The growing deployment of large language models (LLMs) has amplified concerns regarding their inherent biases, raising critical questions about their fairness, safety, and societal impact. However, quantifying LLM bias remains a fundamental challenge, complicated by the ambiguity of what "bias" entails. This challenge grows as new models emerge rapidly and gain widespread use, while introducing potential biases that have not been systematically assessed. In this paper, we propose the Relative Bias framework, a method designed to assess how an LLM's behavior deviates from other LLMs within a specified target domain. We introduce two complementary methodologies: (1) Embedding Transformation analysis, which captures relative bias patterns through sentence representations over the embedding space, and (2) LLM-as-a-Judge, which employs a language model to evaluate outputs comparatively. Applying our framework to several case studies on bias and alignment scenarios following by statistical tests for validation, we find strong alignment between the two scoring methods, offering a systematic, scalable, and statistically grounded approach for comparative bias analysis in LLMs.

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve promising performance on visual and audio benchmarks independently. However, the ability of these models to process cross-modal information synchronously remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce: 1) Daily-Omni, an Audio-Visual Questioning and Answering benchmark comprising 684 videos of daily life scenarios from diverse sources, rich in both audio and visual information, and featuring 1197 multiple-choice QA pairs across 6 major tasks; 2) Daily-Omni QA Generation Pipeline, which includes automatic annotation, QA generation and QA optimization, significantly improves efficiency for human evaluation and scalability of the benchmark; 3) Daily-Omni-Agent, a training-free agent utilizing open-source Visual Language Model (VLM), Audio Language Model (ALM) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model to establish a baseline for this benchmark. The results show that current MLLMs still struggle significantly with tasks requiring audio-visual integration, but combining VLMs and ALMs with simple temporal alignment techniques can achieve substantially better performance. Codes and benchmark are available at \href{https://github.com/Lliar-liar/Daily-Omni}{https://github.com/Lliar-liar/Daily-Omni}.

Musical (MSS) source separation of western popular music using non-causal deep learning can be very effective. In contrast, MSS for classical music is an unsolved problem. Classical ensembles are harder to separate than popular music because of issues such as the inherent greater variation in the music; the sparsity of recordings with ground truth for supervised training; and greater ambiguity between instruments. The Cadenza project has been exploring MSS for classical music. This is being done so music can be remixed to improve listening experiences for people with hearing loss. To enable the work, a new database of synthesized woodwind ensembles was created to overcome instrumental imbalances in the EnsembleSet. For the MSS, a set of ConvTasNet models was used with each model being trained to extract a string or woodwind instrument. ConvTasNet was chosen because it enabled both causal and non-causal approaches to be tested. Non-causal approaches have dominated MSS work and are useful for recorded music, but for live music or processing on hearing aids, causal signal processing is needed. The MSS performance was evaluated on the two small datasets (Bach10 and URMP) of real instrument recordings where the ground-truth is available. The performances of the causal and non-causal systems were similar. Comparing the average Signal-to-Distortion (SDR) of the synthesized validation set (6.2 dB causal; 6.9 non-causal), to the real recorded evaluation set (0.3 dB causal, 0.4 dB non-causal), shows that mismatch between synthesized and recorded data is a problem. Future work needs to either gather more real recordings that can be used for training, or to improve the realism and diversity of the synthesized recordings to reduce the mismatch...

The majority of inhabitants in Hong Kong are able to read and write in standard Chinese butuse Cantonese as theprimary spoken language in daily life. Spoken Cantonese can be transcribed into Chinese characters, which constitute the so-called writte n Cantonese. Written Cantonese exhibits significant lexical and grammatical differences from standard written Chinese. The riseof written Cantonese is increasingly evident in thecyber world.The growing interaction between Mandarin speakers and Cantonese sp eak-ers is leading to a clear demand for automatic translation between Chinese and Cantonese. This paper describes a transformer-based neural machine translation (NMT) system for written-Chine se-to-written-Cantonese translation. Given that parallel text data of Chinese and Cantonese are extremely scarce, a major focus of thi s study is on the effort of preparing good amount of training dat a for NMT. In addition to collecting 28K parallel sentences from previous linguistic studies and scattered internet resources, we devise an effective approach to obtaining 72K parallel sentences by automatically extracting pairs of semantically similar senten ces from parallel articles on Chinese Wikipedia and Cantonese Wikip edia. We show that leveraging highly similar sentence pairs minedfrom Wikipedia improves translation performance in all test set s. Our system outperforms Baidu Fanyi's Chinese-to-Cantonese tr ansla-tion on 6 out of 8 test sets in BLEU scores. Translation exampl es reveal that our system is able to capture important linguistic transformations between standard Chinese and spoken Cantonese.

Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval mechanisms have demonstrated significant potential in fact-checking tasks by integrating external knowledge. However, their reliability decreases when confronted with conflicting evidence from sources of varying credibility. This paper presents the first systematic evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models for fact-checking in the presence of conflicting evidence. To support this study, we introduce \textbf{CONFACT} (\textbf{Con}flicting Evidence for \textbf{Fact}-Checking) (Dataset available at https://github.com/zoeyyes/CONFACT), a novel dataset comprising questions paired with conflicting information from various sources. Extensive experiments reveal critical vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art RAG methods, particularly in resolving conflicts stemming from differences in media source credibility. To address these challenges, we investigate strategies to integrate media background information into both the retrieval and generation stages. Our results show that effectively incorporating source credibility significantly enhances the ability of RAG models to resolve conflicting evidence and improve fact-checking performance.

Automatically evaluating multimodal generation presents a significant challenge, as automated metrics often struggle to align reliably with human evaluation, especially for complex tasks that involve multiple modalities. To address this, we present MMMG, a comprehensive and human-aligned benchmark for multimodal generation across 4 modality combinations (image, audio, interleaved text and image, interleaved text and audio), with a focus on tasks that present significant challenges for generation models, while still enabling reliable automatic evaluation through a combination of models and programs. MMMG encompasses 49 tasks (including 29 newly developed ones), each with a carefully designed evaluation pipeline, and 937 instructions to systematically assess reasoning, controllability, and other key capabilities of multimodal generation models. Extensive validation demonstrates that MMMG is highly aligned with human evaluation, achieving an average agreement of 94.3%. Benchmarking results on 24 multimodal generation models reveal that even though the state-of-the-art model, GPT Image, achieves 78.3% accuracy for image generation, it falls short on multimodal reasoning and interleaved generation. Furthermore, results suggest considerable headroom for improvement in audio generation, highlighting an important direction for future research.

The rapid proliferation of misinformation in digital media demands solutions that go beyond isolated Large Language Model(LLM) or AI Agent based detection methods. This paper introduces a novel multi-agent framework that covers the complete misinformation lifecycle: classification, detection, correction, and source verification to deliver more transparent and reliable outcomes. In contrast to single-agent or monolithic architectures, our approach employs five specialized agents: an Indexer agent for dynamically maintaining trusted repositories, a Classifier agent for labeling misinformation types, an Extractor agent for evidence based retrieval and ranking, a Corrector agent for generating fact-based correction and a V erification agent for validating outputs and tracking source credibility. Each agent can be individually evaluated and optimized, ensuring scalability and adaptability as new types of misinformation and data sources emerge. By decomposing the misinformation lifecycle into specialized agents - our framework enhances scalability, modular-ity, and explainability. This paper proposes a high-level system overview, agent design with emphasis on transparency, evidence-based outputs, and source provenance to support robust misinformation detection and correction at scale.

Following the rising popularity of YouTube, there is an emerging problem on this platform called clickbait, which provokes users to click on videos using attractive titles and thumbnails. As a result, users ended up watching a video that does not have the content as publicized in the title. This issue is addressed in this study by proposing an algorithm called BaitRadar, which uses a deep learning technique where six inference models are jointly consulted to make the final classification decision. These models focus on different attributes of the video, including title, comments, thumbnail, tags, video statistics and audio transcript. The final classification is attained by computing the average of multiple models to provide a robust and accurate output even in situation where there is missing data. The proposed method is tested on 1,400 YouTube videos. On average, a test accuracy of 98% is achieved with an inference time of less than 2s.

The emergence of multi-codebook neutral audio codecs such as Residual Vector Quantization (RVQ) and Group Vector Quantization (GVQ) has significantly advanced Large-Language-Model (LLM) based Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. These codecs are crucial in separating semantic and acoustic information while efficiently harnessing semantic priors. However, since semantic and acoustic information cannot be fully aligned, a significant drawback of these methods when applied to LLM-based TTS is that large language models may have limited access to comprehensive audio information. To address this limitation, we propose DistilCodec and UniTTS, which collectively offer the following advantages: 1) This method can distill a multi-codebook audio codec into a single-codebook audio codec with 32,768 codes while achieving a near 100\% utilization. 2) As DistilCodec does not employ a semantic alignment scheme, a large amount of high-quality unlabeled audio (such as audiobooks with sound effects, songs, etc.) can be incorporated during training, further expanding data diversity and broadening its applicability. 3) Leveraging the comprehensive audio information modeling of DistilCodec, we integrated three key tasks into UniTTS's pre-training framework: audio modality autoregression, text modality autoregression, and speech-text cross-modal autoregression. This allows UniTTS to accept interleaved text and speech/audio prompts while substantially preserving LLM's text capabilities. 4) UniTTS employs a three-stage training process: Pre-Training, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and Alignment. Source code and model checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/IDEA-Emdoor-Lab/UniTTS and https://github.com/IDEA-Emdoor-Lab/DistilCodec.

Ill-posed inverse problems are fundamental in many domains, ranging from astrophysics to medical imaging. Emerging diffusion models provide a powerful prior for solving these problems. Existing maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) or posterior sampling approaches, however, rely on different computational approximations, leading to inaccurate or suboptimal samples. To address this issue, we introduce a new approach to solving MAP problems with diffusion model priors using a dual ascent optimization framework. Our framework achieves better image quality as measured by various metrics for image restoration problems, it is more robust to high levels of measurement noise, it is faster, and it estimates solutions that represent the observations more faithfully than the state of the art.