How Should Video LLMs Output Time? An Analysis of Efficient Temporal Grounding Paradigms

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced Video Temporal Grounding (VTG), existing methods often couple output paradigms with different backbones, datasets, and training protocols. This makes it challenging to isolate the specific impact of the output design. Additionally, as VTG systems are increasingly considered for resource-constrained edge deployment, the trade-off between output formulation and system-level efficiency requires systematic investigation. In this paper, we present a controlled empirical study comparing three dominant VTG output paradigms: Text Numeral Generation, Temporal Token Generation, and Continuous Temporal Decoding. We evaluate these paradigms across identical compact VLMs (SmolVLM2, FastVLM, and Molmo2) using consistent datasets and LoRA fine-tuning protocols. Evaluations on Charades-STA, QVHighlights, and YouCook2 measure both localization accuracy and system efficiency, including inference latency, training throughput, and parameter overhead. Our results demonstrate that the choice of output formulation significantly affects both grounding accuracy and computational cost, independent of model scale. Specifically, the continuous distribution paradigm consistently achieves the most favorable efficiency-accuracy trade-off on the Pareto frontier, delivering robust localization with minimal latency overhead. These findings provide objective empirical guidelines for designing efficient, deployment-ready VTG systems.

Auto-Drafting Police Reports from Noisy ASR Outputs: A Trust-Centered LLM Approach

Achieving a delicate balance between fostering trust in law en- forcement and protecting the rights of both officers and civilians continues to emerge as a pressing research and product challenge in the world today. In the pursuit of fairness and transparency, this study presents an innovative AI-driven system designed to generate police report drafts from complex, noisy, and multi-role dialogue data. Our approach intelligently extracts key elements of law enforcement interactions and includes them in the draft, producing structured narratives that are not only high in quality but also reinforce accountability and procedural clarity. This frame- work holds the potential to transform the reporting process, ensur- ing greater oversight, consistency, and fairness in future policing practices. A demonstration video of our system can be accessed at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kBrsGGR8e3B5xPSblrchRGj-Y-kpCHNO/view?usp=sharing

DHP Benchmark: Are LLMs Good NLG Evaluators?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly serving as evaluators in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. However, the capabilities of LLMs in scoring NLG quality remain inadequately explored. Current studies depend on human assessments and simple metrics that fail to capture the discernment of LLMs across diverse NLG tasks. To address this gap, we propose the Discernment of Hierarchical Perturbation (DHP) benchmarking framework, which provides quantitative discernment scores for LLMs utilizing hierarchically perturbed text data and statistical tests to measure the NLG evaluation capabilities of LLMs systematically. We have re-established six evaluation datasets for this benchmark, covering four NLG tasks: Summarization, Story Completion, Question Answering, and Translation. Our comprehensive benchmarking of five major LLM series provides critical insight into their strengths and limitations as NLG evaluators.

FairLENS: Assessing Fairness in Law Enforcement Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques have become powerful tools, enhancing efficiency in law enforcement scenarios. To ensure fairness for demographic groups in different acoustic environments, ASR engines must be tested across a variety of speakers in realistic settings. However, describing the fairness discrepancies between models with confidence remains a challenge. Meanwhile, most public ASR datasets are insufficient to perform a satisfying fairness evaluation. To address the limitations, we built FairLENS - a systematic fairness evaluation framework. We propose a novel and adaptable evaluation method to examine the fairness disparity between different models. We also collected a fairness evaluation dataset covering multiple scenarios and demographic dimensions. Leveraging this framework, we conducted fairness assessments on 1 open-source and 11 commercially available state-of-the-art ASR models. Our results reveal that certain models exhibit more biases than others, serving as a fairness guideline for users to make informed choices when selecting ASR models for a given real-world scenario. We further explored model biases towards specific demographic groups and observed that shifts in the acoustic domain can lead to the emergence of new biases.