Echo State Networks for Bitcoin Time Series Prediction

Forecasting stock and cryptocurrency prices is challenging due to high volatility and non-stationarity, influenced by factors like economic changes and market sentiment. Previous research shows that Echo State Networks (ESNs) can effectively model short-term stock market movements, capturing nonlinear patterns in dynamic data. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first to explore ESNs for cryptocurrency forecasting, especially during extreme volatility. We also conduct chaos analysis through the Lyapunov exponent in chaotic periods and show that our approach outperforms existing machine learning methods by a significant margin. Our findings are consistent with the Lyapunov exponent analysis, showing that ESNs are robust during chaotic periods and excel under high chaos compared to Boosting and Na\"ive methods.

Dialogues Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Extraction via Structural Entropy Minimization Partitioning

Dialogues Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Extraction (DiaASQ) aims to extract all target-aspect-opinion-sentiment quadruples from a given multi-round, multi-participant dialogue. Existing methods typically learn word relations across entire dialogues, assuming a uniform distribution of sentiment elements. However, we find that dialogues often contain multiple semantically independent sub-dialogues without clear dependencies between them. Therefore, learning word relationships across the entire dialogue inevitably introduces additional noise into the extraction process. To address this, our method focuses on partitioning dialogues into semantically independent sub-dialogues. Achieving completeness while minimizing these sub-dialogues presents a significant challenge. Simply partitioning based on reply relationships is ineffective. Instead, we propose utilizing a structural entropy minimization algorithm to partition the dialogues. This approach aims to preserve relevant utterances while distinguishing irrelevant ones as much as possible. Furthermore, we introduce a two-step framework for quadruple extraction: first extracting individual sentiment elements at the utterance level, then matching quadruples at the sub-dialogue level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in DiaASQ with much lower computational costs.

How Do LLMs Persuade? Linear Probes Can Uncover Persuasion Dynamics in Multi-Turn Conversations

Large Language Models (LLMs) have started to demonstrate the ability to persuade humans, yet our understanding of how this dynamic transpires is limited. Recent work has used linear probes, lightweight tools for analyzing model representations, to study various LLM skills such as the ability to model user sentiment and political perspective. Motivated by this, we apply probes to study persuasion dynamics in natural, multi-turn conversations. We leverage insights from cognitive science to train probes on distinct aspects of persuasion: persuasion success, persuadee personality, and persuasion strategy. Despite their simplicity, we show that they capture various aspects of persuasion at both the sample and dataset levels. For instance, probes can identify the point in a conversation where the persuadee was persuaded or where persuasive success generally occurs across the entire dataset. We also show that in addition to being faster than expensive prompting-based approaches, probes can do just as well and even outperform prompting in some settings, such as when uncovering persuasion strategy. This suggests probes as a plausible avenue for studying other complex behaviours such as deception and manipulation, especially in multi-turn settings and large-scale dataset analysis where prompting-based methods would be computationally inefficient.

Disentangling Bias by Modeling Intra- and Inter-modal Causal Attention for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) aims to understand human emotions by integrating information from multiple modalities, such as text, audio, and visual data. However, existing methods often suffer from spurious correlations both within and across modalities, leading models to rely on statistical shortcuts rather than true causal relationships, thereby undermining generalization. To mitigate this issue, we propose a Multi-relational Multimodal Causal Intervention (MMCI) model, which leverages the backdoor adjustment from causal theory to address the confounding effects of such shortcuts. Specifically, we first model the multimodal inputs as a multi-relational graph to explicitly capture intra- and inter-modal dependencies. Then, we apply an attention mechanism to separately estimate and disentangle the causal features and shortcut features corresponding to these intra- and inter-modal relations. Finally, by applying the backdoor adjustment, we stratify the shortcut features and dynamically combine them with the causal features to encourage MMCI to produce stable predictions under distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on several standard MSA datasets and out-of-distribution (OOD) test sets demonstrate that our method effectively suppresses biases and improves performance.

RLHF Fine-Tuning of LLMs for Alignment with Implicit User Feedback in Conversational Recommenders

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) based on Large Language Models (LLMs) need to constantly be aligned to the user preferences to provide satisfying and context-relevant item recommendations. The traditional supervised fine-tuning cannot capture the implicit feedback signal, e.g., dwell time, sentiment polarity, or engagement patterns. In this paper, we share a fine-tuning solution using human feedback reinforcement learning (RLHF) to maximize implied user feedback (IUF) in a multi-turn recommendation context. We specify a reward model $R_{\phi}$ learnt on weakly-labelled engagement information and maximize user-centric utility by optimizing the foundational LLM M_{\theta} through a proximal policy optimization (PPO) approach. The architecture models conversational state transitions $s_t \to a_t \to s_{t +1}$, where the action $a_t$ is associated with LLM-generated item suggestions only on condition of conversation history in the past. The evaluation across synthetic and real-world datasets (e.g.REDIAL, OpenDialKG) demonstrates that our RLHF-fine-tuned models can perform better in terms of top-$k$ recommendation accuracy, coherence, and user satisfaction compared to (arrow-zero-cmwrquca-teja-falset ensuite 2Round group-deca States penalty give up This paper shows that implicit signal alignment can be efficient in achieving scalable and user-adaptive design of CRS.

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.

Position: The Current AI Conference Model is Unsustainable! Diagnosing the Crisis of Centralized AI Conference

Artificial Intelligence (AI) conferences are essential for advancing research, sharing knowledge, and fostering academic community. However, their rapid expansion has rendered the centralized conference model increasingly unsustainable. This paper offers a data-driven diagnosis of a structural crisis that threatens the foundational goals of scientific dissemination, equity, and community well-being. We identify four key areas of strain: (1) scientifically, with per-author publication rates more than doubling over the past decade to over 4.5 papers annually; (2) environmentally, with the carbon footprint of a single conference exceeding the daily emissions of its host city; (3) psychologically, with 71% of online community discourse reflecting negative sentiment and 35% referencing mental health concerns; and (4) logistically, with attendance at top conferences such as NeurIPS 2024 beginning to outpace venue capacity. These pressures point to a system that is misaligned with its core mission. In response, we propose the Community-Federated Conference (CFC) model, which separates peer review, presentation, and networking into globally coordinated but locally organized components, offering a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient path forward for AI research.

Reasoning Beyond Labels: Measuring LLM Sentiment in Low-Resource, Culturally Nuanced Contexts

Sentiment analysis in low-resource, culturally nuanced contexts challenges conventional NLP approaches that assume fixed labels and universal affective expressions. We present a diagnostic framework that treats sentiment as a context-dependent, culturally embedded construct, and evaluate how large language models (LLMs) reason about sentiment in informal, code-mixed WhatsApp messages from Nairobi youth health groups. Using a combination of human-annotated data, sentiment-flipped counterfactuals, and rubric-based explanation evaluation, we probe LLM interpretability, robustness, and alignment with human reasoning. Framing our evaluation through a social-science measurement lens, we operationalize and interrogate LLMs outputs as an instrument for measuring the abstract concept of sentiment. Our findings reveal significant variation in model reasoning quality, with top-tier LLMs demonstrating interpretive stability, while open models often falter under ambiguity or sentiment shifts. This work highlights the need for culturally sensitive, reasoning-aware AI evaluation in complex, real-world communication.

Transferring Expert Cognitive Models to Social Robots via Agentic Concept Bottleneck Models

Successful group meetings, such as those implemented in group behavioral-change programs, work meetings, and other social contexts, must promote individual goal setting and execution while strengthening the social relationships within the group. Consequently, an ideal facilitator must be sensitive to the subtle dynamics of disengagement, difficulties with individual goal setting and execution, and interpersonal difficulties that signal a need for intervention. The challenges and cognitive load experienced by facilitators create a critical gap for an embodied technology that can interpret social exchanges while remaining aware of the needs of the individuals in the group and providing transparent recommendations that go beyond powerful but "black box" foundation models (FMs) that identify social cues. We address this important demand with a social robot co-facilitator that analyzes multimodal meeting data and provides discreet cues to the facilitator. The robot's reasoning is powered by an agentic concept bottleneck model (CBM), which makes decisions based on human-interpretable concepts like participant engagement and sentiments, ensuring transparency and trustworthiness. Our core contribution is a transfer learning framework that distills the broad social understanding of an FM into our specialized and transparent CBM. This concept-driven system significantly outperforms direct zero-shot FMs in predicting the need for intervention and enables real-time human correction of its reasoning. Critically, we demonstrate robust knowledge transfer: the model generalizes across different groups and successfully transfers the expertise of senior human facilitators to improve the performance of novices. By transferring an expert's cognitive model into an interpretable robotic partner, our work provides a powerful blueprint for augmenting human capabilities in complex social domains.

Federal Reserve Communication and the COVID-19 Pandemic

In this study, we examine the Federal Reserve's communication strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, comparing them with communication during previous periods of economic stress. Using specialized dictionaries tailored to COVID-19, unconventional monetary policy (UMP), and financial stability, combined with sentiment analysis and topic modeling techniques, we identify a distinct focus in Fed communication during the pandemic on financial stability, market volatility, social welfare, and UMP, characterized by notable contextual uncertainty. Through comparative analysis, we juxtapose the Fed's communication during the COVID-19 crisis with its responses during the dot-com and global financial crises, examining content, sentiment, and timing dimensions. Our findings reveal that Fed communication and policy actions were more reactive to the COVID-19 crisis than to previous crises. Additionally, declining sentiment related to financial stability in interest rate announcements and minutes anticipated subsequent accommodative monetary policy decisions. We further document that communicating about UMP has become the "new normal" for the Fed's Federal Open Market Committee meeting minutes and Chairman's speeches since the Global Financial Crisis, reflecting an institutional adaptation in communication strategy following periods of economic distress. These findings contribute to our understanding of how central bank communication evolves during crises and how communication strategies adapt to exceptional economic circumstances.