The rapid spread of misinformation, driven by digital media and AI-generated content, has made automatic claim verification essential. Traditional methods, which depend on expert-annotated evidence, are labor-intensive and not scalable. Although recent automated systems have improved, they still struggle with complex claims that require nuanced reasoning. To address this, we propose CRAVE, a Conflicting Reasoning Approach for explainable claim VErification, that verify the complex claims based on the conflicting rationales reasoned by large language models (LLMs). Specifically, CRAVE introduces a three-module framework. Ambiguity Elimination enchanced Evidence Retrieval module performs ambiguity elimination and entity-based search to gather relevant evidence related to claim verification from external sources like Wikipedia. Conflicting Perspective Reasoning and Preliminary Judgment module with LLMs adopts LLMs to reason rationales with conflicting stances about claim verification from retrieved evidence across four dimensions, i.e., direct evidence, semantic relationships, linguistic patterns, and logical reasoning and make a preliminary judgment. Finally, Small Language Model (SLM) based Judge module is fine-tuned to make use of preliminary judgment from LLMs to assess the confidence of the conflicting rationales and make a final authenticity judgment. This methodology allows CRAVE to capture subtle inconsistencies in complex claims, improving both the accuracy and transparency of claim verification. Extensive experiments on two public claim verification datasets demonstrate that our CRAVE model achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art methods and exhibits a superior capacity for finding relevant evidence and explaining the model predictions. The code is provided at https://github.com/8zym/CRAVE.

While hallucinations of large language models could been alleviated through retrieval-augmented generation and citation generation, how the model utilizes internal knowledge is still opaque, and the trustworthiness of its generated answers remains questionable. In this work, we introduce Context-Prior Augmented Citation Generation task, requiring models to generate citations considering both external and internal knowledge while providing trustworthy references, with 5 evaluation metrics focusing on 3 aspects: answer helpfulness, citation faithfulness, and trustworthiness. We introduce RAEL, the paradigm for our task, and also design INTRALIGN, an integrated method containing customary data generation and an alignment algorithm. Our experimental results show that our method achieves a better cross-scenario performance with regard to other baselines. Our extended experiments further reveal that retrieval quality, question types, and model knowledge have considerable influence on the trustworthiness in citation generation.

In the field of natural language processing (NLP), the capability to infer and reason about causality is increasingly recognized as a critical component of intelligent systems. Despite the recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) (Radford et al., 2019; Devlin et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2022; OpenAI, 2023; Ignat et al., 2024, inter alia), a key question still remains: Can these models understand and reason about causality? This is a critical skill before we can trust AI agents to be integrated into decision-making systems. Moreover, even if LLMs succeed at some extent of reasoning, they still lack transparency of how their decisions are made, forming a strong need for interpretabil-ity (Luo and Specia, 2024; Räuker et al., 2023; Zou et al., 2023). T o bridge the gap, this thesis explores various facets of causal reasoning in LLMs. W e present a series of studies that collectively advance the knowledge of how well these models perform causal reasoning (Part I), how their decisions are made (Part II), how causality among learning variables influences NLP tasks (Part III), and how causality and NLP can together analyze social problems (Part IV). Below we introduce an overview of the four parts and their corresponding chapters.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but they suffer from hallucination, generating plausible yet factually incorrect content. This issue extends to Video-Language Models (VideoLLMs), where textual descriptions may inaccurately represent visual content, resulting in multi-modal hallucinations. In this paper, we address hallucination in ResNetVLLM, a video-language model combining ResNet visual encoders with LLMs. We introduce a two-step protocol: (1) a faithfulness detection strategy that uses a modified Lynx model to assess semantic alignment between generated captions and ground-truth video references, and (2) a hallucination mitigation strategy using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with an ad-hoc knowledge base dynamically constructed during inference. Our enhanced model, ResNetVLLM-2, reduces multi-modal hallucinations by cross-verifying generated content against external knowledge, improving factual consistency. Evaluation on the ActivityNet-QA benchmark demonstrates a substantial accuracy increase from 54.8% to 65.3%, highlighting the effectiveness of our hallucination detection and mitigation strategies in enhancing video-language model reliability.

One-shot controllable video editing (OCVE) is an important yet challenging task, aiming to propagate user edits that are made -- using any image editing tool -- on the first frame of a video to all subsequent frames, while ensuring content consistency between edited frames and source frames. To achieve this, prior methods employ DDIM inversion to transform source frames into latent noise, which is then fed into a pre-trained diffusion model, conditioned on the user-edited first frame, to generate the edited video. However, the DDIM inversion process accumulates errors, which hinder the latent noise from accurately reconstructing the source frames, ultimately compromising content consistency in the generated edited frames. To overcome it, our method eliminates the need for DDIM inversion by performing OCVE through a novel perspective based on visual prompting. Furthermore, inspired by consistency models that can perform multi-step consistency sampling to generate a sequence of content-consistent images, we propose a content consistency sampling (CCS) to ensure content consistency between the generated edited frames and the source frames. Moreover, we introduce a temporal-content consistency sampling (TCS) based on Stein Variational Gradient Descent to ensure temporal consistency across the edited frames. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but concerns have emerged about their susceptibility to ideological manipulation, particularly in politically sensitive areas. Prior work has focused on binary Left-Right LLM biases, using explicit prompts and fine-tuning on political QA datasets. In this work, we move beyond this binary approach to explore the extent to which LLMs can be influenced across a spectrum of political ideologies, from Progressive-Left to Conservative-Right. We introduce a novel multi-task dataset designed to reflect diverse ideological positions through tasks such as ideological QA, statement ranking, manifesto cloze completion, and Congress bill comprehension. By fine-tuning three LLMs-Phi-2, Mistral, and Llama-3-on this dataset, we evaluate their capacity to adopt and express these nuanced ideologies. Our findings indicate that fine-tuning significantly enhances nuanced ideological alignment, while explicit prompts provide only minor refinements. This highlights the models' susceptibility to subtle ideological manipulation, suggesting a need for more robust safeguards to mitigate these risks.

Multimodal fake news detection plays a crucial role in combating online misinformation. Unfortunately, effective detection methods rely on annotated labels and encounter significant performance degradation when domain shifts exist between training (source) and test (target) data. To address the problems, we propose ADOSE, an Active Domain Adaptation (ADA) framework for multimodal fake news detection which actively annotates a small subset of target samples to improve detection performance. To identify various deceptive patterns in cross-domain settings, we design multiple expert classifiers to learn dependencies across different modalities. These classifiers specifically target the distinct deception patterns exhibited in fake news, where two unimodal classifiers capture knowledge errors within individual modalities while one cross-modal classifier identifies semantic inconsistencies between text and images. To reduce annotation costs from the target domain, we propose a least-disagree uncertainty selector with a diversity calculator for selecting the most informative samples. The selector leverages prediction disagreement before and after perturbations by multiple classifiers as an indicator of uncertain samples, whose deceptive patterns deviate most from source domains. It further incorporates diversity scores derived from multi-view features to ensure the chosen samples achieve maximal coverage of target domain features. The extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that ADOSE outperforms existing ADA methods by 2.72\% $\sim$ 14.02\%, indicating the superiority of our model.

Following the initial excitement, Text-to-Image (TTI) models are now being examined more critically. While much of the discourse has focused on biases and stereotypes embedded in large-scale training datasets, the sociotechnical dynamics of user interactions with these models remain underexplored. This study examines the linguistic and semantic choices users make when crafting prompts and how these choices influence the diversity of generated outputs. Analyzing over six million prompts from the Civiverse dataset on the CivitAI platform across seven months, we categorize users into three groups based on their levels of linguistic experimentation: consistent repeaters, occasional repeaters, and non-repeaters. Our findings reveal that as user participation grows over time, prompt language becomes increasingly homogenized through the adoption of popular community tags and descriptors, with repeated prompts comprising 40-50% of submissions. At the same time, semantic similarity and topic preferences remain relatively stable, emphasizing common subjects and surface aesthetics. Using Vendi scores to quantify visual diversity, we demonstrate a clear correlation between lexical similarity in prompts and the visual similarity of generated images, showing that linguistic repetition reinforces less diverse representations. These findings highlight the significant role of user-driven factors in shaping AI-generated imagery, beyond inherent model biases, and underscore the need for tools and practices that encourage greater linguistic and thematic experimentation within TTI systems to foster more inclusive and diverse AI-generated content.

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), there has been increasing interest in human-AI co-creation in a variety of artistic domains including music as AI-driven systems are frequently able to generate human-competitive artifacts. Now, the implications of such systems for musical practice are being investigated. We report on a thorough evaluation of the user adoption of the Multi-Track Music Machine (MMM) as a co-creative AI tool for music composers. To do this, we integrate MMM into Cubase, a popular Digital Audio Workstation (DA W) by Steinberg, by producing a "1-parameter" plugin interface named MMM-Cubase (MMM-C), which enables human-AI co-composition. We contribute a methodological assemblage as a 3-part mixed method study measuring usability, user experience and technology acceptance of the system across two groups of expert-level composers: hobbyists and professionals. Results show positive usability and acceptance scores. Users report experiences of novelty, surprise and ease of use from using the system, and limitations on controllability and predictability of the interface when generating music. Findings indicate no significant difference between the two user groups.

With the rise of artificial intelligence in recent years, there has been a rapid increase in its application towards creative domains, including music. There exist many systems built that apply machine learning approaches to the problem of computer-assisted music composition (CAC). Calliope is a web application that assists users in performing a variety of multi-track composition tasks in the symbolic domain. The user can upload (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) MIDI files, visualize and edit MIDI tracks, and generate partial (via bar in-filling) or complete multi-track content using the Multi-Track Music Machine (MMM). Generation of new MIDI excerpts can be done in batch and can be combined with active playback listening for an enhanced assisted-composition workflow. The user can export generated MIDI materials or directly stream MIDI playback from the system to their favorite Digital Audio Workstation (DA W). We present a demonstration of the system, its features, generative parameters and describe the co-creative workflows that it affords.