Telenor Nordics Customer Service self-help corpus

This paper presents a multilingual customer service self-help corpus comprising 1,122 manually validated documents in Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, totaling over one million tokens. The documents have been sourced from the public self-help pages of four Nordic telecommunications operators and subsequently filtered for person-identifiable information and relevance through a combined LLM and human annotation pipeline. Domain-specific datasets for Nordic languages remain scarce, particularly in customer service: a domain of growing importance for retrieval-augmented generation, cross-lingual transfer learning, and emerging agent-based service architectures. An analysis of the corpus reveals substantial variation in document length and structure across operators, reflecting distinct editorial strategies, as well as broad topical coverage spanning network hardware, mobile services, TV and streaming, billing, and account management. The dataset is publicly available under a CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 license at https://zenodo.org/records/19493152, intended to support reproducible research in Nordic NLP and information retrieval.

Unsupervised Identification and Removal of Spurious Correlations During Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning a pretrained language model on a curated dataset can produce spurious correlations between the fine-tuning task and unintended latent factors -- such as misaligned personas or political slant -- that the curation procedure has entangled with the task. The model can latch onto these spurious correlations, leading to bias and reduced out-of-distribution generalisation. We prove that under reasonable assumptions on task complexity and the spurious correlation, such latent factors can be identified, without supervision, from the weights of a naive LoRA fine-tune. Existing approaches to removing bias, such as activation steering, remove identified factors from residual-stream activations, either at inference or during training. We argue, however, that the goal should be to remove the spurious correlation, not the latent factor itself, as the pretrained model may rely on it for genuine task signal. To enable this, we propose GRASP, GRadient projection of Associated Spurious Patterns, which prevents the model from acquiring new reliance on the identified latent factor while preserving any pretrained content along it. We validate on three fine-tuning tasks. The first two involve emergent misalignment, where fine-tuning on a narrow task -- in our case, writing insecure code and giving bad medical advice -- leads to misaligned responses on unrelated topics. Here our method completely removes misalignment in the insecure code case and reduces them by ~5x in the bad medical advice case, beating all baselines in the trade-off between misalignment-reduction and task-preservation. The last is a novel political-bias experiment, where fine-tuning on right-skewed Reddit financial-advice data causes political-lean drift on unrelated topics. Here our method reduces drift by more than half, while improving financial task performance, beating all baselines.

Eliot: Interactively $\underline{E}$xploring Fast-Changing Scientific $\underline{Li}$terature Trends with $\underline{O}$nline Da$\underline{t}$a and Learning

The rapid growth of scientific publishing has made it increasingly difficult to track how fast-moving areas evolve. Search engines and LLM-based assistants retrieve or summarize papers, but often hide how the corpus was selected, organized, or connected to temporal patterns. We present $\texttt{Eliot}$, a publicly deployed interactive system for traceable exploration of evolving scientific literature. Motivated by two studies on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Automated Planning and Scheduling (APS), $\texttt{Eliot}$ generalizes literature-evolution analysis beyond hand-built taxonomies and domain-specific scripts. Given explicit query terms and filters, it retrieves arXiv papers at query time, represents each paper by title and abstract, clusters the corpus into themes, assigns representative keywords, and visualizes each cluster's publication-year distribution. We evaluate $\texttt{Eliot}$ as both an applied system and an interactive research aid. An offline configuration study across eight arXiv domains compares document representations, dimensionality reduction methods, and clustering algorithms using intrinsic clustering and topic-coherence metrics; the results support MiniLM embeddings with 10-dimensional UMAP and Agglomerative Clustering as a practical default. A scenario-based survey and expert focus group assess interpretability and use contexts: participants rated cluster labels as meaningful in 85% of scenario responses, and feedback indicated that $\texttt{Eliot}$ is most valuable for auditable overviews of rapidly changing technical areas. These results suggest that query-time clustering and temporal inspection can complement search and generation tools by helping researchers inspect and refine the evidence behind literature trends.

Keyphrase Generative Representation of Youth Crisis Conversations Beyond Static Taxonomies

Crisis Responders (CRs) rapidly assess thousands of youth SMS conversations each year to identify mental health concerns and guide support. Yet youth distress is increasingly expressed through evolving and context-specific language that often does not fit fixed-label taxonomies. This work analyzed 703,975 de-identified Kids Help Phone conversations (2018-2023) and expanded KHP's 19-label issue taxonomy into a 39-label hierarchical schema. We then introduce Keyphrase Generative Representation (KGR), a constrained LLM generating concise, conversation-specific keyphrases, evaluated across 129 conversations and 387 expert annotations. The expanded taxonomy achieved expert consensus reliability, with an accuracy of 0.96, and expert review found that 81% of keyphrases accurately reflected content and 74% improved clarity. KGR surfaced identity-linked themes absent from the fixed taxonomy, including immigration problems and caregiver burden, and supported a topic-retrieval workflow that increased accuracy from 0.25 to 0.70 (+0.45) over the manual analyst process. KGR marks a shift toward hybrid, interpretable generative representations that extend crisis response beyond static taxonomies to surface emerging and culturally grounded patterns of youth distress.

AuthTrace: Diagnosing Evidence Construction in Thematically Dense Single-Author Corpora

Evidence construction--the stage that determines which passages reach the language model before generation begins--is evaluated paradigm by paradigm, leaving practitioners with no principled way to diagnose which organization strategy fails, where, or why. We introduce AuthTrace, a diagnostic benchmark built on thematically dense single-author corpora where near-miss distractors share style, topic, and vocabulary with the required evidence. AuthTrace provides explicit quoted evidence, exact fan-in annotation, and a unified pack-level protocol measuring evidence recall, evidence precision, and answer correctness. A fan-in gradient--the number of source documents required to support the answer--serves as the primary diagnostic axis, enabling controlled comparison across retrieval, memory, graph, and structured-evidence paradigms. Evaluating eight systems across two QA models, we find that evidence recall is the strongest observed predictor of answer correctness under the primary reader-judge pair (r = 0.96); most failures stem from missing evidence rather than answer synthesis. Fan-in further exposes paradigm-specific collapse patterns: flat retrieval degrades 2-3x faster than thematically organized evidence construction. These results show fan-in decomposition to be a reusable diagnostic lens for identifying where evidence-construction systems fail and which paradigm best serves a given workload.

Generating 3D models from sketches of human faces using a combined approach of Convolutional Neural Networks, Procedural Modeling, and Contour Mapping

Generating 3D models from face sketches is an active topic of research in Computer Graphics due to its potential to tremendously facilitate the modeling of faces for both professional 3D arists and novices. Motivated by the observation that facial expressions are responsible for significantly altering and shaping the contours in our faces, we combine both expression detection and 3D model generation in our approach. The result is a novel approach to generating 3D models from sketches which relies on three components: Convolutional Neural Networks, a parametric 3D face model (Valley Girl), and Active Snake Contours. For the first time in the literature, CNNs are trained (using our own generated dataset) to detect the expression in the given sketch through detecting the active FACS Action Units. The expression is then duplicated on Valley Girl to obtain a 3D model with a similar expression. Active Snake Contours are then used to find the transforms needed to close the gaps between that model and the given sketch.

StakeBench: Evaluating Language Understanding Grounded in Market Commitment

Existing financial NLP benchmarks often rely on labels supplied by outside observers, measuring how language is perceived rather than what speakers have committed to in the market. We introduce StakeBench, an evaluation framework for language understanding grounded in market commitment. StakeBench links 560,876 comments from 2,261 resolved markets to verified position, action, and market-odds records across Polymarket and Manifold. Supervision is derived from observable market behavior. Position sides, post-comment trading actions, and market-odds trajectories replace human annotation. Four diagnostic tasks test whether models detect market commitment, identify the revealed side, anticipate future action, and perform collective odds projection. Three commitment-aware metrics measure alignment with revealed preferences rather than perceived sentiment. Validity audits and explicit interpretation boundaries help distinguish observable commitment signals from latent belief and causal market-odds impact. Across 15 LLMs and 18 topics and platform settings, models partially recover position-side signals, with Directed Accuracy from 0.506 to 0.599, but show structural failures on later tasks. Ten of the fifteen models collapse to one or two action labels in future action anticipation, and no model consistently improves on the naive odds-direction baseline in collective odds projection. Model scale is not correlated with performance, finance-domain tuning does not improve revealed-side identification, and platform incentives strongly shape higher-order results. StakeBench is packaged with evaluation code and dataset under CC-BY 4.0.

What Gets Cited: Competitive GEO in AI Answer Engines

AI answer engines generate answers from retrieved pages but cite only a few sources. This makes visibility depend not just on ranking, but on being cited. We study competitive Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): when two retrieved candidates compete, what makes one more likely to be cited first? We build a controlled two-document retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) testbed that injects exactly two candidate sources into the model context and measures which source is referenced by the first citation marker in the output. Across six LLMs we execute 252,000 trials, repeated paired comparisons under one factorial program over 18 content factors. In each trial the two sources differ in exactly one factor; we use brand anonymization and counterbalanced source order to separate content effects from position bias. Mixed-effects models show that topical relevance and list position are the biggest drivers of being cited first. Including explicit price information and a recent timestamp also helps consistently. Completeness and trust cues add smaller gains, while formatting-only edits have little impact. We release a reproducible evaluation protocol and a prioritized GEO checklist for practitioners, and we exercised it in an early internal pilot at Sprinklr, where teams reported positive qualitative feedback on workflow usability.

From Item-Only to Query-Item: Query-Conditioned Generative Search with QGS in Quark

Generative sequence models have shown strong results in recommendation. Applying them to search ranking is more challenging. Search behavior is inherently query-driven. Each query switch introduces a sharp topic shift in the user's interaction history. Existing generative methods flatten queries and items into a single token sequence. They do not distinguish query boundaries. This causes the model to mix different query intents into one prediction target, resulting in noisy supervision. We present Query-Conditioned Generative Search (QGS). QGS encodes each interaction as a (query, item) pair token. It trains with a query-conditioned next-item objective. The prediction target changes from a noisy marginal P(item_{t+1}|context_{<=t}) to a clean conditional P(item_{t+1}|context_{<=t}, query_{t+1}). This directly removes the semantic discontinuity caused by query switches. Encoding long interaction histories with standard attention has quadratic cost. This is impractical under strict online latency budgets. We introduce a Linear HSTU encoder. It replaces full attention with causal linear recurrence. Per-layer complexity drops from O(L^2) to O(L) with no loss in ranking quality. Traditional search ranking depends on hand-crafted features like text-matching scores, statistical signals, and behavioral features. We propose HFG-Attention to preserve them in the generative framework. It organizes heterogeneous features into semantic groups and fuses them through a dedicated attention block. This bridges sparse engineered signals with dense sequential representations. QGS is deployed in the ranking module of Quark Search, a major commercial search engine in China. Online A/B tests show statistically significant gains: +0.62% CTR, +0.38% Click-Search Ratio, and +3.55% PV Duration over the production deep learning baseline.

From Simulation to Enaction: Post-trained language models recognize and react to their own generations

Language models are pretrained as passive predictors with no incentive to model the consequences of their own outputs. Post-training changes this: a model producing its own responses can benefit from recognizing that it is on-policy. We present evidence that post-trained models recognize their on-policy generations, and this recognition is implicitly encoded in their output distributions. In particular, on-policy output distribution entropy is 3--4$\times$ lower than off-policy entropy, across model families and size classes. We trace part of this effect to an internal representation of input surprise, tracking the unlikeliness of the most recent input token according to the model's prior predictions, that causally modulates output entropy. One example of these phenomena can be observed in response to open-ended prompts; post-trained models (unlike pretrained models) collapse their uncertainty over the topic of their upcoming response before the first output token; violating this cached intention with a different-topic prefill results in higher output entropy. We also tested whether models can distinguish on-policy contexts from prefills via explicit verbal report. We find that they can, but that interestingly, this explicit recognition routes through a different mechanism than implicit recognition.