In Search of Grandmother Cells: Tracing Interpretable Neurons in Tabular Representations

Foundation models are powerful yet often opaque in their decision-making. A topic of continued interest in both neuroscience and artificial intelligence is whether some neurons behave like grandmother cells, i.e., neurons that are inherently interpretable because they exclusively respond to single concepts. In this work, we propose two information-theoretic measures that quantify the neuronal saliency and selectivity for single concepts. We apply these metrics to the representations of TabPFN, a tabular foundation model, and perform a simple search across neuron-concept pairs to find the most salient and selective pair. Our analysis provides the first evidence that some neurons in such models show moderate, statistically significant saliency and selectivity for high-level concepts. These findings suggest that interpretable neurons can emerge naturally and that they can, in some cases, be identified without resorting to more complex interpretability techniques.

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.

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.

EvolMem: A Cognitive-Driven Benchmark for Multi-Session Dialogue Memory

Despite recent advances in understanding and leveraging long-range conversational memory, existing benchmarks still lack systematic evaluation of large language models(LLMs) across diverse memory dimensions, particularly in multi-session settings. In this work, we propose EvolMem, a new benchmark for assessing multi-session memory capabilities of LLMs and agent systems. EvolMem is grounded in cognitive psychology and encompasses both declarative and non-declarative memory, further decomposed into multiple fine-grained abilities. To construct the benchmark, we introduce a hybrid data synthesis framework that consists of topic-initiated generation and narrative-inspired transformations. This framework enables scalable generation of multi-session conversations with controllable complexity, accompanied by sample-specific evaluation guidelines. Extensive evaluation reveals that no LLM consistently outperforms others across all memory dimensions. Moreover, agent memory mechanisms do not necessarily enhance LLMs' capabilities and often exhibit notable efficiency limitations. Data and code will be released at https://github.com/shenye7436/EvolMem.

Stage-specific cancer survival prediction enriched by explainable machine learning

Despite the fact that cancer survivability rates vary greatly between stages, traditional survival prediction models have frequently been trained and assessed using examples from all combined phases of the disease. This method may result in an overestimation of performance and ignore the stage-specific variations. Using the SEER dataset, we created and verified explainable machine learning (ML) models to predict stage-specific cancer survivability in colorectal, stomach, and liver cancers. ML-based cancer survival analysis has been a long-standing topic in the literature; however, studies involving the explainability and transparency of ML survivability models are limited. Our use of explainability techniques, including SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME), enabled us to illustrate significant feature-cancer stage interactions that would have remained hidden in traditional black-box models. We identified how certain demographic and clinical variables influenced survival differently across cancer stages and types. These insights provide not only transparency but also clinical relevance, supporting personalized treatment planning. By focusing on stage-specific models, this study provides new insights into the most important factors at each stage of cancer, offering transparency and potential clinical relevance to support personalized treatment planning.

SortWaste: A Densely Annotated Dataset for Object Detection in Industrial Waste Sorting

The increasing production of waste, driven by population growth, has created challenges in managing and recycling materials effectively. Manual waste sorting is a common practice; however, it remains inefficient for handling large-scale waste streams and presents health risks for workers. On the other hand, existing automated sorting approaches still struggle with the high variability, clutter, and visual complexity of real-world waste streams. The lack of real-world datasets for waste sorting is a major reason automated systems for this problem are underdeveloped. Accordingly, we introduce SortWaste, a densely annotated object detection dataset collected from a Material Recovery Facility. Additionally, we contribute to standardizing waste detection in sorting lines by proposing ClutterScore, an objective metric that gauges the scene's hardness level using a set of proxies that affect visual complexity (e.g., object count, class and size entropy, and spatial overlap). In addition to these contributions, we provide an extensive benchmark of state-of-the-art object detection models, detailing their results with respect to the hardness level assessed by the proposed metric. Despite achieving promising results (mAP of 59.7% in the plastic-only detection task), performance significantly decreases in highly cluttered scenes. This highlights the need for novel and more challenging datasets on the topic.

An Algorithmic Framework for Systematic Literature Reviews: A Case Study for Financial Narratives

This paper introduces an algorithmic framework for conducting systematic literature reviews (SLRs), designed to improve efficiency, reproducibility, and selection quality assessment in the literature review process. The proposed method integrates Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, clustering algorithms, and interpretability tools to automate and structure the selection and analysis of academic publications. The framework is applied to a case study focused on financial narratives, an emerging area in financial economics that examines how structured accounts of economic events, formed by the convergence of individual interpretations, influence market dynamics and asset prices. Drawing from the Scopus database of peer-reviewed literature, the review highlights research efforts to model financial narratives using various NLP techniques. Results reveal that while advances have been made, the conceptualization of financial narratives remains fragmented, often reduced to sentiment analysis, topic modeling, or their combination, without a unified theoretical framework. The findings underscore the value of more rigorous and dynamic narrative modeling approaches and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithmic SLR methodology.

The Gray Area: Characterizing Moderator Disagreement on Reddit

Volunteer moderators play a crucial role in sustaining online dialogue, but they often disagree about what should or should not be allowed. In this paper, we study the complexity of content moderation with a focus on disagreements between moderators, which we term the ``gray area'' of moderation. Leveraging 5 years and 4.3 million moderation log entries from 24 subreddits of different topics and sizes, we characterize how gray area, or disputed cases, differ from undisputed cases. We show that one-in-seven moderation cases are disputed among moderators, often addressing transgressions where users' intent is not directly legible, such as in trolling and brigading, as well as tensions around community governance. This is concerning, as almost half of all gray area cases involved automated moderation decisions. Through information-theoretic evaluations, we demonstrate that gray area cases are inherently harder to adjudicate than undisputed cases and show that state-of-the-art language models struggle to adjudicate them. We highlight the key role of expert human moderators in overseeing the moderation process and provide insights about the challenges of current moderation processes and tools.

Membox: Weaving Topic Continuity into Long-Range Memory for LLM Agents

Human-agent dialogues often exhibit topic continuity-a stable thematic frame that evolves through temporally adjacent exchanges-yet most large language model (LLM) agent memory systems fail to preserve it. Existing designs follow a fragmentation-compensation paradigm: they first break dialogue streams into isolated utterances for storage, then attempt to restore coherence via embedding-based retrieval. This process irreversibly damages narrative and causal flow, while biasing retrieval towards lexical similarity. We introduce membox, a hierarchical memory architecture centered on a Topic Loom that continuously monitors dialogue in a sliding-window fashion, grouping consecutive same-topic turns into coherent "memory boxes" at storage time. Sealed boxes are then linked by a Trace Weaver into long-range event-timeline traces, recovering macro-topic recurrences across discontinuities. Experiments on LoCoMo demonstrate that Membox achieves up to 68% F1 improvement on temporal reasoning tasks, outperforming competitive baselines (e.g., Mem0, A-MEM). Notably, Membox attains these gains while using only a fraction of the context tokens required by existing methods, highlighting a superior balance between efficiency and effectiveness. By explicitly modeling topic continuity, Membox offers a cognitively motivated mechanism for enhancing both coherence and efficiency in LLM agents.

Soft Contextualized Encoder For User Defined Text Classification

User-Defined Text Classification (UDTC) considers the challenge of classifying input text to user-specified, previously unseen classes, a setting that arises frequently in real-world applications such as enterprise analytics, content moderation, and domain-specific information retrieval. We propose a soft-contextualized encoder architecture for UDTC which contextualizes each candidate label with the label set and a static soft prompt representation of the input query. Training on diverse, multi-source datasets enables the model to generalize effectively to zero-shot classification over entirely unseen topic sets drawn from arbitrary domains. We evaluate the proposed architecture both on held-out in-distribution test data and on multiple unseen UDTC benchmarks. Across datasets, the model achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming or matching the baselines.