Abstract--This paper introduces SENSE (Shared Embedding for N-lingual Speech and tExt), an open-source solution inspired by the SAMU-XLSR framework and conceptually similar to Meta AI's SONAR models. These approaches rely on a teacher-student framework to align a self-supervised speech encoder with the language-agnostic continuous representations of a text encoder at the utterance level. We describe how the original SAMU-XLSR method has been updated by selecting a stronger teacher text model and a better initial speech encoder . The source code for training and using SENSE models has been integrated into the SpeechBrain toolkit, and the first SENSE model we trained has been publicly released. We report experimental results on multilingual and multimodal semantic tasks, where our SENSE model achieves highly competitive performance. Finally, this study offers new insights into how semantics are captured in such semantically aligned speech encoders. Speech foundation models based on self-supervised learning (SSL) have brought significant advances in speech processing. These models, such as wav2vec 2.0 [1], HuBERT [2], and WavLM [3], generate learned speech representations that can be applied to a wide range of downstream speech processing tasks. By training on large amounts of unlabelled speech data, SSL models have demonstrated the ability to capture crucial speech features, such as phonemes and other acoustic units [4]. This capability has led to significant progress in multiple downstream tasks, including speech recognition [1], speech translation [5], speech separation, speaker verification, speaker diarization [3], and emotion detection [6]. Different approaches have been proposed to pretrain model by aligning speech and text, like mSLAM [7], a Massively multilingual joint pre-training for speech and text.

Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) promise to reduce congestion in future urban networks, potentially by optimizing their routing decisions. Unlike for human drivers, these decisions can be made with collective, data-driven policies, developed using machine learning algorithms. Reinforcement learning (RL) can facilitate the development of such collective routing strategies, yet standardized and realistic benchmarks are missing. To that end, we present URB: Urban Routing Benchmark for RL-equipped Connected Autonomous Vehicles. URB is a comprehensive benchmarking environment that unifies evaluation across 29 real-world traffic networks paired with realistic demand patterns. URB comes with a catalog of predefined tasks, multi-agent RL (MARL) algorithm implementations, three baseline methods, domain-specific performance metrics, and a modular configuration scheme. Our results show that, despite the lengthy and costly training, state-of-the-art MARL algorithms rarely outperformed humans. The experimental results reported in this paper initiate the first leaderboard for MARL in large-scale urban routing optimization. They reveal that current approaches struggle to scale, emphasizing the urgent need for advancements in this domain.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted in conservation to address the biodiversity crisis, yet their reliability for species evaluation is uncertain. This study systematically validates five leading models on 21,955 species across four core IUCN Red List assessment components: taxonomy, conservation status, distribution, and threats. A critical paradox was revealed: models excelled at taxonomic classification (94.9%) but consistently failed at conservation reasoning (27.2% for status assessment). This knowledge-reasoning gap, evident across all models, suggests inherent architectural constraints, not just data limitations. Furthermore, models exhibited systematic biases favoring charismatic vertebrates, potentially amplifying existing conservation inequities. These findings delineate clear boundaries for responsible LLM deployment: they are powerful tools for information retrieval but require human oversight for judgment-based decisions. A hybrid approach is recommended, where LLMs augment expert capacity while human experts retain sole authority over risk assessment and policy.

This paper presents the work carried out by the O_FT team, joint with Orange and Ouest-France, on adapting language models to the defense domain as part of the EvalLLM2025 challenge. This work focused on adapting the \texttt{Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3} model using classical techniques of continued pre-training and instruction-tuning. The core of our efforts is based on collecting, generating, and selecting data for these two stages as well as for model evaluation. Experiments show that our adapted models have better domain-specific knowledge and improved domain-specific task processing skills, along with comparable (or even superior) performance on general knowledge and skills. Considering the carbon footprint of our adaptations, this work demonstrates the feasibility of domain adaptation for relatively small models. -- Ce document présente les travaux réalisés par l'équipe O_FT conjointe à Orange et Ouest-France sur l'adaptation de modèles de langue au domaine de la défense dans le cadre du challenge EvalLLM2025. Ces travaux se sont concentrés sur l'adaptation du modèle \texttt{Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3} avec des techniques classiques de poursuite du pré-entraînement et d'affinage sur instructions. L'essentiel de nos travaux a porté sur la constitution, génération et sélection de données pour ces deux étapes ainsi que pour l'évaluation des modèles. Les expériences montrent que nos modèles adaptés ont de meilleures de connaissances de fond et une meilleure capacité de traitement de tâches sur le domaine de la défense, ainsi que des performances comparables (voire supérieures) sur des connaissances ou capacités généralistes. Mis au regard des empreintes carbones de nos adaptations, ces travaux démontrent ainsi la viabilité de l'adaptation à un domaine de modèles relativement petits.

If today some African languages like Swahili have enough resources to develop high-performing Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, many other languages spoken on the continent are still lacking such support. For these languages, still in their infancy, several possibilities exist to address this critical lack of data. Among them is Transfer Learning, which allows low-resource languages to benefit from the good representation of other languages that are similar to them. In this work, we adopt a similar approach, aiming to pioneer NLP technologies for Comorian, a group of four languages or dialects belonging to the Bantu family. Our approach is initially motivated by the hypothesis that if a human can understand a different language from their native language with little or no effort, it would be entirely possible to model this process on a machine. To achieve this, we consider ways to construct Comorian datasets mixed with Swahili. One thing to note here is that in terms of Swahili data, we only focus on elements that are closest to Comorian by calculating lexical distances between candidate and source data. We empirically test this hypothesis in two use cases: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Machine Translation (MT). Our MT model achieved ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L scores of 0.6826, 0.42, and 0.6532, respectively, while our ASR system recorded a WER of 39.50\% and a CER of 13.76\%. This research is crucial for advancing NLP in underrepresented languages, with potential to preserve and promote Comorian linguistic heritage in the digital age.

We have released an open dataset with global coverage on road surface characteristics (paved or unpaved) derived utilising 105 million images from the world's largest crowdsourcing-based street view platform, Mapillary, leveraging state-of-the-art geospatial AI methods. We propose a hybrid deep learning approach which combines SWIN-Transformer based road surface prediction and CLIP-and-DL segmentation based thresholding for filtering of bad quality images. The road surface prediction results have been matched and integrated with OpenStreetMap (OSM) road geometries. This study provides global data insights derived from maps and statistics about spatial distribution of Mapillary coverage and road pavedness on a continent and countries scale, with rural and urban distinction. This dataset expands the availability of global road surface information by over 3 million kilometers, now representing approximately 36% of the total length of the global road network. Most regions showed moderate to high paved road coverage (60-80%), but significant gaps were noted in specific areas of Africa and Asia. Urban areas tend to have near-complete paved coverage, while rural regions display more variability. Model validation against OSM surface data achieved strong performance, with F1 scores for paved roads between 91-97% across continents. Taking forward the work of Mapillary and their contributors and enrichment of OSM road attributes, our work provides valuable insights for applications in urban planning, disaster routing, logistics optimisation and addresses various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS): especially SDGs 1 (No poverty), 3 (Good health and well-being), 8 (Decent work and economic growth), 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), 11 (Sustainable cities and communities), 12 (Responsible consumption and production), and 13 (Climate action).

We introduce a novel embedding method diverging from conventional approaches by operating within function spaces of finite dimension rather than finite vector space, thus departing significantly from standard knowledge graph embedding techniques. Initially employing polynomial functions to compute embeddings, we progress to more intricate representations using neural networks with varying layer complexities. We argue that employing functions for embedding computation enhances expressiveness and allows for more degrees of freedom, enabling operations such as composition, derivatives and primitive of entities representation. Additionally, we meticulously outline the step-by-step construction of our approach and provide code for reproducibility, thereby facilitating further exploration and application in the field.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered LLM agents to autonomously collect world information, over which to conduct reasoning to solve complex problems. Given this capability, increasing interests have been put into employing LLM agents for predicting international events, which can influence decision-making and shape policy development on an international scale. Despite such a growing interest, there is a lack of a rigorous benchmark of LLM agents' forecasting capability and reliability. To address this gap, we introduce MIRAI, a novel benchmark designed to systematically evaluate LLM agents as temporal forecasters in the context of international events. Our benchmark features an agentic environment with tools for accessing an extensive database of historical, structured events and textual news articles. We refine the GDELT event database with careful cleaning and parsing to curate a series of relational prediction tasks with varying forecasting horizons, assessing LLM agents' abilities from short-term to long-term forecasting. We further implement APIs to enable LLM agents to utilize different tools via a code-based interface. In summary, MIRAI comprehensively evaluates the agents' capabilities in three dimensions: 1) autonomously source and integrate critical information from large global databases; 2) write codes using domain-specific APIs and libraries for tool-use; and 3) jointly reason over historical knowledge from diverse formats and time to accurately predict future events. Through comprehensive benchmarking, we aim to establish a reliable framework for assessing the capabilities of LLM agents in forecasting international events, thereby contributing to the development of more accurate and trustworthy models for international relation analysis.