SpeAr, which can further alleviate the bias problem.

NC phenomena occur with different loss functions.

The ability to accurately interpret implied meanings plays a crucial role in human communication and language use, and language models are also expected to possess this capability. This study demonstrates that providing language models with pragmatic theories as prompts is an effective in-context learning approach for tasks to understand implied meanings. Specifically, we propose an approach in which an overview of pragmatic theories, such as Gricean pragmatics and Relevance Theory, is presented as a prompt to the language model, guiding it through a step-by-step reasoning process to derive a final interpretation. Experimental results showed that, compared to the baseline, which prompts intermediate reasoning without presenting pragmatic theories (0-shot Chain-of-Thought), our methods enabled language models to achieve up to 9.6\% higher scores on pragmatic reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we show that even without explaining the details of pragmatic theories, merely mentioning their names in the prompt leads to a certain performance improvement (around 1-3%) in larger models compared to the baseline.

Abstract--Multimodal learning aims to improve performance by leveraging data from multiple sources. During joint multi-modal training, due to modality bias, the advantaged modality often dominates backpropagation, leading to imbalanced optimization. Existing methods still face two problems: First, the long-term dominance of the dominant modality weakens representation-output coupling in the late stages of training, resulting in the accumulation of redundant information. Second, previous methods often directly and uniformly adjust the gradients of the advantaged modality, ignoring the semantics and directionality between modalities. T o address these limitations, we propose Adaptive Redundancy Regulation for Balanced Multimodal Information Refinement (RedReg), which is inspired by information bottleneck principle. Specifically, we construct a redundancy phase monitor that uses a joint criterion of effective gain growth rate and redundancy to trigger intervention only when redundancy is high. Furthermore, we design a co-information gating mechanism to estimate the contribution of the current dominant modality based on cross-modal semantics. When the task primarily relies on a single modality, the suppression term is automatically disabled to preserve modality-specific information. Finally, we project the gradient of the dominant modality onto the orthogonal complement of the joint multi-modal gradient subspace and suppress the gradient according to redundancy. Experiments show that our method demonstrates superiority among current major methods in most scenarios. Ablation experiments verify the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/xia-zhe/RedReg.git Index T erms--Multimodal learning, modality imbalance, information bottleneck This work was supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China (2023YFA1008501) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grant 624B2049 and U22B2035. Wenrui Li, Penghong Wang, and Xiaopeng Fan are with the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China, and also with Harbin Institute of Technology Suzhou Research Institute, Suzhou 215104, China. Hongtao Chen is with the School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan 611731, China (e-mail: ht166chen@163.com).

Multimodal Model Editing (MMED) aims to correct erroneous knowledge in multimodal models. Existing evaluation methods, adapted from textual model editing, overstate success by relying on low-similarity or random inputs, obscure overfitting. We propose a comprehensive locality evaluation framework, covering three key dimensions: random-image locality, no-image locality, and consistent-image locality, op-erationalized through seven distinct data types, enabling a detailed and structured analysis of multimodal edits. We introduce De-VQA, a dynamic evaluation for visual question answering, uncovering a phenomenon we term transient blindness, overfitting to edit-similar text while ignoring visuals. Token analysis shows edits disproportionately affect textual tokens. We propose locality-aware adversarial losses to balance cross-modal representations. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, reducing transient blindness and improving locality by 17% on average.

Attribution is crucial in question answering (QA) with Large Language Models (LLMs).SOTA question decomposition-based approaches use long form answers to generate questions for retrieving related documents. However, the generated questions are often irrelevant and incomplete, resulting in a loss of facts in retrieval.These approaches also fail to aggregate evidence snippets from different documents and paragraphs. To tackle these problems, we propose a new fact decomposition-based framework called FIDES (\textit{faithful context enhanced fact decomposition and evidence aggregation}) for attributed QA. FIDES uses a contextually enhanced two-stage faithful decomposition method to decompose long form answers into sub-facts, which are then used by a retriever to retrieve related evidence snippets. If the retrieved evidence snippets conflict with the related sub-facts, such sub-facts will be revised accordingly. Finally, the evidence snippets are aggregated according to the original sentences.Extensive evaluation has been conducted with six datasets, with an additionally proposed new metric called $Attr_{auto-P}$ for evaluating the evidence precision. FIDES outperforms the SOTA methods by over 14\% in average with GPT-3.5-turbo, Gemini and Llama 70B series.

Street-view imagery (SVI) offers a fine-grained lens on traffic risk, yet two fundamental challenges persist: (1) how to construct street-level indicators that capture accident-related features, and (2) how to quantify their causal impacts across different accident types. To address these challenges, we propose Semantic4Safety, a framework that applies zero-shot semantic segmentation to SVIs to derive 11 interpretable streetscape indicators, and integrates road type as contextual information to analyze approximately 30,000 accident records in Austin. Specifically, we train an eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) multi-class classifier and use Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) to interpret both global and local feature contributions, and then apply Generalized Propensity Score (GPS) weighting and Average Treatment Effect (ATE) estimation to control confounding and quantify causal effects. Results uncover heterogeneous, accident-type-specific causal patterns: features capturing scene complexity, exposure, and roadway geometry dominate predictive power; larger drivable area and emergency space reduce risk, whereas excessive visual openness can increase it. By bridging predictive modeling with causal inference, Semantic4Safety supports targeted interventions and high-risk corridor diagnosis, offering a scalable, data-informed tool for urban road safety planning.

Estimating Individual Treatment Effects (ITE) from observational data is challenging due to confounding bias. Most studies tackle this bias by balancing distributions globally, but ignore individual heterogeneity and fail to capture the local structure that represents the natural clustering among individuals, which ultimately compromises ITE estimation. While instance-level alignment methods consider heterogeneity, they similarly overlook the local structure information. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end Multi-\textbf{P}rototype alignment method for \textbf{ITE} estimation (\textbf{PITE}). PITE effectively captures local structure within groups and enforces cross-group alignment, thereby achieving robust ITE estimation. Specifically, we first define prototypes as cluster centroids based on similar individuals under the same treatment. To identify local similarity and the distribution consistency, we perform instance-to-prototype matching to assign individuals to the nearest prototype within groups, and design a multi-prototype alignment strategy to encourage the matched prototypes to be close across treatment arms in the latent space. PITE not only reduces distribution shift through fine-grained, prototype-level alignment, but also preserves the local structures of treated and control groups, which provides meaningful constraints for ITE estimation. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PITE outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods, achieving more accurate and robust ITE estimation.

Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) are typically trained with a global cross-entropy loss in a supervised end-to-end manner: neurons need to store their outgoing weights; training alternates between a forward pass (computation) and a top-down backward pass (learning) which is biologically implausible. Alternatively, greedy layer-wise training eliminates the need for cross-entropy loss and backpropagation. By avoiding the computation of intermediate gradients and the storage of intermediate outputs, it reduces memory usage and helps mitigate issues such as vanishing or exploding gradients. However, most existing layer-wise training approaches have been evaluated only on relatively small datasets with simple deep architectures. In this paper, we first systematically analyze the training dynamics of popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) through an information-theoretic lens. Our findings reveal that networks converge layer-by-layer from bottom to top and that the flow of information adheres to a Markov information bottleneck principle. Building on these observations, we propose a novel layer-wise training approach based on the recently developed deterministic information bottleneck (DIB) and the matrix-based Rényi's $α$-order entropy functional. Specifically, each layer is trained jointly with an auxiliary classifier that connects directly to the output layer, enabling the learning of minimal sufficient task-relevant representations. We empirically validate the effectiveness of our training procedure on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 using modern deep CNNs and further demonstrate its applicability to a practical task involving traffic sign recognition. Our approach not only outperforms existing layer-wise training baselines but also achieves performance comparable to SGD.