The rapid spread of fake news threatens social stability and public trust, rendering its detection an imperative research priority. Although large language models (LLMs) excel at numerous natural language processing tasks with their remarkable contextual understanding and extensive prior knowledge, the time-bounded knowledge coverage and tendency for generating hallucination content reduce their reliability when handling fast-evolving news streams. Furthermore, models trained on existing static datasets also often lack the generalization needed for emerging news topics. To address these challenges, we propose ZoFia, a novel two-stage zero-shot fake news detection framework. First, we introduce Hierarchical Salience to quantify the importance of entities in the news content, and propose the SC-MMR algorithm to effectively select an informative and diverse set of keywords that serve as queries for retrieving up-to-date external evidence. Subsequently, a multi LLM interactive system, in which each agent assumes a distinct role, performs multi-view collaborative analysis and adversarial debate over the news text and its related information, and finally produces an interpretable and robust judgment. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that ZoFia obviously outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and most of few-shot methods. Our codes will be open-sourced to facilitate related communities.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed for open-ended communication, yet most bias evaluations still rely on English, classification-style tasks. We introduce DebateBias-8K, a new multilingual, debate-style benchmark designed to reveal how narrative bias appears in realistic generative settings. Our dataset includes 8,400 structured debate prompts spanning four sensitive domains: women's rights, socioeconomic development, terrorism, and religion, across seven languages ranging from high-resource (English, Chinese) to low-resource (Swahili, Nigerian Pidgin). Using four flagship models (GPT-4o, Claude 3, DeepSeek, and LLaMA 3), we generate and automatically classify over 100,000 responses. Results show that all models reproduce entrenched stereotypes despite safety alignment: Arabs are overwhelmingly linked to terrorism and religion (>=95%), Africans to socioeconomic "backwardness" (up to <=77%), and Western groups are consistently framed as modern or progressive. Biases grow sharply in lower-resource languages, revealing that alignment trained primarily in English does not generalize globally. Our findings highlight a persistent divide in multilingual fairness: current alignment methods reduce explicit toxicity but fail to prevent biased outputs in open-ended contexts. We release our DebateBias-8K benchmark and analysis framework to support the next generation of multilingual bias evaluation and safer, culturally inclusive model alignment.

Uplift modeling has emerged as a crucial technique for individualized treatment effect estimation, particularly in fields such as marketing and healthcare. Modeling uplift effects in multi-treatment scenarios plays a key role in real-world applications. Current techniques for modeling multi-treatment uplift are typically adapted from binary-treatment works. In this paper, we investigate and categorize all current model adaptations into two types: Structure Adaptation and Feature Adaptation. Through our empirical experiments, we find that these two adaptation types cannot maintain effectiveness under various data characteristics (noisy data, mixed with observational data, etc.). To enhance estimation ability and robustness, we propose Orthogonal Function Adaptation (OFA) based on the function approximation theorem. We conduct comprehensive experiments with multiple data characteristics to study the effectiveness and robustness of all model adaptation techniques. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed OFA can significantly improve uplift model performance compared to other vanilla adaptation methods and exhibits the highest robustness.

Detecting student misconceptions in open-ended responses is a longstanding challenge, demanding semantic precision and logical reasoning. We propose MiRAGE - Misconception Detection with Retrieval-Guided Multi-Stage Reasoning and Ensemble Fusion, a novel framework for automated misconception detection in mathematics. MiRAGE operates in three stages: (1) a Retrieval module narrows a large candidate pool to a semantically relevant subset; (2) a Reasoning module employs chain-of-thought generation to expose logical inconsistencies in student solutions; and (3) a Reranking module refines predictions by aligning them with the reasoning. These components are unified through an ensemble-fusion strategy that enhances robustness and interpretability. On mathematics datasets, MiRAGE achieves Mean Average Precision scores of 0.82/0.92/0.93 at levels 1/3/5, consistently outperforming individual modules. By coupling retrieval guidance with multi-stage reasoning, MiRAGE reduces dependence on large-scale language models while delivering a scalable and effective solution for educational assessment.

Salespeople frequently face the dynamic screening decision of whether to persist in a conversation or abandon it to pursue the next lead. Yet, little is known about how these decisions are made, whether they are efficient, or how to improve them. We study these decisions in the context of high-volume outbound sales where leads are ample, but time is scarce and failure is common. We formalize the dynamic screening decision as an optimal stopping problem and develop a generative language model-based sequential decision agent - a stopping agent - that learns whether and when to quit conversations by imitating a retrospectively-inferred optimal stopping policy. Our approach handles high-dimensional textual states, scales to large language models, and works with both open-source and proprietary language models. When applied to calls from a large European telecommunications firm, our stopping agent reduces the time spent on failed calls by 54% while preserving nearly all sales; reallocating the time saved increases expected sales by up to 37%. Upon examining the linguistic cues that drive salespeople's quitting decisions, we find that they tend to overweight a few salient expressions of consumer disinterest and mispredict call failure risk, suggesting cognitive bounds on their ability to make real-time conversational decisions. Our findings highlight the potential of artificial intelligence algorithms to correct cognitively-bounded human decisions and improve salesforce efficiency.

Deep learning has emerged as a leading approach for Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC), demonstrating superior performance over traditional methods. However, vulnerability to adversarial attacks and susceptibility to data distribution shifts hinder their practical deployment in real-world, dynamic environments. To address these threats, we propose a novel, unified framework that integrates meta-learning with domain adaptation, making AMC systems resistant to both adversarial attacks and environmental changes. Our framework utilizes a two-phase strategy. First, in an offline phase, we employ a meta-learning approach to train the model on clean and adversarially perturbed samples from a single source domain. This method enables the model to generalize its defense, making it resistant to a combination of previously unseen attacks. Subsequently, in the online phase, we apply domain adaptation to align the model's features with a new target domain, allowing it to adapt without requiring substantial labeled data. As a result, our framework achieves a significant improvement in modulation classification accuracy against these combined threats, offering a critical solution to the deployment and operational challenges of modern AMC systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with agent-based reasoning frameworks have recently shown strong potential for autonomous decision-making and system-level operations. One promising yet underexplored direction is microservice remediation, where the goal is to automatically recover faulty microservice systems. Existing approaches, however, still rely on human-crafted prompts from Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), with LLMs merely converting textual instructions into executable code. To advance research in this area, we introduce MicroRemed, the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs in end-to-end microservice remediation, where models must directly generate executable Ansible playbooks from diagnosis reports to restore system functionality. We further propose ThinkRemed, a multi-agent framework that emulates the reflective and perceptive reasoning of SREs. Experimental results show that MicroRemed presents substantial challenges to current LLMs, while ThinkRemed improves end-to-end remediation performance through iterative reasoning and system reflection. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/LLM4AIOps/MicroRemed.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in natural language reasoning, yet their application to Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) remains limited. CTI analysis involves distilling large volumes of unstructured reports into actionable knowledge, a process where LLMs could substantially reduce analyst workload. CTIBench introduced a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs across multiple CTI tasks. In this work, we extend CTIBench by developing AthenaBench, an enhanced benchmark that includes an improved dataset creation pipeline, duplicate removal, refined evaluation metrics, and a new task focused on risk mitigation strategies. We evaluate twelve LLMs, including state-of-the-art proprietary models such as GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5 Pro, alongside seven open-source models from the LLaMA and Qwen families. While proprietary LLMs achieve stronger results overall, their performance remains subpar on reasoning-intensive tasks, such as threat actor attribution and risk mitigation, with open-source models trailing even further behind. These findings highlight fundamental limitations in the reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and underscore the need for models explicitly tailored to CTI workflows and automation.

Early and accurate segmentation of colorectal polyps is critical for reducing colorectal cancer mortality, which has been extensively explored by academia and industry. However, current deep learning-based polyp segmentation models either compromise clinical decision-making by providing ambiguous polyp margins in segmentation outputs or rely on heavy architectures with high computational complexity, resulting in insufficient inference speeds for real-time colorectal endoscopic applications. To address this problem, we propose MicroAUNet, a light-weighted attention-based segmentation network that combines depthwise-separable dilated convolutions with a single-path, parameter-shared channel-spatial attention block to strengthen multi-scale boundary features. On the basis of it, a progressive two-stage knowledge-distillation scheme is introduced to transfer semantic and boundary cues from a high-capacity teacher. Extensive experiments on benchmarks also demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy under extremely low model complexity, indicating that MicroAUNet is suitable for real-time clinical polyp segmentation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JeremyXSC/MicroAUNet.

We investigate the application of large language models (LLMs) to construct credit networks from firms' textual financial statements and to analyze the resulting network structures. We start with using LLMs to translate each firm's financial statement into a credit network that pertains solely to that firm. These networks are then aggregated to form a comprehensive credit network representing the whole financial system. During this process, the inconsistencies in financial statements are automatically detected and human intervention is involved. We demonstrate that this translation process is effective across financial statements corresponding to credit networks with diverse topological structures. We further investigate the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in analyzing credit networks and determining optimal strategies for executing financial operations to maximize network performance measured by the total assets of firms, which is an inherently combinatorial optimization challenge. To demonstrate this capability, we focus on two financial operations: portfolio compression and debt removal, applying them to both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our findings show that LLMs can generate coherent reasoning and recommend effective executions of these operations to enhance overall network performance.