Recent improvement in large language model performance have, in all likelihood, been accompanied by improvement in how well they can approximate the distribution of their training data. In this work, we explore the following question: which properties of text domains do LLMs faithfully approximate, and how well do they do so? Applying observational approaches familiar from corpus linguistics, we prompt a commonly used, opensource LLM to regenerate text from two domains of permissively licensed English text which are often contained in LLM training data -- Wikipedia and news text. This regeneration paradigm allows us to investigate whether LLMs can faithfully match the original human text domains in a fairly semantically-controlled setting. We investigate varying levels of syntactic abstraction, from more simple properties like sentence length, and article readability, to more complex and higher order properties such as dependency tag distribution, parse depth, and parse complexity. We find that the majority of the regenerated distributions show a shifted mean, a lower standard deviation, and a reduction of the long tail, as compared to the human originals.

We propose OmniCaptioner, a versatile visual captioning framework for generating fine-grained textual descriptions across a wide variety of visual domains. Unlike prior methods limited to specific image types (e.g., natural images or geometric visuals), our framework provides a unified solution for captioning natural images, visual text (e.g., posters, UIs, textbooks), and structured visuals (e.g., documents, tables, charts). By converting low-level pixel information into semantically rich textual representations, our framework bridges the gap between visual and textual modalities. Our results highlight three key advantages: (i) Enhanced Visual Reasoning with LLMs, where long-context captions of visual modalities empower LLMs, particularly the DeepSeek-R1 series, to reason effectively in multimodal scenarios; (ii) Improved Image Generation, where detailed captions improve tasks like text-to-image generation and image transformation; and (iii) Efficient Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), which enables faster convergence with less data. We believe the versatility and adaptability of OmniCaptioner can offer a new perspective for bridging the gap between language and visual modalities.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape public understanding and civic decisions, yet their ideological neutrality is a growing concern. While existing research has explored various forms of LLM bias, a direct, cross-lingual comparison of models with differing geopolitical alignments-specifically a PRC-system model versus a non-PRC counterpart-has been lacking. This study addresses this gap by systematically evaluating DeepSeek-R1 (PRC-aligned) against ChatGPT o3-mini-high (non-PRC) for Chinese-state propaganda and anti-U.S. sentiment. We developed a novel corpus of 1,200 de-contextualized, reasoning-oriented questions derived from Chinese-language news, presented in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and English. Answers from both models (7,200 total) were assessed using a hybrid evaluation pipeline combining rubric-guided GPT-4o scoring with human annotation. Our findings reveal significant model-level and language-dependent biases. DeepSeek-R1 consistently exhibited substantially higher proportions of both propaganda and anti-U.S. bias compared to ChatGPT o3-mini-high, which remained largely free of anti-U.S. sentiment and showed lower propaganda levels. For DeepSeek-R1, Simplified Chinese queries elicited the highest bias rates; these diminished in Traditional Chinese and were nearly absent in English. Notably, DeepSeek-R1 occasionally responded in Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese queries and amplified existing PRC-aligned terms in its Chinese answers, demonstrating an "invisible loudspeaker" effect. Furthermore, such biases were not confined to overtly political topics but also permeated cultural and lifestyle content, particularly in DeepSeek-R1.

Fake news on social media is a widespread and serious problem in today's society. Existing fake news detection methods focus on finding clues from Long text content, such as original news articles and user comments. This paper solves the problem of fake news detection in more realistic scenarios. Only source shot-text tweet and its retweet users are provided without user comments. We develop a novel neural network based model, \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{V}iew \textbf{A}ttention \textbf{N}etworks (MVAN) to detect fake news and provide explanations on social media. The MVAN model includes text semantic attention and propagation structure attention, which ensures that our model can capture information and clues both of source tweet content and propagation structure. In addition, the two attention mechanisms in the model can find key clue words in fake news texts and suspicious users in the propagation structure. We conduct experiments on two real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that MVAN can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods by 2.5\% in accuracy on average, and produce a reasonable explanation.

--The rapid expansion of social media platforms has significantly increased the dissemination of forged content and misinformation, making the detection of fake news a critical area of research. Although fact-checking efforts predominantly focus on English-language news, there is a noticeable gap in resources and strategies to detect news in regional languages, such as Urdu. Advanced Fake News Detection (FND) techniques rely heavily on large, accurately labeled datasets. However, FND in under-resourced languages like Urdu faces substantial challenges due to the scarcity of extensive corpora and the lack of validated lexical resources. Current Urdu fake news datasets are often domain-specific and inaccessible to the public. They also lack human verification, relying mainly on unverified English-to-Urdu translations, which compromises their reliability in practical applications. This study highlights the necessity of developing reliable, expert-verified, and domain-independent Urdu-enhanced FND datasets to improve fake news detection in Urdu and other resource-constrained languages. This paper presents the first benchmark large FND dataset for Urdu news, which is publicly available for validation and deep analysis. We also evaluate this dataset using multiple state-of-the-art pre-trained large language models (LLMs), such as XLNet, mBERT, XLM-RoBERT a, RoBERT a, DistilBERT, and DeBERT a. Additionally, we propose a unified LLM model that outperforms the others with different embedding and feature extraction techniques. The performance of these models is compared based on accuracy, F1 score, precision, recall, and human judgment for vetting the sample results of news. The proposed model outperforms advanced machine learning and deep learning models previously used in the literature for fake news detection.

Sparse dictionary learning (and, in particular, sparse autoencoders) attempts to learn a set of human-understandable concepts that can explain variation on an abstract space. A basic limitation of this approach is that it neither exploits nor represents the semantic relationships between the learned concepts. In this paper, we introduce a modified SAE architecture that explicitly models a semantic hierarchy of concepts. Application of this architecture to the internal representations of large language models shows both that semantic hierarchy can be learned, and that doing so improves both reconstruction and interpretability. Additionally, the architecture leads to significant improvements in computational efficiency.

High-quality, large-scale audio captioning is crucial for advancing audio understanding, yet current automated methods often generate captions that lack fine-grained detail and contextual accuracy, primarily due to their reliance on limited unimodal or superficial multimodal information. Drawing inspiration from human auditory perception, which adeptly integrates cross-modal cues and performs sophisticated auditory scene analysis, we introduce a novel two-stage automated pipeline. This pipeline first employs specialized pretrained models to extract diverse contextual cues (e.g., speech, music, general sounds, and visual information from associated video). A large language model (LLM) then synthesizes these rich, multimodal inputs to generate detailed and context-aware audio captions. Key contributions of this work include: (1) the proposed scalable method for fine-grained audio caption generation; (2) FusionAudio, a new large-scale dataset comprising 1.2 million such detailed captions, combined with 6 million QA pairs; and (3) enhanced audio models developed using FusionAudio, specifically a CLAP-based audio encoder with superior audio-text alignment and instruction following. This paper paves the way for more nuanced and accurate automated understanding of complex audio environments. Code and data can be found in https://github.com/satsuki2486441738/FusionAudio.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate content spanning ideological rhetoric to explicit instructions for violence. However, existing safety evaluations often rely on simplistic binary labels (safe and unsafe), overlooking the nuanced spectrum of risk these outputs pose. To address this, we present XGUARD, a benchmark and evaluation framework designed to assess the severity of extremist content generated by LLMs. XGUARD includes 3,840 red teaming prompts sourced from real world data such as social media and news, covering a broad range of ideologically charged scenarios. Our framework categorizes model responses into five danger levels (0 to 4), enabling a more nuanced analysis of both the frequency and severity of failures. We introduce the interpretable Attack Severity Curve (ASC) to visualize vulnerabilities and compare defense mechanisms across threat intensities. Using XGUARD, we evaluate six popular LLMs and two lightweight defense strategies, revealing key insights into current safety gaps and trade-offs between robustness and expressive freedom. Our work underscores the value of graded safety metrics for building trustworthy LLMs.

LLMs exhibit promising Social Intelligence (SI) in modeling human behavior, raising the need to evaluate LLMs' SI and their discrepancy with humans. SI equips humans with interpersonal abilities to behave wisely in navigating social interactions to achieve social goals. This presents an operational evaluation paradigm: outcome-oriented goal achievement evaluation and process-oriented interpersonal ability evaluation, which existing work fails to address. To this end, we propose SocialEval, a script-based bilingual SI benchmark, integrating outcome- and process-oriented evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. Each script is structured as a world tree that contains plot lines driven by interpersonal ability, providing a comprehensive view of how LLMs navigate social interactions. Experiments show that LLMs fall behind humans on both SI evaluations, exhibit prosociality, and prefer more positive social behaviors, even if they lead to goal failure. Analysis of LLMs' formed representation space and neuronal activations reveals that LLMs have developed ability-specific functional partitions akin to the human brain.

Addressing gender bias and maintaining logical coherence in machine translation remains challenging, particularly when translating between natural gender languages, like English, and genderless languages, such as Persian, Indonesian, and Finnish. We introduce the Translate-with-Care (TWC) dataset, comprising 3,950 challenging scenarios across six low- to mid-resource languages, to assess translation systems' performance. Our analysis of diverse technologies, including GPT-4, mBART-50, NLLB-200, and Google Translate, reveals a universal struggle in translating genderless content, resulting in gender stereotyping and reasoning errors. All models preferred masculine pronouns when gender stereotypes could influence choices. Google Translate and GPT-4 showed particularly strong bias, favoring male pronouns 4-6 times more than feminine ones in leadership and professional success contexts. Fine-tuning mBART-50 on TWC substantially resolved these biases and errors, led to strong generalization, and surpassed proprietary LLMs while remaining open-source. This work emphasizes the need for targeted approaches to gender and semantic coherence in machine translation, particularly for genderless languages, contributing to more equitable and accurate translation systems.