Identifying mistakes (i.e., miscues) made while reading aloud is commonly approached post-hoc by comparing automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions to the target reading text. However, post-hoc methods perform poorly when ASR inaccurately transcribes verbatim speech. To improve on current methods for reading error annotation, we propose a novel end-to-end architecture that incorporates the target reading text via prompting and is trained for both improved verbatim transcription and direct miscue detection. Our contributions include: first, demonstrating that incorporating reading text through prompting benefits verbatim transcription performance over fine-tuning, and second, showing that it is feasible to augment speech recognition tasks for end-to-end miscue detection. We conducted two case studies -- children's read-aloud and adult atypical speech -- and found that our proposed strategies improve verbatim transcription and miscue detection compared to current state-of-the-art.

A restaurant dinner or a hotel stay may lead to memorable experiences when guests encounter unexpected aspects that also match their interests. For example, an origami-making station in the waiting area of a restaurant may be both surprising and enjoyable for a customer who is passionate about paper crafts. Similarly, an exhibit of 18th century harpsichords would be atypical for a hotel lobby and likely pique the interest of a guest who has a passion for Baroque music. Motivated by this insight, in this paper we introduce the new task of engineering serendipity through recommendations of items with atypical aspects. We describe an LLM-based system pipeline that extracts atypical aspects from item reviews, then estimates and aggregates their user-specific utility in a measure of serendipity potential that is used to rerank a list of items recommended to the user. To facilitate system development and evaluation, we introduce a dataset of Yelp reviews that are manually annotated with atypical aspects and a dataset of artificially generated user profiles, together with crowdsourced annotations of user-aspect utility values. Furthermore, we introduce a custom procedure for dynamic selection of in-context learning examples, which is shown to improve LLM-based judgments of atypicality and utility. Experimental evaluations show that serendipity-based rankings generated by the system are highly correlated with ground truth rankings for which serendipity scores are computed from manual annotations of atypical aspects and their user-dependent utility. Overall, we hope that the new recommendation task and the associated system presented in this paper catalyze further research into recommendation approaches that go beyond accuracy in their pursuit of enhanced user satisfaction. The datasets and the code are made publicly available at https://github.com/ramituncc49er/ATARS .

Handling unanswerable questions (UAQ) is crucial for LLMs, as it helps prevent misleading responses in complex situations. While previous studies have built several datasets to assess LLMs' performance on UAQ, these datasets lack factual knowledge support, which limits the evaluation of LLMs' ability to utilize their factual knowledge when handling UAQ. To address the limitation, we introduce a new unanswerable question dataset UAQFact, a bilingual dataset with auxiliary factual knowledge created from a Knowledge Graph. Based on UAQFact, we further define two new tasks to measure LLMs' ability to utilize internal and external factual knowledge, respectively. Our experimental results across multiple LLM series show that UAQFact presents significant challenges, as LLMs do not consistently perform well even when they have factual knowledge stored. Additionally, we find that incorporating external knowledge may enhance performance, but LLMs still cannot make full use of the knowledge which may result in incorrect responses.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for long-form text generation. However, factual errors in the responses would undermine their reliability. Despite growing attention to LLM factuality, the effect of response length on factuality remains underexplored. In this work, we systematically investigate this relationship by first introducing an automatic and bi-level long-form factuality evaluation framework, which achieves high agreement with human annotations while being cost-effective. Using this framework, we conduct controlled experiments and find that longer responses exhibit lower factual precision, confirming the presence of length bias. To explain this phenomenon, we empirically examine three hypotheses: error propagation, long context, and facts exhaustion. Our results reveal that facts exhaustion, where the model gradually exhausts more reliable knowledge, is the primary cause of factual degradation, rather than the other two hypotheses.

Video consumption is a key part of daily life, but watching entire videos can be tedious. To address this, researchers have explored video summarization and highlight detection to identify key video segments. While some works combine video frames and transcripts, and others tackle video summarization and highlight detection using Reinforcement Learning (RL), no existing work, to the best of our knowledge, integrates both modalities within an RL framework. In this paper, we propose a multimodal pipeline that leverages video frames and their corresponding transcripts to generate a more condensed version of the video and detect highlights using a modality fusion mechanism. The pipeline is trained within an RL framework, which rewards the model for generating diverse and representative summaries while ensuring the inclusion of video segments with meaningful transcript content. The unsupervised nature of the training allows for learning from large-scale unannotated datasets, overcoming the challenge posed by the limited size of existing annotated datasets. Our experiments show that using the transcript in video summarization and highlight detection achieves superior results compared to relying solely on the visual content of the video.

The rapid growth in feature dimension may introduce implicit associations between features and labels in multi-label datasets, making the relationships between features and labels increasingly complex. Moreover, existing methods often adopt low-dimensional linear decomposition to explore the associations between features and labels. However, linear decomposition struggles to capture complex nonlinear associations and may lead to misalignment between the feature space and the label space. To address these two critical challenges, we propose innovative solutions. First, we design a random walk graph that integrates feature-feature, label-label, and feature-label relationships to accurately capture nonlinear and implicit indirect associations, while optimizing the latent representations of associations between features and labels after low-rank decomposition. Second, we align the variable spaces by leveraging low-dimensional representation coefficients, while preserving the manifold structure between the original high-dimensional multi-label data and the low-dimensional representation space. Extensive experiments and ablation studies conducted on seven benchmark datasets and three representative datasets using various evaluation metrics demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method\footnote{Code: https://github.com/Heilong623/-GRW-}.

Message-Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) have become a cornerstone for processing and analyzing graph-structured data. However, their effectiveness is often hindered by phenomena such as over-squashing, where long-range dependencies or interactions are inadequately captured and expressed in the MPNN output. This limitation mirrors the challenges of the Effective Receptive Field (ERF) in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), where the theoretical receptive field is underutilized in practice. In this work, we show and theoretically explain the limited ERF problem in MPNNs. Furthermore, inspired by recent advances in ERF augmentation for CNNs, we propose an Interleaved Multiscale Message-Passing Neural Networks (IM-MPNN) architecture to address these problems in MPNNs. Our method incorporates a hierarchical coarsening of the graph, enabling message-passing across multiscale representations and facilitating long-range interactions without excessive depth or parameterization. Through extensive evaluations on benchmarks such as the Long-Range Graph Benchmark (LRGB), we demonstrate substantial improvements over baseline MPNNs in capturing long-range dependencies while maintaining computational efficiency.

We present ZIPA, a family of efficient speech models that advances the state-of-the-art performance of crosslinguistic phone recognition. We first curated IPAPack++, a large-scale multilingual speech corpus with 17,132 hours of normalized phone transcriptions and a novel evaluation set capturing unseen languages and sociophonetic variation. With the large-scale training data, ZIPA, including transducer (ZIPA-T) and CTC-based (ZIPA-CR) variants, leverage the efficient Zipformer backbones and outperform existing phone recognition systems with much fewer parameters. Further scaling via noisy student training on 11,000 hours of pseudo-labeled multilingual data yields further improvement. While ZIPA achieves strong performance on benchmarks, error analysis reveals persistent limitations in modeling sociophonetic diversity, underscoring challenges for future research.

Conventional bag-of-words approaches for topic modeling, like latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), struggle with literary text. Literature challenges lexical methods because narrative language focuses on immersive sensory details instead of abstractive description or exposition: writers are advised to "show, don't tell." We propose Retell, a simple, accessible topic modeling approach for literature. Here, we prompt resource-efficient, generative language models (LMs) to tell what passages show, thereby translating narratives' surface forms into higher-level concepts and themes. By running LDA on LMs' retellings of passages, we can obtain more precise and informative topics than by running LDA alone or by directly asking LMs to list topics. To investigate the potential of our method for cultural analytics, we compare our method's outputs to expert-guided annotations in a case study on racial/cultural identity in high school English language arts books.

Recent advances in language modeling and vision stem from training large models on diverse, multi-task data. This paradigm has had limited impact in value-based reinforcement learning (RL), where improvements are often driven by small models trained in a single-task context. This is because in multi-task RL sparse rewards and gradient conflicts make optimization of temporal difference brittle. Practical workflows for generalist policies therefore avoid online training, instead cloning expert trajectories or distilling collections of single-task policies into one agent. In this work, we show that the use of high-capacity value models trained via cross-entropy and conditioned on learnable task embeddings addresses the problem of task interference in online RL, allowing for robust and scalable multi-task training. We test our approach on 7 multi-task benchmarks with over 280 unique tasks, spanning high degree-of-freedom humanoid control and discrete vision-based RL. We find that, despite its simplicity, the proposed approach leads to state-of-the-art single and multi-task performance, as well as sample-efficient transfer to new tasks.