Manual digitization of bibliographic metadata is time consuming and labor intensive, especially for historical and real-world archives with highly variable formatting across documents. Despite advances in machine learning, the absence of dedicated datasets for metadata extraction hinders automation. To address this gap, we introduce BiblioPage, a dataset of scanned title pages annotated with structured bibliographic metadata. The dataset consists of approximately 2,000 monograph title pages collected from 14 Czech libraries, spanning a wide range of publication periods, typographic styles, and layout structures. Each title page is annotated with 16 bibliographic attributes, including title, contributors, and publication metadata, along with precise positional information in the form of bounding boxes. To extract structured information from this dataset, we evaluated object detection models such as YOLO and DETR combined with transformer-based OCR, achieving a maximum mAP of 52 and an F1 score of 59. Additionally, we assess the performance of various visual large language models, including LlamA 3.2-Vision and GPT-4o, with the best model reaching an F1 score of 67. BiblioPage serves as a real-world benchmark for bibliographic metadata extraction, contributing to document understanding, document question answering, and document information extraction.

Understanding how emotions are expressed across languages is vital for building culturally-aware and inclusive NLP systems. However, emotion expression in African languages is understudied, limiting the development of effective emotion detection tools in these languages. In this work, we present a cross-linguistic analysis of emotion expression in 15 African languages. We examine four key dimensions of emotion representation: text length, sentiment polarity, emotion co-occurrence, and intensity variations. Our findings reveal diverse language-specific patterns in emotional expression -- with Somali texts typically longer, while others like IsiZulu and Algerian Arabic show more concise emotional expression. We observe a higher prevalence of negative sentiment in several Nigerian languages compared to lower negativity in languages like IsiXhosa. Further, emotion co-occurrence analysis demonstrates strong cross-linguistic associations between specific emotion pairs (anger-disgust, sadness-fear), suggesting universal psychological connections. Intensity distributions show multimodal patterns with significant variations between language families; Bantu languages display similar yet distinct profiles, while Afroasiatic languages and Nigerian Pidgin demonstrate wider intensity ranges. These findings highlight the need for language-specific approaches to emotion detection while identifying opportunities for transfer learning across related languages.

Despite the indisputable benefits of Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines (or builds), CI still presents significant challenges regarding long durations, failures, and flakiness. Prior studies addressed CI challenges in isolation, yet these issues are interrelated and require a holistic approach for effective optimization. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a novel idea of developing Digital Twins (DTs) of build processes to enable global and continuous improvement. To support such an idea, we introduce the CI Build process Digital Twin (CBDT) framework as a minimum viable product. This framework offers digital shadowing functionalities, including real-time build data acquisition and continuous monitoring of build process performance metrics. Furthermore, we discuss guidelines and challenges in the practical implementation of CBDTs, including (1) modeling different aspects of the build process using Machine Learning, (2) exploring what-if scenarios based on historical patterns, and (3) implementing prescriptive services such as automated failure and performance repair to continuously improve build processes.

People are increasingly using technologies equipped with large language models (LLM) to write texts for formal communication, which raises two important questions at the intersection of technology and society: Who do LLMs write like (model alignment); and can LLMs be prompted to change who they write like (model steerability). We investigate these questions in the high-stakes context of undergraduate admissions at a selective university by comparing lexical and sentence variation between essays written by 30,000 applicants to two types of LLM-generated essays: one prompted with only the essay question used by the human applicants; and another with additional demographic information about each applicant. We consistently find that both types of LLM-generated essays are linguistically distinct from human-authored essays, regardless of the specific model and analytical approach. Further, prompting a specific sociodemographic identity is remarkably ineffective in aligning the model with the linguistic patterns observed in human writing from this identity group. This holds along the key dimensions of sex, race, first-generation status, and geographic location. The demographically prompted and unprompted synthetic texts were also more similar to each other than to the human text, meaning that prompting did not alleviate homogenization. These issues of model alignment and steerability in current LLMs raise concerns about the use of LLMs in high-stakes contexts.

We introduce Open Deep Search (ODS) to close the increasing gap between the proprietary search AI solutions, such as Perplexity's Sonar Reasoning Pro and OpenAI's GPT-4o Search Preview, and their open-source counterparts. The main innovation introduced in ODS is to augment the reasoning capabilities of the latest open-source LLMs with reasoning agents that can judiciously use web search tools to answer queries. Concretely, ODS consists of two components that work with a base LLM chosen by the user: Open Search Tool and Open Reasoning Agent. Open Reasoning Agent interprets the given task and completes it by orchestrating a sequence of actions that includes calling tools, one of which is the Open Search Tool. Open Search Tool is a novel web search tool that outperforms proprietary counterparts. Together with powerful open-source reasoning LLMs, such as DeepSeek-R1, ODS nearly matches and sometimes surpasses the existing state-of-the-art baselines on two benchmarks: SimpleQA and FRAMES. For example, on the FRAMES evaluation benchmark, ODS improves the best existing baseline of the recently released GPT-4o Search Preview by 9.7% in accuracy. ODS is a general framework for seamlessly augmenting any LLMs -- for example, DeepSeek-R1 that achieves 82.4% on SimpleQA and 30.1% on FRAMES -- with search and reasoning capabilities to achieve state-of-the-art performance: 88.3% on SimpleQA and 75.3% on FRAMES.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive versatility as general purpose models. However, their broad applicability comes at a high-cost computational overhead, particularly in auto-regressive decoding where each step requires a forward pass. In domain-specific settings, general-purpose capabilities are unnecessary and can be exchanged for efficiency. In this work, we take a novel perspective on domain adaptation, reducing latency and computational costs by adapting the vocabulary to focused domains of interest. We introduce AdaptiVocab, an end-to-end approach for vocabulary adaptation, designed to enhance LLM efficiency in low-resource domains. AdaptiVocab can be applied to any tokenizer and architecture, modifying the vocabulary by replacing tokens with domain-specific n-gram-based tokens, thereby reducing the number of tokens required for both input processing and output generation. AdaptiVocab initializes new n-token embeddings using an exponentially weighted combination of existing embeddings and employs a lightweight fine-tuning phase that can be efficiently performed on a single GPU. We evaluate two 7B LLMs across three niche domains, assessing efficiency, generation quality, and end-task performance. Our results show that AdaptiVocab reduces token usage by over 25% without compromising performance

Accurately predicting urban microclimate, including wind speed and temperature, based solely on building geometry requires capturing complex interactions between buildings and airflow, particularly long-range wake effects influenced by directional geometry. Traditional methods relying on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are prohibitively expensive for large-scale simulations, while data-driven approaches struggle with limited training data and the need to model both local and far-field dependencies. In response, we propose a novel framework that leverages a multi-directional distance feature (MDDF) combined with localized training to achieve effective wind field predictions with minimal CFD data. By reducing the problem's dimensionality, localized training effectively increases the number of training samples, while MDDF encodes the surrounding geometric information to accurately model wake dynamics and flow redirection. Trained on only 24 CFD simulations, our localized Fourier neural operator (Local-FNO) model generates full 3D wind velocity and temperature predictions in under one minute, yielding a 500-fold speedup over conventional CFD methods. With mean absolute errors of 0.3 m/s for wind speed and 0.3 $^{\circ}$C for temperature on unseen urban configurations, our method demonstrates strong generalization capabilities and significant potential for practical urban applications.

Audio often serves as an auxiliary modality in video understanding tasks of audio-visual large language models (LLMs), merely assisting in the comprehension of visual information. However, a thorough understanding of videos significantly depends on auditory information, as audio offers critical context, emotional cues, and semantic meaning that visual data alone often lacks. This paper proposes an audio-centric video understanding benchmark (ACVUBench) to evaluate the video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information. Specifically, ACVUBench incorporates 2,662 videos spanning 18 different domains with rich auditory information, together with over 13k high-quality human annotated or validated question-answer pairs. Moreover, ACVUBench introduces a suite of carefully designed audio-centric tasks, holistically testing the understanding of both audio content and audio-visual interactions in videos. A thorough evaluation across a diverse range of open-source and proprietary multimodal LLMs is performed, followed by the analyses of deficiencies in audio-visual LLMs. Demos are available at https://github.com/lark-png/ACVUBench.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with specialized tools presents new opportunities for intelligent automation systems. However, orchestrating multiple LLM-driven agents to tackle complex tasks remains challenging due to coordination difficulties, inefficient resource utilization, and inconsistent information flow. We present OmniNova, a modular multi-agent automation framework that combines language models with specialized tools such as web search, crawling, and code execution capabilities. OmniNova introduces three key innovations: (1) a hierarchical multi-agent architecture with distinct coordinator, planner, supervisor, and specialist agents; (2) a dynamic task routing mechanism that optimizes agent deployment based on task complexity; and (3) a multi-layered LLM integration system that allocates appropriate models to different cognitive requirements. Our evaluations across 50 complex tasks in research, data analysis, and web interaction domains demonstrate that OmniNova outperforms existing frameworks in task completion rate (87\% vs. baseline 62\%), efficiency (41\% reduced token usage), and result quality (human evaluation score of 4.2/5 vs. baseline 3.1/5). We contribute both a theoretical framework for multi-agent system design and an open-source implementation that advances the state-of-the-art in LLM-based automation systems.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) operate over both input feature spaces and combinatorial graph structures, making it challenging to understand the rationale behind their predictions. As GNNs gain widespread popularity and demonstrate success across various domains, such as drug discovery, studying their interpretability has become a critical task. To address this, many explainability methods have been proposed, with recent efforts shifting from instance-specific explanations to global concept-based explainability. However, these approaches face several limitations, such as relying on predefined concepts and explaining only a limited set of patterns. To address this, we propose a novel framework, LOGICXGNN, for extracting interpretable logic rules from GNNs. LOGICXGNN is model-agnostic, efficient, and data-driven, eliminating the need for predefined concepts. More importantly, it can serve as a rule-based classifier and even outperform the original neural models. Its interpretability facilitates knowledge discovery, as demonstrated by its ability to extract detailed and accurate chemistry knowledge that is often overlooked by existing methods. Another key advantage of LOGICXGNN is its ability to generate new graph instances in a controlled and transparent manner, offering significant potential for applications such as drug design. We empirically demonstrate these merits through experiments on real-world datasets such as MUTAG and BBBP.