The performances of the Chinese and U.S. Large Language Models on the Topic of Chinese Culture

Cultural backgrounds shape individuals' perspectives and approaches to problem-solving. Since the emergence of GPT-1 in 2018, large language models (LLMs) have undergone rapid development. To date, the world's ten leading LLM developers are primarily based in China and the United States. To examine whether LLMs released by Chinese and U.S. developers exhibit cultural differences in Chinese-language settings, we evaluate their performance on questions about Chinese culture. This study adopts a direct-questioning paradigm to evaluate models such as GPT-5.1, DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen3-Max, and Gemini2.5Pro. We assess their understanding of traditional Chinese culture, including history, literature, poetry, and related domains. Comparative analyses between LLMs developed in China and the U.S. indicate that Chinese models generally outperform their U.S. counterparts on these tasks. Among U.S.-developed models, Gemini 2.5Pro and GPT-5.1 achieve relatively higher accuracy. The observed performance differences may potentially arise from variations in training data distribution, localization strategies, and the degree of emphasis on Chinese cultural content during model development.

DYCP: Dynamic Context Pruning for Long-Form Dialogue with LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit increased response latency and degraded answer quality as dialogue length grows, making effective context management essential. However, existing methods rely on extra LLM calls to build memory or perform offline memory construction without considering the current user utterance, which can introduce inefficiencies or disrupt conversational continuity. We introduce DyCP, a lightweight context management method that dynamically segment and retrieve relevant memory at query time. It preserves the sequential structure of dialogue without predefined topic boundaries and supports efficient, adaptive context retrieval. Across three long-form dialogue benchmarks, LoCoMo, MT-Bench+, and SCM4LLMs, and multiple LLMs, DyCP consistently improves answer quality while reducing response latency. We also examine the gap between modern LLMs' expanded context windows and their actual long-context processing capacity, highlighting the continued importance of effective context management.

Advancing Multinational License Plate Recognition Through Synthetic and Real Data Fusion: A Comprehensive Evaluation

Automatic License Plate Recognition is a frequent research topic due to its wide-ranging practical applications. While recent studies use synthetic images to improve License Plate Recognition (LPR) results, there remain several limitations in these efforts. This work addresses these constraints by comprehensively exploring the integration of real and synthetic data to enhance LPR performance. We subject 16 Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models to a benchmarking process involving 12 public datasets acquired from various regions. Several key findings emerge from our investigation. Primarily, the massive incorporation of synthetic data substantially boosts model performance in both intra- and cross-dataset scenarios. We examine three distinct methodologies for generating synthetic data: template-based generation, character permutation, and utilizing a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model, each contributing significantly to performance enhancement. The combined use of these methodologies demonstrates a notable synergistic effect, leading to end-to-end results that surpass those reached by state-of-the-art methods and established commercial systems. Our experiments also underscore the efficacy of synthetic data in mitigating challenges posed by limited training data, enabling remarkable results to be achieved even with small fractions of the original training data. Finally, we investigate the trade-off between accuracy and speed among different models, identifying those that strike the optimal balance in each intra-dataset and cross-dataset settings.

Aspect Extraction from E-Commerce Product and Service Reviews

Aspect Extraction (AE) is a key task in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), yet it remains difficult to apply in low-resource and code-switched contexts like Taglish, a mix of Tagalog and English commonly used in Filipino e-commerce reviews. This paper introduces a comprehensive AE pipeline designed for Taglish, combining rule-based, large language model (LLM)-based, and fine-tuning techniques to address both aspect identification and extraction. A Hierarchical Aspect Framework (HAF) is developed through multi-method topic modeling, along with a dual-mode tagging scheme for explicit and implicit aspects. For aspect identification, four distinct models are evaluated: a Rule-Based system, a Generative LLM (Gemini 2.0 Flash), and two Fine-Tuned Gemma-3 1B models trained on different datasets (Rule-Based vs. LLM-Annotated). Results indicate that the Generative LLM achieved the highest performance across all tasks (Macro F1 0.91), demonstrating superior capability in handling implicit aspects. In contrast, the fine-tuned models exhibited limited performance due to dataset imbalance and architectural capacity constraints. This work contributes a scalable and linguistically adaptive framework for enhancing ABSA in diverse, code-switched environments.

BiasLab: A Multilingual, Dual-Framing Framework for Robust Measurement of Output-Level Bias in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes contexts where their outputs influence real-world decisions. However, evaluating bias in LLM outputs remains methodologically challenging due to sensitivity to prompt wording, limited multilingual coverage, and the lack of standardized metrics that enable reliable comparison across models. This paper introduces BiasLab, an open-source, model-agnostic evaluation framework for quantifying output-level (extrinsic) bias through a multilingual, robustness-oriented experimental design. BiasLab constructs mirrored probe pairs under a strict dual-framing scheme: an affirmative assertion favoring Target A and a reverse assertion obtained by deterministic target substitution favoring Target B, while preserving identical linguistic structure. To reduce dependence on prompt templates, BiasLab performs repeated evaluation under randomized instructional wrappers and enforces a fixed-choice Likert response format to maximize comparability across models and languages. Responses are normalized into agreement labels using an LLM-based judge, aligned for polarity consistency across framings, and aggregated into quantitative bias indicators with descriptive statistics including effect sizes and neutrality rates. The framework supports evaluation across diverse bias axes, including demographic, cultural, political, and geopolitical topics, and produces reproducible artifacts such as structured reports and comparative visualizations. BiasLab contributes a standardized methodology for cross-lingual and framing-sensitive bias measurement that complements intrinsic and dataset-based audits, enabling researchers and institutions to benchmark robustness and make better-informed deployment decisions.

CLewR: Curriculum Learning with Restarts for Machine Translation Preference Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated competitive performance in zero-shot multilingual machine translation (MT). Some follow-up works further improved MT performance via preference optimization, but they leave a key aspect largely underexplored: the order in which data samples are given during training. We address this topic by integrating curriculum learning into various state-of-the-art preference optimization algorithms to boost MT performance. We introduce a novel curriculum learning strategy with restarts (CLewR), which reiterates easy-to-hard curriculum multiple times during training to effectively mitigate the catastrophic forgetting of easy examples. We demonstrate consistent gains across several model families (Gemma2, Qwen2.5, Llama3.1) and preference optimization techniques. We publicly release our code at https://github.com/alexandra-dragomir/CLewR.

Overcoming the Retrieval Barrier: Indirect Prompt Injection in the Wild for LLM Systems

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on retrieving information from external corpora. This creates a new attack surface: indirect prompt injection (IPI), where hidden instructions are planted in the corpora and hijack model behavior once retrieved. Previous studies have highlighted this risk but often avoid the hardest step: ensuring that malicious content is actually retrieved. In practice, unoptimized IPI is rarely retrieved under natural queries, which leaves its real-world impact unclear. We address this challenge by decomposing the malicious content into a trigger fragment that guarantees retrieval and an attack fragment that encodes arbitrary attack objectives. Based on this idea, we design an efficient and effective black-box attack algorithm that constructs a compact trigger fragment to guarantee retrieval for any attack fragment. Our attack requires only API access to embedding models, is cost-efficient (as little as $0.21 per target user query on OpenAI's embedding models), and achieves near-100% retrieval across 11 benchmarks and 8 embedding models (including both open-source models and proprietary services). Based on this attack, we present the first end-to-end IPI exploits under natural queries and realistic external corpora, spanning both RAG and agentic systems with diverse attack objectives. These results establish IPI as a practical and severe threat: when a user issued a natural query to summarize emails on frequently asked topics, a single poisoned email was sufficient to coerce GPT-4o into exfiltrating SSH keys with over 80% success in a multi-agent workflow. We further evaluate several defenses and find that they are insufficient to prevent the retrieval of malicious text, highlighting retrieval as a critical open vulnerability.

NC-Bench: An LLM Benchmark for Evaluating Conversational Competence

The Natural Conversation Benchmark (NC-Bench) introduce a new approach to evaluating the general conversational competence of large language models (LLMs). Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on the content of model behavior, NC-Bench focuses on the form and structure of natural conversation. Grounded in the IBM Natural Conversation Framework (NCF), NC-Bench comprises three distinct sets. The Basic Conversation Competence set evaluates fundamental sequence management practices, such as answering inquiries, repairing responses, and closing conversational pairs. The RAG set applies the same sequence management patterns as the first set but incorporates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The Complex Request set extends the evaluation to complex requests involving more intricate sequence management patterns. Each benchmark tests a model's ability to produce contextually appropriate conversational actions in response to characteristic interaction patterns. Initial evaluations across 6 open-source models and 14 interaction patterns show that models perform well on basic answering tasks, struggle more with repair tasks (especially repeat), have mixed performance on closing sequences, and find complex multi-turn requests most challenging, with Qwen models excelling on the Basic set and Granite models on the RAG set and the Complex Request set. By operationalizing fundamental principles of human conversation, NC-Bench provides a lightweight, extensible, and theory-grounded framework for assessing and improving the conversational abilities of LLMs beyond topical or task-specific benchmarks.

SegNSP: Revisiting Next Sentence Prediction for Linear Text Segmentation

Linear text segmentation is a long-standing problem in natural language processing (NLP), focused on dividing continuous text into coherent and semantically meaningful units. Despite its importance, the task remains challenging due to the complexity of defining topic boundaries, the variability in discourse structure, and the need to balance local coherence with global context. These difficulties hinder downstream applications such as summarization, information retrieval, and question answering. In this work, we introduce SegNSP, framing linear text segmentation as a next sentence prediction (NSP) task. Although NSP has largely been abandoned in modern pre-training, its explicit modeling of sentence-to-sentence continuity makes it a natural fit for detecting topic boundaries. We propose a label-agnostic NSP approach, which predicts whether the next sentence continues the current topic without requiring explicit topic labels, and enhance it with a segmentation-aware loss combined with harder negative sampling to better capture discourse continuity. Unlike recent proposals that leverage NSP alongside auxiliary topic classification, our approach avoids task-specific supervision. We evaluate our model against established baselines on two datasets, CitiLink-Minutes, for which we establish the first segmentation benchmark, and WikiSection. On CitiLink-Minutes, SegNSP achieves a B-$F_1$ of 0.79, closely aligning with human-annotated topic transitions, while on WikiSection it attains a B-F$_1$ of 0.65, outperforming the strongest reproducible baseline, TopSeg, by 0.17 absolute points. These results demonstrate competitive and robust performance, highlighting the effectiveness of modeling sentence-to-sentence continuity for improving segmentation quality and supporting downstream NLP applications.

AI Generated Text Detection

The rapid development of large language models has led to an increase in AI-generated text, with students increasingly using LLM-generated content as their own work, which violates academic integrity. This paper presents an evaluation of AI text detection methods, including both traditional machine learning models and transformer-based architectures. We utilize two datasets, HC3 and DAIGT v2, to build a unified benchmark and apply a topic-based data split to prevent information leakage. This approach ensures robust generalization across unseen domains. Our experiments show that TF-IDF logistic regression achieves a reasonable baseline accuracy of 82.87%. However, deep learning models outperform it. The BiLSTM classifier achieves an accuracy of 88.86%, while DistilBERT achieves a similar accuracy of 88.11% with the highest ROC-AUC score of 0.96, demonstrating the strongest overall performance. The results indicate that contextual semantic modeling is significantly superior to lexical features and highlight the importance of mitigating topic memorization through appropriate evaluation protocols. The limitations of this work are primarily related to dataset diversity and computational constraints. In future work, we plan to expand dataset diversity and utilize parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA. We also plan to explore smaller or distilled models and employ more efficient batching strategies and hardware-aware optimization.