Mario: Multimodal Graph Reasoning with Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for multimodal reasoning. Yet, most existing methods still rely on pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) to encode image-text pairs in isolation, ignoring the relational structure that real-world multimodal data naturally form. This motivates reasoning on multimodal graphs (MMGs), where each node has textual and visual attributes and edges provide structural cues. Enabling LLM-based reasoning on such heterogeneous multimodal signals while preserving graph topology introduces two key challenges: resolving weak cross-modal consistency and handling heterogeneous modality preference. To address this, we propose Mario, a unified framework that simultaneously resolves the two above challenges and enables effective LLM-based reasoning over MMGs. Mario consists of two innovative stages. Firstly, a graph-conditioned VLM design that jointly refines textual and visual features through fine-grained cross-modal contrastive learning guided by graph topology. Secondly, a modality-adaptive graph instruction tuning mechanism that organizes aligned multimodal features into graph-aware instruction views and employs a learnable router to surface, for each node and its neighborhood, the most informative modality configuration to the LLM. Extensive experiments across diverse MMG benchmarks demonstrate that Mario consistently outperforms state-of-the-art graph models in both supervised and zero-shot scenarios for node classification and link prediction. The code will be made available at https://github.com/sunyuanfu/Mario.

Neuro-Symbolic Financial Reasoning via Deterministic Fact Ledgers and Adversarial Low-Latency Hallucination Detector

Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures fail in high-stakes financial domains due to two fundamental limitations: the inherent arithmetic incompetence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the distributional semantic conflation of dense vector retrieval (e.g., mapping ``Net Income'' to ``Net Sales'' due to contextual proximity). In deterministic domains, a 99% accuracy rate yields 0% operational trust. To achieve zero-hallucination financial reasoning, we introduce the Verifiable Numerical Reasoning Agent (VeNRA). VeNRA shifts the RAG paradigm from retrieving probabilistic text to retrieving deterministic variables via a strictly typed Universal Fact Ledger (UFL), mathematically bounded by a novel Double-Lock Grounding algorithm. Recognizing that upstream parsing anomalies inevitably occur, we introduce the VeNRA Sentinel: a 3-billion parameter SLM trained to forensically audit Python execution traces with only one token test budget. To train this model, we avoid traditional generative hallucination datasets in favor of Adversarial Simulation, programmatically sabotaging golden financial records to simulate production-level ``Ecological Errors'' (e.g., Logic Code Lies and Numeric Neighbor Traps). Finally, to optimize the Sentinel under strict latency budgets, we utilize a single-pass classification paradigm with optional post thinking for debug. We identify the phenomenon of Loss Dilution in Reverse-Chain-of-Thought training and present a novel, OOM-safe Micro-Chunking loss algorithm to stabilize gradients under extreme differential penalization.

DashengTokenizer: One layer is enough for unified audio understanding and generation

This paper introduces DashengTokenizer, a continuous audio tokenizer engineered for joint use in both understanding and generation tasks. Unlike conventional approaches, which train acoustic tokenizers and subsequently integrate frozen semantic knowledge, our method inverts this paradigm: we leverage frozen semantic features and inject acoustic information. In linear evaluation across 22 diverse tasks, our method outperforms previous audio codec and audio encoder baselines by a significant margin while maintaining competitive audio reconstruction quality. Notably, we demonstrate that this acoustic injection improves performance for tasks such as speech emotion recognition, music understanding, and acoustic scene classification. We further evaluate the tokenizer's generative performance on text-to-audio (TTA), text-to-music (TTM), and speech enhancement (SE). Our approach surpasses standard variational autoencoder (VAE)-based methods on TTA and TTM tasks, while its effectiveness on SE underscores its capabilities as a general-purpose audio encoder. Finally, our results challenge the prevailing assumption that VAE-based architectures are a prerequisite for audio synthesis. Checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/mispeech/dashengtokenizer.

PRECTR-V2:Unified Relevance-CTR Framework with Cross-User Preference Mining, Exposure Bias Correction, and LLM-Distilled Encoder Optimization

In search systems, effectively coordinating the two core objectives of search relevance matching and click-through rate (CTR) prediction is crucial for discovering users' interests and enhancing platform revenue. In our prior work PRECTR, we proposed a unified framework to integrate these two subtasks,thereby eliminating their inconsistency and leading to mutual benefit.However, our previous work still faces three main challenges. First, low-active users and new users have limited search behavioral data, making it difficult to achieve effective personalized relevance preference modeling. Second, training data for ranking models predominantly come from high-relevance exposures, creating a distribution mismatch with the broader candidate space in coarse-ranking, leading to generalization bias. Third, due to the latency constraint, the original model employs an Emb+MLP architecture with a frozen BERT encoder, which prevents joint optimization and creates misalignment between representation learning and CTR fine-tuning. To solve these issues, we further reinforce our method and propose PRECTR-V2. Specifically, we mitigate the low-activity users' sparse behavior problem by mining global relevance preferences under the specific query, which facilitates effective personalized relevance modeling for cold-start scenarios. Subsequently, we construct hard negative samples through embedding noise injection and relevance label reconstruction, and optimize their relative ranking against positive samples via pairwise loss, thereby correcting exposure bias. Finally, we pretrain a lightweight transformer-based encoder via knowledge distillation from LLM and SFT on the text relevance classification task. This encoder replaces the frozen BERT module, enabling better adaptation to CTR fine-tuning and advancing beyond the traditional Emb+MLP paradigm.

CLIP Is Shortsighted: Paying Attention Beyond the First Sentence

CLIP models learn transferable multi-modal features via image-text contrastive learning on internet-scale data. They are widely used in zero-shot classification, multi-modal retrieval, text-to-image diffusion, and as image encoders in large vision-language models. However, CLIP's pretraining is dominated by images paired with short captions, biasing the model toward encoding simple descriptions of salient objects and leading to coarse alignment on complex scenes and dense descriptions. While recent work mitigates this by fine-tuning on small-scale long-caption datasets, we identify an important common bias: both human- and LLM-generated long captions typically begin with a one-sentence summary followed by a detailed description. We show that this acts as a shortcut during training, concentrating attention on the opening sentence and early tokens and weakening alignment over the rest of the caption. To resolve this, we introduce DeBias-CLIP, which removes the summary sentence during training and applies sentence sub-sampling and text token padding to distribute supervision across all token positions. DeBias-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art long-text retrieval, improves short-text retrieval, and is less sensitive to sentence order permutations. It is a drop-in replacement for Long-CLIP with no additional trainable parameters.

A Neural Topic Method Using a Large-Language-Model-in-the-Loop for Business Research

The growing use of unstructured text in business research makes topic modeling a central tool for constructing explanatory variables from reviews, social media, and open-ended survey responses, yet existing approaches function poorly as measurement instruments. Prior work shows that textual content predicts outcomes such as sales, satisfaction, and firm performance, but probabilistic models often generate conceptually diffuse topics, neural topic models are difficult to interpret in theory-driven settings, and large language model approaches lack standardization, stability, and alignment with document-level representations. We introduce LX Topic, a neural topic method that conceptualizes topics as latent linguistic constructs and produces calibrated document-level topic proportions for empirical analysis. LX Topic builds on FASTopic to ensure strong document representativeness and integrates large language model refinement at the topic-word level using alignment and confidence-weighting mechanisms that enhance semantic coherence without distorting document-topic distributions. Evaluations on large-scale Amazon and Yelp review datasets demonstrate that LX Topic achieves the highest overall topic quality relative to leading models while preserving clustering and classification performance. By unifying topic discovery, refinement, and standardized output in a web-based system, LX Topic establishes topic modeling as a reproducible, interpretable, and measurement-oriented instrument for marketing research and practice.

Evaluating Cross-Lingual Classification Approaches Enabling Topic Discovery for Multilingual Social Media Data

Analysing multilingual social media discourse remains a major challenge in natural language processing, particularly when large-scale public debates span across diverse languages. This study investigates how different approaches for cross-lingual text classification can support reliable analysis of global conversations. Using hydrogen energy as a case study, we analyse a decade-long dataset of over nine million tweets in English, Japanese, Hindi, and Korean (2013--2022) for topic discovery. The online keyword-driven data collection results in a significant amount of irrelevant content. We explore four approaches to filter relevant content: (1) translating English annotated data into target languages for building language-specific models for each target language, (2) translating unlabelled data appearing from all languages into English for creating a single model based on English annotations, (3) applying English fine-tuned multilingual transformers directly to each target language data, and (4) a hybrid strategy that combines translated annotations with multilingual training. Each approach is evaluated for its ability to filter hydrogen-related tweets from noisy keyword-based collections. Subsequently, topic modeling is performed to extract dominant themes within the relevant subsets. The results highlight key trade-offs between translation and multilingual approaches, offering actionable insights into optimising cross-lingual pipelines for large-scale social media analysis.

Can Thinking Models Think to Detect Hateful Memes?

Hateful memes often require compositional multimodal reasoning: the image and text may appear benign in isolation, yet their interaction conveys harmful intent. Although thinking-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently advanced vision-language understanding, their capabilities remain underexplored for hateful meme analysis. We propose a reinforcement learning based post-training framework that improves reasoning in thinking-based MLLMs through task-specific rewards and a novel Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) objective. Specifically, we (i) conduct a systematic empirical study of off-the-shelf MLLMs for hateful meme understanding, (ii) extend an existing hateful meme dataset by generating weakly or pseudo-supervised chain-of-thought rationales via distillation, and (iii) introduce a GRPO-based objective that jointly optimizes meme classification and explanation quality to encourage fine-grained, step-by-step reasoning. Experiments on the Hateful Memes benchmark show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving accuracy and F1 by approximately 1 percent and explanation quality by approximately 3 percent. We will publicly release our code, dataset extensions, and evaluation resources to support reproducibility.

Hierarchic-EEG2Text: Assessing EEG-To-Text Decoding across Hierarchical Abstraction Levels

An electroencephalogram (EEG) records the spatially averaged electrical activity of neurons in the brain, measured from the human scalp. Prior studies have explored EEG-based classification of objects or concepts, often for passive viewing of briefly presented image or video stimuli, with limited classes. Because EEG exhibits a low signal-to-noise ratio, recognizing fine-grained representations across a large number of classes remains challenging; however, abstract-level object representations may exist. In this work, we investigate whether EEG captures object representations across multiple hierarchical levels, and propose episodic analysis, in which a Machine Learning (ML) model is evaluated across various, yet related, classification tasks (episodes). Unlike prior episodic EEG studies that rely on fixed or randomly sampled classes of equal cardinality, we adopt hierarchy-aware episode sampling using WordNet to generate episodes with variable classes of diverse hierarchy. We also present the largest episodic framework in the EEG domain for detecting observed text from EEG signals in the PEERS dataset, comprising $931538$ EEG samples under $1610$ object labels, acquired from $264$ human participants (subjects) performing controlled cognitive tasks, enabling the study of neural dynamics underlying perception, decision-making, and performance monitoring. We examine how the semantic abstraction level affects classification performance across multiple learning techniques and architectures, providing a comprehensive analysis. The models tend to improve performance when the classification categories are drawn from higher levels of the hierarchy, suggesting sensitivity to abstraction. Our work highlights abstraction depth as an underexplored dimension of EEG decoding and motivates future research in this direction.

An Empirical Analysis of Task-Induced Encoder Bias in Fréchet Audio Distance

Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD) is the de facto standard for evaluating text-to-audio generation, yet its scores depend on the underlying encoder's embedding space. An encoder's training task dictates which acoustic features are preserved or discarded, causing FAD to inherit systematic task-induced biases. We decompose evaluation into Recall, Precision, and Alignment (split into semantic and structural dimensions), using log-scale normalization for fair cross-encoder comparison. Controlled experiments on six encoders across two datasets reveal a four-axis trade-off: reconstruction-based AudioMAE leads precision sensitivity; ASR-trained Whisper dominates structural detection but is blind to signal degradation; classification-trained VGGish maximizes semantic detection but penalizes legitimate intra-class variation. Since no single encoder is a universal evaluator, future metrics must shift toward evaluation-native encoders intrinsically aligned with human perception.