BIS Reasoning 1.0: The First Large-Scale Japanese Benchmark for Belief-Inconsistent Syllogistic Reasoning

We present BIS Reasoning 1.0, the first large-scale Japanese dataset of syllogistic reasoning problems explicitly designed to evaluate belief-inconsistent reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Unlike prior datasets such as NeuBAROCO and JFLD, which focus on general or belief-aligned reasoning, BIS Reasoning 1.0 introduces logically valid yet belief-inconsistent syllogisms to uncover reasoning biases in LLMs trained on human-aligned corpora. We benchmark state-of-the-art models - including GPT models, Claude models, and leading Japanese LLMs - revealing significant variance in performance, with GPT-4o achieving 79.54% accuracy. Our analysis identifies critical weaknesses in current LLMs when handling logically valid but belief-conflicting inputs. These findings have important implications for deploying LLMs in high-stakes domains such as law, healthcare, and scientific literature, where truth must override intuitive belief to ensure integrity and safety.

Do LLMs Need to Think in One Language? Correlation between Latent Language and Task Performance

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to process information using a proficient internal language consistently, referred to as latent language, which may differ from the input or output languages. However, how the discrepancy between the latent language and the input and output language affects downstream task performance remains largely unexplored. While many studies research the latent language of LLMs, few address its importance in influencing task performance. In our study, we hypothesize that thinking in latent language consistently enhances downstream task performance. To validate this, our work varies the input prompt languages across multiple downstream tasks and analyzes the correlation between consistency in latent language and task performance. We create datasets consisting of questions from diverse domains such as translation and geo-culture, which are influenced by the choice of latent language. Experimental results across multiple LLMs on translation and geo-culture tasks, which are sensitive to the choice of language, indicate that maintaining consistency in latent language is not always necessary for optimal downstream task performance. This is because these models adapt their internal representations near the final layers to match the target language, reducing the impact of consistency on overall performance.

Exploring the Effect of Segmentation and Vocabulary Size on Speech Tokenization for Speech Language Models

The purpose of speech tokenization is to transform a speech signal into a sequence of discrete representations, serving as the foundation for speech language models (SLMs). While speech tokenization has many options, their effect on the performance of SLMs remains unclear. This paper investigates two key aspects of speech tokenization: the segmentation width and the cluster size of discrete units. First, we segment speech signals into fixed/variable widths and pooled representations. We then train K-means models in multiple cluster sizes. Through the evaluation on zero-shot spoken language understanding benchmarks, we find the positive effect of moderately coarse segmentation and bigger cluster size. Notably, among the best-performing models, the most efficient one achieves a 50% reduction in training data and a 70% decrease in training runtime. Our analysis highlights the importance of combining multiple tokens to enhance fine-grained spoken language understanding.

How LLMs Learn: Tracing Internal Representations with Sparse Autoencoders

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual capabilities and broad knowledge. However, the internal mechanisms underlying the development of these capabilities remain poorly understood. To investigate this, we analyze how the information encoded in LLMs' internal representations evolves during the training process. Specifically, we train sparse autoencoders at multiple checkpoints of the model and systematically compare the interpretative results across these stages. Our findings suggest that LLMs initially acquire language-specific knowledge independently, followed by cross-linguistic correspondences. Moreover, we observe that after mastering token-level knowledge, the model transitions to learning higher-level, abstract concepts, indicating the development of more conceptual understanding.

A Statistical and Multi-Perspective Revisiting of the Membership Inference Attack in Large Language Models

The lack of data transparency in Large Language Models (LLMs) has highlighted the importance of Membership Inference Attack (MIA), which differentiates trained (member) and untrained (non-member) data. Though it shows success in previous studies, recent research reported a near-random performance in different settings, highlighting a significant performance inconsistency. We assume that a single setting doesn't represent the distribution of the vast corpora, causing members and non-members with different distributions to be sampled and causing inconsistency. In this study, instead of a single setting, we statistically revisit MIA methods from various settings with thousands of experiments for each MIA method, along with study in text feature, embedding, threshold decision, and decoding dynamics of members and non-members. We found that (1) MIA performance improves with model size and varies with domains, while most methods do not statistically outperform baselines, (2) Though MIA performance is generally low, a notable amount of differentiable member and non-member outliers exists and vary across MIA methods, (3) Deciding a threshold to separate members and non-members is an overlooked challenge, (4) Text dissimilarity and long text benefit MIA performance, (5) Differentiable or not is reflected in the LLM embedding, (6) Member and non-members show different decoding dynamics.

Does it Chug? Towards a Data-Driven Understanding of Guitar Tone Description

Natural language is commonly used to describe instrument timbre, such as a "warm" or "heavy" sound. As these descriptors are based on human perception, there can be disagreement over which acoustic features correspond to a given adjective. In this work, we pursue a data-driven approach to further our understanding of such adjectives in the context of guitar tone. Our main contribution is a dataset of timbre adjectives, constructed by processing single clips of instrument audio to produce varied timbres through adjustments in EQ and effects such as distortion. Adjective annotations are obtained for each clip by crowdsourcing experts to complete a pairwise comparison and a labeling task. We examine the dataset and reveal correlations between adjective ratings and highlight instances where the data contradicts prevailing theories on spectral features and timbral adjectives, suggesting a need for a more nuanced, data-driven understanding of timbre.

Improving Unsupervised Constituency Parsing via Maximizing Semantic Information

Unsupervised constituency parsers organize phrases within a sentence into a tree-shaped syntactic constituent structure that reflects the organization of sentence semantics. However, the traditional objective of maximizing sentence log-likelihood (LL) does not explicitly account for the close relationship between the constituent structure and the semantics, resulting in a weak correlation between LL values and parsing accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a novel objective for training unsupervised parsers: maximizing the information between constituent structures and sentence semantics (SemInfo). We introduce a bag-of-substrings model to represent the semantics and apply the probability-weighted information metric to estimate the SemInfo. Additionally, we develop a Tree Conditional Random Field (TreeCRF)-based model to apply the SemInfo maximization objective to Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG) induction, the state-of-the-art method for unsupervised constituency parsing. Experiments demonstrate that SemInfo correlates more strongly with parsing accuracy than LL. Our algorithm significantly enhances parsing accuracy by an average of 7.85 points across five PCFG variants and in four languages, achieving new state-of-the-art results in three of the four languages.

GADFA: Generator-Assisted Decision-Focused Approach for Opinion Expressing Timing Identification

The advancement of text generation models has granted us the capability to produce coherent and convincing text on demand. Yet, in real-life circumstances, individuals do not continuously generate text or voice their opinions. For instance, consumers pen product reviews after weighing the merits and demerits of a product, and professional analysts issue reports following significant news releases. In essence, opinion expression is typically prompted by particular reasons or signals. Despite long-standing developments in opinion mining, the appropriate timing for expressing an opinion remains largely unexplored. To address this deficit, our study introduces an innovative task - the identification of news-triggered opinion expressing timing. We ground this task in the actions of professional stock analysts and develop a novel dataset for investigation. Our approach is decision-focused, leveraging text generation models to steer the classification model, thus enhancing overall performance. Our experimental findings demonstrate that the text generated by our model contributes fresh insights from various angles, effectively aiding in identifying the optimal timing for opinion expression.

Enhancing Financial Sentiment Analysis with Expert-Designed Hint

This paper investigates the role of expert-designed hint in enhancing sentiment analysis on financial social media posts. We explore the capability of large language models (LLMs) to empathize with writer perspectives and analyze sentiments. Our findings reveal that expert-designed hint, i.e., pointing out the importance of numbers, significantly improve performances across various LLMs, particularly in cases requiring perspective-taking skills. Further analysis on tweets containing different types of numerical data demonstrates that the inclusion of expert-designed hint leads to notable improvements in sentiment analysis performance, especially for tweets with monetary-related numbers. Our findings contribute to the ongoing discussion on the applicability of Theory of Mind in NLP and open new avenues for improving sentiment analysis in financial domains through the strategic use of expert knowledge.

Enhancing Investment Opinion Ranking through Argument-Based Sentiment Analysis

In the era of rapid Internet and social media platform development, individuals readily share their viewpoints online. The overwhelming quantity of these posts renders comprehensive analysis impractical. This necessitates an efficient recommendation system to filter and present significant, relevant opinions. Our research introduces a dual-pronged argument mining technique to improve recommendation system effectiveness, considering both professional and amateur investor perspectives. Our first strategy involves using the discrepancy between target and closing prices as an opinion indicator. The second strategy applies argument mining principles to score investors' opinions, subsequently ranking them by these scores. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating its ability to identify opinions with higher profit potential. Beyond profitability, our research extends to risk analysis, examining the relationship between recommended opinions and investor behaviors. This offers a holistic view of potential outcomes following the adoption of these recommended opinions.