Language exhibits a fractal structure in its information-theoretic complexity (i.e. bits per token), with self-similarity across scales and long-range dependence (LRD). In this work, we investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can replicate such fractal characteristics and identify conditions-such as temperature setting and prompting method-under which they may fail. Moreover, we find that the fractal parameters observed in natural language are contained within a narrow range, whereas those of LLMs' output vary widely, suggesting that fractal parameters might prove helpful in detecting a non-trivial portion of LLM-generated texts. Notably, these findings, and many others reported in this work, are robust to the choice of the architecture; e.g. Gemini 1.0 Pro, Mistral-7B and Gemma-2B. We also release a dataset comprising of over 240,000 articles generated by various LLMs (both pretrained and instruction-tuned) with different decoding temperatures and prompting methods, along with their corresponding human-generated texts. We hope that this work highlights the complex interplay between fractal properties, prompting, and statistical mimicry in LLMs, offering insights for generating, evaluating and detecting synthetic texts.

While language technologies have advanced significantly, current approaches fail to address the complex sociocultural dimensions of linguistic preservation. AI Thinking proposes a meaning-centered framework that would transform technological development from creating tools FOR communities to co-creating solutions WITH them. This approach recognizes that meaningful solutions emerge through the interplay of cultural understanding, community agency, and technological innovation. The proposal articulates a holistic methodology and a five-layer technological ecosystem where communities maintain control over their linguistic and cultural knowledge representation. This systematic integration of community needs, cultural preservation, and advanced capabilities could revolutionize how we approach linguistic diversity preservation in the digital age.

How much information about training samples can be gleaned from synthetic data generated by Large Language Models (LLMs)? Overlooking the subtleties of information flow in synthetic data generation pipelines can lead to a false sense of privacy. In this paper, we design membership inference attacks (MIAs) that target data used to fine-tune pre-trained LLMs that are then used to synthesize data, particularly when the adversary does not have access to the fine-tuned model but only to the synthetic data. We show that such data-based MIAs do significantly better than a random guess, meaning that synthetic data leaks information about the training data. Further, we find that canaries crafted to maximize vulnerability to model-based MIAs are sub-optimal for privacy auditing when only synthetic data is released. Such out-of-distribution canaries have limited influence on the model's output when prompted to generate useful, in-distribution synthetic data, which drastically reduces their vulnerability. To tackle this problem, we leverage the mechanics of auto-regressive models to design canaries with an in-distribution prefix and a high-perplexity suffix that leave detectable traces in synthetic data. This enhances the power of data-based MIAs and provides a better assessment of the privacy risks of releasing synthetic data generated by LLMs.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on widely benchmarked high-resource languages; however, linguistic nuances of under-resourced languages remain unexplored. We introduce Batayan, a holistic Filipino benchmark designed to systematically evaluate LLMs across three key natural language processing (NLP) competencies: understanding, reasoning, and generation. Batayan consolidates eight tasks, covering both Tagalog and code-switched Taglish utterances. Our rigorous, native-speaker-driven annotation process ensures fluency and authenticity to the complex morphological and syntactic structures of Filipino, alleviating a pervasive translationese bias in existing Filipino corpora. We report empirical results on a variety of multilingual LLMs, highlighting significant performance gaps that signal the under-representation of Filipino in pretraining corpora, the unique hurdles in modeling Filipino's rich morphology and construction, and the importance of explicit Filipino language support and instruction tuning. Moreover, we discuss the practical challenges encountered in dataset construction and propose principled solutions for building culturally and linguistically-faithful resources in under-represented languages. We also provide a public benchmark and leaderboard as a clear foundation for iterative, community-driven progress in Filipino NLP.

While the ability of language models to elicit facts has been widely investigated, how they handle temporally changing facts remains underexplored. We discover Temporal Heads, specific attention heads primarily responsible for processing temporal knowledge through circuit analysis. We confirm that these heads are present across multiple models, though their specific locations may vary, and their responses differ depending on the type of knowledge and its corresponding years. Disabling these heads degrades the model's ability to recall time-specific knowledge while maintaining its general capabilities without compromising time-invariant and question-answering performances. Moreover, the heads are activated not only numeric conditions ("In 2004") but also textual aliases ("In the year ..."), indicating that they encode a temporal dimension beyond simple numerical representation. Furthermore, we expand the potential of our findings by demonstrating how temporal knowledge can be edited by adjusting the values of these heads.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for high-stake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making process, where the stakes are particularly high and political decisions can have far-reaching consequences. We introduce a novel dataset comprising publicly available UN Security Council (UNSC) records from 1994 to 2024, including draft resolutions, voting records, and diplomatic speeches. Using this dataset, we propose the United Nations Benchmark (UNBench), the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across four interconnected political science tasks: co-penholder judgment, representative voting simulation, draft adoption prediction, and representative statement generation. These tasks span the three stages of the UN decision-making process--drafting, voting, and discussing--and aim to assess LLMs' ability to understand and simulate political dynamics. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the potential and challenges of applying LLMs in this domain, providing insights into their strengths and limitations in political science. This work contributes to the growing intersection of AI and political science, opening new avenues for research and practical applications in global governance. The UNBench Repository can be accessed at: https://github.com/yueqingliang1/UNBench.

In industrial applications requiring real-time feedback, such as quality control and robotic manipulation, the demand for high-speed and accurate pose estimation remains critical. Despite advances improving speed and accuracy in pose estimation, finding a balance between computational efficiency and accuracy poses significant challenges in dynamic environments. Most current algorithms lack scalability in estimation time, especially for diverse datasets, and the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods are often too slow. This study focuses on developing a fast and scalable set of pose estimators based on GDRNPP to meet or exceed current benchmarks in accuracy and robustness, particularly addressing the efficiency-accuracy trade-off essential in real-time scenarios. We propose the AMIS algorithm to tailor the utilized model according to an application-specific trade-off between inference time and accuracy. We further show the effectiveness of the AMIS-based model choice on four prominent benchmark datasets (LM-O, YCB-V, T-LESS, and ITODD).

Multimodal multi-label emotion recognition (MMER) aims to identify the concurrent presence of multiple emotions in multimodal data. Existing studies primarily focus on improving fusion strategies and modeling modality-to-label dependencies. However, they often overlook the impact of \textbf{aleatoric uncertainty}, which is the inherent noise in the multimodal data and hinders the effectiveness of modality fusion by introducing ambiguity into feature representations. To address this issue and effectively model aleatoric uncertainty, this paper proposes Latent emotional Distribution Decomposition with Uncertainty perception (LDDU) framework from a novel perspective of latent emotional space probabilistic modeling. Specifically, we introduce a contrastive disentangled distribution mechanism within the emotion space to model the multimodal data, allowing for the extraction of semantic features and uncertainty. Furthermore, we design an uncertainty-aware fusion multimodal method that accounts for the dispersed distribution of uncertainty and integrates distribution information. Experimental results show that LDDU achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CMU-MOSEI and M$^3$ED datasets, highlighting the importance of uncertainty modeling in MMER. Code is available at https://github.com/201983290498/lddu\_mmer.git.

Alignment techniques have become central to ensuring that Large Language Models (LLMs) generate outputs consistent with human values. However, existing alignment paradigms often model an averaged or monolithic preference, failing to account for the diversity of perspectives across cultures, demographics, and communities. This limitation is particularly critical in health-related scenarios, where plurality is essential due to the influence of culture, religion, personal values, and conflicting opinions. Despite progress in pluralistic alignment, no prior work has focused on health, likely due to the unavailability of publicly available datasets. To address this gap, we introduce VITAL, a new benchmark dataset comprising 13.1K value-laden situations and 5.4K multiple-choice questions focused on health, designed to assess and benchmark pluralistic alignment methodologies. Through extensive evaluation of eight LLMs of varying sizes, we demonstrate that existing pluralistic alignment techniques fall short in effectively accommodating diverse healthcare beliefs, underscoring the need for tailored AI alignment in specific domains. This work highlights the limitations of current approaches and lays the groundwork for developing health-specific alignment solutions.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently gained attention due to their distinctive performance and broad applicability. While it has been previously shown that their efficacy in usage scenarios involving non-Western contexts falls short, existing studies are limited in scope, covering just a narrow range of cultures, focusing exclusively on a small number of cultural aspects, or evaluating a limited selection of models on a single task only. Towards globally inclusive LVLM research, we introduce GIMMICK, an extensive multimodal benchmark designed to assess a broad spectrum of cultural knowledge across 144 countries representing six global macro-regions. GIMMICK comprises six tasks built upon three new datasets that span 728 unique cultural events or facets on which we evaluated 20 LVLMs and 11 LLMs, including five proprietary and 26 open-weight models of all sizes. We systematically examine (1) regional cultural biases, (2) the influence of model size, (3) input modalities, and (4) external cues. Our analyses reveal strong biases toward Western cultures across models and tasks and highlight strong correlations between model size and performance, as well as the effectiveness of multimodal input and external geographic cues. We further find that models have more knowledge of tangible than intangible aspects (e.g., food vs. rituals) and that they excel in recognizing broad cultural origins but struggle with a more nuanced understanding.