EmoHarbor: Evaluating Personalized Emotional Support by Simulating the User's Internal World

Current evaluation paradigms for emotional support conversations tend to reward generic empathetic responses, yet they fail to assess whether the support is genuinely personalized to users' unique psychological profiles and contextual needs. We introduce EmoHarbor, an automated evaluation framework that adopts a User-as-a-Judge paradigm by simulating the user's inner world. EmoHarbor employs a Chain-of-Agent architecture that decomposes users' internal processes into three specialized roles, enabling agents to interact with supporters and complete assessments in a manner similar to human users. We instantiate this benchmark using 100 real-world user profiles that cover a diverse range of personality traits and situations, and define 10 evaluation dimensions of personalized support quality. Comprehensive evaluation of 20 advanced LLMs on EmoHarbor reveals a critical insight: while these models excel at generating empathetic responses, they consistently fail to tailor support to individual user contexts. This finding reframes the central challenge, shifting research focus from merely enhancing generic empathy to developing truly user-aware emotional support. EmoHarbor provides a reproducible and scalable framework to guide the development and evaluation of more nuanced and user-aware emotional support systems.

HiSciBench: A Hierarchical Multi-disciplinary Benchmark for Scientific Intelligence from Reading to Discovery

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal foundation models has sparked growing interest in their potential for scientific research. However, scientific intelligence encompasses a broad spectrum of abilities ranging from understanding fundamental knowledge to conducting creative discovery, and existing benchmarks remain fragmented. Most focus on narrow tasks and fail to reflect the hierarchical and multi-disciplinary nature of real scientific inquiry. We introduce \textbf{HiSciBench}, a hierarchical benchmark designed to evaluate foundation models across five levels that mirror the complete scientific workflow: \textit{Scientific Literacy} (L1), \textit{Literature Parsing} (L2), \textit{Literature-based Question Answering} (L3), \textit{Literature Review Generation} (L4), and \textit{Scientific Discovery} (L5). HiSciBench contains 8,735 carefully curated instances spanning six major scientific disciplines, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, and astronomy, and supports multimodal inputs including text, equations, figures, and tables, as well as cross-lingual evaluation. Unlike prior benchmarks that assess isolated abilities, HiSciBench provides an integrated, dependency-aware framework that enables detailed diagnosis of model capabilities across different stages of scientific reasoning. Comprehensive evaluations of leading models, including GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1, and several multimodal systems, reveal substantial performance gaps: while models achieve up to 69\% accuracy on basic literacy tasks, performance declines sharply to 25\% on discovery-level challenges. HiSciBench establishes a new standard for evaluating scientific Intelligence and offers actionable insights for developing models that are not only more capable but also more reliable. The benchmark will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Single-to-mix Modality Alignment with Multimodal Large Language Model for Document Image Machine Translation

Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT) aims to translate text within document images, facing generalization challenges due to limited training data and the complex interplay between visual and textual information. To address these challenges, we introduce M4Doc, a novel single-to-mix modality alignment framework leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). M4Doc aligns an image-only encoder with the multimodal representations of an MLLM, pre-trained on large-scale document image datasets. This alignment enables a lightweight DIMT model to learn crucial visual-textual correlations during training. During inference, M4Doc bypasses the MLLM, maintaining computational efficiency while benefiting from its multimodal knowledge. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in translation quality, especially in cross-domain generalization and challenging document image scenarios.

From Generic Empathy to Personalized Emotional Support: A Self-Evolution Framework for User Preference Alignment

Effective emotional support hinges on understanding users' emotions and needs to provide meaningful comfort during multi-turn interactions. Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential for expressing empathy; however, they often deliver generic and one-size-fits-all responses that fail to address users' specific needs. To tackle this issue, we propose a self-evolution framework designed to help LLMs improve their responses to better align with users' implicit preferences concerning user profiles (personalities), emotional states, and specific situations. Our framework consists of two distinct phases: \textit{(1)} \textit{Emotional Support Experience Acquisition}, where LLMs are fine-tuned on limited emotional support conversation data to provide basic support, and \textit{(2)} \textit{Self-Improvement for Personalized Emotional Support}, where LLMs leverage self-reflection and self-refinement to generate personalized responses. Through iterative direct preference optimization between the pre- and post-refined responses, our model generates responses that reflect a better understanding of the user's implicit preferences. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the model's performance in emotional support, reducing unhelpful responses and minimizing discrepancies between user preferences and model outputs.

Item Level Exploration Traffic Allocation in Large-scale Recommendation Systems

This paper contributes to addressing the item cold start problem in large-scale recommender systems, focusing on how to efficiently gain initial visibility for newly ingested content. We propose an exploration system designed to efficiently allocate impressions to these fresh items. Our approach leverages a learned probabilistic model to predict an item's discoverability, which then informs a scalable and adaptive traffic allocation strategy. This system intelligently distributes exploration budgets, optimizing for the long-term benefit of the recommendation platform. The impact is a demonstrably more efficient cold-start process, leading to a significant increase in the discoverability of new content and ultimately enriching the item corpus available for exploitation, as evidenced by its successful deployment in a large-scale production environment.

SweetieChat: A Strategy-Enhanced Role-playing Framework for Diverse Scenarios Handling Emotional Support Agent

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising potential in providing empathetic support during interactions. However, their responses often become verbose or overly formulaic, failing to adequately address the diverse emotional support needs of real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we propose an innovative strategy-enhanced role-playing framework, designed to simulate authentic emotional support conversations. Specifically, our approach unfolds in two steps: (1) Strategy-Enhanced Role-Playing Interactions, which involve three pivotal roles -- Seeker, Strategy Counselor, and Supporter -- engaging in diverse scenarios to emulate real-world interactions and promote a broader range of dialogues; and (2) Emotional Support Agent Training, achieved through fine-tuning LLMs using our specially constructed dataset. Within this framework, we develop the \textbf{ServeForEmo} dataset, comprising an extensive collection of 3.7K+ multi-turn dialogues and 62.8K+ utterances. We further present \textbf{SweetieChat}, an emotional support agent capable of handling diverse open-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments and human evaluations confirm the framework's effectiveness in enhancing emotional support, highlighting its unique ability to provide more nuanced and tailored assistance.

AMPLIFY:Attention-based Mixup for Performance Improvement and Label Smoothing in Transformer

Mixup is an effective data augmentation method that generates new augmented samples by aggregating linear combinations of different original samples. However, if there are noises or aberrant features in the original samples, Mixup may propagate them to the augmented samples, leading to over-sensitivity of the model to these outliers . To solve this problem, this paper proposes a new Mixup method called AMPLIFY. This method uses the Attention mechanism of Transformer itself to reduce the influence of noises and aberrant values in the original samples on the prediction results, without increasing additional trainable parameters, and the computational cost is very low, thereby avoiding the problem of high resource consumption in common Mixup methods such as Sentence Mixup . The experimental results show that, under a smaller computational resource cost, AMPLIFY outperforms other Mixup methods in text classification tasks on 7 benchmark datasets, providing new ideas and new ways to further improve the performance of pre-trained models based on the Attention mechanism, such as BERT, ALBERT, RoBERTa, and GPT. Our code can be obtained at https://github.com/kiwi-lilo/AMPLIFY.

Learning from Negative User Feedback and Measuring Responsiveness for Sequential Recommenders

Sequential recommenders have been widely used in industry due to their strength in modeling user preferences. While these models excel at learning a user's positive interests, less attention has been paid to learning from negative user feedback. Negative user feedback is an important lever of user control, and comes with an expectation that recommenders should respond quickly and reduce similar recommendations to the user. However, negative feedback signals are often ignored in the training objective of sequential retrieval models, which primarily aim at predicting positive user interactions. In this work, we incorporate explicit and implicit negative user feedback into the training objective of sequential recommenders in the retrieval stage using a "not-to-recommend" loss function that optimizes for the log-likelihood of not recommending items with negative feedback. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach using live experiments on a large-scale industrial recommender system. Furthermore, we address a challenge in measuring recommender responsiveness to negative feedback by developing a counterfactual simulation framework to compare recommender responses between different user actions, showing improved responsiveness from the modeling change.

E2TIMT: Efficient and Effective Modal Adapter for Text Image Machine Translation

Text image machine translation (TIMT) aims to translate texts embedded in images from one source language to another target language. Existing methods, both two-stage cascade and one-stage end-to-end architectures, suffer from different issues. The cascade models can benefit from the large-scale optical character recognition (OCR) and MT datasets but the two-stage architecture is redundant. The end-to-end models are efficient but suffer from training data deficiency. To this end, in our paper, we propose an end-to-end TIMT model fully making use of the knowledge from existing OCR and MT datasets to pursue both an effective and efficient framework. More specifically, we build a novel modal adapter effectively bridging the OCR encoder and MT decoder. End-to-end TIMT loss and cross-modal contrastive loss are utilized jointly to align the feature distribution of the OCR and MT tasks. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the existing two-stage cascade models and one-stage end-to-end models with a lighter and faster architecture. Furthermore, the ablation studies verify the generalization of our method, where the proposed modal adapter is effective to bridge various OCR and MT models.

Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation For Text Image Machine Translation

Text image machine translation (TIMT) has been widely used in various real-world applications, which translates source language texts in images into another target language sentence. Existing methods on TIMT are mainly divided into two categories: the recognition-then-translation pipeline model and the end-to-end model. However, how to transfer knowledge from the pipeline model into the end-to-end model remains an unsolved problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation (MTKD) method to effectively distillate knowledge into the end-to-end TIMT model from the pipeline model. Specifically, three teachers are utilized to improve the performance of the end-to-end TIMT model. The image encoder in the end-to-end TIMT model is optimized with the knowledge distillation guidance from the recognition teacher encoder, while the sequential encoder and decoder are improved by transferring knowledge from the translation sequential and decoder teacher models. Furthermore, both token and sentence-level knowledge distillations are incorporated to better boost the translation performance. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed MTKD effectively improves the text image translation performance and outperforms existing end-to-end and pipeline models with fewer parameters and less decoding time, illustrating that MTKD can take advantage of both pipeline and end-to-end models.