Can MLLMs Decode the Creative Leap? Introducing C4 for Cross-Concept Understanding

Creative capabilities of MLLMs matter in design, communication, education, and human--AI collaboration, yet remain difficult to evaluate because explicit targets and reward signals are scarce compared with accuracy-oriented tasks. Cross-concept understanding is a core cognitive capacity underlying receptive creativity. It enables a perceiver to recover intended meaning from non-obvious but meaningful conceptual relations. We operationalize item construction as cross-concept encoding and model inference as cross-concept decoding. We introduce C4, a cognition-inspired evaluation framework for Chengyu (Chinese idiom)-based Cross-Concept Creativity. Its encoding component maps target slots to imageable substitute concepts along bridge paths in a manually annotated and third-party-reviewed cross-concept network, enabling batch generation with explicit structure, difficulty indexed by bridge count and depth, and exact answers. Using this framework, we instantiate the C4 Evaluation Set (C4-Eval), comprising 184 synthetic items and 37 human-created cross-concept chengyu figures collected from online sources. We manually construct and review cross-concept relations, bridge paths, and reasoning processes for the collected figures. Each C4-Eval item is instantiated in five task settings, yielding 884 primary answer-recovery cases. Across ten evaluated MLLMs, the strongest closed models reach 50.7% and 48.0% primary accuracy, while open-source models remain substantially lower. Candidate constraints improve accuracy sharply, but bridge hints and explanation requests provide only modest gains. These results expose a substantial gap in how current MLLMs decode creatively encoded meaning through cross-concept relations. The code is in the supplementary material.

Personalized News Recommendation with Multi-granularity Candidate-aware User Modeling

Matching candidate news with user interests is crucial for personalized news recommendations. Most existing methods can represent a user's reading interests through a single profile based on clicked news, which may not fully capture the diversity of user interests. Although some approaches incorporate candidate news or topic information, they remain insufficient because they neglect the multi-granularity relatedness between candidate news and user interests. To address this, this study proposed a multi-granularity candidate-aware user modeling framework that integrated user interest features across various levels of granularity. It consisted of two main components: candidate news encoding and user modeling. A news textual information extractor and a knowledge-enhanced entity information extractor can capture candidate news features, and word-level, entity-level, and news-level candidate-aware mechanisms can provide a comprehensive representation of user interests. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrated that the proposed model could significantly outperform baseline models.

Span-level Emotion-Cause-Category Triplet Extraction with Instruction Tuning LLMs and Data Augmentation

Span-level emotion-cause-category triplet extraction represents a novel and complex challenge within emotion cause analysis. This task involves identifying emotion spans, cause spans, and their associated emotion categories within the text to form structured triplets. While prior research has predominantly concentrated on clause-level emotion-cause pair extraction and span-level emotion-cause detection, these methods often confront challenges originating from redundant information retrieval and difficulty in accurately determining emotion categories, particularly when emotions are expressed implicitly or ambiguously. To overcome these challenges, this study explores a fine-grained approach to span-level emotion-cause-category triplet extraction and introduces an innovative framework that leverages instruction tuning and data augmentation techniques based on large language models. The proposed method employs task-specific triplet extraction instructions and utilizes low-rank adaptation to fine-tune large language models, eliminating the necessity for intricate task-specific architectures. Furthermore, a prompt-based data augmentation strategy is developed to address data scarcity by guiding large language models in generating high-quality synthetic training data. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing baseline methods, achieving at least a 12.8% improvement in span-level emotion-cause-category triplet extraction metrics. The results demonstrate the method's effectiveness and robustness, offering a promising avenue for advancing research in emotion cause analysis. The source code is available at https://github.com/zxgnlp/InstruDa-LLM.