Large language models (LLMs) often miscommunicate their uncertainty: repeated queries can produce divergent answers, yet generated responses are typically unhedged or hedged in ways that do not reflect this variability. This conveys unfaithful information about the uncertain state of the LLMs' knowledge, creating a faithfulness gap that affects even strong LLMs. We introduce Faithful Uncertainty Tuning (FUT): a fine-tuning approach that teaches instruction-tuned LLMs to express uncertainty faithfully without altering their underlying answer distribution. We construct training data by augmenting model samples with uncertainty hedges (i.e. verbal cues such as 'possibly' or 'likely') aligned with sample consistency, requiring no supervision beyond the model and a set of prompts. We evaluate FUT on open-domain question answering (QA) across multiple models and datasets. Our results show that FUT substantially reduces the faithfulness gap, while preserving QA accuracy and introducing minimal semantic distribution shift. Further analyses demonstrate robustness across decoding strategies, choice of hedgers, and other forms of uncertainty expression (i.e. numerical). These findings establish FUT as a simple and effective way to teach LLMs to communicate uncertainty faithfully.

Large language models (LLMs) have grown more powerful in language generation, producing fluent text and even imitating personal style. Yet, this ability also heightens the risk of identity impersonation. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work has examined personalized machine-generated text (MGT) detection. In this paper, we introduce \dataset, the first benchmark for evaluating detector robustness in personalized settings, built from literary and blog texts paired with their LLM-generated imitations. Our experimental results demonstrate large performance gaps across detectors in personalized settings: some state-of-the-art models suffer significant drops. We attribute this limitation to the \textit{feature-inversion trap}, where features that are discriminative in general domains become inverted and misleading when applied to personalized text. Based on this finding, we propose \method, a simple and reliable way to predict detector performance changes in personalized settings. \method identifies latent directions corresponding to inverted features and constructs probe datasets that differ primarily along these features to evaluate detector dependence. Our experiments show that \method can accurately predict both the direction and the magnitude of post-transfer changes, showing 85\% correlation with the actual performance gaps. We hope that this work will encourage further research on personalized text detection.

Counter-speech generation is at the core of many expert activities, such as fact-checking and hate speech, to counter harmful content. Yet, existing work treats counter-speech generation as pure text generation task, mainly based on Large Language Models or NGO experts. These approaches show severe drawbacks due to the limited reliability and coherence in the generated countering text, and in scalability, respectively. To close this gap, we introduce a novel framework to model counter-speech generation as knowledge-wise text generation process. Our framework integrates advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines to ensure the generation of trustworthy counter-speech for 8 main target groups identified in the hate speech literature, including women, people of colour, persons with disabilities, migrants, Muslims, Jews, LGBT persons, and other. We built a knowledge base over the United Nations Digital Library, EUR-Lex and the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, comprising a total of 32,792 texts. We use the MultiTarget-CONAN dataset to empirically assess the quality of the generated counter-speech, both through standard metrics (i.e., JudgeLM) and a human evaluation. Results show that our framework outperforms standard LLM baselines and competitive approach, on both assessments. The resulting framework and the knowledge base pave the way for studying trustworthy and sound counter-speech generation, in hate speech and beyond.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been extended beyond traditional text generation to serve as interactive agents capable of using external tools based on user intent. However, current LLM agents still show limited ability to handle goal-oriented queries, which require decomposing a high-level objective into multiple interdependent API calls with correct planning and execution. Current approaches mainly rely on zero-shot evaluation due to the absence of training data. While proprietary closed-source models such as GPT-4 demonstrate strong reasoning abilities, smaller open-source models struggle to perform complex tool use effectively. Thus, we propose a novel training framework GOAT, which enables fine-tuning of LLM agents in a human annotation-free setting. GOAT automatically constructs synthetic datasets of goal-oriented API execution tasks directly from given API documents, equipping models with the ability to reason over interdependent calls and generate coherent responses. Through extensive experiments, we show that GOAT-trained agents achieve state-of-the-art performance across multiple existing goal-oriented benchmarks. In addition, we introduce GOATBench, a new goal-oriented API execution benchmark, and demonstrate that agents trained with GOAT also excel in this setting. These results highlight GOAT as a practical path toward building robust open-source LLM agents capable of complex reasoning and tool use.

End-to-end Large Speech Language Models (LSLMs) have demonstrated impressive conversational generation abilities, yet consistently fall short of traditional pipeline systems on semantic understanding benchmarks. In this work, we reveal through systematic experimentation that although LSLMs lose some text input performance after speech-text alignment training, the performance gap between speech and text inputs is more pronounced, which we refer to as the modality gap. To understand this gap, we analyze both coarse- and fine-grained text and speech representations. At the coarse-grained level, representations of speech and text in deeper layers are found to be increasingly aligned in direction (cosine similarity), while concurrently diverging in magnitude (Euclidean distance). We further find that representation similarity is strongly correlated with the modality gap. At the fine-grained level, a spontaneous token-level alignment pattern between text and speech representations is observed. Based on this, we introduce the Alignment Path Score to quantify token-level alignment quality, which exhibits stronger correlation with the modality gap. Building on these insights, we design targeted interventions on critical tokens through angle projection and length normalization. These strategies demonstrate the potential to improve correctness for speech inputs. Our study provides the first systematic empirical analysis of the modality gap and alignment mechanisms in LSLMs, offering both theoretical and methodological guidance for future optimization.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made it possible for recommendation systems to interact with users in open-ended conversational interfaces. In order to personalize LLM responses, it is crucial to elicit user preferences, especially when there is limited user history. One way to get more information is to present clarifying questions to the user. However, generating effective sequential clarifying questions across various domains remains a challenge. To address this, we introduce a novel approach for training LLMs to ask sequential questions that reveal user preferences. Our method follows a two-stage process inspired by diffusion models. Starting from a user profile, the forward process generates clarifying questions to obtain answers and then removes those answers step by step, serving as a way to add ``noise'' to the user profile. The reverse process involves training a model to ``denoise'' the user profile by learning to ask effective clarifying questions. Our results show that our method significantly improves the LLM's proficiency in asking funnel questions and eliciting user preferences effectively.

Recent advances in the audio language modeling (ALM) domain tackle audio understanding and text-to-audio generation as separate tasks. V ery few studies attempt to unify these tasks - an essential step toward advanced multimodal reasoning. This paper introduces Unified Audio Language Model (UALM), which aims to unify audio understanding, text-to-audio generation, and multimodal reasoning in a single model. To achieve this goal, we first present UALM-Gen, a text-to-audio language model that directly predicts audio tokens and is comparable to state-of-the-art diffusion-based models. We then demonstrate, using proper data blending, training recipes, and inference techniques, that our single UALM model matches the quality of state-of-the-art specialized models in audio understanding, text-to-audio generation, and text reasoning. Furthermore, we present UALM-Reason, a multimodal reasoning model that utilizes both text and audio in the intermediate thinking steps to facilitate complex generation tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration in audio research of cross-modal generative reasoning, with its effectiveness confirmed by subjective evaluations. Figure 1: Humans need understanding, generation, and reasoning to handle complex tasks, like composing music. Human auditory intelligence is characterized by two fundamental capabilities: perception (understanding) and production (generation). This duality is not merely conceptual; neuro-scientific evidence reveals a profound synergy between these functions, where impairment in one often corresponds to a deficit in the other (Liberman et al., 1967; Hickok & Poeppel, 2007; Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004). Furthermore, resolving complex acoustic challenges requires a sophisticated reasoning process that is inherently multimodal (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976; Leman, 2007; Denes & Pinson, 1993; Liberman & Mattingly, 1985).

Social media has become an essential part of the digital age, serving as a platform for communication, interaction, and information sharing. Celebrities are among the most active users and often reveal aspects of their personal and professional lives through online posts. Platforms such as Twitter provide an opportunity to analyze language and behavior for understanding demographic and social patterns. Since followers frequently share linguistic traits and interests with the celebrities they follow, textual data from followers can be used to predict celebrity demographics. However, most existing research in this field has focused on English and other high-resource languages, leaving Urdu largely unexplored. This study applies modern machine learning and deep learning techniques to the problem of celebrity profiling in Urdu. A dataset of short Urdu tweets from followers of subcontinent celebrities was collected and preprocessed. Multiple algorithms were trained and compared, including Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines, Random Forests, Convolutional Neural Networks, and Long Short-Term Memory networks. The models were evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and cumulative rank (cRank). The best performance was achieved for gender prediction with a cRank of 0.65 and an accuracy of 0.65, followed by moderate results for age, profession, and fame prediction. These results demonstrate that follower-based linguistic features can be effectively leveraged using machine learning and neural approaches for demographic prediction in Urdu, a low-resource language.

Existing Persian speech datasets are typically smaller than their English counterparts, which creates a key limitation for developing Persian speech technologies. We address this gap by introducing ParsVoice, the largest Persian speech corpus designed specifically for text-to-speech(TTS) applications. We created an automated pipeline that transforms raw audiobook content into TTS-ready data, incorporating components such as a BERT-based sentence completion detector, a binary search boundary optimization method for precise audio-text alignment, and audio-text quality assessment frameworks tailored to Persian. The pipeline processes 2,000 audiobooks, yielding 3,526 hours of clean speech, which was further filtered into a 1,804-hour high-quality subset suitable for TTS, featuring more than 470 speakers. To validate the dataset, we fine-tuned XTTS for Persian, achieving a naturalness Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 3.6/5 and a Speaker Similarity Mean Opinion Score (SMOS) of 4.0/5 demonstrating ParsVoice's effectiveness for training multi-speaker TTS systems. ParsVoice is the largest high-quality Persian speech dataset, offering speaker diversity and audio quality comparable to major English corpora. The complete dataset has been made publicly available to accelerate the development of Persian speech technologies. The ParsVoice dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/MohammadJRanjbar/ParsVoice.

Guitar tablature transcription consists in deducing the string and the fret number on which each note should be played to reproduce the actual musical part. This assignment should lead to playable string-fret combinations throughout the entire track and, in general, preserve parsimonious motion between successive combinations. Throughout the history of guitar playing, specific chord fingerings have been developed across different musical styles that facilitate common idiomatic voicing combinations and motion between them. This paper presents a method for assigning guitar tablature notation to a given MIDI-based musical part (possibly consisting of multiple polyphonic tracks), i.e. no information about guitar-idiomatic expressional characteristics is involved (e.g. bending etc.) The current strategy is based on machine learning and requires a basic assumption about how much fingers can stretch on a fretboard; only standard 6-string guitar tuning is examined. The proposed method also examines the transcription of music pieces that was not meant to be played or could not possibly be played by a guitar (e.g. potentially a symphonic orchestra part), employing a rudimentary method for augmenting musical information and training/testing the system with artificial data. The results present interesting aspects about what the system can achieve when trained on the initial and augmented dataset, showing that the training with augmented data improves the performance even in simple, e.g. monophonic, cases. Results also indicate weaknesses and lead to useful conclusions about possible improvements.