Resource-Limited Joint Multimodal Sentiment Reasoning and Classification via Chain-of-Thought Enhancement and Distillation

The surge in rich multimodal content on social media platforms has greatly advanced Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), with Large Language Models (LLMs) further accelerating progress in this field. Current approaches primarily leverage the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of parameter-heavy (Multimodal) LLMs for sentiment classification, overlooking autonomous multimodal sentiment reasoning generation in resource-constrained environments. Therefore, we focus on the Resource-Limited Joint Multimodal Sentiment Reasoning and Classification task, JMSRC, which simultaneously performs multimodal sentiment reasoning chain generation and sentiment classification only with a lightweight model. We propose a Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Distillation model, MulCoT-RD, designed for JMSRC that employs a "Teacher-Assistant-Student" distillation paradigm to address deployment constraints in resource-limited environments. We first leverage a high-performance Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to generate the initial reasoning dataset and train a medium-sized assistant model with a multi-task learning mechanism. A lightweight student model is jointly trained to perform efficient multimodal sentiment reasoning generation and classification. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate that MulCoT-RD with only 3B parameters achieves strong performance on JMSRC, while exhibiting robust generalization and enhanced interpretability.

Model-Agnostic Sentiment Distribution Stability Analysis for Robust LLM-Generated Texts Detection

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has resulted in increasingly sophisticated AI-generated content, posing significant challenges in distinguishing LLM-generated text from human-written language. Existing detection methods, primarily based on lexical heuristics or fine-tuned classifiers, often suffer from limited generalizability and are vulnerable to paraphrasing, adversarial perturbations, and cross-domain shifts. In this work, we propose SentiDetect, a model-agnostic framework for detecting LLM-generated text by analyzing the divergence in sentiment distribution stability. Our method is motivated by the empirical observation that LLM outputs tend to exhibit emotionally consistent patterns, whereas human-written texts display greater emotional variability. To capture this phenomenon, we define two complementary metrics: sentiment distribution consistency and sentiment distribution preservation, which quantify stability under sentiment-altering and semantic-preserving transformations. We evaluate SentiDetect on five diverse datasets and a range of advanced LLMs,including Gemini-1.5-Pro, Claude-3, GPT-4-0613, and LLaMa-3.3. Experimental results demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art baselines, with over 16% and 11% F1 score improvements on Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-4-0613, respectively. Moreover, SentiDetect also shows greater robustness to paraphrasing, adversarial attacks, and text length variations, outperforming existing detectors in challenging scenarios.

Decoding the Poetic Language of Emotion in Korean Modern Poetry: Insights from a Human-Labeled Dataset and AI Modeling

This study introduces KPoEM (Korean Poetry Emotion Mapping) , a novel dataset for computational emotion analysis in modern Korean poetry. Despite remarkable progress in text-based emotion classification using large language models, poetry-particularly Korean poetry-remains underexplored due to its figurative language and cultural specificity. We built a multi-label emotion dataset of 7,662 entries, including 7,007 line-level entries from 483 poems and 615 work-level entries, annotated with 44 fine-grained emotion categories from five influential Korean poets. A state-of-the-art Korean language model fine-tuned on this dataset significantly outperformed previous models, achieving 0.60 F1-micro compared to 0.34 from models trained on general corpora. The KPoEM model, trained through sequential fine-tuning-first on general corpora and then on the KPoEM dataset-demonstrates not only an enhanced ability to identify temporally and culturally specific emotional expressions, but also a strong capacity to preserve the core sentiments of modern Korean poetry. This study bridges computational methods and literary analysis, presenting new possibilities for the quantitative exploration of poetic emotions through structured data that faithfully retains the emotional and cultural nuances of Korean literature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.