Natural language processing

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

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arXiv AI
Sep 7

SCAPES: Semantically Conditioned Autoregressive Prior for Environmental Sounds

SCAPES is a lightweight, resource‑efficient generative model that synthesizes high‑fidelity environmental sounds with high‑level semantic control. It operates on the continuous latent manifold of a neural audio codec, using a segmentation strategy and a Continuous Normalizing Flow to model latent trajectories. A 36‑million‑parameter instance can be trained on limited, uncurated data with a single consumer‑grade GPU, achieving convergence in roughly twice the source audio duration and enabling smooth semantic interpolation.

By Esteban Guti\'errez, Lonce Wyse, Frederic Font, Xavier Serra
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Low-Latency Spell Correction for Japanese Music Search Queries

The paper introduces a compact BART-based sequence‑to‑sequence model for low‑latency spell correction of Japanese music search queries, addressing challenges posed by four writing scripts. It employs a script‑aware synthetic misspelling pipeline that blends keyboard‑layout models, phonetic confusion priors, consonant alternations, and kana case errors, and normalizes mixed‑script titles to a single canonical script to reduce hallucinations. Experiments show the model achieves 41.09% exact‑match accuracy and 11.62% CER, outperforming edit‑distance baselines while keeping inference latency under 4 ms on a single GPU.

By Anshul Garg, Pavni Tandon, Karan Bhukar, Tanmay Khandelwal, Ujjal Kumar Dutta
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

MoirfEolas and Cr\'iochScore: Developing Resources for and the Evaluation of Tokenization Alignment with Irish Morphology

The paper introduces MoirfEolas, a dataset of over 35,000 Irish words annotated with their morphological components, and CríochScore, a metric that measures how well tokenization aligns with these morphological boundaries. Using CríochScore, the authors evaluate common tokenization algorithms and find that the Unigram Language Model best aligns with Irish morphology. They also discuss trade‑offs between morphological alignment, compression, and vocabulary efficiency, offering practical guidance for Irish NLP development.

By Jane Adkins, Abigail Walsh, Brian Davis, Elaine U\'i Dhonnchadha
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Cross-modal triage network: a multimodal deep learning framework for severity-based triage and visual explainability in chest radiographs

The paper introduces the Cross‑Modal Triage Network (CMTN), a multimodal deep‑learning model that fuses a Swin Transformer V2 visual encoder with a PubMedBERT text encoder to perform severity‑based triage, pathology detection, and generate visual explanations for chest radiographs. Trained on 34,639 image‑text pairs from MIMIC‑CXR‑JPG, the CMTN achieves high ordinal agreement with reference labels (QWK = 0.9341) and excellent pathology detection (macro‑AUROC = 0.9970) while operating with 34 ms latency. However, a blinded clinical audit revealed low agreement with expert radiologists (QWK = 0.1399) and only modest spatial‑semantic concordance in heatmaps, underscoring the gap between algorithmic performance and clinical judgment.

By Zinah Ghulam, Richa Mittal, Eranga Ukwatta
arXiv AI
Sep 7

A Verifier-Guided Explainable Reasoning Framework with Gold-Anchored QLoRA, Task-Aware Mixture-of-Experts, and Group-Relative RLVR

The paper introduces a verifier‑guided explainable reasoning framework for educational question answering that integrates gold‑anchored QLoRA, a task‑aware symbolic router, and group‑relative RLVR. It adapts Qwen2.5‑3B‑Instruct with field‑weighted QLoRA supervision, routes logic problems to a FOL/Z3 verifier and physics problems to a symbolic solver, and uses verifier feedback for candidate evaluation, self‑revision, and reward construction. Experiments on 438 held‑out examples show that RLVR boosts reasoning depth (P3) from 50.68 % to 72.20 %, while symbolic verification improves answer reliability at the system level.

By Thi Kim Trang Vo, Nam Tien Le, Thi Kim Nguyet Vo, Minh Khang Tran, Duy Phuong Tran
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

EuroAlpaca: Task-Preserving Localisation of Instruction Data for European Languages

EuroAlpaca presents a task‑preserving localisation pipeline that translates English instruction‑tuning data into 50 European languages while maintaining task‑critical constraints. The method uses field‑wise machine translation or reconstructs task‑equivalent target‑language instances, followed by validation of coherence and consistency. Experiments show that EuroAlpaca improves instruction‑following accuracy by 12.9% over a baseline and outperforms direct translation on ROUGE‑L and F‑BERT metrics.

By Aleix Sant, Jordi Luque, Carlos Escolano
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

An Integrated Vision-and-Language Pretraining (VLP) and Visual Question Answering (VQA) model to Automate Nondestructive Evaluation Image Analysis

The paper presents ChatNDE Figure to Caption, an AI system that automates the interpretation of nondestructive evaluation (NDE) images. It combines a Vision‑and‑Language Pretraining (VLP) approach using ResNet50 for visual feature extraction and GPT‑2 for natural‑language captioning, evaluated with BLEU scores. Additionally, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) model is integrated to answer specific queries about the images, enhancing interactivity for field inspectors.

By Mehrdad Shafiei Dizaji, Hoda Azari
arXiv AI
Sep 7

A Systematic Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Consistency Enhancement Methods in Multilingual Language Models

The paper presents a unified evaluation of cross‑lingual consistency (CLC) enhancement methods for multilingual language models, covering inference‑time interventions and post‑training approaches across three model families and three closed‑form benchmarks. Results indicate that post‑training methods, especially direct distribution alignment, consistently improve CLC across all model‑dataset combinations, while other methods are more sensitive to answer format and language coverage. The study also examines the impact of CLC enhancement on culturally diverse question answering, finding no systematic degradation in controlled settings but occasional accuracy drops in open‑ended generation, particularly for non‑English responses.

By Jirui Qi, Mingyang Wang, Hinrich Sch\"utze, Raquel Fern\'andez, Arianna Bisazza
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

MedProb: Probing Internal Representations of Vision-Language Models for Medical Question Answering

MedProb is a lightweight probing framework that predicts multiple-choice medical visual question answering (Med‑VQA) answers directly from frozen vision‑language model (VLM) representations, avoiding free‑text generation. On datasets such as PATH‑VQA, SLAKE, and VQA‑RAD, MedProb extracts more answer‑relevant signal than prompting and outperforms both medical VLMs and agentic systems. The approach also narrows the performance gap between small and large models, shows that medical adaptation does not consistently improve linear decodability, and reveals positional biases in both prompting and generation.

By Erfan Nourbakhsh, Ke Yang, Anthony Rios
arXiv AI
Sep 7

ERPBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Enterprise Decision-Making Across Competitive Market Ecologies

ERPBench is a benchmark that evaluates large language model agents in enterprise decision-making through a six‑round ERP simulation covering pricing, production, procurement, inventory, finance, and market competition. It tests the same 100 problems in two market ecologies—Solo, where agents compete against rule‑based opponents, and Arena, where six agents compete together—producing 1,200 model trajectories across 7,200 decision rounds. Results show that model performance varies by ecology, with DeepSeek best in Solo and Gemini best in Arena, and only 21 of 100 problems yield the same top performer across both settings.

By Xinran Zhang, Pengrui Lu, Lyumanshan Ye, Pengfei Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Nepali Passport Question Answering: A Low-Resource Dataset for Public Service Applications

The paper introduces a Nepali Question‑Answer dataset focused on passport‑related FAQs to support information retrieval in a low‑resource language. The authors fine‑tune transformer‑based embedding models for semantic similarity and compare them against the BM25 baseline. Their experiments show that fine‑tuned SBERT models outperform BM25, while multilingual E5 embeddings achieve the best overall retrieval performance.

By Funghang Limbu Begha, Praveen Acharya, Bal Krishna Bal
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

When Genomic Masking Priors Fail to Transfer: Strong Variant Prediction, Weak Functional Generation

The paper introduces GenDA, a bidirectional discrete diffusion model designed for genomic sequence reconstruction, hypothesizing that entropy-guided span placement would improve variant-effect prediction and functional sequence generation. While the 202‑million‑parameter GenDA model achieves a higher ClinVar SNV AUROC (0.774) than a comparable autoregressive model, the improvement is not attributable to entropy guidance, and the model fails to outperform a shuffled‑gap baseline in zero‑shot functional inpainting across various genomic regions. The authors identify limitations such as tokenization granularity, span length caps, and the mismatch between local sequence complexity and functional importance, concluding that variant prediction, corruption priors, and functional generation are distinct tasks requiring separate validation.

By Susu Hu, Preetam Gattogi, Jens Lehmann, Sahar Vahdati, Stefanie Speidel, Julien Vibert
arXiv AI
Sep 7

MedFlow: Class-Aware Multi-Scale Generation for Medical Time-Series Synthesis

MedFlow is a class‑aware multi‑scale flow matching framework designed to synthesize medical time‑series data. It uses a vector‑quantized multi‑scale tokenizer to capture both coarse and fine temporal patterns, and introduces Token Marginal Guidance to steer generation toward minority‑class characteristics. Experiments on four public datasets show MedFlow outperforms diffusion baselines, improving AUPRC by 5.8%, reducing Context‑FID by 88.6%, and achieving 3.8× higher sampling throughput.

By Yanhao Huang, Shibo Feng, Wanjin Feng, Peilin Zhao, Chunyan Miao
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Attributable by Construction: Claim-Anchored Provenance for Multi-Document Summarization

The paper introduces CAMS, a Claim‑Anchored Multi‑Document Summarization framework that decomposes source documents into atomic claims, resolves provenance deterministically from verbatim quotes to token spans, clusters equivalent claims across documents, and rewrites summaries so each sentence ends with claim identifiers linking back to source spans. CAMS separates provenance (an invariant for each emitted sentence) from faithfulness (an objective encouraged by selection, rewriting, and verification). Evaluations on MultiNews, DiverseSumm, and zero‑shot WCEP show that CAMS matches strong baselines in summary quality while improving faithfulness and citation precision, raising attribution accuracy from 38% to 64% and reducing human verification time per claim by 3.4×.

By Shuo Guan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

BIT.UA at BioASQ 14B: Modular Retrieval with pg_textsearch and Qdrant, and Agent-Based Answer Generation

The BIT.UA team from the University of Aveiro participated in the 14th BioASQ Task B challenge, presenting a refactored modular pipeline for biomedical question answering. They replaced the PyTerrier PISA index with PostgreSQL-based pg_textsearch for BM25 retrieval and adopted Qdrant for dense embedding indexing, while also exploring HyDE-based query expansion and a Context-1 retrieval strategy. For answer generation, they introduced an LLM-as-a-judge framework and an agent quorum mechanism that allows multiple agents with diverse prompts to debate and converge on a consensus answer, achieving competitive MAP ranks of 5 in Phase A batches.

By Andr\'e Ribeiro, R\'uben Garrido, Alexander Christiansen, Richard A. A. Jonker, S\'ergio Matos
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Detect, Remask, Repair: Diffusion Editing for Faithful Summarization of Evolving Contexts

The paper introduces DETECT-REMASK-REPAIR, a diffusion-based method for updating outdated spans in existing summaries while keeping supported content intact. It identifies, masks, and repairs only the changed regions using masked diffusion language models. Experiments on DialogSum and a new StreamSum benchmark show that this localized repair improves faithfulness, reduces repair time to under half a second, and offers trade‑offs between faithfulness, speed, and preservation of the original summary.

By Hao Zou, Zachary Horvitz, Chandhru Karthick, Zhou Yu, Kathleen McKeown
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Consensus Group Relative Policy Optimization for Text Generation

Consensus Group Relative Policy Optimization (C‑GRPO) is a new training method that distills Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding into a group‑relative objective, enabling text generation models to approximate MBR performance without the costly inference‑time sampling and scoring. C‑GRPO only needs a utility function and policy samples, avoiding the need for gold references or curated preference data. Experiments on WMT 2024 machine translation and XSum summarization show that C‑GRPO matches MBR decoding quality while reducing inference overhead and outperforming other reference‑free baselines.

By Yuki Ichihara, Yuu Jinnai, Kaito Ariu, Eiji Uchibe
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

SeamFlow: Structure-Aware Flow Matching on Edge Probabilities for Artist-Like UV Unwrapping

SeamFlow is a new generative framework for 3D surface cutting and UV unwrapping that reformulates the discrete mesh‑cutting problem as continuous flow matching in a high‑dimensional edge‑probability space. By learning a deterministic mapping from a Gaussian prior to a target seam‑probability distribution and using an evolution network to couple local topological tokens with global shape priors, SeamFlow guides smooth probability flow through ODE solving. Compared with existing autoregressive generative methods, SeamFlow improves topology awareness, eliminates 3D spatial projection errors and artificial sequential‑order bias, and achieves exceptional semantic coherence with remarkably low parameterization distortion.

By Yuming Zhao, Zangyueyang Xian, Qijian Zhang, Rendong Liang, Qin Jia, Ying He, Junhui Hou
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Cross-Preference Learning for Sentence-Level and Context-Aware Machine Translation

The paper introduces Cross-Preference Learning (CPL), a training framework that explicitly models the complementary strengths of sentence-level and context-aware machine translation. By incorporating intra- and cross-condition preferences into the optimization objective, CPL provides targeted supervision to leverage useful contextual signals while remaining robust to uninformative context. Experiments on multiple public context-aware MT tasks with models such as Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, and Llama-3-8B-Instruct show consistent improvements in translation quality and robustness without altering the model architecture.

By Ying Li, Xinglin Lyu, Junhui Li, Jinlong Yang, Hengchao Shang, Min Zhang, Shimin Tao, Daimeng Wei
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

LentEx: Generalizable Latent Entity Extraction via Synthetic Data and Instruction-Tuned LLMs

LentEx is a new framework for latent entity extraction that uses synthetic data generation and instruction fine‑tuning to train smaller, efficient large language models. By creating diverse, contextually rich synthetic examples through a template‑based approach, LentEx overcomes the lack of labeled datasets and achieves strong performance, surpassing state‑of‑the‑art models on the MTEB Clustering Benchmark. The method also generalizes well to unseen domains, making it useful for tasks such as retrieval‑augmented generation, customer persona analysis, and knowledge graph enrichment.

By Umesh Bodhwani, Yuan Ling, Cibi Chakravarthy Senthilkumar, Shujing Dong, Yarong Feng, Hongfei Li, Ayush Goyal