Thinking with Comics: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning through Structured Visual Storytelling

Chain-of-Thought reasoning has driven large language models to extend from thinking with text to thinking with images and videos. However, different modalities still have clear limitations: static images struggle to represent temporal structure, while videos introduce substantial redundancy and computational cost. In this work, we propose Thinking with Comics, a visual reasoning paradigm that uses comics as a high information-density medium positioned between images and videos. Comics preserve temporal structure, embedded text, and narrative coherence while requiring significantly lower reasoning cost. We systematically study two reasoning paths based on comics and evaluate them on a range of reasoning tasks and long-context understanding tasks. Experimental results show that Thinking with Comics outperforms Thinking with Images on multi-step temporal and causal reasoning tasks, while remaining substantially more efficient than Thinking with Video. Further analysis indicates that different comic narrative structures and styles consistently affect performance across tasks, suggesting that comics serve as an effective intermediate visual representation for improving multimodal reasoning.

Reasoning Over Space: Enabling Geographic Reasoning for LLM-Based Generative Next POI Recommendation

Generative recommendation with large language models (LLMs) reframes prediction as sequence generation, yet existing LLM-based recommenders remain limited in leveraging geographic signals that are crucial in mobility and local-services scenarios. Here, we present Reasoning Over Space (ROS), a framework that utilizes geography as a vital decision variable within the reasoning process. ROS introduces a Hierarchical Spatial Semantic ID (SID) that discretizes coarse-to-fine locality and POI semantics into compositional tokens, and endows LLM with a three-stage Mobility Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm that models user personality, constructs an intent-aligned candidate space, and performs locality informed pruning. We further align the model with real world geography via spatial-guided Reinforcement Learning (RL). Experiments on three widely used location-based social network (LBSN) datasets show that ROS achieves over 10% relative gains in hit rate over strongest LLM-based baselines and improves cross-city transfer, despite using a smaller backbone model.

Enhancing Large Language Models'Machine Translation via Dynamic Focus Anchoring

Large language models have demonstrated exceptional performance across multiple crosslingual NLP tasks, including machine translation (MT). However, persistent challenges remain in addressing context-sensitive units (CSUs), such as polysemous words. These CSUs not only affect the local translation accuracy of LLMs, but also affect LLMs' understanding capability for sentences and tasks, and even lead to translation failure. To address this problem, we propose a simple but effective method to enhance LLMs' MT capabilities by acquiring CSUs and applying semantic focus. Specifically, we dynamically analyze and identify translation challenges, then incorporate them into LLMs in a structured manner to mitigate mistranslations or misunderstandings of CSUs caused by information flattening. Efficiently activate LLMs to identify and apply relevant knowledge from its vast data pool in this way, ensuring more accurate translations for translating difficult terms. On a benchmark dataset of MT, our proposed method achieved competitive performance compared to multiple existing open-sourced MT baseline models. It demonstrates effectiveness and robustness across multiple language pairs, including both similar language pairs and distant language pairs. Notably, the proposed method requires no additional model training and enhances LLMs' performance across multiple NLP tasks with minimal resource consumption.

Cross-Domain Bilingual Lexicon Induction via Pretrained Language Models

Bilingual Lexicon Induction (BLI) is generally based on common domain data to obtain monolingual word embedding, and by aligning the monolingual word embeddings to obtain the cross-lingual embeddings which are used to get the word translation pairs. In this paper, we propose a new task of BLI, which is to use the monolingual corpus of the general domain and target domain to extract domain-specific bilingual dictionaries. Motivated by the ability of Pre-trained models, we propose a method to get better word embeddings that build on the recent work on BLI. This way, we introduce the Code Switch(Qin et al., 2020) firstly in the cross-domain BLI task, which can match differit is yet to be seen whether these methods are suitable for bilingual lexicon extraction in professional fields. As we can see in table 1, the classic and efficient BLI approach, Muse and Vecmap, perform much worse on the Medical dataset than on the Wiki dataset. On one hand, the specialized domain data set is relatively smaller compared to the generic domain data set generally, and specialized words have a lower frequency, which will directly affect the translation quality of bilingual dictionaries. On the other hand, static word embeddings are widely used for BLI, however, in some specific fields, the meaning of words is greatly influenced by context, in this case, using only static word embeddings may lead to greater bias. ent strategies in different contexts, making the model more suitable for this task. Experimental results show that our method can improve performances over robust BLI baselines on three specific domains by averagely improving 0.78 points.