Fine-tuning large language models is essential for task-specific adaptation, yet it remains computationally prohibitive. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a solution, but current approaches typically ignore the distinct roles of model components and the heterogeneous importance across layers, thereby limiting adaptation efficiency. Motivated by the observation that Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) induce critical activations in the low-frequency dimensions of attention states, we propose RoPE-aware Selective Adaptation (RoSA), a novel PEFT framework that allocates trainable parameters in a more targeted and effective manner. RoSA comprises a RoPE-aware Attention Enhancement (RoAE) module, which selectively enhances the low-frequency components of RoPE-influenced attention states, and a Dynamic Layer Selection (DLS) strategy that adaptively identifies and updates the most critical layers based on LayerNorm gradient norms. By combining dimension-wise enhancement with layer-wise adaptation, RoSA achieves more targeted and efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on fifteen commonsense and arithmetic benchmarks demonstrate that RoSA outperforms existing mainstream PEFT methods under comparable trainable parameters.

Humor, as both a creative human activity and a social binding mechanism, has long posed a major challenge for AI generation. Although producing humor requires complex cognitive reasoning and social understanding, theories of humor suggest that it follows learnable patterns and structures, making it theoretically possible for generative models to acquire them implicitly. In recent years, multimodal humor has become a prevalent form of online communication, especially among Gen Z, highlighting the need for AI systems capable of integrating visual understanding with humorous language generation. However, existing data-driven approaches lack explicit modeling or theoretical grounding of humor, often producing literal descriptions that fail to capture its underlying cognitive mechanisms, resulting in the generated image descriptions that are fluent but lack genuine humor or cognitive depth. To address this limitation, we propose HUMORCHAIN (HUmor-guided Multi-step Orchestrated Reasoning Chain for Image Captioning), a theory-guided multi-stage reasoning framework. It integrates visual semantic parsing, humor- and psychology-based reasoning, and a fine-tuned discriminator for humor evaluation, forming an interpretable and controllable cognitive reasoning chain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly embed cognitive structures from humor theories into multimodal humor generation, enabling a structured reasoning process from visual understanding to humor creation. Experiments on Meme-Image-No-Text, Oogiri-GO, and OxfordTVG-HIC datasets show that HUMORCHAIN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in human humor preference, Elo/BT scores, and semantic diversity, demonstrating that theory-driven structured reasoning enables large language models to generate humor aligned with human perception.

We present the results of cognitive tests on conceptual combinations, performed using specific Large Language Models (LLMs) as test subjects. In the first test, performed with ChatGPT and Gemini, we show that Bell's inequalities are significantly violated, which indicates the presence of 'quantum entanglement' in the tested concepts. In the second test, also performed using ChatGPT and Gemini, we instead identify the presence of 'Bose-Einstein statistics', rather than the intuitively expected 'Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics', in the distribution of the words contained in large-size texts. Interestingly, these findings mirror the results previously obtained in both cognitive tests with human participants and information retrieval tests on large corpora. Taken together, they point to the 'systematic emergence of quantum structures in conceptual-linguistic domains', regardless of whether the cognitive agent is human or artificial. Although LLMs are classified as neural networks for historical reasons, we believe that a more essential form of knowledge organization takes place in the distributive semantic structure of vector spaces built on top of the neural network. It is this meaning-bearing structure that lends itself to a phenomenon of evolutionary convergence between human cognition and language, slowly established through biological evolution, and LLM cognition and language, emerging much more rapidly as a result of self-learning and training. We analyze various aspects and examples that contain evidence supporting the above hypothesis. We also advance a unifying framework that explains the pervasive quantum organization of meaning that we identify.

Lightweight language models remain attractive for on-device and privacy-sensitive applications, but their responses are highly sensitive to prompt quality. For open-ended generation, non-expert users often lack the knowledge or time to consistently craft high-quality prompts, leading them to rely on prompt optimization tools. However, a key challenge is ensuring the optimized prompts genuinely align with users' original intents and preferences. We introduce PromptTailor, a system for controllable prompt generation for open-ended text that improves model output quality by intent-aligned prompt synthesis. PromptTailor expands minimal user instructions into rich, domain-aware prompts while preserving the user's stated preferences. The system is a quantized Llama3-8B model fine-tuned with a lightweight LoRA adapter on 12,300 prompt-refinement dialogues spanning 41 everyday domains, distilled from three stronger LLMs. The adapter attaches to any Llama3-8B base, enabling edge deployment. In human and LLM-judge evaluations across multiple target models and optimization baselines, PromptTailor yields higher preference rates than chain-of-thought prompting and matches or surpasses state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods while requiring fewer model calls (e.g., 3 vs. 9). These results show that a compact student, guided by powerful teachers, can learn effective prompt-generation strategies that enhance response quality while maintaining alignment with user intent.

Objective This study introduces the Alzheimer's Disease Common Data Element Ontology for Clinical Trials (AD-CDO), a lightweight, semantically enriched ontology designed to represent and standardize key eligibility criteria concepts in Alzheimer's disease (AD) clinical trials. Materials and Methods We extracted high-frequency concepts from more than 1,500 AD clinical trials on ClinicalTrials.gov and organized them into seven semantic categories: Disease, Medication, Diagnostic Test, Procedure, Social Determinants of Health, Rating Criteria, and Fertility. Each concept was annotated with standard biomedical vocabularies, including the UMLS, OMOP Standardized Vocabularies, DrugBank, NDC, and NLM VSAC value sets. To balance coverage and manageability, we applied the Jenks Natural Breaks method to identify an optimal set of representative concepts. Results The optimized AD-CDO achieved over 63% coverage of extracted trial concepts while maintaining interpretability and compactness. The ontology effectively captured the most frequent and clinically meaningful entities used in AD eligibility criteria. We demonstrated AD-CDO's practical utility through two use cases: (a) an ontology-driven trial simulation system for formal modeling and virtual execution of clinical trials, and (b) an entity normalization task mapping raw clinical text to ontology-aligned terms, enabling consistency and integration with EHR data. Discussion AD-CDO bridges the gap between broad biomedical ontologies and task-specific trial modeling needs. It supports multiple downstream applications, including phenotyping algorithm development, cohort identification, and structured data integration. Conclusion By harmonizing essential eligibility entities and aligning them with standardized vocabularies, AD-CDO provides a versatile foundation for ontology-driven AD clinical trial research.

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for simulating human perspectives via persona prompting is gaining traction in computational social science. However, well-curated, empirically grounded persona collections remain scarce, limiting the accuracy and representativeness of such simulations. Here we introduce the German General Personas (GGP) collection, a comprehensive and representative persona prompt collection built from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). The GGP and its persona prompts are designed to be easily plugged into prompts for all types of LLMs and tasks, steering models to generate responses aligned with the underlying German population. We evaluate GGP by prompting various LLMs to simulate survey response distributions across diverse topics, demonstrating that GGP-guided LLMs outperform state-of-the-art classifiers, particularly under data scarcity. Furthermore, we analyze how the representativity and attribute selection within persona prompts affect alignment with population responses. Our findings suggest that GGP provides a potentially valuable resource for research on LLM-based social simulations that enables more systematic explorations of population-aligned persona prompting in NLP and social science research.

Behavioral health conditions, which include mental health and substance use disorders, are the leading disease burden in the United States. Peer-run behavioral health organizations (PROs) critically assist individuals facing these conditions by combining mental health services with assistance for needs such as income, employment, and housing. However, limited funds and staffing make it difficult for PROs to address all service user needs. To assist peer providers at PROs with their day-to-day tasks, we introduce PeerCoPilot, a large language model (LLM)-powered assistant that helps peer providers create wellness plans, construct step-by-step goals, and locate organizational resources to support these goals. PeerCoPilot ensures information reliability through a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline backed by a large database of over 1,300 vetted resources. We conducted human evaluations with 15 peer providers and 6 service users and found that over 90% of users supported using PeerCoPilot. Moreover, we demonstrated that PeerCoPilot provides more reliable and specific information than a baseline LLM. PeerCoPilot is now used by a group of 5-10 peer providers at CSPNJ, a large behavioral health organization serving over 10,000 service users, and we are actively expanding PeerCoPilot's use.

Recent research on large language model (LLM) jailbreaks has primarily focused on techniques that bypass safety mechanisms to elicit overtly harmful outputs. However, such efforts often overlook attacks that exploit the model's capacity for abstract generalization, creating a critical blind spot in current alignment strategies. This gap enables adversaries to induce objectionable content by subtly manipulating the implicit social values embedded in model outputs. In this paper, we introduce MICM, a novel, model-agnostic jailbreak method that targets the aggregate value structure reflected in LLM responses. Drawing on conceptual morphology theory, MICM encodes specific configurations of nuanced concepts into a fixed prompt template through a predefined set of phrases. These phrases act as conceptual triggers, steering model outputs toward a specific value stance without triggering conventional safety filters. We evaluate MICM across five advanced LLMs, including GPT-4o, Deepseek-R1, and Qwen3-8B. Experimental results show that MICM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art jailbreak techniques, achieving high success rates with minimal rejection. Our findings reveal a critical vulnerability in commercial LLMs: their safety mechanisms remain susceptible to covert manipulation of underlying value alignment.

This paper argues that dataset structure is important in image recognition tasks (among other tasks). Specifically, we focus on the nature and genesis of correlational structure in the actual datasets upon which DNNs are trained. We argue that DNNs are implementing a widespread methodology in condensed matter physics and materials science that focuses on mesoscale correlation structures that live between fundamental atomic/molecular scales and continuum scales. Specifically, we argue that DNNs that are successful in image classification must be discovering high order correlation functions. It is well-known that DNNs successfully generalize in apparent contravention of standard statistical learning theory. We consider the implications of our discussion for this puzzle.

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports have become central to how companies communicate climate risk, social impact, and governance practices, yet they are still published primarily as long, heterogeneous PDF documents. This makes it difficult to systematically answer seemingly simple questions. Existing tools either rely on brittle rule-based extraction or treat ESG reports as generic text, without explicitly modelling the underlying reporting standards. We present \textbf{EulerESG}, an LLM-powered system for automating ESG disclosure analysis with explicit awareness of ESG frameworks. EulerESG combines (i) dual-channel retrieval and LLM-driven disclosure analysis over ESG reports, and (ii) an interactive dashboard and chatbot for exploration, benchmarking, and explanation. Using four globally recognised companies and twelve SASB sub-industries, we show that EulerESG can automatically populate standard-aligned metric tables with high fidelity (up to 0.95 average accuracy) while remaining practical in end-to-end runtime, and we compare several recent LLM models in this setting. The full implementation, together with a demonstration video, is publicly available at https://github.com/UNSW-database/EulerESG.