Pardon? Evaluating Conversational Repair in Large Audio-Language Models

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated strong performance in spoken question answering (QA), with existing evaluations primarily focusing on answer accuracy and robustness to acoustic perturbations. However, such evaluations implicitly assume that spoken inputs remain semantically answerable, an assumption that often fails in real-world interaction when essential information is missing. In this work, we introduce a repair-aware evaluation setting that explicitly distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. We define answerability as a property of the input itself and construct paired evaluation conditions using a semantic-acoustic masking protocol. Based on this setting, we propose the Evaluability Awareness and Repair (EAR) score, a non-compensatory metric that jointly evaluates task competence under answerable conditions and repair behavior under unanswerable conditions. Experiments on two spoken QA benchmarks across diverse LALMs reveal a consistent gap between answer accuracy and conversational reliability: while many models perform well when inputs are answerable, most fail to recognize semantic unanswerability and initiate appropriate conversational repair. These findings expose a limitation of prevailing accuracy-centric evaluation practices and motivate reliability assessments that treat unanswerable inputs as cues for repair and continued interaction.

Language of Thought Shapes Output Diversity in Large Language Models

Output diversity is crucial for Large Language Models as it underpins pluralism and creativity. In this work, we reveal that controlling the language used during model thinking-the language of thought-provides a novel and structural source of output diversity. Our preliminary study shows that different thinking languages occupy distinct regions in a model's thinking space. Based on this observation, we study two repeated sampling strategies under multilingual thinking-Single-Language Sampling and Mixed-Language Sampling-and conduct diversity evaluation on outputs that are controlled to be in English, regardless of the thinking language used. Across extensive experiments, we demonstrate that switching the thinking language from English to non-English languages consistently increases output diversity, with a clear and consistent positive correlation such that languages farther from English in the thinking space yield larger gains. We further show that aggregating samples across multiple thinking languages yields additional improvements through compositional effects, and that scaling sampling with linguistic heterogeneity expands the model's diversity ceiling. Finally, we show that these findings translate into practical benefits in pluralistic alignment scenarios, leading to broader coverage of cultural knowledge and value orientations in LLM outputs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/iNLP-Lab/Multilingual-LoT-Diversity.

DR-Arena: an Automated Evaluation Framework for Deep Research Agents

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly operate as Deep Research (DR) Agents capable of autonomous investigation and information synthesis, reliable evaluation of their task performance has become a critical bottleneck. Current benchmarks predominantly rely on static datasets, which suffer from several limitations: limited task generality, temporal misalignment, and data contamination. To address these, we introduce DR-Arena, a fully automated evaluation framework that pushes DR agents to their capability limits through dynamic investigation. DR-Arena constructs real-time Information Trees from fresh web trends to ensure the evaluation rubric is synchronized with the live world state, and employs an automated Examiner to generate structured tasks testing two orthogonal capabilities: Deep reasoning and Wide coverage. DR-Arena further adopts Adaptive Evolvement Loop, a state-machine controller that dynamically escalates task complexity based on real-time performance, demanding deeper deduction or wider aggregation until a decisive capability boundary emerges. Experiments with six advanced DR agents demonstrate that DR-Arena achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.94 with the LMSYS Search Arena leaderboard. This represents the state-of-the-art alignment with human preferences without any manual efforts, validating DR-Arena as a reliable alternative for costly human adjudication.

Explainable Ethical Assessment on Human Behaviors by Generating Conflicting Social Norms

Human behaviors are often guided or constrained by social norms, which are defined as shared, commonsense rules. For example, underlying an action ``\textit{report a witnessed crime}" are social norms that inform our conduct, such as ``\textit{It is expected to be brave to report crimes}''. Current AI systems that assess valence (i.e., support or oppose) of human actions by leveraging large-scale data training not grounded on explicit norms may be difficult to explain, and thus untrustworthy. Emulating human assessors by considering social norms can help AI models better understand and predict valence. While multiple norms come into play, conflicting norms can create tension and directly influence human behavior. For example, when deciding whether to ``\textit{report a witnessed crime}'', one may balance \textit{bravery} against \textit{self-protection}. In this paper, we introduce \textit{ClarityEthic}, a novel ethical assessment approach, to enhance valence prediction and explanation by generating conflicting social norms behind human actions, which strengthens the moral reasoning capabilities of language models by using a contrastive learning strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baseline approaches, and human evaluations confirm that the generated social norms provide plausible explanations for the assessment of human behaviors.

MASim: Multilingual Agent-Based Simulation for Social Science

Multi-agent role-playing has recently shown promise for studying social behavior with language agents, but existing simulations are mostly monolingual and fail to model cross-lingual interaction, an essential property of real societies. We introduce MASim, the first multilingual agent-based simulation framework that supports multi-turn interaction among generative agents with diverse sociolinguistic profiles. MASim offers two key analyses: (i) global public opinion modeling, by simulating how attitudes toward open-domain hypotheses evolve across languages and cultures, and (ii) media influence and information diffusion, via autonomous news agents that dynamically generate content and shape user behavior. To instantiate simulations, we construct the MAPS benchmark, which combines survey questions and demographic personas drawn from global population distributions. Experiments on calibration, sensitivity, consistency, and cultural case studies show that MASim reproduces sociocultural phenomena and highlights the importance of multilingual simulation for scalable, controlled computational social science.

FreeChunker: A Cross-Granularity Chunking Framework

Chunking strategies significantly impact the effectiveness of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Existing methods operate within fixed-granularity paradigms that rely on static boundary identification, limiting their adaptability to diverse query requirements. This paper presents FreeChunker, a Cross-Granularity Encoding Framework that fundamentally transforms the traditional chunking paradigm: the framework treats sentences as atomic units and shifts from static chunk segmentation to flexible retrieval supporting arbitrary sentence combinations. This paradigm shift not only significantly reduces the computational overhead required for semantic boundary detection but also enhances adaptability to complex queries. Experimental evaluation on LongBench V2 demonstrates that FreeChunker achieves superior retrieval performance compared to traditional chunking methods, while significantly outperforming existing approaches in computational efficiency.

PEAR: Phase Entropy Aware Reward for Efficient Reasoning

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks by generating detailed chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, these responses are often excessively long, containing redundant reasoning steps that inflate inference cost and reduce usability. Controlling the length of generated reasoning without sacrificing accuracy remains an open challenge. Through a systematic empirical analysis, we reveal a consistent positive correlation between model entropy and response length at different reasoning stages across diverse LRMs: the thinking phase exhibits higher entropy, reflecting exploratory behavior of longer responses, while the final answer phase shows lower entropy, indicating a more deterministic solution.This observation suggests that entropy at different reasoning stages can serve as a control knob for balancing conciseness and performance. Based on this insight, this paper introduces Phase Entropy Aware Reward (PEAR), a reward mechanism that incorporating phase-dependent entropy into the reward design. Instead of treating all tokens uniformly, PEAR penalize excessive entropy during the thinking phase and allowing moderate exploration at the final answer phase, which encourages models to generate concise reasoning traces that retain sufficient flexibility to solve the task correctly. This enables adaptive control of response length without relying on explicit length targets or rigid truncation rules. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that PEAR consistently reduces response length while sustaining competitive accuracy across model scales. In addition, PEAR demonstrates strong out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness beyond the training distribution. Our code is available at: https://github.com/iNLP-Lab/PEAR.

AI-Driven Collaborative Satellite Object Detection for Space Sustainability

The growing density of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) presents serious challenges to space sustainability, primarily due to the increased risk of in-orbit collisions. Traditional ground-based tracking systems are constrained by latency and coverage limitations, underscoring the need for onboard, vision-based space object detection (SOD) capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel satellite clustering framework that enables the collaborative execution of deep learning (DL)-based SOD tasks across multiple satellites. To support this approach, we construct a high-fidelity dataset simulating imaging scenarios for clustered satellite formations. A distance-aware viewpoint selection strategy is introduced to optimize detection performance, and recent DL models are used for evaluation. Experimental results show that the clustering-based method achieves competitive detection accuracy compared to single-satellite and existing approaches, while maintaining a low size, weight, and power (SWaP) footprint. These findings underscore the potential of distributed, AI-enabled in-orbit systems to enhance space situational awareness and contribute to long-term space sustainability.

Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Models

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for mental health support, yet current approaches lack realism in simulating specialized psychotherapy and fail to capture therapeutic progression over time. Narrative therapy, which helps individuals transform problematic life stories into empowering alternatives, remains underutilized due to limited access and social stigma. We address these limitations through a comprehensive framework with two core components. First, INT (Interactive Narrative Therapist) simulates expert narrative therapists by planning therapeutic stages, guiding reflection levels, and generating contextually appropriate expert-like responses. Second, IMA (Innovative Moment Assessment) provides a therapy-centric evaluation method that quantifies effectiveness by tracking "Innovative Moments" (IMs), critical narrative shifts in client speech signaling therapy progress. Experimental results on 260 simulated clients and 230 human participants reveal that INT consistently outperforms standard LLMs in therapeutic quality and depth. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of INT in synthesizing high-quality support conversations to facilitate social applications.

The Emergence of Abstract Thought in Large Language Models Beyond Any Language

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, their capacity to function effectively across a diverse range of languages has shown marked improvement. Preliminary studies observe that the hidden activations of LLMs often resemble English, even when responding to non-English prompts. This has led to the widespread assumption that LLMs may "think" in English. However, more recent results showing strong multilingual performance, even surpassing English performance on specific tasks in other languages, challenge this view. In this work, we find that LLMs progressively develop a core language-agnostic parameter space-a remarkably small subset of parameters whose deactivation results in significant performance degradation across all languages. This compact yet critical set of parameters underlies the model's ability to generalize beyond individual languages, supporting the emergence of abstract thought that is not tied to any specific linguistic system. Specifically, we identify language-related neurons-those are consistently activated during the processing of particular languages, and categorize them as either shared (active across multiple languages) or exclusive (specific to one). As LLMs undergo continued development over time, we observe a marked increase in both the proportion and functional importance of shared neurons, while exclusive neurons progressively diminish in influence. These shared neurons constitute the backbone of the core language-agnostic parameter space, supporting the emergence of abstract thought. Motivated by these insights, we propose neuron-specific training strategies tailored to LLMs' language-agnostic levels at different development stages. Experiments across diverse LLM families support our approach.