Optimizing RAG Rerankers with LLM Feedback via Reinforcement Learning

Rerankers play a pivotal role in refining retrieval results for Retrieval-Augmented Generation. However, current reranking models are typically optimized on static human annotated relevance labels in isolation, decoupled from the downstream generation process. This isolation leads to a fundamental misalignment: documents identified as topically relevant by information retrieval metrics often fail to provide the actual utility required by the LLM for precise answer generation. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReRanking Preference Optimization (RRPO), a reinforcement learning framework that directly aligns reranking with the LLM's generation quality. By formulating reranking as a sequential decision-making process, RRPO optimizes for context utility using LLM feedback, thereby eliminating the need for expensive human annotations. To ensure training stability, we further introduce a reference-anchored deterministic baseline. Extensive experiments on knowledge-intensive benchmarks demonstrate that RRPO significantly outperforms strong baselines, including the powerful list-wise reranker RankZephyr. Further analysis highlights the versatility of our framework: it generalizes seamlessly to diverse readers (e.g., GPT-4o), integrates orthogonally with query expansion modules like Query2Doc, and remains robust even when trained with noisy supervisors.

A novel three-step approach to forecast firm-specific technology convergence opportunity via multi-dimensional feature fusion

As a crucial innovation paradigm, technology convergence (TC) is gaining ever-increasing attention. Yet, existing studies primarily focus on predicting TC at the industry level, with little attention paid to TC forecast for firm-specific technology opportunity discovery (TOD). Moreover, although technological documents like patents contain a rich body of bibliometric, network structure, and textual features, such features are underexploited in the extant TC predictions; most of the relevant studies only used one or two dimensions of these features, and all the three dimensional features have rarely been fused. Here we propose a novel approach that fuses multi-dimensional features from patents to predict TC for firm-specific TOD. Our method comprises three steps, which are elaborated as follows. First, bibliometric, network structure, and textual features are extracted from patent documents, and then fused at the International Patent Classification (IPC)-pair level using attention mechanisms. Second, IPC-level TC opportunities are identified using a two-stage ensemble learning model that incorporates various imbalance-handling strategies. Third, to acquire feasible firm-specific TC opportunities, the performance metrics of topic-level TC opportunities, which are refined from IPC-level opportunities, are evaluated via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with a large language model (LLM). We prove the effectiveness of our proposed approach by predicting TC opportunities for a leading Chinese auto part manufacturer, Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls co., ltd, in the domains of thermal management for energy storage and robotics. In sum, this work advances the theory and applicability of forecasting firm-specific TC opportunity through fusing multi-dimensional features and leveraging LLM-as-a-judge for technology opportunity evaluation.

Approaches to Analysing Historical Newspapers Using LLMs

This study presents a computational analysis of the Slovene historical newspapers \textit{Slovenec} and \textit{Slovenski narod} from the sPeriodika corpus, combining topic modelling, large language model (LLM)-based aspect-level sentiment analysis, entity-graph visualisation, and qualitative discourse analysis to examine how collective identities, political orientations, and national belonging were represented in public discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. Using BERTopic, we identify major thematic patterns and show both shared concerns and clear ideological differences between the two newspapers, reflecting their conservative-Catholic and liberal-progressive orientations. We further evaluate four instruction-following LLMs for targeted sentiment classification in OCR-degraded historical Slovene and select the Slovene-adapted GaMS3-12B-Instruct model as the most suitable for large-scale application, while also documenting important limitations, particularly its stronger performance on neutral sentiment than on positive or negative sentiment. Applied at dataset scale, the model reveals meaningful variation in the portrayal of collective identities, with some groups appearing predominantly in neutral descriptive contexts and others more often in evaluative or conflict-related discourse. We then create NER graphs to explore the relationships between collective identities and places. We apply a mixed methods approach to analyse the named entity graphs, combining quantitative network analysis with critical discourse analysis. The investigation focuses on the emergence and development of intertwined historical political and socionomic identities. Overall, the study demonstrates the value of combining scalable computational methods with critical interpretation to support digital humanities research on noisy historical newspaper data.

Investigating the Influence of Language on Sycophantic Behavior of Multilingual LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of tasks, but they are also prone to sycophancy, the tendency to agree with user statements regardless of validity. Previous research has outlined both the extent and the underlying causes of sycophancy in earlier models, such as ChatGPT-3.5 and Davinci. Newer models have since undergone multiple mitigation strategies, yet there remains a critical need to systematically test their behavior. In particular, the effect of language on sycophancy has not been explored. In this work, we investigate how the language influences sycophantic responses. We evaluate three state-of-the-art models, GPT-4o mini, Gemini 1.5 Flash, and Claude 3.5 Haiku, using a set of tweet-like opinion prompts translated into five additional languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Our results show that although newer models exhibit significantly less sycophancy overall compared to earlier generations, the extent of sycophancy is still influenced by the language. We further provide a granular analysis of how language shapes model agreeableness across sensitive topics, revealing systematic cultural and linguistic patterns. These findings highlight both the progress of mitigation efforts and the need for broader multilingual audits to ensure trustworthy and bias-aware deployment of LLMs.

ContextClaim: A Context-Driven Paradigm for Verifiable Claim Detection

Verifiable claim detection asks whether a claim expresses a factual statement that can, in principle, be assessed against external evidence. As an early filtering stage in automated fact-checking, it plays an important role in reducing the burden on downstream verification components. However, existing approaches to claim detection, whether based on check-worthiness or verifiability, rely solely on the claim text itself. This is a notable limitation for verifiable claim detection in particular, where determining whether a claim is checkable may benefit from knowing what entities and events it refers to and whether relevant information exists to support verification. Inspired by the established role of evidence retrieval in later-stage claim verification, we propose Context-Driven Claim Detection (ContextClaim), a paradigm that advances retrieval to the detection stage. ContextClaim extracts entity mentions from the input claim, retrieves relevant information from Wikipedia as a structured knowledge source, and employs large language models to produce concise contextual summaries for downstream classification. We evaluate ContextClaim on two datasets covering different topics and text genres, the CheckThat! 2022 COVID-19 Twitter dataset and the PoliClaim political debate dataset, across encoder-only and decoder-only models under fine-tuning, zero-shot, and few-shot settings. Results show that context augmentation can improve verifiable claim detection, although its effectiveness varies across domains, model architectures, and learning settings. Through component analysis, human evaluation, and error analysis, we further examine when and why the retrieved context contributes to more reliable verifiability judgments.

NativeTernary: A Self-Delimiting Binary Encoding with Unary Run-Length Hierarchy Markers for Ternary Neural Network Weights, Structured Data, and General Computing Infrastructure

BitNet b1.58 (Ma et al., 2024) demonstrates that large language models can operate entirely on ternary weights {-1, 0, +1}, yet no native binary wire format exists for such models. NativeTernary closes this gap. We present NativeTernary, a binary encoding scheme that partitions the 2-bit pair space into three data symbols representing ternary values -- either balanced {-1, 0, +1} or unsigned {0, 1, 2} -- and a reserved structural delimiter. The central contribution is the use of unary run-length encoding to represent semantic hierarchy depth: a sequence of N consecutive delimiter pairs denotes a boundary of level N, encoding character, word, sentence, paragraph, and topic boundaries at cost 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 bits respectively -- proportional to boundary rarity. The choice of which 2-bit pair serves as the delimiter is a design parameter: {11} is the primary embodiment, offering simple OR-gate detection; {00} is an alternative embodiment optimised for ultra-low-power CMOS systems, minimising switching activity. All four bit-pair choices are covered by the patent claims. We present three encoding variants: (1) the primary scheme with {11} as sole delimiter; (2) a dual-starter variant where both {10} and {11} initiate distinct symbol namespaces; and (3) an analysis of unsigned versus balanced ternary data mappings. We describe a path toward ternary-native general computing infrastructure requiring no hardware changes, and outline applications spanning ternary neural network weight storage, hierarchical natural language encoding, edge computing, IoT and satellite telemetry, industrial sensors, automotive systems, medical devices, gaming, and financial tick data. The decoder is a 10-line stateless state machine resilient to bitstream corruption.

Do Language Models Know When They'll Refuse? Probing Introspective Awareness of Safety Boundaries

Large language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, but can they accurately predict when they will refuse before responding? We investigate this question through a systematic study where models first predict their refusal behavior, then respond in a fresh context. Across 3754 datapoints spanning 300 requests, we evaluate four frontier models: Claude Sonnet 4, Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.2, and Llama 3.1 405B. Using signal detection theory (SDT), we find that all models exhibit high introspective sensitivity (d' = 2.4-3.5), but sensitivity drops substantially at safety boundaries. We observe generational improvement within Claude (Sonnet 4.5: 95.7 percent accuracy vs Sonnet 4: 93.0 percent), while GPT-5.2 shows lower accuracy (88.9 percent) with more variable behavior. Llama 405B achieves high sensitivity but exhibits strong refusal bias and poor calibration, resulting in lower overall accuracy (80.0 percent). Topic-wise analysis reveals weapons-related queries are consistently hardest for introspection. Critically, confidence scores provide actionable signal: restricting to high-confidence predictions yields 98.3 percent accuracy for well-calibrated models, enabling practical confidence-based routing for safety-critical deployments.

Reproducible, Explainable, and Effective Evaluations of Agentic AI for Software Engineering

With the advancement of Agentic AI, researchers are increasingly leveraging autonomous agents to address challenges in software engineering (SE). However, the large language models (LLMs) that underpin these agents often function as black boxes, making it difficult to justify the superiority of Agentic AI approaches over baselines. Furthermore, missing information in the evaluation design description frequently renders the reproduction of results infeasible. To synthesize current evaluation practices for Agentic AI in SE, this study analyzes 18 papers on the topic, published or accepted by ICSE 2026, ICSE 2025, FSE 2025, ASE 2025, and ISSTA 2025. The analysis identifies prevailing approaches and their limitations in evaluating Agentic AI for SE, both in current research and potential future studies. To address these shortcomings, this position paper proposes a set of guidelines and recommendations designed to empower reproducible, explainable, and effective evaluations of Agentic AI in software engineering. In particular, we recommend that Agentic AI researchers make their Thought-Action-Result (TAR) trajectories and LLM interaction data, or summarized versions of these artifacts, publicly accessible. Doing so will enable subsequent studies to more effectively analyze the strengths and weaknesses of different Agentic AI approaches. To demonstrate the feasibility of such comparisons, we present a proof-of-concept case study that illustrates how TAR trajectories can support systematic analysis across approaches.

Is the Modality Gap a Bug or a Feature? A Robustness Perspective

Many modern multi-modal models (e.g. CLIP) seek an embedding space in which the two modalities are aligned. Somewhat surprisingly, almost all existing models show a strong modality gap: the distribution of images is well-separated from the distribution of texts in the shared embedding space. Despite a series of recent papers on this topic, it is still not clear why this gap exists nor whether closing the gap in post-processing will lead to better performance on downstream tasks. In this paper we show that under certain conditions, minimizing the contrastive loss yields a representation in which the two modalities are separated by a global gap vector that is orthogonal to their embeddings. We also show that under these conditions the modality gap is monotonically related to robustness: decreasing the gap does not change the clean accuracy of the models but makes it less likely that a model will change its output when the embeddings are perturbed. Our experiments show that for many real-world VLMs we can significantly increase robustness by a simple post-processing step that moves one modality towards the mean of the other modality, without any loss of clean accuracy.

Speech-Synchronized Whiteboard Generation via VLM-Driven Structured Drawing Representations

Creating whiteboard-style educational videos demands precise coordination between freehand illustrations and spoken narration, yet no existing method addresses this multimodal synchronization problem with structured, reproducible drawing representations. We present the first dataset of 24 paired Excalidraw demonstrations with narrated audio, where every drawing element carries millisecond-precision creation timestamps spanning 8 STEM domains. Using this data, we study whether a vision-language model (Qwen2-VL-7B), fine-tuned via LoRA, can predict full stroke sequences synchronized to speech from only 24 demonstrations. Our topic-stratified five-fold evaluation reveals that timestamp conditioning significantly improves temporal alignment over ablated baselines, while the model generalizes across unseen STEM topics. We discuss transferability to real classroom settings and release our dataset and code to support future research in automated educational content generation.