Natural language processing

Classical and neural NLP: translation, question answering, tokenization and the evaluation of language understanding.

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arXiv AI
Sep 15

Multimodal Duplex Interaction Agent

arXiv:2609.08977v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we present Gander, a native multimodal duplex interaction model that builds on MiniCPM-o 4.5 and is further adapted for realtim...

By Orantqing, Shengpeng Ji, Junlong Tong, Jialong Zuo, Dongjie Fu, Di Cao, Yangzhuo Li, Shangda Wu, Franz, Evan, Theron Veyra, Changhao Pan, Jingyu Lu, Dongchao Yang, Zhifei Xie, Yang Tan, Xiaoyu Shen, Xiaoda Yang, Wenfu Wang, Teddy Sun, Steve Yves, Zhou Zhao
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

Q-SiT: Teaching LMMs for Image Quality Scoring and Interpreting

Q‑SiT is a unified framework that trains large multimodal models to perform both image quality scoring and interpreting simultaneously. By converting standard IQA datasets into question‑answer pairs and adding human‑annotated interpreting data, the model learns to quantify overall quality and describe perceived attributes. An efficient balance strategy optimizes data mix ratios on lightweight models before scaling to full‑size LMMs, reducing computational cost while improving cross‑task knowledge transfer.

By Zicheng Zhang, Haoning Wu, Ziheng Jia, Weisi Lin, Guangtao Zhai
arXiv AI
Sep 15

DuoTok: Source-Aware Dual-Track Music Tokenization for Vocal-Accompaniment Generation

DuoTok is a source‑aware dual‑track music tokenizer designed for vocal‑accompaniment generation. It first learns a semantic audio representation via self‑supervised pretraining, then refines source‑aware structure with feature‑replacement noise and multi‑task supervision (spectral reconstruction, source separation regularization, and an ASR head for lyric alignment). The encoder is frozen and hard‑routed codebooks for vocals and accompaniment are learned, while a diffusion decoder restores fine acoustic detail from the discrete tokens, achieving a favorable predictability‑fidelity trade‑off at ultra‑low bitrate across public benchmarks.

By Rui Lin, Zhiyue Wu, Jiahe Lei, Kangdi Wang, Weixiong Chen, Junyu Dai, Tao Jiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Breaking the Token Ceiling: Distilling Smaller, Stronger Byte Models

The paper investigates whether small models distilled from larger ones behave similarly when using byte versus token tokenization. It introduces two methods—Marginalize‑It (approximate) and End‑Of‑Token (exact)—to convert token logits to byte logits, and conducts a large‑scale study on decoder‑only dense transformers ranging from 1 billion to 1 trillion bytes of data. Results show that while token‑based models excel early, byte‑based models eventually surpass them with more compute, achieving higher performance ceilings, greater data efficiency, and lower logit storage costs.

By Kalyani Marathe, Artidoro Pagnoni, Tomasz Limisiewicz, Margaret Li, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer, Srinivasan Iyer
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

QTrans: A Quantum Transformer for Sentiment Classification

QTrans is a quantum transformer designed for small‑scale binary sentiment classification. It constructs query, key, and value features using parameterized quantum circuits and derives attention coefficients from Gaussian distances between quantum measurements. The model incorporates a quantum feed‑forward network, residual connections, and layer normalization, achieving higher accuracies on MR, CR, and MPQA datasets compared to classical baselines.

By Ren-Xin Zhao, Xinjie Huang, Yahong Liu, Maoyu Ye, Jinjing Shi, Shi Wang, Yaonan Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

UrduFactCheck: An Agentic Fact-Checking Framework for Urdu with Evidence Boosting and Benchmarking

The paper introduces UrduFactBench and UrduFactQA, two hand‑annotated benchmarks for claim verification and factual consistency evaluation in Urdu, created through a multi‑stage annotation process with native speakers. It also presents UrduFactCheck, a modular fact‑checking framework that uses both monolingual and translation‑based evidence retrieval to address the scarcity of high‑quality Urdu evidence. Experiments on twelve LLMs show that translation‑augmented pipelines outperform monolingual ones, highlighting ongoing challenges for open‑source models in Urdu.

By Sarfraz Ahmad, Hasan Iqbal, Momina Ahsan, Numaan Naeem, Muhammad Ahsan Riaz Khan, Arham Riaz, Muhammad Arslan Manzoor, Yuxia Wang, Preslav Nakov
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

TokenMapper: A Step Toward Interoperable Speech Token Translation

TokenMapper is a framework that enables direct translation between different speech tokenizers, allowing heterogeneous speech models to communicate without converting tokens to waveform audio. It handles mismatched token spaces, including single and multi-codebook representations, while maintaining a shared effective token rate. Experiments on GLM-4-Voice, MiMi, and DualCodec show that TokenMapper achieves word error rates close to native reconstructions, comparable human MOS scores, and significantly reduces latency compared to waveform bridging.

By Tal Kozakov, Tal Rosenwein, Eliya Nachmani
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

EAR: Entity-Aware Partitioning Approach for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Development

The paper introduces EAR, an Entity‑Aware Partitioning approach that improves retrieval‑augmented generation for multiple‑choice question answering by extracting normalized surface anchors from questions, answers, and the corpus. EAR retrieves local windows around matching anchors and can attach a larger parent passage via an extractive summary, reducing retrieved words by 37.5‑40.2% compared to fixed‑size chunks. Experiments on a cleaned MMLU‑style subset with Mistral, Gemma, and DeepSeek show modest accuracy changes, none statistically significant, highlighting EAR’s methodological contribution of compact, inspectable retrieval units.

By Cenab Batu Bora, Oylum Alatl{\i}, Sebnem Bora, Oguz Dikenelli
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

Doc2FRC: Length-Consistent Document-Level Machine Translation via Fixed-Range Chunking

Doc2FRC introduces Fixed-Range Chunking (FRC), a dynamic programming method that partitions documents into chunks of a predefined length interval, ensuring consistent length distributions during training and inference. This approach reduces train-test length mismatch, mitigates n-gram repetition, and improves translation quality for 7B LLMs compared to direct Doc2Doc fine-tuning. Experiments on IWSLT2017 and a new 10-language test set, GlobVDoc, demonstrate that FRC outperforms existing document-level machine translation methods and enhances out-of-distribution translation performance.

By Xiaotian Wang, Youyuan Lin, Zhan Shen, Hitomi Yanaka