As Machine Translation (MT) becomes increasingly commonplace, understanding how the general public perceives and relies on imperfect MT is crucial for contextualizing MT research in real-world applications. We present a human study conducted in a public museum (n=452), investigating how fluency and adequacy errors impact bilingual and non-bilingual users' reliance on MT during casual use. Our findings reveal that non-bilingual users often over-rely on MT due to a lack of evaluation strategies and alternatives, while experiencing the impact of errors can prompt users to reassess future reliance. This highlights the need for MT evaluation and NLP explanation techniques to promote not only MT quality, but also MT literacy among its users.

Edge-cloud speculative decoding (SD) accelerates inference by having a cloud-based large language model (LLM) that verifies draft tokens generated by a resource-constrained small language model (SLM) at the edge. A central bottleneck is the limited bandwidth of the edge-cloud link, which necessitates efficient compression of draft token distributions. We first derive an information-theoretic bound that decomposes the token rejection rate into contributions from SLM-LLM distribution mismatch and from quantization distortion. Guided by this analysis, we propose the Sparse Quantize-and-Sample SD (SQS-SD) framework, which exploits distributional sparsity through structured sparsification and lattice-based quantization. Within this framework, K-SQS applies fixed top-K truncation, while C-SQS adaptively adjusts the retained token set via online conformal prediction to ensure bounded deviation from the dense distribution. Empirical results confirm that both approaches improve end-to-end latency and rejection rates in complimentary operating regimes.

Abstractive summarization using large language models (LLMs) has become an essential tool for condensing information. However, despite their ability to generate fluent summaries, these models sometimes produce unfaithful summaries, introducing hallucinations at the word, phrase, or concept level. Existing mitigation strategies, such as post-processing corrections or contrastive learning with synthetically generated negative samples, fail to fully address the diverse errors that can occur in LLM-generated summaries. In this paper, we investigate fine-tuning strategies to reduce the occurrence of unfaithful spans in generated summaries. First, we automatically generate summaries for the set of source documents in the training set with a variety of LLMs and then use GPT-4o to annotate any hallucinations it detects at the span-level. Leveraging these annotations, we fine-tune LLMs with both hallucination-free summaries and annotated unfaithful spans to enhance model faithfulness. In this paper, we introduce a new dataset that contains both faithful and unfaithful summaries with span-level labels and we evaluate three techniques to fine-tuning a LLM to improve the faithfulness of the resulting summarization: gradient ascent, unlikelihood training, and task vector negation. Experimental results show that all three approaches successfully leverage span-level annotations to improve faithfulness, with unlikelihood training being the most effective.

Dynamic graph representation learning has become essential for analyzing evolving networks in domains such as social network analysis, recommendation systems, and traffic analysis. However, existing continuous-time methods face three key challenges: (1) some methods depend solely on node-specific memory without effectively incorporating information from neighboring nodes, resulting in embedding staleness; (2) most fail to explicitly capture correlations between node neighborhoods, limiting contextual awareness; and (3) many fail to fully capture the structural dynamics of evolving graphs, especially in absence of rich link attributes. To address these limitations, we introduce TAWRMAC-a novel framework that integrates Temporal Anonymous Walks with Restart, Memory Augmentation, and Neighbor Co-occurrence embedding. TAWRMAC enhances embedding stability through a memory-augmented GNN with fixedtime encoding and improves contextual representation by explicitly capturing neighbor correlations. Additionally, its Temporal Anonymous Walks with Restart mechanism distinguishes between nodes exhibiting repetitive interactions and those forming new connections beyond their immediate neighborhood. This approach captures structural dynamics better and supports strong inductive learning. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that TAWRMAC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in dynamic link prediction and node classification under both transductive and inductive settings across three different negative sampling strategies. By providing stable, generalizable, and context-aware embeddings, TAWRMAC advances the state of the art in continuous-time dynamic graph learning. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/tawrmac-A253 .

This work demonstrates the possibilities for improving wildfire and air quality management in the western United States by leveraging the unprecedented hourly data from NASA's TEMPO satellite mission and advances in self-supervised deep learning. Here we demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for mapping the near real-time hourly spread of wildfire fronts and smoke plumes using an innovative self-supervised deep learning-system: successfully distinguishing smoke plumes from clouds using GOES-18 and TEMPO data, strong agreement across the smoke and fire masks generated from different sensing modalities as well as significant improvement over operational products for the same cases.

Generative modeling becomes increasingly data-intensive in high-dimensional spaces. In molecular science, where data collection is expensive and important events are rare, compression to lower-dimensional manifolds is especially important for various downstream tasks, including generation. We combine a time-lagged information bottleneck designed to characterize molecular important representations and a diffusion model in one joint training objective. The resulting protocol, which we term Diffusive State Predictive Information Bottleneck (D-SPIB), enables the balancing of representation learning and generation aims in one flexible architecture. Additionally, the model is capable of combining temperature information from different molecular simulation trajectories to learn a coherent and useful internal representation of thermodynamics. We benchmark D-SPIB on multiple molecular tasks and showcase its potential for exploring physical conditions outside the training set.

The Mar Menor, Europe's largest coastal lagoon, located in Spain, has undergone severe eutrophication crises. Monitoring chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) is essential to anticipate harmful algal blooms and guide mitigation. Traditional in situ measurements are spatially and temporally limited. Satellite-based approaches provide a more comprehensive view, enabling scalable, long-term, and transferable monitoring. This study aims to overcome limitations of chlorophyll monitoring, often restricted to surface estimates or limited temporal coverage, by developing a reliable methodology to predict and map Chl-a across the water column of the Mar Menor. The work integrates Sentinel 2 imagery with buoy-based ground truth to create models capable of high-resolution, depth-specific monitoring, enhancing early-warning capabilities for eutrophication. Nearly a decade of Sentinel 2 images was atmospherically corrected using C2RCC processors. Buoy data were aggregated by depth (0-1 m, 1-2 m, 2-3 m, 3-4 m). Multiple ML and DL algorithms-including RF, XGBoost, CatBoost, Multilater Perceptron Networks, and ensembles-were trained and validated using cross-validation. Systematic band-combination experiments and spatial aggregation strategies were tested to optimize prediction. Results show depth-dependent performance. At the surface, C2X-Complex with XGBoost and ensemble models achieved R2 = 0.89; at 1-2 m, CatBoost and ensemble models reached R2 = 0.87; at 2-3 m, TOA reflectances with KNN performed best (R2 = 0.81); while at 3-4 m, RF achieved R2 = 0.66. Generated maps successfully reproduced known eutrophication events (e.g., 2016 crisis, 2025 surge), confirming robustness. The study delivers an end-to-end, validated methodology for depth-specific Chl-amapping. Its integration of multispectral band combinations, buoy calibration, and ML/DL modeling offers a transferable framework for other turbid coastal systems.

Large models (LMs) are powerful content generators, yet their open-ended nature can also introduce potential risks, such as generating harmful or biased content. Existing guardrails mostly perform post-hoc detection that may expose unsafe content before it is caught, and the latency constraints further push them toward lightweight models, limiting detection accuracy. In this work, we propose Kelp, a novel plug-in framework that enables streaming risk detection within the LM generation pipeline. Kelp leverages intermediate LM hidden states through a Streaming Latent Dynamics Head (SLD), which models the temporal evolution of risk across the generated sequence for more accurate real-time risk detection. To ensure reliable streaming moderation in real applications, we introduce an Anchored Temporal Consistency (ATC) loss to enforce monotonic harm predictions by embedding a benign-then-harmful temporal prior. Besides, for a rigorous evaluation of streaming guardrails, we also present StreamGuardBench-a model-grounded benchmark featuring on-the-fly responses from each protected model, reflecting real-world streaming scenarios in both text and vision-language tasks. Across diverse models and datasets, Kelp consistently outperforms state-of-the-art post-hoc guardrails and prior plug-in probes (15.61% higher average F1), while using only 20M parameters and adding less than 0.5 ms of per-token latency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at tasks such as dialogue, summarization, and question answering, yet they struggle to adapt to specialized domains and evolving facts. To overcome this, web search has been integrated into LLMs, allowing real-time access to online content. However, this connection magnifies safety risks, as adversarial prompts combined with untrusted sources can cause severe vulnerabilities. We investigate red teaming for LLMs with web search and present CREST-Search, a framework that systematically exposes risks in such systems. Unlike existing methods for standalone LLMs, CREST-Search addresses the complex workflow of search-enabled models by generating adversarial queries with in-context learning and refining them through iterative feedback. We further construct WebSearch-Harm, a search-specific dataset to fine-tune LLMs into efficient red-teaming agents. Experiments show that CREST-Search effectively bypasses safety filters and reveals vulnerabilities in modern web-augmented LLMs, underscoring the need for specialized defenses to ensure trustworthy deployment.

Every year, the European Union and its member states allocate millions of euros to fund various development initiatives. However, the increasing number of applications received for these programs often creates significant bottlenecks in evaluation processes, due to limited human capacity. In this work, we detail the real-world deployment of AI-assisted evaluation within the pipeline of two government initiatives: (i) corporate applications aimed at international business expansion, and (ii) citizen reimbursement claims for investments in energy-efficient home improvements. While these two cases involve distinct evaluation procedures, our findings confirm that AI effectively enhanced processing efficiency and reduced workload across both types of applications. Specifically, in the citizen reimbursement claims initiative, our solution increased reviewer productivity by 20.1%, while keeping a negligible false-positive rate based on our test set observations. These improvements resulted in an overall reduction of more than 2 months in the total evaluation time, illustrating the impact of AI-driven automation in large-scale evaluation workflows.