DASH: Dialogue-Aware Similarity and Handshake Recognition for Topic Segmentation in Public-Channel Conversations

Dialogue Topic Segmentation (DTS) is crucial for understanding task-oriented public-channel communications, such as maritime VHF dialogues, which feature informal speech and implicit transitions. To address the limitations of traditional methods, we propose DASH-DTS, a novel LLM-based framework. Its core contributions are: (1) topic shift detection via dialogue handshake recognition; (2) contextual enhancement through similarity-guided example selection; and (3) the generation of selective positive and negative samples to improve model discrimination and robustness. Additionally, we release VHF-Dial, the first public dataset of real-world maritime VHF communications, to advance research in this domain. DASH-DTS provides interpretable reasoning and confidence scores for each segment. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves several sota segmentation trusted accuracy on both VHF-Dial and standard benchmarks, establishing a strong foundation for stable monitoring and decision support in operational dialogues.

When Reject Turns into Accept: Quantifying the Vulnerability of LLM-Based Scientific Reviewers to Indirect Prompt Injection

The landscape of scientific peer review is rapidly evolving with the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs). This shift is driven by two parallel trends: the widespread individual adoption of LLMs by reviewers to manage workload (the "Lazy Reviewer" hypothesis) and the formal institutional deployment of AI-powered assessment systems by conferences like AAAI and Stanford's Agents4Science. This study investigates the robustness of these "LLM-as-a-Judge" systems (both illicit and sanctioned) to adversarial PDF manipulation. Unlike general jailbreaks, we focus on a distinct incentive: flipping "Reject" decisions to "Accept," for which we develop a novel evaluation metric which we term as WAVS (Weighted Adversarial Vulnerability Score). We curated a dataset of 200 scientific papers and adapted 15 domain-specific attack strategies to this task, evaluating them across 13 Language Models, including GPT-5, Claude Haiku, and DeepSeek. Our results demonstrate that obfuscation strategies like "Maximum Mark Magyk" successfully manipulate scores, achieving alarming decision flip rates even in large-scale models. We will release our complete dataset and injection framework to facilitate more research on this topic.

From Shallow Humor to Metaphor: Towards Label-Free Harmful Meme Detection via LMM Agent Self-Improvement

The proliferation of harmful memes on online media poses significant risks to public health and stability. Existing detection methods heavily rely on large-scale labeled data for training, which necessitates substantial manual annotation efforts and limits their adaptability to the continually evolving nature of harmful content. To address these challenges, we present ALARM, the first lAbeL-free hARmful Meme detection framework powered by Large Multimodal Model (LMM) agent self-improvement. The core innovation of ALARM lies in exploiting the expressive information from "shallow" memes to iteratively enhance its ability to tackle more complex and subtle ones. ALARM consists of a novel Confidence-based Explicit Meme Identification mechanism that isolates the explicit memes from the original dataset and assigns them pseudo-labels. Besides, a new Pairwise Learning Guided Agent Self-Improvement paradigm is introduced, where the explicit memes are reorganized into contrastive pairs (positive vs. negative) to refine a learner LMM agent. This agent autonomously derives high-level detection cues from these pairs, which in turn empower the agent itself to handle complex and challenging memes effectively. Experiments on three diverse datasets demonstrate the superior performance and strong adaptability of ALARM to newly evolved memes. Notably, our method even outperforms label-driven methods. These results highlight the potential of label-free frameworks as a scalable and promising solution for adapting to novel forms and topics of harmful memes in dynamic online environments.

Three-way conflict analysis based on alliance and conflict functions

Trisecting agents, issues, and agent pairs are essential topics of three-way conflict analysis. They have been commonly studied based on either a rating or an auxiliary function. A rating function defines the positive, negative, or neutral ratings of agents on issues. An auxiliary function defines the alliance, conflict, and neutrality relations between agents. These functions measure two opposite aspects in a single function, leading to challenges in interpreting their aggregations over a group of issues or agents. For example, when studying agent relations regarding a set of issues, a standard aggregation takes the average of an auxiliary function concerning single issues. Therefore, a pair of alliance +1 and conflict -1 relations will produce the same result as a pair of neutrality 0 relations, although the attitudes represented by the two pairs are very different. To clarify semantics, we separate the two opposite aspects in an auxiliary function into a pair of alliance and conflict functions. Accordingly, we trisect the agents, issues, and agent pairs and investigate their applications in solving a few crucial questions in conflict analysis. Particularly, we explore the concepts of alliance sets and strategies. A real-world application is given to illustrate the proposed models.

FAME: Fictional Actors for Multilingual Erasure

LLMs trained on web-scale data raise concerns about privacy and the right to be forgotten. To address these issues, Machine Unlearning provides techniques to remove specific information from trained models without retraining from scratch. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating unlearning in LLMs face two major limitations: they focus only on English and support only entity-level forgetting (removing all information about a person). We introduce FAME (Fictional Actors for Multilingual Erasure), a synthetic benchmark for evaluating Machine Unlearning across five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. FAME contains 1,000 fictional actor biographies and 20,000 question-answer pairs. Each biography includes information on 20 topics organized into structured categories (biography, career, achievements, personal information). This design enables both entity-level unlearning (i.e., forgetting entire identities) and instance-level unlearning (i.e., forgetting specific facts while retaining others). We provide two dataset splits to support these two different unlearning scenarios and enable systematic comparison of unlearning techniques across languages. Since FAME uses entirely fictional data, it ensures that the information was never encountered during model pretraining, allowing for a controlled evaluation of unlearning methods.

FIBER: A Multilingual Evaluation Resource for Factual Inference Bias

Large language models are widely used across domains, yet there are concerns about their factual reliability and biases. Factual knowledge probing offers a systematic means to evaluate these aspects. Most existing benchmarks focus on single-entity facts and monolingual data. We therefore present FIBER, a multilingual benchmark for evaluating factual knowledge in single- and multi-entity settings. The dataset includes sentence completion, question-answering, and object-count prediction tasks in English, Italian, and Turkish. Using FIBER, we examine whether the prompt language induces inference bias in entity selection and how large language models perform on multi-entity versus single-entity questions. The results indicate that the language of the prompt can influence the model's generated output, particularly for entities associated with the country corresponding to that language. However, this effect varies across different topics such that 31% of the topics exhibit factual inference bias score greater than 0.5. Moreover, the level of bias differs across languages such that Turkish prompts show higher bias compared to Italian in 83% of the topics, suggesting a language-dependent pattern. Our findings also show that models face greater difficulty when handling multi-entity questions than the single-entity questions. Model performance differs across both languages and model sizes. The highest mean average precision is achieved in English, while Turkish and Italian lead to noticeably lower scores. Larger models, including Llama-3.1-8B and Qwen-2.5-7B, show consistently better performance than smaller 3B-4B models.

Grad: Guided Relation Diffusion Generation for Graph Augmentation in Graph Fraud Detection

Nowadays, Graph Fraud Detection (GFD) in financial scenarios has become an urgent research topic to protect online payment security. However, as organized crime groups are becoming more professional in real-world scenarios, fraudsters are employing more sophisticated camouflage strategies. Specifically, fraudsters disguise themselves by mimicking the behavioral data collected by platforms, ensuring that their key characteristics are consistent with those of benign users to a high degree, which we call Adaptive Camouflage. Consequently, this narrows the differences in behavioral traits between them and benign users within the platform's database, thereby making current GFD models lose efficiency. To address this problem, we propose a relation diffusion-based graph augmentation model Grad. In detail, Grad leverages a supervised graph contrastive learning module to enhance the fraud-benign difference and employs a guided relation diffusion generator to generate auxiliary homophilic relations from scratch. Based on these, weak fraudulent signals would be enhanced during the aggregation process, thus being obvious enough to be captured. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two real-world datasets provided by WeChat Pay, one of the largest online payment platforms with billions of users, and three public datasets. The results show that our proposed model Grad outperforms SOTA methods in both various scenarios, achieving at most 11.10% and 43.95% increases in AUC and AP, respectively. Our code is released at https://github.com/AI4Risk/antifraud and https://github.com/Muyiiiii/WWW25-Grad.

Exploring LLMs for Scientific Information Extraction Using The SciEx Framework

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly touted as powerful tools for automating scientific information extraction. However, existing methods and tools often struggle with the realities of scientific literature: long-context documents, multi-modal content, and reconciling varied and inconsistent fine-grained information across multiple publications into standardized formats. These challenges are further compounded when the desired data schema or extraction ontology changes rapidly, making it difficult to re-architect or fine-tune existing systems. We present SciEx, a modular and composable framework that decouples key components including PDF parsing, multi-modal retrieval, extraction, and aggregation. This design streamlines on-demand data extraction while enabling extensibility and flexible integration of new models, prompting strategies, and reasoning mechanisms. We evaluate SciEx on datasets spanning three scientific topics for its ability to extract fine-grained information accurately and consistently. Our findings provide practical insights into both the strengths and limitations of current LLM-based pipelines.

Quantifying consistency and accuracy of Latent Dirichlet Allocation

Topic modelling in Natural Language Processing uncovers hidden topics in large, unlabelled text datasets. It is widely applied in fields such as information retrieval, content summarisation, and trend analysis across various disciplines. However, probabilistic topic models can produce different results when rerun due to their stochastic nature, leading to inconsistencies in latent topics. Factors like corpus shuffling, rare text removal, and document elimination contribute to these variations. This instability affects replicability, reliability, and interpretation, raising concerns about whether topic models capture meaningful topics or just noise. To address these problems, we defined a new stability measure that incorporates accuracy and consistency and uses the generative properties of LDA to generate a new corpus with ground truth. These generated corpora are run through LDA 50 times to determine the variability in the output. We show that LDA can correctly determine the underlying number of topics in the documents. We also find that LDA is more internally consistent, as the multiple reruns return similar topics; however, these topics are not the true topics.

Large Causal Models from Large Language Models

We introduce a new paradigm for building large causal models (LCMs) that exploits the enormous potential latent in today's large language models (LLMs). We describe our ongoing experiments with an implemented system called DEMOCRITUS (Decentralized Extraction of Manifold Ontologies of Causal Relations Integrating Topos Universal Slices) aimed at building, organizing, and visualizing LCMs that span disparate domains extracted from carefully targeted textual queries to LLMs. DEMOCRITUS is methodologically distinct from traditional narrow domain and hypothesis centered causal inference that builds causal models from experiments that produce numerical data. A high-quality LLM is used to propose topics, generate causal questions, and extract plausible causal statements from a diverse range of domains. The technical challenge is then to take these isolated, fragmented, potentially ambiguous and possibly conflicting causal claims, and weave them into a coherent whole, converting them into relational causal triples and embedding them into a LCM. Addressing this technical challenge required inventing new categorical machine learning methods, which we can only briefly summarize in this paper, as it is focused more on the systems side of building DEMOCRITUS. We describe the implementation pipeline for DEMOCRITUS comprising of six modules, examine its computational cost profile to determine where the current bottlenecks in scaling the system to larger models. We describe the results of using DEMOCRITUS over a wide range of domains, spanning archaeology, biology, climate change, economics, medicine and technology. We discuss the limitations of the current DEMOCRITUS system, and outline directions for extending its capabilities.