CLAP: Coreference-Linked Augmentation for Passage Retrieval

Large Language Model (LLM)-based passage expansion has shown promise for enhancing first-stage retrieval, but often underperforms with dense retrievers due to semantic drift and misalignment with their pretrained semantic space. Beyond this, only a portion of a passage is typically relevant to a query, while the rest introduces noise--an issue compounded by chunking techniques that break coreference continuity. We propose Coreference-Linked Augmentation for Passage Retrieval (CLAP), a lightweight LLM-based expansion framework that segments passages into coherent chunks, resolves coreference chains, and generates localized pseudo-queries aligned with dense retriever representations. A simple fusion of global topical signals and fine-grained subtopic signals achieves robust performance across domains. CLAP yields consistent gains even as retriever strength increases, enabling dense retrievers to match or surpass second-stage rankers such as BM25 + MonoT5-3B, with up to 20.68% absolute nDCG@10 improvement. These improvements are especially notable in out-of-domain settings, where conventional LLM-based expansion methods relying on domain knowledge often falter. CLAP instead adopts a logic-centric pipeline that enables robust, domain-agnostic generalization.

Topic Modeling and Link-Prediction for Material Property Discovery

Link prediction infers missing or future relations between graph nodes, based on connection patterns. Scientific literature networks and knowledge graphs are typically large, sparse, and noisy, and often contain missing links between entities. We present an AI-driven hierarchical link prediction framework that integrates matrix factorization to infer hidden associations and steer discovery in complex material domains. Our method combines Hierarchical Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (HNMFk) and Boolean matrix factorization (BNMFk) with automatic model selection, as well as Logistic matrix factorization (LMF), we use to construct a three-level topic tree from a 46,862-document corpus focused on 73 transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). These materials are studied in a variety of physics fields with many current and potential applications. An ensemble BNMFk + LMF approach fuses discrete interpretability with probabilistic scoring. The resulting HNMFk clusters map each material onto coherent topics like superconductivity, energy storage, and tribology. Also, missing or weakly connected links are highlight between topics and materials, suggesting novel hypotheses for cross-disciplinary exploration. We validate our method by removing publications about superconductivity in well-known superconductors, and show the model predicts associations with the superconducting TMD clusters. This shows the method finds hidden connections in a graph of material to latent topic associations built from scientific literature, especially useful when examining a diverse corpus of scientific documents covering the same class of phenomena or materials but originating from distinct communities and perspectives. The inferred links generating new hypotheses, produced by our method, are exposed through an interactive Streamlit dashboard, designed for human-in-the-loop scientific discovery.

Metasurface-based Fluid Antennas: from Electromagnetics to Communications Model

Fluid antenna systems (FASs) have become a popular topic in the wireless community as an effective yet simple means of exploiting spatial diversity. Due to the limitations of physically moving radiating elements, electronically reconfigurable antennas are emerging as practical implementations of FASs, since changing the radiation pattern is functionally equivalent to physically moving the device. However, electronically reconfigurable antennas pose a challenge in terms of analytical modeling, often requiring full-wave simulations or measurements for their characterization; this severely limits the extraction of theoretical insights useful for system design. Motivated by these difficulties and the growing interest in FASs, we propose in this paper a complete analytical model for metasurface-based embodiments of FASs. Specifically, we advocate for the implementation of the FAS concept through dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs), hitherto proposed as array replacements in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We leverage circuit theory to rewrite the conventional signal model of FASs in terms of admittance matrices accounting for the electromagnetic effects inherent to metasurfaces. The model is validated with full-wave simulations, showing good agreement. We further illustrate how to apply the model for standard performance analysis, and provide closed-form expressions for key metrics, including the resulting signal covariance matrix. Results confirm that practical DMA-based FASs can achieve similar performance to that of idealized implementations of position-flexible antennas.

Demo: TOSense -- What Did You Just Agree to?

Online services often require users to agree to lengthy and obscure Terms of Service (ToS), leading to information asymmetry and legal risks. This paper proposes TOSense-a Chrome extension that allows users to ask questions about ToS in natural language and get concise answers in real time. The system combines (i) a crawler "tos-crawl" that automatically extracts ToS content, and (ii) a lightweight large language model pipeline: MiniLM for semantic retrieval and BART-encoder for answer relevance verification. To avoid expensive manual annotation, we present a novel Question Answering Evaluation Pipeline (QEP) that generates synthetic questions and verifies the correctness of answers using clustered topic matching. Experiments on five major platforms, Apple, Google, X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft, and Netflix, show the effectiveness of TOSense (with up to 44.5% accuracy) across varying number of topic clusters. During the demonstration, we will showcase TOSense in action. Attendees will be able to experience seamless extraction, interactive question answering, and instant indexing of new sites.

Whose Truth? Pluralistic Geo-Alignment for (Agentic) AI

AI (super) alignment describes the challenge of ensuring (future) AI systems behave in accordance with societal norms and goals. While a quickly evolving literature is addressing biases and inequalities, the geographic variability of alignment remains underexplored. Simply put, what is considered appropriate, truthful, or legal can differ widely across regions due to cultural norms, political realities, and legislation. Alignment measures applied to AI/ML workflows can sometimes produce outcomes that diverge from statistical realities, such as text-to-image models depicting balanced gender ratios in company leadership despite existing imbalances. Crucially, some model outputs are globally acceptable, while others, e.g., questions about Kashmir, depend on knowing the user's location and their context. This geographic sensitivity is not new. For instance, Google Maps renders Kashmir's borders differently based on user location. What is new is the unprecedented scale and automation with which AI now mediates knowledge, expresses opinions, and represents geographic reality to millions of users worldwide, often with little transparency about how context is managed. As we approach Agentic AI, the need for spatio-temporally aware alignment, rather than one-size-fits-all approaches, is increasingly urgent. This paper reviews key geographic research problems, suggests topics for future work, and outlines methods for assessing alignment sensitivity.

A Benchmark Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Vietnamese Large Language Models in Customer Support

With the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential for Question Answering (QA) systems, improving efficiency and reducing human workload in customer service. The emergence of Vietnamese LLMs (ViLLMs) highlights lightweight open-source models as a practical choice for their accuracy, efficiency, and privacy benefits. However, domain-specific evaluations remain limited, and the absence of benchmark datasets reflecting real customer interactions makes it difficult for enterprises to select suitable models for support applications. To address this gap, we introduce the Customer Support Conversations Dataset (CSConDa), a curated benchmark of over 9,000 QA pairs drawn from real interactions with human advisors at a large Vietnamese software company. Covering diverse topics such as pricing, product availability, and technical troubleshooting, CSConDa provides a representative basis for evaluating ViLLMs in practical scenarios. We further present a comprehensive evaluation framework, benchmarking 11 lightweight open-source ViLLMs on CSConDa with both automatic metrics and syntactic analysis to reveal model strengths, weaknesses, and linguistic patterns. This study offers insights into model behavior, explains performance differences, and identifies key areas for improvement, supporting the development of next-generation ViLLMs. By establishing a robust benchmark and systematic evaluation, our work enables informed model selection for customer service QA and advances research on Vietnamese LLMs. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ura-hcmut/Vietnamese-Customer-Support-QA.

AniMer+: Unified Pose and Shape Estimation Across Mammalia and Aves via Family-Aware Transformer

In the era of foundation models, achieving a unified understanding of different dynamic objects through a single network has the potential to empower stronger spatial intelligence. Moreover, accurate estimation of animal pose and shape across diverse species is essential for quantitative analysis in biological research. However, this topic remains underexplored due to the limited network capacity of previous methods and the scarcity of comprehensive multi-species datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce AniMer+, an extended version of our scalable AniMer framework. In this paper, we focus on a unified approach for reconstructing mammals (mammalia) and birds (aves). A key innovation of AniMer+ is its high-capacity, family-aware Vision Transformer (ViT) incorporating a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design. Its architecture partitions network layers into taxa-specific components (for mammalia and aves) and taxa-shared components, enabling efficient learning of both distinct and common anatomical features within a single model. To overcome the critical shortage of 3D training data, especially for birds, we introduce a diffusion-based conditional image generation pipeline. This pipeline produces two large-scale synthetic datasets: CtrlAni3D for quadrupeds and CtrlAVES3D for birds. To note, CtrlAVES3D is the first large-scale, 3D-annotated dataset for birds, which is crucial for resolving single-view depth ambiguities. Trained on an aggregated collection of 41.3k mammalian and 12.4k avian images (combining real and synthetic data), our method demonstrates superior performance over existing approaches across a wide range of benchmarks, including the challenging out-of-domain Animal Kingdom dataset. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of both our novel network architecture and the generated synthetic datasets in enhancing real-world application performance.

MELAC: Massive Evaluation of Large Language Models with Alignment of Culture in Persian Language

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in our daily lives, evaluating their quality and reliability across diverse contexts has become essential. While comprehensive benchmarks exist for assessing LLM performance in English, there remains a significant gap in evaluation resources for other languages. Moreover, because most LLMs are trained primarily on data rooted in European and American cultures, they often lack familiarity with non-Western cultural contexts. To address this limitation, our study focuses on the Persian language and Iranian culture. We introduce 19 new evaluation datasets specifically designed to assess LLMs on topics such as Iranian law, Persian grammar, Persian idioms, and university entrance exams. Using these datasets, we benchmarked 41 prominent LLMs, aiming to bridge the existing cultural and linguistic evaluation gap in the field.

Comparing Apples to Oranges: A Dataset & Analysis of LLM Humour Understanding from Traditional Puns to Topical Jokes

Humour, as a complex language form, is derived from myriad aspects of life, whilst existing work on computational humour has focussed almost exclusively on short pun-based jokes. In this work, we investigate whether the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to explain humour depends on the particular humour form. We compare models on simple puns and more complex topical humour that requires knowledge of real-world entities and events. In doing so, we curate a dataset of 600 jokes split across 4 joke types and manually write high-quality explanations. These jokes include heterographic and homographic puns, contemporary internet humour, and topical jokes, where understanding relies on reasoning beyond "common sense", rooted instead in world knowledge regarding news events and pop culture. Using this dataset, we compare the zero-shot abilities of a range of LLMs to accurately and comprehensively explain jokes of different types, identifying key research gaps in the task of humour explanation. We find that none of the tested models (inc. reasoning models) are capable of reliably generating adequate explanations of all joke types, further highlighting the narrow focus of most works in computational humour on overly simple joke forms.

Survey of NLU Benchmarks Diagnosing Linguistic Phenomena: Why not Standardize Diagnostics Benchmarks?

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a basic task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The evaluation of NLU capabilities has become a trending research topic that attracts researchers in the last few years, resulting in the development of numerous benchmarks. These benchmarks include various tasks and datasets in order to evaluate the results of pretrained models via public leaderboards. Notably, several benchmarks contain diagnostics datasets designed for investigation and fine-grained error analysis across a wide range of linguistic phenomena. This survey provides a comprehensive review of available English, Arabic, and Multilingual NLU benchmarks, with a particular emphasis on their diagnostics datasets and the linguistic phenomena they covered. We present a detailed comparison and analysis of these benchmarks, highlighting their strengths and limitations in evaluating NLU tasks and providing in-depth error analysis. When highlighting the gaps in the state-of-the-art, we noted that there is no naming convention for macro and micro categories or even a standard set of linguistic phenomena that should be covered. Consequently, we formulated a research question regarding the evaluation metrics of the evaluation diagnostics benchmarks: "Why do not we have an evaluation standard for the NLU evaluation diagnostics benchmarks?" similar to ISO standard in industry. We conducted a deep analysis and comparisons of the covered linguistic phenomena in order to support experts in building a global hierarchy for linguistic phenomena in future. We think that having evaluation metrics for diagnostics evaluation could be valuable to gain more insights when comparing the results of the studied models on different diagnostics benchmarks.