Abstract--This paper investigates sequence-to-sequence T ransformer models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) error correction in low-resource Burmese, focusing on different feature integration strategies including IP A and alignment information. T o our knowledge, this is the first study addressing ASR error correction specifically for Burmese. W e evaluate five ASR backbones and show that our ASR Error Correction (AEC) approaches consistently improve word-and character-level accuracy over baseline outputs. The proposed AEC model, combining IP A and alignment features, reduced the average WER of ASR models from 51.56 to 39.82 before augmentation (and 51.56 to 43.59 after augmentation) and improving chrF++ scores from 0.5864 to 0.627, demonstrating consistent gains over the baseline ASR outputs without AEC. Our results highlight the robustness of AEC and the importance of feature design for improving ASR outputs in low-resource settings.

Large language models must satisfy hard orthographic constraints during controlled text generation, yet systematic cross-architecture evaluation remains limited. We evaluate 28 configurations spanning three model families (Qwen3, Claude Haiku-4.5, GPT-5-mini) on 58 word puzzles requiring character-level constraint satisfaction. Architectural differences produce substantially larger performance gaps (2.0-2.2x, F1=0.761 vs. 0.343) than parameter scaling within families (83% gain from eightfold scaling), suggesting that constraint satisfaction may require specialized architectural features or training objectives beyond standard language model scaling. Thinking budget sensitivity proves heterogeneous: high-capacity models show strong returns (+0.102 to +0.136 F1), while mid-sized variants saturate or degrade. These patterns are inconsistent with uniform compute benefits. Using difficulty ratings from 10,000 human solvers per puzzle, we establish modest but consistent calibration (r=0.24-0.38) across all families, yet identify systematic failures on common words with unusual orthography ("data", "poop", "loll": 86-95% human success, 89-96% model miss rate). These failures reveal over-reliance on distributional plausibility that penalizes orthographically atypical but constraint-valid patterns, suggesting architectural innovations may be required beyond simply scaling parameters or computational budgets.

In low-resource languages like Burmese, classification tasks often fine-tune only the final classification layer, keeping pre-trained encoder weights frozen. While Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are commonly used, their fixed non-linearity can limit expressiveness and increase computational cost. This work explores Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) as alternative classification heads, evaluating Fourier-based FourierKAN, Spline-based EfficientKAN, and Grid-based FasterKAN-across diverse embeddings including TF-IDF, fastText, and multilingual transformers (mBERT, Distil-mBERT). Experimental results show that KAN-based heads are competitive with or superior to MLPs. EfficientKAN with fastText achieved the highest F1-score (0.928), while FasterKAN offered the best trade-off between speed and accuracy. On transformer embeddings, EfficientKAN matched or slightly outperformed MLPs with mBERT (0.917 F1). These findings highlight KANs as expressive, efficient alternatives to MLPs for low-resource language classification.

Abstract--Detecting sarcasm remains a challenging task in the areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) despite recent advances in neural network approaches. Currently, Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are the preferred approach for sarcasm detection. However, the complexity of sarcastic text, combined with linguistic diversity and cultural variation across communities, has made the task more difficult even for PLMs and LLMs. Beyond that, those models also exhibit unreliable detection of words or tokens that require extra grounding for analysis. Building on a state-of-the-art prompting method in LLMs for sarcasm detection called Pragmatic Metacognitive Prompting (PMP), we introduce a retrieval-aware approach that incorporates retrieved contextual information for each target text. Our pipeline explores two complementary ways to provide context: adding non-parametric knowledge using web-based retrieval when the model lacks necessary background, and eliciting the model's own internal knowledge for a self-knowledge awareness strategy. We evaluated our approach with three datasets, such as Twitter Indonesia Sarcastic, SemEval-2018 T ask 3, and MUStARD. Non-parametric retrieval resulted in a significant 9.87% macro-F1 improvement on Twitter Indonesia Sarcastic compared to the original PMP method. Self-knowledge retrieval improves macro-F1 by 3.29% on Semeval and by 4.08% on MUStARD. Future work will focus on optimizing the retrieval of relevant contextual information and examining how retrieval quality affects performance. In the field of machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) tasks have been shown to be a crucial part of human life. NLP tasks revolve around processing text in a specific manner and receiving an output that can be useful, with examples such as text classification, text generation, information retrieval, and similar related tasks. Sarcasm detection, or as some call it verbal irony detection, is a task in NLP that automatically classifies text, and in extended forms includes images, audio, or video, as either sarcastic or not. Systems designed for sarcasm detection are becoming more important in the 21st century due to the growth of the use of sarcasm detection datasets caused by media usage of it, such as social media, television, and much more. Additionally, enhancing these automatic systems for sarcasm detection could become crucial in interpreting the real sentence meaning of a text.

Offline data selection and online self-refining generation, which enhance the data quality, are crucial steps in adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific downstream tasks. We tackle offline data selection and online self-refining generations through an optimization perspective. Specifically, bilevel data selection is used for offline data selection with respect to the validation dataset, and we treat online self-refining generation as a model adaptation step of selecting the model trained on current responses that best fits the validation data. Our framework offers a unified understanding of offline data selection and self-refining generation by assigning a learned data weight to each question and response, either explicitly or implicitly. For the first time, we theoretically demonstrate the effectiveness of the bilevel data selection framework and demonstrate its performance gains over unfiltered direct mixing baselines. By combining offline data with validation-weighted online generations, our method enhances fine-tuning performance. Experiments on quality enhancement and safety-aware LLM fine-tuning validate its effectiveness.

Diffusion planning is a promising method for learning high-performance policies from offline data. To avoid the impact of discrepancies between planning and reality on performance, previous works generate new plans at each time step. However, this incurs significant computational overhead and leads to lower decision frequencies, and frequent plan switching may also affect performance. In contrast, humans might create detailed short-term plans and more general, sometimes vague, long-term plans, and adjust them over time. Inspired by this, we propose the Temporal Diffusion Planner (TDP) which improves decision efficiency by distributing the denoising steps across the time dimension. TDP begins by generating an initial plan that becomes progressively more vague over time. At each subsequent time step, rather than generating an entirely new plan, TDP updates the previous one with a small number of denoising steps. This reduces the average number of denoising steps, improving decision efficiency. Additionally, we introduce an automated replanning mechanism to prevent significant deviations between the plan and reality. Experiments on D4RL show that, compared to previous works that generate new plans every time step, TDP improves the decision-making frequency by 11-24.8 times while achieving higher or comparable performance.

Can in-context learning (ICL) override pre-trained label semantics, or does it merely refine an existing semantic backbone? We address this question by treating LLMs as prompt-induced classifiers and contrasting their behavior under natural demonstrations (with correct labels) and inverted demonstrations (systematically flipping label meanings). We decompose ICL behavior into three alignment metrics (truth, prior, and prompt alignment) and introduce a semantic override rate, defined as correctness under flipped semantics. Across eight classification tasks and eight open-source LLMs (1-12B parameters), we find consistent evidence for a semantic anchor view. With natural demonstrations, ICL improves accuracy while maintaining strong prior alignment; most correct predictions coincide with zero-shot behavior, even when the prior is weak. With inverted demonstrations, models cannot learn coherent anti-semantic classifiers: prompt alignment increases only by sacrificing accuracy, and semantic override rates remain exactly zero in our few-shot 1-12B setting. Rather than flexibly remapping label meanings, ICL primarily adjusts how inputs project onto stable semantic directions learned during pre-training, clarifying fundamental limits of few-shot prompting and suggesting that overriding label semantics at these scales requires interventions beyond ICL. All code is available at: https://github.

Holography offers significant potential for AR/VR applications, yet its adoption is limited by the high demands of data compression. Existing deep learning approaches generally lack rate adaptivity within a single network. We present RAVQ-HoloNet, a rate-adaptive vector quantization framework that achieves high-fidelity reconstructions at low and ultra-low bit rates, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods. In low bit, our method exceeds by -33.91% in BD-Rate and achieves a BD-PSNR of 1.02 dB from the best existing method demonstrated by the rate-distortion curve.

Dairy farmers should decide to keep or cull a cow based on an objective assessment of her likely performance in the herd. For this purpose, farmers need to identify more resilient cows, which can cope better with farm conditions and complete more lactations. This decision-making process is inherently complex, with significant environmental and economic implications. In this study, we develop an AI-driven model to predict cow longevity using historical multivariate time-series data recorded from birth. Leveraging advanced AI techniques, specifically Multi-Head Attention Transformers, we analysed approximately 780,000 records from 19,000 unique cows across 7 farms in Australia. The results demonstrate that our model achieves an overall determination coefficient of 83% in predicting herd life across the studied farms, highlighting its potential for practical application in dairy herd management.

Temporal distribution shift (TDS) erodes the long-term accuracy of recommender systems, yet industrial practice still relies on periodic incremental training, which struggles to capture both stable and transient patterns. Existing approaches such as invariant learning and self-supervised learning offer partial solutions but often suffer from unstable temporal generalization, representation collapse, or inefficient data utilization. To address these limitations, we propose ELBO$_\text{TDS}$, a probabilistic framework that integrates seamlessly into industry-scale incremental learning pipelines. First, we identify key shifting factors through statistical analysis of real-world production data and design a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy that resamples these time-varying factors to extend the training support. Second, to harness the benefits of this extended distribution while preventing representation collapse, we model the temporal recommendation scenario using a causal graph and derive a self-supervised variational objective, ELBO$_\text{TDS}$, grounded in the causal structure. Extensive experiments supported by both theoretical and empirical analysis demonstrate that our method achieves superior temporal generalization, yielding a 2.33\% uplift in GMV per user and has been successfully deployed in Shopee Product Search. Code is available at https://github.com/FuCongResearchSquad/ELBO4TDS.