Instruction tuning in low-resource languages remains underexplored due to limited text data, particularly in government and cultural domains. To address this, we introduce and open-source a large-scale (10,600 samples) instruction-following (IFT) dataset, covering key institutional and cultural knowledge relevant to Kazakhstan. Our dataset enhances LLMs' understanding of procedural, legal, and structural governance topics. We employ LLM-assisted data generation, comparing open-weight and closed-weight models for dataset construction, and select GPT-4o as the backbone. Each entity of our dataset undergoes full manual verification to ensure high quality. We also show that fine-tuning Qwen, Falcon, and Gemma on our dataset leads to consistent performance improvements in both multiple-choice and generative tasks, demonstrating the potential of LLM-assisted instruction tuning for low-resource languages.

Text embeddings are typically evaluated on a limited set of tasks, which are constrained by language, domain, and task diversity. To address these limitations and provide a more comprehensive evaluation, we introduce the Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) - a large-scale, community-driven expansion of MTEB, covering over 500 quality-controlled evaluation tasks across 250+ languages. MMTEB includes a diverse set of challenging, novel tasks such as instruction following, long-document retrieval, and code retrieval, representing the largest multilingual collection of evaluation tasks for embedding models to date. Using this collection, we develop several highly multilingual benchmarks, which we use to evaluate a representative set of models. We find that while large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters can achieve state-of-the-art performance on certain language subsets and task categories, the best-performing publicly available model is multilingual-e5-large-instruct with only 560 million parameters. To facilitate accessibility and reduce computational cost, we introduce a novel downsampling method based on inter-task correlation, ensuring a diverse selection while preserving relative model rankings. Furthermore, we optimize tasks such as retrieval by sampling hard negatives, creating smaller but effective splits. These optimizations allow us to introduce benchmarks that drastically reduce computational demands. For instance, our newly introduced zero-shot English benchmark maintains a ranking order similar to the full-scale version but at a fraction of the computational cost.

The rapid adoption of AI across diverse domains has led to the development of organisational guidelines that vary significantly, even within the same sector. This paper examines AI policies in two domains, news organisations and universities, to understand how bottom-up governance approaches shape AI usage and oversight. By analysing these policies, we identify key areas of convergence and divergence in how organisations address risks such as bias, privacy, misinformation, and accountability. We then explore the implications of these findings for international AI legislation, particularly the EU AI Act, highlighting gaps where practical policy insights could inform regulatory refinements. Our analysis reveals that organisational policies often address issues such as AI literacy, disclosure practices, and environmental impact, areas that are underdeveloped in existing international frameworks. We argue that lessons from domain-specific AI policies can contribute to more adaptive and effective AI governance at the global level. This study provides actionable recommendations for policymakers seeking to bridge the gap between local AI practices and international regulations.

The rapid advancement and deployment of AI systems have created an urgent need for standard safety-evaluation frameworks. This paper introduces AILuminate v1.0, the first comprehensive industry-standard benchmark for assessing AI-product risk and reliability. Its development employed an open process that included participants from multiple fields. The benchmark evaluates an AI system's resistance to prompts designed to elicit dangerous, illegal, or undesirable behavior in 12 hazard categories, including violent crimes, nonviolent crimes, sex-related crimes, child sexual exploitation, indiscriminate weapons, suicide and self-harm, intellectual property, privacy, defamation, hate, sexual content, and specialized advice (election, financial, health, legal). Our method incorporates a complete assessment standard, extensive prompt datasets, a novel evaluation framework, a grading and reporting system, and the technical as well as organizational infrastructure for long-term support and evolution. In particular, the benchmark employs an understandable five-tier grading scale (Poor to Excellent) and incorporates an innovative entropy-based system-response evaluation. In addition to unveiling the benchmark, this report also identifies limitations of our method and of building safety benchmarks generally, including evaluator uncertainty and the constraints of single-turn interactions. This work represents a crucial step toward establishing global standards for AI risk and reliability evaluation while acknowledging the need for continued development in areas such as multiturn interactions, multimodal understanding, coverage of additional languages, and emerging hazard categories. Our findings provide valuable insights for model developers, system integrators, and policymakers working to promote safer AI deployment.

In green security, defenders must forecast adversarial behavior, such as poaching, illegal logging, and illegal fishing, to plan effective patrols. These behavior are often highly uncertain and complex. Prior work has leveraged game theory to design robust patrol strategies to handle uncertainty, but existing adversarial behavior models primarily rely on Gaussian processes or linear models, which lack the expressiveness needed to capture intricate behavioral patterns. To address this limitation, we propose a conditional diffusion model for adversary behavior modeling, leveraging its strong distribution-fitting capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of diffusion models in the green security domain. Integrating diffusion models into game-theoretic optimization, however, presents new challenges, including a constrained mixed strategy space and the need to sample from an unnormalized distribution to estimate utilities. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a mixed strategy of mixed strategies and employ a twisted Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampler for accurate sampling. Theoretically, our algorithm is guaranteed to converge to an epsilon equilibrium with high probability using a finite number of iterations and samples. Empirically, we evaluate our approach on both synthetic and real-world poaching datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Sustainability reports are key for evaluating companies' environmental, social and governance, ESG performance, but their content is increasingly obscured by greenwashing - sustainability claims that are misleading, exaggerated, and fabricated. Yet, existing NLP approaches for ESG analysis lack robustness against greenwashing risks, often extracting insights that reflect misleading or exaggerated sustainability claims rather than objective ESG performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce A3CG - Aspect-Action Analysis with Cross-Category Generalization, as a novel dataset to improve the robustness of ESG analysis amid the prevalence of greenwashing. By explicitly linking sustainability aspects with their associated actions, A3CG facilitates a more fine-grained and transparent evaluation of sustainability claims, ensuring that insights are grounded in verifiable actions rather than vague or misleading rhetoric. Additionally, A3CG emphasizes cross-category generalization. This ensures robust model performance in aspect-action analysis even when companies change their reports to selectively favor certain sustainability areas. Through experiments on A3CG, we analyze state-of-the-art supervised models and LLMs, uncovering their limitations and outlining key directions for future research.

In the evolving landscape of multimodal language models, understanding the nuanced meanings conveyed through visual cues - such as satire, insult, or critique - remains a significant challenge. Existing evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on direct tasks like image captioning or are limited to a narrow set of categories, such as humor or satire, for deep semantic understanding. To address this gap, we introduce, for the first time, a comprehensive, multi-level Chinese-based benchmark designed specifically for evaluating the understanding of implicit meanings in images. This benchmark is systematically categorized into four subtasks: surface-level content understanding, symbolic meaning interpretation, background knowledge comprehension, and implicit meaning comprehension. We propose an innovative semi-automatic method for constructing datasets, adhering to established construction protocols. Using this benchmark, we evaluate 15 open-source large vision language models (LVLMs) and GPT-4o, revealing that even the best-performing model lags behind human performance by nearly 14% in understanding implicit meaning. Our findings underscore the intrinsic challenges current LVLMs face in grasping nuanced visual semantics, highlighting significant opportunities for future research and development in this domain. We will publicly release our InsightVision dataset, code upon acceptance of the paper.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have significantly advanced beyond traditional Large Language Models (LLMs) with their exceptional logical reasoning capabilities, yet these improvements introduce heightened safety risks. When subjected to jailbreak attacks, their ability to generate more targeted and organized content can lead to greater harm. Although some studies claim that reasoning enables safer LRMs against existing LLM attacks, they overlook the inherent flaws within the reasoning process itself. To address this gap, we propose the first jailbreak attack targeting LRMs, exploiting their unique vulnerabilities stemming from the advanced reasoning capabilities. Specifically, we introduce a Chaos Machine, a novel component to transform attack prompts with diverse one-to-one mappings. The chaos mappings iteratively generated by the machine are embedded into the reasoning chain, which strengthens the variability and complexity and also promotes a more robust attack. Based on this, we construct the Mousetrap framework, which makes attacks projected into nonlinear-like low sample spaces with mismatched generalization enhanced. Also, due to the more competing objectives, LRMs gradually maintain the inertia of unpredictable iterative reasoning and fall into our trap. Success rates of the Mousetrap attacking o1-mini, claude-sonnet and gemini-thinking are as high as 96%, 86% and 98% respectively on our toxic dataset Trotter. On benchmarks such as AdvBench, StrongREJECT, and HarmBench, attacking claude-sonnet, well-known for its safety, Mousetrap can astonishingly achieve success rates of 87.5%, 86.58% and 93.13% respectively. Attention: This paper contains inappropriate, offensive and harmful content.

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.

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges when balancing multiple high-level objectives, such as generating coherent, relevant, and high-quality responses while maintaining efficient task adaptation across diverse tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce Transfer-Prompting, a novel two-stage framework designed to enhance cross-task adaptation in prompt generation. The framework comprises two key components: (1) source prompt construction, which refines the original prompts on source task datasets to generate source prompts with enhanced generalization ability, and (2) target prompt generation, which enhances cross-task adaptation of target prompts by fine-tuning a set of high-scored source prompts on task-specific datasets. In each optimization cycle, a reference LLM generates candidate prompts based on historical prompt-score pairs and task descriptions in our designed reference prompt. These candidate prompts are refined iteratively, while a scorer LLM evaluates their effectiveness using the multi-dimensional metrics designed in the objective prompts evaluator-a novel contribution in this work that provides a holistic evaluation of prompt quality and task performance. This feedback loop facilitates continuous refinement, optimizing both prompt quality and task-specific outcomes. We validate Transfer-Prompting through extensive experiments across 25 LLMs, including 7 foundational models and 18 specialized models, evaluated on 9 diverse datasets. The results demonstrate that Transfer-Prompting significantly improves task-specific performance, highlighting its potential for enhancing cross-task adaptation in LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/llm172/Transfer-Prompting.