The paper audits the widely used ISOT/Kaggle Fake and Real News corpus and finds that extremely high reported accuracies (≈0.98) are largely due to shortcut signals rather than genuine veracity detection. A simple TF‑IDF linear classifier achieves perfect F1 when using only subject metadata, and even after removing metadata, newswire tags, and duplicate documents, the F1 drops only modestly, indicating that editorial style rather than specific tokens drives performance. Under topic‑disjoint and temporal transfer tests, performance collapses, and models transfer poorly to the independent LIAR benchmark, showing that within‑corpus scores reflect source and topic separability, not truth verification.
whyItMatters:"The study demonstrates that current high accuracy metrics on this fake‑news dataset are misleading, highlighting the need for more robust evaluation protocols that guard against shortcut learning."
By Yuvraj Verma
arXiv:2603. 18482v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Standard decoding strategies for text generation, including top-$k$, nucleus sampling, and contrastive search, select tokens based on likelihood, restricting outputs to high-probability regions.
By Esteban Garces Arias, Nurzhan Sapargali, Christian Heumann, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher
arXiv:2608. 14649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present dLLM-SetScore, a training-free method that uses discrete masked-diffusion language models for multi-label text classification.
By Pawan Kumar
arXiv:2606. 12232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive alternative to autoregressive language models, with the promise of faster inference via parallel token generation.
By Stipe Frkovic, Metod Jazbec, Dan Zhang, Christian A. Naesseth, Ilija Bogunovic, Eric Nalisnick
The paper introduces a synthetic benchmark for multimodal time‑series forecasting that evaluates how well text annotations contribute to predictions. By generating controlled signals with semantically correct, incorrect, and irrelevant annotations, the authors can precisely measure the true information content. Six mutual‑information estimators (KSG, MINE, InfoNCE, CCA, PID, and V‑information) are tested, all correctly ranking useful annotations and enabling annotation auditing without model training. The benchmark also highlights each estimator’s limitations and validates findings on seven real datasets, providing practical guidelines for metric implementation.
By Emma Andrews, Gianmarco Mengaldo
arXiv:2605. 29223v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The parameter counts of the most widely used large language models (LLMs) are often withheld by their developers, leaving model size -- a primary reference point for interpreting capabilities and costs -- largely undisclosed.
By Ivica Nikolic