Retrieve-Refine-Calibrate: A Framework for Complex Claim Fact-Checking

Fact-checking aims to verify the truthfulness of a claim based on the retrieved evidence. Existing methods typically follow a decomposition paradigm, in which a claim is broken down into sub-claims that are individually verified. However, the decomposition paradigm may introduce noise to the verification process due to irrelevant entities or evidence, ultimately degrading verification accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a Retrieve-Refine-Calibrate (RRC) framework based on large language models (LLMs). Specifically, the framework first identifies the entities mentioned in the claim and retrieves evidence relevant to them. Then, it refines the retrieved evidence based on the claim to reduce irrelevant information. Finally, it calibrates the verification process by re-evaluating low-confidence predictions. Experiments on two popular fact-checking datasets (HOVER and FEVEROUS-S) demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance compared with competitive baselines.

AEQ-Bench: Measuring Empathy of Omni-Modal Large Models

While the automatic evaluation of omni-modal large models (OLMs) is essential, assessing empathy remains a significant challenge due to its inherent affectivity. To investigate this challenge, we introduce AEQ-Bench (Audio Empathy Quotient Benchmark), a novel benchmark to systematically assess two core empathetic capabilities of OLMs: (i) generating empathetic responses by comprehending affective cues from multi-modal inputs (audio + text), and (ii) judging the empathy of audio responses without relying on text transcription. Compared to existing benchmarks, AEQ-Bench incorporates two novel settings that vary in context specificity and speech tone. Comprehensive assessment across linguistic and paralinguistic metrics reveals that (1) OLMs trained with audio output capabilities generally outperformed models with text-only outputs, and (2) while OLMs align with human judgments for coarse-grained quality assessment, they remain unreliable for evaluating fine-grained paralinguistic expressiveness.

NDRL: Cotton Irrigation and Nitrogen Application with Nested Dual-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Effective irrigation and nitrogen fertilization have a significant impact on crop yield. However, existing research faces two limitations: (1) the high complexity of optimizing water-nitrogen combinations during crop growth and poor yield optimization results; and (2) the difficulty in quantifying mild stress signals and the delayed feedback, which results in less precise dynamic regulation of water and nitrogen and lower resource utilization efficiency. To address these issues, we propose a Nested Dual-Agent Reinforcement Learning (NDRL) method. The parent agent in NDRL identifies promising macroscopic irrigation and fertilization actions based on projected cumulative yield benefits, reducing ineffective explorationwhile maintaining alignment between objectives and yield. The child agent's reward function incorporates quantified Water Stress Factor (WSF) and Nitrogen Stress Factor (NSF), and uses a mixed probability distribution to dynamically optimize daily strategies, thereby enhancing both yield and resource efficiency. We used field experiment data from 2023 and 2024 to calibrate and validate the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) to simulate real-world conditions and interact with NDRL. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the best baseline, the simulated yield increased by 4.7% in both 2023 and 2024, the irrigation water productivity increased by 5.6% and 5.1% respectively, and the nitrogen partial factor productivity increased by 6.3% and 1.0% respectively. Our method advances the development of cotton irrigation and nitrogen fertilization, providing new ideas for addressing the complexity and precision issues in agricultural resource management and for sustainable agricultural development.

PRISM of Opinions: A Persona-Reasoned Multimodal Framework for User-centric Conversational Stance Detection

The rapid proliferation of multimodal social media content has driven research in Multimodal Conversational Stance Detection (MCSD), which aims to interpret users' attitudes toward specific targets within complex discussions. However, existing studies remain limited by: **1) pseudo-multimodality**, where visual cues appear only in source posts while comments are treated as text-only, misaligning with real-world multimodal interactions; and **2) user homogeneity**, where diverse users are treated uniformly, neglecting personal traits that shape stance expression. To address these issues, we introduce **U-MStance**, the first user-centric MCSD dataset, containing over 40k annotated comments across six real-world targets. We further propose **PRISM**, a **P**ersona-**R**easoned mult**I**modal **S**tance **M**odel for MCSD. PRISM first derives longitudinal user personas from historical posts and comments to capture individual traits, then aligns textual and visual cues within conversational context via Chain-of-Thought to bridge semantic and pragmatic gaps across modalities. Finally, a mutual task reinforcement mechanism is employed to jointly optimize stance detection and stance-aware response generation for bidirectional knowledge transfer. Experiments on U-MStance demonstrate that PRISM yields significant gains over strong baselines, underscoring the effectiveness of user-centric and context-grounded multimodal reasoning for realistic stance understanding.

ReMoD: Rethinking Modality Contribution in Multimodal Stance Detection via Dual Reasoning

Multimodal Stance Detection (MSD) is a crucial task for understanding public opinion on social media. Existing work simply fuses information from various modalities to learn stance representations, overlooking the varying contributions of stance expression from different modalities. Therefore, stance misunderstanding noises may be drawn into the stance learning process due to the risk of learning errors by rough modality combination. To address this, we get inspiration from the dual-process theory of human cognition and propose **ReMoD**, a framework that **Re**thinks **Mo**dality contribution of stance expression through a **D**ual-reasoning paradigm. ReMoD integrates *experience-driven intuitive reasoning* to capture initial stance cues with *deliberate reflective reasoning* to adjust for modality biases, refine stance judgments, and thereby dynamically weight modality contributions based on their actual expressive power for the target stance. Specifically, the intuitive stage queries the Modality Experience Pool (MEP) and Semantic Experience Pool (SEP) to form an initial stance hypothesis, prioritizing historically impactful modalities. This hypothesis is then refined in the reflective stage via two reasoning chains: Modality-CoT updates MEP with adaptive fusion strategies to amplify relevant modalities, while Semantic-CoT refines SEP with deeper contextual insights of stance semantics. These dual experience structures are continuously refined during training and recalled at inference to guide robust and context-aware stance decisions. Extensive experiments on the public MMSD benchmark demonstrate that our ReMoD significantly outperforms most baseline models and exhibits strong generalization capabilities.

Bridging the Long-Term Gap: A Memory-Active Policy for Multi-Session Task-Oriented Dialogue

Existing Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems primarily focus on single-session dialogues, limiting their effectiveness in long-term memory augmentation. To address this challenge, we introduce a MS-TOD dataset, the first multi-session TOD dataset designed to retain long-term memory across sessions, enabling fewer turns and more efficient task completion. This defines a new benchmark task for evaluating long-term memory in multi-session TOD. Based on this new dataset, we propose a Memory-Active Policy (MAP) that improves multi-session dialogue efficiency through a two-stage approach. 1) Memory-Guided Dialogue Planning retrieves intent-aligned history, identifies key QA units via a memory judger, refines them by removing redundant questions, and generates responses based on the reconstructed memory. 2) Proactive Response Strategy detects and correct errors or omissions, ensuring efficient and accurate task completion. We evaluate MAP on MS-TOD dataset, focusing on response quality and effectiveness of the proactive strategy. Experiments on MS-TOD demonstrate that MAP significantly improves task success and turn efficiency in multi-session scenarios, while maintaining competitive performance on conventional single-session tasks.

Sparse Activation Editing for Reliable Instruction Following in Narratives

Complex narrative contexts often challenge language models' ability to follow instructions, and existing benchmarks fail to capture these difficulties. To address this, we propose Concise-SAE, a training-free framework that improves instruction following by identifying and editing instruction-relevant neurons using only natural language instructions, without requiring labelled data. To thoroughly evaluate our method, we introduce FreeInstruct, a diverse and realistic benchmark of 1,212 examples that highlights the challenges of instruction following in narrative-rich settings. While initially motivated by complex narratives, Concise-SAE demonstrates state-of-the-art instruction adherence across varied tasks without compromising generation quality.

Targeted Distillation for Sentiment Analysis

This paper presents a compact model that achieves strong sentiment analysis capabilities through targeted distillation from advanced large language models (LLMs). Our methodology decouples the distillation target into two key components: sentiment-related knowledge and task alignment. To transfer these components, we propose a two-stage distillation framework. The first stage, knowledge-driven distillation (\textsc{KnowDist}), transfers sentiment-related knowledge to enhance fundamental sentiment analysis capabilities. The second stage, in-context learning distillation (\textsc{ICLDist}), transfers task-specific prompt-following abilities to optimize task alignment. For evaluation, we introduce \textsc{SentiBench}, a comprehensive sentiment analysis benchmark comprising 3 task categories across 12 datasets. Experiments on this benchmark demonstrate that our model effectively balances model size and performance, showing strong competitiveness compared to existing small-scale LLMs.

xJailbreak: Representation Space Guided Reinforcement Learning for Interpretable LLM Jailbreaking

Safety alignment mechanism are essential for preventing large language models (LLMs) from generating harmful information or unethical content. However, cleverly crafted prompts can bypass these safety measures without accessing the model's internal parameters, a phenomenon known as black-box jailbreak. Existing heuristic black-box attack methods, such as genetic algorithms, suffer from limited effectiveness due to their inherent randomness, while recent reinforcement learning (RL) based methods often lack robust and informative reward signals. To address these challenges, we propose a novel black-box jailbreak method leveraging RL, which optimizes prompt generation by analyzing the embedding proximity between benign and malicious prompts. This approach ensures that the rewritten prompts closely align with the intent of the original prompts while enhancing the attack's effectiveness. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive jailbreak evaluation framework incorporating keywords, intent matching, and answer validation to provide a more rigorous and holistic assessment of jailbreak success. Experimental results show the superiority of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on several prominent open and closed-source LLMs, including Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Llama3.1-8B-Instruct, and GPT-4o-0806. Our method sets a new benchmark in jailbreak attack effectiveness, highlighting potential vulnerabilities in LLMs. The codebase for this work is available at https://github.com/Aegis1863/xJailbreak.

AutoCBT: An Autonomous Multi-agent Framework for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Psychological Counseling

Traditional in-person psychological counseling remains primarily niche, often chosen by individuals with psychological issues, while online automated counseling offers a potential solution for those hesitant to seek help due to feelings of shame. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an essential and widely used approach in psychological counseling. The advent of large language models (LLMs) and agent technology enables automatic CBT diagnosis and treatment. However, current LLM-based CBT systems use agents with a fixed structure, limiting their self-optimization capabilities, or providing hollow, unhelpful suggestions due to redundant response patterns. In this work, we utilize Quora-like and YiXinLi single-round consultation models to build a general agent framework that generates high-quality responses for single-turn psychological consultation scenarios. We use a bilingual dataset to evaluate the quality of single-response consultations generated by each framework. Then, we incorporate dynamic routing and supervisory mechanisms inspired by real psychological counseling to construct a CBT-oriented autonomous multi-agent framework, demonstrating its general applicability. Experimental results indicate that AutoCBT can provide higher-quality automated psychological counseling services.