Online Density-Based Clustering for Real-Time Narrative Evolution Monitorin

Automated narrative intelligence systems for social media monitoring face significant scalability challenges when processing continuous data streams using traditional batch clustering algorithms. We investigate the replacement of HDBSCAN (offline clustering) with online (streaming/incremental) clustering methods in a production narrative report generation pipeline. The proposed system employs a three-stage architecture (data collection, modeling, dashboard generation) that processes thousands of multilingual social media documents daily. While HDBSCAN excels at discovering hierarchical density-based clusters and handling noise, its batch-only nature necessitates complete retraining for each time window, resulting in memory constraints, computational inefficiency, and inability to adapt to evolving narratives in real-time. This work evaluates a bunch of online clustering algorithms across dimensions of cluster quality preservation, computational efficiency, memory footprint, and integration compatibility with existing workflows. We propose evaluation criteria that balance traditional clustering metrics (Silhouette Coefficient, Davies-Bouldin Index) with narrative metrics (narrative distinctness, contingency and variance). Our methodology includes sliding-window simulations on historical datasets from Ukraine information space, enabling comparative analysis of algorithmic trade-offs in realistic operational contexts. This research addresses a critical gap between batch-oriented topic modeling frameworks and the streaming nature of social media monitoring, with implications for computational social science, crisis informatics, and narrative surveillance systems.

Reading Between the Waves: Robust Topic Segmentation Using Inter-Sentence Audio Features

Spoken content, such as online videos and podcasts, often spans multiple topics, which makes automatic topic segmentation essential for user navigation and downstream applications. However, current methods do not fully leverage acoustic features, leaving room for improvement. We propose a multi-modal approach that fine-tunes both a text encoder and a Siamese audio encoder, capturing acoustic cues around sentence boundaries. Experiments on a large-scale dataset of YouTube videos show substantial gains over text-only and multi-modal baselines. Our model also proves more resilient to ASR noise and outperforms a larger text-only baseline on three additional datasets in Portuguese, German, and English, underscoring the value of learned acoustic features for robust topic segmentation.

PIO-FVLM: Rethinking Training-Free Visual Token Reduction for VLM Acceleration from an Inference-Objective Perspective

Recently, reducing redundant visual tokens in vision-language models (VLMs) to accelerate VLM inference has emerged as a hot topic. However, most existing methods rely on heuristics constructed based on inter-visual-token similarity or cross-modal visual-text similarity, which gives rise to certain limitations in compression performance and practical deployment. In contrast, we propose PIO-FVLM from the perspective of inference objectives, which transforms visual token compression into preserving output result invariance and selects tokens primarily by their importance to this goal. Specially, vision tokens are reordered with the guidance of token-level gradient saliency generated by our designed layer-local proxy loss, a coarse constraint from the current layer to the final result. Then the most valuable vision tokens are selected following the non-maximum suppression (NMS) principle. The proposed PIO-FVLM is training-free and compatible with FlashAttention, friendly to practical application and deployment. It can be deployed independently as an encoder-free method, or combined with encoder compression approaches like VisionZip for use as an encoder-involved method. On LLaVA-Next-7B, PIO-FVLM retains just 11.1% of visual tokens but maintains 97.2% of the original performance, with a 2.67$\times$ prefill speedup, 2.11$\times$ inference speedup, 6.22$\times$ lower FLOPs, and 6.05$\times$ reduced KV Cache overhead. Our code is available at https://github.com/ocy1/PIO-FVLM.

Seg-ReSearch: Segmentation with Interleaved Reasoning and External Search

Segmentation based on language has been a popular topic in computer vision. While recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have endowed segmentation systems with reasoning capabilities, these efforts remain confined by the frozen internal knowledge of MLLMs, which limits their potential for real-world scenarios that involve up-to-date information or domain-specific concepts. In this work, we propose \textbf{Seg-ReSearch}, a novel segmentation paradigm that overcomes the knowledge bottleneck of existing approaches. By enabling interleaved reasoning and external search, Seg-ReSearch empowers segmentation systems to handle dynamic, open-world queries that extend beyond the frozen knowledge of MLLMs. To effectively train this capability, we introduce a hierarchical reward design that harmonizes initial guidance with progressive incentives, mitigating the dilemma between sparse outcome signals and rigid step-wise supervision. For evaluation, we construct OK-VOS, a challenging benchmark that explicitly requires outside knowledge for video object segmentation. Experiments on OK-VOS and two existing reasoning segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our Seg-ReSearch improves state-of-the-art approaches by a substantial margin. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/Seg-ReSearch.

SoftHateBench: Evaluating Moderation Models Against Reasoning-Driven, Policy-Compliant Hostility

Online hate on social media ranges from overt slurs and threats (\emph{hard hate speech}) to \emph{soft hate speech}: discourse that appears reasonable on the surface but uses framing and value-based arguments to steer audiences toward blaming or excluding a target group. We hypothesize that current moderation systems, largely optimized for surface toxicity cues, are not robust to this reasoning-driven hostility, yet existing benchmarks do not measure this gap systematically. We introduce \textbf{\textsc{SoftHateBench}}, a generative benchmark that produces soft-hate variants while preserving the underlying hostile standpoint. To generate soft hate, we integrate the \emph{Argumentum Model of Topics} (AMT) and \emph{Relevance Theory} (RT) in a unified framework: AMT provides the backbone argument structure for rewriting an explicit hateful standpoint into a seemingly neutral discussion while preserving the stance, and RT guides generation to keep the AMT chain logically coherent. The benchmark spans \textbf{7} sociocultural domains and \textbf{28} target groups, comprising \textbf{4,745} soft-hate instances. Evaluations across encoder-based detectors, general-purpose LLMs, and safety models show a consistent drop from hard to soft tiers: systems that detect explicit hostility often fail when the same stance is conveyed through subtle, reasoning-based language. \textcolor{red}{\textbf{Disclaimer.} Contains offensive examples used solely for research.}

Endogenous Resistance to Activation Steering in Language Models

Large language models can resist task-misaligned activation steering during inference, sometimes recovering mid-generation to produce improved responses even when steering remains active. We term this Endogenous Steering Resistance (ESR). Using sparse autoencoder (SAE) latents to steer model activations, we find that Llama-3.3-70B shows substantial ESR, while smaller models from the Llama-3 and Gemma-2 families exhibit the phenomenon less frequently. We identify 26 SAE latents that activate differentially during off-topic content and are causally linked to ESR in Llama-3.3-70B. Zero-ablating these latents reduces the multi-attempt rate by 25%, providing causal evidence for dedicated internal consistency-checking circuits. We demonstrate that ESR can be deliberately enhanced through both prompting and training: meta-prompts instructing the model to self-monitor increase the multi-attempt rate by 4x for Llama-3.3-70B, and fine-tuning on self-correction examples successfully induces ESR-like behavior in smaller models. These findings have dual implications: ESR could protect against adversarial manipulation but might also interfere with beneficial safety interventions that rely on activation steering. Understanding and controlling these resistance mechanisms is important for developing transparent and controllable AI systems. Code is available at github.com/agencyenterprise/endogenous-steering-resistance.

ChemPro: A Progressive Chemistry Benchmark for Large Language Models

We introduce ChemPro, a progressive benchmark with 4100 natural language question-answer pairs in Chemistry, across 4 coherent sections of difficulty designed to assess the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in a broad spectrum of general chemistry topics. We include Multiple Choice Questions and Numerical Questions spread across fine-grained information recall, long-horizon reasoning, multi-concept questions, problem-solving with nuanced articulation, and straightforward questions in a balanced ratio, effectively covering Bio-Chemistry, Inorganic-Chemistry, Organic-Chemistry and Physical-Chemistry. ChemPro is carefully designed analogous to a student's academic evaluation for basic to high-school chemistry. A gradual increase in the question difficulty rigorously tests the ability of LLMs to progress from solving basic problems to solving more sophisticated challenges. We evaluate 45+7 state-of-the-art LLMs, spanning both open-source and proprietary variants, and our analysis reveals that while LLMs perform well on basic chemistry questions, their accuracy declines with different types and levels of complexity. These findings highlight the critical limitations of LLMs in general scientific reasoning and understanding and point towards understudied dimensions of difficulty, emphasizing the need for more robust methodologies to improve LLMs.

Fin-RATE: A Real-world Financial Analytics and Tracking Evaluation Benchmark for LLMs on SEC Filings

With increasing deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the finance domain, LLMs are increasingly expected to parse complex regulatory disclosures. However, existing benchmarks often focus on isolated details, failing to reflect the complexity of professional analysis that requires synthesizing information across multiple documents, reporting periods, and corporate entities. They do not distinguish whether errors stem from retrieval failures, generation flaws, finance-specific reasoning mistakes, or misunderstanding of the query or context. This makes it difficult to pinpoint performance bottlenecks. To bridge these gaps, we introduce Fin-RATE, a benchmark built on U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and mirror financial analyst workflows through three pathways: detail-oriented reasoning within individual disclosures, cross-entity comparison under shared topics, and longitudinal tracking of the same firm across reporting periods. We benchmark 17 leading LLMs, spanning open-source, closed-source, and finance-specialized models, under both ground-truth context and retrieval-augmented settings. Results show substantial performance degradation, with accuracy dropping by 18.60% and 14.35% as tasks shift from single-document reasoning to longitudinal and cross-entity analysis. This is driven by rising comparison hallucinations, time and entity mismatches, and mirrored by declines in reasoning and factuality--limitations that prior benchmarks have yet to formally categorize or quantify.

MARE: Multimodal Alignment and Reinforcement for Explainable Deepfake Detection via Vision-Language Models

Deepfake detection is a widely researched topic that is crucial for combating the spread of malicious content, with existing methods mainly modeling the problem as classification or spatial localization. The rapid advancements in generative models impose new demands on Deepfake detection. In this paper, we propose multimodal alignment and reinforcement for explainable Deepfake detection via vision-language models, termed MARE, which aims to enhance the accuracy and reliability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in Deepfake detection and reasoning. Specifically, MARE designs comprehensive reward functions, incorporating reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), to incentivize the generation of text-spatially aligned reasoning content that adheres to human preferences. Besides, MARE introduces a forgery disentanglement module to capture intrinsic forgery traces from high-level facial semantics, thereby improving its authenticity detection capability. We conduct thorough evaluations on the reasoning content generated by MARE. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate that MARE achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and reliability.

HypRAG: Hyperbolic Dense Retrieval for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Embedding geometry plays a fundamental role in retrieval quality, yet dense retrievers for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) remain largely confined to Euclidean space. However, natural language exhibits hierarchical structure from broad topics to specific entities that Euclidean embeddings fail to preserve, causing semantically distant documents to appear spuriously similar and increasing hallucination risk. To address these limitations, we introduce hyperbolic dense retrieval, developing two model variants in the Lorentz model of hyperbolic space: HyTE-FH, a fully hyperbolic transformer, and HyTE-H, a hybrid architecture projecting pre-trained Euclidean embeddings into hyperbolic space. To prevent representational collapse during sequence aggregation, we introduce the Outward Einstein Midpoint, a geometry-aware pooling operator that provably preserves hierarchical structure. On MTEB, HyTE-FH outperforms equivalent Euclidean baselines, while on RAGBench, HyTE-H achieves up to 29% gains over Euclidean baselines in context relevance and answer relevance using substantially smaller models than current state-of-the-art retrievers. Our analysis also reveals that hyperbolic representations encode document specificity through norm-based separation, with over 20% radial increase from general to specific concepts, a property absent in Euclidean embeddings, underscoring the critical role of geometric inductive bias in faithful RAG systems.