Reasoning-Intensive Regression

AI researchers and practitioners increasingly apply large language models (LLMs) to what we call reasoning-intensive regression (RiR), i.e. deducing subtle numerical properties from text. Unlike standard language regression tasks, e.g. for sentiment or similarity, RiR often appears instead in ad-hoc problems like rubric-based scoring or domain-specific retrieval, where much deeper analysis of text is required while only limited task-specific training data and computation are available. We cast three realistic problems as RiR tasks to establish an initial benchmark, and use that to test our hypothesis that prompting frozen LLMs and finetuning Transformer encoders via gradient descent will both often struggle in RiR. We then propose MENTAT, a simple and lightweight method that combines batch-reflective prompt optimization with neural ensemble learning. MENTAT achieves up to 65% improvement over both baselines, though substantial room remains for future advances in RiR.

The Sound of Risk: A Multimodal Physics-Informed Acoustic Model for Forecasting Market Volatility and Enhancing Market Interpretability

Information asymmetry in financial markets, often amplified by strategically crafted corporate narratives, undermines the effectiveness of conventional textual analysis. We propose a novel multimodal framework for financial risk assessment that integrates textual sentiment with paralinguistic cues derived from executive vocal tract dynamics in earnings calls. Central to this framework is the Physics-Informed Acoustic Model (PIAM), which applies nonlinear acoustics to robustly extract emotional signatures from raw teleconference sound subject to distortions such as signal clipping. Both acoustic and textual emotional states are projected onto an interpretable three-dimensional Affective State Label (ASL) space-Tension, Stability, and Arousal. Using a dataset of 1,795 earnings calls (approximately 1,800 hours), we construct features capturing dynamic shifts in executive affect between scripted presentation and spontaneous Q&A exchanges. Our key finding reveals a pronounced divergence in predictive capacity: while multimodal features do not forecast directional stock returns, they explain up to 43.8% of the out-of-sample variance in 30-day realized volatility. Importantly, volatility predictions are strongly driven by emotional dynamics during executive transitions from scripted to spontaneous speech, particularly reduced textual stability and heightened acoustic instability from CFOs, and significant arousal variability from CEOs. An ablation study confirms that our multimodal approach substantially outperforms a financials-only baseline, underscoring the complementary contributions of acoustic and textual modalities. By decoding latent markers of uncertainty from verifiable biometric signals, our methodology provides investors and regulators a powerful tool for enhancing market interpretability and identifying hidden corporate uncertainty.

Dream to Chat: Model-based Reinforcement Learning on Dialogues with User Belief Modeling

World models have been widely utilized in robotics, gaming, and auto-driving. However, their applications on natural language tasks are relatively limited. In this paper, we construct the dialogue world model, which could predict the user's emotion, sentiment, and intention, and future utterances. By defining a POMDP, we argue emotion, sentiment and intention can be modeled as the user belief and solved by maximizing the information bottleneck. By this user belief modeling, we apply the model-based reinforcement learning framework to the dialogue system, and propose a framework called DreamCUB. Experiments show that the pretrained dialogue world model can achieve state-of-the-art performances on emotion classification and sentiment identification, while dialogue quality is also enhanced by joint training of the policy, critic and dialogue world model. Further analysis shows that this manner holds a reasonable exploration-exploitation balance and also transfers well to out-of-domain scenarios such as empathetic dialogues.

HumAIne-Chatbot: Real-Time Personalized Conversational AI via Reinforcement Learning

Current conversational AI systems often provide generic, one-size-fits-all interactions that overlook individual user characteristics and lack adaptive dialogue management. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{HumAIne-chatbot}, an AI-driven conversational agent that personalizes responses through a novel user profiling framework. The system is pre-trained on a diverse set of GPT-generated virtual personas to establish a broad prior over user types. During live interactions, an online reinforcement learning agent refines per-user models by combining implicit signals (e.g. typing speed, sentiment, engagement duration) with explicit feedback (e.g., likes and dislikes). This profile dynamically informs the chatbot dialogue policy, enabling real-time adaptation of both content and style. To evaluate the system, we performed controlled experiments with 50 synthetic personas in multiple conversation domains. The results showed consistent improvements in user satisfaction, personalization accuracy, and task achievement when personalization features were enabled. Statistical analysis confirmed significant differences between personalized and nonpersonalized conditions, with large effect sizes across key metrics. These findings highlight the effectiveness of AI-driven user profiling and provide a strong foundation for future real-world validation.

Improving Narrative Classification and Explanation via Fine Tuned Language Models

Understanding covert narratives and implicit messaging is essential for analyzing bias and sentiment. Traditional NLP methods struggle with detecting subtle phrasing and hidden agendas. This study tackles two key challenges: (1) multi-label classification of narratives and sub-narratives in news articles, and (2) generating concise, evidence-based explanations for dominant narratives. We fine-tune a BERT model with a recall-oriented approach for comprehensive narrative detection, refining predictions using a GPT-4o pipeline for consistency. For narrative explanation, we propose a ReACT (Reasoning + Acting) framework with semantic retrieval-based few-shot prompting, ensuring grounded and relevant justifications. To enhance factual accuracy and reduce hallucinations, we incorporate a structured taxonomy table as an auxiliary knowledge base. Our results show that integrating auxiliary knowledge in prompts improves classification accuracy and justification reliability, with applications in media analysis, education, and intelligence gathering.

DCR: Quantifying Data Contamination in LLMs Evaluation

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has heightened concerns about benchmark data contamination (BDC), where models inadvertently memorize evaluation data, inflating performance metrics and undermining genuine generalization assessment. This paper introduces the Data Contamination Risk (DCR) framework, a lightweight, interpretable pipeline designed to detect and quantify BDC across four granular levels: semantic, informational, data, and label. By synthesizing contamination scores via a fuzzy inference system, DCR produces a unified DCR Factor that adjusts raw accuracy to reflect contamination-aware performance. Validated on 9 LLMs (0.5B-72B) across sentiment analysis, fake news detection, and arithmetic reasoning tasks, the DCR framework reliably diagnoses contamination severity and with accuracy adjusted using the DCR Factor to within 4% average error across the three benchmarks compared to the uncontaminated baseline. Emphasizing computational efficiency and transparency, DCR provides a practical tool for integrating contamination assessment into routine evaluations, fostering fairer comparisons and enhancing the credibility of LLM benchmarking practices.

MEGA: xLSTM with Multihead Exponential Gated Fusion for Precise Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a critical Natural Language Processing (NLP) task that extracts aspects from text and determines their associated sentiments, enabling fine-grained analysis of user opinions. Existing ABSA methods struggle to balance computational efficiency with high performance: deep learning models often lack global context, transformers demand significant computational resources, and Mamba-based approaches face CUDA dependency and diminished local correlations. Recent advancements in Extended Long Short-Term Memory (xLSTM) models, particularly their efficient modeling of long-range dependencies, have significantly advanced the NLP community. However, their potential in ABSA remains untapped. To this end, we propose xLSTM with Multihead Exponential Gated Fusion (MEGA), a novel framework integrating a bi-directional mLSTM architecture with forward and partially flipped backward (PF-mLSTM) streams. The PF-mLSTM enhances localized context modeling by processing the initial sequence segment in reverse with dedicated parameters, preserving critical short-range patterns. We further introduce an mLSTM-based multihead cross exponential gated fusion mechanism (MECGAF) that dynamically combines forward mLSTM outputs as query and key with PF-mLSTM outputs as value, optimizing short-range dependency capture while maintaining global context and efficiency. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that MEGA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior accuracy and efficiency in ABSA tasks.

GNN-CNN: An Efficient Hybrid Model of Convolutional and Graph Neural Networks for Text Representation

Time, cost, and energy efficiency are critical considerations in Deep-Learning (DL), particularly when processing long texts. Transformers, which represent the current state of the art, exhibit quadratic computational complexity relative to input length, making them inefficient for extended documents. This study introduces a novel model architecture that combines Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), integrated with a real-time, end-to-end graph generation mechanism. The model processes compact batches of character-level inputs without requiring padding or truncation. To enhance performance while maintaining high speed and efficiency, the model incorporates information from Large Language Models (LLMs), such as token embeddings and sentiment polarities, through efficient dictionary lookups. It captures local contextual patterns using CNNs, expands local receptive fields via lattice-based graph structures, and employs small-world graphs to aggregate document-level information. The generated graphs exhibit structural properties indicative of meaningful semantic organization, with an average clustering coefficient of approximately 0.45 and an average shortest path length ranging between 4 and 5. The model is evaluated across multiple text classification tasks, including sentiment analysis and news-categorization, and is compared against state-of-the-art models. Experimental results confirm the proposed model's efficiency and competitive performance.

Are You Listening to Me? Fine-Tuning Chatbots for Empathetic Dialogue

Conversational agents have made significant progress since ELIZA, expanding their role across various domains, including healthcare, education, and customer service. As these agents become increasingly integrated into daily human interactions, the need for emotional intelligence, particularly empathetic listening, becomes increasingly essential. In this study, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) respond when tasked with generating emotionally rich interactions. Starting from a small dataset manually crafted by an expert to reflect empathic behavior, we extended the conversations using two LLMs: ChatGPT and Gemini. We analyzed the emotional progression of the dialogues using both sentiment analysis (via VADER) and expert assessments. While the generated conversations often mirrored the intended emotional structure, human evaluation revealed important differences in the perceived empathy and coherence of the responses. These findings suggest that emotion modeling in dialogues requires not only structural alignment in the expressed emotions but also qualitative depth, highlighting the importance of combining automated and humancentered methods in the development of emotionally competent agents.

Stereotype Detection as a Catalyst for Enhanced Bias Detection: A Multi-Task Learning Approach

Bias and stereotypes in language models can cause harm, especially in sensitive areas like content moderation and decision-making. This paper addresses bias and stereotype detection by exploring how jointly learning these tasks enhances model performance. We introduce StereoBias, a unique dataset labeled for bias and stereotype detection across five categories: religion, gender, socio-economic status, race, profession, and others, enabling a deeper study of their relationship. Our experiments compare encoder-only models and fine-tuned decoder-only models using QLoRA. While encoder-only models perform well, decoder-only models also show competitive results. Crucially, joint training on bias and stereotype detection significantly improves bias detection compared to training them separately. Additional experiments with sentiment analysis confirm that the improvements stem from the connection between bias and stereotypes, not multi-task learning alone. These findings highlight the value of leveraging stereotype information to build fairer and more effective AI systems.