SECite: Analyzing and Summarizing Citations in Software Engineering Literature

Identifying the strengths and limitations of a research paper is a core component of any literature review. However, traditional summaries reflect only the authors' self-presented perspective. Analyzing how other researchers discuss and cite the paper can offer a deeper, more practical understanding of its contributions and shortcomings. In this research, we introduce SECite, a novel approach for evaluating scholarly impact through sentiment analysis of citation contexts. We develop a semi-automated pipeline to extract citations referencing nine research papers and apply advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques with unsupervised machine learning to classify these citation statements as positive or negative. Beyond sentiment classification, we use generative AI to produce sentiment-specific summaries that capture the strengths and limitations of each target paper, derived both from clustered citation groups and from the full text. Our findings reveal meaningful patterns in how the academic community perceives these works, highlighting areas of alignment and divergence between external citation feedback and the authors' own presentation. By integrating citation sentiment analysis with LLM-based summarization, this study provides a comprehensive framework for assessing scholarly contributions.

From Muscle to Text with MyoText: sEMG to Text via Finger Classification and Transformer-Based Decoding

Surface electromyography (sEMG) provides a direct neural interface for decoding muscle activity and offers a promising foundation for keyboard-free text input in wearable and mixed-reality systems. Previous sEMG-to-text studies mainly focused on recognizing letters directly from sEMG signals, forming an important first step toward translating muscle activity into text. Building on this foundation, we present MyoText, a hierarchical framework that decodes sEMG signals to text through physiologically grounded intermediate stages. MyoText first classifies finger activations from multichannel sEMG using a CNN-BiLSTM-Attention model, applies ergonomic typing priors to infer letters, and reconstructs full sentences with a fine-tuned T5 transformer. This modular design mirrors the natural hierarchy of typing, linking muscle intent to language output and reducing the search space for decoding. Evaluated on 30 users from the emg2qwerty dataset, MyoText outperforms baselines by achieving 85.4% finger-classification accuracy, 5.4% character error rate (CER), and 6.5% word error rate (WER). Beyond accuracy gains, this methodology establishes a principled pathway from neuromuscular signals to text, providing a blueprint for virtual and augmented-reality typing interfaces that operate entirely without physical keyboards. By integrating ergonomic structure with transformer-based linguistic reasoning, MyoText advances the feasibility of seamless, wearable neural input for future ubiquitous computing environments.

Training Free Zero-Shot Visual Anomaly Localization via Diffusion Inversion

Zero-Shot image Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) aims to detect and localise anomalies without access to any normal training samples of the target data. While recent ZSAD approaches leverage additional modalities such as language to generate fine-grained prompts for localisation, vision-only methods remain limited to image-level classification, lacking spatial precision. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective training-free vision-only ZSAD framework that circumvents the need for fine-grained prompts by leveraging the inversion of a pretrained Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM). Specifically, given an input image and a generic text description (e.g., "an image of an [object class]"), we invert the image to obtain latent representations and initiate the denoising process from a fixed intermediate timestep to reconstruct the image. Since the underlying diffusion model is trained solely on normal data, this process yields a normal-looking reconstruction. The discrepancy between the input image and the reconstructed one highlights potential anomalies. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on VISA dataset, demonstrating strong localisation capabilities without auxiliary modalities and facilitating a shift away from prompt dependence for zero-shot anomaly detection research. Code is available at https://github.com/giddyyupp/DIVAD.

Detecting LLM-Generated Text with Performance Guarantees

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok have been deeply integrated into our daily life. They now support a wide range of tasks -- from dialogue and email drafting to assisting with teaching and coding, serving as search engines, and much more. However, their ability to produce highly human-like text raises serious concerns, including the spread of fake news, the generation of misleading governmental reports, and academic misconduct. To address this practical problem, we train a classifier to determine whether a piece of text is authored by an LLM or a human. Our detector is deployed on an online CPU-based platform https://huggingface.co/spaces/stats-powered-ai/StatDetectLLM, and contains three novelties over existing detectors: (i) it does not rely on auxiliary information, such as watermarks or knowledge of the specific LLM used to generate the text; (ii) it more effectively distinguishes between human- and LLM-authored text; and (iii) it enables statistical inference, which is largely absent in the current literature. Empirically, our classifier achieves higher classification accuracy compared to existing detectors, while maintaining type-I error control, high statistical power, and computational efficiency.

Training-Free Adaptation of New-Generation LLMs using Legacy Clinical Models

Adapting language models to the clinical domain through continued pretraining and fine-tuning requires costly retraining for each new model generation. We propose Cross-Architecture Proxy Tuning (CAPT), a model-ensembling approach that enables training-free adaptation of state-of-the-art general-domain models using existing clinical models. CAPT supports models with disjoint vocabularies, leveraging contrastive decoding to selectively inject clinically relevant signals while preserving the general-domain model's reasoning and fluency. On six clinical classification and text-generation tasks, CAPT with a new-generation general-domain model and an older-generation clinical model consistently outperforms both models individually and state-of-the-art ensembling approaches (average +17.6% over UniTE, +41.4% over proxy tuning across tasks). Through token-level analysis and physician case studies, we demonstrate that CAPT amplifies clinically actionable language, reduces context errors, and increases clinical specificity.

The Alchemy of Thought: Understanding In-Context Learning Through Supervised Classification

In-context learning (ICL) has become a prominent paradigm to rapidly customize LLMs to new tasks without fine-tuning. However, despite the empirical evidence of its usefulness, we still do not truly understand how ICL works. In this paper, we compare the behavior of in-context learning with supervised classifiers trained on ICL demonstrations to investigate three research questions: (1) Do LLMs with ICL behave similarly to classifiers trained on the same examples? (2) If so, which classifiers are closer, those based on gradient descent (GD) or those based on k-nearest neighbors (kNN)? (3) When they do not behave similarly, what conditions are associated with differences in behavior? Using text classification as a use case, with six datasets and three LLMs, we observe that LLMs behave similarly to these classifiers when the relevance of demonstrations is high. On average, ICL is closer to kNN than logistic regression, giving empirical evidence that the attention mechanism behaves more similarly to kNN than GD. However, when demonstration relevance is low, LLMs perform better than these classifiers, likely because LLMs can back off to their parametric memory, a luxury these classifiers do not have.

VoxCog: Towards End-to-End Multilingual Cognitive Impairment Classification through Dialectal Knowledge

In this work, we present a novel perspective on cognitive impairment classification from speech by integrating speech foundation models that explicitly recognize speech dialects. Our motivation is based on the observation that individuals with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) often produce measurable speech characteristics, such as slower articulation rate and lengthened sounds, in a manner similar to dialectal phonetic variations seen in speech. Building on this idea, we introduce VoxCog, an end-to-end framework that uses pre-trained dialect models to detect AD or MCI without relying on additional modalities such as text or images. Through experiments on multiple multilingual datasets for AD and MCI detection, we demonstrate that model initialization with a dialect classifier on top of speech foundation models consistently improves the predictive performance of AD or MCI. Our trained models yield similar or often better performance compared to previous approaches that ensembled several computational methods using different signal modalities. Particularly, our end-to-end speech-based model achieves 87.5% and 85.9% accuracy on the ADReSS 2020 challenge and ADReSSo 2021 challenge test sets, outperforming existing solutions that use multimodal ensemble-based computation or LLMs.

Qalb: Largest State-of-the-Art Urdu Large Language Model for 230M Speakers with Systematic Continued Pre-training

Despite remarkable progress in large language models, Urdu-a language spoken by over 230 million people-remains critically underrepresented in modern NLP systems. Existing multilingual models demonstrate poor performance on Urdu-specific tasks, struggling with the language's complex morphology, right-to-left Nastaliq script, and rich literary traditions. Even the base LLaMA-3.1 8B-Instruct model shows limited capability in generating fluent, contextually appropriate Urdu text. We introduce Qalb, an Urdu language model developed through a two-stage approach: continued pre-training followed by supervised fine-tuning. Starting from LLaMA 3.1 8B, we perform continued pre-training on a dataset of 1.97 billion tokens. This corpus comprises 1.84 billion tokens of diverse Urdu text-spanning news archives, classical and contemporary literature, government documents, and social media-combined with 140 million tokens of English Wikipedia data to prevent catastrophic forgetting. We then fine-tune the resulting model on the Alif Urdu-instruct dataset. Through extensive evaluation on Urdu-specific benchmarks, Qalb demonstrates substantial improvements, achieving a weighted average score of 90.34 and outperforming the previous state-of-the-art Alif-1.0-Instruct model (87.1) by 3.24 points, while also surpassing the base LLaMA-3.1 8B-Instruct model by 44.64 points. Qalb achieves state-of-the-art performance with comprehensive evaluation across seven diverse tasks including Classification, Sentiment Analysis, and Reasoning. Our results demonstrate that continued pre-training on diverse, high-quality language data, combined with targeted instruction fine-tuning, effectively adapts foundation models to low-resource languages.

A Unified Framework for Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis via Expert-Guided Multimodal Fusion with Large Language Models

Multimodal emotion understanding requires effective integration of text, audio, and visual modalities for both discrete emotion recognition and continuous sentiment analysis. We present EGMF, a unified framework combining expert-guided multimodal fusion with large language models. Our approach features three specialized expert networks--a fine-grained local expert for subtle emotional nuances, a semantic correlation expert for cross-modal relationships, and a global context expert for long-range dependencies--adaptively integrated through hierarchical dynamic gating for context-aware feature selection. Enhanced multimodal representations are integrated with LLMs via pseudo token injection and prompt-based conditioning, enabling a single generative framework to handle both classification and regression through natural language generation. We employ LoRA fine-tuning for computational efficiency. Experiments on bilingual benchmarks (MELD, CHERMA, MOSEI, SIMS-V2) demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, with superior cross-lingual robustness revealing universal patterns in multimodal emotional expressions across English and Chinese. We will release the source code publicly.

GraphSearch: Agentic Search-Augmented Reasoning for Zero-Shot Graph Learning

Recent advances in search-augmented large reasoning models (LRMs) enable the retrieval of external knowledge to reduce hallucinations in multistep reasoning. However, their ability to operate on graph-structured data, prevalent in domains such as e-commerce, social networks, and scientific citations, remains underexplored. Unlike plain text corpora, graphs encode rich topological signals that connect related entities and can serve as valuable priors for retrieval, enabling more targeted search and improved reasoning efficiency. Yet, effectively leveraging such structure poses unique challenges, including the difficulty of generating graph-expressive queries and ensuring reliable retrieval that balances structural and semantic relevance. To address this gap, we introduce GraphSearch, the first framework that extends search-augmented reasoning to graph learning, enabling zero-shot graph learning without task-specific fine-tuning. GraphSearch combines a Graph-aware Query Planner, which disentangles search space (e.g., 1-hop, multi-hop, or global neighbors) from semantic queries, with a Graph-aware Retriever, which constructs candidate sets based on topology and ranks them using a hybrid scoring function. We further instantiate two traversal modes: GraphSearch-R, which recursively expands neighborhoods hop by hop, and GraphSearch-F, which flexibly retrieves across local and global neighborhoods without hop constraints. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that GraphSearch achieves competitive or even superior performance compared to supervised graph learning methods, setting state-of-the-art results in zero-shot node classification and link prediction. These findings position GraphSearch as a flexible and generalizable paradigm for agentic reasoning over graphs.