Beyond Feeling Better: Capability-Sustaining Emotional Dialogue as a Longitudinal Research Paradigm

Emotional dialogue research includes two influential strategy traditions. Empathetic dialogue prioritizes understanding a speaker's emotional experience. Emotional support conversation selects and sequences support for the seeker's current needs. Sustained use introduces a further goal. Effective support should sustain users' capacities for emotion regulation, coping, self-endorsed decisions, and social connection across the interaction lifecycle. We propose capability-sustaining emotional dialogue (CSED) as a longitudinal research paradigm that aligns supportive strategy with this goal and organizes data, models, system design, evaluation, and governance around repeated use, non-use, transition, and termination. A targeted literature-and-corpus audit motivates this position. In a PRISMA-ScR-guided sample, 95% of 60 system-building papers pursue relief-oriented goals. None evaluates capability or longitudinal outcomes, and only 1 considers dependency, autonomy, or termination risk. In 300 ESConv supporter turns, capability-relevant functions appear in 43.0%, while generic suggestions account for 22.0%, compared with 4.0% reappraisal, 6.7% self-efficacy support, and 0.3% boundary behavior. We release a protocol for extending the audit to model behavior. An illustrative process model connects latent user capability to six design commitments, four evaluation timescales, and lifecycle constraints. The resulting agenda makes CSED testable across data, policy design, training, evaluation, and governance.

Efficiency Meets Reliability: Enhanced Generalized Interleaved Transform for Random Multiplexing

To meet the demands of 6G wireless systems operating in high-mobility scenarios, this paper presents a design of a random multiplexing (RM) communication system that is both storage-efficient and highly reliable. In principle, RM with cross-domain memory approximate message passing (CD-MAMP) can achieve replica maximum a posteriori (MAP)-optimal performance by constructing a fully dense equivalent channel matrix. However, its practical implementation is hindered by the large storage overhead of conventional interleavers and by performance degradation in severely ill-conditioned channels, which existing related work (focusing on interleaving and transform designs) fails to address simultaneously. To overcome these issues, we develop a storage-efficient and highly reliable system that integrates RM with CD-MAMP, referred to as RM-MAMP. Specifically, we propose a Logistic chaotic mapping interleaver with a quantitative parameter-selection criterion, and a dual-stage high-order permutation polynomial interleaver, both of which achieve nearly identical bit-error-rate (BER) as fully random interleavers while reducing the interleaver storage from O(N) to O(1) and significantly lowering interleaver signaling overhead. We further propose a highly reliable interleaved transform framework, comprising an interleaved phase perturbation transform and a multi-layer interleaved coupled transform, to enhance the incoherence and diversity of the equivalent channel matrix. Simulation results show that the proposed storage-efficient interleavers maintain BER performance comparable to fully random interleavers, while the highly reliable transforms provide over 4 dB gain in severely time-varying channels, confirming the dual benefits of reduced storage overhead and improved robustness for the enhanced RM-MAMP system.

GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing

Self-report questionnaires remain the prevailing tool for probing the psychological states of persona-conditioned agents (PC-Agents). However, classical instruments inherit two well-known threats: contamination from training corpora and directional bias driven by social-desirability or contextual framing. To overcome these methodological bottlenecks, we ask whether projective paradigms can be adapted into a robust psychometric tool. We introduce \textbf{GenPT} (Generative Projective Testing), which reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organizes assessment as a three-stage pipeline to derive standardized psychological indicators and target states. Evaluating PC-Agents induced via CharacterRAG and AnnaAgent profiles, we benchmark GenPT's reliability and validity against classical questionnaires. The results indicate that questionnaires exhibit systematic directional shifts under social-desirability framing, most strongly on suicide ideation. In contrast, GenPT's collected behavioral patterns stay near the symmetric baseline. Furthermore, under a longitudinal counselling context, GenPT-based depression assessment shifts by roughly an order of magnitude more than the questionnaire counterpart when Qwen3 serves as the backbone. Overall, GenPT complements self-report methods in scenarios where contamination resistance, bias asymmetry, and context sensitivity matter. Code and stimuli can be found at https://github.com/sci-m-wang/GenPT.

Translating Signals to Languages for sEMG-Based Activity Recognition

Surface electromyography (sEMG) signal-based activity recognition has attracted increasing research attention in recent years. To develop accurate sEMG signal-based activity recognizers, numerous approaches have been proposed. Some studies focus on designing larger and more expressive model architectures to enhance the representational capacity of sEMG signals, while others aim to enrich model priors through large-scale pretraining, thereby improving recognition performance. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable generalization and reasoning capabilities in natural language processing, whose implicit knowledge, learned from extensive linguistic descriptions of actions, opens new possibilities for interpreting sEMG signals and inferring activity intentions. Motivated by this, we propose LLM-sEMG, a novel framework that leverages LLMs as sEMG activity recognizers. Within this framework, we design a language-oriented mapping mechanism that converts continuous sEMG sequences into sEMG language, integrating several strategies to further facilitate the signal-to-language mapping process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves highly accurate sEMG signal-based activity recognition using large language models.

AgenticQwen: Training Small Agentic Language Models with Dual Data Flywheels for Industrial-Scale Tool Use

Modern industrial applications increasingly demand language models that act as agents, capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use in real-world settings. These tasks are typically performed under strict cost and latency constraints, making small agentic models highly desirable. In this paper, we introduce the AgenticQwen family of models, trained via multi-round reinforcement learning (RL) on synthetic data and a limited amount of open-source data. Our training framework combines reasoning RL and agentic RL with dual data flywheels that automatically generate increasingly challenging tasks. The reasoning flywheel increases task difficulty by learning from errors, while the agentic flywheel expands linear workflows into multi-branch behavior trees that better reflect the decision complexity of real-world applications. We validate AgenticQwen on public benchmarks and in an industrial agent system. The models achieve strong performance on multiple agentic benchmarks, and in our industrial agent system, close the gap with much larger models on search and data analysis tasks. Model checkpoints and part of the synthetic data: https://huggingface.co/collections/alibaba-pai/agenticqwen. Data synthesis and RL training code: https://github.com/haruhi-sudo/data_synth_and_rl. The data synthesis pipeline is also integrated into EasyDistill: https://github.com/modelscope/easydistill.

A Systematic Analysis of the Impact of Persona Steering on LLM Capabilities

Imbuing Large Language Models (LLMs) with specific personas is prevalent for tailoring interaction styles, yet the impact on underlying cognitive capabilities remains unexplored. We employ the Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction (NPTI) framework to induce Big Five personality traits in LLMs and evaluate performance across six cognitive benchmarks. Our findings reveal that persona induction produces stable, reproducible shifts in cognitive task performance beyond surface-level stylistic changes. These effects exhibit strong task dependence: certain personalities yield consistent gains on instruction-following, while others impair complex reasoning. Effect magnitude varies systematically by trait dimension, with Openness and Extraversion exerting the most robust influence. Furthermore, LLM effects show 73.68% directional consistency with human personality-cognition relationships. Capitalizing on these regularities, we propose Dynamic Persona Routing (DPR), a lightweight query-adaptive strategy that outperforms the best static persona without additional training.

Synthetic or Authentic? Building Mental Patient Simulators from Longitudinal Evidence

Patient simulation is essential for developing and evaluating mental health dialogue systems. As most existing approaches rely on snapshot-style prompts with limited profile information, homogeneous behaviors and incoherent disease progression in multi-turn interactions have become key chellenges. In this work, we propose DEPROFILE, a data-grounded patient simulation framework that constructs unified, multi-source patient profiles by integrating demographic attributes, standardized clinical symptoms, counseling dialogues, and longitudinal life-event histories from real-world data. We further introduce a Chain-of-Change agent to transform noisy longitudinal records into structured, temporally grounded memory representations for simulation. Experiments across multiple large language model (LLM) backbones show that with more comprehensive profile constructed by DEPROFILE, the dialogue realism, behavioral diversity, and event richness have consistently improved and exceed state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the importance of grounding patient simulation in verifiable longitudinal evidence.

Fine-grained Verbal Attack Detection via a Hierarchical Divide-and-Conquer Framework

In the digital era, effective identification and analysis of verbal attacks are essential for maintaining online civility and ensuring social security. However, existing research is limited by insufficient modeling of conversational structure and contextual dependency, particularly in Chinese social media where implicit attacks are prevalent. Current attack detection studies often emphasize general semantic understanding while overlooking user response relationships, hindering the identification of implicit and context-dependent attacks. To address these challenges, we present the novel "Hierarchical Attack Comment Detection" dataset and propose a divide-and-conquer, fine-grained framework for verbal attack recognition based on spatiotemporal information. The proposed dataset explicitly encodes hierarchical reply structures and chronological order, capturing complex interaction patterns in multi-turn discussions. Building on this dataset, the framework decomposes attack detection into hierarchical subtasks, where specialized lightweight models handle explicit detection, implicit intent inference, and target identification under constrained context. Extensive experiments on the proposed dataset and benchmark intention detection datasets show that smaller models using our framework significantly outperform larger monolithic models relying on parameter scaling, demonstrating the effectiveness of structured task decomposition.

MindChat: A Privacy-preserving Large Language Model for Mental Health Support

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for mental health support, yet training such models is constrained by the scarcity and sensitivity of real counseling dialogues. In this article, we present MindChat, a privacy-preserving LLM for mental health support, together with MindCorpus, a synthetic multi-turn counseling dataset constructed via a multi-agent role-playing framework. To synthesize high-quality counseling data, the developed dialogue-construction framework employs a dual closed-loop feedback design to integrate psychological expertise and counseling techniques through role-playing: (i) turn-level critique-and-revision to improve coherence and counseling appropriateness within a session, and (ii) session-level strategy refinement to progressively enrich counselor behaviors across sessions. To mitigate privacy risks under decentralized data ownership, we fine-tune the base model using federated learning with parameter-efficient LoRA adapters and incorporate differentially private optimization to reduce membership and memorization risks. Experiments on synthetic-data quality assessment and counseling capability evaluation show that MindCorpus improves training effectiveness and that MindChat is competitive with existing general and counseling-oriented LLM baselines under both automatic LLM-judge and human evaluation protocols, while exhibiting reduced privacy leakage under membership inference attacks.

REPAIR: Robust Editing via Progressive Adaptive Intervention and Reintegration

Post-training for large language models (LLMs) is constrained by the high cost of acquiring new knowledge or correcting errors and by the unintended side effects that frequently arise from retraining. To address these issues, we introduce REPAIR (Robust Editing via Progressive Adaptive Intervention and Reintegration), a lifelong editing framework designed to support precise and low-cost model updates while preserving non-target knowledge. REPAIR mitigates the instability and conflicts of large-scale sequential edits through a closed-loop feedback mechanism coupled with dynamic memory management. Furthermore, by incorporating frequent knowledge fusion and enforcing strong locality guards, REPAIR effectively addresses the shortcomings of traditional distribution-agnostic approaches that often overlook unintended ripple effects. Our experiments demonstrate that REPAIR boosts editing accuracy by 10%-30% across multiple model families and significantly reduces knowledge forgetting. This work introduces a robust framework for developing reliable, scalable, and continually evolving LLMs.