can agree more while knowing less. We call for evaluations that measure which facts, uncertainties, and legitimate disagreements survive interaction.

Better with Experience: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Evidence-Grounded Health Community Notes

Large Language Model (LLM)-augmented Community Notes offer a scalable path for timely, evidence-grounded correction of health misinformation on social platforms. However, they still reset at every post, leaving useful correction experience from prior cases unused. We introduce EvoNote, an agentic framework that enables health Community Notes generation to self-evolve through an evolving experience memory of prior misinformation correction episodes. Its core is fine-grained credit assignment: EvoNote grounds trajectory-level feedback in health-specific note qualities and distills it into action-level memory for claim analysis, evidence acquisition, and note writing. We evaluate EvoNote on MM-HealthCN, a 1.2K-instance multimodal benchmark of user-flagged health posts with human-written Community Notes and crowd-derived helpfulness labels. Under a human-validated hierarchical utility judge, EvoNote-generated notes are preferred over corresponding human-written notes in 89.6% of cases; on a separate set of Needs More Ratings posts without a crowd helpfulness verdict, EvoNote produces helpful notes for 82.0% of cases. It also reduces the median time needed to produce a candidate correction from over 13 hours in the human-note pipeline to under 2 minutes. Analyses link these gains to stronger evidence use and reusable correction strategies, positioning self-evolving note generation as a promising paradigm for health misinformation governance.

CommunityFact: A Dynamic, Multilingual, Multi-domain Benchmark for Misinformation Detection in the Wild

Misinformation verification increasingly occurs in public, fast-moving, and multilingual online settings, where static benchmarks provide an incomplete measure of model reliability. We introduce CommunityFact, a refreshable benchmark for misinformation detection in the wild, with three major goals: coverage, granularity, and redistributability. This release contains 15,992 standalone claims across five languages and two domains. We evaluate ten LLMs under varying inference-time capabilities, including thinking and web-search. Our results show that closed-input verification remains challenging, web access yields the largest gains, and web-enabled LLMs' source-selection policies are systematically misaligned with the sources human Community Notes raters converge on -- a gap that closes through model-specific mechanisms of retrieval expansion or pruning. We further find substantial variation across language-domain slices and across the evidence ecosystems used by web-enabled systems. Beyond evaluation, CommunityFact positions Community Notes as a training signal for claim-conditioned source suggesters that could improve factual verification on novel claims.

GitSearch: Enhancing Community Notes Generation with Gap-Informed Targeted Search

Community-based moderation offers a scalable alternative to centralized fact-checking, yet it faces significant structural challenges, and existing AI-based methods fail in "cold start" scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we introduce GitSearch (Gap-Informed Targeted Search), a framework that treats human-perceived quality gaps, such as missing context, etc., as first-class signals. GitSearch has a three-stage pipeline: identifying information deficits, executing real-time targeted web-retrieval to resolve them, and synthesizing platform-compliant notes. To facilitate evaluation, we present PolBench, a benchmark of 78,698 U.S. political tweets with their associated Community Notes. We find GitSearch achieves 99% coverage, almost doubling coverage over the state-of-the-art. GitSearch surpasses human-authored helpful notes with a 69% win rate and superior helpfulness scores (3.87 vs. 3.36), demonstrating retrieval effectiveness that balanced the trade-off between scale and quality.

Epistemic Context Learning: Building Trust the Right Way in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

Individual agents in multi-agent (MA) systems often lack robustness, tending to blindly conform to misleading peers. We show this weakness stems from both sycophancy and inadequate ability to evaluate peer reliability. To address this, we first formalize the learning problem of history-aware reference, introducing the historical interactions of peers as additional input, so that agents can estimate peer reliability and learn from trustworthy peers when uncertain. This shifts the task from evaluating peer reasoning quality to estimating peer reliability based on interaction history. We then develop Epistemic Context Learning (ECL): a reasoning framework that conditions predictions on explicitly-built peer profiles from history. We further optimize ECL by reinforcement learning using auxiliary rewards. Our experiments reveal that our ECL enables small models like Qwen 3-4B to outperform a history-agnostic baseline 8x its size (Qwen 3-30B) by accurately identifying reliable peers. ECL also boosts frontier models to near-perfect (100%) performance. We show that ECL generalizes well to various MA configurations and we find that trust is modeled well by LLMs, revealing a strong correlation in trust modeling accuracy and final answer quality.

Manager: Aggregating Insights from Unimodal Experts in Two-Tower VLMs and MLLMs

Two-Tower Vision--Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various downstream VL tasks. While BridgeTower further enhances performance by building bridges between encoders, it \textit{(i)} suffers from ineffective layer-by-layer utilization of unimodal representations, \textit{(ii)} restricts the flexible exploitation of different levels of unimodal semantic knowledge, and \textit{(iii)} is limited to the evaluation on traditional low-resolution datasets only with the Two-Tower VLM architecture. In this work, we propose Manager, a lightweight, efficient and effective plugin that adaptively aggregates insights from different levels of pre-trained unimodal experts to facilitate more comprehensive VL alignment and fusion. First, under the Two-Tower VLM architecture, we introduce ManagerTower, a novel VLM that introduces the manager in each cross-modal layer. Whether with or without VL pre-training, ManagerTower outperforms previous strong baselines and achieves superior performance on 4 downstream VL tasks. Moreover, we extend our exploration to the latest Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) architecture. We demonstrate that LLaVA-OV-Manager significantly boosts the zero-shot performance of LLaVA-OV across different categories of capabilities, images, and resolutions on 20 downstream datasets, whether the multi-grid algorithm is enabled or not. In-depth analysis reveals that both our manager and the multi-grid algorithm can be viewed as a plugin that improves the visual representation by capturing more diverse visual details from two orthogonal perspectives (depth and width). Their synergy can mitigate the semantic ambiguity caused by the multi-grid algorithm and further improve performance. Code and models are available at https://github.com/LooperXX/ManagerTower.

What Makes a Good Natural Language Prompt?

As large language models (LLMs) have progressed towards more human-like and human--AI communications have become prevalent, prompting has emerged as a decisive component. However, there is limited conceptual consensus on what exactly quantifies natural language prompts. We attempt to address this question by conducting a meta-analysis surveying more than 150 prompting-related papers from leading NLP and AI conferences from 2022 to 2025 and blogs. We propose a property- and human-centric framework for evaluating prompt quality, encompassing 21 properties categorized into six dimensions. We then examine how existing studies assess their impact on LLMs, revealing their imbalanced support across models and tasks, and substantial research gaps. Further, we analyze correlations among properties in high-quality natural language prompts, deriving prompting recommendations. We then empirically explore multi-property prompt enhancements in reasoning tasks, observing that single-property enhancements often have the greatest impact. Finally, we discover that instruction-tuning on property-enhanced prompts can result in better reasoning models. Our findings establish a foundation for property-centric prompt evaluation and optimization, bridging the gaps between human--AI communication and opening new prompting research directions.