Serialized TV shows are built on complex storylines that can be hard to track and evolve in ways that defy straightforward analysis. This paper introduces a multi-agent system designed to extract and analyze these narrative arcs. Tested on the first season of Grey's Anatomy (ABC 2005-), the system identifies three types of arcs: Anthology (self-contained), Soap (relationship-focused), and Genre-Specific (strictly related to the series' genre). Episodic progressions of these arcs are stored in both relational and semantic (vectorial) databases, enabling structured analysis and comparison. To bridge the gap between automation and critical interpretation, the system is paired with a graphical interface that allows for human refinement using tools to enhance and visualize the data. The system performed strongly in identifying Anthology Arcs and character entities, but its reliance on textual paratexts (such as episode summaries) revealed limitations in recognizing overlapping arcs and subtler dynamics. This approach highlights the potential of combining computational and human expertise in narrative analysis. Beyond television, it offers promise for serialized written formats, where the narrative resides entirely in the text. Future work will explore the integration of multimodal inputs, such as dialogue and visuals, and expand testing across a wider range of genres to refine the system further.

The reliability of large language models remains a critical challenge, particularly due to their susceptibility to hallucinations and factual inaccuracies during text generation. Existing solutions either underutilize models' self-correction with preemptive strategies or use costly post-hoc verification. To further explore the potential of real-time self-verification and correction, we present Dynamic Self-Verify Decoding (DSVD), a novel decoding framework that enhances generation reliability through real-time hallucination detection and efficient error correction. DSVD integrates two key components: (1) parallel self-verification architecture for continuous quality assessment, (2) dynamic rollback mechanism for targeted error recovery. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate DSVD's effectiveness, achieving significant improvement in truthfulness (Quesetion-Answering) and factual accuracy (FActScore). Results show the DSVD can be further incorporated with existing faithful decoding methods to achieve stronger performance. Our work establishes that real-time self-verification during generation offers a viable path toward more trustworthy language models without sacrificing practical deployability.

With the rapid development of the Internet, the information dissemination paradigm has changed and the efficiency has been improved greatly. While this also brings the quick spread of fake news and leads to negative impacts on cyberspace. Currently, the information presentation formats have evolved gradually, with the news formats shifting from texts to multimodal contents. As a result, detecting multimodal fake news has become one of the research hotspots. However, multimodal fake news detection research field still faces two main challenges: the inability to fully and effectively utilize multimodal information for detection, and the low credibility or static nature of the introduced external information, which limits dynamic updates. To bridge the gaps, we propose ERIC-FND, an external reliable information-enhanced multimodal contrastive learning framework for fake news detection. ERIC-FND strengthens the representation of news contents by entity-enriched external information enhancement method. It also enriches the multimodal news information via multimodal semantic interaction method where the multimodal constrative learning is employed to make different modality representations learn from each other. Moreover, an adaptive fusion method is taken to integrate the news representations from different dimensions for the eventual classification. Experiments are done on two commonly used datasets in different languages, X (Twitter) and Weibo. Experiment results demonstrate that our proposed model ERIC-FND outperforms existing state-of-the-art fake news detection methods under the same settings.

Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in task-oriented applications, yet building emotionally intelligent chatbots that can engage in natural, strategic conversations remains a challenge. We present a novel approach called SAGE that uses latent variables to control long-horizon behavior in dialogue generation. At the core of our method is the State-Action Chain (SAC), which augments standard language model fine-tuning by introducing latent variables that encapsulate emotional states and conversational strategies between dialogue turns. During inference, these variables are generated before each response, enabling coarse-grained control over dialogue progression while maintaining natural interaction patterns. We also introduce a self-improvement pipeline that leverages dialogue tree search, LLM-based reward modeling, and targeted fine-tuning to optimize conversational trajectories. Our experimental results show that models trained with this approach demonstrate improved performance in emotional intelligence metrics while maintaining strong capabilities on LLM benchmarks. The discrete nature of our latent variables facilitates search-based strategies and provides a foundation for future applications of reinforcement learning to dialogue systems, where learning can occur at the state level rather than the token level.

Bangla, a language spoken by over 300 million native speakers and ranked as the sixth most spoken language worldwide, presents unique challenges in natural language processing (NLP) due to its complex morphological characteristics and limited resources. While recent Large Decoder Based models (LLMs), such as GPT, LLaMA, and DeepSeek, have demonstrated excellent performance across many NLP tasks, their effectiveness in Bangla remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we establish the first benchmark comparing decoder-based LLMs with classic encoder-based models for Zero-Shot Multi-Label Classification (Zero-Shot-MLC) task in Bangla. Our evaluation of 32 state-of-the-art models reveals that, existing so-called powerful encoders and decoders still struggle to achieve high accuracy on the Bangla Zero-Shot-MLC task, suggesting a need for more research and resources for Bangla NLP.

As speech translation (ST) systems become increasingly prevalent, understanding their vulnerabilities is crucial for ensuring robust and reliable communication. However, limited work has explored this issue in depth. This paper explores methods of compromising these systems through imperceptible audio manipulations. Specifically, we present two innovative approaches: (1) the injection of perturbation into source audio, and (2) the generation of adversarial music designed to guide targeted translation, while also conducting more practical over-the-air attacks in the physical world. Our experiments reveal that carefully crafted audio perturbations can mislead translation models to produce targeted, harmful outputs, while adversarial music achieve this goal more covertly, exploiting the natural imperceptibility of music. These attacks prove effective across multiple languages and translation models, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in current ST architectures. The implications of this research extend beyond immediate security concerns, shedding light on the interpretability and robustness of neural speech processing systems. Our findings underscore the need for advanced defense mechanisms and more resilient architectures in the realm of audio systems. More details and samples can be found at https://adv-st.github.io.

Over recent years, the rapid evolution and progress of generative models have opened new possibilities in manipulating images, audio, and text, both independently and in a multimodal context. These AI advancements have ignited considerable debate about the essence of these human-engineered "intelligences". Critics have termed large language models (LLMs) as "statistical parrots" (Bender et al., 2021) due to their reliance on data. However, others view them as advanced tools capable of emulating and exploring the intricate structures of the human brain (Zhao et al., 2023; Abbasiantaeb et al., 2024; Fayyaz et al., 2024). Despite this division, it has become increasingly clear that limiting these models to a few specialized areas greatly restricts their potential to fully grasp and portray the complexity of the world. Therefore the integration of sensory modalities through technology, particularly using AI, has emerged as a compelling frontier in computer science and cognitive research (Murari et al., 2020; Turato et al., 2022). As multimodal AI models advance, they increasingly offer innovative solutions for bridging human experiences and machine understanding across diverse sensory domains. These models, which merge information from different modalities enable machines to interpret complex real-world scenarios and provide more nuanced outputs. While recent research has predominantly focused on the intersection of audio and visual modalities, the potential for integrating taste and sound remains relatively unexplored.

This paper addresses the optimization of human-robot collaborative work-cells before their physical deployment. Most of the times, such environments are designed based on the experience of the system integrators, often leading to sub-optimal solutions. Accurate simulators of the robotic cell, accounting for the presence of the human as well, are available today and can be used in the pre-deployment. We propose an iterative optimization scheme where a digital model of the work-cell is updated based on a genetic algorithm. The methodology focuses on the layout optimization and task allocation, encoding both the problems simultaneously in the design variables handled by the genetic algorithm, while the task scheduling problem depends on the result of the upper-level one. The final solution balances conflicting objectives in the fitness function and is validated to show the impact of the objectives with respect to a baseline, which represents possible initial choices selected based on the human judgment.

In our era of widespread false information, human fact-checkers often face the challenge of duplicating efforts when verifying claims that may have already been addressed in other countries or languages. As false information transcends linguistic boundaries, the ability to automatically detect previously fact-checked claims across languages has become an increasingly important task. This paper presents the first comprehensive evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for multilingual previously fact-checked claim detection. We assess seven LLMs across 20 languages in both monolingual and cross-lingual settings. Our results show that while LLMs perform well for high-resource languages, they struggle with low-resource languages. Moreover, translating original texts into English proved to be beneficial for low-resource languages. These findings highlight the potential of LLMs for multilingual previously fact-checked claim detection and provide a foundation for further research on this promising application of LLMs.

The #StopAsianHate (SAH) movement is a broad social movement against violence targeting Asians and Asian Americans, beginning in 2021 in response to racial discrimination related to COVID-19 and sparking worldwide conversation about anti-Asian hate. However, research on the online SAH movement has focused on English-speaking participants so the spread of the movement outside of the United States is largely unknown. In addition, there have been no long-term studies of SAH so the extent to which it has been successfully sustained over time is not well understood. We present an analysis of 6.5 million "#StopAsianHate" tweets from 2.2 million users all over the globe and spanning 60 different languages, constituting the first study of the non-English and transnational component of the online SAH movement. Using a combination of topic modeling, user modeling, and hand annotation, we identify and characterize the dominant discussions and users participating in the movement and draw comparisons of English versus non-English topics and users. We discover clear differences in events driving topics, where spikes in English tweets are driven by violent crimes in the US but spikes in non-English tweets are driven by transnational incidents of anti-Asian sentiment towards symbolic representatives of Asian nations. We also find that global K-pop fans were quick to adopt the SAH movement and, in fact, sustained it for longer than any other user group. Our work contributes to understanding the transnationality and evolution of the SAH movement, and more generally to exploring upward scale shift and public attention in large-scale multilingual online activism.